part that always coldly observed the progress of the dream, powerless to prevent or still, recognised that it was some kind of signal and fumbled, as with frozen fingers, to decipher its significance. Something to do with an alert — not an alert like others, not a scramble.
With sudden, frightening clarity he knew what it was, so that the image of the Firefox, in one of the photographs he had studied, was before him — then the memory of the cockpit simulator they had built for him, on which he had learned… He knew what it was. Baranovich. He saw the wise face, peering kindly, in Olympian pity, through the flames.
Tic and noise coordinated. The bleeper on his arm, taped there by Baranovich. The instructions filtered through, like pebbles dropped irregularly into dark water. The bleep was the alert — wait for the continuous sound, which is the summons.
He tried to move, felt that he was moving against a great wave, which pinned him where he was, struggled, tried again to raise himself — and did so.
The bathroom came into a kind of focus, and he shook his head, rubbed both stiff hands down his cheeks. It was like coming back from the dead, far worse than coming back from a narcotic trip, far worse than that. The water, still running, filtered through his mind as a distant sound, nothing to do with the crackling of flames. He had always been afraid of moving like this, before the dream had played itself out. Now he knew he had to.
He opened the bathroom door, his hand like a frozen claw gripping the door handle clumsily. He slammed the door behind him. He felt an ache, dull and distant, in his thigh. He looked down. There was a bruise across his muscle. He presumed it was some self-inflicted blow, performed an age before.
He walked stiffly, like a man on new limbs, across to the locker which he remembered contained Voskov's pressure-suit. He had to dress himself…
The bleep is the alert; wait for the continuous noise, which is the summons. Baranovich smiled down on him, the memory of that moment in Kreshin's bedroom, the white-haired man holding the cup of sweet coffee. He saw the face from that angle, as he had lain on the bed.
He spilled the suit onto the floor and bent wearily, a long way down, to pick it up. He untaped the bleeper, then stuck it to the locker door. Then he began to struggle into the legs, fitting his clumsy limbs into the stiff, unyielding garment. He was running freely with sweat.
Another sound clamoured for the attention of his fogged awareness — an alarm, a fire-alarm, he decided. He knew then what the diversion was, responding to stimuli as he was. He knew that it signalled an increase in the urgency of his efforts. It marked another stage passed, a new tempo introduced. He began to struggle with the lacing, the all-important lacing that was his only protection against the disastrous effects of the G-forces he would encounter in the Firefox. It was a skilled job, it required more of him than he was able to give. Yet it had to be right — it might kill him, as surely as any mechanical malfunction in the aircraft, more surely. He tried to concentrate.
It was not easy, but it was familiar. He knew what he was doing. He forced himself to pay attention, his own harsh breathing roaring in his ears.
The bleep is the alert; wait for the continuous noise, which is the summons, Baranovich told him, above the panic of the blood.
At last he had finished. The suit was hot, choking, sticky with his frantic efforts. He had no time to put on dry underclothes. He picked the pilot's helmet from its shelf, glanced inside it, and could make nothing of the contacts and sensors of the thought-system. They had been checked by Baranovich the previous day.
He tugged on the helmet, snapped down the visor, and the image of flame roared up in his imagination, the dying effort of the dream to swallow his consciousness.
Wait for the continuous noise, which is the summons. Baranovich whispered above the noise of the flames.
He realised that the bleep had vanished. There was a continuous, penetrating cry from the receiver on the locker. He reached into the locker, and picked from the shelf the innards of the transistor radio. He looked at the small black object, like a cigarette case now its disguise of transistors and batteries had gone. In the radio it had appeared nothing more sinister than a circuit-board.
The continuous noise is the summons.
He moved swiftly towards the door.
The crowd simply seemed, as if by a communal awareness and command, to disappear, to drift to either side of the two Jews. They were alone, and marked. There was nowhere to hide, no shelter for them. A group of guards in a semi-circle was advancing slowly towards them, through the smoke that was filling the hangar, rolling like a pall towards the open doors. Tsernik's head was hidden by the loud-hailer he had raised to his lips, and they heard his amplified, mechanical voice call to them.
'Put down your weapons — now, or I will order them to open fire! Put down your weapons — immediately!'
There seemed little else to do. The fire-tender had been joined, raucously, by its twin, and the fire-fighting units were soaking the aircraft and the hangar floor with foam, choking out Semelovsky's fire, Semelovsky's funeral pyre. There were people all around them now, backing away, as from something diseased or deformed — men in white coats, others in overalls, the technicians and scientists who had rushed towards the fire, then retreated from it like an ebbing wave. Baranovich and Kreshin were between the crescent of the approaching guards, and the crescent of the fire-fighters behind them. Baranovich felt the drop in temperature as the foam choked the life from the fire beneath the second Mig. Around the first one, around Gant's plane, the circle of guards had thinned, though they had not disappeared, not all left their posts.
There seemed noise like a wall behind him, pushing against him with an almost physical force. In front of him, there was a cone of silence, with Kreshin and himself at the point, and the semi-circle of closing guards embraced within it as they moved slowly forward. It was one of the most powerful visual images of his life, the approaching guards and then, beating at his ears, a palpable silence.
A gun roared at his side and its sound, too, seemed to come from far away, as if muffled. He saw a guard drop, and a second one lurch sideways. It was too easy, he thought, they are too close together, as he had once seen advancing Germans in the defence of Stalingrad — too close… His mind did not tell him to open fire. His own gun lay uselessly in his pocket.
'Drop your weapons, or I shall order them to open fire!' he heard the distant, mechanical voice say.
He did not hear the command, but he saw the flames from the rifles, sensed, rather than saw, Kreshin plucked away from his side. Then, with growing agony and the terrible revulsion of the awareness of death, he felt his own body plucked by bullets, his coat ripped as if by small detonations. He felt old. He staggered, no longer sure of his balance. He stumbled back a couple of paces, then sat untidily down on the ground, like a child failing a lesson in walking. Then it seemed as if the hangar lights had been turned off, he rolled sideways from the waist, like an insecure doll flopping onto its side. His eyes were tightly closed, squeezed shut, to avoid the terrible moment of death and, as his face slapped dully against the concrete floor, he didn't see Gant, a dim shadow in the dull green pressure-suit, standing at the entrance to the hangar from the security building. Baranovich died believing that Gant would not come.
Gant could see from where he stood something in a white coat on the ground, and the closing, cautious semi-circle of guards approaching it. He saw Kreshin's blond head, and his limbs flung in the careless attitude of violent death. The aircraft was thirty yards from him, no more.
There had been a fire at the other end of the hangar. He could see the two fire-tenders, and the foam- soaked frame of the second prototype now being rolled clear of the smouldering materials that had begun, and sustained, the fire. Already, he realised, the occupants of the hangar were in a position to begin to turn their attention back to the Firefox. He was almost too late — he might, in fact, be too late. The excuse for rolling the plane out of the hangar was almost over, the fire out. He saw a spurt of flame near the wall of the hangar, and an asbestos-suited fireman rear back from it. He heard the dull concussion of a fuel-drum explode.
