Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  “Yes.” She forced herself to smile. “When the police come. . .”

  “You have to tell them. . .”

  “Yes.”

  “He made me. I never. . .”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s crazy. He would have. . .”

  “Yes.”

  And then he covered her mouth with his own, forcing his tongue between her teeth. And she let him. She would have let him do anything. Whatever it would have taken.

  As they walked back to the car, with his arm through her own, they could see von Niehauser standing beside one of the gasoline pumps, talking to the attendant. They looked like conspirators.

  “I was tellin’ him,” the attendant said, turning to Lautner as they approached. “Radio says there’s a big storm comin’ up from Mexico—be here by the mornin’. Hope you folks ain’t got too far t’ go.”

  His tiny blue eyes were worried—they were the only things left in his face that seemed to have any powers of expression at all.

  “Twelve point five gallons. That’ll be a buck twenty-nine—I don’t set the prices.”

  Lautner counted out the money and the gasoline coupons, keeping his back to von Niehauser as he did it.

  “You know, you really ought to do something about that washroom of yours,” he murmured, like someone confiding a secret to a friend. “It’s filthy in there—no place for a lady.”

  Perhaps the eyes weren’t all that was left alive. It was his gas station, his pride. He looked like MacArthur contemplating the fall of Corregidor.

  . . . . .

  Somehow the stop for gas seemed to have worked a change in von Niehauser. He appeared more relaxed. Almost as soon as they were back on the highway, he pulled a paper bag out from between his feet and dropped it on the seat in front of him.

  “The old man sold me some sandwiches,” he announced. “And a few bottles of something called ‘Squirt’. It’s nearly five—I thought you might be hungry.”

  “What is it?”

  With his right hand, and keeping his eyes on the road ahead, Lautner opened the bag and felt around inside. He brought out a triangular package wrapped in heavy waxed paper. “Open it for me, Jenny.”

  It turned out to be tuna fish. The odor flooded the car, making her feel slightly sick—she liked tuna fish as a rule. It was strangely disgusting to watch Erich eat the thing as he drove.

  “Have one, Jenny,” he said. “It’s good.”

  “No, thanks.”

  “How about you, von Niehauser?”

  “Thank you, no. I seem to have lost the habit.”

  When he was finished, he asked for one of the bottles, which von Niehauser opened with the flat side of a folding knife he took from his pocket.

  “This stuff is awful.”

  “Yes. Turn on your headlights, Erich. It’s beginning to get dark.” Their little party seemed to have fallen flat.

  . . . . .

  In the desert, the light lingers. At five o’clock the sky was merely a pale, luminous gray—true night was still almost an hour away.

  But somehow the mere fact of the headlights seemed to make the air darken. It was only very gradually that you could see the faint, yellowish smear on the road ahead, but the sense of isolation was strong. You had the distinct impression that this arid, heartless landscape was collapsing in around you. The stillness was terrible.

  “According to the map, we should be approaching the junction with state road 26. You will wish to turn to the right there.”

  Lautner nodded in the direction of the rear view mirror, and his eyes flickered toward Jenny, who sat all the way across the seat from him, as if she couldn’t get far enough away.

  Where were the police? Hadn’t that old fool gone into the washroom and seen the mirror? Had he imagined it was some kind of prank? What kind of idiot would think that? He had seen von Niehauser, hadn’t he?

  She had tried to keep some track of time since they had left the gas station, but it was difficult. She wasn’t wearing a watch and, under the circumstances, she didn’t think she could just trust to her impressions. There was only the car’s odometer—Erich was driving a shade over forty miles per hour, and they had come about nineteen miles. That made it, what? Twenty-eight and a half minutes. A little less.

  How would it work? If the State Police had a car out on the roads they would send that, but they had gas rationing too. Probably they had had to cut back on their patrols. They probably had an office in Hot Springs. Or they might send one out from Las Cruces—she had seen a road sign a few miles back, and Las Cruces was forty miles to the south. And now von Niehauser wanted to turn off onto a side road. If they came from Las Cruces, with the lead he had, they would probably miss him.

  But if they came from Hot Springs—and if they believed her message—they wouldn’t be held back by any speed limits. So they might catch him before the turnoff. Or they might have, if they had even sent a car. What were the chances of that now, after twenty-eight minutes? Not very good.

  It was von Niehauser who saw them first.

  “Didn’t you notice anything, you fool?” he shouted. “Don’t you use your mirrors? There’s the junction—get onto the side road at least.”

  Jenny twisted around to have a look through the rear window—after such an outburst, would she dare not?—and she saw, very faintly, the glimmer of a headlight. It was a few seconds before she understood what could have alarmed von Niehauser so much, and then, gradually, she was able to make it out. Whoever was back there must be doing close to seventy miles an hour.

  With a lurch that almost sent her sprawling into Erich’s lap, the car made a sharp right turn onto state road 26. The sound of the tires was like a woman screaming—at that precise instant, just as they began to straighten out, she could hear the slow whine of a siren and she saw a red light flashing from the car behind them. It was the police all right, and they had figured out who they were supposed to be after. She felt like cheering.

  “Slow down,” von Niehauser barked. His face was set and expressionless, and he seemed coiled up inside like a snake. “We don’t know what they want, and there’s nothing to be gained by trying to outrun them. When we get a few hundred yards farther on, pull over. And try to remember that you are an innocent motorist—possibly they only want to issue us a speeding ticket.”

  He didn’t believe that—you could read it in his eyes. The war is here, Jenny thought to herself. She was looking at a man getting ready to die.

  Suddenly there was nothing left to cheer about.

  It seemed to take forever. The car drifted to a slow stop—you could look out the window and count the tufts of dead grass as the engine growled and died away. Erich switched off the ignition and looked at her sideways, smiling faintly. He swallowed hard. He was sweating. But still, he smiled.

  Von Niehauser, fortunately, didn’t see. He was trained on the rear window like a cannon, as if he believed he could kill with just his eyes if he looked hard enough. You couldn’t see anything except the back of his head, of course, but his very hair seemed to be on the alert.

  It was then, watching him as he watched the car behind them, that Jenny began to grow genuinely afraid. Because the police didn’t settle a thing, not just by being there. This one wasn’t going to go along quietly.

  “Do nothing. Merely wait.” The voice seemed to be sounding from an immense distance. “Make them come to us.”

  The police car stopped about fifty feet back. The siren slid down about four octaves, growing steadily louder until it cut out at about a sixth below middle C. The red light kept on winking like a bad joke. There were two men inside. They were wearing the flat-brimmed hats that seemed to be standard with state troopers everywhere. They just waited. For what seemed like a long time, but probably wasn’t more than five or six seconds, they simply sat in their car, as if they expected Erich to get out and come to them.

  “Do nothing—merely wait.” It was no longer clear that von Niehauser was speaking to anyo
ne. He didn’t look back. He didn’t move. He hardly did more than whisper. “We are tourists, on our way to Deming where we expect to meet a friend.”

  Deming? Where in God’s name was Deming?

  And then the two highway patrolmen got out. The doors pushed open on both sides, and first one and then the other got out. They didn’t hurry. One of them, the driver, was very fat.

  Wilma Bragg had gotten stopped once when they were all on their way back to Los Alamos. It was about three months after Jenny arrived, when everything that happened still seemed unique and completely strange. Wilma hadn’t given a signal, or something like that, and the troopers pulled her over. Only one of them had gotten out; the other one had stayed in the car. It had seemed the usual thing—why should it take two grown men just to issue a moving violation notice? But perhaps von Niehauser didn’t know that.

  Of course, it was impossible to misunderstand their intentions when, as they came around the front of their cruiser, they both drew their revolvers.

  It was a bad moment in the car. Von Niehauser suddenly had Hal’s service pistol in his hand—Jenny had had her eyes on him the whole time, and she didn’t recall that he had moved; but there it was—and Erich was clutching the steering wheel with one hand and breathing in short, ragged gulps as he stared back over his shoulder at the two policemen. And Jenny was trying her best to remember what it was she had thought would happen when she scrawled that message on the washroom mirror. Not this. Certainly not this.

  “We haven’t got a chance,” Erich said abruptly, his voice thick and gravelly, as if from years of disuse. “Did you hear me, von Niehauser? We’ll get killed—you can see that.”

  Von Niehauser turned around, very slowly, and smiled. All the tension seemed to have gone out of him. He seemed at peace with himself. He seemed to welcome what was coming.

  “At least there’s no pretense here. And if we die, then we die.”

  Erich simply stared at him—struck dumb, it seemed, shocked into helpless silence by the staggering, inexplicable transparency of the thing. Von Niehauser wasn’t going to surrender. As far as Erich Lautner was concerned, he might as well have been watching the man turn himself into a werewolf.

  And then, quite suddenly, from one instant to the next, he screamed. It was a loud, high-pitched scream of more than animal terror; it seemed to make the stillness shatter like glass.

  The sound was still trembling in the air when Erich’s door popped open, something it seemed to do of its own accord. Erich just went with the door—all at once he was outside, crouched and running. He was holding his arms out at his sides, heading obliquely toward the policemen, and he was shouting something, but his voice was too shrill and cracked for anyone to make out what he was saying.

  The events of the next few seconds seemed to stretch out over hours. Jenny was sitting on her knees on the front seat; she could watch it all happen so clearly, just as if time had been slowed down almost to nothing for her particular benefit. And there wasn’t anything she could do.

  It began when one of the policemen—the thin one, the one who hadn’t been driving—raised his pistol and fired. Maybe he thought he saw something, or maybe he was just startled. Either way, no one was ever going to know. The bullet caught Erich square in the neck, and his shouting stopped, and he pitched over face first onto the road.

  Jenny began to fill her lungs to shout something—there was just an instant when that still seemed to be possible—and then she stopped short. Something had changed. She couldn’t define what it was, but something had happened, something that made her scream suddenly irrelevant. She could do anything she wanted and it wouldn’t make any difference.

  And then she understood. She was alone.

  The back door was open, and von Niehauser was gone. He just wasn’t there. She couldn’t understand it. He was gone—he had left her there alone.

  “God help us,” she heard herself whispering.

  She was perfectly aware that this was the moment to duck. What she should have done was to get her head down as quickly as possible, to hit the floor and stay there until it was all over, but she couldn’t move. Nothing on earth could have induced her to move. She couldn’t even turn her head away. All she could do was to witness in helpless fascination. Volition had nothing to do with it.

  It was all over in an instant. There was a blur of sound that she dimly understood to be gunfire. The two policemen were firing wildly, not seeming to know which way to aim, and then the big one seemed to kick backward with his right leg, just as if it were being pulled from behind, and then his whole body began to twist wildly—he must already have been dead; he was being jerked around like a child’s doll, and nothing alive could have moved like that. And he collapsed to the ground. He bounced—at least, it looked like he bounced—and then he was still.

  What happened to the other one was less mysterious but, if that was possible, more terrible. He was standing by the side of the road; you could have thought he was at target practice. And then his arm fell down to his side, just as if it had grown tired, and he went on standing there as the bullets tore into his chest, making little black circles on the front of his light brown jacket. Once, twice—he didn’t seem to notice them. And then once more. He finally looked down, as though to see what was happening, and then he collapsed forward, sinking onto his knees first. And then he went over on his face.

  Neither of them moved. There was no sound.

  She had no idea how long she sat there staring. Probably not very long, but it felt like half her life. And then, cautiously, afraid of what more there might be to see, she peeked out of the side window.

  Von Niehauser was lying in the withered grass by the side of the road. And he wasn’t moving either.

  She began edging toward the open door on the other side, the one through which Erich had run to his death. It wasn’t until she was outside, standing on the road, that she felt the sting from the wind; it carried a strange, acrid smell. She imagined for a moment it was the smell of blood, but she knew that was ridiculous.

  There was a bullet hole in the rear window of the care—odd that she hadn’t noticed that. Had they been shooting at her too? It seemed strangely unimportant now.

  Erich was dead, there couldn’t be any doubt about that. He was lying on his face, in a huge pool of blood that looked almost black. She turned him over and found that his eyes were still open. They wouldn’t close all the way.

  One of the policemen was still alive. The big one was lying on his side, and when she knelt down next to him his lips seemed to be trying to form some word. She waited there with him for the minute or so until he was gone too.

  She sat down beside von Niehauser, if only because she was suddenly too tired to go any further. After a few moments she reached down to press her finger against the side of his neck—she had read somewhere that that was the best place to feel for a pulse. She didn’t expect to find one.

  And then, all at once, as if recoiling from her touch, he moved. She drew back her hand as though from something burning and watched as, slowly, and with obvious suffering, he rolled away from her and onto his side.

  The pistol was still in his hand—and pointed directly at her head—and he was grinning, whether in pain or from some twisted feeling of triumph it was impossible to know.

  “As you see, madam,” he said, his voice nothing more than a tense gasp. “As you see, we are not quite finished yet.”

  26

  He was very bad. He had been shot twice; one bullet had shattered his left elbow and the other had taken him in the small ribs, just under his right lung. His arm was soaked in blood all the way down to his fingers. There was no way of knowing how it was inside his chest.

  “But alive, madam. As you see, still alive.”

  It was painful just to watch him as he struggled to his feet—he must have been in agony. For a moment, as he stood braced against the side of the car, she thought he was weaving so badly that he might simply collapse. But he
got hold of himself.

  After a few minutes he seemed to forget all about his wounds. His eyes narrowed as he studied his surroundings, and finally, with a wave of his pistol, he ordered her to follow him as he began walking stiffly in the direction of the two dead policemen. He took the revolvers out of their hands and stripped the gun belt from one of them—the thin one, who had died so hard. He reloaded one of the revolvers from the gun belt and then threw the other one, along with Hal’s automatic, into the field on the other side of the road.

  “I was out of bullets—you should have killed me when you had the chance,” he said, and then he glanced down again at the body at his feet and frowned. “We are only about a quarter of a mile from the main road. A parked police car might not attract any notice, but these corpses will. You will have to drag them out of sight, madam—I fear I have not the strength to do it myself.”

  He pointed to a ditch that ran along parallel to the road. Jenny simply stared at him. It was the most appalling suggestion she had ever heard in her life.

  But finally, when she saw that he meant it, that he was prepared to kill her if she did not do exactly as he said, she went over to one of the policemen and grabbed him by the coat sleeve. He wouldn’t move.

  “I have learned from experience that it is easier if you pick them up by the legs.”

  It was horrible. They left thick smears of blood behind them on the asphalt, their arms trailing limply along like pieces of heavy rope. Erich was the worst. The whole side of his face was caked with blood.

  “It’s over now, isn’t it,” she said, her breast heaving with more than merely fatigue as she rested against the police car, staring down at the three bodies that filled the ditch, head to foot, as if they were playing hide-and-seek. “You don’t have the secret now. You don’t have Erich anymore.”

  Von Niehauser merely smiled.

  “I too am a scientist, madam. And before I came I knew which questions needed to be answered.” He touched his breast pocket. “I have my notes and my memory—Herr Lautner and I had a long conversation the other evening. His presence in Berlin would have been a convenience, but it will not be vital. I think I know enough to help my people build their bomb.”