Polaris (44 page)

True to the end.

Whatever they used as an explosive device, it was pretty thorough. All the authorities ever found was a charred piece of one of the antigrav pods.

The interest in the
Polaris
generated by the anniversary events and the attack at Survey had subsided. Everything went back to normal.

We passed messages to several microbiologists that we had reason to believe that Dunninger had been on the right track. They assured us they'd look into it.

Morton College is still in operation. The Lockhart Foundation, which specializes in education for genius-level types, has taken it over.

I've always thought of that morning as if two separate conversations took place, one between Alex and the men, the other between Nancy White and me.

She looked young and vibrant and, in some ways, more than human. Or
different
from human. Maybe knowing you won't grow old, at least for a very long time, does that for you, adds a certain sense of who and what you are, that you've stepped outside the ordinary run of mankind, and indeed of the natural world. Maybe at that point you become almost
a neutral observer, sympathetic to humanity in the way that one might be sympathetic to a lost kitten, but nevertheless possessing the sure and certain knowledge that you are
different
in kind, and not simply in degree.

When the people you meet in daily life become
temporary, transient,
their significance must necessarily lessen. Jiggle the equipment in Shawn Walker's skimmer so that he goes into orbit, and what is lost? Only a few decades. In the short term, he was dead anyhow. Is that how it is?

I've thought of it often, sitting on the big porch at the end of the day, before setting out for home. Nancy White was trying to tell me something that morning, something more than simply that she'd had to jettison everyone and
everything
she knew and start life over. I think she was trying to underscore what Alex said later, that the treatment would have been, at best, a mixed gift. That she had become something else.

Metahuman. The next stage. Whatever. Maybe it was the original Nancy White, locked up somewhere inside, trying to connect with me.

You know about the cemetery at the edge of the woods. You can't get a good look at it unless you go up to the fourth floor. But there has never been a day, since the visit from Klassner and the others, that I haven't thought about it. When I come in each morning, dropping down past the trees, my eyes are drawn to it, to its pale white markers, and its stone figures. Last stop. Terminal City. I'm a little more conscious of it than I used to be.

It reminds me every day of Klassner's rejoinder when I told them I wasn't going to sit on everything for them.
Then you doom everybody.
Over the top, I'd thought. People never really talk like that. And I'd assumed he meant Alex and me as well as the four of them, and the entire human race. But I don't think that was it at all. We were in the office, and he was talking about the device they'd planted in the skimmer, that they planned to use if the meeting didn't go well.

It hadn't gone well.

“But I think we've answered one question,” said Alex.

“And what's that?”

“Maddy
was
an aberration. The mere fact of having your life prolonged doesn't cause you to become something other than human.”

“—Because the more sensible thing for them to do would have been to blow
us
up—”

“Absolutely. Instead they found an elegant solution to their problem.”

“
Elegant?
You call committing suicide elegant?”

He was grinning. Big, wide, ear-to-ear. “Are you sure they died?”

“Alex,” I said, “that
had
to be their skimmer. They never got back to Morton, and nobody else is missing.”

He nodded at Maddy's jacket. “Chase, don't forget—these are the same people who disappeared out of the
Polaris.
”