Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (35 page)

           
I have rationalized Andy Harbinger.
The close call at the Quad Cinema convinced me to take the time, to do this
part without shortcuts. So Andy is now a complete human being, with all the
usual and necessary parts, if in somewhat better condition that most.

           
And while I was at it, I gave him
everything else a human being such as Andy Harbinger would have; which is to
say, a job and a past. The sociology professorship—untenured assistant
professor, actually—at
Columbia
has become real. Andy’s co-members of the faculty have memories of him,
mosdy pleasant, extending back several years. His birth certificate will be
found in the Bureau of Vital Statistics in
Oak Park
,
Illinois
. His school records, employment records, even dental and health
records, are all in place. For the remainder of the time that life shall exist
on Earth, Andy Harbinger is for me now fully functional, fully operative; what
we might call my destination resort.

           
Oh, and yes, Dr. Delantero has
described the end rather accurately. He will turn out—though the knowledge
would not be likely to please him—to have been right about what will happen
when that drop of strange matter is spilled on the floor at Green Meadow III
Nuclear Power Plant. Or at least to be right when it counts.

           
After all, the universe is
His
creation. He can still tinker with
it if He wishes, so long as He doesn’t thereby change what is already known to
be true. (Well, He can, naturally, and sometimes does, but those instances are
called miracles. We’re not considering a miracle here. In fact, miracles have
been stricdy enjoined in this case; deniability, you know.)

           
But there is still much of the real
universe that is not known to human beings, not charted, not yet
proved
, and in that vast terra incognita
God can do as He wills, with no miracle involved. Human science, for instance,
has reached the point with strange matter where two theories have been
proposed, of more or less equal probability. The spilled drop of strange matter
might result in Dr. Philpott’s infinitesimal speck lying on the floor, quickly
dissipated. Equally, it might result in Dr. Delantero’s destruction of the
planet by conversion of its entire mass to strange matter.

           
To prove either of those theories
true would not, in Earth terms, constitute a miracle. Either theory could join
the web of the already known without in any way rupturing the fabric of
observed reality. Therefore, although I do not know which of those theories has
been correct up till now, I know for certain which of them is correct as of
this moment.

           
That is, after all, why I am here.
To transmute the entire Earth, and everything on it, to a ball bearing.

           
In the end, it was easier to steal
an empty school bus than try to board one of those carrying the Green Meadow
cadre. The buses didn’t pick up the supervisors and managers at home, to begin
with, but only brought them from a well-guarded parking lot four miles away.
Also, each bus carried its own armed private security guard. But the buses had
been leased from a transportation company that serviced some of the public and
most of the private schools in that part of
New York
State
, and
its
large parking lot, usually at least half full of buses not at that moment in
use, was barely guarded at all.

           
By this time, the demonstrations had
been going on for months and the strike for weeks, and everybody was into the
daily routine of it. There was a known role to be played by everyone who showed
up at the plant gates: demonstrators, strikers, working cadre, police, private
security force, media crews, and the large yellow buses saying things like
Istanfayle Consolidated School District
on their sides but always with the same company name
—Kelly Transit,
in green script within an oudined shamrock—on the
door. Most of the drivers were women, most of the guards riding shotgun wore
rent-a-copdark blue uniforms. Sometimes the buses were nearly empty when they
drove into the plant; they were never completely full.

*
 
*
 
*

           
“Are you sure you want to do this?”
Grigor asked.

           
“Of course I am,” Frank said. “It
was my idea.”

           
“But
I
have nothing to lose,” Grigor pointed out. “If you are caught—”

           
“That’s not gonna happen,” Frank
assured him. “Win or lose, they don’t lay a hand on me. That’s a little promise
I made myself.”

           
“But why? Why do you want to do it?”

           
“For money.” Frank grinned. “I’m a
simple guy, money’s enough for me. You do your speeches, you warn the world,
you get everybody’s attention, that’s all okay by me. But when they get their
atom factory back is after I get mine. Or you’ll
see
a joke.”

*
 
*
 
*

           
Frank was the pro, he was the one
who knew how to do all this stuff. He drove down into
New York
and rented a cop uniform from a theatrical
costume supplier. Up in
New Hampshire
, he bought three pistols in three pawnshops; two of them would probably
blow your hand off if you tried to fire them, but that was okay. They were just
for show. The third one would have to be able to shoot, but not
at
anybody; just to attract attention.

           
Back in Stockbridge, he rooted
through the worn old clothing Jack Auston had left behind and outfitted himself
with old grease-stained dark green chinos and a dark red plaid shirt. He bought
a clipboard and some standard inventory forms from a local stationer, skipped
shaving one day, and went down to Kelly Transit. Walking into the big parking
area, he strolled over to the dispatcher’s window, consulted his clipboard, and
said, “I’m here to pick up number 271.”

           
It was four-thirty in the afternoon,
and the dispatcher wasalmost at the end of his workday. More important, in half
an hour there would be a shift change at Green Meadow; if things went well, Kelly
Transit’s bus number 271 would be the first to arrive with the replacement
staff.

           
The dispatcher looked up from his
crossword puzzle, frowned at Frank, and said, “Who says?”

           
“Hyatt Garage,” Frank said, as
though he didn’t care what happened next, one way or the other.

           
“I’m not sure it’s in.”

           
It was; Frank had noted the number
of the bus he wanted as he’d walked across the yard. But he shrugged and said,
'That’s okay, pal, I’ll go back to the garage.” And turned away.

           
“Hold it, hold it, I didn’t say it
wasn’t
here.”

           
Frank stopped and looked at the guy.
“Make up your mind, okay? I wanna go home tonight.”

           
“We all do,” the dispatcher said,
and made a big show of looking at his dispatch sheets before he said, “Yeah,
it’s in. It’ll be around here somewhere. Hold on.”

           
Frank held on. The dispatcher
reached around behind himself, took a set of keys from the many rows of hooks
on the wall, finally got up from his stool, and came thumping around and out
the door. “Let’s see,” he said, peering at the tag with the keys, then
squinting out at his yard full of buses. “Should be right around here.”

           
Frank didn’t help, but still the
dispatcher took only three minutes to find the bus standing in front of him.
271
was painted on the rear emergency
door and like an eyebrow above the left side of the windshield.
Messenger of God Parish School
was
painted on both sides, in block black letters, beneath the rows of windows.

           
“Looks like that might be it,” the
dispatcher said.

           
“If you say so.”

           
The dispatcher had Frank sign a
form—“George Washington,” he scrawled—then gave him the keys, and Frank drove
on out of there.

*
 
*
 
*

           
Maria Elena said, “Then
this
will do it.” Do what? Accomplish
what? She didn’t care. She refused to even look at such questions. She had her
answer: “Then
this
will do it.”

           
She knew what she knew, and that was
enough. She knew that movement was life, and stillness was death, and she’d
been dead too long. She knew that a group with a goal was life and a solitary
person without a goal was death, and she’d been dead too long. She knew that a
singer was alive, and a person without a song (without, now, even the records
and memories of the songs that had been) was dead, and that she’d been dead too
long. She knew that death would come anyway, to all of them, some sooner than
others, and that it was wrong for her to be dead before she was dead. That
Frank made her feel alive, and Frank wanted to do this, and to
do
something was better, infinitely
better, than the nothing she had been doing for so long.

*
 
*
 
*

           
Maria Elena drove the bus, wearing a
chauffeur’s cap and lighdy tinted sunglasses, to help avoid accidental
identification from any of her former acquaintances among the demonstrators
milling as usual outside the gate. (As though there would be an “afterward” in which
such things would matter.) Frank stood in the first step of the stairwell with
the rent-a-cop uniform on, brazenly visible through the windshield. Kwan sat in
the second row on the right, in suit and white shirt and tie; about a quarter
of the scientific staff at Green Meadow was Oriental, so his presence added
verisimilitude. Grigor, two rows behind Kwan, in open-necked plaid shirt,
looked like the kind of unworldly blue-sky research guy who wouldn’t know a
necktie if he were hanged by one. Pami, seated on the other side, was got up in
black sweater, one string of pearls, and horn-rimmed glasses, her usually
explosive hair imprisoned in a neat bun; it was hard to say what image she
projected, exacdy, but it was at least respectable.

           
In any event, they didn’t have to
project any image at all for very long. The school buses never stopped when
they made the turn to go through the just-opened gate into the plant grounds;
it would make too tempting a target for the strikers and demonstrators. The
state troopers and private security guards simply saw what they expected to
see—a yellow school bus from Kelly Transit with a woman driver and a
blue-uniformed guard and some egghead types aboard—at the time they expected to
see it, and waved it on through.

           
The land within the perimeter fence
had been carefully recontoured, to present to the public eye along the public
road nothing but a gende upslope in a parklike setting of specimen trees and
well-pruned shrubs on a neady mowed lawn, with taller trees, most of them firs
of one kind or another, forming a dense year-round backdrop. The two-lane
asphalt road meandered up this easy incline, and when it crested the ridge and
started down the far side, the quintet in the bus could see what was really
here, in among the trees.

           
Straight ahead was the dome-topped
containment building, a featureless, windowless concrete box. Within the
concrete would be a steel inner shell, and within that the reactor, with its
core, control rods, steam generator, pressurizer, coolant pump, drain tank,
valves, and sump. This was the heart of the power plant, the dangerous living
essence of the thing, the part the quintet in the bus had to control if they
were going to accomplish anything; if they were, in fact, to avoid being
dragged right back off* the property again, in handcuffs.

           
To the left of the containment
building was its concrete baby brother, the auxiliary building, with its
emergency core-cooling system pump, sump pump, borated-water storage tank, and
radioactive-waste storage tank. A bit farther away on that side was the
administrative building, brick and stone, three stories high, oddly
matter-of-fact amid all the grotesqueries of nuclear architecture. It had the
air of a faculty office building on a midwestern college campus.

           
To the right of the containment
building was the turbine building, reassuringly like such structures from power
plants of an earlier day. It held the turbine, generator, condenser,
transformer, and all the other elements needed to turn the power emanating from
the containment building into usable electricity. In the shadow of the turbine
building was another smaller windowless concrete structure, containing Dr.
Philpotfs controversial laboratory. And behind them all, looming over them,
were the twin cooling towers, salt and pepper shakers, huge concave edifices of
pale gray concrete, like minimalist graven images of Baal.

           
But in front of the containment
building, attached to it or thrust from it, was the squat structure of the
control section. Here was where the servants of the machine fed it and cooled
it and guided it through its life of bridled violence. And here was where the
five people in the bus had to take command, or lose.

           
Maria Elena halted the bus in front
of the control section. She pushed the long lever that opened the door. Frank
looked back at his string, his four confederates. Jesus H. Christ, what a crew.
Nodding, he said, “What have we got to lose?” and stepped down from the bus.

           
It was as good a battle cry as any.