“You don’t leave me in here with these people,” Pami said. She’d had trouble waking up just now, and was more irritable than ever.
ccWell, somebody’s gotta keep an eye on the store,” Frank said.
“You know,” Grigor told him, “most of this is automated, it’s merely a matter of watching the gauges. We could lock the staff in the dayroom while we’re gone, five or ten minutes. We would bring Philpott here, and let them out again.”
“But who looks at the gauges?”
“Kwan.”
Frank looked over at Kwan, huddled in a chair in the corner, lost in his own helpless despairing rage. “We’ll see,” Frank said, and went over to him. “Kwan? You get the idea?”
Kwan looked at him without response.
Frank said, “We’ll lock these people up, go over and get the mad scientist, and bring him back. You sit at the controls there, keep an eye on things. If it looks like something’s gonna blow, you fix it, right?”
Kwan’s head lifted slighdy. A faint gleam came into those dead eyes.
Frank touched his shoulder, feeling its bony hardness, tense as a bridge cable. “You don’t wreck it, okay? Not yet. I tell you what: if the time comes to say screw it, let er rip, you’ll be the guy to do it. Okay?”
A faint smile touched those gray lips.
Frank grinned at him. “You’d like to blow the whole thing, wouldn’t you? China and everybody”
With those eyes, and that smile, on that fleshless face, Kwan looked like a death’s head.
* * *
No one was in the lounge to watch the television set three minutes later, when a scared-looking newsreader tried to shut the barn door, now that the horse was out and off and running. “From his vacation home in East Hampton, Long Island, the eminent scientist Dr. Marlon Philpott today broke his silence on.. .”
In the lab, Dr. Philpott broke a long tense silence to whisper, “It’s there.” He sounded as though he’d seen God. “Chang? Cindy? It’s in there.”
It was. This time it was. The radiation monitor showed definite gamma ray activity in the holding ring. Somewhere within the swirling deuterium something now existed that hadn’t been there before. It had been trying to be born for some time, for weeks, as high-speed streams of heavy ions had been directed into collision courses inside the holding ring. But to get a specific result out of these collisions was as chancy and difficult as getting a specific result out of any collision; like smashing two Hondas together and coming out with one Cadillac. Or like throwing a deck of cards into the air and having them land, all faceup, in exact sequence by suit and number.
Well, this time they had it. And they would keep it. While Philpott and Cindy watched, barely breathing, Chang operated the switching circuit that would transfer the—thing—from the holding ring to the storage botde. “Gamma radiation has stopped in the holding ring,” Chang announced.
“Then it’s in the bottle.”
Chang looked stricken. ‘There’s no gamma activity from the bottle!”
“Strange matter,” Philpott reminded him, “only gives off radiation while it’s being fed, that’s one of the reasons it’s so safe. Shoot deuterium across the center of the bottle.”
“A reaction!” Chang’s round face beamed with delight.
“So it’s real,” Philpott said, as though he still hadn’t really believed it, not even one minute ago. His mouth was dry. Knowing that something was real was in no way the same thing as experiencing it; the difference between being out in a blizzard and looking at a snowscape on a Christmas card.
Held poised in the storage botde was a piece of strange matter, known as an S-drop. The storage botde itself was a simple glass vacuum jug on a table, containing one positive and one negative hemispherical electrode, with the S-drop suspended by electric current between them. Facing the bottle, a video camera was lined up with an ordinary bare light bulb on the other side, the S-drop centered midway between the two. The camera informed the computer at which Chang sat, and the computer directed the power supply in maintaining the equilibrium of the S-drop. To make the S-drop fall—to the terror of alarmists such as Dr. Delantero—all one had to do was wave a hand in front of the video camera. Dr. Philpott would do it himself, simply to prove Dr. Delantero wrong in the presence of these two graduate student witnesses, but it would ruin the experiment, and who knew how long it would be before he could produce another such beneficial collision?
Chang broke into the self-satisfaction of Philpott’s thoughts, saying, “Professor, it’s getting larger and a whole lot heavier.”
“What? Are you still feeding it?”
“Well, yes, sir.”
“Turn it off,” Philpott told him. “Turn off the deuterium. If that drop gets much larger, I won’t be able to use it. In fact, we won’t be able to hold it.”
Leaning close to the botde, vision hampered by the guidance light to his left, Philpott peered into the center of that enclosed airless space. Could he see it, actually see it? A speck? Or was that wishful thinking?
* * *
Once Frank had convinced the staffers he really would shoot the locks off the lab doors, no matter how much that might startle Dr. Philpott or louse up his experiments, it seemed they had keys to that building after all. “FU tell him you fought like hell,” he promised, as he locked them into the dayroom.
Then it turned out Grigor couldn’t walk, not more than a dozen steps. “I’m sorry, Frank,” he said, with a shamed smile. “I think I hid this from the staff people—”
“You hid it from us all.”
“But I cannot possibly walk from here to another building.” “No problem,” Frank said. “I’ll carry you.”
He did, and Maria Elena damn near had to carry Pami, too. She was also a lot weaker than anybody had known, staggering like a crackhead forced to walk in the middle of the high. Maria Elena took her arm and helped her steer a straight line.
It was the first they’d been outside since they’d taken over the plant, the first they’d seen the outside. It was a bright day, but not sunny, with very high white clouds and low humidity, so that the whole world had a look of flat clarity. The air wasn’t really cold, but there was still a touch of oncoming winter in its crispness, a sharp sensation in the nose, too faint to be called a smell. The deciduous trees and shrubs were far along in their seasonal color display, so that the conifers looked an even darker green.
The concrete paths curving between the buildings were clean and neat and empty, as though these four were the last people on Earth, the slope-shouldered man carrying the feather-light bundle of the second man, the sturdily built woman leading the skinny little black girl who tottered and reeled as though about to fall at every step. The four made their slow and uneven way along the paths toward the lab, moving as though to the tinny sound of a toy piano that only they could hear.
The lab beyond the turbine building was the smallest of the structures within the plant perimeter. A separate windowless concrete-block rectangle two stories high, it had entrances on three sides. The main front entrance, a pair of black metal doors that faced a neat curving concrete path flanked by low tasteful plantings, had been dead-bolted on the inside, in addition to the locks, so they couldn’t get in that way.
“Wait,” Frank told his group, and walked around to the left, to the single door, also black metal, that opened onto a path direcdy to the nearby turbine building. This too had been bolted on the inside.
‘They’re beginning to piss me off,” Frank informed the others, as he walked by on his way to the right side entrance, another pair of black metal doors, this one on a higher level, opening onto a loading dock over a blacktop driveway. A dozen black plastic trash cans were lined up on the loading dock, along the wall beside the doors. This was where deliveries were made and unwanted materials taken out, and the construction of the loading dock and doors had made dead bolts impractical here. Frank opened the two locks, and then the right-hand door. “More like it,” he said
, and went back to get the others.
* * *
Seated on a lab stool, leaning on a metal table, Philpott was dictating, and Cindy was taking it down in her private shorthand: “The S-drop is stable. It is not, as many of my fellow scientists feared or hoped, or at least theorized, quasistable. It has not decayed into a different form. The radiation monitor shows gamma ray activity where we know the S-drop to be. It stops when we stop feeding the drop, and begins again when the drop is fed. At this point, its mass is still below the lowest limits of human vision, but when the current disturbance here at the facility has come to an end, it is my intention to feed the drop further, until it is large enough to be seen by the naked eye. To make it any larger than that, however—”
“Professor.”
There was something so strange in Chang’s voice that Philpott didn’t even think to protest at the interruption. He looked over at the boy, and saw him staring toward the corridor door. Pretending the fear he felt was only irritation, Philpott swiveled around on the stool.
42
The four people who stepped into the lab room were not at all what Philpott had expected the invaders of the plant to be. Of the four, only the man waving the pistol with such easy familiarity looked at all like PhilpotPs idea of a terrorist. And only the rather exotic-looking woman had anything of the manner of a fanatic. The other man and woman were both very obviously sick; horribly sick, both of them.
Yes, of course. The man would be the Russian, the spokesman for the group, the fireman who’d been poisoned at Chernobyl. Could the black woman also have been there? That seemed so unlikely, and yet she was clearly as sick as the Russian. In fact, there was such an air of hopelessness and dejection and desperation about this entire quartet that Philpott’s first immediate reaction was pity.
A reaction that didn’t last. Quasistable, it immediately decayed into irritation and outrage. “I suppose we must obey your orders now,” he said, speaking to the man with the pistol, the obvious leader. “But I would ask you please not to disturb anything in this room. You can gain nothing by it, and I could lose a great deal.”
“I saw you on television,” the man said.
Of course. If this is fame, Philpott thought, I’d prefer to do without it. “I have been on television,” he agreed.
“You’re gonna be on television again,” the man said, with a faint tough-guy smile that didn’t fool Philpott for a second. “When you explain how you yourself, all by yourself, made the breakthrough that got us all out of this place and let everybody get back to normal.”
Philpott’s smile now was pitying; but sardonically and deliberately so. “Is that what you think!” he said. “That I will make any difference?”
“Sure you will.” The man gestured with the pistol. “They want their power plant back, but they don’t think we’re serious about that. They’ll want you back even more, and you can talk. You can let them know we really are serious.”
Philpott had only a few seconds to decide how to handle this. Go along with them, keep quiet, agree to their fantasies? Or disabuse them of the notion they would ever under any circumstances successfully complete whatever childish scheme they were acting out here?
Marlon Philpott was, first and foremost, a scientist, a rational man. His strong tendency would have been to come down on the side of reality versus fantasy in any case, but this time there was an even more cogent reason to be realistic from the outset with these people: their fantasies were keeping a lot of men and women from getting on with their normal lives. Including, now, himself.
If this unfortunate incident were to end without bloodshed, it seemed to Philpott, it would only happen after the invaders had accepted the hopelessness of their position. Therefore, he said, “I’m sorry, but you know, it really won’t work. I’ll do what you say, of course—you have the gun—but please, when it fails, don’t put the blame on me.”
There was such calm conviction in his words that they had no choice but to hear them, to at least think about what he was saying. The Russian, who had crossed to sit on the nearest stool while Philpott was speaking, and who leaned his back now wearily—weakly—against the wall, said, “Why must we fail?”
He sounds reasonable, Philpott thought, surprised and saddened by the realization. With unexpected empathy, he suddenly saw the route—like tracking a molecule through its invisible journey— whereby an ordinary small-town fireman could be transformed by something like Chernobyl not merely into a person subsumed by his terminal illness but into this person, blundering into this totally untenable position in one last doomed effort to make his life have meant something.
Concentration on his specialty had made Philpott narrow and cold in his dealings with other human beings, but he was an intelligent man, and he was capable of sympathetic and emotional responses to other individuals when his attention had been caught. At this moment, his attention was caught.
Basmyonov; Philpott suddenly remembered, glad to have retained the name from the television reports. “Mr. Basmyonov,” he said, with passable Russian inflection, the accent on the penultimate syllable, “the world is a rather well organized place, all in all. The damage you can do here is, at its worst, infinitesimal in comparison with the planet, with all the hundreds of nuclear power plants producing electricity around the globe, with the thousands of power plants of other types. In human terms, more people are being conceived at this moment than you and this plant could possibly kill. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to make light of your situation, but what you people are doing is a very small blip on the screen. They can afford to outwait you. Stall, talk, negotiate, never come to any conclusion. And meantime, your food is running low. It certainly is in here. We’ve eaten just about every bit of junk food we had in the lounge.”
The thin black woman slid slowly down the wall behind her and sat on the floor, head lolling, like a doll left behind when the family moved. The other woman stooped as though to help her, but there was nothing to be done, so she straightened again. The black woman’s eyes were glazed, mouth slack. She seemed to take no interest in anything that was being said.
The Russian said, “But why isn’t it easier for them to negotiate?”
It was the exotic-looking woman who answered before Philpott could, turning her attention away from the woman seated on the floor. “Authority she said, with such disgust it was as though the word were a dead mouse she had found on her tongue. “Their authority must be unquestioned. They must be permitted to do what they want with their world. In Brazil, they killed entire valleys, killed the people, the trees, the waters, the ground, and no one was permitted to question their right to do so.”
So that’s your bugbear, Philpott thought, and said, “I wouldn’t phrase it quite the same way, but yes, that’s essentially it. All of this was thought out, worked out, in the capitals of the world, years ago. I was on some of the preliminary working panels myself, and I know the decisions, and I know the thinking behind it. No nation can afford to give in even once to nuclear blackmail. It can never be seen to be a paying proposition, or it will proliferate, and the carnage would be unbelievable.”
The man with the gun said, scornfully, ‘They’d let us wreck this place?”
“If you’re that mindless, yes. Listen, there are five billion human beings on this Earth. How many do you think you could kill with this plant? I mean, if every circumstance went exactly your way. Thirty thousand? This lady mentioned dead valleys in Brazil. How many more dead valleys could the human race create, and still survive on the planet? Hundreds.” To the Russian, he said, “Your nation has managed to destroy an entire sea, the Aral. A huge inland salt sea, mismanaged to a brackish puddle the size of this room. The salt floats in the air. Infants are dying there, because there’s salt in their mothers’ milk and they can’t eat. A vast expanse of your own nation destroyed, with everybody and everything on it, but the Soviet Union goes on. The planet goes on. The human race goes on.”
The Russian said, “We’re t
oo unimportant, you mean.”
“All of us are,” Philpott agreed. “You, I, the negotiators, all of us.”
The man with the gun said, “What if we start shooting hostages?”
Philpott frowned at him. “I don’t think you will,” he said, “but you might. If you do, communication will stop. They would write us all off, and just wait.”
“For us to wreck the plant.” That false scorn was there again, the man trying to convince himself of his potency; but of course failing.
Philpott said, “I’ll tell you what I think is happening out there right now. I believe the area in front of the gate is full of fire trucks and other emergency equipment. I believe there are hundreds, perhaps even more than a thousand, people in radiation suits, poised and ready. The instant you give any indication that you are damaging the plant, they will pour in here to contain that damage as best they can. As the weather reports on television have been telling us, civilization has been getting a lucky break and you an unlucky one-“
“Civilization,” the exotic woman spat, and her scorn was no affectation.
Philpott looked at her. “I can see civilization has harmed you,” he said. “It does that. I can’t feel your pain, of course, but I still believe human civilization is worth the price we pay.”
“The price you pay, or the price I pay?” Philpott spread his hands. “We all make that decision for ourselves.” Turning back to the armed man, he said, “What I was saying about the weather. There are neither high winds nor rain anywhere in the forecast, and those are the two weather modes that would spread radiation and destruction the farthest. Given the current weather, and given the emergency teams no doubt waiting outside the perimeter, there’s a very good chance they can contain the damage to this immediate area only.”
“You’ll die,” the armed man pointed out, “along with the rest of us.”
Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 Page 31