Skeletons (32 page)

"It's just that . . ."

"Go on, son," I said.

"I didn't die in vain, sir," he said. "And we all feel you're doing the right thing for everyone."

I stood and shook his hand. There were still tears in my eyes.

"Thank you, son," I said.

I gave my short speech, forgetting the words I had written on the plane trip down. I related instead the short meeting I had had with that soldier, whose name I didn't even know.

Then I went back to Washington, some of my doubts relieved. I learned on the plane that Lee had taken the day, wiping out the last resistance of the humans in the eastern part of the United States.

I learned also that there had been a coup in Washington, and that a former president now occupied the White House.

Stanton, with a heavily armed contingent, met me at the airport.

"It's over," he said. "We have the man in custody. It didn't last more than an hour. He had a few others with him, all of whom have been subdued." Stanton paused. "However . . ."

"Yes?" I said, sensing that something had gone wrong.

"I'm afraid Robert and Tad were lost in the attempt. Also Billy Herndon. We feel they should be interred here in Washington. A trip to Springfield would be too dangerous for you now."

"Eddie and Willie?" I asked.

"Safe. We do think this was an isolated incident, and the last threat to your administration. The polls show an overwhelming approval—"

"Damn the polls!" I shouted. "Where is this man?"

He blinked. "Why, he's being held in the basement, in the national security conference room. He'll be—”

“I want to see him, now!"

"But Mr. President, there's a very important—"

"Now!"

He bowed to my wrath. The short helicopter trip to the White House lawn was a silent one. I stalked from the machine as soon as it touched ground and stayed a step ahead of Stanton and the Secret Service, marching to the bank of elevators that would take me to the basement offices.

I stopped them at the elevator. "I'm going down alone," I said.

"Mr. President, there's an extremely important visitor in your office, I really think—"

"He can wait!"

The elevator doors closed, taking me down.

Two marine guards saluted as the doors opened at the bottom. Behind them, at the far end of a long conference table, sat a bound figure.

"Out," I said.

"Mr. President, we have orders—"

"Here is a direct order from the commander in chief! Out!"

They saluted again, stepped into the elevator. I watched as the doors closed, made sure the elevator ascended.

I turned to the man at the end of the conference table, who sat examining me with shifting eyes under his high forehead.

"Why did you do this?" I asked. "Don't you understand this has nothing to do with power? The entire future, for good or ill, is what is at stake here. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"

He looked at me, his eyes darting, his jowls hanging loose as he spoke.

"Well," he said, "let me make one thing perfectly clear. They wouldn't have me in China. And
Haldeman
assured me—assured me, mind you—that it would go without a hitch. 'Touchdown,' he said, 'definite touchdown.' Of course, he's been wrong before. . . ."

That was all I let him say. A little while later I went up in the elevator and told the two marine guards waiting there that a dust mop was needed in the national security conference room.

From my reading, the man who waited for me in the Oval Office looked familiar. He was a twentieth-century figure, but I had read so much about so many twentieth-century figures that I could not recall him.

He was not well dressed, and favored his pipe, and had such a saddened smile under his bushy gray mop of hair that I immediately took a liking to him.

"Mr. President," Stanton said, "may I present Mr. Albert Einstein."

"Of course!" I said. "The scientist fellow!"

Einstein nodded humbly. "It is a great pleasure meeting you," he said, taking my hand.

"Dr. Einstein has news for us," Stanton said.

"Oh?"

"Enigmatic news, I'm afraid, Mr. President," he said in his German accent.

I looked to Stanton for a clue, but he stood still, his attention focused on Mr. Einstein.

"You know, I came here once before," Einstein said, "to meet another president, Mr. Franklin Roosevelt. That was not a happy meeting, I'm afraid. You see, I urged him then to speed development of what became the atom bomb."

"Yes . . ." I said, instantly afraid that Einstein was here to present some new and even more terrible weapon to me.

Einstein smiled, sensing my mood. "Let me assure you, Mr. President, that is not why I am here this time. I think we have all the weapons we need at the moment, thank you."

"I quite agree."

"But I am here with something of a puzzle. You see, I've always been interested in puzzles—for instance, the way the universe is put together. I must admit that this puzzle may even be bigger than that." He looked up at me. "Have you wondered why we're here, Mr. President? Why we're . . . back?"

"I've thought about almost nothing else, Mr. Einstein."

He nodded, put his pipe in his mouth, took it out again. "I really do wish I had brought a blackboard."

I took a sheet of paper from my desk, handed it to him along with a pen.

"Thank you."

He began to draw on the paper, a crude picture of what I took to be our sun, along with our own planet and moon circling it.

'This, of course, is us," he said, pointing to the earth. He made a circular motion around the sun. "And this, along with the other planets, is our solar system. And our entire solar system moves through space, around the core of our galaxy, which we call the Milky Way."

He looked up at me. "I understand these things, Mr. Einstein."

"Good." He smiled. "I realize that in your day much of this was not known. But every age has its unknowns. That is the beauty of nature, eh?"

I nodded, smiled myself.

He began to sketch in another corner of the paper, drawing a whirlpool-like object and then a tiny circle on one side of it, about two thirds of the way out from the center. He drew an arrow from the little circle to his picture of our solar system.

He pointed to the whirlpool. "This, then, is the Milky Way, and this," he continued, following the arrow back from the solar system to the tiny circle, "is our solar system's place in the Milky Way."

He turned his shaggy head to me to make sure I understood, and I nodded, scratching my chin.

"Looks like we're rather small turnips in a big garden," I said.

He laughed. "Rather small turnips, indeed. There are billions upon billions of galaxies just like our Milky Way—if you want your turnips even smaller!"

"Ha!" I said. "My Lord, Mr. Einstein, but these things I can barely hold in my head. How do you think that big? Did you ever feel like the man wearing a barrel who spent so much time thinking that he forgot where his clothes were? He said, 'If I hadn't been so smart, I wouldn't be so
nekkid
.' "

Einstein laughed and looked down at himself. "I'm not such a smart dresser to begin with, Mr. Lincoln. And it is true that much of the time we don't need to think of these things to run our daily lives." His manner became grim. "But I'm afraid that at this time it's necessary."

I kept staring at his diagram, trying to take all this immensity in. "Go on, sir."

Einstein sketched a cloudy bar across the Milky Way galaxy, starting at the middle, and out to one edge, going through the tiny circle representing our solar system.

'This," he said, pointing to the bar, "is the cloud we are presently in."

I raised my eyebrows. "Our entire system of planets?”

“Everything for a half light-y—" He stopped, smiled. "For quite a distance."

I stared at the paper, scratched my chin.

Einstein said, "We last went through a cloud twenty-six million years ago." He paused. "Not coincidentally, there was an extinction of life on earth at that time. The first great extinction we have evidence of occurred at the end of the Permian Age, some two hundred and forty million years ago. Ninety percent of all species in the oceans perished; the mass extinction of various land species set the stage for the rise of the dinosaurs."

He began to sketch in other, tinier cloud spokes in the wheel of the Milky Way. "There have been other, small extinctions every twenty-six million years or so. One of those was responsible for wiping out the dinosaurs. We've now been able to detect other clouds along our path through the Milky Way."

I stood up straight. "You mean a cloud . . . ?"

"Yes. We believe these clouds have been instrumental in shaping life on earth. The highly charged particles,
irridium
and others, contained in the cloud—"

I held up my hand. "Whoa! Highly charged what?"

He smiled. 'That would be physics and chemistry, Mr. President."

"Let's just say I'm not good at wearing barrels, Mr. Einstein!"

He laughed, packed his pipe, and lit it. "Do you know what I wanted more than anything when I . . . returned? To smoke this pipe."

I clapped him on the back. "Well, you go right ahead."

We turned back to the diagram. "To make it simple, Mr. President, there are . . . unknown substances in the cloud which made the return of former life to earth possible."

"So that's what brought us back."

"We believe so." He went back to his diagram of the solar system, "Marvelous things have been happening on all the planets. Mars has sprouted vegetation. Incredibly, given the immense pressure and heat on the surface, we have indications of massive vegetative growth on Venus. That planet has become a huge hothouse of sorts, perhaps covered with orchids. The gas clouds of Jupiter are now supporting massive airborne organisms, possibly intelligent. Titan, the moon of Saturn . . ."

"Surely, the work of the Almighty," I said, in wonder.

He didn't contradict me. "You might even call this cloud Creation itself, Mr. President. It is marvelous, but it is also fraught with enigma. I have been in consultation with some of the finest minds in the world, at Princeton University and elsewhere. Isaac Newton himself has been working on the problem in England, and
Kepler
in Germany. These are great men. Here in the United States, at Harvard University, Hubble, who discovered that some nebulae are independent galaxies, by the way, has been at work. He and I and others believe we must initiate a project immediately, to send a rocket at high speed, manned if possible, away from earth in the direction our solar system is heading."

I watched him trace a line away from the tiny circle, through the cloud and out of it.

"You see, Mr. President," Einstein said, puffing on his pipe, producing more fragrant smoke, "in a matter of months, the entire solar system, including earth, is going to leave the cloud. And we have no idea what's going to happen then."

That very night, falling asleep as I pondered the many intriguing questions Dr. Einstein had raised, while simultaneously awash in grief for those I had lost, and feeling very much alone, I had a dream, a vision, the sign I had waited for.

At the end of summer, as the first cold winds began to sweep down from the heights of
Konzhakovski
Kamen
, now long behind us, the baby began to show in
Reesa's
belly.

At my insistence, our progress was slower, though
Reesa
was strong and called me foolish.

Our wagon was long since gone, broken in the rocks at the summit of the mountain. We had ridden the horse for hundreds of miles until it was hobbled, requiring me to shoot it once, and then again. Near Petropavlovsk, we had found a truck, which had taken us north nearly to
Noginski
before giving out. We left its rusting, noisy body behind. Now we carried what we could on our backs.

The land provided food, and the night provided stars for our covering. When we felt safe enough, we made a fire, though with the cooler temperatures, and
Reesa's
condition, there was more need now to take risks.

We had seen no one, human or skeleton, for weeks. In that time a kind of dream had settled over us, a fantasy that the world belonged to us alone, which was broken only occasionally by the sight of a high-flying hawk in skeleton form, or the marks of a skeletal footprint in the dirt. At night the crickets and other night bugs chirped and sang, and though we knew that the sounds came mostly from the white little carcasses of ghosts, again, our fantasy let us think the world was right.

I was content for the first time I could remember. My whole past life seemed like history. All that existed was my wife and my coming child, and the blue sky and brown earth and stars. The moon rose and set for
Reesa
and me, and changed its shape as the weeks passed. If I lost myself in this living dream, I could make this the world.