Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (40 page)

           
It was. This time it was. The
radiation monitor showed definite gamma ray activity in the holding ring.
Somewhere within the swirling deuterium something now existed that hadn’t been
there before. It had been trying to be born for some time, for weeks, as
high-speed streams of heavy ions had been directed into collision courses
inside the holding ring. But to get a specific result out of these collisions
was as chancy and difficult as getting a specific result out of
any
collision; like smashing two Hondas
together and coming out with one Cadillac. Or like throwing a deck of cards
into the air and having them land, all faceup, in exact sequence by suit and
number.

           
Well, this time they had it. And
they would keep it. While Philpott and Cindy watched, barely breathing, Chang
operated the switching circuit that would transfer the—
thing
—from the holding ring to the storage botde. “Gamma radiation
has stopped in the holding ring,” Chang announced.

           
“Then it’s in the bottle.”

           
Chang looked stricken. ‘There’s no
gamma activity from the bottle!”

           
“Strange matter,” Philpott reminded
him, “only gives off radiation while it’s being fed, that’s one of the reasons
it’s so safe. Shoot deuterium across the center of the bottle.”

           
“A reaction!” Chang’s round face
beamed with delight.

           
“So it’s real,” Philpott said, as
though he
still
hadn’t really
believed it, not even one minute ago. His mouth was dry. Knowing that something
was real was in no way the same thing as experiencing it; the difference
between being out in a blizzard and looking at a snowscape on a Christmas card.

           
Held poised in the storage botde was
a piece of strange matter, known as an S-drop. The storage botde itself was a
simple glass vacuum jug on a table, containing one positive and one negative
hemispherical electrode, with the S-drop suspended by electric current between
them. Facing the bottle, a video camera was lined up with an ordinary bare
light bulb on the other side, the S-drop centered midway between the two. The
camera informed the computer at which Chang sat, and the computer directed the
power supply in maintaining the equilibrium of the S-drop. To make the S-drop
fall—to the terror of alarmists such as Dr. Delantero—all one had to do was
wave a hand in front of the video camera. Dr. Philpott would do it himself,
simply to prove Dr. Delantero wrong in the presence of these two graduate
student witnesses, but it would ruin the experiment, and who knew how long it
would be before he could produce another such beneficial collision?

           
Chang broke into the
self-satisfaction of Philpott’s thoughts, saying, “Professor, it’s getting
larger and a whole lot heavier.”

           
“What? Are you still feeding it?”

           
“Well, yes, sir.”

           
“Turn it off,” Philpott told him.
“Turn off the deuterium. If that drop gets much larger, I won’t be able to use
it. In fact, we won’t be able to
hold
it.”

           
Leaning close to the botde, vision
hampered by the guidance light to his left, Philpott peered into the center of
that enclosed airless space. Could he see it, actually see it? A speck? Or was
that wishful thinking?

*
 
*
 
*

           
Once Frank had convinced the
staffers he really would shoot the locks off the lab doors, no matter how much
that might startle Dr. Philpott or louse up his experiments, it seemed they had
keys to that building after all. “FU tell him you fought like hell,” he
promised, as he locked them into the dayroom.

           
Then it turned out Grigor couldn’t
walk, not more than a dozen steps. “I’m sorry, Frank,” he said, with a shamed
smile. “I think I hid this from the staff people—”

           
“You hid it from us all.”

           
“But I cannot possibly walk from
here to another building.” “No problem,” Frank said. “I’ll carry you.”

           
He did, and Maria Elena damn near
had to carry Pami, too. She was also a lot weaker than anybody had known,
staggering like a crackhead forced to walk in the middle of the high. Maria
Elena took her arm and helped her steer a straight line.

           
It was the first they’d been outside
since they’d taken over the plant, the first they’d
seen
the outside. It was a bright day, but not sunny, with very
high white clouds and low humidity, so that the whole world had a look of flat
clarity. The air wasn’t really cold, but there was still a touch of oncoming
winter in its crispness, a sharp sensation in the nose, too faint to be called
a smell. The deciduous trees and shrubs were far along in their seasonal color
display, so that the conifers looked an even darker green.

           
The concrete paths curving between
the buildings were clean and neat and empty, as though these four were the last
people on Earth, the slope-shouldered man carrying the feather-light bundle of
the second man, the sturdily built woman leading the skinny little black girl
who tottered and reeled as though about to fall at every step. The four made
their slow and uneven way along the paths toward the lab, moving as though to
the tinny sound of a toy piano that only they could hear.

           
The lab beyond the turbine building
was the smallest of the structures within the plant perimeter. A separate
windowless concrete-block rectangle two stories high, it had entrances on three
sides. The main front entrance, a pair of black metal doors that faced a neat
curving concrete path flanked by low tasteful plantings, had been dead-bolted
on the inside, in addition to the locks, so they couldn’t get in that way.

           
“Wait,” Frank told his group, and
walked around to the left, to the single door, also black metal, that opened
onto a path direcdy to the nearby turbine building. This too had been bolted on
the inside.

           
‘They’re beginning to piss me off,”
Frank informed the others, as he walked by on his way to the right side
entrance, another pair of black metal doors, this one on a higher level,
opening onto a loading dock over a blacktop driveway. A dozen black plastic
trash cans were lined up on the loading dock, along the wall beside the doors.
This was where deliveries were made and unwanted materials taken out, and the
construction of the loading dock and doors had made dead bolts impractical
here. Frank opened the two locks, and then the right-hand door. “More like it,”
he said, and went back to get the others.

*
 
*
 
*

           
Seated on a lab stool, leaning on a
metal table, Philpott was dictating, and Cindy was taking it down in her
private shorthand: “The S-drop is stable. It is not, as many of my fellow
scientists feared or hoped, or at least theorized, quasistable. It has not
decayed into a different form. The radiation monitor shows gamma ray activity
where we know the S-drop to be. It stops when we stop feeding the drop, and
begins again when the drop is fed. At this point, its mass is still below the
lowest limits of human vision, but when the current disturbance here at the
facility has come to an end, it is my intention to feed the drop further, until
it is large enough to be seen by the naked eye. To make it any larger than
that, however—”

           
“Professor.”

           
There was something so strange in
Chang’s voice that Philpott didn’t even think to protest at the interruption.
He looked over at the boy, and saw him staring toward the corridor door.
Pretending the fear he felt was only irritation, Philpott swiveled around on
the stool.

           
The
four people who stepped into the lab room were not at all what Philpott had
expected the invaders of the plant to be. Of the four, only the man waving the
pistol with such easy familiarity looked at all like PhilpotPs idea of a
terrorist. And only the rather exotic-looking woman had anything of the manner
of a fanatic. The other man and woman were both very obviously sick; horribly
sick, both of them.

           
Yes, of course. The man would be the
Russian, the spokesman for the group, the fireman who’d been poisoned at
Chernobyl
. Could the black woman also have been
there? That seemed so unlikely, and yet she was clearly as sick as the Russian.
In fact, there was such an air of hopelessness and dejection and desperation
about this entire quartet that Philpott’s first immediate reaction was pity.

           
A reaction that didn’t last.
Quasistable, it immediately decayed into irritation and outrage. “I suppose we
must obey your orders now,” he said, speaking to the man with the pistol, the
obvious leader. “But I would ask you please not to disturb anything in this
room. You can gain nothing by it, and I could lose a great deal.”

           
“I saw you on television,” the man
said.

           
Of course. If this is fame, Philpott
thought, I’d prefer to do without it. “I have been on television,” he agreed.

           
“You’re gonna be on television
again,” the man said, with a faint tough-guy smile that didn’t fool Philpott
for a second. “When you explain how you yourself, all by yourself, made the
breakthrough that got us all out of this place and let everybody get back to
normal.”

           
Philpott’s smile now was pitying;
but sardonically and deliberately so. “Is that what you think!” he said. “That
I
will make any difference?”

           
“Sure you will.” The man gestured
with the pistol. “They want their power plant back, but they don’t think we’re
serious about that. They’ll want
you
back even more, and you can talk. You can let them know we really are serious.”

           
Philpott had only a few seconds to
decide how to handle this. Go along with them, keep quiet, agree to their
fantasies? Or disabuse them of the notion they would ever under any
circumstances successfully complete whatever childish scheme they were acting
out here?

           
Marlon Philpott was, first and
foremost, a scientist, a rational man. His strong tendency would have been to
come down on the side of reality versus fantasy in any case, but this time
there was an even more cogent reason to be realistic from the outset with these
people: their fantasies were keeping a lot of men and women from getting on
with their normal lives. Including, now, himself.

           
If this unfortunate incident were to
end without bloodshed, it seemed to Philpott, it would only happen
after
the invaders had accepted the
hopelessness of their position. Therefore, he said, “I’m sorry, but you know,
it really won’t work. I’ll do what you say, of course—you have the gun—but
please, when it fails, don’t put the blame on me.”

           
There was such calm conviction in
his words that they had no choice but to hear them, to at least think about
what he was saying. The Russian, who had crossed to sit on the nearest stool
while Philpott was speaking, and who leaned his back now wearily—weakly—against
the wall, said, “Why must we fail?”

           
He sounds reasonable, Philpott
thought, surprised and saddened by the realization. With unexpected empathy, he
suddenly saw the route—like tracking a molecule through its invisible journey—
whereby an ordinary small-town fireman could be transformed by something like
Chernobyl not merely into a person subsumed by his terminal illness but into
this
person, blundering into this
totally untenable position in one last doomed effort to make his life have
meant something.

           
Concentration on his specialty had
made Philpott narrow and cold in his dealings with other human beings, but he
was an intelligent man, and he was capable of sympathetic and emotional
responses to other individuals when his attention had been caught. At this
moment, his attention was caught.

           
Basmyonov
;
Philpott suddenly remembered, glad to have retained the name from the
television reports. “Mr. Basmyonov,” he said, with passable Russian inflection,
the accent on the penultimate syllable, “the world is a rather well organized
place, all in all. The damage you can do here is, at its worst, infinitesimal
in comparison with the planet, with all the hundreds of nuclear power plants
producing electricity around the globe, with the
thousands
of power plants of other types. In human terms, more
people are being
conceived
at this
moment than you and this plant could possibly kill. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to
make light of your situation, but what you people are doing is a very small
blip on the screen. They can afford to outwait you. Stall, talk, negotiate,
never come to any conclusion. And meantime, your food is running low. It
certainly is in here. We’ve eaten just about every bit of junk food we had in
the lounge.”

           
The thin black woman slid slowly
down the wall behind her and sat on the floor, head lolling, like a doll left
behind when the family moved. The other woman stooped as though to help her,
but there was nothing to be done, so she straightened again. The black woman’s
eyes were glazed, mouth slack. She seemed to take no interest in anything that
was being said.

           
The Russian said, “But why isn’t it
easier for them to negotiate?”

           
It was the exotic-looking woman who
answered before Philpott could, turning her attention away from the woman
seated on the floor. “
Authority
she
said, with such disgust it was as though the word were a dead mouse she had
found on her tongue. “Their authority must be unquestioned. They must be
permitted to do what
they
want with
their
world. In
Brazil
, they killed entire valleys, killed the
people, the trees, the waters, the ground, and no one was permitted to question
their right to do so.”

           
So that’s
your
bugbear, Philpott thought, and said, “I wouldn’t phrase it
quite the same way, but yes, that’s essentially it. All of this was thought
out, worked out, in the capitals of the world, years ago. I was on some of the
preliminary working panels myself, and I know the decisions, and I know the
thinking behind it. No nation can afford to give in even once to nuclear
blackmail. It can
never
be seen to be
a paying proposition, or it will proliferate, and the carnage would be
unbelievable.”

           
The man with the gun said,
scornfully, ‘They’d let us wreck this place?”

           
“If you’re that mindless, yes.
Listen, there are five billion human beings on this Earth. How many do you
think you could kill with this plant? I mean, if every circumstance went exactly
your way. Thirty thousand? This lady mentioned dead valleys in
Brazil
. How many more dead valleys could the human
race create, and still survive on the planet? Hundreds.” To the Russian, he
said, “Your nation has managed to destroy an entire sea, the Aral. A huge
inland salt sea, mismanaged to a brackish puddle the size of this room. The
salt floats in the air. Infants are dying there, because there’s salt in their
mothers’ milk and they can’t eat. A vast expanse of your own nation destroyed,
with everybody and everything on it, but the
Soviet Union
goes on. The planet goes on. The human race
goes on.”

           
The Russian said, “We’re too
unimportant, you mean.”

           
“All of us are,” Philpott agreed.
“You, I, the negotiators, all of us.”

           
The man with the gun said, “What if
we start shooting hostages?”

           
Philpott frowned at him. “I don’t
think you will,” he said, “but you might. If you do, communication will stop.
They would write us all off, and just wait.”

           
“For us to wreck the plant.” That
false scorn was there again, the man trying to convince himself of his potency;
but of course failing.

           
Philpott said, “I’ll tell you what I
think is happening out there right now. I believe the area in front of the gate
is full of fire trucks and other emergency equipment. I believe there are
hundreds, perhaps even more than a thousand, people in radiation suits, poised
and ready. The instant you give any indication that you are damaging the plant,
they will pour in here to contain that damage as best they can. As the weather
reports on television have been telling us, civilization has been getting a
lucky break and you an unlucky one-“

           
“Civilization,” the exotic woman
spat, and
her
scorn was no
affectation.

           
Philpott looked at her. “I can see
civilization has harmed you,” he said. “It does that. I can’t feel your pain,
of course, but I still believe human civilization is worth the price we pay.”

           
“The price you pay, or the price I
pay?”
Philpott spread his hands. “We all make that decision for
ourselves.” Turning back to the armed man, he said, “What I was saying about
the weather. There are neither high winds nor rain anywhere in the forecast,
and those are the two weather modes that would spread radiation and destruction
the farthest. Given the current weather, and given the emergency teams no doubt
waiting outside the perimeter, there’s a very good chance they can contain the
damage to this immediate area only.”

           
“You’ll
die,” the armed man pointed out, “along with the rest of us.”

           
Philpott sighed. “I know that. But
what am I to do? It frightens me, naturally, and it saddens me, just when I’ve-”
He glanced toward the storage bottle with its invisible S-drop. His triumph;
too late?

           
Suddenly he realized he shouldn’t
draw their attention to it. “That’s why I hope,” he said, more loudly, looking
at the armed man, “I can convince you to give this up. So far, I believe you’ve
harmed no one. Two of your partners here are in desperate need of
hospitalization, and—“
The thin black woman on the floor roused
herself, from what had seemed like a drugged sleep, to say, “No hospital help
me. Nothing help me. I’m dead meat.”

           
Philpott pushed forward,
concentrating on the armed man.

           
“If you’re willing, I could try to
negotiate your surrender, terms, lawyers—“

           
The armed man pointed the gun at
Philpott, but not as a threat. It was as though he were pointing a finger. He
said, “I’m not going back. I already promised myself that.”

           
The exotic woman wrapped her arms
around herself. She looked cold, and utterly bitter. “It’s no good,” she said.
“Nothing ever works. They always win. You can’t fight them. It’s
their
world.”

           
“I’m not going back,” the armed man
repeated.

           
Philpott wasn’t sure exactly what he
meant—back to a madhouse?—but he could see that
this
was no bluff or braggadocio. He said, “I’m sure we could
negotiate some sort of press conference as part of the surrender. You
could
get your story out, we could at
least make sure of that much.”

           
The exotic woman said, “That’s what
they told Li Kwan.”

           
“That’s what I’m remembering, too,”
the armed man said. He looked meaner, colder. He’s made a decision, Philpott
realized, and I’m not going to like it.

           
The Russian suddenly said, “Is
that
the experiment you were talking
about on television?”

           
He saw me look that way, Philpott
thought. The Russian was pointing direcdy at the storage bottle on the table on
the other side of the room. Philpott’s mouth was very dry, his palms wet. He
said, “We’re still trying to find the particle.”

           
“Are you?” The Russian kept peering
at the storage bottle. “Then what is the camera looking at?”

           
“Nothing.”

           
“Then why is that light bulb on?”

           
Philpott had no immediate answer,
which was wrong. The hesitation gave the game away, even though Chang tried to
salvage the situation by blurting out, “We were testing it when you came in.”