The Hercules Text

by Jack McDevitt

  Hakluyt, in fact, had always been sensitive to the fleeing years. His thirtieth birthday had been traumatic, and he’d watched the premature retreat of his hairline with gnawing fear. Now, while he grew daily more hopeful of the possibilities that the Hercules Text might promise, the green rolling hills around Westminster seemed less threatening, and the lost days of his youth were no longer quite so remote.

  Westminster was bigger than he remembered: a couple of office buildings had been erected on the outskirts, and a shopping mall had sprung into existence. Western Maryland College had expanded, too, and he passed several new housing developments on the south side as he drove into town.

  The house in which he’d grown up was gone, swept away to make room for a parking lot. Most of the rest of his neighborhood had disappeared along with it. Gunderson’s Pharmacy had survived, and the C&I Lumberyard. But not much else.

  They’d added a new wing to the high school, a glass and plastic monstrosity that threatened to overwhelm the old brick building. Bells sounded inside as he passed: just as in the old days, the bells rang seven days a week and were shut off only during the summer. It was good to know there was some stability in the world.

  The athletic field had a new backstop. Despite poor vision, Hakluyt had been a fair infielder once, at a time when they’d all expected to play forever. But after leaving Westminster, he’d never put on a uniform again.

  The hamburger spot where he used to take Pat Whitney was still there. He smiled as he drove by, surprised that, after all these years, he could still feel the familiar pulse in his throat that only she had ever induced. Where was she now? And for the first time, perhaps, since the terrible night when she’d sent him into the dark, he could think of her without anger.

  Ruley Milo arrived at his executive suite in the state of disarray with which he customarily greeted Monday morning. But this had been an extraordinary weekend. He’d managed a Saturday evening dinner with the head of the City Council, planting the seeds for solving licensing problems with some commercial real estate held by one of Burns & Hoffman’s clients. And on Sunday he’d finally succeeded in bedding the black bitch who’d been running him all over Kansas City.

  Two of his account executives, Abel Walker and Carolyn Donatelli, tried unsuccessfully to intercept him on his way in. Both were wearing anxious frowns, but Walker fretted about everything, and Donatelli, of course, was a woman. An attractive one, but still Only a woman. He’d fondled her with his eyes any number of times, but he prudently kept his hands off.

  Never fool with the office staff: it was Milo’s most basic moral principle.

  His head hurt, and, of course, he hadn’t had enough sleep. He got some orange juice out of his office refrigerator, decided against adding vodka, and slid down onto the leather sofa.

  The intercom buzzed. When he didn’t answer, his secretary pushed the door ajar. “Mr. Milo,” she said. “Al and Carol would both like to speak with you.” While he considered his response, she added, “The market opened down twenty.”

  Milo grunted, climbed to his feet, and turned on the computer. “It’s more than thirty now,” said Walker, pushing past the secretary.

  Donatelli filed in behind him. “Pennsylvania Gas and Electric is off six,” she said.

  “What the hell happened?” asked Milo. PG&E was still on the firm’s buy list for conservative investors who wanted good income with security.

  “Did you have your television on this morning?” asked Donatelli. Milo shook his head. “There’s a rumor that the people at Greenbelt, the ones who’ve been working on that message from outer space, have found a way to produce cheap power. A lot of it.”

  “Goddammit, Al, nobody’s going to believe that.”

  “Maybe,” said Donatelli, “but some of the money market managers must have expected the news to drive the market down. And they sure as hell don’t want to stand around and take a beating. They’ve sold everything, and they’re probably looking to pick the stuff back up this afternoon or tomorrow at a substantial discount.”

  “Vermont Gas is down five and a quarter,” said Walker. His voice was squeaking. “The utilities are hardest hit, but we’re taking a beating right across the board.”

  Milo punched up some averages. The major oils were already off by more than 10 percent. Heavy equipment firms, especially those that served the utilities, had tumbled. Banks were down sharply; so were a number of service companies. Christ, even the high-tech firms were losing ground despite good news last week.

  Only the automobile manufacturers were bucking the trend. GM, Ford, and Chrysler had all spurted. Naturally, if the rumor was well founded, oil prices would collapse, gasoline would become even cheaper, and more people would return to big cars.

  “Have we begun calling our clients?” asked Milo.

  “They’ve been calling us,” said Walker. “And they’re upset. Especially the smaller accounts. Ruley, I’ve had a couple of people today talk to me about suicide. They’re getting wiped out. Lifetime savings going up in smoke. Okay? These aren’t people trying to make a killing in the market: these are our electric company accounts!”

  “Keep calm,” said Milo. “These things happen. What do we tell everybody who opens an account with us? Don’t invest anything in the stock market that you can’t afford to lose. It’s right in the brochure. But you’re right, of course. We don’t want it happening under our auspices. Make sure when you talk to these people that you point out who’s at fault. But tell them we expect to see a rally. The unfortunate thing is that utilities tend to be slow to recover from things like this. What about our major customers?”

  “They’ve been calling us, too,” said Walker.

  “Of course they have. What are we telling them?”

  “We don’t know what to tell them,” said Donatelli. “I called Adam at the Exchange and he says the sell orders aren’t coming in as fast now but that they’re still heavily backlogged.”

  “Which means we’ll lose another thirty points by noon. Okay, we couldn’t get any sales in before then anyway. Let’s just ride it out. We’ll probably get a rally this afternoon and recover maybe thirty percent of the initial losses. What happens after that will depend on what the government has to say.” He shut his eyes tight. “Christ, sometimes I hate this business.

  “All right, start calling the list. Reassure them. Tell them we’re watching developments. Anybody wants to sell, let them sell. Personally, I think this might be a good time to buy. And you can tell them that.”

  When he was alone, Milo got on the phone to Washington.

  Rudy McCollumb was a railroad man. He was retired now, but that didn’t change his essential nature. Rudy had ridden the old steam-driven eighteen-wheelers across the prairies, hauling lumber to Grand Forks and potash to Kansas City. He’d started in the dispatch office in Noyes, Minnesota, during the Second World War. But he had no love for things that didn’t move, so he applied for every brakeman’s job that came open until they gave him a freight that ran down to the Twin Cities.

  After that, he was a conductor with the Great Central for forty years and could have been station master in Boulder once, but that didn’t suit him, so Rudy kept riding until his hair whitened and the wind carved his features to resemble the scored slabs on the Rocky Mountain run.

  At the end they gave him a thousand dollars and a watch.

  He settled in Boulder, in a small apartment off the main line. He added the thousand to his savings, which were substantial, and invested it all in the Great Central. For four years, he collected generous dividends, and the value of the stock went up a few points.

  But the railroad’s primary source of revenue was coal. The endless strings of hoppers carried it from the western mines to the eastern power companies; and when the big board crashed on Monday, March 11, the Great Central and Rudy’s money went with it.

  On Tuesday evening, after a day-long drinking bout across the street from the Boulder yards, he threw a brick into the pla
te glass window of Harmon & McKissick, Inc., Brokers.

  It was the first time in his life that he’d consciously broken the law.

  Marian Courtney knew immediately something was wrong: the blue Plymouth was straddling two lanes as it approached from the west on Greenbelt Road. It slowed near the main gate and made a sudden left directly into oncoming traffic. Horns blared; it sideswiped a Citation and spun it sideways against the center strip. But the Plymouth kept coming.

  She stepped out of the inspection booth onto the small hook of paving that divided the roadway. Reflexively, her right hand brushed the .38 on her hip, but she did not unclip the safety strap that held the weapon in its holster.

  The car slowed; Marian had a glimpse of the driver as he straightened after the turn. He looked, she realized with a chill, like Lee Oswald, a creature of black moods and arrogant pretensions. He was smiling at her when she saw the .45.

  The window behind her exploded.

  Something tugged at her belly, she dived back inside the booth and lay on the floor while he methodically blew out the rest of the glass. Then he drove casually out onto Road 1 and poured automatic gunfire into a group of pedestrians. They scattered screaming; several went down, and two or three lay still after he passed.

  Security forces were slow to respond. The Plymouth was on Road 2, almost out of sight, before a pursuit vehicle left the main gate. Marian’s radio came alive. She brushed the glass shakily out of her hair. Her supervisor was sprinting toward her from the gatehouse, his eyes wide, his hands held out to her.

  It was the last thing she saw.

  The driver of the Plymouth killed three more in a wild chase across lawns and through parking areas before they cornered him behind the house that Baines Rimford had occupied, and blew him in half. All together, seven were dead. Of the critically injured, three, including the gate guard, died that night.

  The assailant turned out to be a welfare father from Baltimore, who was under a peace bond for threatening low-ranking employees of Eastern Maryland Power & Gas.

  Senator Parkman Randall, Republican from Nebraska, had no idea what the Oval Office meeting would be about, but he hoped the President had something he could take home to his constituents. Farm policies during this administration had been a disaster. Randall had played the loyal soldier, supporting what he could and opposing what he had to, knowing always that the President understood. The stock market collapse that had begun on Monday wasn’t helping matters. And he had other problems: abortion, the gun issue, prayer in the schools. Each was a politician’s nightmare, an issue that allowed no easy compromise. And on each, he had eventually been forced to take a position and to vote. Randall knew, as every good politician knows, that votes on sensitive issues never win friends, but invariably lose voters.

  He was up for re-election in November.

  The members of the Senate Defense Committee gathered in their caucus room and rode the underground jitney to the White House. Chilton was waiting for them when they debarked, and he escorted them to the Oval Office.

  The President stood as they entered and advanced to shake their hands. He was smiling, and Randall knew his man well enough to understand immediately that the news, whatever it was, would be good. He was grateful for that, at least.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, after everyone had settled into place, “I have an announcement of some importance.” He paused, enjoying the moment. “We’ve lived under a nuclear sword now for almost half a century. There has never been a day in our lives that we haven’t been aware of the possibility, at any moment, of an armed attack that could destroy the United States and probably every hope for a human future as well. There has never been an hour that we have not been at the mercy of Soviet self-interest. And we have waited for the miscalculation, for the accident, for the madman. Or for the technological breakthrough that would set us free.

  “I am in a position to tell you today that the waiting is nearly ended.”

  The men and women who sat around the perimeter of the office had, collectively, spent almost two centuries in politics; they were not easily impressed by talk. But they sensed something different tonight. The eloquence was gone; instead of the measured rhythmic tones and sparkling phrases, they heard only his elation. “The United States is about to activate ORION.”

  Through the window, Randall watched the inevitable demonstrators, protesting South American policy today, environmental issues tomorrow. They walked in tireless circles outside the gate. They never went away, they criticized everything, and they had no solutions. The people in the office began to applaud, and Randall joined them.

  “ORION is a particle-beam weapon,” the President continued. “It attacks guidance and other electronic systems on board enemy missiles, rendering them useless. That is, the missiles will not go where they are aimed. And even if they could, they would not detonate when they arrived.”

  “Mr. President,” asked Randall, “how long will it take?”

  “Our best guess,” said the President, “is thirty days. The shuttles have already begun ferrying the hardware into orbit.”

  Chilton was passing among them with a tray on which rested thirteen glasses. Each of the seven men and five women took one. The President took the last. John Hurley retrieved an ice bucket from behind his desk, lifted a bottle of champagne from it, and removed the cork. When Ed Wrenside of New Hampshire hurried forward to help, the President waved him back with a smile and filled their glasses one by one.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “I give you the United States.”

  MONITOR

  WHITE HOUSE DENIES NEW ENERGY SOURCE

  “I Wish It Were True,” Says President

  DJIA Off 740 Points in Week

  ALTHEAN RUNAWAY BEST-SELLER

  Michael Pappadopoulis’s Translations from the Althean surged to the top of the New York Times best-seller list during its first week of release. Despite critical charges that the volume contains more of Pappadopoulis than the Altheans, bookstores reported mounting sales.

  AYADI DENIES HAVING BOMB

  “I would have no use for one,” the Ayadi Ztana Mendolian told a crowded gathering of Iraqis and Jordanians yesterday. “The Almighty does not need my help to destroy Israel.” Later he attended a soccer game.

  MARKET SLIDE BLAMED ON SPECULATORS

  Short sales by insiders probably triggered the market collapse this week. “The averages were too high, and we were ripe for something like this,” said Val Koestler, electronics specialist for Killebrew & Denkle. “There were other factors that contributed, of course: the steady climb in interest rates over recent weeks, increased tension in the Middle East, the latest unemployment figures. People were jittery…”

  SOVIETS WALK OUT OF GENEVA

  Declare U.S. “Frivolous”

  Hurley Seeks Clear-Cut Military Advantage, Says Tass

  Taimanov Returns to Moscow

  MAN WIELDING PICKAX SLAUGHTERS SIX IN PEORIA BAR

  Claims Extraterrestrials Talk to Him on Channel 9

  CHINESE REINSTATE BIRTH RESTRICTIONS

  Human Rights Groups Denounce Action

  TALIOFSKY WINS CHESS TITLE AND DEFECTS

  Moscow Charges Champ Lured by Sex and Drugs

  15

  HARRY WAS WORKING late in his office when the fire engines went by, headed north toward Venture Park, the VIP housing area. His angle of vision was bad, but he could make out a fiery glare in the sky.

  It was a quarter to eleven.

  He pulled on his coat, walked swiftly to the north end of the building, and hurried out onto the lawn. Flames and moving lights were visible through a screen of trees. They seemed to be centered on Cord Majeski’s house.

  From the direction of the main gate, he heard more sirens.

  Harry broke into a run, knowing somehow with the fatalism that recent weeks had induced that the fire would be connected with the Hercules Project. Always now, things were connected. There was no rest.

 
Majeski’s house: it had been a two-story frame, painted light and dark brown, with a small deck on the west side and a storm door and a single concrete step in front. Emergency vehicles cluttered the street in front. Lights blinked, and people stood in small puzzled groups, staring at what remained. It was the damnedest thing Harry’d ever seen.

  The kitchen, the rear bedrooms, and part of the dining room were gutted. A few blackened timbers hung precariously together, hissing and sputtering under white streams of water. The air reeked of charred wood.

  The front of the house stood untouched, glowing frostily in the bright night, a lovely thing of blue crystal and cold fire. It reflected the revolving lights of the emergency vehicles and the steady glow of the street lamps. A silver arc centered on the house spread out across the lawn almost to the sidewalk. Two elms and some azaleas, caught within the arc, were laced with hoarfrost.

  “What is it?” someone asked as Harry walked up.

  Leslie stood off to one side. She’d thrown a coat over her nightclothes and, holding it tightly around her, stared disconsolately at the wreckage. She did not see him as he approached.

  “Where’s Cord?” he asked gently, placing his hand on her shoulder.

  She filled the space between them and pressed against him. It was her only answer.

  Harry heard an order to cut the water, and the hoses went limp. Some of the firemen started poking at the rubble. More sparks flew up.

  “Why is it so cold?” she asked.

  Harry’s face was already numb. “There’s a wave of it coming from somewhere,” he said, looking around curiously. “I think it’s the front of the house!” He held his palms out in that direction. “Jesus!” he said, “it is. What the hell’s going on?”

  Medical technicians and security officers were still arriving. Pete Wheeler’s car bounced across some grass fields, dropped into the street, and stopped half a block away. He got out and stared.