“The energy released by a category 20 earthquake would be equivalent to the detonation of several trillion tons of TNT,” Henry said, “or about the same force as a meteor five kilometers in diameter crashing into the planet.”
“Unimaginable,” Clementine said.
Henry, who had imagined the apocalypse in detail, gave her one of his faint smiles.
Clementine was just back from a mission to Hsi-tau, where she had met with General Yao. She had hit it off with one of the chow chows. She and the dog that had been assigned to protect her were great friends now. I asked Clementine if she had tested the relationship by removing her protective identity badge. Of course she had. The chow had been quite happy to smell the real Clementine.
“Of course,” said Clementine with a fond smile, “he could also smell the identity disk in my bag.”
She had painted a watercolor of the dog, which had posed for its portrait like an angel.
Neither Henry nor I volunteered a new subject, so Clementine kept talking about dogs.
“Have you ever wondered,” she asked, “how we and dogs got together in the Paleolithic, and why we formed such an enduring friendship?”
“Yes,” I said, “My theory is that the dogs helped us hunt down Neanderthals and eat them.”
“What a perfectly outrageous idea,” Clementine said.
“Maybe, Clementine, but think about it. We know Neanderthals were cannibalized, and we’re the logical suspects.”
From deep inside her, Clementine made a sound of disgust.
“In what way does that incriminate dogs?” she asked.
“It would explain why dogs are so fawning. They’re our partners in original sin.”
“You do go too far,” Clementine said. But she stopped asking questions.
Henry was gazing out to sea. He had long since tuned out. Now he excused himself in an almost inaudible voice and went away. Clementine gazed in fond admiration at his retreating figure.
She said, “I have what might be called a Christmas gift for you. General Yao informs me that Mulligan’s DNA matches evidence collected at the scene of all three rapes in China. The Chinese act very quickly in such matters. Mulligan has been sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of release. He is in a very secure, very remote prison in Hsi-tau.”
I kissed Clementine on the cheek. She looked as though she wanted to kiss me back, but exercised self-control.
She chattered on. Clementine knew all sorts of things—such as what each of the gifts in “The Twelve Days of Christmas” symbolized in English folklore. There was a reason for her encyclopedic bent. As a schoolgirl, she had made a business of studying up on out-of-the-way facts.
“Because I wasn’t pretty, I strove to be interesting,” she said, “but of course it was hopeless. I was avoided as the most boring girl at school.”
I asked how she knew that. She listed the cruelties that had been visited upon her by the blackshirts in the sixth form. By the time she flew back to New York on the fifth day of Christmas (the five gold rings are a code term for the first five books of the Old Testament), I was learned in her miseries. It turned out we had a good deal in common. Any two people plunked down together on an uninhabited island might have made the same discovery, but the important thing was that we made friends and closed our eyes to each other’s peculiarities.
On her day of departure I walked her down to the airstrip. I carried her easel and paint box. On the tarmac, we kissed each other on both cheeks. I told her I sincerely hoped neither of us would be buried alive before we met again. Clementine considered this, then laughed for the first time in my presence. It came out as a series of yips that must have been much imitated at her school.
“Look after Henry,” she said. “He seems to be on the verge of something.”
Henry was breakfasting on the terrace and fiddling with his laptop when I got back to the house. He lifted a careless hand. I gestured in return and sat down opposite him at the table. Since Christmas dinner, he had been hiding out, and mostly had not even joined Clementine and me for meals. Clementine assumed he was thinking great thoughts in his solitude.
Finally he looked up. “Clementine told you the news from China?” he said.
“If you mean Bear’s fate, yes.”
Although I had questions—where exactly in Inner Mongolia was Bear imprisoned? what would his life be like? might General Yao, at some future moment, decide to swap him for a Chinese spy held by the CIA?—it seemed inappropriate to ask the questions or to thank Henry for putting the man who wanted to murder me away for the rest of his life. Justice had been done. That was enough.
Henry said, “Would you mind going back to China for a few days? There’s something I want you to see.”
We left the next morning. In Hsi-tau I was assigned to my usual yurt and chow chow. After more than three years, the dog and I knew each other pretty well, but if the animal recognized me, it didn’t let me know. Looking over the pack, I wondered which one was Clementine’s chum. It might even be my friend.
On my way to the big yurt for dinner, I saw Chinese soldiers lounging around their armored vehicles. I smelled their cigarette smoke before I saw the men. Inside, General Yao gallantly kissed my hand and gave me a mock-flirtatious look. He had brought a gaggle of cooks and waiters and all the other necessities for a Chinese banquet. He was attentive throughout the evening, transferring delicacies to my plate and making small talk. His subject tonight was the New York theater. He read all the reviews online and knew far more about it than I did. He was shocked by my ignorance. How could I live in a theatrical paradise and pay so little attention to it? One day he would come to New York and we would go to all the best plays together for at least a week, matinees and evening performances. I would emerge reeducated, hungry—insatiable—for more theater. He had a hundred different smiles and let me know with one of them that this promise was double entendre.
When dinner was over, General Yao dismissed his aides, and he and Henry talked very intently in English. Their voices were low. The exchange lasted no more than five minutes. I listened in, of course, but I missed most of what they were saying. Both men seemed tense, even uncomfortable with each other. As was so often the case, Henry’s mind seemed to be elsewhere.
At last the conversation ended. General Yao turned to me with his smoothy’s smile and once again bowed over my hand.
“Until tomorrow, then,” he said.
What was going to happen tomorrow? No one told me. I smiled and said good night. Henry saw General Yao to his car and didn’t come back.
At first light the following morning, General Yao called for us in an unmarked helicopter. It was the biggest helicopter I had ever seen. Its twin rotors created a pall of brown dust as it landed. The chow chows’ frantic barking could not be heard above the noise of the machine. Henry watched the landing impassively. He had done everything impassively for many days now—few words, no smiles, hardly a gesture. Something was eating him, but who knew what?
We flew much lower in the giant helicopter than we had done in the rickety little brown airplane Ng Fred had sent for us the last time we went on a field trip. The passenger compartment of the ship wasn’t insulated against noise. The
whack-whack
of the rotors was deafening. After maybe an hour, Yao got to his feet and pointed out the window. When I didn’t respond right away—what could there be to look at in this wilderness?—he touched the skin under his eye with a fingertip to indicate that I should take a look. I did as suggested, and there below us was a vast prison camp surrounded by a high fence that enclosed a great many buildings. Hundreds of human beings, all dressed alike in blue, marched across its open spaces in long columns, like worker ants. The helicopter flew lower and circled. The ants, apparently under orders to pretend that this intrusion wasn’t happening, did not look up. Soon they were hidden in a cloud of dust. The helicopter was now flying so close to the ground that I could see the faces of the guards in the watchtowers. They too were ignoring us.
The helicopter hovered. General Yao put his lips close to my ear. I felt the warmth and moisture of his breath.
“Mulligan,” he shouted, pointing.
I looked hard and sure enough, there was Bear himself, standing on a rooftop with his red hair blowing in the wash of the chopper’s rotors. He now had a red beard to go with his mustache, and the beard was windblown, too. Bear was in chains—not shackles but actual chains, very heavy ones, secured by padlocks. Like the rest of the prisoners, he wore a blue uniform. Four smaller men in brown uniforms held his arms. Half a dozen other guards surrounded them. Bear struggled, silently roared. It was a version of the theater scene in
King Kong.
The guards beat him with truncheons. He shrugged off their puny blows. In his mind he was still the lord of the jungle. He had not yet realized he was now an ant and could never change back into the invincible creature he used to be. He glared upward. Could he see my face in the window? One of the guards struck him in the small of the back with a baton. Bear paid no heed, but continued to snarl at the helicopter. Would he leap upward, take hold of the helicopter, and smash it into the ground? Evidently the pilot had a similar thought. Abruptly, the machine climbed to a much higher altitude. Hundreds of kilometers of empty desert surrounded the camp in all directions.
“No escape possible,” General Yao shouted in my ear. “Finished.”
I wondered.
~ * ~
2
NG FRED GREETED US
AT our destination, a factory in the middle of nowhere. Unlike the underground installation I had visited earlier, this one was a complex of enormous structures made of corrugated metal. Two tremendously long concrete runways dwindled into the distance across the perfectly flat landscape. Ng Fred tugged at my arm. Henry was in the act of disappearing with General Yao into the building. Ng Fred, hurrying after them, rushed me through the door.
What I saw when I stepped inside astonished me. Five spaceships stood on their tails, their noses a few feet short of the ceiling two hundred feet above. They had stubby wings, two amidships and two at the tail, but they couldn’t possibly be airplanes, nor did they resemble any flying machine I had even seen in reality or the movies. Two large engines hung from either side of the tail. The ships had no windows. Painted on the fuselage was a picture of our blue planet, wreathed in white clouds. There were no other markings— no flags, no lettering, no numbers.
Henry, still locked into his silence, gazed wordlessly at these wonders. He seemed to be as spellbound as I was, even though he had certainly seen these extraordinary objects many times before.
He had invented them—no one else who ever lived could possibly have done so. They belonged to him. They had been conceived in his brain and built with his money.
“Shuttles,” Ng Fred said. “Very new. We call them Spaceplanes.”
Hearing Ng Fred’s words, General Yao nodded—one curt bob of the head. It was inconceivable that he had not already seen pictures of these craft, taken by spies he had planted in the factory. Yet he seemed to be taken aback by the reality. The astonishing quickly became the familiar. By the time we completed our guided tour of the Spaceplane, its mystery was dispelled. It was just another wonder of technology, its eventual development foretold by the first stone tool. If mankind lived on, this machine would metamorphose over time into marvels that no one, except maybe Henry, could begin to imagine.
The Spaceplane was designed to carry two hundred passengers or six hundred tons of cargo. It would lift the components of the spheres and the scores of women who would build them into orbit. Fifty people could live aboard for weeks without resupply. Resupply by another Spaceplane would be a routine exercise.
“The ship requires no booster rockets,” Ng Fred said. “It will take off from a runway like an airplane, climb to the upper edge of the atmosphere, and then accelerate and escape Earth’s gravity. It will attain orbit at a distance of about five hundred miles from the planet. When its mission is achieved, it will return to Earth, land like an airplane, and be ready for turnaround just as quickly as an airplane—quicker, because it will not require refueling.”