“Hey, mister.”
He looked up.
A black form, like a monstrous bat, was suspended above him. The woman. Jenny Edison. He could not see her face, but he had no doubt about who she was. She had heard him coming up the stairs when he thought he was being so clever. She had climbed atop the bell and had braced herself in the steel bell supports, against the ceiling, at the highest point of the arch, six feet overhead, like a goddamned bat.
It’s twenty-seven years since I was in Korea, he thought. I’m too old for commando raids. Too old…
He couldn’t see the gun she held, but he knew he was looking into the barrel of it.
Behind him the Annendale girl scrambled out of the line of fire.
It happened so fast, too fast.
“Good riddance, you bastard,” the Edison woman said.
He never heard the shot.
Dawson landed on his back in the middle of the inclined ramp. Trapped in the other man’s clumsy but effective embrace, Paul fell on top of him, driving the breath from both of them.
After a long shudder, the conveyor belt adjusted to their weight. It swiftly carried them headfirst toward the open mouth of the scrap furnace.
Gasping, limp, Paul managed to raise his head from Dawson’s heaving chest. He saw a circle of yellow and orange and red flames flickering satanically thirty yards ahead.
Twenty-five yards…
Winded, with a bullet wound in one shoulder, having cracked his head against the ramp when he fell, Dawson was not immediately in a fighting mood. He sucked air, choked on the fiercely heavy rain, and blew water from his nostrils.
The belt clattered and thumped upward.
Twenty yards…
Paul tried to roll off that highway of death.
With his good hand Dawson held Paul by the shirt.
Fifteen yards…
“Let go… you… bastard.” Paul twisted, squirmed, hadn’t the strength to free himself.
Dawson’s fingers were like claws.
Ten yards…
Tapping his last reserves of energy, the dregs from the barrel, Paul pulled back his fist and punched Dawson in the face.
Dawson let go of him.
Five yards…
Whimpering, already feeling the furnace heat, he threw himself to the right, off the ramp.
How far to the ground?
He fell with surprisingly little pain into a bed of weeds and mud beside the mill pond.
When he looked up he saw Dawson — delirious, unaware of the danger until it was too late for him — dropping headfirst into that crackling, spitting, roiling, hellish pit of fire.
If the man screamed, his voice was blotted out by a cymbal-like crash of thunder.
THE ENDING
Saturday, August 27, 1977
The mess hall at the logging camp was a rectangle, eighty feet by forty feet. Sam and Rya sat behind a dining table at one end of the long room. A single-file line of weary lumbermen stretched from their table across the hall and out the door at the far end.
As each man stepped up to the table, Sam used the power of the key-lock program to restructure his memory. When the new recollections were firmly implanted, he excused the man — and Rya struck a name from the Big Union Supply Company’s employee list.
Between the thirtieth and the thirty-first subject, Rya said to Sam, “How do you feel?”
“How do
“I’m not the one who was shot.”
“You’ve been hurt too,” he said.
“All I feel is — grown up.”
“More than that.”
“And sad,” she said.
“And sad.”
“Because it’ll never be the same. Not ever.” Her lips trembled. She cleared her throat. “Now, how’s your leg?”
“About a yard long,” he said.
He pulled on her chin.
She pulled on his beard.
He managed to get a smile from her, and that was better medicine than Doc Troutman’s antibiotics.
The storm clouds had begun to break up two hours ago. Dawn brought welcome shafts of autumn sunlight.
In the dense pine forest, half a mile above Black River, three men lowered the remains of Dawson, and the bodies of Salsbury and Klinger into a common grave.
“All right,” Jenny told them. “Fill it in.”
With each shovelful of dirt that struck the corpses, she felt more alive.
After a refueling stop in Augusta, the hornetlike helicopter put down on the landing pad behind the Greenwich house at nine thirty in the morning.
“Get it gassed up and serviced for a trip back to Black. River this evening,” Paul said.
“Yes, sir,” Malcolm Spencer said.
“Then go home and get some sleep. Be back here by seven o’clock this evening. That should give us both time to rest. ”
“I can use it,” Spencer said.
Paul got out of the helicopter and stretched. He had showered and shaved and changed clothes before leaving Maine, but that had refreshed him only temporarily. He was stiff, sore, and tired deep in his bones.
He went to the rear door of the stone house and knocked.
A servant answered. She was a plump, pleasant-faced woman in her fifties. Her hair was tied back in a bun. Her hands were white with flour. “Yes, sir?”
“I am the key.”
“I am the lock.”
“Let me in.”
She stepped out of his way.
Inside, he said, “Where’s the computer?”
“The what, sir?” she asked.
“The computer. Dawson’s computer.”
“I haven’t any idea, sir.”
He nodded. “Okay. Forget about me. Go back to whatever you were doing.” He looked around the elaborately equipped kitchen. “Doing a bit of baking, I see. Go ahead with it. Forget that I was ever here.”
Humming to herself, she returned to the counter beside the oven.
