The Forge of God (47 page)

"It's a softening up?" Schwartz asked.

Lehrman shrugged. "Who can understand the design, or what this means? We're not dead yet, so it's a preliminary; that's all anybody knows. Seismic stations all over are reporting heavy anomalistic fault behavior."

"I don't think the bullets have collided yet," Crockerman said. "Irwin's hit the nail on the head. It's a softening up."

Lehrman sat down at the large diamond-shaped table and held out his hands: your guess is as good as mine.

"I think we have maybe an hour, maybe less," the President said. "There's nothing we can do. Nothing we could have ever done."

Schwartz studied the Diamond Apple displays with a slight squint. They still conveyed no convincing reality. They were attractive abstractions. What did Hawaii look like now? What would San Francisco look like in a few minutes? Or New York?

"I'm sorry not everybody is here," Crockerman said. "I'd like to thank them."

"We're not evacuating… again?" Schwartz asked automatically.

Lehrman gave him a sharp, ironic look. "We don't have a lunar settlement, Irwin. The President, when he was a senator, was instrumental in getting those funds cut in 1990."

"My mistake," Crockerman said, his tone almost bantering. At that moment, had Schwartz had a pistol, he would have killed the man; his anger was a helpless, undirected passion that could just as easily leave him in tears as draw him into violence. The displays conveyed no reality; Crockerman, however, conveyed it all.

"We really are children," Schwartz said after the flush had gone out of his face and his hands had stopped trembling. "We never had a chance."

Crockerman looked around as the floor shook beneath their feet. "I'm almost anxious for the end," he said. "I hurt so bad inside."

The shaking became more violent.

The First Lady held the doorframe and then leaned on the table. Schwartz reached out to help her to a chair. Secret Service agents entered the room, struggling to stay on their feet, catching hold of the table edge. After Schwartz had seated the First Lady, he sat down again himself and gripped the wooden arms of the chair. The shaking was not dying away; it was getting worse.

"How long will it take, do you think?" Crockerman asked nobody in particular.

"Mr. President, we should get you out of the building and onto the grounds," said the agent who had made the most progress into the situation room; His voice quavered. He was terrified. "Everybody else, too."

"Don't be ridiculous," Crockerman said. "If the roof fell on me now, it would be a goddamn blessing. Right, Irwin?" His smile was bright, but there were tears in his eyes.

The display on the screen went out, and the lights in the room dimmed shortly after, to return with less conviction.

Schwartz stood. Time once again to be an example. "I think we should let these men do their job, Mr. President." He had a sudden heavy sensation in his stomach, as if he were in a fast-rising elevator. Crockerman stumbled and an agent caught him. The rising sensation continued, seemingly forever, and then stopped with a suddenness that lifted the White House a fraction of an inch from its foundations. The framework of steel beams that had been built into the White House shell in the late forties and early fifties squealed and groaned, but held. Plaster fell in clouds and patches from the ceiling and a rich wood panel split with a loud report.

Schwartz heard the President calling his name. From where he lay on the floor—somehow he had rolled under the table—he tried to answer, but all the breath had been knocked out of him. Gasping, blinking, wiping plaster dust from his eyes, he listened to a hideous creaking and splitting noise overhead. He heard enormous thuds outside-stone facing coming loose, he guessed, or columns toppling. He was forcibly reminded of so many movies about the demise of ancient cities by earthquake or volcano, huge blocks of marble tumbling onto crowds of hapless citizens.

Not the White House… Surely not that.

"Irwin, Otto…" The President again. A pair of legs walking with short jerks near the table.

"Under here, sir," Schwartz said. He saw a brief portrait of his wife in his mind, her features indistinct, as if he looked at an old, badly focused picture. She smiled. Then he saw their daughter, married and living in South Carolina… if the ocean had spared her.

Again the rising. He was pressed to the floor. It was brief, only a second or two, but he knew it was enough. When it stopped, he waited for the collapse of the upper floors, eyes scrunched tight.
Jesus, is the entire eastern seaboard going up?
The wait and the silence seemed interminable. Schwartz could not decide whether to open his eyes again… or to wait out the long seconds,
feeling
the sway of the building above.

He turned his head to one side and opened his eyes.

The President had fallen and lay faceup beside the table, ghost-white with dust. His eyes were open but not aware.

The White House regained its voice and screamed like a thing alive.

The massive legs of the table buckled and exploded in splinters. They could not withstand the weight of tons of cement and steel and stone.

Quaint, Edward thought; quaint and touching and he wished he could muster up the emotion to join them; a group of twenty or more had gathered by now in a circle a hundred yards behind the Granite Point, singing hymns and more folk songs. Betsy clung to him on the asphalt path. Fresh tremors had subsided, but the air itself seemed to be grumbling, complaining.

Ironically, having climbed the trail to have a good vantage, they now stood well back from the rim. A foot-wide crack had appeared in the terrace stonework. From where they stood, they could see only the upper third of the opposite wall of the valley.

"You're a geologist," Betsy said, massaging his neck with one hand, something he had not asked her to do, but which felt good. "Do you know what's going on?"

"No," he said.

"It's not just an earthquake, though?"

"I don't think so."

"So it's beginning now. We just got up here."

He nodded and swallowed back a lump of fear. Now that it had come, he was near panic. He felt trapped, claustrophobic, with only all of the Earth and sky to move in—not even that, lacking wings. He felt squeezed between steel plates of gravity and his own puny weakness. His body was forcibly reminding him that fear was difficult to control, and presence of mind in the face of death was rare.

"God," Betsy said, placing her cheek against his, looking toward the Point. She was shaking, too. "I thought at least we'd have time to talk about it, sit around a campfire…"

Edward held her more tightly. He imagined her as a wife, and then thought of Stella, marveling at the fickleness of his fantasies; he was grasping for many lives, now that his own seemed so short. Over his fear he thought of long years together with both of them.

The tremors had almost passed.

The hymn singers continued searching for a common key, hopelessly lost. Minelli and Inez came from the trees and climbed the hill between the close switchbacks of the asphalt path. Minelli whooped out loud and ran his hand through his hair. "Jesus, isn't adrenaline great?"

"He's crazy," Inez said, breathing hard, her face pale. "Maybe not the craziest I've met, but close."

"Does it feel warmer to you?" Betsy asked.

Edward considered that possibility. Would heat transmit itself before a shock wave? No. If the bullets were colliding, or had collided only a short time ago, deep in the center of the Earth, the expanding and irresistible plasma of their mutual destruction would crack the Earth wide before heat could ever reach the surface.

"I don't think it's warmer because of… the end," Edward said. He had never felt his mind racing so rapidly over so many subjects. He wanted to see what was happening in the valley.

"Shall we?" he asked, pointing to the terraces and the still-intact rim.

"What else did we come here for?" Minelli asked, laughing and shaking his head like a wet dog. Sweat flew from his hair. He whooped again and took Inez's plump hand, dragging her across the gravel to the terraces.

"Minelli," she protested, looking back at them for help. Edward glanced at Betsy, and she nodded once, face flushed.

"I am so
terrified
" she whispered. "It's like being high." They walked together toward the edge. "I pity all those folks who stayed home. I really do."

The two couples stood alone on the terrace, looking down into the valley. Not much had changed; there was no visible damage, not at first glance, anyway. Then Minelli pointed to a thick column of smoke. "Look."

The Ahwanee was on fire. Nearly the entire hotel was ablaze.

"I love that old place," Betsy said. Inez moaned and wrung her hands.

"How much longer, do you think?" Inez asked, her expression that of someone about to sneeze, or shriek. She did neither.

"It seems real close," he said. Betsy raised her arms with a moan and he hugged her tightly, almost squeezing the breath out of her.

"Hold me, dammit," Inez demanded. Minelli blinked at her, then followed Edward's example.

Ten minutes after the meeting, Arthur and Clara had assigned the members of their group to the new quarters along the curved hallway. Two of the younger children were crying inconsolably and all were emotionally exhausted; Arthur stood in the confines of the cabin he and Francine and Marty would share, pondering the common sanitation facilities accessible through the first doorway on the right of the sealed hatch where they had met with the robot. A few had already used the lavatory; some had gone in there to be sick. Clara was one of the latter. She came to the Gordons' cabin and leaned against the edge of the hatch, rubbing her eyes with one hand. "All settled, I think," she said. "What's next?"

Francine had said little for the entire time they had been aboard. She sat on the bed, clutching her box of disks and papers with one hand. Marty held her other hand firmly. She stared at Clara with a vacancy that worried Arthur.

Choose four witnesses.
The restatement of the command in their minds was polite but unequivocal.
It is the Law.

Clara jerked and stood upright. "You heard that?" she asked.

He nodded. Francine turned to look at Arthur. "They want us to choose four witnesses," he told her.

"Witnesses to what?" Her voice was small, distant.

"The end," he said.

"Not the children," Francine said firmly. Arthur briefly conferred with the voice.
Two must be younger, to pass on the memories.

"They want two children," he said. Francine clenched her fists.

"I don't want Martin to experience that," she said. "It's bad enough if we have to."

"They want kids for what?" Marty asked, looking between them, wide-eyed.

"It's the Law. Their law," Arthur said. "They need some of us to watch the Earth when it's destroyed, and two of them must be kids."

Marty thought that over for a moment. "All the other kids are younger than me," he said, "except one. That girl. I don't know her name."

Francine turned Marty to face her and gripped his arms. "Do you know what's going to happen?" she asked.

"The Earth is going to blow up," Marty said. "They want us to see it so we know what it's like."

"Do you know who
they
are?" Francine asked.

"The people that talk to Dad," Marty said.

"He understands pretty well," Arthur said.

"I'll say," Clara agreed.

Francine gave her an angry glance, then focused again on Marty. "Do you want to see?" she asked.

Marty shook his head no. "It would give me nightmares," he said.

"Then it's decided," Francine said. "He—"

"But Mom, if I don't see, I won't know."

"Know what?"

"How mad I'm supposed to be."

Francine searched her son's face slowly, and then let him go, wrapping her arms around herself. "Only four?" she asked softly.

"At least four," he said. "All who wish to see."

"Marty," Francine said, "we'll share nightmares, okay?"

"Okay."

"You're a very brave boy," Clara said.

"Are you going to watch?" Arthur asked Francine.

She nodded slowly. "If you and Marty watch, I can't chicken out, can I?"

How much longer
? he asked.

There will be a gathering in the common viewing cabin in an hour and ten minutes.

He sat on the narrow lower bed beside Francine and Marty. "We'll be leaving the Earth soon," he said. "In a few minutes, probably."

"Can we feel it when we take off, Dad?" Marty asked.

"No," he said. "We won't feel it."

Grant had followed the Gordons' station wagon to the bay, and waited a hundred yards away, engine idling, as they parked and walked to the pier. Then he had parked his BMW beside the wagon, slung a pair of binoculars around his neck, and followed at a discreet distance, feeling like a fool, asking himself—as Danielle had asked when he left—why he didn't simply confront them and demand answers.

He knew he wouldn't do that. First, he could not really believe that Arthur would be part of a government escape into space. Grant couldn't believe such an escape was contemplated, or even possible. Nobody could travel far enough away to survive the Earth's destruction—not if such destruction was as spectacular as what he had seen in the movies. And even if they could—traveling out beyond the moon, for example—he didn't think they would be able to live very long in space.

But he was curious. He believed as firmly as Danielle that the Gordons were up to something. In the curious kind of floating emotional state he now experienced, tracking the Gordons offered a possibility for diversion.

He was otherwise powerless. He could not save his family. He felt what billions of others—all who knew and believed—were feeling now, a deep terror surmounted by helplessness, resulting in a dopey calmness, not unlike what his grandparents must have felt as they were led to the death pits in Auschwitz.