“Get me Tony,” Anson said, when Khalid was gone.
His conversation with his brother was brief. Tony had never been a deep thinker, nor was he a man of many words. He was eight years younger than Anson and had always held him in the deepest reverence. Loved him; feared him; looked up to him. Would do anything for him. Even this, Anson hoped.
He explained to Tony what was at stake, and what would be needed to bring it off.
“I’m going to give it a try,” Anson said. “It’s my responsibility.”
“Is that how you see it? Well, then.”
“That’s how I see it, yes. But the first one who goes down there may not bring it off. If I don’t succeed in killing Prime, will you agree to be the next one to take a whack at the job?”
“Sure,” Tony replied immediately. He seemed hardly even to give the matter any consideration. The difficulties, the risk. No frowns furrowed Tony’s broad, amiable, clear-eyed face. “Why not? Whatever you say, Anson. You’re the boss.”
“It won’t be that simple. It could involve months of special training. Years, maybe.”
“You’re the boss,” Tony said.
A little while later, as Khalid was finishing his morning’s work, Anson came to him. He looked even more tightly wound than usual, lips clamped tightly, eyebrows furrowed. They stood together outside the building, amidst the carved array of naked wooden Jills, and Anson said, “You told us just now that you were indifferent to the whole idea of killing Entities. That you were indifferent to it, apparently, even as you went about killing one.”
“Yes. This is so.”
“Do you think you could instruct somebody in that kind of indifference, Khalid? That way you have of wiping your mind clean of anything that might arouse an Entity’s defenses?”
“I could try, I suppose. I think it would not work. You have to be born to it, I think.”
“Perhaps not. Perhaps it could be taught.”
“Perhaps,” said Khalid.
“Could you try to teach me?”
That startled Khalid, that Anson would want to propose himself for what surely would be a suicide mission. Khalid could almost understand that sort of dedication to a task: in the abstract, at least. But Anson was the father of a large family, as Khalid was. Six, seven children already, Anson had, and still young himself, a few years younger even than Khalid. Year after year children came out of Raven, the plump little broad-hipped wife whom Anson had found for himself over in the ranch-hand compound, with unvarying regularity. You could always tell when spring had arrived, because Raven was having her annual baby. Did Anson not want the joy of watching those children grow up? Was it worth losing all that for the sake of a foolhardy attempt to kill some monstrous being from another world?
This was a pointless discussion, though. “You would never learn it,” Khalid said. “You have the wrong kind of mind. You could never be indifferent to anything.”
“Try me anyway.”
“I will not. It would be a waste of your time and mine.”
“What a stubborn bastard you are, Khalid!”
“Yes. Yes, I suppose I am that.”
He waited for Anson to go away. But Anson remained right there, looking at him, frowning, chewing on his lower lip, visibly calculating things. A moment or two went by; and then he said, “Well, then, Khalid, what about my brother Tony? He’s told me that he’d be willing.”
“Tony,” Khalid repeated. The big stupid one, yes. He was a different story, that one. “I suppose I could try it, with Tony,” Khalid said. “It probably would not work even for him, because I think it is a thing that you must learn from childhood, and even if he did learn, and he went to destroy the Entity, I think he would perish in the attempt. I think they would see through him no matter how well he is trained, and they would kill him. Which is something for you to consider. But I could try to teach him, yes. If that is what you want.”
FORTY-SEVEN YEARS FROM NOW
Toward dawn, bleary-eyed and going foggy in the head after sitting in front of seven computer screens all night long, Steve Gannett decided he had had enough. He was going to be fifty next year, a little old for pulling all- nighters. He looked up at the blond-haired boy who had just entered the communications center with a breakfast tray for him and said, “Martin, have you seen my son Andy around yet this morning?”
“I’m Frank, sir.”
“Sorry. Frank.” All of Anson’s goddamned kids looked alike. This one’s voice, he realized, had already begun to break, which would put him at about thirteen, which would make him Frank.
Martin was only around eleven. Steve looked groggily into the tray and said again, “Well, tell me, Frank, is Andy up yet?”
“I don’t know, sir. I haven’t seen him.—My father sent me to ask you for a progress report.”
“Minimal, tell him.”
“Minimum?”
“Close. Minimal is what I said. It means ‘very little.’ It means ‘just about goddamn none,’ as a matter of fact. Tell him that I didn’t get anywhere worth speaking of, but I do see one possible new approach to the problem, and I’m going to ask Andy to explore it this morning. Tell him that. And then, Frank, go look for Andy and tell him to get himself over here lickety-split.”
“Lickety-split?”
“’Extremely quickly’ is what that phrase means.”
Jesus Christ, Steve thought. The language is rotting away before my very eyes.
Anson, looking out the chart room’s open window half an hour later, saw Steve go trudging like a weary bullock across the lawn toward the Gannett family compound, and called out to him: “Hey, cousin! Cousin! Got a minute to spare for me?”
Yawning, Steve said, “Just about that much, I guess.” There was very little enthusiasm in his voice.
He came trudging over and peered in through the window. A light early-season rain had begun to fall, but Steve was standing out there as though unable to perceive that that was happening.
Anson said, “No. Come on inside. This may take a minute and a half, maybe even two, and you’re going to get soaked if you stay out there.”
“I would really like to get some sleep, Anson.”
“Just give me a little of your time first, cousin,” Anson said, a little less affably this time, his tone verging on what his father described as the Colonel-voice. Anson, who had been sixteen when the Colonel died, had only the vaguest of recollections of his grandfather’s special tone of command. But apparently he had inherited it.
“So?” Steve said, when he had arrived in the chart room, letting droplets of water fall to the rug in front of Anson’s leather-topped desk.
“So Frank tells me you say you’ve found some new approach to the Prime problem. Can you tell me what it is?”
“It’s not a new approach, exactly. It’s the approach to a new approach. What it is is, I think I’ve hacked into the entrance to Karl-Heinrich Borgmann’s private archives.”
“The Borgmann?”
“The very one. Our own special latter-day Judas himself.”
“He’s been dead for ages. You mean his archives still exist?”
“Listen, can we discuss this after I’ve had some sleep, Anson?”
“Just let me have a moment more. We’re approaching a kind of crisis point in the Prime project and I need to keep myself on top of all the data. Tell me about this Borgmann thing insofar as it may impact the hunt for Prime. I assume that that’s the angle, right? Some link to Prime in the Borgmann files?”
Steve nodded. He looked about ready to fall down. Anson wondered charitably whether he might be pushing the man too hard. He expected top-flight performance from everyone, the way his father had, the way the old
