thumping tread on the back stairs.
Then silence fell, and what he listened to now was the silence. Soon, the words came again, the words— whispering, shouting, demanding, from the other universe.
It was Martin, and he was talking to himself, and Wiley knew why. The poor guy had stayed here at the house, and was trying to force himself not to follow his family, and was agonized about that.
Martin was crying out, Martin was more desperate than any human being Wylie had ever known.
FIVE
DECEMBER 3
THE BUNKER
AND NOW, SUDDENLY, WYLIE WAS looking at trees. At grass. He knew that he was far from Harrow, Kansas.
He wanted to return to Martin. He could feel the poor guy’s mind just racing for solutions, could feel his hunger to give up and blow his poor damn brains out, and his agony that he could not because those he loved could not.
He took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and saw that he was in a dark meadow in a pine woods. There were vents low to the ground, humming softly. Two deer, their ears turning this way and that, ventured out from the shadows.
Then he thought maybe he knew what this was. Martin had followed his family after all. He would have loaded his car up with food and water and set out through the woods and across the fields of his beloved Kansas, and that’s where this was.
But no, it was too quiet and too—well, the word was creepy. It had an evil feel to it. Nasty. The deer were uneasy, flipping their tails, their great eyes wary.
Night was falling here, the west was dense with clouds…and there was flickering in the clouds. A sign, he feared, of the disks.
Then he wasn’t in a meadow anymore, he was in a gray place that was softly rumbling. There were walls here, a long corridor lit by bulbs in wire cages.
Footsteps came, somebody moving fast, and a man in uniform wheeled around a corner. General Al North moved along the hallway in what appeared to be a military bunker of some sort. As the general came closer, Wylie could see that his fatigues were dirty, his face was sheened with sweat, his eyes, which had been gray and full of resolve in Washington, were now the flitting eyes of a rat.
So, he had survived the attack. Wiley had wondered about what had happened to these people. This was a huge thing, involving the whole world, and Washington had taken one of the early hits.
Al burst into Tom Samson’s office. “Does the president know about this?” he shouted, throwing a crumpled sheet of paper down on his superior officer’s desk.
“How dare you!”
“You’re telling them to congregate? To gather in groups? Are you insane?”
“God damn you.”
“Oh, shut up with your bluster, Tom. You’re in way over your head and you never should’ve been appointed and we both know it. But this—this isn’t just executive ineptitude. This is treason and I want an explanation that satisfies me, or I’m gonna arrest you, General.”
“You? You don’t have the authority.”
“This is war. We’re out of touch with higher authority.”
“The president of the United States is two offices away.”
“And I’m carryin’ and you’re not, and I’ll shoot you as soon as look at you unless you explain this goddamn thing. How many people have received this?”
“Pitifully few, given that I’m forced to deliver it with blimps, trucks, Cessnas, and word of mouth.”
“Let me go in another direction with this. We got a communication from Fort Riley about three hours ago, to the effect that a group of small towns northwest of Topeka took a terrific hit last night. They had your pamphlet. They congregated in their churches. And eight out of ten of these people are now wanderers. Thank you, Tom. I thank you for them, for their families, for the country. And what’s this Kansas deal? Why did you even leaflet these people? Did you somehow know that Lautner County was gonna take a hit?”
“Of course not.”
“Oh, no, you did. Because you singled it out. Two days ago, you directed a blimp run over the whole area.”
“Routine.”
“Really? Why not hit Topeka? Why not hit K.C.? But instead, you just go to this one little county. So I have to ask you, Tom, who’s side are you on?”
“Don’t be ridiculous!”
“Our chains of command are busted all to hell, Tom. We’re going down in damn flames, worldwide. Bases raided by the disks time and again, desertions by the tens of thousands—we’re done, man.”
“We have a weapon.”
“What? Stealth bombers? Nukes like the one that failed to do jack shit to the lens on Easter Island? Now, there was a good move. We nuke ’em and as a result they pick up their pace a hundredfold. So I’m not so sure I even want to hear about this damn weapon.”
“You want to hear about it.”
He picked up the crumpled pamphlet. “I want to hear about this, Tom.”
“Aw, Christ. Has anybody ever actually told you what an extreme asshole you are?”
“Please,” Al said.
“You talk about failure of discipline—speaking of Kansas, you belong in Leavenworth.”
Should Al just draw the gun and shoot? How would the president react to that? “Tom, you should’ve told them to hide, seal themselves in spaces where no light can reach. Force the attack to be executed in detail. Takes more time that way, and we already know that they withdraw at dawn.”
“Fish school because mathematically the survival rate among large populations being attacked by predators is greater than that for isolated individuals. Same goes for herding animals. And under these circumstances, my friend, the same exact principle applies to us.”
“Let’s put it to the president.”
“The pamphlets are being distributed as fast as we can manage it, and that’s going to continue. Do you know why we were concerned about Lautner County?”
“No.”
“Your friend, the little man, the archaeologist—he’s there. And they want him dead, I can assure you.”
“They? I’m dealing with lenses that emit these bursts of disks every night that go out and wreak havoc. There is no ‘they.’”
“Somebody’s behind the lenses and behind the disks, never doubt it, and your man is a danger because he has the smarts and the knowledge of the deep past to maybe figure this out, and maybe—just maybe—to figure out a vulnerability. And they know it, and they are after that man.”
“Did they get him?”
“Don’t know. The place is in chaos, communications are down.”
“Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“You still ready to shoot me?”
Al was silent.
“Then you start respecting my command. You salute me, and you call me sir.”
Al shook his head, laughing to himself.
“Do it now, goddamn you!”
The two men glared at each other. Al did not salute.
