The Library at Mount Char (43 page)

Eight-year-old Carolyn giggled. “You talk funny!”

“Carolyn!” said her dad.

“No, it's OK,” said Adam Black. He squatted down to be at eye level with her. She remembered how the giggles drained out of her when she saw his eyes. “No…” she said, and buried her face in her dad's leg.

“Don't be scared,” Adam Black said, and reached out to brush away her hair. “You're right. Sometimes I
do
talk funny, but most people don't notice. You've got a good ear.”

“Thank you.” She could tell from his tone that he meant to be comforting, but she was not comforted. Not in the least.

“How
should
I say it, honey?”

Carolyn peeked out from her dad's leg. “ ‘Recipe.' ”

“Reshipeee.”

Despite herself, she giggled. “No, ‘recipe'!”

The giggle seemed to satisfy him. His face erupted again into that soft smile. “Hey, you guys want to stay and chat with me for a minute? I don't think they're quite set up down in the park. I've got beer in the cooler, and soft drinks for your daughter.”

Her dad looked down at the park, where some men were setting up a volleyball net.

“Can I have one, Dad?” She liked Sprite, but usually she wasn't allowed.

Dad considered. “Yeah, sure. Why not? Grab me a beer, too.”

Carolyn had brought her book with her. She sat down on a metal lawn chair to read while the grown-ups talked.

“So, can I ask where you got that grill?” Dad asked. “Never seen anything quite like it.”

“You know, I honestly don't remember. Somewhere in the Middle East, probably. I used to kick around there when I was a young buck.”

“Oh, yeah? Doing what?”

“Soldiering, mostly. Seems like I walked up and down just about every hill in Asia at one time or another.”

“Really? Wow. I bet you must have some stories.”

“A few.” They waited, but he didn't volunteer any of them.

“Is that what you do now? We don't see much of you around here.”

He laughed. “No, no. Not for years. Soldiering is a young man's game. Actually, I'm in the process of retiring,” the old man said.

“Really? You look kind of young for that.”

“Nice of you to say. I'm older than I look, though.”

“Retiring from what, if you don't mind my asking?”

“Don't mind a bit. I'm head of a small company. Well, small but influential. We're in the book business, kind of a family thing.”

“Cool. How do you like it?”

“It's interesting work. It can be kind of cutthroat, though. A lot of competition. My successor is liable to have a rough go of it, in the first few years anyway.”

“Oh, you've got a guy all picked out?”

“I do. Actually, it's a girl. It took me a long while to find the right person. Now it's just a question of getting her trained.” Carolyn didn't remember noticing at the time, didn't remember
any
of this, but Adam Black was looking directly at her as he spoke. Something about the look in his eyes stirred her mom's maternal instincts and she put her arm around Carolyn's shoulder. It would be the last time they ever touched.

Now, today, Carolyn sat alone in the heart of the Library with her jaw hanging open.
Successor? Picked out? Surely he can't mean…

“Who's the lucky
gal
?” Carolyn's mom asked, ribbing her husband. Feminist issues were a source of mild friction in the marriage.

“Her name's Carolyn. She's a niece of mine—well, sort of. She's a pretty distant relation, actually. I see a lot of me in her, though.”

“Oh?” her father said. “Weird coincidence. That's our daughter's name.”

“You don't say.” Adam Black rooted around in the grill with a spatula, flipping ribs.

Her father took a swig of his beer. “So what's the training process involve, exactly?”

“Actually, if you don't mind, I'd rather not get into too much detail. Trade secret and all that.”

“Oh? Yeah. Sure, no problem, I understand.” He obviously didn't.

“I can say, though, that the toughest part about it is going to be getting through it with her heart intact.” Seeing the look on Mom's face, he added, “Figuratively, I mean.”

“Tough business?”

“Oh yeah. Some of the competition are real monsters.”

Her dad interrupted. “Really? What exactly are—”

Adam Black let the interruption slide, but a little iron crept into his voice. “I'm not worried about that, though. She's like me. She'll do whatever's necessary—after I get her attention.” He smiled, flipped a burger. His eyes blazed.

Mom gave a nervous smile. Dad, oblivious, sipped at his beer.

“The tricky part will come later—after she's won. When I was young, the war was everything to me.” Father's gaze burned into her. “In the service of my will, I emptied myself. It was long and long before I understood what I had lost, and by then it was gone forever.” He shrugged. “Perhaps she will be wiser.” In the ancient, dusty recesses of her memory, he tipped her a wink. Now, today, Carolyn felt like fainting.

Her mom's eyes narrowed. She hadn't seen the wink, but this last exchange had pushed some mothery needle into the red. “Well,” she said, “I guess we better get going.”

“But I—” her dad said.

“We don't want to take up too much of Mr. Black's time, dear.” Her tone had a distinct chill to it.

“Oh. Um, right.” He smiled at Adam Black. “Well, thanks for the beer. You going to come down and join us? Maybe play some volleyball?”

Adam Black smiled. “I'll be along in just a minute. I want to get a good char on this pork first.”

Carolyn's parents exchanged a look. “OK,” said her dad. “See you later.” He took Carolyn by the hand and they set off down the hill.

I
n those days Garrison Oaks had a common area, a sort of park, in the spot that was the lake today. The houses of the neighborhood ringed it, which gave everyone the illusion of a three-acre backyard. The park was full of people, adults sitting on the picnic benches drinking Coke or Sprite out of green glass bottles or smoking Tareytons. Children swarmed over the swing set and the wooden jungle gym. Adam Black's house stood on the highest hill in the neighborhood, so from there Carolyn, holding her dad's hand, had to pick her way down a moderately steep slope to get to the park. Her father's grip was gentle but not un-tight. At least once he saved her from a fall. When they reached the bottom of the hill she shook his hand off for the last time.

“Look, Dad, there's Steve!” She waved. “Hi, Steve!” Steve was a bit older than her.
He's eleven
, she thought,
or maybe twelve
. He was playing tag with a herd of other kids.

There was David, reaching down to help a younger child who had fallen in the grass. “You OK, Mike?” David said. His voice was kind. At the sound of it the younger boy, who had seemed on the verge of tears, got to his feet and smiled. David smiled back, then tagged him and said, “You're it!” They ran off together, laughing.

Margaret was there as well, she saw. She seemed a bit older than the rest—nine or ten, perhaps? She was jumping her way across a hopscotch grid laid out on the basketball court in yellow chalk. Her pigtails flopped in the sunshine as she hopped. Her skin glowed from the exertion, pink and alive.

“Hi, Carolyn!” said Steve.

Something inside her jumped at the sound of his voice. In those days Steve lived across the street from her.
Our parents were friends. Sometimes we all ate dinner together. I thought he was “cute.”
Once, she remembered, she had taken a crayon and written his name and hers together on pink construction paper and then encased the two names with a heart. She never told anyone this.

Her father looked down at her, bemused and perhaps just a tad apprehensive. He waved at Steve. “Hi.”

Steve waved back. “Hi, Mr. Sopaski!”

“Daddy, can I go play with Steve?”

“Oh, honey, Steve doesn't want—”

“It's fine, sir,” Steve said, and Carolyn's eight-year-old heart soared. “Wanna go over to Scabby Flats and shoot a few?”

“Sure!” Carolyn said.

“Go where?” said her dad.

“The basketball court,” she said. “That's just what we call it.” She and Steve had made-up names for a bunch of stuff in the neighborhood. The basketball court, paved with a mixture of black asphalt and rough gravel, was Scabby Flats. In her room there was a map, hand-drawn in crayon, with these and other names. The woods at the end of the road were Missing Muttland. The stream in the woods was Cat Splash Creek after an amusing accident. And so on.

“Oh,” her dad said. “Right. Well…you guys have fun.”

They walked together over to the basketball court. Steve bounced a ball as they walked.

“How are you?” she asked, a little apprehensively. She hadn't seen him in months. The day after school ended, Steve's dad had been in a car accident. Mr. Hodgson was in the hospital for a week, and then he died. Steve and his mom had spent the summer with his grandparents in Wisconsin.

“I'm OK. It's good to be back.” He bounced the ball on the asphalt. “Good old Scabby Flats.”

He didn't sound OK. Carolyn didn't blame him. Having her dad die was about the worst thing she could imagine. When she tried to picture something similar happening to her it felt like a bottomless hole opened up in her mind. “Really?”

“Yeah. I mean, it sucks. But you adjust.”

She looked up at him, awed. To Carolyn, eight years old, that one sentence seemed to contain all that might ever be known of courage. “You do?”

He nodded.

“How?”

“You just do. You can adjust to anything if you don't give up.” He smiled wanly. “That's what my dad used to say, anyway.”

“Oh.”

“Hey, do you mind if we talk about something else?”

“Sure.” She tried to think of something to say, but anything that might have come was swallowed by the bottomless hole. After a long pause, she said, “Like what?” in a small voice.

Steve chuckled. “What have you been reading?”

Steve was the only kid in the neighborhood who was as bookish as she was. They didn't read much of the same stuff—he liked spaceships and superheroes; she was more into animal stories and Beverly Cleary—but they both enjoyed talking about what they'd read, and every so often there was some overlap.
“A Wrinkle in Time,”
she said. “Have you read it?”

“Yeah! It was really good. Did you know there's another one after that?”

“What, like with the same characters?”

“Pretty much, yeah. I'll bring it if you want.”

“Thanks!”

“Sure,” he said, reaching into his pocket. “But meantime, I brought you this one. I think you'll like it.”

She examined the cover. “
Black Beauty
. It's the one about the horse, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Is it sad? Margaret said it was sad.”

“A little. Well, sort of. At the end—”

“Don't tell me!”

“Sorry.” Steve raised the ball to shoot, then froze and cocked his head, listening. “Do you hear that?”

“Hear what? I don't—” She broke off then, because she
did
hear it, a whistling in the sky that grew louder, an approaching sound. She looked up and saw a long, thin, arch-shaped contrail. When she first saw it, it was very high in the sky, but it drew closer as she watched, then closer still.

“I think it's coming towards us,” Steve said.

She saw that he was right, and for some reason that made her afraid. She reached out to take his hand and—

…everything…

…stopped…

I have wrought the Crafte of alshaq shabboleth
, Carolyn thought now,
which maketh the slow things swifte
. To the children it seemed as if the world had frozen in place. She saw her dad talking to Mr. Craig from down the street. Dad's mouth was frozen open, midsentence. Mr. Craig was blowing out a puff of cigarette smoke. It hung in the air, motionless.

The leading point of the contrail was frozen above them. It hovered motionless about a hundred feet over their heads. Well, not quite motionless. As she watched, it moved down an inch or so, then another.

Her young eyes saw what was coming for them. She thought at first it was a space capsule, like the kind she had seen on TV. But as she examined it a bit closer, she realized that wasn't right. It was too small, for one thing, too small to hold a man. And there were no windows. But it was shaped a bit like a space capsule, a plain cone of metal. It had an American flag and some writing on the side. USAF-11807-A1. Below that, hand-painted in bright red, was a smiley face and the words “Hi ‘Adam'!”

She remembered thinking,
They sent it for him. It's for Adam Black. But what
is
it?
She knew now. David explained it to her some years later. “It's called a Pershing missile,” he said. “It's a weapon. It holds a lot of things called ‘kilotons.' Mostly it's for blowing up cities. The Americans thought it might be strong enough to kill Father.”

At the time, though, Carolyn had no idea what she was looking at—fireworks, perhaps?—but, whatever sort of show this was, she thought it was rather pretty. She remembered how a small crack had appeared in the thing hovering over their heads, how it glowed inside as if it were an egg about to hatch something magical.

She looked at Steve. He was saying something, or his lips were moving at any rate, but she could hear nothing.
We were too fast
, she realized now.
The alshaq shabboleth made us too fast for sound
.

The crack grew as she watched. The light inside spilled out like the sunrise breaking over the mountains. It ate away the metal on which the letters USA were written.