Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51

by Humans (v1. 1)

  “It is.”

  “And each theory has its scientifically respectable supporters?” “That is correct.”

  “So Dr. Philpott has just as much chance to be right as you have.”

  “He does. But so do I, and that’s why we shouldn’t take the risk.”

  “And what do you see happening, if I spill that drop of strange matter on the carpet?”

  Dr. Delantero squared his bony shoulders. “As Dr. Philpott said, strange matter is much more dense than normal matter. It is also likely to be more stable. That drop of yours would eat its way through the floor, through the ground—”

  “Oh, really, there isn’t the slightest—”

  “Dr. Philpott, you’ll have your chance. Dr. Delantero?”

  “Combining with the matter around it,” Dr. Delantero said, “this extremely heavy, extremely dense drop of matter would burn its way to the molten center of the Earth, where it would get hot, and really go to work.”

  “An explosion, you mean?”

  “No, I do not. I mean that the one drop would, in a very short period of time, convert this entire planet, and everything on it, every tree, every person, the very atmosphere around us, into strange matter.”

  “And what effect would that have?”

  “The Earth would become,” Dr. Delantero said, “a featureless, smooth, glittering ball of incredible density, the same weight as it is now, but measuring less than a mile in diameter.”

  With his small smile, Koppel said, “And you and I would be part of that featureless ball.”

  “We would.”

  To the camera, Koppel said, “As you can see, the difference of opinion is quite marked here, and the scientific stakes extremely high. On the one side, cheap safe fuel; on the other, the end of everything. Is Dr. Philpott actually close to resolving these opposed theories, and what safeguards is he employing to avoid the finish Dr. Delantero so vividly described. What would Dr. Delantero like science to do about the question of strange matter, if anything? We’ll get into all that, when we return.”

  During the commercials, Frank looked over at Grigor and grinned: “Is that the joke you wanna pull? Drop the drop?”

  “It has already been dropped, on me,” Grigor said. He didn’t sound amused.

  Ananayel

  I have rationalized Andy Harbinger. The close call at the Quad Cinema convinced me to take the time, to do this part without shortcuts. So Andy is now a complete human being, with all the usual and necessary parts, if in somewhat better condition that most.

  And while I was at it, I gave him everything else a human being such as Andy Harbinger would have; which is to say, a job and a past. The sociology professorship—untenured assistant professor, actually—at Columbia has become real. Andy’s co-members of the faculty have memories of him, mosdy pleasant, extending back several years. His birth certificate will be found in the Bureau of Vital Statistics in Oak Park, Illinois. His school records, employment records, even dental and health records, are all in place. For the remainder of the time that life shall exist on Earth, Andy Harbinger is for me now fully functional, fully operative; what we might call my destination resort.

  Oh, and yes, Dr. Delantero has described the end rather accurately. He will turn out—though the knowledge would not be likely to please him—to have been right about what will happen when that drop of strange matter is spilled on the floor at Green Meadow III Nuclear Power Plant. Or at least to be right when it counts.

  After all, the universe is His creation. He can still tinker with it if He wishes, so long as He doesn’t thereby change what is already known to be true. (Well, He can, naturally, and sometimes does, but those instances are called miracles. We’re not considering a miracle here. In fact, miracles have been stricdy enjoined in this case; deniability, you know.)

  But there is still much of the real universe that is not known to human beings, not charted, not yet proved, and in that vast terra incognita God can do as He wills, with no miracle involved. Human science, for instance, has reached the point with strange matter where two theories have been proposed, of more or less equal probability. The spilled drop of strange matter might result in Dr. Philpott’s infinitesimal speck lying on the floor, quickly dissipated. Equally, it might result in Dr. Delantero’s destruction of the planet by conversion of its entire mass to strange matter.

  To prove either of those theories true would not, in Earth terms, constitute a miracle. Either theory could join the web of the already known without in any way rupturing the fabric of observed reality. Therefore, although I do not know which of those theories has been correct up till now, I know for certain which of them is correct as of this moment.

  That is, after all, why I am here. To transmute the entire Earth, and everything on it, to a ball bearing.

  35

  In the end, it was easier to steal an empty school bus than try to board one of those carrying the Green Meadow cadre. The buses didn’t pick up the supervisors and managers at home, to begin with, but only brought them from a well-guarded parking lot four miles away. Also, each bus carried its own armed private security guard. But the buses had been leased from a transportation company that serviced some of the public and most of the private schools in that part of New York State, and its large parking lot, usually at least half full of buses not at that moment in use, was barely guarded at all.

  By this time, the demonstrations had been going on for months and the strike for weeks, and everybody was into the daily routine of it. There was a known role to be played by everyone who showed up at the plant gates: demonstrators, strikers, working cadre, police, private security force, media crews, and the large yellow buses saying things like Istanfayle Consolidated School District on their sides but always with the same company name—Kelly Transit, in green script within an oudined shamrock—on the door. Most of the drivers were women, most of the guards riding shotgun wore rent-a-copdark blue uniforms. Sometimes the buses were nearly empty when they drove into the plant; they were never completely full.

  * * *

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Grigor asked.

  “Of course I am,” Frank said. “It was my idea.”

  “But I have nothing to lose,” Grigor pointed out. “If you are caught—”

  “That’s not gonna happen,” Frank assured him. “Win or lose, they don’t lay a hand on me. That’s a little promise I made myself.”

  “But why? Why do you want to do it?”

  “For money.” Frank grinned. “I’m a simple guy, money’s enough for me. You do your speeches, you warn the world, you get everybody’s attention, that’s all okay by me. But when they get their atom factory back is after I get mine. Or you’ll see a joke.”

  * * *

  Frank was the pro, he was the one who knew how to do all this stuff. He drove down into New York and rented a cop uniform from a theatrical costume supplier. Up in New Hampshire, he bought three pistols in three pawnshops; two of them would probably blow your hand off if you tried to fire them, but that was okay. They were just for show. The third one would have to be able to shoot, but not at anybody; just to attract attention.

  Back in Stockbridge, he rooted through the worn old clothing Jack Auston had left behind and outfitted himself with old grease-stained dark green chinos and a dark red plaid shirt. He bought a clipboard and some standard inventory forms from a local stationer, skipped shaving one day, and went down to Kelly Transit. Walking into the big parking area, he strolled over to the dispatcher’s window, consulted his clipboard, and said, “I’m here to pick up number 271.”

  It was four-thirty in the afternoon, and the dispatcher wasalmost at the end of his workday. More important, in half an hour there would be a shift change at Green Meadow; if things went well, Kelly Transit’s bus number 271 would be the first to arrive with the replacement staff.

  The dispatcher looked up from his crossword puzzle, frowned at Frank, and said, “Who says?”

  “Hyatt Garage,” Fran
k said, as though he didn’t care what happened next, one way or the other.

  “I’m not sure it’s in.”

  It was; Frank had noted the number of the bus he wanted as he’d walked across the yard. But he shrugged and said, 'That’s okay, pal, I’ll go back to the garage.” And turned away.

  “Hold it, hold it, I didn’t say it wasn’t here.”

  Frank stopped and looked at the guy. “Make up your mind, okay? I wanna go home tonight.”

  “We all do,” the dispatcher said, and made a big show of looking at his dispatch sheets before he said, “Yeah, it’s in. It’ll be around here somewhere. Hold on.”

  Frank held on. The dispatcher reached around behind himself, took a set of keys from the many rows of hooks on the wall, finally got up from his stool, and came thumping around and out the door. “Let’s see,” he said, peering at the tag with the keys, then squinting out at his yard full of buses. “Should be right around here.”

  Frank didn’t help, but still the dispatcher took only three minutes to find the bus standing in front of him. 271 was painted on the rear emergency door and like an eyebrow above the left side of the windshield. Messenger of God Parish School was painted on both sides, in block black letters, beneath the rows of windows.

  “Looks like that might be it,” the dispatcher said.

  “If you say so.”

  The dispatcher had Frank sign a form—“George Washington,” he scrawled—then gave him the keys, and Frank drove on out of there.

  * * *

  Maria Elena said, “Then this will do it.” Do what? Accomplish what? She didn’t care. She refused to even look at such questions. She had her answer: “Then this will do it.”

  She knew what she knew, and that was enough. She knew that movement was life, and stillness was death, and she’d been dead too long. She knew that a group with a goal was life and a solitary person without a goal was death, and she’d been dead too long. She knew that a singer was alive, and a person without a song (without, now, even the records and memories of the songs that had been) was dead, and that she’d been dead too long. She knew that death would come anyway, to all of them, some sooner than others, and that it was wrong for her to be dead before she was dead. That Frank made her feel alive, and Frank wanted to do this, and to do something was better, infinitely better, than the nothing she had been doing for so long.

  * * *

  Maria Elena drove the bus, wearing a chauffeur’s cap and lighdy tinted sunglasses, to help avoid accidental identification from any of her former acquaintances among the demonstrators milling as usual outside the gate. (As though there would be an “afterward” in which such things would matter.) Frank stood in the first step of the stairwell with the rent-a-cop uniform on, brazenly visible through the windshield. Kwan sat in the second row on the right, in suit and white shirt and tie; about a quarter of the scientific staff at Green Meadow was Oriental, so his presence added verisimilitude. Grigor, two rows behind Kwan, in open-necked plaid shirt, looked like the kind of unworldly blue-sky research guy who wouldn’t know a necktie if he were hanged by one. Pami, seated on the other side, was got up in black sweater, one string of pearls, and horn-rimmed glasses, her usually explosive hair imprisoned in a neat bun; it was hard to say what image she projected, exacdy, but it was at least respectable.

  In any event, they didn’t have to project any image at all for very long. The school buses never stopped when they made the turn to go through the just-opened gate into the plant grounds; it would make too tempting a target for the strikers and demonstrators. The state troopers and private security guards simply saw what they expected to see—a yellow school bus from Kelly Transit with a woman driver and a blue-uniformed guard and some egghead types aboard—at the time they expected to see it, and waved it on through.

  The land within the perimeter fence had been carefully recontoured, to present to the public eye along the public road nothing but a gende upslope in a parklike setting of specimen trees and well-pruned shrubs on a neady mowed lawn, with taller trees, most of them firs of one kind or another, forming a dense year-round backdrop. The two-lane asphalt road meandered up this easy incline, and when it crested the ridge and started down the far side, the quintet in the bus could see what was really here, in among the trees.

  Straight ahead was the dome-topped containment building, a featureless, windowless concrete box. Within the concrete would be a steel inner shell, and within that the reactor, with its core, control rods, steam generator, pressurizer, coolant pump, drain tank, valves, and sump. This was the heart of the power plant, the dangerous living essence of the thing, the part the quintet in the bus had to control if they were going to accomplish anything; if they were, in fact, to avoid being dragged right back off* the property again, in handcuffs.

  To the left of the containment building was its concrete baby brother, the auxiliary building, with its emergency core-cooling system pump, sump pump, borated-water storage tank, and radioactive-waste storage tank. A bit farther away on that side was the administrative building, brick and stone, three stories high, oddly matter-of-fact amid all the grotesqueries of nuclear architecture. It had the air of a faculty office building on a midwestern college campus.

  To the right of the containment building was the turbine building, reassuringly like such structures from power plants of an earlier day. It held the turbine, generator, condenser, transformer, and all the other elements needed to turn the power emanating from the containment building into usable electricity. In the shadow of the turbine building was another smaller windowless concrete structure, containing Dr. Philpotfs controversial laboratory. And behind them all, looming over them, were the twin cooling towers, salt and pepper shakers, huge concave edifices of pale gray concrete, like minimalist graven images of Baal.

  But in front of the containment building, attached to it or thrust from it, was the squat structure of the control section. Here was where the servants of the machine fed it and cooled it and guided it through its life of bridled violence. And here was where the five people in the bus had to take command, or lose.

  Maria Elena halted the bus in front of the control section. She pushed the long lever that opened the door. Frank looked back at his string, his four confederates. Jesus H. Christ, what a crew. Nodding, he said, “What have we got to lose?” and stepped down from the bus.

  It was as good a battle cry as any.

  36

  “Professor! My God, look at this!”

  Dr. Marlon Philpott, more rumpled yet somehow more serious in his laboratory than he had been on Nightline, turned reluctantly from the holding ring, in which, in the heavy swirl of liquid deuterium, something had been happening. Or about to happen. He squinted testily at Chang, jittering up and down over there in the doorway to the lounge: “What is it?”

  “Something’s happening on TV!”

  Dr. Philpott was fairly sure he’d made a fool of himself, or been made a fool of, which amounted to the same thing, on that damn program, and so wasn’t feeling particularly cordial about television at the moment. The damned Unitronic directors, with their worship of the great god Public Relations... “Something is happening in the deuterium,” he said sternly, “something infinitely more important than television.”

  “No, no.” Chang was really very disturbed, bobbing up and down over there as though he had to go to the bathroom. “It’s something happening here, at the facility.”

  The demonstrators, the strikers: Philpott paid as little attention to those Luddites as possible. He was about to say so when

  Cindy, attracted by Chang’s agitation, left her place at the auxiliary control console and crossed the lab toward the lounge, brushing blond hair out of her eyes in an unconscious habitual gesture as she did so, saying, “Chang? What is it?”

  “I’m just not sure,” the boy told her, his smooth face expressing alarm by becoming even more round than usual behind his round light-reflecting spectacles. “They say it’s been taken over.�
� Cindy shook her head, blond hair falling into her eyes again.

  “What’s been taken over?”

  “Us! The facility!”

  Philpott, wanting nothing but to return his attention to what either was or was not beginning to come into existence in the liquid deuterium, spread his hands and said, “Taken over? By whom? I don’t seem to see them.”

  “Not here, Professor. The control section!”

  “Oh, my gosh!” Cindy said, and ran past Chang into the lounge.

  The fact was, as Philpott well knew, graduate student assistants are vital to any coherent program of accomplishment in the scientific world. And graduate student assistants are the cheapest possible source of slave labor in the otherwise civilized world today. So it was necessary to let them have their heads every once in a while, to allow them their own little pursuits, their own enthusiasms, their own overreactions.

  Moving at a measured tread, a condescending smile already on his lips, Philpott entered the lounge, turned to the television set, and saw on its screen what was clearly an even more turbulent scene than normal these days at the gates of Green Meadow. Vast groups of people milled about in the background, like battle scenes in Shakespeare films, while somebody’s daughter, dressed approximately like a grown-up and looking very much like an older Cindy, jabbered into a microphone in the foreground.

  “Well,” Philpott said. “Reaching some sort of critical mass out there, are they?”

  “No, wait, Professor,” Chang said. “Listen.”

  Philpott didn’t want to listen, but he did, and when he understood what he was hearing he even more emphatically didn’t want to listen. Not to this:

  “Who the terrorists are and what their demands will be no one seems to know as yet. What is certain now is that they do include at least one expert in the operation of this type of plant. At their insistence, all plant personnel except the hostages have been evacuated, leaving the terrorists in charge of the reactor controls. The reactor is producing at its lowest possible rate. At this point, no electricity is being furnished by Green Meadow III. The slack is being taken up by other electric utilities in the Northeast and Canadian grids, and consumers are assured-“