Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51
Page 28
“My God!” Philpott cried, at last accepting the unbelievable. ‘They’re in here!”
“Yes, Professor!”
Philpott looked quickly around. “But they obviously don’t know about us yet. They must not ever know. Quick, lock and bolt the doors. Switch over to our emergency generator, we don’t want them to see us using power.”
Chang and Cindy exchanged a glance. It was Cindy who dared the question: “Professor Philpott? You aren’t going to go on, are you?”
“Of course I am. We’re in the middle of— Shut down? Surrender to these mindless thugs?”
“But—” Chang floundered, almond eyes frightened behind those false-looking glasses. “The experiment, the risk..”
‘There is no risk,” Philpott snapped. “We’ve been autonomous in here anyway, absolutely self-contained. Do you want to be a hostage to these people, a bargaining chip in their absurd quarrel with authority, whatever that might be? I don’t particularly relish the thought of being held for exchange of some political prisoner in someplace like Northern Ireland or Lebanon.” So. That part of the reality of the situation hadn’t occurred to either of the young people. They stared at him, both frightened, both at a loss. Fortunately, he was not at a loss, nor was he frightened, though he was certainly concerned. “We’re safer here than anywhere else,” he told them. “We’ll do nothing to attract the attention of those cretins out there. We’ll stay within the lab building, locked in, until the authorities straighten out this mess. And as long as we’re in here, there is absolutely no reason not to go on with the experiment. Agreed?”
They were both reluctant to answer, but he needed that answer. He bore his sternest gaze first on Chang, the more malleable of the two, and Chang fidgeted, awkward and uncomfortable, but unable to argue back. “Yes, Professor,” he finally said, low and mumbled. “Agreed.”
“Cindy?”
Another hesitation, but her agreement was inevitable: “I... suppose so. I suppose it’s the only thing we can do.”
“Of course it is.” He turned his glare toward the daughter on the TV screen, nattering on now about terrorist “assurances.” He muttered, as though at her, as though it were her fault, “I will not be interrupted.” Then he looked through the doorway toward the experiment in progress: “Now, of all times.”
37
It was Frank’s pistol, fired once, the bullet thudding into a wooden desk, that had focused the attention of the eight staffers in the control section, but it was Grigor who turned them from panic and disintegration into a cooperative and useful team. “I was at Chernobyl,” he told them, once Frank had assembled them and they stood frightened and demoralized in a little cluster in the middle of the main control room. “I was a fireman there.”
He told them what had happened to him, and in their own technical jargon he told them why Chernobyl had gone wrong. “I don’t want to do to anyone else what was done to me,” he told them, “I assure you of that. I am not here to cause a meltdown. With your help, we will do no harm at all. We are here only to force public awareness. That is all we want.”
“And the money,” Frank reminded him. “For the cause.” Because they’d finally argued their way to an agreement that Frank’s crass commercial motives would best be hidden within the social concerns of the others. The five million dollars— Frank’s number, one he refused to change—would be for their
Committee for the Environment. (The committee wasn’t real, but the damn money better be.)
“Yes, the money,” Grigor agreed, “but we’ll get to that.” And he went on explaining things, in his thin and non-threatening voice, seated at a desk facing them all, as though at his ease, successfully so far hiding from them the extreme weakness that had made it almost impossible for him to walk this far from the bus. (Kwan and Pami were also seated, necessarily, at the fringes of the group, leaving only Frank and Maria Elena to stand and wave guns around. But they were enough.)
Once the staffers began to engage Grigor in dialogue, Frank knew it was going to be all right. These weren’t tough guys, no more than Frank himself. They were five women and three men, all of them technicians, none of them death-defying jocks. Because they were managers and supervisors, they were older than the workers who would normally have been on duty here. They would do what they were told.
And what they were told to do was simple. Do not shut down the reactor, but close down its output to the lowest possible minimum. Then make the phone call; the first phone call.
That was a job for the senior technician, a woman of about sixty, who might have looked a lot like Maria Elena in her younger days. She was the one who dialed the offices in the administrative building and delivered the message Frank gave her:
The control section has been taken over by armed and desperate individuals.
If everyone obeys the orders of the invading group, no harm will come to anyone.
The reactor is still being operated by the staff, but under the supervision of one of the invaders, who is himself an expert in nuclear-fission plants.
Everyone else within the Green Meadow perimeter fence is to evacuate; now.
Contact will be made with officials outside the gate once everyone has cleared the plant.
There is no reason for general panic, and in fact the invaders insist that the surrounding counties not be evacuated.
One hint that the general population is being moved, to make possible an assault on the plant, and the invaders will deliberately cause a meltdown, before the people to be affected can get clear; the invaders are absolutely prepared to die.
At this point, their only demands are that the plant be cleared and that a telephone contact be established outside the gate.
Once that is accomplished, and once it is generally seen and recognized that the invaders are both serious and responsible, a dialogue can begin.
X
Now what? A nuclear plant? These five misfits have blundered themselves into a nuclear plant? For what? How much damage could they do in there) I have come to save the world, only to find that truckling toady is content to destroy New York State? (It is true there are those who believe that New York—or at least the city of the same name, no relation—is the world, but surely the loathsome He is not among them.)
And what of Susan Carrigan? What is her part in the scheme, where does she fit, what is her job? He’s driving me mad with that grimalkin, that heifer, that fur-farm. The other five are terrorizing the populace at Green Meadow, and she’s in the arms of that smoky simulacrum, playing at love, hovel That’s supposed to be my territory, you shameless bastard!
Shall I just kill her, and see what happens? Slowly, with boils and pus and scum from every pore? Or immediately, with a lightning stroke?
Come to me, my spies of the middle air, my northern apples of the twilight ether, extenders of my brain, my strength, my knowledge. What do they want? What do we know? What is his advantage, that bland mortician, that poisoned milk, that sterile tool?
Stable matter? Stable matter! Stab at Mater, what a vicious idea! So is that what the experiment in that plant is all about, the search for what the instable humans call strange matter (as though they weren’t sufficiently strange themselves).
By Unholy Lucifer, he means to stabilize the Earth!
No, no, no. I have to get in there. I have to stop this, and at once.
And that’s a pearl, that was my planet? No.
Ananayel
So he knows.
Well, he would, wouldn’t he? And my little lesson in Connecticut didn’t take, did it? But of course I should have realized that; intimidation is a cumbersome tool, as likely to stiffen resolve as to break spirit. Oddly enough, violence never is the answer. Things done in violence have to be done over again.
But what else is there, with as fallen and shameless a creature as this nameless slave of the Unholy? Reason? Persuasion? Argument? Emotional appeal? Bribery? He’s an extension of his miserable master, nothing else, with no more free wi
ll than a moon.
All right, we’ll stop him. Again.
In order to accomplish anything, this fetid fiend will have to take a corporeal form, which in his case of course means possessing a human’s body rather than, as in mine, creating a pleasing person out of air. And his first idea—they’re so predictable, so obvious, these tools of Satan—will be to take over one of the hostages in the plant, one of the staff members kept inside to run the machinery. But that’s easily dealt with. I have my own assistants when necessary, my cherubim, swifter than thought, darting through space and time with arrowed precision. (How unthinking of human artists to portray them as fat!)
I have called upon them, these lean servants of the Lord. They hover now over the hostages, protecting, observing, prepared to alert me at the slightest hint of incursion. Until the end, each hostage shall have one of these, these, oh, let’s call them guardian angels.
So he can’t suddenly, all at once, be there, inside the plant. He’ll have to start from the other side of the fence, take over some poor human somewhere out in the world, and try to scheme some way to move it through the maze of officialdom ringing the site. Impossible? I’m not sure; that diseased cur does seem to have a low cunning.
Outside, of course, his choice of host is wide. I can’t give everyone a guardian angel. We’ll simply have to keep a diligent watch.
38
These were the times that tried Joshua Hardwick’s soul. To be public information director for a nuclear power plant less than a hundred miles from a major population center like New York City was no bed of roses even when things were going well. When the plant was under occupation by terrorists— nobody even knew for sure which terrorists, just to put the icing on the cake—the PID’s life became, in a word, hell.
There were even times these days when he found himself thinking nostalgically of the advertising racket, that’s how bad it was. (At least in the ad game, you could drink at lunch. And CNN wasn’t training its cameras on you every time you blew your nose. And. . . Nah. There’s no parenthesis big enough.)
Lately, Joshua hated to get out of bed in the morning, hated that first pre-breakfast phone call to the command post outside the Green Meadow gate—“Still there. No change.”—hated sitting in his Honda for the twenty-minute bucolic (and so what?) drive from his once-happy home in Connecticut to his once-cushy job. He hated the job, the reporters, the cops, the questions, the answers, and the fact that there actually weren’t any answers, not really
Possibly most of all—apart from the terrorists who were ultimately responsible for this mess—Joshua hated his bosses, and God knows there were enough of them for the hate to spread around. Green Meadow was a quasi-govemmental, quasiprivate corporation, run by three federal and two New York State agencies, plus a consortium of private companies led by Unitronic Laboratories, itself a subsidiary of Anglo Dutch Oil. Every one of those entities had its representatives here for the crisis, and the task of each and every one of those representatives, it had early become clear, was to see to it that some other entity got the blame when things ended badly.
That was kind of depressing already, knowing they all expected it to end badly And that, rather than any of them trying to do something to change that gloomy prediction, they were all spending their time trying to scramble out of the way of falling debris. Expected falling debris.
Which meant they all wanted the ear—and the voice, and the heart, and the mind, and the soul—of the public information director. They all wanted to believe he was on their side, would present their waffling and cowardice in the best light while screwing everybody else. (The idea that everybody else should be screwed was as important to these businessmen and government officials as the idea that they themselves should be spared.)
As usual this morning Joshua had to show his two separate IDs—one wasn’t enough for these people, because they were very serious—at the police barrier half a mile down the road from the plant entrance, and as usual it was a state trooper he never remembered seeing before, and who felt the same about him. Sitting at the wheel of his Honda with controlled impatience during the trooper’s long slow inspection of his face, Joshua felt a sudden startling clench in his stomach, a sudden urgent need to throw up. “Oh, my God,” he said. “I can’t— You’ll have to—”
Startled, the trooper backed away, hand whipping to his sidearm as Joshua came boiling out of the car, right hand clamped over mouth. Joshua managed two steps toward the far verge, all his muscles and joints lashing him with sudden excruciating pain, before he dropped to his knees and burst breakfast all over the westbound lane and slightly on his own trousers.
“Jesus Christ, fella!” the trooper cried, no longer suspicious— nobody can fake that much vomit—‘What's the matter with you?”
“I dun—I dunno.” Kneeling there, head sagging, Joshua gasped, lungs searing with pain at every breath. He dropped back to sit on his heels, arms hanging at his sides, and felt the pain strike at him everywhere, as though a whole bag of cats at once were trying to claw their way out of his body
“I’ll call somebody,” the trooper decided.
“Wai—” Joshua said, vaguely lifting an arm. ‘Wait.”
Because the pain, as quickly as it had come over him, was now lessening, fading away. He was able to take deeper and deeper breaths, he could feel his strength steadily return, and he lifted a shaking hand to wipe his sweat-beaded and cold-feeling brow.
“What a hell of a thing,” he said, his voice trembling. And now that the first attack was over, what he mosdy felt was scared. What was this? Cancer? Leukemia? An early sign?
Oh, Christ, don’t tell me I got something at the goddamn plant.
“Wait there,” the trooper said, which Joshua was more than willing to do, sitting back on his heels in front of his breakfast like an extremely oddball worshipper, and the trooper went away to his impressive official Plymouth Fury II on the other side of the road, returning a minute later with a roll of paper towels and a Diet Pepsi. “Here you go,” he said. “Try it, anyway.”
Grateful, Joshua wiped his face and neck with the paper towels, then took a long swig of Diet Pepsi to clean out his mouth. It landed in his stomach without incident, seeming content to stay there, and Joshua struggled to his feet, the trooper giving him a hand. ‘Thanks,” Joshua said. “Boy, I don’t know what that was.”
“You better check with your doctor,” the trooper told him.
“I will.”
“You’re looking awfully red-eyed.”
Terrific; a vampire for CNN. “I don’t know,” Joshua said, leaning one hand on the top of the Honda. “Maybe I ought to go home, call in. Maybe you could call in for me, the Press Office”
“Sure,” said the trooper.
But then Joshua felt a stiffening of the spine—he actually felt it, a surge of toughness through his body—and he stood up straighter, taking his hand off the Honda as he said, “No, never mind, I’m all right now.”
“You sure?”
“Positive.”
Joshua got back behind the wheel, and glanced at himself in the rearview mirror, and by God his eyes were red-rimmed, as though he’d spent all last night in mad debauch. One of the secretaries would have Murine, Visine, one of those eyedrop things. He couldn’t face a news camera like this; he could barely face a print reporter like this.
So why don’t I go home? he asked himself, even as his body, following its own agenda, started the car, shifted into gear, and waved “so long” to the trooper, who called, ‘Take care now.”
The last half mile between police barrier and plant entrance was the most peaceful ride in the world. There were no houses or farms along here, nothing but regrowth woods (containing shreds of stone wall, the faint pencil marks of failed setdements) and overgrown fields, not yet reclaimed by forest. The road was reasonably smooth and reasonably straight, and he was alone on it, his Honda a magic carpet through a world called Serenity. If only all of driving could be like this.
Fortunately, the local weekly paper was not that high on the list of Joshua’s media problems. He was distantly polite to their chubby girl reporter, gave her the same handouts he gave everybody else, and let it go at that. And enjoyed the half mile of sequestered road. It was one of the few things in his life these days he could enjoy at all.
By the time he got to the command post—a series of trailers scattered like a Canadian mining town all over the road in the vicinity of the main gate—Joshua’s recent illness was completely gone, except for the red eyes. He left the Honda in its assigned space, walked to the Press Office trailer, and a steno there did have eyedrops for him. She paused in her endless work at the copying machine to root through her big horse-feeder-bag purse and find the little bottle, which he took to the men’s room and used on both eyes, to no effect. The red fringe was just there, in his eyes, as though behind them his brain were on fire.