The Forge of God

  Rogers glanced up the shaft and held his rasping breath momentarily, trying to hear something. Surely the bogey wouldn't just let him haul the weapon in, without some resistance?

  He coiled the ropes and secured them to his belt, then suspended the monkey on a rope secured to a stake he hammered into the lava. He climbed the chimney as he had before, bracing back against one side and feet against the other, inching his way. That took an additional five minutes. Twelve minutes had passed and he was tiring, but not yet winded.

  Crouching in the low, almost horizontal tunnel, he jerked free the slipknot attaching the monkey to the stake, and began to haul it up the chimney as fast as he could. The cylinder weighed at least seventy pounds and the effort made his arm muscles knot.

  With the cylinder almost over the edge, he heard Gilmonn's voice echoing from below.

  "How are you doing, Colonel?"

  "Almost there," he answered. His arms were twin agonies. The radiation jacket chafed and was becoming a major irritation.

  "We're going now."

  "You have twenty-five minutes," the lieutenant added. "Gotcha."

  He switched on the electric torch, placed the warhead perpendicular to the tunnel, and rolled it ninety feet to the lip of the antechamber. Resting his arms for only a moment, he scrambled over the weapon, detached the ropes, then lifted it and waddled ducklike to deposit it in the center of the cylindrical space. He placed it on its end and opened the cover plate to see that the timer was still working. It was. He closed the cover plate.

  As he shined the torch at the larger chamber beyond, a grin flickered on his lips. The impassive gray faceting reflected the beam back in a myriad of dull gleams. "Here's thanks for you," he murmured.

  Twenty minutes. He could be down the tunnel and two miles away. He pulled a knife from his trouser pocket and sliced away the crotch strap on the jacket, then shrugged it off and flung it aside. He slid along the horizontal tunnel, ignoring the heat of the friction on his elbows and butt, and stopped long enough to take a deep breath and prepare to shinny down the chimney. Instinctively wary of heading into even the most familiar darkness, he played his torch beam down.

  Three yards below, the beam met a dead end.

  Rogers stared at the blockage in disbelief.

  It might have been there through all eternity, a flat plug as dark and featureless as the walls of the chimney itself.

  "Holy Christ," he said.

  Eighteen minutes.

  He was out of the horizontal tunnel and beside the bomb before he could even think. With amazing dexterity, he had the cover plate open and his finger on the cutoff switch. And then he froze, his face wet with sweat, salty drops stinging his eyes.

  No way out. Even if he stopped the timer on the monkey, he could not think of any way he could escape. A dozen unlikely possibilities lined themselves up in panicky parade. Perhaps another opening had been made elsewhere. Perhaps the bogey was coming alive, finally, even preparing to lift off.

  Perhaps a bargain was being struck.

  Deactivate the bomb, and we'll let you go.

  He backed away from the cylinder, his torch swinging back and forth on the floor nearby. Why did it close up? Has it been active all along, watching us, guessing everything we'd do?

  He propped himself against the curve of the antechamber near the horizontal tunnel. Sixteen minutes.

  In five or six minutes, it probably wouldn't matter whether he got out or not. He wouldn't be far enough away from the bogey to survive the hail of shrapnel. He could not conceive of any vessel, even the size of a small mountain, withstanding an internal blast of three kilo-tons.

  Rogers shook his head slowly, trying to concentrate, keep his mind from wandering. He could turn off the weapon and see if the way was opened again. Tit for tat. Scratch my back, Til scratch yours. Sorry, it was all a big misunderstanding.

  Kneeling beside the monkey, he again reached out for the switch.

  You know, this is the first time we've actually gotten a reaction.

  He thought that over, biting his lower lip, fingers tensing and relaxing over the switch.

  "Maybe you feel threatened," he said aloud. "Maybe for the first time we're getting through to you."

  Somehow, that wasn't convincing.

  He could not bring himself to flip the switch. He would not be able to reset the timer if he shut the weapon off; the lieutenant had not shown him how to do that.

  Fourteen minutes.

  The first blow for our side. I'm in charge.

  He sat down beside the monkey, reaching out to bring up the radiation jacket and drape it over his knees. Quandary.

  The silence within the chamber was absolute.

  "If you're listening, damn you, then talk to me," he said. "Tell me about yourself." He chuckled and that sound scared him worst of all, for it told him how close he really was to flipping the switch. He might see his wife and kid again if he flipped the switch; they might not have to receive and read the letter he had posted on his bulletin board. He could see Clare's face, mourning, and his chest hurt.

  William's face, sweet five-year-old deviltry pure.

  What would he think of himself if he deactivated?

  His career might as well be over. He would have fallen back in the face of enemy action and jeopardized their entire defense effort. Others had risked their careers, perhaps even their lives. Rogers did not, right now, want to contemplate how many people up the line had helped to procure this weapon, and how they felt at this moment: possible traitors, lawbreakers, risk-takers. Acting in defiance of the President. Mutineers, rebels.

  "God damn, you know us so well," he said to the darkness. "You've twisted us every which way, so casual, and now you think you've got us again." No reply.

  The silence of deep space. Eternities.

  Twelve minutes.

  How many times would his hand reach out, the body pleading, and how many times would something undefined pull it back?

  "I won't touch it. Come on out and deactivate it yourself. Maybe I won't put up a fight. Maybe we have something in common now!"

  He was hyperventilating. Clasping his hands before his mouth, he tried to rebreathe each gulp of air and slow his frantic lungs. Did judgment of one's courage, valor, require the appearance of nobility, or was an act alone sufficient? If by the end of the—he checked—eleven minutes, he was on the floor, a screaming, weeping madman capable only of keeping his finger away from the switch, would he still get to the Army Valhalla and toss off a few with all the dead heroes? Or would he be turned away, sent to the showers? Wash off that stink of fear, soldier.

  He didn't want Valhalla. He wanted Clare and William. He wanted to say good-bye in more words than he had put in the letter. In person.

  "Please God, let me be calm," he said hoarsely. He flattened his cupped hands into a gesture of prayer, pinching the tip of his nose between his index fingers, closing his eyes. It might have been easier if he had brought a pistol along. "Jesus Jesus Jesus Christ."

  Don't let me fuck this one up. Dear God keep my hand from that switch. Hit them back hit them back in the face. God I know you don't take sides but I'm a soldier God and this is what I have to do. Take care of them please Lord of all of us and help us save our home our world. Let this mean something please God.

  Nine minutes. He crawled down the horizontal tunnel again and saw the plug was still in place. To make sure it was solid, and not just an illusion, he jumped the three yards and landed his feet squarely on the flat grayness, flexing his knees to break the shock, slamming his elbows and lower arms against the chimney wall. Solid. He stomped on it several times. Nothing. Grimacing from his bruised heels, he braced himself and climbed out of the well, returning to the antechamber.

  He refused to allow himself to get closer than six feet from the monkey.

  Another way out.

  Not likely.

  Tit for tat.

  "What are you doing, learning more about us, setting up another exper
iment? Will I or won't I?" He stood on the edge of the antechamber, waving his torch beam across the semiglossy cathedral facets. "I can't make sense out of any of this. Why did you come here? Why can't you just go away, leave me with my wife and family?"

  That was enough talking, and a fine sentiment to end all the words he had ever spoken. No more words, he vowed. He broke the vow immediately. Breaking small vows helped him keep to the big one.

  "So why don't we talk? I'm not going to push that switch. I won't be around to tell anybody. Talk to me, show me what you're all about."

  Five minutes.

  "I hear you might have gone clear across this galaxy, gone from star to star. You're part of a planet-eating machine. That's what the newspapers are saying. Lots of people speculating. Aren't you curious what we'd think, what I'd think if I knew the truth? So talk to me." Give me something to hang on to. Some reason. "I'm not touching that switch! That bomb is going to go off."

  What if it didn't?

  What if he had to spend the next few weeks in here, dying of thirst, all for nothing, because the aliens had found some way to deactivate the weapon? What if they kept him there to starve just as punishment for trying?

  Three minutes.

  "I'm a dead man," he said, and realized the truth of that. He was a dead soldier already. There was no escape, no way out between his convictions and his duty. That thought calmed him considerably, and he sat on the lip of the antechamber, as he had sat once before, legs dangling out over the darkness. "So where's your light?" he asked. "Show me your little red light."

  He wouldn't even know when it had happened. He wouldn't hear anything, see anything.

  One minute.

  Frozen men become warm again

  And rabbits drug themselves in the wolfs jaws

  God gives us ways out

  I'm still thinking

  But it doesn't hurt now.

  I know how very small and inconsequential

  I

  From six miles away, Senator Gilmonn put on the smoky gray glasses the lieutenant gave to him and looked across the desert at the distant black hump that was the bogey. The cultists had scattered all across the desert floor, most out of the area, farther away than his small group, but some hiding behind piles of rock and other cinder cones. He had no idea how many of the diehards would survive.

  "He's not out of there," the lieutenant said, removing a pair of radio headphones. Observers in the mountains had not seen Rogers leave the bogey.

  "I wonder what happened?" Gilmonn asked. "Did he plant the . . . it?"

  Beams of brilliant red light shot up from the false cinder cone, and the desert floor was illuminated by a small sun. Huge black fragments twisted upward in silhouette against the fireball, disintegrating, the smaller fragments falling back in smoking arcs. The sound was a palpable wall, more solid and painful than loud, and a violent blast of dusty wind progressed visibly over the scrub and sand and rock. When it hit, they had a hard time staying on their feet.

  The dust cleared momentarily and they saw a tall, lean pillar of cloud rising, a fascinating ugly yellow-green, shot through with pastel pinks and purples and reds.

  The lieutenant was weeping. "My god, he didn't get out. Dear Jesus. What a blast! Like a goddamned pipe bomb."

  Senator Gilmonn, too stunned to react, decided he simply did not understand. The lieutenant understood, and his face was shiny with tears.

  Fragments of rock and glass and metal fell for ten miles around for the next ten minutes. At six miles, none of the fragments exceeded half an inch in diameter.

  They took refuge in the trucks and waited out the shower, and then drove away from the site to the decontamination center in Shoshone.

  49

  January 6

  The network between the Possessed was beginning to knit and connect. Arthur could feel its progress. This both excited and saddened him; the time he was spending with Francine and Marty might be coming to a close.

  If she could not accept what had happened, he would have to continue without them.

  Arthur did not know quite how she was taking his revelation, until, in the morning, he overheard her talking to Marty in the kitchen. He had just finished a thorough check of the family station wagon and was wiping his hands on a paper towel before passing through the swinging door.

  "Dad's going to have a lot of work to do soon," Francine said. Arthur paused behind the door, crumpled towel in one hand, his jaw working.

  "Can he stay with us?" Marty asked.

  He could not see them, but he could tell that Francine was by the sink, facing the center of the kitchen, where the boy stood. "What he's doing is important," she said, not answering Marty's question. She didn't know the answer.

  "He's not working for the President now. He told me."

  "Right," Francine said.

  "I wish he could stay home."

  "So do I."

  "Is he going someplace without us?"

  "I don't understand what you're asking, Marty."

  "Is he going to leave us here when the Earth blows up?"

  Arthur closed his eyes. The towel was a tight ball in his fist.

  "He's not leaving us anywhere. He's just . . . working."

  "Why work when everything's going to stop?"

  "Everybody has to work. We don't know everything's going to stop. Besides, he's working so that maybe it won't . . . stop." The catch in her voice made him raise his head to keep the tears from dropping down his cheek.

  "Mr. Perkins says there isn't much we can do."

  "Mr. Perkins should stick to arithmetic," Francine said sharply.

  "Is Dad ascared?"

  "Afraid."

  "Yeah, but is he?"

  "No more than I am," she said.

  "What can he do to stop things?"

  "Time for us to take you to school now. Where's your father?"

  "Mo-ommm! Can he?"

  "He's working with . . . some people. They think maybe they can do something."

  "I'll tell Mr. Perkins."

  "Don't tell Mr. Perkins anything, Marty. Please."

  Arthur stepped back a few feet to make a noise, came through the door, and dropped the thoroughly wadded towel into the trash bag under the sink. Marty stared at him with wide eyes, lips pressed together and sucked inward.

  "Everybody ready?"

  They nodded.

  "Have you been crying, Daddy?" Marty asked.

  Arthur said nothing, simply staring between them.

  "We're a team, aren't we, honey?" Francine said, hugging him and gesturing for Marty to come. The boy was not of an age to be enthusiastic about physical affection, but he came and Arthur knelt, one arm around Francine's waist, one arm wrapped around his son.

  "We sure are," he said.

  What he received, in the way of messages, was a peculiar shorthand unlike anything he had ever experienced before. The flow of information came as truncated visuals, bits of spoken conversations (sometimes delivered by separate and identifiable voices, sometimes monotoned or not auditory at all), and as often as not, simply as memories. He could not remember receiving the memories, but they were there, and they informed his planning and action.

  By that evening, as he lay in bed again beside his wife, as yet more rain pattered gently on the roof and windows, he knew that:

  Lehrman, McClennan, and Rotterjack had formed a delegation to inform the President of the destruction of the Furnace bogey. (Lehrman was one of the Possessed.)

  The President had listened to the information, delivered largely by Rotterjack, and had said nothing, simply shaking his head and gesturing for them to leave.

  He saw:

  A Soviet vacationer from Samarkand (Arthur did not know whether male or female) watching a conifer forest burn in the Zerafshan Mountains, sending thick white walls of smoke over the craggy alpine ridges.

  Large sections of New York (Queens and the Bronx), Chicago, and New Orleans on fire, with no sign of the blazes being brought un
der control. Much of Tokyo had been leveled by four major fires in the past week. Half of Beijing had been consumed by fire following an apparently natural earthquake.

  Lying awake, not knowing whether Francine was asleep or simply lying still, Arthur received these memories that were not his, and made decisions about his family's immediate future.

  Wherever he went, they would go with him; their unity was far more important than any home or security. In approximately a month, they would remove Marty from school and travel together.

  He would soon be called to Seattle. From there, he would work his way down the Pacific coast to San Francisco, performing his duties along the way. Apparently, most of his work would consist of gathering records of culture—documents, music, films, whatever was on a list that would be fed to him a section at a time. The decisions as to what should go on this list were being made by others on the network. And who does the choosing?

  He had again the nightmare thought:

  The Possessed are simply being used. There are no saviors. There are only plunderers, and they use us as slaves to loot the Earth of all they can carry away.

  How many were Possessed now?

  Ten thousand.

  A round number, growing larger each day.

  And room on the arks for as few as two thousand.

  If he was chosen, he decided, and Marty and Francine were not, he would stay. He would refuse. Won't I? And that was the worst nightmare thought of all. Arthur could not be sure that when the time came, given the opportunity denied to his wife and son, he would not leave them.

  I can stay. I will stay.

  "Are they talking to you?" Francine rolled over in the dark and faced him. He smiled at her and pulled her close.

  "No," he said. "Not right now." "Where are the spiders?"

  "In their box." He had taken a wooden box and given the spiders a home on the upper shelf of the office closet. Neither of the spiders had moved for days.

  "What kind of people do they need?"

  "I have no idea," Arthur answered.

  "Do you remember that night, when Grant and Danielle and Becky were yisiting, and Chris Riley called . . . To tell you about Europa?"

  He nodded.