that high.” His grin widened in red light. “Believe me, Cowboy, they’ve tried.”
“What about outside?” Pettis inquired.
Wyatt answered, still smiling in the red glow, “You’ll see.”
“I don’t like it,” Pettis complained. He looked down at his daughter, curled miserably at the bottom of the huge mirror, before turning his hard eyes to the outside air through the dome slit, to wait for the wolves to come.
CHAPTER 18
The Young Girl
We heard their howls and then we saw their shapes. There were about twenty, gray shadows in the moonlight, pacing up the road to the observatory. They entered the front door, snarling, knocking over whatever was in their way, and then they were on the stairs, their claws clicking on the steps. They burst through the door into the room, one after another, yellow eyes aglow. They glared up at us, teeth bared. I counted nine, meaning the others had peeled off from the pack.
Pettis lowered his Uzi to spray them, but Wyatt quietly stopped him. “That’ll just make things worse. I’ve got some work to do, and I’d like it as quiet as possible till I’m finished. If you shoot ‘em, they’ll just make a lot of noise tearing each other up.”
“Damn it, Wyatt!” Pettis complained.
“Just watch,” Proctor counseled gently.
One of the wolves had circled completely around the telescope. It now stopped at the bottom of the platform. It tensed, then ran up the short flight of steps and leaped, trying to catch the bottom rungs of the locked ladder. It failed by a yard and fell yapping to the floor. It circled again, growling in frustration.
“Let ‘em have fun,” Proctor said, returning to his eyepiece. “The real show’s at the slit, Cowboy.”
Reluctantly, Pettis turned away from the commotion on the floor below us. Another, larger wolf had tried to reach the ladder and missed. The others were now milling about, pacing in tight circles, snorting.
Wyatt wheeled from his position at the focuser. “What the—” Pettis said as Wyatt produced a .44 from the inside of his jacket and aimed past Pettis’s ear. Something had appeared at the slit level with us, staring in with a baleful copper glare and then throwing itself across the gulf between dome and cage.
The sound of Wyatt’s .44 echoed through the dome. The wolf fell screaming to the floor, claws just scraping our cage.
Instantly, the others were on the wounded beast, tearing it to pieces even as it howled in pain.
“There goes my peace and quiet,” Proctor sighed. He pointed to the dome slit. “Listen real close; you can hear their claws tapping on the gridwork of the catwalk out there.”
I heard the
“Think you fellows can handle things for a while?” Proctor asked mildly, tucking his .44 away. “I’d like to get some work done.”
“Go on,” Pettis said. There was a slight smile on his face now.
In the next two hours, as Wyatt studied the Moon, Cowboy and I shot four more wolves. One ignored the initial slugs we put into it and actually reached the cage, grasping it with its claws. Its teeth pulled back in rage as it bashed its open mouth against the metal, trying to break through. It began to climb. We put a few more rounds into it. Still it refused to fall.
Proctor, chiding us for disturbing him, pulled his .44 and put two shots into the thing’s eyes. Its head thrashing wildly, it fell into the waiting throng below.
At three in the morning, Pettis nudged me. I must have been dozing because he said, “Why don’t you climb down and sleep?” I protested, until he added, “You’re no good to me anyhow. Relieve me in a couple of hours.”
I agreed and whirled out of the cage and down into the depths of the telescope. The sound of my descent set off a mad rage in the wolves below. My stomach tightened as I reached the mirror. Though there were two tons of glass and metal between us, I was only a matter of feet from the beasts.
Amy was nestled against the curve of the tube, asleep. I crawled to the opposite side and lay down. It was more comfortable than I thought it would be, the bow of my back settling against the telescope neatly, if rigidly. Avoiding the mirror, whose funhouse properties still disturbed what little sense of reality I retained after the past few days, I lay, head cradled on one arm, staring up at the dark forms of the three men in the cage above me. Pettis was silent, Doc and Wyatt talking in low tones, arguing as if they were at a seminar instead of in a tiny metal cage suspended above a pack of hungry, vicious devils that would gladly tear them to pieces had they the chance.
Doc argued reasonably, in his cultured Oxford tones.
Wyatt answered just as reasonably, “The only way is to put them there and hope for the best.”
“Let’s make sure there’s no other way,” Doc replied, and then the two of them launched into another discussion that became less and less intelligible to me.
I stared up at the three men in the cage dreamily, as my eyes began to close…
“Mr. Blake?”
I blinked awake and turned my head to find Amy wide awake and staring at me.
“Am I disturbing you?” She sounded lonely.
“Not at all. What’s wrong?”
She had crawled over to sit near me, keeping a respectful distance but obviously craving company. “I miss my mother.”
“I know how you feel, Amy. I’ve lost two people who were very dear to me.”
“I loved my mother very much. She had a beautiful garden next to our house; she taught me all the names of the flowers and vegetables. She took care of that garden the way she took care of me. She was always there when I needed her.” She hesitated. “My father…”
I was curious to hear about her father, and waited until she was ready to speak.
“My father is a very hard person. He was always busy with his work. When he was there he always demanded so much. My mother didn’t expect me to be anybody but myself.”
“Did your mother and father get along?”
She looked surprised at my question. “They loved each other a lot.”
“All those things your mother said in the bomb shelter—”
“My mother said those things because she didn’t want him to die. He insisted on doing everything himself. She didn’t see why he couldn’t let someone else be the leader. She was afraid.” Amy looked at me as the wolves raged outside. “I’m afraid, too.”
“We’re all afraid.”
“It’s just that…”As she struggled to express herself, a mixture of child and adult, I realized that in the confusion and constant action of the past day there had not been time for her to become a person for me; she had just been one of the players, someone who had come onto my stage, and who might be yanked off at any time. I tried to gauge how old she was: twelve? thirteen? A child who had been forced to grow up overnight.
“It’s just that”—she sobbed suddenly—“I want things to be the way they were.”
She tried to be an adult, not to cry. I tried to think of some magical words to say that would make everything all right. But suddenly she was holding me tight around the shoulders, burying her face in my chest.
“Oh, God, what’s going to happen to us…”
I held her—and then I held her tighter, imagining she was my own child. I tried to comfort her the way I would have comforted Richie. This was a new world, and from now on, all of us would have to be parents.
After a while, her sobs became whimpers, and then she slept. I cradled her against me and leaned back. My spine found a comfortable curve in the belly of the telescope, the metal beast, and I rested.
Up above, Doc and Wyatt still discussed.
“On the far side,” Doc insisted.
“I can see that. And we can drop them right
