The Forge of God (29 page)

Star munched.

"You should ride the chestnut gelding, that's Midge," she suggested. "Midge is even-tempered. Get acquainted."

Edward approached the chestnut and stroked its neck and mane, murmuring "Good horse, nice friendly horse."

After a few minutes of reacquainting the horses with human company, Stella brought two blankets and saddles from the Jeep, Star accepted the blanket skittishly, Midge with resignation.

"I'll get on them both first," Stella said. "Try them out and get them used to riders." She adjusted the cinch on Star and mounted easily. The pinto backed away from the alfalfa and paced around the feed pen nervously, then stood still and hoofed the soft dirt and old straw in a corner. Stella dismounted and approached Midge. Edward backed away.

She mounted Midge just as gracefully. Midge bucked from the feed and reared, throwing Stella on her back in the dirt. Edward yelled and grabbed the reins and kept his feet clear of the prancing hooves. When he had guided the horse away, he sidled it into a corner and went to help Stella to her feet.

"I'm fine. Just embarrassed." She brushed her jeans with quick, disgusted strokes.

"Gentle, hm?" Edward asked.

"He's your horse, obviously."

"I'll try to convince him of that."

A few minutes later, Midge accepted Edward's weight without protest, and Stella rode the pinto beside them. They rode to the far end of the corral and she dismounted to lift the wire loop on a sun-bleached gate.

Shoshone, like most of the desert resorts in the area, sat on a thermal hot spring that poured hundreds of gallons of water a minute out across the desert, and had done so, without letup, for decades. The runoff formed a creek that meandered under California 127, borax pans covered with grass and scrub, throwing up thick fringes of cattails along its banks.

They rode across the creek and into the dry desert beyond, coming finally to a borax-topped decline. With some prodding, the horses slid down the decline. They rode in shadow through the Death Valley sage of a quiet gully, glancing at each other and smiling but saying nothing.

The gully spread out onto a broad plain and the sage gave way to hummocky yellow salt grass. Part of an old narrow-gauge mining railway ran to their left, rails rusting on a long embankment of cinders and gray dirt. Birds called out in the stillness and a thick rat snake slid its meter length through the scrub.

"All right," Stella said, reining her horse up short and facing him. "I'm just about cured. How about you?"

Edward nodded. "This sure helps."

She sidled the pinto closer to him and patted its shoulder. "I've lived here all my life, with a few years at school and traveling. Europe. Africa. Peace Corps. My mother and sister and I have done everything we could to keep the town together after my father died. It's become my life. Sometimes it's an awful responsibility—you wouldn't think that, would you, since it's so small? But it weighs on me. Mother takes it in her stride."

"She's a wonder," Edward said.

Stella leaned her head to one side, looking sadly at the gravel. "You know, I said I was a radical. It was my sister who was the real radical. She went to Cuba. She has a complete set of Lenin and Marx on her bookshelves. She loves Shoshone as much as I do, but she had to leave. We think she's in Angola. Lord, what a place to be now. Me, I'm just a capitalist like all the rest."

"Hard on your mother, I guess."

"Who, me or my sister?" Stella smiled.

"I meant your sister. I suppose both of you."

"What about your family?"

"None to speak of. My father vanished more than twenty years ago, and my mother lives in Austin. We don't see much of each other."

"And your connections at the university?"

"I'm not sure I'll stay there, now."

"No long-term plans?"

Edward brushed at a buzzing horsefly and watched it veer across the hummocks until it vanished. "I don't see why."

"Mother and I have been making plans for selling mineral rights. We'll redo the town's sewage line with a government loan, but this extra money—that could keep the town going for years, even if the tourists keep flocking over to Tecopa."

"The big resort."

She nodded. "What a disaster for us all. Tecopa used to be a bunch of shacks built over hot springs. Rowdy. Now it's plush. The desert is like that."

"It's beautiful here. Something big could happen to Shoshone."

"Yes, but would we want it to?" She shook her head dubiously. "I'd like to keep it the way it was when I was a girl, but I know that's not practical. The way it was when Father was alive. It seemed so permanent then. I could always come back." She shook her head slowly, looking out across the grass to a lava-covered hill beyond. "What I'm getting around to saying is, we could use a geologist here. In Shoshone. To help us work out the mineral rights and figure out what we have, exactly."

"That would be nice," Edward agreed.

"You'll think it over?"

"Your tourist business should be real good for the next few months," he said.

Stella made a face. "We're just getting the freaks now. Religious nuts. All going out to the cinder cone. Who needs them? Everybody else is going to stay at home and wait it out. Do you think it's all going to go away?"

"I don't know." But he did know, in his gut. "That's not true, actually. I think it's all over."

"The things inside the Earth?"

"Maybe. Maybe something we don't even know about."

"It makes me so goddamned mad," Stella said, her voice breaking. "Helpless."

"Yeah."

"But I'm going to keep on planning. Maybe the whole deal will fall through. The commodities markets are going crazy. Maybe nobody will want to buy mineral rights now. But we have to keep working."

"I don't think I can stay," he said. "It sounds wonderful, but…"

Her eyes narrowed. "Restless?"

"I don't think I can really have a home now. Not even here, nice as this is."

"Where will you go?"

"I'll travel. Probably break away from Reslaw and Minelli. Go out on my own."

'Sometimes I wish I could do that," she said wistfully. But my roots are too deep here. I'm not enough like my sister. And I have to stay with Mother."

"There was a place," Edward said, "where my father took my mother and me before he ran away. My last summer with him, and the best summer I've ever had. I haven't been back since. I didn't want to be disappointed. I wondered if it would have changed… For the worse."

"Where was that?"

"Yosemite," he said.

"It's beautiful there."

"You've been there recently?"

"Last summer, driving through on the way to the wine country. It was really lovely, even with all the people. Without crowds, it would be wonderful."

"Maybe I'll go there. Live on my back salary. I've dreamed about it, you know. Those peculiar dreams where I go back and it's completely different, but still something special. I think to myself, after all those years of just dreaming about being there, I'm finally back. And then I wake up… and it's a dream."

Stella reached out to touch his arm. "If… it works out, you can come back here after."

"Thank you," Edward said. "That would be nice. My teaching position will certainly be closed by that time. I can't expect them to wait forever."

"Let's strike a deal," Stella said. "Next summer, you come back here and help Mother and me. After you go to Yosemite, and after the world gets its act together."

"All right," Edward said, smiling. He reached out and touched her arm, and then leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. "It's a deal."

PERSPECTIVE

Compunews Network, November 29, 1996, Frederick Hart reporting:

Here in the winter desert, only a few miles from Death Valley proper, it gets bitterly cold at night, and thousands of campfires light up the grass and sand around the government—declared National Security Site. In the middle of the site, rising against the clouds of stars like a great black hump, is the so-called Bogey, the imitation extinct volcano that has burrowed into the national imagination as the Kemp objects have burrowed into the Earth's core, and into our nightmares. People have come here from around the world, kept back a mile from the site by barbed wire and razor-wire barricades. They seem to have come to worship, or to just sit quietly under the warm desert sun and stare. What does it mean to them, to us? Should they wish to storm the site, will the Army be able to keep them back?

Among their numbers are approximately ten thousand Forge of Godders, with their various prophets and religious guides. The American branch of this cult has arisen in just three weeks, sown in the fertile religious ground of the American South and West by the President's blunt, uncompromising words. I have spoken with these people, and they share the President's convictions. Most are fundamentalist Christians, seeing this as the Apocalypse predicted in the Bible. But many come from other faiths, other religions, around the world. They say they will stay here until the end. As one cultist told me, "This is the center. This is where it's at. Forget Australia. The End of the World begins right here, in Death Valley."

December 1

Lieutenant Colonel Rogers, in mufti of hunter's cap and bush jacket and denims, hands in jacket pockets, stood at the edge of the Furnace Creek airstrip. A sleek eight-passenger private LearFan Special coasted to a stop twenty yards beyond, its two in-line props swishing the air with a diminishing chop-chop-chop. The plane's landing lights were extinguished and its side door opened. Two passengers—a man and a woman—stepped down almost immediately, peering around in the darkness, then approached Rogers.

"The President refuses to see any of us," said the man. Dressed in a recently donned and still disarrayed overcoat, black suit, and a silk shirt, he was very portly, late middle-aged, and completely bald. The woman was slender, in her forties, with large attractive eyes, a narrow jaw, and full lips. She, too, wore an overcoat and beneath that a dark pants suit.

"What does your group plan now?" the woman asked.

Rogers rubbed his jaw reflectively. "My group… hasn't fixed its plans yet," he said. "We're not used to this kind of activity."

"Congress and the committees are really on Crockerman's tail. They may bring him down," the man said. "We still haven't gotten McClennan and Rotterjack to join us. Loyalists to the last." The bulky bald man curled his lip. Loyalty beyond pragmatism was not something he understood. "Even so, it may be too late. Have you talked to the task force?"

"We're going to keep them out of this, as much as possible," Rogers said. "I talked to Gordon, and he even broached this sort of plan to me, but we don't know which of them might have supported his decision covertly."

"Do you have the sleeping bag?" the woman asked.

"No, ma'am."

"Do you know where you'll get it, if the time comes? Oak Ridge is in my district…"

"We will not get it from civilian sources," Rogers said.

"What about the codes, the complications, the authorization you'll need… the chain of command?" the woman persisted.

"That's on our end. We'll take care of it. If the time comes."

"They have the smoking gun, goddammit," the man said. "We've already been shot."

"Yes, sir. I read the papers."

"The admiral should know," the man said, with the air of drawing their conversation to a conclusion," that our group can do no more in a reasonable period of time. If we do bring the President to ground, it will take months. We can't stop or delay the swearing in. The recommendation from the House Judiciary Committee will take weeks. The trial could drag on for half a year beyond that. He's going to hold out for at least that long. That puts the ball in your court."

Rogers nodded.

"Do you know when you'll act?" the woman asked.

"We don't even know if we can, or whether we will if we can. It's all up in the air."

"Decisions have to be made soon," she reiterated. "Everybody's too upset… this is too extraordinary a conclave for it to stay secret long."

Rogers agreed. The two returned to their LearFan Special and the plane's counterrotating props began to spin again, with eerie softness. Rogers returned to his truck and drove away from the airport as the plane whined into the blackness and silence of the overcast night.

Around the bogus cinder cone, for a distance of several hundred yards, soldiers patrolled well-lighted squares of the desert in Jeeps and on foot. Beyond the patrols and the fences, a mile from the object of their interest, the civilians gathered in trucks and vans and motor homes. Even this late, almost into the morning, campfires burned in the middle of wide circles of mesmerized watchers. Raucous laughter in one area was countered by gospel singing in another. Rogers, maneuvering his truck down the fenced approach corridor to the site, wondered if they would ever sleep.

December 15

Two o'clock in the morning, the phone beside their bed rang, and Arthur came awake immediately, leaning forward to pick up the receiver. It was Ithaca Feinman. She was calling from a hospital in Los Angeles.

"He's going fast," she said softly.

"So soon?"

"I know. He says he's fighting, but…"

"I'll leave…" He looked at his watch. "This morning. I can be down there by eight or nine, maybe earlier."

"He says he's sorry, but he wants you here," Ithaca said.

"I'm on my way."

He hung up and wandered into the living room to look for Francine, who said she had not been asleep, but had been sitting on the living room couch with Gauge's head in her lap, worrying about something, she wasn't sure what.

"Harry's going, or at least Ithaca thinks so."

"Oh, God," Francine said. "You're flying down there?"

"Yes."

She swallowed hard. "Go see him. Say… Say goodbye for me if he's really… Oh, Arthur." Her voice was a trembling whisper. "This is an awful time, isn't it?"

He was nearly in tears. "We'll make it through," he said.

As Francine folded some shirts and pants for him, he slipped his toiletries into a suitcase and called the airport to book a flight for six-thirty. For a few seconds, dithering in the yellow light of the bedside lamp, he tried to gather his wits, remember if he had left anything behind, if there was anybody else he should notify.