The Cloud Atlas

“It's a remarkable device,” Gurley said, his face flushed.

“I'll say,” Leavit said. “It's Jap, isn't it?”

“Well,” Gurley said slowly, rolling his eyes at McDermott, like they were two old friends who knew better. McDermott did know better. So did I. I hurried around to the other side of the truck, took a deep breath, regretted it, and climbed back up over the side.

“It's a hell of a thing, is what it is,” I said as enthusiastically as I could. I finished scanning. It was clear. Looked just like all the others had. Except-

“Can I quote you on that?” Leavit said, not even looking up. “Need your name, rank, age, and hometown.”

Now Gurley stepped closer, and when he spoke, I could tell from the tone of his voice that he was upset I'd screwed up his plan to have Leavit explode. I suppose I was a little touched; Gurley's being upset must have meant that he didn't want to see me blown up, and that was some kind of progress for us. “I'm afraid you can't quote him on that,” Gurley said, rather seriously, and now I was the only one who could tell he was still acting. He turned around to include McDermott. Leavit looked up, and Gurley offered him a hand down from the truck. His other hand was a fist. Leavit took one last look at the device, then at me, and then climbed down. “You can't quote him, or me, really, because this is very, very, secret,” Gurley said. He looked around and then announced that this was an “experimental targeting device” of the Canadian Expedition Force. McDermott's eyes went a little wider, and mine did as well. That he'd made it Canadian was the kind of useless flourish Gurley adored.

“But I'm telling you none of this. If word gets out about what the Canadians are doing…” He looked skyward.

“There's a story here, Captain, I'm sorry,” Leavit answered.

“There is,” Gurley said, drawing himself up, and turning Leavit by the elbow toward the plane. “But frankly, it's not to be found in the back of this truck.” He turned to me. “Sergeant, log the serial number off it and then do whatever you like with it-box it up or burn it. But let's go. Quickly.” I needed another second or two of Gurley's gaze to understand what he was up to, but I didn't get it. Certainly he didn't want me to burn anything. I checked his shoulders, his posture, to see if he was going back into that stance; perhaps he was going to take Leavit off and pummel the memory out of him. He still had the one hand clenched in a fist.

With them safely out of earshot, McDermott turned to me. “Your captain's a funny man, Sergeant.”

“He has a way of doing things, sir,” I said briskly.

“I never knew a man like him in my army,” McDermott said.

“There isn't one, sir,” I said, climbing into the truck bed one more time, trying to figure out what struck me as different about this balloon. It was the control frame. The top tier. It looked different. Had it been damaged? There was an oily stain. From the demo block? Something else? I'd seen the demo block, hadn't I, when I'd examined it the first time? Only the demo block? I looked for Gurley saw him loading Leavit into the plane, panicked, and then tilted the control frame away from me, holding my breath.

I was never so relieved to see two pounds of picric acid in all my life. Nothing else, just the block. My old fears returned in a rush. The picric acid was extremely explosive, too explosive to leave where it was as we transported the control frame. As I pried it off, the two pounds felt like two hundred. There are objects like that. Ronnie's Comfort One bracelet, for one. The Host, for another, when I elevate it during Mass. I intone, “the Body of Christ,” and some days, I'm certain, I'm hoisting all 170-odd pounds of him.

I stepped out of the truck bed, carefully, and looked over what I'd left behind. It could travel. The demo block could travel, too, but I didn't want it to. I wanted to leave it right here in Kirby But the rule was to recover everything now. McDermott drove it all over to the plane, with me in the passenger seat, demo block on my lap. He helped me crate the control frame, and watched suspiciously as I did all I could to render the demo block safe. Then I thanked him and climbed aboard.

McDermott stopped me. “What was that?” he asked, looking at the crate we'd just loaded.

I looked, too. If there had been any rats aboard, they'd left before we'd gotten there. Maybe they'd never gotten on.

“A relief,” I said, and shut the door.

* * *

WE SPENT AN HOUR flying Leavit around Wyoming. Gurley had told him that the Army was investigating the region for a whole new network of “intracontinental defense bases.” He pointed out one imaginary site after another. He was in full performance mode, charming and arch, though I knew he was tense-he kept that one fist clenched the entire time, at his side, or behind his back. But Leavit didn't notice, he was too delighted with his scoop. The story he later wrote caused a bit of consternation among Gurley's higher-ups and Wyoming 's congressional delegation, but the matter was soon forgotten.

Not forgotten, at least by me, is the exchange Gurley and I had after we'd deposited Leavit in Cheyenne and taken off for home.

“Dodged one there, sir,” I said, flush with the success of duping Leavit, disarming the balloon single-handedly, and, most important, discovering a germ-free balloon. I assumed we'd formed a new kind of camaraderie on the way down, and thought I'd take advantage of it by needling him. “Course, sir, when you slapped the side of the truck there,” I said, “I thought that might just have been enough to get that little demo block to go-”

Gurley slowly raised his fist. I'd been mistaken about our friendship. I noticed it was the same fist he'd kept clenched all this time. But he hadn't swung at Leavit, and he didn't swing at me. Instead, he turned his hand over and slowly opened it. I stared down. Ribbing me for my supposed love of palm reading?

But you didn't need to be Lily to read the story there. A smear of dried blood and two black specks, crushed carcasses of the tiny flying insects he killed. I shook my head, I held my breath. If he spoke, I didn't hear him. I just watched him, hollow-eyed, as he fished the jewelry store clipping out of his bag and numbly scraped the fleas' remains onto the paper.

CHAPTER 11

OH, RAPTURE.

An aging priest, I fear this most, this rapture. Evangelical Christians claimed rapture-sorry, Rapture-from Revelations, promising that the good would be sucked skyward When The Time Came. The truth is, the good disappear even earlier than that-lovely, ordinary Catholics are sucked out of my church and into the arms of these new, fresh-faced teetotaling missionaries. The young are thunderstruck, the old relieved; what a glorious, dramatic, prospect this Rapture is.

But they've not seen previous Raptures. I remember when brave and good Alaskans began disappearing before. The Japanese immigrants were the first to go; overnight, it seemed, they began disappearing from storefronts and sidewalks in Anchorage, shipped well south to California. Native Alaskans vanished, too. As Gurley had said, Aleuts had been relocated by the military, but in a most disorienting fashion: they were taken from their weatherworn, mostly treeless islands and deposited in the hush and dark of a thick southeastern Alaska forest.

And they were the lucky ones: other Aleuts, farther out on the Chain, were dragged from their homes by Japanese soldiers and taken back to Japan, where they spent the remainder of the war. Close to half died there.

That was rapture; that was when governments presumed to play God and did so with requisite carelessness. Anything in Alaska could be done if required by the war (or whim, the two terms so close, it seems now). Homes, buildings, towns, and airports were taken up and dropped elsewhere.

That was when the end of the world was nigh, not