CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Morning found the test site hushed and vacant.

The last technician had left at midnight. The observation bunker was miles to the east, a slit-windowed slab of reinforced concrete. Remote monitors communicated the status of the weapon to banks of telemetry consoles inside, their anodized faceplates glittering with jewel-faceted lights. The telltales showed amber or green in reassuring patterns. Everything was going according to plan. Everything was as it should be, Milos Fabrikant thought—at least within the narrow compass of these machines.

Fabrikant had been invited here as an observer, and he still had not received a convincing explanation why the Proctors had chosen this particular place to test the weapon: was Cartagena a snowbound target? Was Spain so full of pine woods?

But the Proctors, inevitably, followed their own logic. He hadn’t pressed the issue. All Fabrikant had done was his duty, which was to extract enriched uranium isotopes and apply them to the manufacture of a bomb. Three functional implosion-type weapons had been constructed, with more on the way; one of them rested on the gantry in the forest. The other two had been shipped to some Atlantic airbase or other, and if this test was successful the bombs would be dropped on belligerent Europe. And then God help us all.

He had seen the yield prediction from the Bureau Centrality, and it was even more prodigious than his own calculation. He wondered who was right. In either case, the numbers defied imagination. Divining energy from mass, he thought, as if we were Archons ourselves: the sheer hubris of it!

He was privileged to be here. And not a little frightened.

He turned to the Censeur in charge, that unpleasant man Bisonette. “How long—”

“Two or three hours yet, Monsieur Fabrikant. Please be patient.” I wasn’t trying to hurry it, Fabrikant thought.

Symeon Demarch had stayed close to the telephone all night, talking in relay rounds to Bisonette at the test bunker, Delafleur at City Hall, Trebach at the soldiers’ quarters, and the commandant at Fort LeDuc. From the dim light of Evelyn’s study he had watched the parade of lights along the far shore of Lake Merced, a huge detachment of Proctors and senior military men in a convoy bound for safety and the south. The traffic had possessed a strange beauty in the falling snow. It looked like a candlelight procession, like a body of Renunciates making a midnight pilgrimage on Ascension Eve.

The procession of automobile lights faded long before dawn. Of those leaving Two Rivers, only Trebach and Delafleur and himself (and their chauffeurs) were left. Delafleur was worried about some unrest at the military barracks; he tied up /???/ the line to Bisonette and Demarch’s phone was quiet for an hour before sunrise. Demarch sat motionless in the silence, not asleep but not really awake… only sitting.

A military car came for him at dawn.

He answered the knock at the front door and told the driver, “All right. Yes. Just wait a moment.”

“Sir, we don’t have much time.” The driver was a young man and worried. “There’s trouble in town. You can hear the shooting. And this snow is a problem, too.”

“I won’t be long.”

He trudged upstairs to the bedroom. Evelyn was inside. Perhaps she hadn’t slept, either. She was wearing the dress he had imported from the capital so many months ago. She looked frail in that confection. Frail and beautiful. The bedroom window faced the wind, and the snow had covered it completely; Evelyn looked up at him from a dimness of silk and ice. Her eyes were wide.

She said, “Is this it? Are we leaving now?”

Demarch felt as if something had lurched inside him. Incipit vita nova, he thought dazedly. A new life begins: not when he joined the Bureau but now, here in this room. Now something is left behind; now something is forsaken.

He thought of Dorothea and the memory was so vivid that her face seemed to float in front of him. He thought of Christof and of Christof’s wary eyes. He had left home for a place less real, a makeshift and temporary place, he thought; it would only exist for a few hours more.

He thought of Guy Marris, missing three fingers from his right hand.

Downstairs, the driver was calling his name. Evelyn frowned.

“It’s only a chore,” he told her. “They want me at City Hall. I’ll be back before long.”

He left the room before she could answer. He didn’t want to know whether or not she believed him.

Evelyn hurried downstairs and reached the big window in the front room just as the car was pulling away. It skidded on the snow-slick surface of Beacon Street, then picked up speed as it headed east and out of sight.

When the sound of the motor faded she was able to hear another sound—popcorn bursts of distant gunfire, faint but unmistakable.

Was there still time to reach Dex Graham? Evelyn doubted it… and anyway, that wasn’t what she felt like doing.

Mainly she wanted to watch the snow. It looked lovely as it fell, she thought. It absorbed the attention. She would sit in her bedroom and watch the morning snow shaped into ripples and dunes by the wind that blew across the frozen surface of Lake Merced.

That would be a fine thing to be doing, Evelyn thought, when the bright light finally came. But first she wanted to change her clothes. She didn’t like this dress anymore. She didn’t want it touching her.

Clement Delafleur lost the phone line with Corporal Trebach and reached him moments later by radio. Trebach was shouting something about the barracks, about his men, but it was unintelligible in gusts of static; Delafleur told him, “Leave, for God’s sake—it doesn’t matter now! Just leave.” But there was no response. Trebach’s radio had failed, too.

Delafleur went to search for his own driver. He had fulfilled his duties with what he thought was considerable élan under pressure, and any inconvenience would soon be erased: as in the joke about doctors, he would bury his mistakes. If Trebach ran into trouble and was forced to stay, then Delafleur would be the last to leave… and that might impress Censeur Bisonette, who seemed to have overcome his distaste for the Ideological Branch. Delafleur was attracting patronage these days the way sugar attracts insects. It was a consoling thought.

He walked to the outer office where his chauffeur should have been. There was another radio here, tuned to the broadcast from the test bunker. It emitted a high-pitched whistle punctuated by bursts of incomprehensible data or mechanical time checks. Less than three hours to the detonation, Delafleur noted, and a little late to be leaving, but this messiness with Trebach had delayed him.

Where had the driver gone? The rest of the office was empty, of course. He had dismissed the staff, all faithful Proctors and pions, and sent them off in a midnight cortege. The driver had stayed behind, drinking black coffee from the strange cafetiere in the comer. But now the room was empty.

Delafleur roamed the carpeted hallways with an increasing but carefully suppressed anxiety. He checked the toilet, but the driver wasn’t there. Nor in the empty offices, their doors all ajar, nor in the marbled foyer on the first floor. There wasn’t time for this! He was suddenly conscious of the ebbing minutes, to which he had been oblivious only an hour ago. There was snow on the roads and some of it had drifted dangerously deep. They must leave soon.

He heard the sound of gunfire from the west. According to Trebach’s last dispatches, that was some disturbance at the edge of town: a guardpost had exchanged gunfire with civilian automobiles, presumably refugees attempting to escape on one of the logging roads. Trebach had sent out a few more troops, and that should have ended it. But the sporadic firing went on and on—a bad sign.