“Every available agent is looking. We will find it eventually. We’d better catch up to him—I don’t want your boy just wandering around the offices. He shouldn’t be giving orders, you know. He’s hardly qualified.”
“Your people made him head of the Dream Division,” she replied. “You’ll just have to live with that. And remember, he’s a veteran of the French Foreign Legion, and older than most of us.”
“So you keep telling me—I suppose I’m just supposed to take your word for it. Some of the staff members hate him, did you know that?”
She’d already gone ahead, but threw back, “They have absolutely no reason to.”
The inner offices were manned by a variety of agents, military personnel on loan, CID scientists, and a few private citizens recruited because they had been affected by the incursions. Randolph was attempting to ask some of them questions. For the most part they kept their physical distance and ignored him. One small woman did at least pretend to pay attention to him, nodding randomly at his comments.
“What did you want to know, Carter?” Agent Miles asked, scowling.
Randolph turned to Dorothy. “Ask him about Ettore Majorana. The Italian mathematician? A few months ago he disappeared.”
Agent Miles was obviously annoyed, first trying to catch Randolph’s eye, then giving up and addressing Dorothy. “I’m quite aware of that. He was travelling by ship from Palermo to Naples, but then he wasn’t there when the ship docked in Naples. We’ve been working with the Italians. Still no sign of him, but I don’t think—”
Carter interrupted. “He was actually a theoretical physicist working on neutrino masses.”
“And what are those?” Miles asked Dorothy.
Dorothy shook her head. “I have no idea.”
“I know, you’re going to tell me it’s just another coincidence.” Randolph was agitated, waving his clawed arm around. The yellow pillowcase had begun to slip; a few inches of dark, chitinous surface were exposed. People around the office began to move away. “Just like the explosion at the New London school in Texas last year. More than 295 students and teachers killed, and they attributed all that to a natural gas explosion?”
“Because it was,” Miles said.
“And just this February in Sydney. Three hundred swimmers on Bondi Beach dragged out to sea. They said it was because of ‘freak’ waves. Three freak waves in a row?”
“At least they managed to save all but five,” replied Miles. “Carter, you’re working yourself up. I appreciate that you feel responsible for, well, damn near everything it seems. But it doesn’t help to make things worse than they are. These—things,” Dorothy saw him glance at Randolph’s claw, now almost fully-exposed, “—they’re bad enough, but they’re not everywhere!”
Randolph finally turned to look at him. “You haven’t seen what I’ve seen, Agent. Yaddith and the sweetness, nameless aeons and the endless reaches of the galaxy, drowning in the voices of my multiple selves . . .”
Dorothy had been nudging Randolph toward the next door and away from Agent Miles. Finally she got him through. They descended a series of steps. “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is playing,” she said. “An entirely animated movie—can you imagine? I’ll take you, my treat.”
“Thank you, Lieutenant.” His voice was softer, slightly broken. “I quite enjoyed our excursion to New York to see Our Town.”
“I wasn’t sure. It seemed to upset you. I thought you might be uncomfortable, sitting in the back, wearing that hood and the oversized cloak.”
“It was moving. In the final act the most prominent characters are the dead souls who already inhabit the cemetery, sitting in chairs at the front of the stage, and largely indifferent to earthly events. And earlier, the girl, Rebecca, talked of how Grover’s Corners was contained within ‘the Mind of God.’ It’s much as I have tried to explain—the ‘real’ world is nothing more than a set of mental images in the mind of some greater being that . . . that we cannot even begin to comprehend.”
“It will take me awhile to get my mind around that.” The truth was she didn’t want to get her mind around that. She hoped that he was incorrect, that his experiences had unhinged him somehow. In fact she counted on it.
Finally at the end of a low-lit hallway they came to the door with DREAM DIVISION etched into the frosted glass. Randolph turned the knob and pushed the door in, then when it stopped after a few inches pushed it harder, and then had to really put his shoulder into it. Papers and a few books poured around the leading edge of the door with this final shove. They entered, stepping onto a layer of paper, books, and other reading materials. A large number of the papers were filled with his cramped and strange handwriting. Many of the others were Photostats of old documents and diagrams.
“Randolph, you promised me you would do better. It’s hard to work in these conditions.”
“This is better, isn’t it?”
Dorothy stooped to pick some of it up.
“Stop!” he cried. “I know where everything is!”
“Really? What if Agent Miles were to come down here? Or Brady himself?”
“Hardly likely. They haven’t . . .”
“But they might. You have to do something about this. They distrust you as it is.”
But he had rushed ahead to a clean area. He got down on all fours, searching. “Did one of you do this?” he shouted. “Have you been in my things?”
Of course there was no reply. Their peculiar staff, Dorothy knew, would be indisposed.
There were half-empty bookcases on both sides of the room. She couldn’t understand why they were so underutilized. A few of the drawings and Photostats had been nailed to blank sections of wall. The light was so dim in here she couldn’t imagine how anyone could read what was on them, but then remembered that Randolph had a fancy aluminum flashlight for that very purpose.
A large cyanotype blueprint rolled off a pile of books leaning against the wall and onto her shoes. She scooped it up and unrolled it. It was an architectural drawing of a huge office building in the shape of a pentagon. Numerous notations had been made, some of them in Randolph’s unmistakable hand. Some features had been circled. At the bottom it was labeled us war department.
“Randolph! You were supposed to submit your comments on Bergstrom’s designs weeks ago!”
He sat down on the floor and looked at her. “Was I? Well, I had more important things to attend to. It will have to wait.”
“They need to break ground on this! The Foggy Bottom building is too small.”
He got up with a sigh and ambled over. “They should have known that and built a bigger building. They are a wasteful bunch, these government types.” He glanced at it, made several more notations. “If they want maximum protection from future incursions they will need to move the electromagnetic generators here and here, and straighten those walls. And these . . .” He drew several arrows indicating points on the western side of the structure, the army section, “. . . between corridors four and five, are vulnerable to breach. They need to strengthen them.” He tossed the blueprint back to her. “Call up upstairs. I need to know if there have been any sightings, and where.”
“Randolph, I’m not your servant.”
“I know. I once had a servant—Parks. He was much more respectful.”
She looked for a clean surface to put the rolled-up drawing on. There was an old wooden desk in a nearby room. She’d waded through the clutter and had laid the roll and her bag down when she heard the snoring. Peering around the desk, she found the low chaise lounge and one of Randolph’s selected “staff” asleep on top of it. Normally she would have pulled the man to his feet and scolded him, but then this was his actual job, wasn’t it?
He appeared to be a homeless man—they had thousands of them in D.C.—too poor to afford even a cobbled-together alley house, so they slept in the parks, or under things, like insects. His shoes were no more than tacked-together bits of leather, his shirt and pants long past saving. He had
a fifth of whiskey clutched under his arm like a baby. He wore this contraption of wires and metal and ceramic plates around his head, pressed deeply into his greasy gray hair. It was of Randolph’s invention, and she wasn’t sure exactly how it functioned. Randolph’s simple explanation was “it keeps him focused on what he needs to focus on.”
She hadn’t been there for this man’s recruitment. Randolph had found him, supposedly questioned him extensively, and finagled one of the soldiers to bring him back to the Monument. Dorothy didn’t approve of Randolph going out like that, even with a soldier for protection, but she hadn’t been consulted. When she’d asked him why he chose this particular individual out of all the other homeless about, he’d told her, “We shared war stories.”
At least they could have cleaned the poor man up. He was caked in black dirt over his forehead and cheekbones. It was even crusted over his closed eyelids. She wondered if he could even open them.
His mouth was frozen in a grimace, lips pulled back to uncover his canines. He continued to snore, but his mouth was mostly closed. Still, the sound came from the direction of his head, somewhere.
There were several more of these men sleeping around the office, and one woman. She didn’t always know where. There was a phone on the desk. She picked it up and dialed upstairs.
After the phone call she grabbed her bag and went to find Randolph. She preferred avoiding the extended parts of the suite. He’d promised he’d make them more comfortable for her—at least he appeared to want to please her—but of course he’d broken his promise. It simply wasn’t in his nature to accept any ordering or organization other than his own.
There were a number of rooms. When Randolph first took charge of these quarters Dorothy couldn’t imagine why they’d allocated him so much space. She’d initially been told that Dream Division would have minimal staff. But by the time she’d joined him a week later, the rooms were in more or less the same condition they were in now—bleak and overflowing with notes and research materials. When she’d asked him where it all came from he told her, “A room in Massachusetts.”
Light in the deeper reaches of Dream Division was dim. Of course there were no windows, and lamps were few and appeared to operate inefficiently. Some fixtures were equipped with fluorescent tanning bulbs, for which Randolph had never offered an explanation. Once or twice she stumbled over a sleeping form. She mumbled her embarrassed apologies, but no one awakened, apparently too busy doing their job.
Now and then a phone would ring for a while in a distant room and stop. She heard no voices so assumed the calls hadn’t been answered. Randolph hated phones and rarely used them, preferring that she answer the calls when she was there. She’d explained to him dozens of times that she wasn’t his secretary, to no avail.
The short hall leading to his private office space (he called it his “cubby”) was jammed with heavy steel filing cabinets, army-green and decorated with various dents and islands of corrosion. There had been no attempt to arrange them in a straight line—they appeared like wreckage from some terrible collision.
His space had no door but was marked by an intensification of clutter. She shuffled sideways between the tall stacks of reading materials. Finally she found him bent over a small mattress containing his lone female sleeper. The poor old woman was weeping, her eyes rolling, her back spasms lifting her off the mattress. Randolph was stroking her hair away from her forehead, muttering, “Where, where?”
The phone began ringing again. She looked around. He’d stuffed it into a corner of the floor. “Randolph?”
“Answer it,” he said, then added, “but only if you really want to.”
She stepped over some books, bent, and pulled the receiver up to her ear. Apparently she’d joined an excited conversation midchatter. She could hardly distinguish the individual voices. Then Agent Miles was speaking to her directly. “Get up here!” he shouted. “There’s been a sighting.” Then she was disconnected.
“Randolph!”
“I know,” he said softly. “Listen to her.”
She stepped around and knelt beside him. She saw the pin fixed by the old woman’s throat, that gold Red Cross pin. The wretched woman was babbling in a weak, cracked open voice. “Supernumerary . . . polymelia . . . supernumerary.”
“She was a nurse. She’s describing a birth defect,” Dorothy said. “It’s when the baby is born with too many limbs.”
The woman’s tone had changed. “Temple Court . . . skitter . . . skitter . . . southwest . . . the Anarch . . .”
“Close enough to see the Capitol’s dome from there,” Randolph said. “Whatever it is, it’s moving through the slums.”
They started out a couple of hours before sunrise, the streets still suspiciously deserted. In the deathly quiet the noise their vehicles made sounded like a circus parade. Dorothy kept scanning the horizon for signs of unusual activity. Her companions appeared to be paying no attention at all.
This time they had a bigger car and they’d squeezed two more soldiers in beside their driver. The older one carried a man-pack FM radio transmitter receiver. The other kept staring at Randolph surreptitiously. Finally Dorothy reached over and laid her hand on the young soldier’s shoulder and shook her head.
Randolph probably hadn’t noticed. He was deep in thought, unconsciously rocking back and forth. She’d seen this behavior from him before, so it didn’t bother her. But usually he did this only in private.
They’d offered her a pistol but she’d declined. She’d lied that she didn’t even know how to use one. She kept a tight grip on her bag.
Their vehicle was accompanied by several Marmon-Herrington converted trucks full of soldiers. Two M2 light tanks followed a block behind. Agent Miles’s doing, she guessed. This amount of firepower worried her. They were in the middle of a large urban population, the nation’s capital no less.
“I hear this is a big one,” the younger soldier said as if reading her mind.
“Why would you say that?” she asked. “We have no idea what we’re facing.”
“Hmmm . . . scuttlebutt, miss,” he replied.
She frowned at him. “You’re not in the navy, soldier. I’d suggest you stow that talk.”
Away from the government’s Grand Plaza but still within sight of the Capitol Building, the convoy began to slow down. The brick houses here were progressively less grand, but still respectable middle-class homes. The alleys between the streets, behind these homes, were another story.
D.C. had been a city planned with spacious lots so, as the housing shortage for poor and migrant workers became increasingly acute, wealthy landowners discovered they could provide accommodations for these people in their backyards and along their alleys, giving birth to the alley slums, soon overcrowded with those who had nowhere else to live.
Old planks could be pieced together to make a short one-story dwelling with a makeshift roof, no windows or yard, the rickety construction thrown up right on the edge of the alley. A battered washtub could be set on top of each one to collect the rain.
Wooden additions could be tacked on to the sturdy brick backs of businesses even in otherwise wealthy neighborhoods, their wobbly balconies stacked three stories high. Or a number of one-room ramshackle boxes could be wedged into the backyard of a nicer house or hotel. No plumbing was necessary; all the toilets were outdoors. Water was provided by a shared hand-pump or hauled in half barrels. Clotheslines stretched above the crowded brick lanes. In the summer mattresses were set outside for the overheated kids. Trash could be sorted and sold. Everything was so dirty anyway, the working class residents often felt no urgency to pick up the accumulating rubbish.
The convoy turned suddenly into one of these narrow alleys and barreled forward at a frightening pace, splashing through huge puddles of drainage, clipping garbage cans and discarded furniture and even the occasional edge of a dwelling.
“Slow down!” she screamed. “Human beings live here!”
“Orders, miss!” the driver s
houted back at her. “We were told this was where we were most likely to find the enemy! The tanks are too big— they’ll meet us at the other end. Don’t worry! I know what I’m doing!”
The enemy. She’d never conceptualized these manifestations that way, but in the final analysis she supposed that was what they were.
They rattled past rows of slight wooden structures made with ill-fitting weathered planks with countless broken and patched surfaces. The occasional gaps in these dwellings were crowded with cast-off furniture too imperfect even for these unfortunates, more drab shacks with broken-out windows and missing doors, and layer upon layer of flapping, hanging laundry, some of it dragged down and pulled under the wheels of their vehicle. Everyone in the car was silent except Randolph, who suddenly straightened up and asked, “Why are we doing this?”
At that same moment a dark emaciated figure leapt through the headlight beams, head rolling loosely and limbs all akimbo. The driver slammed on the brakes, the truck following so closely behind them screamed to a stop. Dorothy was tossed from her seat onto the legs of the men. As the soldiers scrambled to help her up she shouted, “Was that a child?”
The driver got out of the car and searched the area around the stillburning headlights. The other two soldiers joined the search with their flashlights, looking under the vehicle and among the garbage cans and assorted battered containers on the other side. The other military trucks coming up behind them turned their vehicles at staggered angles and used their lamps to illuminate a large portion of the slums on both sides of the alley. The soldiers piled out with their rifles. They stepped forward slowly. Dorothy expected the residents to come out, or at least some of them, to see what was going on. But no one came. There weren’t even any curious faces in the windows as far as she could see. The entire complex of dilapidated housing appeared to be abandoned.
“Oh, I don’t believe the soldiers should have gotten out of their vehicles,” Randolph said beside her. “I don’t think that was a good idea at all. Please call them back, Lieutenant.”
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