The Dragon Book (36 page)

He crossed backwards and forwards a few times, confirming that it was indeed the track of the man that was still intensely radioactive some hours after he passed. The actual footprints were hotter still, impossibly so; it was as if a chunk of pure uranium was buried in every faint indentation of the ground.

Weiss got back in the Chevy convertible as Colonel White’s jeep pulled in behind. The White Streak jumped out before the jeep stopped rolling and ran up to the window as Weiss gently moved his foot over the accelerator, but he didn’t press it down.

“Professor!” shouted the Colonel. “Where are you going?”

“The test site.” Weiss smiled. “Keep everyone back. There’s a trail of very high radiation. Run a phone line to the nearest junction, and I’ll call in from the site.”

“What? You can’t go in alone! We’ve lost a helicopter, we don’t know what that thing is. Those morons at Groom Lake won’t say if it’s something of theirs, but I tell you, whatever it is, we’ll finish it off with that goddamned A-bomb if we have—”

“Good-bye, Colonel,” said Weiss. He let his foot pivot forward from the heel, and the Chevy accelerated away, TurboGlide smooth through the gears. Weiss jinked the car around the jeeps and off the road, plumes of dust spurting up as the rear wheels spun for a moment in the loose roadside gravel before getting traction on the stony desert floor.

Weiss sang as he drove, Puccini’s “
E lucevan le stelle
.” In his head, he could hear the clarinet solo, repeating over and over again, no matter what part he sang. He did not want to die, but it could not be helped. It was only a matter of time. Perhaps in the next few hours, if not, then in the next few weeks, a horrible and painful death.

There was no obvious gap in the inner fence, no way for the walker to have got through. Weiss swung the car around and reversed through, wincing as the barbed wire scratched the beautiful blue paintwork and shredded the folded-back roof. He ducked down and avoided being scratched himself, only to wince again as a thick strand of triple-barb scraped across the hood.

Closer to the test site, he let himself wonder what he was following. Before the first test, way back in ’45, he had been an atheist. Since then, he was not sure what he believed, but it certainly included things that could not be immediately measured or similarly known. He knew of no scientific reason for how a man could be immune to bullets, or would leave a radioactive trail, but that did not mean that no scientific reason existed. He was quite curious to find out … anything, really.

Colonel White obviously thought that it was an alien, for there were inexplicable and possibly alien artifacts under study over at Groom Lake, but they were sad remnants for the most part and did not include anything alive. Unless the Air Force had been hiding them from the atomic scientists who had assisted in some of the early investigations, which was possible.

Weiss saw the robed man shortly thereafter. He was climbing the tower that held the Pascal-F device. A ten-kiloton bomb, suspended in place and fully prepared to fire in … Weiss glanced at his watch … forty-nine minutes. Unless he called in to stop it, he supposed.

The professor backed the Chevy in by one of the instrument stands. He left the engine running. With the car pointed west, he could reach one of the observation bunkers in ten minutes, or the trenches dug by the Marines who’d been the subject of last month’s test.

Not that he was entirely sure he’d bother. He took one last look at the Geiger counter. The walker’s path was more radioactive than before. Getting closer to the cause of that trail would in all probability be lethal, particularly the way the dust was kicking up, carrying the radiation into his lungs.

“Hello there!” Weiss called up when he reached the foot of the tower. He didn’t suppose the fellow would feel like talking after being shot at so much, but as it hadn’t stopped him, perhaps he wouldn’t mind. At least he had evidently reached his destination. “Mind if I come up?”

There was a moment when Weiss thought there would be no answer. Then an answer came, in a harsh, guttural, and strangely accented voice.

“Come if you wish. You are aware my nature is antithetical to your own?”

“Yes,” called up Weiss. He set his foot on the ladder and reached for a rung. “I am. I don’t suppose you know how swiftly it will kill me?”

“Should we touch, you would die instanter,” said the man. “But stay beyond arm’s reach, and you may live to see another season.”

“My name is Weiss,” said the professor as he gained the platform. He took care to stay as far away from the walking man as possible, and kept the bulk of the bomb between them. “Professor Weiss. May I ask who you are?”

“A sinner,” said the man. “Who seeks to make up his last accounts.”

He stood and pushed back his hood. Weiss stared at the dark red, large-scaled flesh and the blue, human-seeming eyes that were set so strangely in their reptilian sockets.

“I see. Ah, what planet … what distant star have you come from?”

“No star, no far planet,” muttered the man. “Yet from the far side of this world, I have come.”

“From the far side of this world,” repeated Weiss. He kept looking at the man. Was he some sort of mutant? But it was not biologically possible to be so radioactive and continue to live.

“I have sought such a thing as this for many, many centuries,” said the man. He indicated the bomb. “Yearning for it as I once yearned for love, or wine. Yet even now, I delay, when at a touch I might have release …”

“You know what this is?” asked Weiss. “An atom bomb. It is set to explode soon and it will kill—”

“Aye,” interrupted the man. “It is a hope made real. I learned of it from a woman who came to my cave in Cappadocia, as so many have done, seeking the healing power of my inner fires. She died, but it was a slow death, and she told me many things, and taught me more of this tongue we speak. I had learned it once before, a long time past, but had forgot it.”

“Cappadocia?” asked Weiss. “In Turkey? You come from Turkey?”

He couldn’t help but smile a little, as he thought of the strangeness of this interview. Perhaps his mind was already affected, maybe this was all a morphine dream, the result of treatment begun to ease him through the horrors of death by plutonium poisoning.

“As it is now called,” said the man. He licked the dust from his lips with a long, forked tongue, and sighed. “But I am no Turk. I was a good Christian, long ago, in the service of my Emperor. Ah, how I long to shed this vile form, that I may join him in heaven!”

“Your … vile form,” said Weiss. “You were not always—”

“Always thus? I was not. Once I was as well set up a fellow as any might see … but so long ago. My own face is lost to me, gone so long I cannot see it, even in my mind’s eye …”

“How did you become … whatever you have become?” asked Weiss. He looked at his watch. Thirty-three minutes to detonation. Perhaps he had given up on life too early. It was not too late for him to have a genuine and great discovery to his credit, something truly remarkable, not just an accretion on top of the work of other, more gifted scientists. If he could study this altered man, learn the secret of radioactive life … others would have to continue the work, but if he could publish even the preliminary findings, it would be a famous memorial of … or perhaps … perhaps he might even learn how he could live, learn some secret to purge the plutonium residue from his blood and bone …

“How did I become what I am?” said the man. “I have told the story before, but perhaps none lived to repeat it.”

“I think I would remember hearing about someone like you,” said Weiss. “Maybe we would be more comfortable down on the ground? I mean if it’s a long story—”

“The story is long, but I shall tell it short, and as the end lies here, it would not be meet to leave it.”

“Sure,” said Weiss. He looked at his watch again. Eleven twenty-nine. “Go on.”

“I was an officer of the Empire, a high commander,” said the man. “Of a good family, loyal to the Emperor, successful in war. This was in the reign of
… you would say … Heraclitus. I was a simple fellow, wishing only to do my duty, raise a family, have sons to rise to even greater glory … but it was not to be. It is strange, that this I am to tell you was so long ago, yet it is ever clear to me, when more recent times are but clouded mud, and I could not tell you what I did for a hundred years …”

The minute hand on Weiss’s watch moved to the six.

“It was summer, the end of a long, dry summer. I had gone to the mountains, to escape the heat, and hunt. The days were very long, and the evenings were of a gentleness that I never felt again … with the wind coming soft and cool from the snowy heights and the earth still warm from the sun. On such an evening, I saw a star fall, and it seemed to me to have fallen close, beyond the lake where my summer house stood on its oaken piles. I had my house slaves ready a boat, and they rowed me to the far shore, or almost to it, for there amidst the burning reeds was a great boat of shining silver. The slaves were frightened and backed their oars. Startled, I fell into the water. I called to them, but they were too afraid, and their fear made me angry, and braver than I should otherwise have been. I swam ashore, and seeing a hinged door open in the side of the silver ship, I went inside.

“It was cold inside that metal ship. Colder than the nights on the high plateau, when the ice storms blow sideways and no shelter is ever enough, and no fire can adequately warm you. But I was still angry, and I thought to see the glow of lamplight upon golden plate. Greed overcame me, and I struck deeper into the craft.”

“What did you find?” asked Weiss anxiously. There were only twenty-eight minutes left now, and he would need five minutes at least to reach a fixed phone. Now that death was so imminent, he wanted to do more to postpone it, and this strange, cursed, voluble creature might be the means of doing so.

“Not gold. I found a creature. A great shining lizard-thing, trapped in the wreckage of its chamber. Longer than this tower, it was, and only one vast clawed arm free, but that was enough. It was quick, as quick as the small lizards that dart across the stones. Even as I drew back, it gripped me and took me in. Its grasp burned and my flesh boiled away at its touch, and the pain … the pain was mercifully cut short, as I lost my senses and fell into a swoon. It was while I was insensible that it tried to do its work—”

“Hold that thought!” cried Weiss, unable to listen to any more, his eyes fixed upon his watch and the inexorable circling of the minute hand. “I must … I must send a message from below. I’ll be back.”

He had his feet over the edge of the platform and was feeling for a rung when he felt a terrible, burning pain across his forearms and was dragged bodily back up. The walking man set him down in the corner and quietened his screams with a firm but final tap to the middle of his forehead.

“Tried to do its work,” he continued, speaking, as he had done so often, to a corpse. “To make me into what it was, to serve its purpose. But I did not wish to be a dragon, and with the grace of God, it could not complete its foul purpose, and so I have remained at least half a man.”

He bent down and kissed Weiss on both cheeks, his lips leaving a burning brand. “Half a man, who cannot touch a lover, and who cannot be slain, nor drown, nor die at all. Or so I thought, until at last Mrs. Harrison told me that my prayers were answered, and that there is a way to slay my dragon.”

Weiss’s watch said sixteen minutes to twelve, and the detonation was set for noon, as set by a bank of electric clocks and three separate control cables. But when the dragon embraced the bomb and tightened his grip, it was enough.

Nine miles away, as he stood mute while being scrubbed in the decontamination showers, Karadjian felt the floor shake for several seconds, and the flow of water from the shower head slowed, stopped, then restarted. It was a much bigger shock and a heavier ground wave than for a mere ten-kiloton test.

“Hey, Sarge,” called out Anderson. “Reckon that guy went up then, with the bomb?”

“What guy?” asked Karadjian. “There never was no guy.”

He was right. Five minutes later, still wet from the showers, they signed the forms that said so, while the mushroom cloud fell into itself in the middle distance.