Psychlone (31 page)

Then he saw them. Coming through the smoke, rising up from the road like two-dimensional figures in a shooting gallery, assuming three-dimensional form, stumbling, crawling, lurching, their skin like black wool, falling away, their eyes empty. Sexless, ageless, equalized. Baked plasma dripping clear from their skin. They marched, and behind them the road steamed.

Jacobs tried to stand, fell to his knee, then tried again and pulled Trumbauer on to his shoulder. Nathan and Sally were nowhere to be seen, but in the chaos he could hear the sound of automatic weapon fire. Carrying Trumbauer, Jacobs pushed between the smoky, hazy figures, smelling them, hearing them chant. His neck itched distantly. There were blisters on the back of his hands. Trumbauer was like a rag.

Circles of green hands and faces spun in the smoke.

The ground split and Jacobs leaped across. From the crack, a bloody horse tried to rise, but there was no order in its bones. Its rider was spread across its back like butter.

A broken fire hydrant spewed water across the road, and, insanely, bodies floated in the river, bobbing, swollen, anonymous faces upturned, black hands beseeching.

Jacobs tried to run but Trumbauer weighed too much. He sloshed across the shallow stream of hydrant water.

And then, ahead, he saw a figure in khaki, waving them on. Squinting against the smoke, Jacobs followed. The silos and elevator were mangled skeletons of steel. The road beyond was intact. Unburned grass grew between the railroad tracks. The purple smoke was thinning.

He looked up, rubbed his eyes with one hand, and saw the hill, the lights circling the weapon, tiny figures running. He saw the barrel lift. Nothing seemed to issue from its tip, but streamers of violet radiated outward from the plateau. For an instant, the streamers were steady like searchlight beams. Then they began to bend and twist into helices. Lightning flared over Siloam Springs, playing through the clouds of smoke, some of the bolts bending back upon themselves in mid-air. The purpleness at the center of the town seethed and bubbled. Jacobs was reminded of the blebs in a living cell about to divide.

The air filled with a metallic buzz. From loudspeakers on the hill he heard a tinny shout, “Penetration!” The violet beams dissipated. An amber glow rippled like a circular blanket above the town. Pseudopods of blood red writhed on its edges. One arm extended toward the hill, dimming as it passed outside the influence of the beams. Then it fell back.

On the hill, men were dancing, on fire, like clowns in hell.

“Solution!” the loudspeakers rang.

The noise was sub-sonic. It reverberated through Jacobs’ body, making him feel like a bell.

Miss Unamuno helped hand out the fire extinguishers and personally foamed down two technicians. She glanced wild-eyed at the weapon. The doughnuts stacked behind the barrel crackled and snapped.

The spikes on the bulbous midriff leaned forward.

And one by one, the generators shorted and caught fire. One tore loose from its mount and pin-wheeled across the ground, breaking through the ribbon perimeter and gouging a furrow in the dirt before coming to a smoking rest.

Above Siloam Springs, the night returned.

Burnford stopped groaning and lay still on the ground. He sat up and wiped tears from his eyes, feeling his face with his fingers. Miss Unamuno stood behind him, sighing with a shudder.

The second shock-wave—if that was what it was—hit without warning. Trumbauer was lifted from Jacobs’ back and he felt himself falling dreamily to the ground. His head was filled with faces, some horribly disfigured, others whole, beseeching ... and fading.

The screams lingered, but only Miss Unamuno heard them, and heard them fade, too.

It was over. Men swarmed across the generators, spraying them with water and foam. Steam hissed into the air. General Machen got to his feet unsteadily.

“They're gone,” Miss Unamuno said.

“Where?” Burnford asked.

“No trace. I could feel it—and so could they. The end of all things, all perceiving."

From the edge of the plateau, one of the four technicians who had caught fire, his robe blackened and hair singed but otherwise unhurt, called out, “Solution! All sensors nominal!"

Jacobs found Trumbauer still alive, not even badly injured. He picked him up in his arms. Footsteps came up behind him. It was Sally, clutching the walkie-talkie, her eyes almost swollen shut. A few yards to one side, Nathan limped across a field.

Jacobs turned back to Siloam Springs. The air was black except for the light of scattered fires. He looked down on Trumbauer, still unconscious but breathing easier.

“Now we have the power,” Jacobs whispered.

Millicent Jacobs brought her husband's breakfast to the small house behind the garden. He was sitting by the typewriter, biting his thumbnail. She set the tray down on top of a bookcase, balancing it precariously. Every other surface was covered with books and papers.

“How's it going?” she asked.

“You don't want to know."

“Trouble?"

“I can't write. It's too cold out here."

“I think it's fine."

“Yes, well, every time you open the door it gets too cold."

“This is the first time I've been here since you started this morning,” she said patiently.

Jacobs sighed and backed his chair away from the typewriter. “I can't write anything to publish because I can't say anything important. They won't let me."

“My husband, the man of mystery."

“I could get put in jail if I even told you."

“I'm not sure I want to be told, anyway,” Millicent said, looking blankly at the dusty window across the room. She had never known her husband so deeply upset, irritated, jumpy.

“No, maybe not. But I have to write it down, even if nobody reads it. I wrote the President a letter, but I wonder.... It's very crackpot stuff, you know. I've tried talking to others. They won't listen to me. That scientist, Burnford, he's moved away and I don't know where. Prohaska isn't working for his station any more. They say he's on extended leave, writing a book about logging."

Millicent put her hand on his shoulder. “Arnold listens,” she said.

“He knows what happened as well as I. I don't need to tell him."

“Then ... tell me. If it's so important, tell me."

“I can't,” he said, staring at the typewriter. As soon as she had come in he had put a piece of cardboard over the page, obscuring what he was writing. “I can't tell anybody, and it's eating me alive."

Millicent's face hardened. “What does this have to do with patriotism? What do they—"

“Listen,” Jacobs said softly, “I'll eat breakfast. Then I'll write what I have to write. But you can't be here."

“All right,” Millicent said, trying to sound neutral. “Perhaps later we can go to a movie."

“Yes."

She left and closed the door behind her.

“No more movies,” Jacobs said quietly. He took his hand away from the page. “Dear Mr. President,” he read silently, lips mouthing the words to feel their sound and sense. This was the fourth draft.

“Dear Mr. President. Thirty years ago—more than thirty—” He scratched out the sentence. “At the end of the Second World War, we used a weapon of awesome power in an attempt to save human lives. We have lived under the shadow of even stronger weapons ever since...” He shook his head and scratched out the passage, then ripped the paper from the machine.

“Dear Mr. President,” he began again. “Once more, we have used the power of science to end a struggle and try to save human lives..."

Again he ripped the paper from the typewriter. It had to be succinct and clear. That was why he was afraid nobody would listen—expressed clearly, it was outrageous. He could hardly believe it himself. He pounded one fist on the edge of the machine, making it rattle. To hell with who read it and who didn't.

“We have been given the keys to our cage,” he wrote, “one by one, across tens of thousands of years. A key to the bars of cold and raw meat; a key to open the doors of understanding—thousands of keys for that, and more doors still to be opened. You, Lord, have given us more and more freedom—freedom over procreation, freedom from many diseases, freedom from dark and some old fears, as if You thought we were growing up, getting more mature. Each time we had a new key, we thought it was the last door, the final conquest—freedom, now, to shape our bodies and those of our children, to leave the Earth, freedom even to choose whether or not we should live or die. But there always seemed a barrier to truly botching everything, a final safeguard—I know I felt secure thinking that. Thinking there was a final protection, that beyond death we might have more chances, more trials. It seemed an indestructible guarantee. You would always hold that finality back from us."

He paused, fingers barely tapping the keys.

“Thank You, Lord, for believing we have grown up.” He read over what he had written and shook his head. “Thank You for giving us this final key. You must think we are ready for it, terribly mature, terribly ready to accept all responsibility. Thank You for giving us the final powers of a god. For that final freedom to choose."

It must be the curse of the totally free, he thought, that they would never sleep soundly, never close their eyes without deep and abiding fear.

How long had it been since Arnold had told him, two days? Arnold had felt the little whirlwinds; out in the desert, in Nevada and Arizona, they were testing that terrible machine, first on animals. The wounded and desiccated souls of goats, sheep, dogs, baboons. The strange, metallic-tasting particle-scatter of total death. Arnold had felt it happening.

Soon enough, it would spread.

Visit www.ereads.com for information on additional titles by this and other great authors.