After following the fence a certain number of miles, you come to an opening protected by a cattle guard—a western invention consisting of a number of rails laid across the road over a shallow trench. Vehicles can negotiate this kind of open-work bridge, but stock won’t try it for fear of getting their hoofs caught between the rails; so it serves the purpose of a gate without having to be opened and closed for each passing car. While bouncing over this guard, you’ll see another sign: PRIVATE ROAD—KEEP OUT! Johnson Land and Cattle Co. The name isn’t Johnson, of course, but never mind. The road is gravel and fairly rough. It leads back among the dry and barren foothills, out of sight of the main highway, and runs, finally, past a large, paved parking lot and up to a gate in another fence, this one of steel mesh twelve feet high topped by three strands of barbed wire on a slanting bracket. At this point a Marine guard with a gun steps out of a little house and asks where the hell you think you’re going.
Beyond him you see a number of low government buildings—government architecture has an unmistakable look—and that’s all you’ll see, and all I am permitted to tell you. If you want to know more, ask any waitress in any restaurant in Albuquerque. She’ll have more dope on it than I do, anyway; I have to go through channels to get my information.
The conference took a couple of hours, and was as productive as most emergency conferences that are called on the spur of the moment by an administrative officer in a big tizzy, before enough data has been assembled to act upon. We finally came to the momentous decision that we had better wait until Jack Bates, who had been flown to Nevada by the Army, got back with some accurate information, and adjourned. I drove home, parked the Pontiac in the driveway, and let myself into the house. The lights were on in the living room, and Natalie was sprawled in the big chair with her glasses on and not much else: she was wearing one of those abbreviated nighties that come equipped with little pants, and need them. She looked about ten years old.
I said, “That’s a hell of a costume for a married woman. You look like Shirley Temple.”
She sat up quickly, startled. Absorbed in her book, she had not heard me come in. Then she grinned. “That shows your age,” she said. “I’m younger than she is.”
“What are you reading?” I asked.
She glanced at the cover of the book and shrugged. “Just brushing up on how to save the world,” she said. “All it needs is one or two little changes in human nature, it says here.”
She took off her glasses and laid them aside, shivered slightly and reached for the short white terry-cloth robe she had thrown off. “It was hot in here while the fire was going,” she said. “I didn’t realize it had burned down so far. How did your meeting go?”
I shrugged. “We accomplished the usual amount of nothing.”
“Trouble, darling?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Who was there, or shouldn’t I ask?”
“Shouldn’t ask,” I said. “The Director was there; I’ll tell you that much. He was very happy. He loves trouble, as long as it happens to somebody else.”
“To you?”
“Oh, no,” I said. “He wouldn’t like that. It might reflect back on him. No, I’m in the clear. In fact, I’m apt to come out of this very well.” I hesitated; but there are times when you have to talk to someone. “You see, Princess, somebody in Washington didn’t like a few recommendations I made in my last report. Apparently that’s what’s been holding things up for the past six months. When they hear things they don’t like in Washington, they have a routine they go into. First they decide that the guy who gave the unpalatable advice must be a subversive bastard, or he wouldn’t say unpleasant things like that. And then they look around for somebody who’ll give them the answer they want. Well, it’s never hard to find a man who’ll tell a Senator what he wants to hear. Only now it turns out that I was right after all.”
She looked relieved. “Then you should feel very good about it, darling.”
I nodded. “Sure,” I said. “I feel swell about it. I just love to have a hundred and sixty-three men die to prove me right. Good night, Princess.”
“Greg!”
I looked back. “They tested it, Princess,” I said softly. “I told them we didn’t know enough yet, but they tested it anyway. It wiped out Northrop and his whole crew. That’s very confidential information, so don’t tell anybody I told you. Just how they’re going to keep a hundred and sixty-three families from learning papa’s dead…!” I drew a long breath. “Good night, Princess. I’ve got a date with a nightmare.”
I went down the hall to my room. Early in our marriage we had discovered that, both being temperamental and used to privacy, we got more sleep and family harmony by occupying separate rooms except on special occasions. Natalie, therefore, had the big master bedroom adjoining the bathroom; while I used the smaller of the two rooms across the hall for sleeping, and the larger as a combination gunroom, trophy room, and study—it also was supplied with a studio couch so that it could serve as guest room when needed. My bedroom was fairly bare; I had resisted all Natalie’s efforts to have it decorated. I don’t like to feel that I’m part of an artistic composition when I’m trying to sleep. I got out of my clothes and into pajamas, went into the bathroom and took a one-and-a-half-grain Nembutal—all the propaganda against barbiturates notwithstanding, there’s nothing like a sedative when you really need to sleep—and went to bed. I lay there for about an hour before the pill went to work.
Then there was this red light flashing in the middle of the instrument board and with each flash the warning bells would scream throughout the building and everybody else was running away but I couldn’t move a muscle. I woke up sweating. The light was on and Natalie was bending over me.
“It’s Larry on the phone again,” she said.
I said, “If the wires blew down, he’d die of frustration. What does he want now? Incidentally, what’s the time?”
“Twelve-thirty. He wants you to come over.”
“Over where?”
“His house. Jack’s there. Larry says he’s in bad shape. Drunk or something. Larry wants you to talk to him.”
I said, “Do you mind driving me? I’m full of Nembutal.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I’ll be ready as soon as you are.”
SEVEN
IT WAS ONE of those brilliantly clear nights they often have out here, particularly in winter. You could see more stars than an easterner ever dreamed of. It was cold, and I was glad Natalie had handed me my big, fur-collared, down-insulated hunting jacket instead of some more refined garment. Herself she had wrapped in the usual minks. The heater of the Pontiac had barely time to start functioning properly before we reached our destination.
“Should I wait out here?” Natalie asked.
I looked at the lighted windows. “It looks as if everybody’s up. You can come on in and talk to Ruth.”
She grimaced. “That’ll be a real treat,” she said and got out of the car. I closed the door after her. As we moved up the walk, she took my arm, saying, “I’m sorry. I’ll be good. I’ve been very good lately, haven’t I?”
“Is that what it is?” I asked. “I noticed you hadn’t been acting at all natural.”
She laughed, squeezing my arm. “Darling, that’s what I love about you. You’re such a rewarding person to do things for.”
The house looked about like ours, except that it was peach-colored and somewhat smaller. It gave out a sound of organ music, which seemed a little odd under the circumstances; but Larry was a hi-fi bug and needed very little excuse to turn on the system. I saw the chunky shape of Jack Bates’s station wagon in the driveway; it was a red Willys with high-altitude head, oversized radiator and clutch, and four-wheel drive. I knew all about it because I had been invited to come along some Sunday and make my fortune—prospecting was his most recent enthusiasm—but I get enough of uranium and its by-products at work without spending my spare time looking for more.
Ruth met us at th
e door. She was wearing what seemed to be one of Larry’s old shirts and a pair of faded blue jeans—the western substitute for slacks, shorts, housedresses, riding pants, and just about any other practical garment you can think of. They’d use them for bathing suits if they had any water to swim in. Ruth’s were rolled to just below the knees, and had a good deal of paint on them, as did the shirt.
“You’re going to have to forgive the way I look,” she said. “Everything’s been so… so hectic tonight I knew I couldn’t sleep so I’ve been in the studio working like mad.”
We were shedding our coats. I asked, “Where are they?”
She gestured toward the sound of music. “They’re waiting for you in the living room, Greg. I’ll take Natalie into my private sanctum if she doesn’t mind an awful mess. I never do seem to get things organized… Oh, dear, don’t treat that lovely coat like that; let me hang it up in the closet!”
I left them being sweet to each other. When I opened the living-room door, the organ music almost knocked me down. I could feel the bass vibrations through the soles of my feet. The DeVry living room had an unbalanced look; no arrangement of furniture could shift the center of gravity far from the big, homemade corner enclosure that housed Larry’s loud-speaker system. At the other end of the room from the monstrosity, Larry and Jack were sitting side by side on the maple sofa without speaking. They had empty glasses on the low maple table in front of them—neatly set on coasters. As far as I’m concerned, there are two kinds of hospitality. One lets you set your drink down where you damn well please, trusting you to use a little judgment; the other keeps running after you with coasters. Strangely, this never used to bother me back in Chicago; but like many things about the DeVrys, it had started to get on my nerves lately.
I had the illusion that Larry and Jack looked small and far away, dwarfed by the giant sounds emanating from the contraption in the corner. The reproduction was really very good, as a matter of fact; if you closed your eyes you could almost imagine that you had the organ in your lap. Larry must have felt the jar as I closed the door. He certainly couldn’t have heard the sound, but he looked up, jumped up, and came over.
“Greg!” he shouted, shaking my hand as if he hadn’t seen me for months. “Glad you’re here! Come over and talk some sense into this guy.” I think that’s what he said; it was hard to make out over the noise. I made some gesture toward the roaring and screaming speakers. Larry walked over and cut the thing off. The silence was tremendous. “Just showing Jack the effect of my new dividing network,” he said. “Sit down, Greg. I’ll get some more beer.”
“None for me,” I said. “Coffee if you’ve got it.”
He nodded, and left the room. I walked across the rug in the unearthly silence and sat down in a chair not far from Jack. He was making a thing of lighting a cigarette. I leaned back and waited. There were some of Ruth’s paintings on the walls. Back east she had done all right with her landscapes, but out here she couldn’t seem to get the size of the country. The dunes at White Sands looked like Jackson Park Beach in Chicago. She did better with flowers. There was a cholla cactus in bloom—the red, not the yellow—that I hadn’t seen before. I reminded myself to say something nice about it as an exercise in diplomacy, before we left.
“I’m quitting, Greg,” Jack said.
I looked at him for a moment. I had noticed that he had been looking kind of worn and preoccupied Christmas Eve; he looked worse now. He was wearing boots, jeans, and a red wool shirt—they run those tests off in pretty rough country. There was nothing to be gained by taking it big. I said, “This is a hell of a time of night for it.”
“I wrote up my report on the plane coming back,” he said. “I stopped by at the Project on the way. Van Horn was there; I turned it over to him. You can read it in the morning. I’ve had it, Greg.”
“Okay,” I said. “’By, kid.”
“I mean it,” he said. “I’m not kidding.”
“I’m not arguing with you,” I said.
“Is that the way you feel about it?”
“Do my feelings enter into the equation?”
“Well,” he said, “a little. You brought me out here. I appreciate that. It was a big opportunity, and I’ve tried to do my best by it. Also, you’re a… oh, hell, you’re a pretty good guy, and we’ve had a lot of fun together. I hate to run off and leave you in a spot just when everybody’s going to be wanting results. But I’ve got to do it, Greg.” He got up and walked to the picture window and parted the drapes and looked out at nothing in particular. “I’ve just come from there,” he said quietly. “You don’t know what it’s like. It’s… it’s a hundred square miles of… of nothing. Nothing but glass.”
“Glass?”
“Volcanic glass. Stuff like obsidian. What you get when molten rock cools too quickly to crystallize.” He had been reading up on geology since he caught the uranium fever.
“A hundred miles of glass,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“How thick?”
“Several feet, at least.”
“But not more than several feet?”
He glanced at me. “No. It followed the surface, all right, just as you figured it would.”
“Hot?”
“Temperature or radioactivity?”
“Both.”
“We couldn’t get on it. It was still smoking. Radioactivity wasn’t enough to worry about, except for the usual high readings near ground zero, from the trigger explosion. They sent a ’copter in to check; also to look for any signs of Northrop and his team. They didn’t find anything. No block house, no observation posts, nothing. Just glass.” He drew a long breath. “Looks like you had it figured about right. It ought to make quite a weapon—if you can learn how to control it.”
“But you aren’t going to help?”
He shook his head. “I’ve had it, Greg. I don’t want any part of it from now on. To be honest with you, I’m scared stiff.”
I looked at him, and shifted my gaze to Ruth’s cactus. She had not got the red quite right after all. The real flower had a tinge of purple.
“Jack,” I said, “what stopped it?”
He shook his head again. “I don’t know. What stops a chain reaction in an unlimited mass of material? God, maybe.”
“That doesn’t help much,” I said. “We can’t draft Him. Besides, Washington would probably turn Him down as a security risk. After all, isn’t He related to that well-known radical Jesus Christ?”
Jack said, “It doesn’t mean anything to you, does it? A hundred square miles of the face of the earth fused to nothing… What if it hadn’t stopped, Greg? Have you thought of that?”
I said, “It had occurred to me.”
“One of the aerial observers said it looked as if somebody had dropped a coal on a piece of brown paper. You know how paper will sometimes char and glow for a while, a kind of hole growing away from the central point. And sometimes it will go out of its own accord. And sometimes… sometimes, if a breath of air strikes it just right, maybe, it will burst into flames—”
“Jack,” I said, “you’re playing games with words. You’re trying to equate a simple reaction involving cellulose and oxygen with a very complex reaction involving—”
“Involving the earth itself.” He swung around to face me. “You don’t know why it stopped this time, do you? Or what it’s going to do next time?”
I said, “All I know is that we need to know more about it.”
“All I know,” he said, “is that we know too much about it already. So I’m quitting. Mrs. Bates didn’t bring up her boy to set the world on fire… Greg, fly out there. Go take a look at it. It’s hard and kind of slick and brown, except for places that have bubbles like that Mexican glass. Nothing else as far as you can see: no trees, no grass, not even any rocks. Just this hard, shiny, smoking stuff, clear to the horizon. You can stand there and think about what might have happened if it hadn’t stopped. Just a dead glass ball, spinning through spac
e like a damn Christmas ornament.”
I said, “Jack, if a thing is in the realm of possible human knowledge, it’s going to get itself discovered sooner or later, whether the human race is ready for it or not.”
He said, “I’ve heard that argument. And the one about do we want the Russians to get it first. I don’t want anybody to get it. But one guy is not going to get it for sure, and that’s me. I can’t stop your going ahead with it, or the Russians going ahead with it, or anybody else who likes to tinker with the celestial works. But I don’t have to be the one to discover it. I don’t have to have it on my conscience.”
I said, “Well, good luck, kid. I hope you and your conscience have lots and lots of fun.”
I got up and walked across the room and into the hall without looking back. I retrieved my jacket and my wife and got out of there. The cold night air hit me outside the door. I stopped to zip the jacket up, and regarded the jeep station wagon in the drive with an envious eye. That’s my idea of what a vehicle should look like, instead of a chrome-plated thunderbolt on wheels. He even had a winch on the front so that if he got stuck he could run the cable to a tree and haul himself out. The only trouble with that idea is the scarcity of trees in most parts of the country where they hunt uranium.
Natalie said, “Can you tell me what it’s all about?”
“Jack’s quitting,” I said.
“Why?”
“He’s scared, I guess,” I said. “He’s got an attack of conscience, like old man Fischer. He wants us to leave it to God.”
She hesitated; then she said, “Darling, he could be right.”
Assassins Have Starry Eyes Page 5
