The Sky is Falling td-63

by Warren Murphy

  "I think I have the answer to your problems," said the doctor.

  "This had better be major for you to break cover," came back the voice.

  "If it was major enough for you to warn me to look for, I assume it is major enough for me to get back to you."

  "That was a general warning this morning,"

  "I think I found them."

  "The man and the woman?"

  "Yes. She had red hair and was beautiful."

  "We've had ten reports like that this morning from all over South America. One of the beautiful redheads turned out to be an orangutan in the Rio de Janeiro zoo whose keeper was taking her to the veterinarian,"

  "This man killed two persons by fusing cervical vertebrae with what I have to assume were his bare hands."

  "What did he look like?"

  The doctor heard the tension in the man's voice. Every bit of anxiety would mean many dollars for him. He gave a description of the two, told where he thought they were, and then added an afterthought.

  "He did not wear a wristwatch," said the doctor. "What is that supposed to mean?"

  "All foreigners and cabinet ministers wear wristwatches. They must have thought this man was one of their own. The peasants, I mean."

  "You wear a wristwatch, doctor," came back the voice from the KGB control center.

  "Yes," said the doctor. "But I am also Minister of Health for San Gauta."

  The report was sent immediately by radio message-because it had maximum priority-to Moscow, which had been receiving similar messages all day. But this one was different. In all the others the man had either shot or stabbed someone, but this message indicated a person who, with his bare hands, could create enough pressure to fuse vertebrae as though they had been baked in an oven.

  "That's him," said the KGB colonel Ivan Ivanovich, who now first had to report to Zemyatin and then, with the old one's help, prepare the way to kill him.

  "Good," said the Great One, And then he found out the news was even better: the couple was still in San Gauta. "We can dispatch a team before they leave the country," said the young colonel. He felt his hands begin to sweat just talking to the field marshal. Who knew whom he would kill and when?

  "No," said Alexei Zemyatin. "This time we do everything right."

  Chapter 11

  Reemer Bolt didn't know whether it was the heat or his excitement, but he was sweltering in his silver radiation suit. One of the experiments at Maldeti had proved that a radiation suit could protect a person under the sun's power rays for a maximum of twenty minutes. What else had been discovered was not quite certain because he had not heard from Kathy O'Donneil again. He missed her luscious body, her exhilarating smile, her quick mind, but most of all her body. When he really thought about it, he didn't miss her smile or her mind at all. In fact, without her here he would be the sole architect of the most amazing industrial advance of the twentieth century, Perhaps ever. The person who invented the wheel may have been forgotten, but Reemer Bolt would not be.

  Credit would be given where credit was due. Reemer Bolt had worked out the last bug this bright autumn day. He had not only found a use for the device, but one in a major world industry. In one paltry year CC of M would be able to recoup their entire investment and they'd all be on their way to exotic wealth forever.

  The cars and trucks had been arriving all morning, their bare metal skins glistening in the sun. Some were old, with deep, mud-red primer patches. Others were new, with rivets still visible, A small valley had been cleared of trees just north of Chester, New Hampshire. Into this valley came the cars and trucks all morning. Into this valley came the board of directors of Chemical Concepts of Massachusetts.

  Into this valley came a crate of glistening radiation suits. Reemer Bolt had the board of directors put them on. The chairman of the board looked at the fifty cars and calculated a cost of more than two hundred thousand dollars and probably less than five hundred thousand dollars. He looked at the suits and figured that they had to go for a thousand apiece. There were fine brass fittings over the face plates, and soft padding under the silver skins of the suits. Reemer Bolt was talking in a hushed voice as though someone over his shoulder would hear him. The chairman of the board noticed it was quite effective. Other members were being caught up in this as though they were part of some great secret raid.

  "Reemer," said the chairman of the board; beckoning Bolt with a finger. He spoke loud enough to break the spell. "Reemer, this experiment must have cost us at least a half-million dollars. At least."

  "Two million," said. Reemer almost with joy.

  The other directors, most of whom still had the face masks of their suits in their hands, turned their heads. "The cars here and things cost about a half-million. But the real money went for something even more vital," said Bolt. And then as though he had not baited this hook, he went about helping another board member don a radiation suit.

  "Reemer," said the chairman of the board.

  "Yes," said Bolt. "Your face mask goes over the shoulders, almost like a driver's suit, except we don't have to screw the helmet down into the shoulders."

  "Reemer," said the chairman of the board. "What is the one-point-five-million-dollar 'even more vital'?"

  "You don't think one-point-five-million-dollars is worth securing control over the entire auto industry? Trucks, cars, sports cars, off-the-road vehicles, tractors. Do you really think, sir, they are going to give up control like that?" Bolt snapped a finger and gave a knowing smile.

  "One-point-five million dollars," repeated the chairman of the board. "How did you spend that additional money?"

  "In providing you all with drivers who didn't know who they were working for. In setting up interlocking dummy corporations, each one providing a greater maze than the next. In buffering all of us, especially the name of our company, which I asked you not to mention today in case the ears of these people pick it up. It costs money to set up dummy corporations leading to the Bahamas. It costs money to hire people through these corporations. It costs money to weave a web that cannot be traced, because, gentlemen, when we leave here today we will leave a paltry two million dollars sitting in a field we bought but will not claim. Yes, gentlemen, we leave a few dollars, and we walk away with control of the entire auto industry."

  Bolt grabbed his helmet tightly in both hands.

  "We have something so valuable, something that will become so necessary that the auto industry will do everything to break our secret. And until we are ready to dictate our terms, we must keep what happens today to ourselves."

  Bolt placed his clear face mask over his head and turned his back, knowing that there were still more questions. But these would be answered in a moment. He had wooden stands built for the board of directors, very much like those in a football stadium. He wondered if they would raise him to their shoulders and carry him off the field when the experiment was done.

  Almost tripping on the padding over his shoes, Bolt waved an arm. A score of workmen advanced on the cars with spray nozzles. Pink and lavender clouds filled the air.

  Then there was fire-engine red and living-room beige. Mushroom and melon. Daisy and chartreuse. The paint hissed onto the cars moist and glistening.

  With a control radio, Reemer Bolt, who had purchased a new scrambler system, contacted a technician back at Chemical Concepts. He had purposely kept from this technician the exact nature of the experiment. He had disguised it as something financially meaningless, like saving the air for people to breathe.

  The device was now secured under a small office. When the technician heard the signal, he lifted the red shield over the initiating button. The floor above the device opened. The roof of the building opened.

  Sunlight poured in over the device-now reduced to the size of a desk-with a five-foot chrome nozzle pointing upward; much like a small cannon. Except this cannon had two storage drums, and an iron beam generator that acted like a sluice for the fluorocarbons, transferring them just short of the speed o
f light up to the ozone shield.

  The roof closed, the floor above the device closed, and the machine had done its work. It was now down to less than five seconds in operating time. The directional problems had been overcome at the Malden experiment. The duration time, namely protecting the remaining parts of the thin globe-girdling shield, had been determined in the first; Salem, New Hampshire, experiment. The technician knew by the almost upright angle of the generator that the experiment point had to be very close.

  Up in the treeless valley near Chester, New Hampshire, a miraculous blue light opened up above. For five seconds it seemed to bubble and then it closed rapidly. The fifty cars and trucks did absolutely nothing. Wettish reds, pinks, blacks, browns, grays, and blues glistened from the cars.

  Reemer Bolt took off his mask. He signaled the board of directors to do the same.

  "Is it safe yet?" asked one.

  "Safe," said Bolt. He glanced up at the sky. The ring was now down to a circle. The technicians had even gotten the ozone shield to close faster. The air smelled faintly of burned grass. Small plops like bags of candy could be heard hitting the field. Birds caught again.

  Bolt's feet crushed dried dead grass. The ground itself felt brittle underneath.

  "C'mon," he called out to the board of directors. "It's safe."

  He signaled the workmen to stand off. In case they didn't move fast enough, one of his dummy corporations had hired guards. They moved the workmen away. With great ostentation he nodded to a man with a control box sitting to the right of the stands. With so many people in glistening silver shield uniforms, it looked as though Martians or other spacemen had landed in this little valley in Chester, New Hampshire, where the device had been used for the third time.

  Despite careful instructions the workmen tended to mill about confused, and the man at the sound shield box looked the most confused.

  "Turn it on," yelled Bolt. He had been assured that certain sound waves obliterated other waves. He had been assured that even the CIA was just getting this device. He was assured that a person could yell five feet from another person and not be heard if the sound shield was in effect. The man at the box shrugged.

  "I said turn on the damned sound shield," yelled Bolt. The man mouthed the word:

  "What?"

  Reemer saw one of the delivery cars take away a batch of workers who would no longer be needed. He saw the cars cough out exhaust and move silently along the woodland road out of sight. The man at the sound shield box was turning red in the face mouthing the word "What?"

  But he wasn't mouthing.

  "Perfect," said Reemer with an extra big grin and an extra-obvious nod. "Perfect."

  And then the men who had provided the money and his future:

  "Nothing we say here must be heard by other ears."

  "There is nothing about a bunch of paint-wet cars that I care to keep secret," said the chairman of the board. If he knew nothing else, Bolt knew drama. He took the hand of the chairman of the board and forced it down into the glistening pink of a sedan roof. The chairman yanked it back and was about to wipe it off when he realized it was dry. He rubbed the car again. Glistening and dry. He rubbed another car. The other directors rubbed metal that shone with a luster they had never seen in an auto showroom.

  Now Reemer spoke, hushed and precise.

  "We can take three hundred dollars off the price of any top-grade auto finish. We can transform the cheapest grades of paint into top quality. In brief, gentlemen, we can hold the entire auto industry hostage to our cheaper method of applying finish paint. In brief, gentlemen, to the robots of Japan, to the workers of Detroit, to the technicians of Wiesbaden, Germany, we say: your car-painting days are over. There is one finish worthy of the name, and only we can apply it."

  The chairman of the board hugged Reemer Bolt like a son. He would have adopted him at that moment. "Don't applaud. Don't carry me away from here. Very quietly, as though this was routine, walk to the cars I have rented for you and leave."

  They nodded. A few gave Reemer Bolt a wink. One of them said the hardest thing in his life at that moment was not jumping for joy.

  "And on your way out, tell that sound-shield guy to turn it off."

  When wonderful was made in this world, Reemer, thy name was you, thought Bolt. On his face was the delicious glow of magnificent success. Reemer Bolt loved the world at that moment. And why shouldn't he? He planned to own much of it soon.

  Suddenly he heard noise from the cars leaving and knew the sound shield was off. In a few moments he was alone. He waited, whistling. The next phase was about to begin.

  Buses pulled up, chugging to a halt. Fifty people got out, some men, some women. Each with a ticket. They poured out onto the field, a few of them stumbling because they were reading their tickets.

  The ones who had driven in the cars were gone before the paint went on. The ones who would drive them out would not know that they were freshly painted.

  Bolt unpeeled his suit when he realized he was getting glances. He would go out with the last car, and then be dropped off at a nearby town two blocks from where another driver in a normal car would pick him up.

  It was massive. It was brilliant. It was, thought Bolt, Boltian, expressing audacity, complexity, and most of all success. And then the little idiots just sat in their cars doing nothing.

  "C'mon. Move along," he said. But they just sat there staring at their wheels, straining with something. Reemer went to the closest car and flung open the door. A young woman was at the wheel.

  "Start it," he said.

  "I can't," she said.

  "Well, try turning the key," he said.

  She showed him her fingers. They were red. "I have been," she said.

  "Move over," he said.

  Outside of Kathy O'Donnell, all women were good for only one thing, he thought. He turned the key. There wasn't even a groan. He turned the key again. Not a flicker on the dashboard. The car was still.

  "See," said the young woman.

  "Proud of yourself, I bet," said Bolt, and he went to a man's car. Again nothing. Not in the Beige Buick or Caramel Chrysler. Not in the Peppermint Pontiac or Sun Shimmer Subaru. Not in the Tan Toyota, the Mauve Mustang. The Porsche, the Audi, the Citroen, Oldsmobile, Bronco, Fairlane, Thunderbird, Nissan, Datsun, or Alfa Romeo.

  Even the Ferrari was dead. Dead. Reemer Bolt's fingertips were bleeding as he told everyone they would be paid, just get in the darn buses and go. Go, now. "You can do that, can't you?"

  As the buses pulled off, he was left alone with a field full of cars that would not start. Alone was the word for it. Failure nestled sorely inside his belly.

  He couldn't move the cars. He wouldn't know where to begin. So he just left them and walked away. No one could trace them, he thought. But two worldwide networks had already zeroed in on the brief and dangerous puncture of the ozone shield. And no one in Moscow or Washington was calling it a window to prosperity.

  The President had always known the world would end like this, with his looking on as a helpless bystander. The beam had been shot off; Russia had spotted it, too, and would not, under any circumstances, according to the best reports, accept the fact that America could not find a weapon being activated in its own land. But it was true.

  The FBI reported that its search for something that produced a fluorocarbon stream had been fruitless. No one knew what to look for. Was it a gun? Was it a balloon? Did it look like a tank? Did it look like a giant can of hair spray?

  But there was one good report as the world stumbled blindly toward its death. This from that most secret of organizations, the one he found out about on inauguration day, when the former president had brought him into the bedroom and showed him that red phone.

  The President had used it more in the last week than all his predecessors had during their terms of office. The man on the other-end was named Smith, and his voice was sharp and lemony. It was a voice from which the President drew reassurance.

  "We tr
acked down the source to one place, but it had been moved. It's in Hanoi."

  "Are you sure?"

  "We will only be sure when we get our hands on the damned thing. But our man tracked it to San Gauta and then that led to Hanoi."

  "So the commies have it. Why are they being so mysterious?"

  "I don't understand, sir."

  "More than anything, I would like to get into the Kremlin and find out what the hell is going on. Could you use the older one for that? The Oriental?"

  "He's on sort of a sabbatical."

  "Now?" screamed the President.

  "You don't order this one around like some officer. They have traditions a lot older than our country, or even Europe for that matter, sir."

  "Well, what about the end of the world? What about that? Did you make that clear?"

  "I think he has heard that before also, sir."

  "Wonderful. Do you have any suggestions?"

  "If I were you?" said Smith.

  "Yes. "

  "One of the problems, perhaps the main one, is that the Russians don't believe we are helpless about this fluorocarbon weapon, if it is a weapon."

  "But if it's in Hanoi, they have it."

  "Maybe they have it now and maybe they don't. If they do, I think they might step away from the brink. Let's hope they do. My man is only following the best lead we have, and frankly, Mr. President, I am glad we have that man doing it. There is no one better in the world we could have."

  "I agree. I agree. Go on."

  "I would suggest something I have been thinking about for a long time. Give them something to show that we want their trust in this matter. That we are just as interested in finding out about that fluorocarbon device as they are. We should give them some powerful secret of our own. That secret would be a proof of trust."

  "Do you have one in mind?"

  "Some device. We must have scores that they would be interested in. But make sure it is not one they think we think they already know about. The one thing we have to be in this matter is absolutely open. We have no choice, sir. I mean you'll have to open it all up."