Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (36 page)

           
“Professor! My God, look at this!”

           
Dr. Marlon Philpott, more rumpled
yet somehow more serious in his laboratory than he had been on
Nightline,
turned reluctantly from the
holding ring, in which, in the heavy swirl of liquid deuterium,
something
had been happening. Or about
to happen. He squinted testily at Chang, jittering up and down over there in
the doorway to the lounge: “What is it?”

           
“Something’s happening on TV!”

           
Dr. Philpott was fairly sure he’d
made a fool of himself, or been made a fool of, which amounted to the same
thing, on that damn program, and so wasn’t feeling particularly cordial about
television at the moment. The damned Unitronic directors, with their worship of
the great god Public Relations... “Something is happening in the deuterium,” he
said sternly, “something infinitely more important than television.”

           
“No, no.” Chang was really very
disturbed, bobbing up and down over there as though he had to go to the
bathroom. “It’s something happening
here,
at the facility.”

           
The demonstrators, the strikers:
Philpott paid as little attention to
those
Luddites as possible. He was about to say so when

           
Cindy, attracted by Chang’s
agitation, left her place at the auxiliary control console and crossed the lab
toward the lounge, brushing blond hair out of her eyes in an unconscious
habitual gesture as she did so, saying, “Chang? What is it?”

           
“I’m just not sure,” the boy told
her, his smooth face expressing alarm by becoming even more round than usual
behind his round light-reflecting spectacles. “They say it’s been taken over.”
Cindy shook her head, blond hair falling into her eyes again.

           
“What’s been taken over?”

           
“Us! The facility!”

           
Philpott, wanting nothing but to
return his attention to what either was or was not beginning to come into
existence in the liquid deuterium, spread his hands and said, “Taken over? By
whom? I don’t seem to see them.”

           
“Not here, Professor. The control
section!”

           
“Oh, my gosh!” Cindy said, and ran
past Chang into the lounge.

           
The fact was, as Philpott well knew,
graduate student assistants are vital to any coherent program of accomplishment
in the scientific world. And graduate student assistants are the cheapest
possible source of slave labor in the otherwise civilized world today. So it
was necessary to let them have their heads every once in a while, to allow them
their own little pursuits, their own enthusiasms, their own overreactions.

           
Moving at a measured tread, a
condescending smile already on his lips, Philpott entered the lounge, turned to
the television set, and saw on its screen what was clearly an even more
turbulent scene than normal these days at the gates of Green Meadow. Vast
groups of people milled about in the background, like battle scenes in
Shakespeare films, while somebody’s daughter, dressed approximately like a
grown-up and looking very much like an older Cindy, jabbered into a microphone
in the foreground.

           
“Well,” Philpott said. “Reaching
some sort of critical mass out there, are they?”

           
“No, wait, Professor,” Chang said.
“Listen.”

           
Philpott didn’t want to listen, but
he did, and when he understood what he was hearing he even more emphatically
didn’t want to listen. Not to this:

           
“Who the terrorists are and what
their demands will be no one seems to know as yet. What is certain now is that
they do include at least one expert in the operation of this type of plant. At
their insistence, all plant personnel except the hostages have been evacuated,
leaving the terrorists in charge of the reactor controls. The reactor is
producing at its lowest possible rate. At this point, no electricity is being
furnished by Green Meadow III. The slack is being taken up by other electric
utilities in the Northeast and Canadian grids, and consumers are assured-“

           
“My God!” Philpott cried, at last
accepting the unbelievable. ‘They’re in
here!”

           
“Yes, Professor!”

           
Philpott looked quickly around. “But
they obviously don’t know about us yet. They must not ever know. Quick, lock
and bolt the doors. Switch over to our emergency generator, we don’t want them
to see us using power.”

           
Chang and Cindy exchanged a glance.
It was Cindy who dared the question: “Professor Philpott? You aren’t going to
go
on,
are you?”

           
“Of course I am. We’re in the middle
of— Shut down? Surrender to these mindless thugs?”

           
“But—” Chang floundered, almond eyes
frightened behind those false-looking glasses. “The experiment, the risk..”

           
‘There is no risk,” Philpott
snapped. “We’ve been autonomous in here anyway, absolutely self-contained. Do
you want to be a
hostage
to these
people, a bargaining chip in their absurd quarrel with authority, whatever that
might be? I don’t particularly relish the thought of being held for exchange of
some political prisoner in someplace like
Northern Ireland
or
Lebanon
.” So.
That
part of the reality of the situation hadn’t occurred to either of the young
people. They stared at him, both frightened, both at a loss. Fortunately, he
was not at a loss, nor was he frightened, though he was certainly concerned.
“We’re safer here than anywhere else,” he told them. “We’ll do nothing to
attract the attention of those cretins out there. We’ll stay within the lab
building, locked in, until the authorities straighten out this mess. And as
long as we’re in here, there is absolutely no reason not to go on with the
experiment. Agreed?”

           
They were both reluctant to answer,
but he needed that answer. He bore his sternest gaze first on Chang, the more
malleable of the two, and Chang fidgeted, awkward and uncomfortable, but unable
to argue back. “Yes, Professor,” he finally said, low and mumbled. “Agreed.”

           
“Cindy?”

           
Another hesitation, but her
agreement was inevitable: “I... suppose so. I suppose it’s the only thing we
can do.”

           
“Of course it is.” He turned his
glare toward the daughter on the TV screen, nattering on now about terrorist
“assurances.”
He muttered, as though at her, as though it were her
fault, “I will
not
be interrupted.”
Then he looked through the doorway toward the experiment in progress: “Now, of
all times.”

           
It was Frank’s pistol, fired once,
the bullet thudding into a wooden desk, that had focused the attention of the
eight staffers in the control section, but it was Grigor who turned them from
panic and disintegration into a cooperative and useful team. “I was at
Chernobyl
,” he told them, once Frank had assembled
them and they stood frightened and demoralized in a little cluster in the
middle of the main control room. “I was a fireman there.”

           
He told them what had happened to
him, and in their own technical jargon he told them why
Chernobyl
had gone wrong. “I don’t want to do to
anyone else what was done to me,” he told them, “I assure you of that. I am not
here to cause a meltdown. With your help, we will do no harm at all. We are
here only to force public awareness. That is all we want.”

           
“And the money,” Frank reminded him.
“For the cause.” Because they’d finally argued their way to an agreement that
Frank’s crass commercial motives would best be hidden within the social
concerns of the others. The five million dollars— Frank’s number, one he
refused to change—would be for their

           
Committee
for the Environment.
(The committee wasn’t real, but the damn money better
be.)

           
“Yes, the money,” Grigor agreed,
“but we’ll get to that.” And he went on explaining things, in his thin and
non-threatening voice, seated at a desk facing them all, as though at his ease,
successfully so far hiding from them the extreme weakness that had made it
almost impossible for him to walk this far from the bus. (Kwan and Pami were
also seated, necessarily, at the fringes of the group, leaving only Frank and
Maria Elena to stand and wave guns around. But they were enough.)

           
Once the staffers began to engage
Grigor in dialogue, Frank knew it was going to be all right. These weren’t
tough guys, no more than Frank himself. They were five women and three men, all
of them technicians, none of them death-defying jocks. Because they were
managers and supervisors, they were older than the workers who would normally
have been on duty here. They would do what they were told.

           
And what they were told to do was
simple. Do
not
shut down the reactor,
but close down its output to the lowest possible minimum. Then make the phone
call; the first phone call.

           
That was a job for the senior
technician, a woman of about sixty, who might have looked a lot like Maria
Elena in her younger days. She was the one who dialed the offices in the
administrative building and delivered the message Frank gave her:

           
The
control section has been taken over by armed and desperate individuals.

           
If
everyone obeys the orders of the invading group, no harm will come to anyone.

           
The
reactor is still being operated by the staff, but under the supervision of one
of the invaders, who is himself an expert in nuclear-fission plants.

           
Everyone
else within the Green Meadow perimeter fence is to evacuate; now.

           
Contact
will be made with officials outside the gate once everyone has cleared the
plant.

           
There
is no reason for general panic, and in fact the invaders insist that the
surrounding counties not be evacuated.

           
One
hint that the general population is being moved, to make possible an assault on
the plant, and the invaders will deliberately cause a meltdown, before the
people to be affected can get clear; the invaders are absolutely prepared to
die.

           
At
this point, their only demands are that the plant be cleared and that a
telephone contact be established outside the gate.

           
Once
that is accomplished, and once it is generally seen and recognized that the
invaders are both serious and responsible, a dialogue can begin.

           
N
ow
what? A nuclear plant? These five misfits have blundered themselves into a
nuclear plant? For what? How much damage could they do in
there)
I have come to save the world, only to find that truckling
toady is content to destroy
New York
State
? (It is true there are those who believe that
New York
—or at least the city of the same name, no
relation
—is
the world, but surely the
loathsome He is not among them.)

           
And what of
Susan Carrigan
? What is her part in the scheme, where does she fit,
what is her
job
? He’s driving me mad
with that grimalkin, that heifer, that fur-farm. The other five are terrorizing
the populace at Green Meadow, and
she’s
in the arms of that smoky simulacrum, playing at love,
hovel
That’s supposed to be
my
territory, you shameless bastard!

           
Shall I just kill her, and see what
happens? Slowly, with boils and pus and scum from every pore? Or immediately,
with a lightning stroke?

           
Come to me, my spies of the middle
air, my northern apples of the twilight ether, extenders of my brain, my
strength, my knowledge. What do they want? What do we know? What is his
advantage,
that bland mortician, that
poisoned milk, that sterile tool?

           
Stable matter?
Stable matter! Stab at Mater,
what a vicious idea! So is
that
what the experiment in that plant
is all about, the search for what the instable humans call
strange matter
(as though they weren’t sufficiently strange
themselves).

           
By Unholy Lucifer, he means to
stabilize the Earth!

           
No, no, no. I have to get in there.
I have to stop this, and at once.

           
And that’s a pearl, that was my
planet? No.