Westlake, Donald E - Novel 51 (41 page)

           
“You weren’t.”

           
The armed man said, “Grigor? What’s
up?”

           
The Russian looked at him, and
pointed a bony finger toward the storage bottle. “That’s the thing they were
talking about on television. Him, and the other scientist. The thing that, if
it fell down, either nothing would happen or the world would come to an end.
The whole world .”

           
The armed man smiled for the first
time, a faint smile but an honest one. He said to Philpott, “You’re the guy
says it’s safe.” All at once, Philpott understood the dangerous depths they
were in. The back of his neck felt cold, as though some wind from eternity were
blowing on him. Choosing his words with great care, he said, “I say I
believe
it is safe. No one yet knows.
Dr. Delantero, some others, they might possibly be correct, after all. Nothing
is
proved
yet. I would be, of course,
extremely cautious with the material until we had tested it a thousand
different ways. I would bring Dr. Delantero himself here to—”

          
The Russian said, “We could test the
theory for you, Doctor.” To the armed man, he said, “We just go knock that
table over.”

           
Philpott could hardly breathe. He
hadn’t known it was possible to be this afraid. In a choked hoarse voice he
said, “Man, why would you do that?”

           
The Russian’s eyes were sunk into
his head, as though his brain looked directly out from the center of his skull.
He said, “I’m leaving very soon, Doctor. I don’t mind the idea of taking
everybody with me. I
like
that idea.
The best joke I ever thought of.” He turned that fleshless head. “Pami? Should
we bring them all with us when we go?”

           
“
Yes!”
You wouldn’t have guessed the woman could speak so forcefully, or that she
could rise up so powerfully, onto one knee, one foot on the floor, before she
had to reach out and clutch at the other woman’s leg for support.

           
The Russian shrugged. “And we know
how Kwan votes.” They couldn’t
all
feel that way. But the exotic woman, holding to the black woman’s wrist with
one hand, took the armed man’s free hand with her other and said, “There’s
nothing for us here, nothing anywhere. We can’t win. Why should it be
their
world?”

           
“I’m not going back, that’s all I
know.” The armed man showed that chilling smile to Philpott again. “It’s a
crapshoot, right? Fifty-fifty. Either nothing happens, and we’ll figure out
what to do next, or our troubles are over. Even money, right?”

           
“Please,” Philpott whispered.
“Please don’t.”

           
“Fuck you,” the armed man said, “and
the horse you rode in on.” He freed his hand from the woman’s, and walked
toward the storage bottle.

           
Please.
But Philpott couldn’t even speak any more. What have I done?

           
The armed man approached the table.
He reached out for the storage bottle, and the phone rang.

           
Everybody stopped. The armed man
looked over his shoulder at the Russian. The phone rang a second time. “The
last phone call in history,” the armed man said. “Should we answer it?”

           
“I will,” Cindy said, stumbling in
her hurry as she ran to the desk where the phone sat. They all watched her pick
up the receiver. “Yes?” A little pause, and she looked around. “Is somebody
here named Frank?”

           
The armed man frowned, thunderously.
“Who knows my name? What’s going on? Who is it?”

           
Cindy held the phone out to him.
“She says her name is Mary Ann Kelleny.”

           
I just couldn’t. When the moment
came, when the time came, I couldn’t. I saw my future, the high far calm
reaches of my future, the long ages of emptiness, the occasional Call, the
endless time remembering, and I could not. I could not obey.

           
It is not only Susan. It is the
whole existence of which she is a part, the existence that makes it possible
for two humans to be so selflessly bound together, to elevate their mutual
caring so far beyond their petty selves, for each of them to attain such an
intensity of altruism toward one other person that all of eternity
does
exist in the space of one shared
thought.

           
He should have sent someone with
more experience of the humans, someone who had already grown as bored with them
as He. I tried to remain aloof, but I could not. What at first seemed to me
human squalor has become human vibrancy. The cumbersomeness I first thought of
as pathetically comic, I now see as endearing; and with what ingenuity they
struggle to overcome their physical helplessness. And the violence of their
emotions, once repugnant to me, is now elixir to my pallid soul.

           
Pallid no more. We all have free
will, but we all must be prepared to take the consequences when we exercise it.
I know what my consequence shall be: ejection. Like Lucifer before me—but at a
much more frivolous level of rebellion—I shall be cast out. But not to join
that greatest of dissenters in
his
dark sphere. No; the punishment for my defection will be suited to my crime. Do
I love the humans so much? Then I will become one of them.

           
But first, I must save them.

           
Frank took the phone from the little
blonde girl as though it was hot. Two seconds ago, he’d been ready to risk
everything on one throw of the dice—if he got snuffed, that was okay; and if he
was still around after he dumped over the professor’s experiment he’d probably
be so happy to be alive he might even
stand
the joint for one more tour—and now he was scared.
Now
he was scared; not before.

           
Into the phone, cautiously, as
though the damn thing might bite him, he said, “Who’s this?”

           
“Hello, Frank. Not doing too well,
huh?”

           
It was her voice, all right, he
remembered it clearly, and it evoked the picture of her the first time he’d
ever seen her, getting out of her car after the blowout, standing there shaking
with after-the-event jitters. The lady
Nebraska
lawyer, maybe thirty-five, tall and
slender, with straight brown hair. The one that put the five-million-dollar-job
idea in his head in the first place.

           
He said, “How in Christ’s name did
you know I was here?”

           
“Frank,” she said, “I blame myself.
When I said all that to you about the one big job, I didn’t expect you to do
anything like
this”

           
“Am I blown?” he demanded. “Do they
have a make on me out there?” Not that it really mattered any more; he just
wanted to know.

           
Surprisingly, she said, “No. I
^’
m
the only one who knows it’s you, Frank, and I want to—“

             
    
“How?”

           
“Oh, come on, Frank, what difference
does it make? I know you people must be about ready to give up in there—“

           
Frank looked over at the experiment
on the table, and grinned a little. “You could say that.”

           
“You don’t have to,” she said. “Will
you trust me, Frank?”

           
Why should he? On the other hand,
why should he not? She’d treated him decentiy back in
Nebraska
, when he changed the tire for her, even
tried to give him three hundred dollars to keep him from a life of crime. And
if she was really the only one on the outside who knew a guy named Frank
Hillfen was among the hijackers, then maybe she
was
trustworthy as far as he was concerned.

           
But, still.
Why
should she be reliable? What was in it for her? Frank said,
“That depends. You want me to walk out there and give myself up?”

           
“No! That’s the last thing I want
you to do, Frank. Well; the next to the last thing.”

           
“So what do you want?”

           
“I want you to convince Maria Elena
to go on living, that’s the first thing.”

           
Frank was astonished all over again.
“You know about
her? How?”

           
“Frank,” she said, sounding hurried
and impatient, “I’m not going to answer any of those questions, so just stop
asking them. I want you to convince her to live, Frank. Then you can leave
Grigor in charge—“

           
“Leave?”

           
“The others are going to die
anyway,” she said, brisk and callous. “You and Maria Elena can live.”

           
“In jail,” he said bitterly.

           
“No. Listen to me, Frank. If you go
outside and pass around the right cooling tower on the outside—not between the
towers— you’re going to see a radio mast on a mountain way ahead of you. If you
walk straight toward that, when you come to the perimeter fence you’ll find a
small hole at the base of it, dug by animals.”

           
“The fence is wired. They’ll know
when we go through.”

           
“The switches are in the control
section,” she said. “Grigor can turn off the rear security area twenty minutes
after you leave, then turn it back on ten minutes later. You’ll have plenty of
time to get through. Then you keep walking straight, and when you get to the
county road there’ll be a car parked there. No keys in it, but you can jump-start
a car, can’t you, Frank?”

           
“I don’t get this,” Frank said. His
mind was swimming; this was James Bond time. How did she
know
all this stuff, if nobody else knew any of it? The only thing
certain was that she wouldn’t answer that question.

           
“I’m trying to make it up to you,
Frank,” Mary Ann Kelleny was saying, “for steering you wrong in the first place.
Now, listen. If you can convince Maria Elena to come with you, then when you
get clear away you’ll find out that something happened two days ago that will
see to it you never have to work again. You did like retirement, didn’t you,
Frank?”

           
Frank couldn’t help it; his mouth
twisted with sardonic disbelief: “Another five-mil hit?”

           
“Oh, you don’t need that much,
Frank,” she said, as though they were just kidding around here together. “You
do want to retire, don’t you? With Maria Elena.”

           
Frank looked over again at the
funny-looking glass jug on the table; the professor’s experiment. There’s
something truly weird going on here, he thought.
Truly
weird. His voice barely audible, he said, “You know a lot of
stuff, don’t you, Ms. Kelleny? You know what’s happening here.”

           
“Some,” she said.

           
“And that thing’s loaded, isn’t it?
It really
is
loaded.”

           
There was a little silence. Then,
“Don’t bump into anything, Frank,” Mary Ann Kelleny said. “On your way out.”
And she hung up.

           
The half of the telephone conversation
that Grigor could hear made no sense. All he knew was, the exertion of the last
hour had worn him down to only the smallest spark of self. But at the same
time, this delay was taking from his resolve.

           
The idea of ending it with
everybody else;
how’s that for the
ultimate joke? No longer would I be an object of pity, of study, of
embarrassment, of condescension. We’re all in the same boat together, and the
boat’s at the bottom of the ocean. Yes, that was a good way to think of it: the
ultimate joke on the human race.

           
But the phone call, the delay, the
incomprehensibility of what Frank was saying, all served to confuse the issue
in Grigor’s mind. He found himself remembering Boris Boris, that aggressive
comic bear, the only other man in the world who was entided, the man who had
appreciated and nurtured Grigor’s small talent, given him something to think
about beyond his own imminent end. What would Boris Boris think of Grigor
Basmyonov’s last joke?

           
“Not funny, Grigor. You owe me some
good jokes, or what the hell are you doing in my office?”

           
The doctors at the Bone Disease
Research Clinic in
Moscow
; the doctors at the hospital just a few miles from here. Is this the
way to setde their bills?

           
That’s the problem with getting rid
of everybody: there’s nobody left.

           
What a group we are, he thought. Not
one of us has any close living relative, nor anyone who deeply loves us. (A
ruefiil thought of Susan crossed his mind.) And then we had this perfect
meeting with the scientist, the coldly rational man who explained to us our own
futility and shameful inadequacy, so that even we could see it.

           
A momentum was there, a readiness to
do
it, to risk the destruction of
everything simply because we ourselves had already been destroyed. And who
could blame us afterward? (Another joke.)

           
The phone call has broken that
momentum. I am not the man I was three minutes ago. My revulsion from the human
race does not include revulsion from certain humans. Boris Boris. Susan.

           
I don’t think I can go through with
it.

           
But what about Frank? Grigor watched
him, trying to make sense of the phone call, and when it finished and Frank
hung up the receiver and turned around, Grigor saw from his face that he too
had changed. But in what direction?

           
Frank looked at the scientist. “It isn’t
fifty-fifty,” he said.

           
The scientist’s face was softer,
more pliable, than when they’d first invaded his domain. His emotions now were
more readily decoded there. And at this moment, Grigor saw, the scientist was
torn, wasn’t sure what to do. He strongly wanted to defend his beliefs, but not
if doing so would lead to violence or destruction. And he’d lost some of his
earlier assurance in his own theories. He stammered a litde, under Frank’s
steady look, and then said, ‘Whatever the odds, I beg you not to do it.”

           
So it really
is
the end of the world, Grigor thought, looking again at that
botde in the bright light. That’s what’s in there. It contains nothing that we
can see, but it’s a nothing that could make nothing of us all.

           
Frank was saying, “Maria, why don’t
we live to fight another day?”

           
Maria Elena responded with a
haughty, angry look, stepping away from him, putting her hand on the crouched
Pami’s shoulder. “You
want
to live?
In
this
world?”

           
“It’s the only one we’ve got.”

           
“We don’t have it!
They
have it!”

           
“Maria,” Frank said, “I think we
just got a chance to pull ourselves out of this.”

           
Grigor, pressing his palms onto his
thighs to give himself the strength to speak, said, “I don’t have a chance, you
know. Neither does Pami.”

           
Frank turned to him. His eyes looked
very sure. He said, “Grigor, I could die twenty times, it wouldn’t change
what’s gonna happen to you. You know that.”

           
Grigor’s eyes half closed as he
considered, as he tried to find his place in this. He said, “But I am better testimony
if I am here, in this plant. Alive or dead. There’s no point in my making an
escape.”

           
“You’re right about that,” Frank
agreed. “But staying behind, you could help Maria and me get clear.”

           
Maria Elena said, “Frank? You’ve
really changed your mind?” He reached out for her hand, but she wouldn’t let
him have it yet. Fie said, “That thing over there, that’s not suicide, that’s
killing everything forever, ending the whole story. Maria? You don’t want to
kill
everybody!”

           
 
“BUT I DO!”

           
The voice was Pami’s, a terrible
amplified crow-squawk. She lunged forward, away from Maria Elena’s hand. She
couldn’t walk, but she could scramble on all fours, as quick as a crippled cat,
scutding toward the experiment on the table.

           
The Chinese kid, the lab assistant,
launched himself at her, grabbing her arm and shoulder, pulling her back. Her
head snapped around, teeth flashing.

           
Grigor stretched out a useless hand:
“She has AIDS!”

           
The Chinese boy recoiled from that
snarling, biting mouth. Pami lunged again for the table, but this time she’d
pushed her body too far. Her torso arched, her bones jutted out against her
clothes, and her mouth stretched wide as she curved impossibly backward. She
managed one short scream, blocked by a gush of blood, and dropped to the floor,
a thrown-away rag. A red halo of corrupt blood circled her head.