Asterisk (29 page)

He put his hands flat against the glass and stared into the chamber beneath him.

Asterisk.

An enormous disk, perhaps five or six hundred feet in diameter, was raised up on a platform and tilted slightly away from him. He stared at the glistening expanse of metal, the seamless stretch of an underside, yellowy gold even under the cluster of red lights, a sequence of what looked like portholes slit into the side of the object—and he wondered, he wondered, what kind of faces had looked out from behind that glass? What kind of eyes had perceived? What kind of brains? The night sky, the appearance of lights, the mysteries of what came and went across the reaches of darkness and space—

Asterisk—

There were footsteps in the corridor.

Thorne!

And then there was a roar in the dark that might have been a plane taking off, it might have been the sound of a comet falling out of a moonless sky, the rush of a shooting star or a meteorite or some other astral body hurtling toward the vulnerable surface of the planet. But it was none of these things.

The glass panel in front of his face shattered.

He was running again. Running. He had always been running.

More footsteps in the corridor. His lungs worked madly. He imagined them as two pale jellyfish pulsating in his chest.

Asterisk—was that what he had really seen?

Was it?

He was standing at the bottom of a metal spiral staircase. He started to climb. He could hear shouts echoing down the halls and corridors. The alarm still whining. God. God. Get me out of it. Out. He pulled himself up the spiral, dizzy, not caring to look back down.

Thorne!

Then the stairway opened out into another corridor.

Running. When would it stop?

On either side of him now there were doors, metal doors, uniformly green and closed. He passed them in a blur, pursued by the alarm, by the noise of boots over steel.

The corridor.

A dead end a trap a blank wall a fucking blank wall nowhere left nowhere else left to hide
.

A door to his left swung open.

A man appeared in the frame, an old man in a white coat. He made a gesture and Thorne understood: He's beckoning to me. Why?

Thorne went toward the door, stepped inside the room. The man shut the door and slid a bolt. It was a tiny room, a cell, windowless. There was a bunk in a corner and a table covered with books and papers. The old man had spectacles pushed up on his skull.

The mad room, Thorne thought.

The place where it all ends.

The alarms, deadened a fraction by the closed door, still sounded. Thorne, leaning against the door, aching for breath, eyes watering, saw the white coat, too long for the old guy, touch the floor.

He looked at Thorne.

The room where it all ends.

Where else? Where else could it end but the place where they had the thing called Asterisk? Logical. Perfect. A closed system. He put his hand to his brow: cold, no sweat. Why? The old man was standing only a few yards away from him, pulling his glasses down over his eyes. He wore a blue plastic name tag on the lapel of his clinical coat. The letters, like a dye running, meant nothing to Thorne. Inscrutable. Marks on papyrus. An alphabet of incomprehension. Why not? Why would there be any understanding here?

Act, he thought.

In the name of Christ,
act!

The sirens still. The alarms. All hell.

“You saw it?” the man asked.

Thorne tried to answer, couldn't.

“Who sent you here?”

“Sent me?” It was not his own voice; it came from a dark place in his head, some muffled source. He stared at the man's name tag. The letters formed the name
MORGENTHAU, H.

Morgenthau.
Who's Who
. The computer printout.

The cryptanalyst.

“Why did you come here?”

Sit me down, Thorne thought. Lay me on a couch. Analyze the shit out of me. The alarms. Running men. Some other time over coffee, he thought, some other time, some other place, you and me can sit down and you can put your cryptanalytical brain to work on my psychic puzzles.

“How do—” His voice went again, broken.

“How do you get out of here?” the man asked.

Why did he move so fucking slowly? why?

“There's a way,” Morgenthau said. He turned his face toward a door at the other side of the room. Why is it all slow motion now? The flawed sprockets of a projector. “There's a way.”

Thorne was aware: he was meant to follow Morgenthau to the door across the room. The old man had already begun to move in that direction.

He was opening the door.

It gave to another corridor, this one of badly lit red bricks. They must have run out of steel, Thorne thought. Inane. Move. Move.

Morgenthau closed the door and was moving into the corridor.

He paused and, as if there were all the time in the world, said: “You know what they've got here?”

Thorne nodded his head: know? what did he know?

The old man sighed, gesturing for Thorne to follow him along the corridor. Leadenly, dreaming a dream, dreaming a long dream, he saw Morgenthau walk ahead of him. He caught up with him: the alarms sounded distant now.

The hand, covered with fine white hairs, touched Thorne's sleeve: “How did you get here?”

Major General Burckhardt. It's a long story. Thorne saw the reflections of pale lights glimmer on the man's glasses. Water in the pool.

“Walter.” The man's voice was dry and Thorne realized that he must have spoken a thought aloud. “Walter,” Morgenthau said again.

“They killed him,” Thorne said.

“It's as easy for them to kill …” Morgenthau was leading him from the corridor into a narrow, low tunnel. There was the smell of something rank, putrescent. The old man stopped, crouching. “You've seen what they've got here. You know what it is.”

Thorne looked down the darkness of the tunnel. What Wonderlands lay ahead of him down there? He could feel Morgenthau's breath on the side of his face.

“If you know what it is then you know what it means,” Morgenthau said. “And if you know that, then you see the importance …”

The importance, yes, Thorne thought. Why was the old man rambling? Was he deaf? Didn't he hear the noise of the sirens? Didn't he know the jeopardy?

“It doesn't add up,” Morgenthau was saying. “They don't want us to see what they've got here … and yet they don't prevent us from stumbling into that gallery. It doesn't add up.”

There were echoes all at once and Thorne realized that the old man's words, rising from a whisper to harshness, were coming back out of the tunnel. Addddupppp. Adddduppp … He gazed into the blackness of the tunnel.

“Walter,” the old man said, as if this were a spare moment in time for grief, for eulogizing, for putting the ghosts to rest. “I knew he would try to blow it. I knew he had the courage for that.”

Thorne moved away from the old man, feeling the dark and the cold of the tunnel engulf him.

“Five hundred yards,” Morgenthau said, coming back to the present. “I don't know how much good it's going to do you. If they don't get you in here, they'll get you out in the desert.”

Thorne wanted to say something, a word of gratitude, anything. But Morgenthau was already moving away from the tunnel. Five hundred yards, Thorne thought. And then what?

He turned from the light, from the opening that Morgenthau was slowly disappearing into, and he began to run again. It was dark, darker, the farther he ran. And then he could see nothing in front of himself. In the blackness he suddenly encountered a dead end. A trap, that was it, that was all it was, a trap—but this time one without doors, exits, loopholes. Morgenthau had sent him into the tunnel knowing there wasn't anyplace else left to go. That was it. It made sense. Pretending some fondness for good old Walter, pretending some compassion, a longing to help, feigning a tiny act of courage, all he had done was to send Thorne into a blind place—

He shoved his hands into the dark in front of him.

Metal. Cold cold metal.

But what?

There it was. Some kind of handle that felt it had the shape of a small wheel. He gripped it, twisted, hearing the grind of joints, of tumblers turning, the freeing of an unused lock. The hatch swung slowly away from him and he stepped through and he saw, way overhead, the night sky, the millions of stars spread across the galaxies in a way you never saw above the pollution of a city, the shape of the moon hanging with enormous clarity. Morgenthau, he thought, thank you: thank you.

He began to run. The terrain was rough, crumbling under his feet, and although the sky above was illuminated, incandescent, the desert itself was dark. He moved sightlessly, he moved blindly, he stumbled through this darkness. Once or twice he fell, once or twice he lost his balance or tripped over some debris beneath his feet.

When he could finally run no further, when his lungs felt dehydrated and his heart sore, he lay face down in what seemed to him in the darkness a gulley, an arroyo, and he pressed his body close to the ground. He closed his eyes, listening, listening for the sound of pursuit. But there was a deep, primeval silence, the night windless, still, seemingly bereft of all life.

It lasted only a moment.

He heard the motor of a vehicle not far away. And then something more ominous, something that vibrated through the darkness, sending waves of brushed air across the silences. He raised his head. The helicopter had a lamp rigged to its cabin. The light was stunning, a solid white beam that illuminated everything for yards around. He got to his feet. He began to move again, more slowly this time, away from the light. But it came on after him, like the eye of some ancient predatory thing. It burned up the sky and the desert below. He moved toward a clump of sparse bushes which afforded him very little cover. And the light kept coming, the chopper whirring in the air, the light swinging this way and that, mesmerizing desert moths that flew in its path like particles of metal drawn to a magnet. He moved out of the bushes, found himself going down a slight incline—

There was a sudden yellow light like one that might have been created by an exploding candle and he understood, he realized that they were dropping flares, that the whole desert was lit. He felt totally vulnerable, laid bare, and even as the flare was falling and disintegrating he was running again, scrambling on his back down the slope, knocking stones and rubble as he went. He lost his footing, slipped, slipped and went spinning over and over and over, reaching the bottom of the slope, understanding that he had somehow twisted his arm, that the arm was becoming numb. He got up, swayed, the pain was bad, he got up and dragged himself forward through the dark. He wasn't thinking. His mind was a void. He was conscious only of a physical self, a thing, an object he had somehow to protect.

The helicopter behind him.

The light.

Fragments of the desert lit up, throwing unnatural shadows.

More yellow flares. The sky seemed to scream. The jaundiced lights briefly tore the darkness apart. They must see me, he thought. They must see me. They must.

He kept going forward.

From behind there was the sound of voices.

He stopped, pressing himself to the side of the arroyo he was passing through. The helicopter, like some killing bird, was almost directly overhead. He could almost feel the warmth of the beacon on his skin.

He looked upward.

Someone was firing from the cabin.

He heard the whine of a bullet, the sound of metal slamming into the rock face around him. He slipped forward, started to run, seeing the chopper swing in an arc above him. It was coming in again. Another flare was fired. He was a bull's-eye, a target, how could they miss him now? He covered his face with his numb arm, the light was bright, terribly bright, blinding. He heard the explosion of a gun. Fragments of smashed rock flew up in a quick rain around him. The chopper hovered. The beam was going back and forth as if momentarily the person controlling the light had lost him. He scrambled down the dry wash. More flares, flare after flare, the
whoosh
of the flare gun, the explosion of sparks and light.

He was running, rushing away from the scalpel of light. When he could go no farther, when his strength had the texture of threadbare fabric, he fell down on his knees, closed his eyes, wanted to sleep. Muscles don't function, he thought. Connections severed. The millions of messages, impulses, codes, that constitute that thing known as volition—fucked. But the great bird was still coming, it was still coming after him. Get up. Had to get up.

He rose, went forward a few more steps, fell, rose again, moved on.

Can't make it.

Must
.

Can't.

Yes
.

He reached an area of flat land. Shadows of saguaro, thrown by the helicopter light, created great flat pools of dark. He ran across the flatness. When he couldn't run he scrambled, going on all fours, moving like some injured mammal.
They'll get you out in the desert
. Morgenthau and the major general. Had they whispered together about what to do with Asterisk? Had they conspired feebly in the cells and corridors and underground vaults of Escalante? The major general; the dead man's reach. Had Morgenthau been scared of the consequences? Burckhardt hadn't, had he?

Get up, Thorne. Get up. Go.

Ahead of him he saw lights, different lights now.

They're coming from all directions now, he thought. Front. Back. Above. He turned his head, watching the illuminated helicopter hover: a great mantis with a firework for a heart. But it wasn't moving. It was still, hanging. It wasn't moving.

And suddenly Thorne realized that the lights he saw ahead of him were those of vehicles on the public highway he had left no more than an hour before. Cars, trucks, a thin stream of commonplace traffic—

He had come back to the highway.