“Intimidating,” Linneth said.
“Always. It was part of his shtick. It made him a reputation. And it was his reputation that brought him here.”
Dex said, “I’m surprised he accepted government work.”
“He didn’t want to. Especially during the Cold War, government research was often the equivalent of dropping into a black hole. If your work is classified, you can’t publish, and if you can’t publish, it ain’t science. But they made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. They promised him a long look into the heart of the mystery.”
Howard described the Turkish fragment, an object so defiantly strange that it beggared comprehension.
“You can imagine how it fed Stern’s obsessions. By day he took measurements and made cautious, rigorous hypotheses. By night he installed himself in the study in Ruth Wintermeyer’s house and composed rambling notes about the Plenum, the fragment as a divine artifice, literally a piece of the Appennoia. The journal he left is partly autobiography, partly scientific chronicle, partly the ravings of a lunatic. He was losing the ability to distinguish speculation from fact. It all became one thing, the mysterium tremendae—the outer limit of rational thought.”
Linneth said, “But ultimately, did he discover what the fragment was?”
“Not with any certainty. He came to believe it was a piece of what he called a ‘wormhole boat.’ ”
“Wormhole?”
“Call it a device for traveling between parallel worlds. But that rests on some highly speculative physics and a lot of Stern’s own bizarre ideation. He did prove one interesting thing—that the fragment responded in minute but detectable ways to the proximity of living beings. It knew when someone was close, in other words. Stern took this as evidence for another of his pet notions, that consciousness is tied to reality in some way more profound than we generally suppose. Whether it really proved any such thing is questionable, of course.”
“And the accident?” Dex asked.
“Ah. Interesting. There’s no way to reconstruct it from his notes, but he was talking about pouring radiation into the fragment to see how it responded. He had these enormous power lines installed. Ultimately, I guess he provoked a bigger response than he anticipated. Crossed some threshold.”
“And brought us here?”
“Yes.”
“You mean, personally?”
“Well,” Howard said, “it’s a puzzle, but the pieces are in place. The fragment responds to Stern’s presence—to his mind, Stern would claim. He applies a tremendous amount of energy and some kind of catalysis takes place, and in some unimaginable way, we’re transported here. But more than that. I think the process isn’t finished. It’s still happening.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Isn’t it obvious? The lab is still enclosed in that dome of light. And think about what happened when the filling station caught fire. Energy was liberated, and it took a strange form. People saw God or the Devil, but to me—” He looked at the table, then raised his eyes defiantly. “To me it looked like Stern himself.”
Howard’s reasoning had gone deeper than he wanted to admit.
From the scant evidence in the journal he had decided that Stern might be right: the fragment was part of a device meant to cross between avenues of creation, the infinite universes of Linde or the multiple alternatives of the uncollapsed wave function—or, somehow, both. And it had interacted with human consciousness, with Stern himself.
It was a boat, and Stern had become its pilot, had taken this piece of northern Michigan with him into a world that echoed, but imperfectly, all his stubborn obsessions.
He pictured Stern as a lingering presence inside the ruined lab, preserved somehow . . . as alive as he had seemed in Howard’s dreams.
“When the Proctors were investigating the lab, they sent people inside in protective clothing. It must have helped, if only a little. I want to get hold of one of those suits.”
“Howard, that’s ludicrous,” Dex said. “What could you possibly achieve?”
He hesitated. Did it make sense to say that he knew he should do this? Not only that he wanted to but that he felt asked to? Compelled to?
“I can’t explain it,” he said finally, “but I have to try.”
Linneth said, “You don’t have much time.”
Howard looked blankly at her. “What do you mean?”
“She means the town doesn’t have much time,” Dex said. “The Proctors mean to destroy it. They have some kind of atom bomb out on the old Ojibway reserve. That’s what we came to tell you. Howard, even if Stern is alive—there’s no way to help him. All we can do is try to get out.”
Howard thought of all that random energy, the white heat of nuclear fission, flooding the ruined lab and whatever mystery still pulsed at the heart of it.
He remembered a dream of his uncle in a globe of light.
Dex said, “We can’t stop them. The only way out is to get out.”
Howard took a breath, then shook his head. What he had heard in his dreams was a cry for help: Stern, lost at the edge of the world, looking for a way home. He had turned away from it once. Bad decision. “No,” he said. “You’re wrong, Dex. Maybe not for you. But for me. I think, for me, the only way out is in.”
CHAPTER 19
The temperature dropped steadily, but the clouds parted and for three days the sun shone from a flawless blue winter sky. Last week’s snow receded from the streets and Clifford was able to take his bike out again.
He started early in the morning and rode eastward through the silent town. Each storefront, each dusty window, glittered in the sunlight. Clifford wore his warmest winter jacket, plus gloves, boots, and a knit cap. Pedaling was a little awkward under all these clothes. And he tired easily, but maybe that was because of his diet: there hadn’t been meat for two weeks, except what Luke brought; no fresh vegetables for months.
The town, encased in winter, was doomed. Clifford knew what the firebreak meant. Two Rivers was going to burn. He had been certain of it as soon as he saw the teenagers hanging by their necks from the City Hall streetlights. If that could happen, Clifford thought, anything could happen.
He pedaled east toward the highway and the old Ojibway land. Luke had said the Proctors were building something out there. Something the soldiers weren’t supposed to know about.
He reached the highway before noon and ate lunch—a sandwich of stale bread and old cheese. He stood off the road in a pine grove enclosed by snow, eating his sandwich in big bites. Bars of sunlight came through the pine branches and the moist air.
After lunch he rode in the direction of the ruined lab, but turned left where a new track had been cut into the woods. There was not much traffic here and he had plenty of warning when a truck or car approached; the roar of the motor and the crunch of tires on old snow carried a long way in the afternoon air. The rutted, wet road was difficult for his bike, however, so he left it in a shadowy copse and walked a distance among the trees.
He was about to turn back when he came to the crest of a low hill and saw the steel gantry above the distant pinetops. Clifford approached more cautiously now, aware of the din of voices and clatter of tools. He moved close enough to see all of the tower, its girders entwined like metal scrollwork against the sky.
He guessed its purpose. He had seen a movie about the first atomic bomb test and he knew the Los Alamos bomb had been dropped from a gantry like this one. Maybe this wasn’t a bomb, maybe it was something else, but what else would burn a territory as large as Two Rivers?
He stood a long time looking at the gantry and the enclosure above it, which might contain the bomb itself, so much destruction to fit in a simple steel box. He half hoped the explosion would happen now; that it would carry him away in one white-hot instant.
But it didn’t.
He thought of the town and all the people in it, all with no future. Including his mother—himself.
Then, suddenly tired, he turned and headed fo
r home.
Shortly before curfew, he knocked at Howard Poole’s door and told him what he had seen. But Howard had already heard about the bomb.
Clifford said, “Are you still trying to save the town?”
“In my own way.”
“Maybe not much time left,” Clifford said.
“Maybe not.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
“No.” Then, after a silence, “Or maybe there is. Clifford, this radio scanner.” Howard took it from a kitchen cupboard. “I want you to take it to someone. Dex Graham. I’ll write down his address. Take it to him and show him how it works.”
“Dex Graham,” Clifford repeated.
“And tell him how you and I met. Tell him you need to get out of town, and tell him I said he would help. Can you remember that?”
“Sure,” Clifford said. The prospect of leaving Two Rivers intrigued him; he had not thought it was possible. “But what about you?”
Howard smiled in a strange way. “Don’t worry about me.”
CHAPTER 20
John F. Kennedy High School had closed for the holidays and never reopened. The reasons were both political and practical.
Early in January, the words PROCTORS=MURDERERS were spray-painted across the school’s brickwork where it faced La Salle Avenue. A military patrol arrived in the morning to splash whitewash over the slogan, but the words showed through, baleful and ghostly. The Proctors declared the school a property of the Bureau de la Convenance and welded a chain across the doors.
The gesture was largely symbolic. Parents had agreed among themselves that the risk of sending their children to school was not worth taking any longer. Anything might happen to children out of sight; the evidence of that had been ample. Besides, what were they learning? Ancient history. To what end? None.
Evelyn had copied some of Symeon Demarch’s written dispatches in her careful longhand. Dex passed them on to Shepperd in exchange for more information on the planned escape.
The plans were reasonably credible. All the military traffic moved on a north–south route that connected with the highway and led back to Fort LeDuc—obviously not a viable way out. But during the invasion in June a tank battalion had come in from the west along a seldom used corduroy road through the forest. Shepperd’s scouts had established that this largely unguarded road was a logging trail that led to an evacuated timber camp twenty miles southeast. From there, a larger road led west—presumably toward civilization, but avoiding the bottleneck at what used to be the Mackinac Bridge. There was plenty of tree cover and even a large expedition might go undetected, “Provided we get out relatively clean and the weather’s favorable—say, cloudy but not too snowy. If we land on our feet, a lot of folks are talking about heading farther west, maybe what we would have called Oregon or Washington State. It’s supposed to be kind of a frontier out there. The Proctors are less powerful. Homesteading is a possibility, in the long run.”
He told Dex, “We’ll let you know when the times are final. But it’s close, obviously. You’ll need transportation, extra gasoline, snow tires—chains, if you can get ’em; rope, tools, food. Bob Hoskins says he can help you out on that account. And we prefer a fully occupied vehicle; we have more refugees than cars. If you don’t have at least three passengers, come to me; there’s a waiting list. Tell me, you ever do any shooting?”
Dex said, “In the Reserves. But that was years ago.”
“Still handle a weapon?”
“I suppose so.”
“Then take this.” Shepperd pressed a .38 caliber military pistol into his hand and filled the pocket of Dex’s jacket with spare clips. “I trust you won’t have to use it. But I’m a trusting soul.”
Dex Graham went home to Linneth. The Proctors had recently withdrawn their guards from the civilian wing of the Blue View Motel and it was easier now for her to spend the night.
After dark, blinds pulled, she sat beside Dex on the bed and unbuttoned his shirt. The bullet wound was a pink dimple in the meat of his arm. It was only intermittently painful. She touched it with the palm of her hand in a gesture that was probably unconscious but seemed to Dex full of significance, a healing caress she might have learned from her mother. Maybe a token of the strange religion she had grown up with, Hellenic paganism evolved through centuries of Europe. In London, she said, they still allowed temples in the city. Oracles of Apollo in Leicester Square.
She undressed in the dim light with a combination of modesty and glee that was half Puritan, half pagan. In spite of all the hardship—the arrest of her parents, three years in a gray nunnery in Utica, her long and arduous education—she still owned this hidden liveliness. It ran through her veins like blood.
And it struck a similar chord in Dex. Strange to realize, so close to what was liable to be his death, how much of himself he had lost. Invisibly. He was accustomed to the idea that he had seen the boundaries of the world and that he was lingering here by default, neglected by death for reasons he couldn’t fathom. That belief had made him brave . . . or at least insolent, careless, grim.
But it was an addictive sort of courage. Teflon courage. He had glided through time, adhering nowhere. It was a courage, in any case, not much exercised. He had never been called on to face down a tank, like the murdered students of Tiananmen Square. He was an American and it was still possible, even at the ragged end of the twentieth century, to live a life insulated from evil—any evil but his own.
He had occasionally wondered what evil looked like. It was easy enough to find it on CNN, the bodies in the pits, the death squads in their dusty pickup trucks. But evil face to face: would he cower before it? Or would it have the same stale odor as his own guilt?
But now he had seen it. The small bodies hanging outside City Hall were its frank signature. What else to call it but evil? There was nothing to exonerate the hangman, no extenuating circumstances or plausible excuses; only a contrived, practiced cruelty.
And it was not frightening. It was offensive, banal, repellent, crude, tragic—everything but frightening. It could hurt him, certainly. Kill him. Probably it would. But its face was only the face of the Proctors, self-aggrandizing and completely superficial.
And here was Linneth, its opposite. Her smile repudiated oppression and her touch brought martyrs back to life. Prisons opened with every breath she took.
There was nothing complicated here, he thought, only a doorway with daylight beyond it and an opportunity after all these dry years to step forward and pass through, pass through.
Linneth was with Dex in the morning when the boy came to the apartment.
The boy was an ordinary-seeming child, large eyes under a cascade of unkempt blond hair, but Linneth thought she noticed a hint of recognition from Dex. Odd, because the boy was clearly a stranger: he had come with a strange sort of radio and instruction for its use from Howard Poole.
The boy must be twelve years old or so, Linneth thought. Blue-eyed, like Dex. He looked almost like a relative. Or a son. Ah.
How many agonizing times had that spark of recognition leaped to strangers? It must be terribly hard for him, she thought.
The boy said Howard had promised that Dex would help him when it was time to leave Two Rivers.
“Of course,” Dex said.
“And my mother,” Clifford said. “There’s just the two of us. We have a car, if you need a car. A Honda. There’s even some gas in it.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Dex said. “We have room for two.”
But a darker thought had occurred to Linneth. She said, “Clifford, when did you talk to Howard?”
“Yesterday—just before curfew.”
“You told him about the tower in the forest, you said?”
“The bomb. He already knew about it.”
“And he gave you the radio and told you to come here?”
“Yes.”
“That sounds very final. Clifford . . . do you think he was getting ready to go somewhere?”
&nbs
p; Clifford seemed to think it over. “Maybe. He had a big winter coat by the door. A backpack next to it. He could have been getting ready to go somewhere.”
And Linneth looked at Dex, who knew at once what this meant.
Dex hurried to the house, but it was empty. The light had been turned off, the kitchen cleaned—a futile but typical gesture—and Howard’s sleeping roll was missing from the basement where Dex had seen it last.
“I didn’t think he would really do this,” Dex said. “It’s suicide. He knows that.”
“Perhaps he didn’t feel he had much to lose. Or perhaps he really thought it was a way out.” Linneth shrugged unhappily. “I didn’t know Howard well. But he seemed like a very religious man.”
CHAPTER 21
Because it was Friday night, Lukas Thibault borrowed a car from the motor pool and drove across town to Ellen’s.
It was easier nowadays to borrow a vehicle and find someone to cover for him in the evenings. Not that it wasn’t still dangerous: Nico Bourgoint, newly recovered from his flying-glass injuries at the gas depot explosion, had been stockaded for laying over with a woman from the roadhouse crowd. But Nico had few friends; no one would cover for him. It was a matter of protocol, really. The purely mechanical aspects of an assignation—vehicles, duty rosters—had lately been less problematic. All the commanding officers seemed distracted.
Thibault parked his car in the shadow of Ellen’s garage. The neighbors would know he was here, of course; discretion was only a gesture. But he doubted Ellen spoke often to her neighbors.
She opened the door at his knock, her eyes traveling to the bag that contained a quart of barracks whiskey in a glass jar—the real object of her desire.
She waved him inside. They sat together at the kitchen table. Thibault had grown almost accustomed to the strange unkempt sybaritic luxury of the house, with its broadloom (stained), sleek machines (dusty), glittering countertops (chipped). Still, it struck him every time he crossed the threshold, a dizzy feeling. How mysteriously these people had lived!