State of Nature: Book Three of The Park Service Trilogy (32 page)

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I mean, even if we have that thing roped well, and even if we somehow manage to hoist it up there and dismantle it, the warhead will fall and sink, taking our ropes with it.”

“What if the water’s not that deep?”

“Oh, I bet it’s deeper than our ropes. But that hardly matters, because I doubt we could raise it again anyway.”

I walk the shore as far around as it goes, inspecting the situation from every angle. I look at the way we came down, knowing that we’ll need to drag the warhead up the slope somehow. Then a plan begins to form in my mind.

“I’ve got an idea, Mom.”

“What is it, Son?”

“What if we tied the warhead off with the cable and the ropes—everything we’ve got that will stretch that far? Then what if we secured the other ends to the rock up there at the top of the rankfluffle thing, or whatever you called it.”

“Randkluft,” she says.

“Mom, don’t interrupt. I’ll lose my train of thought.”

“Okay, sorry,” she says. “Go on, please.”

“So, if we had the ropes and cable really taut, then when the warhead was freed from the missile body, wouldn’t it swing down pendulum-like and land there on the shore, right where we need it at the base of the slope?”

She looks from the warhead to the opening above and then to the bottom of the slope, calculating the distances. Then she smiles.

“That might just work, Son. And the full load would never really hit the ropes, so we wouldn’t have to worry about it breaking. But how will we get up there to secure the ropes on the warhead to begin with?”

“That’s on you,” I say. “I did my part.”

She tousles my hair, which makes me feel small. But then again I’m glad to have some hair finally growing back.

“You’re a smart boy, Aubrey.”

I correct her quickly. “Smart man.”

“Smart young man. How’s that? Now, I don’t know about you, but I’d rather sleep down here tonight than cramped up in that drone. Let’s go up and start bringing our supplies down.”

It takes the rest of our daylight to lug the supplies from the drone and lower them down to the shore of the lake. When everything is unpacked, we climb back out, sit on the crater rim, and watch the sunset. The sky is painted a thousand shades of orange. We sit side by side and watch as the last wedge of sun slips into the Pacific. Then we watch as the color drains away after it, replaced by a veil of blue sky already twinkling with stars. A cold wind rises up the slope at our feet, and we gather our furs tight and make for our rope to descend into the safety of our subterranean camp. It’s pitch black and cold, and although we did pack lamps, we leave them unlit and lie next to one another in darkness, listening to the wind howl across the crater above.

My mother’s already up working when I wake. She has the ropes and our cable stretched out on the lakeshore. She’s pacing them off and making calculations on an ice wall, using a screwdriver as a pen.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” she says, once she notices that I’m awake. “Grab yourself a meal bar there. You’re going to need your energy today.”

I walk to the rope and start the climb up.

“Where you going?” she asks.

“To get a little privacy.”

“Just go down here,” she says. “I used the corner there.”

“I’m not peeing in front of my mom.”

She laughs and returns to her work. “Fine, but hurry back. We’ve got a lot to do today.”

After I’ve freshened up and eaten my meager breakfast, my mother shows me what she’s put together. We have enough rope and cable to tie off to the warhead and then to the upper rock, making about three passes, which should be enough to hold its weight. Once it’s down, we’ll use the pulleys to try and get enough leverage to bring it up the slope to the drone.

“Okay,” I say, “this is basically what I said yesterday. But how do you plan to get up to the warhead to remove it?”

“Easy,” she says. “There’s enough rope left to make a harness with. We’ll use the pulley and slide from the upper rock along the cable to the warhead. We can lead the plasma torch out on one of the other ropes, and if we bring the drone to the edge of the randkluft, the power cable will just reach.”

She’s smart, but she’s missing one important thing. I almost hate to have to point it out to her.

“That’s great, Mom,” I say. “It really is smart. But there’s a bigger problem.”

“What’s that, Son?”

“Well, getting on the cable from up there and sliding down to the warhead shouldn’t be a problem. The angle would be just about right. But you’re forgetting that we’ve got no way to get the cable secured to the warhead in the first place.”

“Oh, don’t be such a naysayer, Aubrey.”

“I’m not being a naysayer, Mom. But the last time I looked, neither of us had wings.”

“We don’t need wings,” she says. “We have neodymium.”

“We’ve got what?”

She holds up a black metallic disc with a hole in its center. “Magnets, Son. We sinter these out of neodymium powder down in Holocene II. They’re what make up the basis for our drone engines. We’ll need our engines, of course, so I cut this one out of the supply carrier this morning.”

I step toward her to get a closer look, but she jerks the magnet back and steps away from me.

“Do you have your strike-a-light in your pocket?” she asks. I nod that I do, and she shakes her head. “If there’s enough iron in that steel striker, this thing will rip it clean out of your pocket and maybe take my fingers off in the process.”

“They’re that strong?”

“They pull thirteen hundred times their own weight.”

“And how much does that magnet weigh?”

“About a pound and a half.”

“Well, holy hydrogen, if we get a few of those up there on that warhead, they’ll hold then for sure.”

“You see,” she says, “we don’t need wings after all.”

We start with the longest and strongest rope. My mother loops it through the magnet disc and ties a two half hitch. Then she moves anything metal as far as possible down the shore. She coils the rope at her feet and hands me the end for safekeeping. She swings the magnet in wide arcs, slowly letting out slack as I imagine rodeo riders might as they prepared to lasso a calf. Then, when the momentum is right, she releases the magnet and its trailing rope toward the missile. It misses and lands in the water with a splash. When she draws it up again, the rope comes nearly straight out of the water at the bank, answering our question about how deep the lake is. She twirls the magnet again and lets it fly. This time it hits its mark and clamps onto the warhead with an audible clank.

“You did it!” I shout.

By late afternoon we’ve got two ropes and a cable strung between the warhead and the horn of rock at the edge of the randkluft, plus a harness and pulley system to carry us out to work. My mother goes first, sliding herself out along the cable with an ice screw she made from a steel spring.

“Why do we need that?” I ask.

“Because we need something to attach to when we’re out here working,” she says, as she twists it into the ceiling next to the warhead. “You have to remember that we’re cutting the warhead free. We don’t want to drop with it when it falls.”

“But doesn’t that create another problem, then? Once the warhead falls with its ropes, won’t you just be hanging out there over the lake with no way to get back?”

“Actually,” she says, looking down at me, “I was kind of hoping you’d make the final cut.”

“Well, wouldn’t I be hanging out there then?”

“Sure”—she shrugs—“but you can swim.”

“You want me to drop into that cold, black water?”

“Unless maybe you’ve grown those wings you were talking about,” she says.

When the day’s work is finished, we sit on the shore in the dim blue light leaking in from the various openings above and eat cold jerky and drink cold tea. We marvel together at the crazy architecture of wires and rope we’ve managed to thread together between the missile and the crater edge. It looks like some circus performance in the making.

“Tomorrow we’ll start cutting,” my mother says.

“You think that little torch has what it takes?”

“It’s going to have to,” she answers. “That damn warhead is coming down if I have to hang up there for the next hundred years and chip away at it with my fingernails.”

This night is the quietest night I’ve ever spent. So quiet I can hardly sleep. We lie wrapped in our furs on the shore. Not one draft of wind or even a drip of water is audible in all that darkness above. The silence is so complete that I find myself shifting in my bedding just to verify by the sound that I haven’t, in fact, gone deaf. When we wake, I understand the source of the silence. A pile of fresh snow lies on the lakeshore beneath our opening in the crater ceiling above. When we climb out the drift piled outside our randkluft is so deep that I have to scramble several feet up the rock face to even see above the snow. The sky is laden with gray clouds; the crater is laden with snow. Only the very top of our drone is visible.

For the next week we wait. My mother makes several trips out on the wire to inspect the missile, carrying with her a sharp stone and marking out with scrapes where she thinks we should cut. When it’s not snowing, I lie at the base of the opening and read my slate in the cold, gray light. By the fourth day the lamps are out of fuel, and we can no longer melt snow, so we fill our bottles in the lake. Then, on the morning of day five, just when our spirits are on the verge of breaking, we wake to the sound of dripping water everywhere and an amazing light show of golden sun reflecting through blue ice. We’re both anxious to get working again, but it’s another two days before the drone is completely freed from its prison of snow.

I’m prepared to push it to the edge of the randkluft, but to my relief, my mother hops in, fires it up, and taxis it across the crater, using the engines instead. The power cord is not quite long enough after all, but my mother cuts the cord from the welder and splices the two together. Then she connects the plasma torch to the drone and secures it to another pulley on one of the ropes. She carefully guides herself and her precarious assembly out over the lake to the missile. I sit nervously on the shore with my arms wrapped around my knees and watch. The compressor kicks on with a stutter, and she draws the blue bead of plasma along her score marks, sending a shower of orange sparks down to meet their rising reflections on the black surface of the still water. I know the nuke shouldn’t blow, but my guts still coil up with fear. Then again there’s little to worry about, I guess, because if it did somehow explode, I doubt we’d even know. We’d just be here and then we wouldn’t—which is a small comfort to me, knowing that the same goes for Hannah if this scheme of ours works. She’ll be caught up in whatever she’s doing, and then she’ll be vaporized into a memory. And aren’t memories what each of us is destined to become?

When my mother’s arms are tired, we trade places.

It’s a funny feeling hanging from an ice screw above an underground lake and cutting a nuclear warhead with an electric torch. We’re cutting just beyond the last of the bolts that secure the warhead to the rocket with the plasma set at full amperage, just hoping that it cuts deep enough to free it.

On the morning of our third day working with the torch, just as my mother is beginning to worry over the drone’s battery, I’m out cutting when there’s a loud peel of metal, and the warhead pulls partly free from the rocket’s casing. I freeze there on the ice screw, my feet dangling above the lake.

“You’ve got to keep cutting,” my mother says. “You can’t come back now on the line; it’s too risky.”

“You sure this thing won’t explode when it drops?”

“It’s set to go off with an interior altimeter, Son.”

“What if that altitude is just another few meters?”

“Aubrey, trust me. It won’t go off.”

“Okay,” I say. “I sure hope you’re right.”

Nothing more happens for the next several hours as I make the final cuts. The harness begins to synch into my legs. My shoulders ache, and my arms seem to be made of lead. Then there’s a loud crack, followed by a snap as the cable goes taut and the warhead drops free and swings beneath me on its lines and slams into the shore just on the edge of the lake. Time seems to stop. I dangle from the ice screw with the torch hissing in my hand and stare with wonder at this thing we’ve set free. My mother looks at me, and we’re momentarily connected in a strange federation of relief and fear. I turn the torch off, and the cavern goes silent.

“What do I do with this thing?” I ask, indicating the torch.

“Just let it hang there,” she says. “We won’t need it now.”

I look down at the black water. For some reason I’m afraid to drop into it. It’s not just because I know it’s cold, but because I’m worried I might sink to the very heart of the mountain. I hoist myself up for slack and pull my legs free from the harness until I’m just hanging from the screw by my hands. The shock of the cold water sends me paddling for the shore as if I’m being chased by something. My mother reaches me a hand, pulls me out, and wraps me in a dry fur. I sit there on the bank, shivering as she rubs warmth back into my limbs.

We both keep stealing glances at the warhead lying beside us and my mother keeps saying over and over again, “We did it, Son. We really did it.”

The next day we haul it up. It’s even heavier than I had thought, and it is no small feat of engineering for the two of us. Yet between the ropes, the pulleys, and the pulling power of the drone’s engines, we hoist it out and over the edge until it’s lying in the bright sunlight like some horrible, indigestible relic of war ejected from the bowels of the earth. It’s no smaller task loading it into the carrier. Another centimeter or two larger and it would never even fit. But by late afternoon we have the warhead sealed safely inside and the drone parked at the far end of the glacier for the best possible shot at picking up enough speed to take off with the added weight.

Ready or not, neither of us suggests going right away.

Instead we sit in the afternoon sun on the eastern edge of the crater rim and look off past the river and the evergreens toward the distant blue sparkle of the lake. We both know it may never look the same again. My mother seems relaxed and content but also somewhat sad. I watch her face, trying my best to read the clouds of thought crossing her dark eyes.