Ananayel
I don’t disappear that easily,” I said, and tousled her hair.
But I do, don’t I? Or I will. Or she will, in fact. I’ll still be around, but she’ll disappear very easily indeed.
Per our agreement, she got up first, since she takes longer in the bathroom, and I lay a bit longer in bed, brooding. (Already we are working out these fine points of cohabitation.) But what am I going to do with her, what am I going to do with Susan? It’s absurd, I know it’s absurd, but I want to go on pleasing her, watching her reactions. I have never felt so enjoyably at service before.
I even want to go on inhabiting this body, which, for all its oafish awkwardness, has been serving me well. And the fact is, the way the humans have structured their civilizations, their bodies aren’t even that much of a liability. Chairs, automobiles, restaurants; they have worked out fairly ingenious and even enjoyable ways of overcoming their limitations.
But what am I to do about Susan? I’ve thought and thought, and there’s simply no way to take her with me, to pluck her off the Earth before it transmogrifies. How would I do it? Where and how would she live? In a bubble of air and soil from her former planet? First she would lose her mind—I mean, immediately she would lose her mind—and then she would pine and die.
Susan is of this place. More, she is of this place and time. There would be no life for her in the deep spaces of the real, alone, the last of her kind, with no companion but an amorphism she’s expected to call Andy. If I’m going to think about this, I at least have to think realistically.
But I don’t want to lose her. I don’t want to stop knowing her, that’s the long and the short of it. I don’t want to stop being Andy, and I don’t want to stop being in love with Susan. (We haven’t said the word, humans are often wary of that word, but we both know.)
I have choice, I know that, I have free will, but on what could I bend that will? Where is the alternative? If Susan stays on this Earth, she will be snuffed at the same instant as every other creature, every plant, every molecule of air. But where could she go instead? Nowhere. So where is the choice?
40
“I’m sorry, Congressman,” Reed Stockton said, “but I just can’t go along with it.”
Congressman Stephen Schlurn leaned forward, his reddened eyes burning into Reed’s. “Do you know who you’re talking to, young man?”
Yes, he did, Reed Stockton knew exactly who he was talking to, worse luck. A hell of a way to start a new job; first day, first morning, and he has to stand up and say no to a hotshot congressman, in fact the congressman in whose district Green Meadow III Nuclear Power Plant festered, and who had a sudden urge to be a... a what? A hero? A media star?
A headache and a jerk, in Reed Stockton’s opinion. “I know who you are, sir,” he said, being both firm and respectful, “and I have to tell you, it wouldn’t matter if you were the president, I’d still have to say the same thing.”
The congressman shook his head, showing how exasperated he’d been made by Reed’s stupidity. “It’s not as though,” he said, “I’m talking about going in there alone. I want you with me, that’s the whole point.”
“Congressman,” Reed said, “I have to tell you this is my first day as PID, and I’m not really prepared to put my job on the line on any one person’s say-so. My predecessor, a fellow named Hardwick—”
“I heard about him,” Schlurn said. Hardwick’s shocking bewildering finish was being downplayed in public as much as possible, but of course Congressman Schlurn would have his sources, he would know all about it. “Went crazy, didn’t he?”
“Yes, sir. Killed a national guardsman with a rock, went over the fence with the man’s rifle, and apparendy killed himself inside. The helicopters have seen what’s almost certainly his body.”
“I fail to understand,” Schlurn said, “what that garish adventure has to do with you and me. I want us, representing the people and the media, to walk openly and boldly straight through that main gate and down to the plant and talk to these people, one on one. All these telephone negotiations aren’t doing a damn thing, and I don’t care if you only got the job ten minutes ago, you still have to know I’m right about that.”
Give me strength, Lord, Reed Stockton prayed, and he meant it. He was a religious person, raised a Methodist by devout parents, married to a devout girl himself, the two of them raising their first child—with more to come, God willing—the same way. When troubled or harassed, Reed prayed for help, for guidance, for strength, and it seemed to him his prayers were always answered.
And they would be again this time. Knowing that God was giving him eloquence, Reed said, “Sir, you may be absolutely right about everything you say. You’re an intelligent man, and a very persuasive man, and I wouldn’t doubt for a second that if you could get into a face-to-face discussion with the unfortunate people sitting in at the plant right now you would very eloquently—”
“Sitting in?” Schlurn stared at him with revulsion. “Did you say sitting in?”
“Yes, sir, Congressman Schlurn, I did.” Reed permitted himself a small pleased smile. “And frankly, sir, I’m proud of it. That was my idea.”
“Your idea.”
“Yes, sir. When I took over this morning, there was a briefing session with General Bloodmore and the other people in charge, and I made that suggestion and they accepted it at once. And thanked me, sir.”
“Sitting in,” repeated Schlurn.
“It’s a much less emotive word than anything else that has been used,” Reed explained. ‘Talking about hostages, and terrorists, and invasions, and captures, and threats and all that, it simply serves to escalate the danger quotient. Sir, I was a poli sci major at Cal Tech, with a minor in communications history, and I like to think that I understand what words do in public discourse. I think of that as my specialty. And to say that what we have to deal with here is a sit-in suggests the possibility for reason and discussion on both sides of the issue. It suggests a situation that isn’t really dangerous.”
“But,” Schlurn said, “it is really dangerous.”
“Sir, we don’t want to emphasize that with the folk outside. Particularly those within one hundred and twenty-five miles of the plant. Which includes, as you know, New York City.”
Schlurn considered. He and Reed were standing on opposite sides of Reed’s desk—formerly poor Hardwick’s desk—in the Press Office trailer, surrounded by activity they’d both been ignoring: secretaries typing, telephoning, making copies. Now Schlurn, with those painful-looking red eyes as though he hadn’t slept for a week—dreaming up this insane .scheme, no doubt—looked around the trailer, looked back at Reed, and in a new low voice, calmer than before, said, “I’m not going to persuade you, am I?”
“To let you on-site, sir? And to go with you? No, sir, you aren’t.”
“The idea of yourself becoming a media figure has no appeal to you.”
Reed smiled thinly. He used the media, he didn’t subscribe to it. “No, sir,” he said.
“No, I can see that. Is there a men’s room?”
“Of course, sir.”
Reed, magnanimous in victory, was solicitous in pointing the way, and beamed at the congressman’s back as Schlurn stumped off.
Eloquence, that’s all it ever took. Eloquence and calm. Reed, pleased and relieved at having survived his first crisis in the new job, sat at the desk and went back to sorting through the vast collection of messages left unreturned by poor Hardwick, who hadn’t survived his last crisis at all, whatever it had been.
Five minutes later the congressman was back, looking better than before, calmer and more in control of himself. Even his eyes were clearer. He said, “Reed, I want to thank you.”
Reed jumped to his feet, scattering message memos. “Yes, sir!”
“That was a dumb idea I had,” Schlurn said. “I woke up with it this morning, and it just seemed great, and I couldn’t get it out of my head all day. What I needed was a calm rational person
to look at me and say you’re crazy, and I’m grateful to you for doing it.”
“Oh, Congressman,” Reed stammered, “I never meant to suggest, uh, suggest...”
“Don’t worry about it, Reed, you were right,” Schlurn told him, and grinned in a friendly reassuring way, and slowly shook his head. “I don’t know what got into me,” he said.
X
How do I get in there? How?
With all the temporal and heavenly powers both blocking my way, with them all united against me, guards and angels and fences and force fields all opposed to my will, how do I get my hands on that miserable quintet, those hopeless pawns? How? HOW? HOOOOOOWWWW!!!
And how much time have I left, to get there?
41
Frank didn’t want any chummy relationships developing between his group and the hostages, the eight staff members kept here to run the plant under the eye of Grigor, but what could he do? Human beings interact. It’s easier to be friendly, or at least courteous, than impersonal and aloof
So it wasn’t long before Grigor was saying, “Rosie, would you bring me that printout, please?” or “Mark, it’s time to check the pressure gauges,” or even, “Fran, I’m thirsty, could you get me a glass of water? Thank you.”
Frank wasted a little breath arguing against this fraternization at first, but gave up when he saw he wasn’t getting anywhere. And in any case it was easier for him, too, to address the hostages by name, to say “please” and “thank you,” to act as though this was just some kind of stupid boat ride they were all taking together, instead of what it was.
So they knew the hostages’ first names, and after a while even some of their backgrounds and personal lives. And the hostages knew Grigor’s and Kwan’s names, because the whole world knew their names. Early in the negotiations with the people outside, Grigor had announced both of their names and histories, to demonstrate the seriousness and capability of the people who’d taken over, and to start to get their stories out. And to show, as well, that they believed they had nothing to lose.
The hostages—and the world—didn’t know Frank’s name, or Maria Elena’s, because on that he insisted, firmly believing they were going to pull this caper off somehow. And they didn’t know Pami’s name because they didn’t need to know it. Pami had gone all boneless and weak the minute they’d established control of this place, as though that’s all she’d been holding herself together for, and she spent most of her time now either asleep in the dayroom or slumped in a chair, glowering at the world around her with sunken eyes. There was no making human contact with Pami, not by the hostages and not even by her companions.
Frank had expected Grigor also to have collapsed by now, to be of little more than symbolic use once they’d got themselves inside the plant, but that emaciated body seemed to find sustenance and fresh vigor here in the control section. Dealing with the plant and the hostages, negotiating with the thickheaded officials outside, it all gave him a wiry energy that made him move as though he were plugged into his own electric source.
Kwan was the one losing vigor, particularly after the television announced he was simply a common crook after all, and not a revolutionary, not a hero of Tiananmen Square. This was two days after Grigor had given the names to the media. Apparently there was no way for them to smear the hero fireman of Chernobyl, but the Chinese government was happy to announce that Li Kwan was no more than a garden-variety criminal, lying about his past in an effort to gain political sanctuary. And the American State Department, for reasons of its own—no doubt solid hardheaded realistic mature reasons— was happy to announce it had studied the documents the Chinese government had provided as “prooP’ and to pronounce them genuine.
“That’s all right, Kwan,” Frank said, trying to cheer him up, “the lie comes apart, don’t worry about it. You already had a lotta ink, right? A lotta stuff in the newspapers about who you really are.”
Kwan shrugged, silent little face bitter, not caring.
“You’ll get your story out,” Frank told him, and then made a mistake. “You’ll have plenty of time after this is all over,” he said.
Kwan looked at him, with painted-on eyes. Frank cleared his throat, and blinked, and patted Kwan on the shoulder, and left him there.
Despite the weirdness of the situation, despite its unprecedented craziness, life soon setded into a kind of routine, which was something else Frank didn’t want or need. What he wanted and needed was steady forward movement, negotiation and then planning out the final details of the endgame and then doing it and home free. Stasis was his enemy. Being stuck here in stalemate could only help the people outside, who didn’t have this fragile cat’s cradle to hold together.
Meanwhile, nothing was getting accomplished. Their grip on the plant was secure, but somehow that didn’t mean as much as it should. The propaganda effect, for Grigor and Kwan, was just about non-existent, buried within the media’s overriding interest in the caper. Maria Elena’s more general ecologic point couldn’t seem to get made at all. And Frank wasn’t getting his money.
The way that part was supposed to work, at the final moment Frank was to split off from the rest of them. The others all had their propaganda objectives, so were willing to let themselves be captured to accomplish their agenda. So, assuming the goddamn stumble-minded officials finally did come around to agree on the five-mil ransom, Grigor would tell them to put it in suitcases in a car just outside the gate, and that a member of the group would go out and drive the car away.
The story was, if the driver wasn’t arrested or followed, and if he was permitted to get clear away, he would telephone the plant six hours later and tell his partners still inside that everything was okay. No phone call, the partners would destroy the plant. (In reality, Frank would just clear out, and then the others would surrender. Fle’d like to take Maria along, if she’d go, but that didn’t seem likely.)
First, though, the morons outside had to get the idea into their thick heads that they had to come up with the five mil.
Had to come up with it, or they could kiss their goddamn nuclear power plant goodbye.
And time was getting short.
* * *
Pami did the most sleeping, and even when she was awake she was lisdess and cranky, like a colicky child. Frank slept the least, driven by nervous energy, but they all, invaders and hostages alike, took their turns on the sofas in the dayroom, covered by the thin cotton blankets normally kept in a supply closet in case an emergency ever arose in which staffers would have to remain at the plant for an extended period of time. (Societal breakdown outside the perimeter had been the emergency the planners had been thinking of, not the standoff that now existed.)
The only television set was also in the dayroom. They kept it on all the time, to see how the world was perceiving their situation, but turned the volume low, since there were always sleepers in the room. It was the afternoon of the fifth day of the siege that Dr. Philpott was first mentioned on that set.
Frank and two female staffers were watching at the moment, sitting close to the set in order to hear it, with Maria Elena and Pami and two other staffers asleep across the room, and Grigor and Kwan and the remaining four staff members out in the main control room. “To this point, nothing has been heard of the situation of Dr. Marlon Philpott, the eminent scientist whose controversial experiments with anti-gravity led to the strike at Green Meadow, which in turn-“
Frank looked away from the set. The two women watching the program with him looked scared. You could see them praying he wouldn’t ask any questions. But their prayers were not to be answered.
* * *
Dr. Philpott stared at the TV set in the lounge. “Anti-gravity? What the hell are they talking about?”
“Professor,” Cindy said, sounding frightened and looking wide-eyed as she brushed the hair out of her eyes, “they told. They weren’t supposed to tell.”
And of course that was true. The level of lay ignorance demonstrated by that anti-gravi
ty reference had distracted him from the even more egregious error in that announcement: they weren’t supposed to tell.
The media knew he was hidden in here, of course. He was the closest thing to a celebrity connected with Green Meadow, so naturally the media would have sought him out at the very beginning of the crisis, for statements and comments and interviews and all that, and God knows the authorities had initially wanted him out of here. But he’d convinced them, finally, after a number of phone calls—fortunately, the phones in here didn’t have to go through any switching system that the terrorists would see—that both he and the lab were safer, that the whole plant would be safer, if he stayed right here. (He didn’t tell them he was continuing his experiment, merely that he was “safeguarding” it; a white lie, that’s all, a venial sin of omission.)
But the media wasn’t supposed to tell. As one of the officials he’d talked to on the phone had said, there would be a “news blackout” on the whereabouts of the eminent Dr. Marlon Philpott until this emergency was over. (And why were all scientists “eminent,” anyway?)
But, as ever in human affairs, there’s always someone who didn’t get the message, some temporary assistant subeditor in precisely the wrong place at the wrong time. “All we can hope,” Philpott said, “is that the terrorists are too busy to watch television.” And he went back into the lab to see how Chang and the infinitely minute speck of something in the deuterium was coming along.
* * *
“This raises the ante,” Frank said. “I’ll go in that lab there and get him and bring him here and put him on the phone with those assholes, and maybe we’ll start to get somewhere.”
“I should come with you,” Grigor said. “We’re not sure what’s happening in that lab.”
“I must come, too,” Maria Elena said. “I want to see this laboratory. I want to see what this man is doing.”
Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 Page 30
