Jesus loved little children.
She didn't see Michael, and as she started searching the crowd of singing children more closely, she noticed his total absence.
'I'm over here,' she heard a voice say, the voice shockingly deep, but recognizable.
She turned, looking at her son—he was growing too fast, she thought absently, watching him sitting on the running board of a Volkswagen beetle, the car dirty, dented, but apparently still serviceable.
'What's the matter, Michael?'
He looked up at her, his brown eyes not smiling, the corners of his still childish mouth downturned, the leanness of his face more pronounced than she ever remembered
having seen it. He had killed, he had saved her life and Annie's life—he had been a man.
'That's stupid—playing. Stupid.'
'It's not stupid to play,' she began, walking over to him. 'Scoot over,' and she nudged against him gently, sitting beside him on the running board of the VW.
'Yes, it is stupid—you know why?'
'No—tell me why,' she told him.
'You know why.'
'No—no, I don't. What is it? Just because you're a man when I need you, you figure you can't be a little boy anymore. Well—you are a little boy. You'll be a man soon enough—don't rush it anymore than you already have.'
'That's not what I mean,' he answered, looking up at her.
She folded her arms around him, drawing his head against her right breast. She heard the other children playing, the singing stopped, the children running off excess energy, chasing each other around the fenced-in corral.
She held her son very close—the little boy in him had died somewhere and she started to cry as she held him more tightly against her body.
Chapter 50
Nehemiah Rozhdestvenskiy ordered the driver of the electric car to stop, then stepped out.
Its vastness amazed him.
The Womb.
Everywhere, men moved machinery and equipment, weapons, ammunition, food stores.
At the far end of the long, high-vaulted rock chamber he witnessed the coffm-shaped crates being transported one at a time because of their fragility on yellow, Hyster forklifts. There would be eventually two thousand of these, if time permitted. The first one hundred were already being unpacked, connected to monitoring equipment, being tested for functional reliability.
What they carried meant everything.
The rumble of electric generators being transferred on propane fueled trucks made an echoing sound.
'Comrade colonel—'
He looked at his driver.
'The future—it is here,' he told the man. He told the polished stone of the walls—he told himself.
The Womb—he smiled as he thought of it. The most important strategic intelligence operation in the history of mankind—and at least for once, the code name was apt.
The Womb.
'Yes—drive on.' He sat down, closing his eyes as the electric car took him ahead.
Chapter 51
Rourke sat with the ship's armorer, the man reassembling an M-after having saturated it in a bath of Break Free CLP. Rourke had done the same with his own and Rubenstein's guns, getting to the salt water in time to prevent damage. He assembled Rubenstein's Browning High Power now, the finish a little the worse for wear but the gun wholly serviceable and no new evidence of rust or pitting.
The armorer had aided Rourke in the detailed reassembly of the German MPsubmachinegun—the older the weapon, somehow, Rourke had always noted, the greater the complexity of parts, The six-inch tubed Metalifed
