'Who was that?' Rachel asked.
I replayed the message for her.
'I have to admit,' she said, 'that sounded like Ewan McCaskell.'
'Like him? That was him. Didn't you understand anything you saw last night?'
She pulled a chair away from the kitchen table and sat in front of me. 'Listen to me, David. Do you know why I'm here? Why I helped you last night?'
'Tell me.'
'Your book.'
'My book?'
'Yes. Every day in the hospital I see things they never told me about in medical school. Cases that fall into the cracks between reality and legality. Dilemmas the govern¬ment hasn't got the guts to face. I do what I can about them… maybe I complain to another doctor, but that's it. You wrote it down for the world to read, without giving a damn what would happen to you. Abortion. Last-year-of-life care versus prenatal care. Euthanasia. My God, you wrote about assisting your own brother to die.'
I closed my eyes and saw an image of my older brother, unable to move anything but his eyelids due to the ravages of ALS, then unable to move even those. We'd made a pact. At that point I would help him end what remained of his life.
'I nearly left that out,'' I said.
She gripped my forearm. 'But you didn't. You took the risk, and you helped countless people by leaving it in. People you'll never know. But they know you. I know you. And now you're ill. You've needed help for months, and conventional therapy wasn't working. I couldn't break through the walls you'd put up.' Her hand tight¬ened on my arm, and she smiled encouragingly. “I believe you're involved in some kind of special work, okay? But tell me this. If the Trinity computer is all you say it is, then why you? You know? You wrote a great book. The president knew your brother. But does that qualify you to make judgments about the kind of science you've told me about?'
She was right. There was more to it. I'd kept my past secret for so long that to speak of it now required a sur¬prising act of will.
'My father was a nuclear physicist,' I said softly. 'He worked at Los Alamos during the war. He was the youngest physicist to work on the Manhattan Project.'
Her dark eyes flashed. 'Go on.'
'My undergraduate degree is in theoretical physics. MIT.'
'My God. I really know nothing about you, do I?'
I touched her shoulder. 'Sure you do. Look, my father was part of the group that began to protest using the bomb. Leo Szilard, Eugene Wigner, those guys. The Germans had surrendered, and the Japanese just didn't have the resources to build an atomic bomb. My father's group wanted our bomb demonstrated for the Japanese army, not used on civilians. Their dissent was ignored, and Hiroshima became history.
'But we live in a different world now. Once the presi¬dent realized the implications of Trinity-we're talking about liberating human intelligence from the body, for God's sake-he knew he'd be vulnerable politically if the public learned he'd gone ahead without concern for ethics or morality. Look at the craziness that surrounds cloning and fetal tissue research. So he demanded ethical oversight. He knew my book, he knew the public trusts me to tell the truth, and he trusted me because he'd known my brother. Beyond that, my pedigree for conscientious objection went back to my father and the Manhattan Project. So, who better than I?'
Rachel was shaking her head. 'Why did you become a doctor rather than a physicist?'
She couldn't stop being a shrink. Or maybe she was just being a woman. 'After Hiroshima, my dad led a troubled life. Edward Teller was gearing up to build the hydrogen superbomb. Oppenheimer opposed it. So did my father. Dad requested a transfer. General Groves didn't want to release him from weapons work, but they agreed to give him a more technical job, one more removed from the actual warheads. They moved him to the national lab at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.'
'Why didn't he just quit altogether?'
'Eventually he did. But this was the Cold War. There were different kinds of pressure then. Oppenheimer was persecuted for years for his opposition to the hydrogen bomb. Dad also met my mother at Oak Ridge. Things were better there. They had my brother. I was born much later. An accident, really.' I smiled at the memory of my parents revealing this fact to me. 'I grew up in Oak Ridge, but when I was a teenager, Dad quit nuclear physics and moved us to Huntsville, Alabama, so he could work on the space program.'
'I still don't see the medical connection.'
'My mother was a pediatrician in Oak Ridge. She did a lot of good. It didn't take a genius to see that she was a lot happier in her work than my dad had been. That's what influenced me.'
I glanced down at the phone, willing it to ring again. 'Last night, I only told you part of the truth. When the president offered me this position, it felt oddly like poetic justice. I was being given the opportunity my father never had at Los Alamos. The chance to exercise some control over a great undertaking that was likely to change the world forever. For good or evil. I sensed that that the day I visited the Oval Office, and that's what put me here.'
Rachel took a deep breath and slowly blew out the air. 'It's all real, isn't it? Trinity, I mean.'
'Yes. And I'm damned glad McCaskell called me back. We need the president badly.'
I stood up, half wanting to replay McCaskell's message, but a wave of fatigue rolled through me. I hoped it was just exhaustion, but then the familiar high-pitched ringing began in my back teeth. Remembering I had no amphetamines left, I took a can of Mountain Dew out of the fridge, popped it open, and drank a long pull for the caffeine.
'David?' Rachel was watching me strangely. 'Are you all right? You look shaky.'
'I may go out,' I said, taking another gulp of the soda.
'Go out?' Her eyes widened. 'Narcolepsy?'
She'd never witnessed one of my episodes. As I nodded, a shadow seemed to pass over my eyes. It left me with a vague feeling of threat, as though someone were in the room with us, there but unseen. 'I'm missing something,' I thought aloud.
'What are you talking about?'
An image of Geli Bauer came into my mind. 'We're in danger.'
Rachel looked worried, more about me than any external threat. 'What kind of danger?'
'There's something about the way all this is happening. Godin giving us time off… my chart being stolen from your office… McCaskell's call. I'm missing something, but I'm too tired to think of what.'
'I thought McCaskell's call was good news.'
'It is. It's just…' As drowsy as I was, I felt a desperate need to have my gun in my hand. 'I want you to do me a favor. Wait here for two minutes.'
'What?' Worry darkened her eyes. 'Where are you going?'
'To my neighbor's house.' I hurried to the back door.
'David! What if you pass out?'
'Don't answer the door!' I called. 'But if the phone rings, answer it and say I'll be right back.'
I ran outside and crashed through the thick hedges that bordered the backyards of the houses on my street. I sprinted the length of three backyards, then cut back through the hedge behind a neighbor's utility shed. I had slipped out of my house last night about 2 A.M. and I had hidden Fielding's box beneath it. Inside the box were Fielding's electronic gadgets, my partially recorded videotape, Fielding's letter, and my pistol. I got on my knees and retrieved the box, then crawled back through the hedge and sprinted back to my own yard. By the time I reached it, I felt like a drunk running through an unfamiliar city.
Rachel was waiting just inside the back door. 'That's the stuff from last night,' she said. 'Why do you need that?'
I tilted the box so she could see the gun.
She stepped back. 'David, you're scaring me.'
'You need to get out of here. You'll be fine for the time it takes me to tell my story to McCaskell.' I set the box on the floor, put the gun in my waistband, then led her to the front of the house. 'Spend the rest of the day somewhere public, like a mall. Don't go home until you hear from me.'
She pivoted and stopped me from pushing her toward the door. Her assertiveness seemed to bring us eye to
