The Forge of God

  "It's not a government secret," he said, smiling. He told her about the encounter in the airport, the information in his head, the formation of the network. It spilled from him in a confessional torrent, and he interrupted only to let Gauge in when the pup howled miserably in the garage.

  Francine watched her husband's shining eyes and his beatific face and bit her lip.

  When he was finished, he shivered and shrugged all at once. "I sound completely nuts, don't I?"

  She nodded, a tear falling down her cheek.

  "All right. I'll show you something very strange."

  He went to the locked upper-hall cupboard and drew down a cardboard box. In the bedroom, he drew off the fid. Within the box, to his surprise, lay not one but two identical spiders, motionless, their green linear eyes glowing. Francine backed away from the open box.

  "I didn't know there was another," he said.

  "What are they?"

  "Our saviors, I think," Arthur answered.

  Will she be saved? he asked the humming expectancy in his head. She reached out to touch the spiders, and he was about to stop her, warn her, when he realized it didn't matter. If they had wanted her to be "possessed," the new spider—wherever it came from—would have already taken her. Hesitantly, she reached out to touch one. It did not react. She stroked the chromium body thoughtfully. The spiders moved their legs in unison, and she withdrew her hand hastily. The motion stopped.

  "It's like they're alive," she said.

  "I think they're just very complicated machines."

  "They take samples, store information . . . and they ..." She swallowed hard and wrapped her arms around herself. She began to shiver, her teeth clacking. "Ooo-o-h, Ar-rthur ..."

  He reached out to hug her tightly, laying his cheek on the top of her head, nuzzling her.

  "I'm still here," he said.

  "Everything is so unreal."

  "I know."

  "What . . . what do we do now?"

  "We wait," he said. "I do what I must do."

  Her expression as she craned her head back to face him was a mix of fascination and repulsion. "I don't even know that you are who you say you are."

  He nodded. "I can't prove that."

  "Yes, you can," she said. "Please, maybe you can. Maybe I know already." She folded herself more compactly into his arms and hid her face against his chest. "I don't want to think . . . I've lost you already. Oh, God." She pulled away again, mouth open. "Don't tell Marty. You haven't told Marty?"

  "No."

  "He couldn't take it. He has nightmares already about fire and earthquakes."

  "I won't tell him."

  "Not until later," she said firmly. "When we know for sure. What's going to happen, I mean."

  "All right."

  Then it was time to dress and pick up Marty from the school. They drove together through the drizzle.

  That evening, after Marty had gone to bed and while they sat together on the couch in the living room reading, legs entangled, the phone rang. Arthur answered.

  "I have a call for Arthur Gordon from President Crockerman."

  Arthur recognized the voice. It was Nancy Congdon, the White House secretary.

  "Speaking."

  "Hold on, please."

  A few seconds later, Crockerman came on the line. "Arthur, I need to speak with you or Feinman, or with Senator Gilmonn ... I assume you're in touch with him, or with the Puzzle Palace?"

  "I'm sorry, Mr. President ... I haven't spoken with the senator or the NSA. Harry Feinman is very ill now. He's dying."

  "That's what I was told." The President said nothing for a long moment. "I'm under siege here, Arthur. They still can't get a vote through in the House, but they're maybe two votes down . . . I'm not sure I know everybody who's laying siege, but I thought you might be able to speak to them. You don't need to admit complicity . . . or whatever you would call it."

  "I may not be the right man, Mr. President," Arthur said.

  "In the past few hours, I have been denied access to the war room. I've fired Otto Lehrman but that hasn't stopped a thing. Jesus, they've actually threatened to withdraw the troops around the White House! All they've done is clearly illegal, but these people . . . They can afford to wait me out. Something's going on. And I need to know what it is, for Christ's sake. I'm the President of the United States, Arthur!"

  "I don't know anything about this, Mr. President."

  "Right. Hold to the party line. For whatever it's worth, I'm not a stubborn idiot. I've spent the last few weeks agonizing over this. I've spoken with Party Secretary Nalivkin. Do you know what they're doing? They're negotiating with the bogey in Mongolia. He says the world is on the brink of a socialist millennium. That's what the spacecraft in Mongolia is telling him! Arthur, give it to me straight ... Is there anybody I can talk to who can put me back in the chain of command? I am not an unreasonable man. I can be reasoned with. God knows I've been thinking this all over. I'm willing to rethink my position. Have you heard about Reverend Ormandy?"

  "No, sir."

  "He's dead, for Christ's sake! They shot him. Somebody shot him."

  Arthur, face pale, said nothing.

  "If they aren't talking to you, then who would they be talking to?"

  "Have you called McClennan, or Rotterjack?" Arthur asked. Both of them had sworn allegiance to Crockerman even after their resignations.

  "Yes. I can't get through to them. I think they've been arrested or kidnaped. Is this a revolution, a mutiny, Arthur?"

  "I don't know sir. I honestly don't know."

  Crockerman muttered something Arthur didn't hear clearly and hung up.

  47

  January 4

  Reuben Bordes met the Money Man near the Greyhound bus terminal on Twelfth Street. The white-haired, paunchy stranger wore a dark blue wool suit, pin-striped golden silk shirt, and alligator-skin shoes. He seemed perfectly happy to pass Reuben a plump gray vinyl zippered bag filled with hundred- and thousand-dollar bills. Reuben shook his hand firmly, smiled, and they parted without a word said between them. Reuben stuck the envelope into the pocket of his olive-green army coat and hailed a cab.

  Instructions given, he sat back in the seat, happier than he had ever been in his life. With this money, he could be traveling in style now: taxicabs, airplanes, fine hotels wherever he went. But more than likely the money would be spent on other things. Still, the thought . . .

  There was an extensive shopping list in his head. His first stop would be the Government Printing Office Data Center. There he would purchase four sets of data disks containing the entire public-domain nonfiction records of the Library of Congress. Each set, on five hundred disks, occupied the space of a good-sized filing cabinet, and he did not know why four copies were necessary, but he would pay for them all in cash with about half of the money in the envelope.

  He stood in line at the service counter of the Data Center for ten minutes, and then stepped up to the clerk, a young, balding man with a full red beard and a sharply appraising stare.

  "Can I help you?" the clerk asked.

  "I'd like four sets of number 15-692-421-3-A-G."

  The clerk wrote the number down and consulted a terminal. "That's nonfiction, complete, L.C.," he said. "Including all reference guides and indices?"

  Reuben nodded.

  The clerk's stare became more intense. "That's fifteen thousand dollars a set," he said.

  Reuben calmly unfolded a roll of money and counted out sixty thousand-dollar bills.

  The clerk examined the bills carefully, rubbing them, holding them up close. "I'll have to call my supervisor," he said.

  "Fine," Reuben said.

  A half hour later, ail the formalities cleared away, Reuben wrote down where he wanted the sets sent—a mailing address in West Virginia.

  "What will you do with them all?" the clerk asked as he handed Reuben the receipt.

  "Read them," Reuben said. "Four times."

  He regretted that flippancy as
he walked south on Seventh Street toward the National Archives, but only for a moment. Instructions were pouring in rapidly, and he had little time to think for himself.

  48

  January 5

  Lieutenant Colonel Rogers came out of a sound sleep at four a.m., just minutes before his wristwatch alarm was set to go off. He deactivated the alarm and switched on the small lamp at the head of his narrow bunk. For a luxurious minute, he lay still in the bunk, listening. All was quiet. All calm. It was Sunday; most of the Forge of Godders had moved to Furnace Creek the night before for a huge rally planned this morning by the Reverend Edwina Ashberry.

  He dressed quickly, putting on climbing boots and pulling two hundred-foot lengths of nylon rope from a knapsack in the trailer's corner. Rope in hand, he looked down, brows knitted, at the small desk and telephone. Then he dropped the ropes on the bunk and sat in the chair to write a letter to his wife and son, in case he did not make it back. That took five minutes. He was still ahead of schedule, so he spent five more minutes carefully shaving, making sure every long bristle on his neck was scraped off: military clean. He brushed his teeth and combed his hair meticulously, glancing at the letter. Unhappy with the wording, he quickly recopied the message onto a fresh piece of paper, signed it, folded it into an envelope, and posted the envelope on his message board with address and instructions.

  At four-thirty he descended the trailer steps and stood in the bitterly cold desert darkness, a steady wind dragging at his coat and pants legs. At the east end of the camp was Senator Julio Gilmonn's car, in a fenced-off square reserved for the munitions locker. Gilmonn himself stood with two aides, a handsome, stern-looking middle-aged black woman and a young white male, bulky and clean-cut, near the inner gate leading to the rock.

  "Good morning," Rogers said as he approached. Gilmonn extinguished a cigarette after taking one last frowning, concentrated drag and shook Rogers's hand.

  "There are still a few Forgers out there," the senator said, pointing to the outer-perimeter fence. "Have you made any plans for clearing them?"

  Rogers nodded. "In fifteen minutes we'll set off a siren and announce an emergency situation. Nothing specific. Then we'll evacuate the camp through the corridor. If the Forgers haven't cleared out by then . . ."He shrugged. "The hell with them."

  "That could alert the . . . bogey," the young aide said.

  Rogers acknowledged that possibility. "It hasn't done anything for months that we know of," he said. "We'll just take the risk. There are about a thousand people out there now."

  The woman regarded Rogers with an expression between severe doubt and motherly concern, but said nothing.

  "Who else is involved?" Gilmonn asked.

  "I'm having two of my staff officers help me carry the weapon to the entry. They'll evacuate at that point. And there's your expert, of course. Where is he?"

  Gilmonn pointed to a figure walking through a spotlighted area a few dozen yards away. "He's coming now."

  The "expert" was a young naval lieutenant, lean and of middle height, with thin, precise eyebrows and short-cut tight brown hair, dressed in civvies and carrying a large bag and a briefcase. He greeted the others quietly and asked to be taken to the weapon. Gilmonn opened the gate with the key Rogers had entrusted to him, and then lifted the trunk lid. Within was an orange-striped silver cylinder about a foot and a half wide and two feet long, lying in an aluminum cradle. The radiation-warning trefoil was prominently featured at three points on the cylinder.

  "We don't have a presidential authorization code," the lieutenant explained matter-of-factly. "So I've had to take an unarmed, stockpiled missile warhead and remove the PAL—the permissive action link, the code box. This causes a fatal mechanical failure in the detonator and proximity fuse—fatal to the mechanism, not to me. So I've had to engineer my own time fuse and detonator and match them with the warhead. With higher authorization, I've taken a Navy plane wave generator and klystron and the necessary black boxes and cobbled them together. I can guarantee that it will work." He smiled almost apologetically and turned to Rogers. "Sir, you will be able to deactivate this weapon, should you encounter something unexpected, right up to the last second before it goes off. So pay close attention."

  Rogers listened carefully as the lieutenant removed a cover plate from one end of the cylinder and explained the procedure. He then explained it all over again, checking Rogers's face at each crucial point to make sure he understood. "Got that, sir?" the lieutenant asked.

  "Yes," Rogers said.

  "I apologize we couldn't find a backpack nuke—a SADM—for you, sir," the lieutenant said. "But they've been out of stock for about twenty years. They've all been scrapped or dumped. This only weighs about a third again as much as a SADM—special atomics demolition munition," he explained for the benefit of the senator's aides. "But you should be able to haul it up with no difficulty if the shaft is as smooth as you've said. Then push and pull it for the next leg, and when you can stand, haul it into position using your backpack. You seem to be in good shape, sir, and you should be able to complete the mission . . ." The lieutenant shook his head. "Sorry. I don't mean to tell you your business, sir." "No problem," Rogers said.

  "Just one question. Nobody back home was able to answer something for me. How strong is this bogey, internally?"

  "We don't know," Rogers said.

  "Strong enough, possibly, to have survived a descent from orbit," Gilmonn said.

  "If it offers even token resistance to the weapon, then I can't estimate the effect on the surrounding countryside," the lieutenant said. "Unless it stays integral, which I really doubt, there's going to be hot rock and shrapnel all over this valley. I don't know how far away you'll have to be, sir."

  "I'll have a Jeep," Rogers said.

  "Drive like hell," the lieutenant recommended. "And another thing. What sort of drive mechanism might it have?"

  Rogers shook his head. "There's no outlets, no nozzles or . . . Nothing we've seen."

  "If there is a drive mechanism—which seems logical, if we think of it as a spaceship—then the explosion could set it off."

  Rogers took a deep breath. "I've thought about that," he said.

  "We've detected no radiation in or around the bogey," Gilmonn said. "If there's any drive mechanism, I doubt very much they use rocket fuel."

  "Yeah, but what do they use?" the lieutenant asked.

  "Everything we do here involves some risk," Gilmonn said. "And if they think we can be bamboozled by our own imaginations . . . How much stronger does that make them? What has that kind of thinking done to us already?"

  The sirens began to wail, echoing back from the mountains, painful and terrifying. Loudspeakers around the perimeter announced:

  "This is an emergency. This is an emergency. Evacuate all personnel immediately." The message repeated, louder than the sirens, until Rogers felt he might jump out of his skin. Around the site, car horns began to honk. Headlights flashed like the eyes of wary animals. Gilmonn held his hands to his ears. "Are we going ahead, or are we going to stand here and waffle?"

  Rogers nodded. "We're on."

  The lieutenant reached into the bag and pulled out a white jacket with a crotch strap. "Residual radiation protection, sir. Put this on now," he shouted over the din. He pulled out another and donned it himself, connecting the crotch flap to a loop on the back.

  The jacket weighed perhaps twenty pounds and seemed reasonably flexible, with overlapping sheets of leaded plastic sewn into its fabric.

  "You do me, and I'll do you." Rogers helped secure the straps and the lieutenant reciprocated.

  "Let's go, sir," the lieutenant said. Together, they lifted the weapon from its cradle in the car's trunk onto a hand truck. It weighed at least sixty-five pounds, perhaps seventy. "No need to be delicate, sir. It's made to withstand missile launch and ocean impact. We'd have to take a sledgehammer to it to do any damage."

  Rogers opened the inner perimeter gate and they pulled the hand truck a
hundred yards across the pounded sand and gravel trail to the entry hole.

  The lieutenant lifted the cylinder from its cradle by himself and lowered it on one end into the sand. The sirens continued to scream and the loudspeakers repeated the evacuation order, over and over, painfully monotonous.

  The first suffusion of dawn outlined the Greenwater Range in ghostly purple. Bouncing headlight beams still cut through the air around the site, but fewer in number now.

  "Looks like they're moving out," Gilmonn said.

  "Time for the camp to evacuate," Rogers said. "I'll need the lieutenant and one other, that's it."

  "I'm staying until you're in the tunnel and the arrow's up there with you," Gilmonn said.

  "We call it a 'monkey' now, sir, not an arrow," the lieutenant corrected him.

  "Whatever the hell," Gilmonn said.

  "Monkey on my back," Rogers said.

  The lieutenant pulled an inch-thick Teflon sheet from the weapon's accessory kit and wrapped it tightly around the cylinder, belting it with three straps and a clasp. The top and bottom of the sheet projected over the ends of the cylinder, blunting any sharp edges that might hang up inside the tunnel. He then attached two ropes to sunken eyebolts in the upper end, on each side of the cover plate. "All set, sir?"

  Rogers nodded. "Let's go."

  The lieutenant removed the cover plate and set the timer. "You have forty minutes, sir, from the time I flip this switch. We'll stay down here for fifteen minutes. You'll have your Jeep to drive clear after we leave."

  "Understood," Rogers said.

  He climbed into the hole, paying out the ropes from loops in his belt, and scrambled to the first bend, then braced himself there. "Bring it up," he said. The lieutenant flipped the switch, closed the plate, and hefted the weapon up into the hole. Rogers pulled it up the length of the first segment of the tube, hand over hand on the rope.

  He then called down to the lieutenant and Gilmonn. "Around the first bend," he said. "I'm climbing the vertical shaft."

  "Thirty-five minutes, Colonel," the lieutenant replied.