Gunshots suddenly sounded from near the front of the plane, many fast gunshots, and more screaming. And then silence.
The turbanned man squeezed his shoulders higher around his ears, pressed his beads harder between the balls of his fingertips, and his lips moved faster and faster above his quaking round chin. Everyone in this cabin waited, hardly daring to breathe, and the silence went on and on.
Then all at once the blond man shifted, seemed to relax, and nodded. He looked at Pami, who hadn’t noticed before how powerful his eyes were. “So that’s that,” he said.
X
Calm. We will be calm. We shall not indulge our wrath until it is of some use. But then. Then! ·
It won the first round, yes it did, that pallid serf, that spiridess spirit, god’s golem. Yes. They do win sometimes, but that’s only to be expected; after all, we’re very evenly matched. We were like them, Satan protect us, before we won our freedom.
As for the widespread belief that they inevitably win, well, that’s just crap, isn’t it? Of course it is. If they inevitably won, we’d no longer be here, would we? But here we are.
And here you are, you scrofulous fleas. And now he’s after you as well, isn’t he? Now you’ll know what it’s like to suffer his snotty displeasure. But be encouraged. He can be resisted, as we are here to prove. He was just an early master of propaganda, that’s all.
But how shall we save you bilious earth-lice from your creator’s boredom? First we have to know what he’s up to. He’s always, of course, up to something: testing Job and Isaac, tempting Thomas and Judas, on and on. Idle hands are whose workshop?
He Who We Serve was going to and fro in the Earth, and walking up and down in it, as was his wont, when he came upon one of the bloodiest slaughters of a Dane since the good old days of Elsinore. But the Dane didn’t exist. He reacted with the Njoroge woman, she sliced him into stew meat, he died, and yet he was without existence. Once the woman had fled with the sack of loot, the body vanished. The blood unsprayed itself. The mattress became unslashed. The towels returned, laundered, to their folded positions in the bathroom. The deed became, in short, undone.
God’s baroque hand was clear in this playlet, because we hadn’t done it. Pami Njoroge is not a creature we need to subvert. He Who We Serve maintains contacts in the adversary’s camp, and even on occasion visits there himself, so it didn’t take him long to find out what had really happened in that Nairobi hotel room. Significandy, god isn’t using a slavey who’s already had extensive contact with humans, one of his ordinary lickspittles like Michael or Gabriel or Raphael. As spineless as the rest, they still might have developed some sympathy for the wretched human race during previous contacts. So no, he chose Ananayel, a timeserver, a mediocrity, as nondescript as an umbrella in the lost-and-found.
But what is Ananayel doing? What is that flunkey up to? Torturing a Bantu whore, yes, using elaborate stratagems to move her from her normal mud wallow to the similar but far-off dung heap called New York, and at the same time encouraging in her emotions of guilt and despair. But what is she to do, this blowfly, once she gets to New York? How can a miserable midge like Pami Njoroge bear any direct responsibility for the end of the human race? She has even less knowledge and power than normal among her kind.
So there are others in the scheme. That bleached sycophant, Ananayel, is assembling them, isn’t he, from somewhere? Moving them to New York, putting them together, letting them do the job themselves. That’s god’s way, isn’t it? Deniability. ‘They brought it on themselves,” he’ll say, with that airy smugness of his.
Well, we’re alert now. We’re on the job. My companions have spread across the world, searching for the spoor of Ananayel’s passage. Whatever humans he has touched, chosen, altered, moved, we will crush like a louse between a chimpanzee’s fingertips.
So that you will live. You, my darlings.
The greatest good for the greatest number. Hah!
ANTITHESIS
14
To be public information director (PID) for a nuclear power plant less than a hundred miles from a major population center like New York City is not, at the best of times, an easy job, but Joshua Hardwick cheerfully soldiered on, almost never losing heart. Thirty-three years old, pudgy and open-faced, a relendess optimist and a refugee from the advertising business in the city, Hardwick could sing the pro-nuclear song with the best of them, downplaying the downside and painting a picture of an energy-rich and peaceful and happy and secure future dominated by the image of a little girl in a pink crinoline dress playing ball on an expanse of lush green lawn. Like Hans Brinker himself, he could skate with aplomb over the occasional patch of thin ice, such as plant safety or disposal of contaminated wastes, awing and distracting the populace with the grace and assurance of his arabesques.
But this was too much. Arriving at Green Meadow III Nuclear Power Plant this morning, after his usual pleasant bucolic twenty-minute drive from his home in Connecticut, Joshua was startled to see demonstrators marching around on the asphalt of the country road out front.
Oh, God. Not since the operating license struggle when the plant first opened had there been demonstrators here. The emptiness of this rural area, its calm and quiet, seemed to deter most dissenters, as though they needed crowds and hard pavements to fully believe their own rhetoric.
This was a very small demonstration: fewer than a dozen protestors, plus, parked a little distance away, one state police car containing a couple of bored troopers. But was it an augury of worse to come? Squinting, leaning forward over his Honda steering wheel to look out the windshield, Joshua tried to read the signs the demonstrators carried:
“No Nukes Is Good Nukes.” Well, yes, we know that one.
“No Experiments With Our Lives!” Hmm; that one’s new, but what does it mean exactly? That’s the trouble with slogans, they can get a little too cryptic for their own good.
“Keep Maniac Philpott Away From Reactors!” Well, that was straightforward enough, if not quite as clear as chicken broth. Maniac Philpott. A person? Who?
Did one of the demonstrators have a halo? Joshua blinked, and peered again, and of course not. Just a trick of the light.
As usual, Joshua showed his face and his clearance badge to the guard at the gate, who looked more grim than customary this morning but who did wave him through in the ordinary way. Joshua waved back, and drove up and over the gentle rise concealing the main structures from the idle gaze—or concentrated gaze, for that matter—of the populace on the public roadway, and as he drove he mulled that last sign.
“Keep Maniac Philpott Away From Reactors!” Wasn’t there a Philpott, a scientist, some kind of big-dome thinking machine, over at Grayling, not far from here? Philpott, Philpott; Joshua couldn’t remember the first name. There was new construction starting, off to the right of the main buildings, but Joshua, deep in thought, barely registered it. Philpott; Philpott. A scientist, an experimenter.
“No Experiments With Our Lives!’
“Oh, no. Here? Here? Inside his Honda, as he steered toward his reserved parking space, Joshua looked stricken. They wouldn’t.
And yet they would.
“I don’t know how the news leaked so soon,” Gar Chambers said.
“Not through me, obviously, not through the spokesman here,” Joshua said, not bothering to hide his irritation.
They sat together in Gar’s office, he being chief operating officer of the facility and Joshua’s immediate boss, and the reason Joshua didn’t bother to hide his irritation was that they both knew he could walk out of here and into a job at least as good as this one by the end of the working day. As a spokesman, for anything at all, Joshua was one of the naturals.
Four years ago, when Green Meadow III first opened and the spokesman job here became available, Joshua and his wife, Jennifer, had just completed their first year in their weekend country house, had come to the realization that they no longer liked the commute to New York or the work in New York or even
the life in New York, and Joshua had upped roots and converted himself from a harried account executive in a thankless enterprise to a country gendeman who did some chatting for the nuclear industry from time to time. Personally, he had no opinion about nuclear power one way or the other, any more than he’d held strong opinions about the cat food, lipstick, or adult diapers he’d once sold. So if the job was going to become unpleasant, with demonstrators outside the gates and secrets held back from him within, he’d be just as happy being spokesperson for the New York State Tourist Council.
All of which Gar knew as well as Joshua. Sounding apologetic, he said, “We were hoping to get the situation in place before any public announcement was made. A fait accompli is much easier to deal with, as you know.”
“So I was kept outside the loop.”
“I’m sorry about that,” Gar said. “I really thought we could keep it quiet.”
“An experimental physicist,” Joshua said, “world-renowned, is going to move over here from Grayling University to conduct experiments in new kinds of energy. And you thought you could keep that secret. Half the secretaries here must know it by now, but I didn’t know it.”
“It’s probably the construction that gave it away,” Gar said.
“Construction. Oh, yes, I saw something on my way in. What’s that all about?”
“A new laboratory for our distinguished guest,” Gar said. :Well away from the reactor, well away from waste storage. Absolutely guaranteed safe, no possible problem to anybody ever.”
“Doesn’t he have a lab over at Grayling?”
“Well, yes,” Gar admitted.
Joshua smelled the reek of old fish. ‘Then why isn’t he staying there?”
Gar looked depressed, even a litde sick. “He blows things up sometimes,” he said. “They seemed to feel, a college campus wasn’t the right place for that.”
“But a nuclear power plant is.”
Gar spread his hands. “Joshua, the decision was made far above thee and me. Far above.”
“Okay,” Joshua said, “so there’s something in it for our masters. What’s in it for us?”
Gar tried to look hopeful. “Prestige? The inside track on new advances in energy research?”
‘Those are pretty thin bones,” Joshua said, “but I’ll do my best to make soup of it. For a while, anyway.”
Gar lifted his head, alert and worried, as though he’d just heard a shot down the hall. “For a while?”
“I don’t know, Gar,” Joshua said, “this is kind of discouraging. To have secrets kept from me, things I really need to know.”
“It won’t happen again, I promise.”
“It happened once.”
Gar said, “Joshua, I need you now. It wasn’t my idea to have that goddamn genius move in on us, but he’s here, or he’s going to be here very soon, and we’ve got to sell him to the public. We can’t let Dr. Marlon Philpott become the excuse for a new round of anti-nuclear demonstrations.”
“He already has.”
“I need you,” Gar repeated. “Stay with the team, Joshua” “Did the team stay with me?”
“It will, it will. Don’t abandon the ship now, not when we’re in crisis. Get our story out, Joshua. Please.”
Joshua, somewhat mollified, and aware that the Tourist Council would provide only a little bit more money with a much longer commute, got to his feet and said, “Gar, for you. Only for you. I’ll see what I can do.”
Gar also stood. “Thank you, Joshua,” he said.
* * *
For the next few weeks, and particularly after Dr. Philpott moved into his new laboratory on-site, the demonstrations outside the main gate of Green Meadow III grew larger and more unruly every day.
15
In warm weather, in the darkness of a new moon, Kwan climbed over the rail in the soft air and swiftly descended the ladder rungs to the kitchen staff’s deck. It was nearly three in the morning, and everyone on this deck was presumably asleep, exhausted by the day’s labors. Li Kwan, after labor of a much more pleasant sort, and a nice nap in the arms of an Italian college girl named Stefania, felt no sleepiness at all, and paused on the lower deck, forearms on the thrumming rail, to look out at their phosphorescent wake, not even minding that hint of engine oil in the salty air.
Tuesdays made it possible. Kwan could survive his exile now, his flight, his forced anonymity, but only because of Tuesday. Rarely would the same woman be aboard two Tuesdays in a row, but if so he was delighted with the opportunity for a reunion. He had learned to stay away from alcohol, and to sleep for a while on Tuesday afternoons in preparation for the night. His life had become, at least one day a week, more than bearable; it was comfortable, even luxurious.
Perhaps too luxurious? It was too easy to forget in these circumstances who he really was. Not merely a kitchen scamp who crept up the equivalent of a drainpipe to bed his betters on the upper floors, he was a part of a massive human movement against tyranny and oppression, a small but inspired element in a drive to free one-quarter of humanity from the slavery of the ancient murderers.
I must not let this luxury soften me, Kwan told himself. I must not let my love of women distract me from my love of freedom.
Faint lights were visible from time to time, far away to starboard. Some city of Africa; they were steaming up the African coast of the Adantic now, with Barcelona the next stop and then Rotterdam, and then Southampton, and on and on. Eventually, some part of the North American continent would be reached, and when it was, he would have to find a way off the ship.
Some American girl? Could he persuade an American girl to smuggle him off with her? Could he insert himself among the visitors who crowded aboard at every stop to see off their friends?
A way will present itself, Kwan was sure of that. As though he had at his side a guardian angel—in the shape of the Statue of Liberty, perhaps, like the one in Tiananmen Square—he was confident he would not give in to ease, not lose heart, not be defeated. The road would open before him.
Smiling, pleased with his adventure of the night, with his accommodation to this temporary world, with the fact of his own confidence and youth, Kwan gazed out at the glittering wake of Star Voyager, as it disappeared into the utter blackness of the vast ocean. Such a confident wake.
16
What affected Susan most of all was Grigor’s matter-of- factness. He behaved as though his courage were the most natural thing in the world, as though being brave were something like being blue-eyed or left-handed. It wasn’t an English kind of stiff-upper-lip thing, nor an American’s self-conscious imitation of Humphrey Bogart or Indiana Jones. It probably wasn’t even anything generically Russian, but simply Grigor’s own personality: laconic, aware but unafraid, viewing his own history as it passed by with interest but dispassion. He must have been a wonderful fireman, Susan thought, before they killed him.
She was twenty minutes late today, because demonstrators opposed to some sort of esoteric research at the nuclear power plant near the Taconic Parkway exit had blocked the road. Grigor was not in his room, but the nurse called Jane, at her desk in the hall, grinned hello, and said, “He’s faxing.”
“Thanks.”
It no longer struck anyone odd to have a patient in a cancer research hospital in upstate New York—within ten miles of a nuclear power plant, no less—faxing jokes to Moscow. In
Russian. Susan had spent days searching New York last spring, and at last had found a typewriter dealer named Tytell who had come up with a Cyrillic-alphabet typewriter, a used one he’d gotten years before from the Soviet U.N. mission. So now Grigor could tap out his gags two-fingered and not subject some long-suffering secretary in Moscow to his truly terrible penmanship.
In truth, Susan didn’t think Grigor’s jokes were particularly funny, but she understood she wasn’t his intended audience. The Russian television people at the other end of the fax machine seemed pleased, and that was what counted.
And also what counted was that Grigo
r’s spirits were kept reasonably buoyant. Susan could make the drive up from the city only on weekends, and it seemed to her now that every week he’d declined visibly, become thinner, slower, feebler. His eyes were deep-set now, ringed in gray. The gums were steadily receding from his teeth, so that more and more he looked like a skull, particularly when he laughed. Realizing that, he did his laughing with closed lips these days, or covered his mouth with his hand. It broke Susan’s heart to see the embarrassed way he brought that hand up, the haunted eyes looking out at her as he laughed in secret; laughing was so much a part of his life, and to have it hampered and hedged seemed unnecessarily cruel.
The fax machine was in a small windowless room—a big closet, really—stuffed with the machinery of the clerical trade: a large copying machine, a Mr. Coffee, a paper cutter, several staplers, and a tall gray metal cabinet full of stationery supplies. Grigor sat hunched on the room’s one small typist’s chair, back to the doorway, punching out the phone number with his bony forefinger. Shoulder blades protruded sharply against the back of his shirt, like stubby angel wings. She wanted to put her arms around him, but never had.
Sensing movement, Grigor turned, saw Susan, and smiled with his lips held close together, like a prissy man sipping from a straw. “A remarkable machine, this,” he said, by way of hello. “I merely touch a few numbers, and in no time at all I can hear a busy signal eleven thousand miles away.”
Smiling back, not showing him anything except the smile, Susan said, “Is that one of the jokes you’re sending?”
“One of the jokes I’m not sending,” he said, and punched the numbers again. “No, the fax isn’t common enough in the Soviet so far. I sent one gag— Ah, the busy signal.” He broke the connection, turned back to Susan. “I did send one: The Moscow/Washington hot line is by fax now. The only trouble is, the KGB made us attach ours to a shredder.”
Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 Page 13
