Authors: Robert Silverberg
Signal coming through now from Rasheed.
Andy, his senses phenomenally oversharpened by all this, experiences an interval of about six years between each incoming digit.
Is Rasheed telling him that he has been caught? That he has lost his way? That this is the wrong building altogether?
No.
Rasheed is saying that he has reached the Objective.
That he has taken the bomb from his backpack and is sticking it to the wall of wherever-he-is, neatly affixing it in some nice snug insignificant place. That he has done his job and is coming out.
The whole thing unwinds in reverse, now. Rasheed is heading back toward Checkpoint Three. Yes. There he goes, right through it. All is well.
Checkpoint Two. Crimson circle moving nicely.
Checkpoint One. Will they collar him here? “We’re very sorry, young man, we simply can’t permit you to plant bombs within this area.”
Zap!
No zap. He’s made it. He’s outside Checkpoint One. Outside the sanctuary entirely. Leaving the Objective Zone quickly, not running, of course, oh, no, not cool calm Rasheed, just moving along through the streets with his usual long-legged stride.
Andy is dealing with four people at once, now, shooting a welter of coded messages to them. At Andy’s command Cheryl has left her parking spot and is coming forward to collect Rasheed as he moves eastward toward her. She will try to get out the Alhambra gate, the same one through which she entered. Charlie is parked outside that gate and will take Rasheed from her, assuming she can get through. Frank, at the Glendale gate, and Mark, at Burbank, are the fallback drivers if for some reason the Alhambra gate has been closed to vehicular traffic; if that is the case one or the other of them will enter the city, if they can, and rendezvous with Cheryl at a point to be determined by Andy, if it can be managed, and take Rasheed from her and spirit him back out through some gate or other, whichever one they can. If. If. If. If.
Andy wants to ask all sorts of questions, now, but he doesn’t dare use the audio line. Too easy to intercept that; this all has to be done by coded impulse, cryptic blips coursing along the electronic highway between the ranch and the city. Sparks seem to fly on the screen as the colors dance. Andy leans forward until his nose is practically touching the screen. His fingers caress its cool plastic surface as though he has abruptly decided to conduct the rest of this operation in Braille.
Crimson circle is now a halo around the midsection of the deep-purple line. Cheryl has picked up Rasheed. Heading for Alhambra gate.
The moment has arrived when the greatest of this series of gambles must be played out. Detonation has to wait until Rasheed is safely through the gate. They will surely close all the gates the moment the bomb blows. Rasheed needs to be outside the wall first: there’s no choice about that. But what if Andy waits too long to give the detonation signal, and Prime’s attendants notice the bomb? It is inconspicuous but definitely not invisible. If the Alhambra gate is shut down and he has to futz around with arranging a second rendezvous, bringing Rasheed out through Burbank or Glendale, and meanwhile they find the bomb and are able to defuse it—
If. If. If. If.
But Alhambra is open. Crimson halo passes to green line. Rasheed is safely outside the wall, and he is in Charlie’s car now. Using five hands and at least ninety fingers, Andy sends simultaneous signals to all parties concerned.
Frank—Mark—head homeward right away.
Charlie—get your ass up toward the 210 Freeway and cruise toward Sylmar, where you will rendezvous with Cheryl and give Rasheed back to her.
And you, Cheryl—shadow Charlie on the freeway, just in case he runs into a roadblock, in which case you can grab Rasheed and dart off in the other direction with him.
Plus one message more.
Hey—Prime! Here’s something for you!
Andy grins and keys in the detonator code.
There was no way for him to feel the explosion from 150 miles away, no, sirree. Except in his imagination. In Andy’s imagination, the whole world shook with the force of a Richter Ten, the sky turned black with red streaks, the stars began to run backward in their courses. But of course it was impossible really to know, at least not right away, what had actually happened in Los Angeles. The bomb was a potent one but it hadn’t been Anson’s plan to blow up the whole city with it. Most likely it hadn’t been noticed even in places as close to the site as Hollywood.
But then a voice in Andy’s headphone said, “I’m just off Sunset Boulevard, not far from Dodger Stadium. Two Entities just went by in a wagon, and they were, like, screaming. Shrieking. You know, like they were in the most extreme pain. The explosion must have, like, driven them out of their minds. The death of Prime.’’
“Who is this, please?” Andy said.
“Sorry. This is Hawk.”
One of the spotters, that was. Andy said, “You can see the Figueroa Street headquarters from where you are, can’t you? What’s happening there?”
“Lights blinking on and off all over the upper stories. It seems pretty frantic. That’s all I can see, the upper stories. I hear sirens, too.”
“You felt the explosion?”
“Oh, yeah. Yeah. Most definitely. And, like—”
But another of the Los Angeles spotters had begun to signal for his attention. Andy cut over to him. This one was Redwood, calling in from Wilshire and Alvarado, the eastern side of MacArthur Park. “There’s an Entity keeled over at the edge of the lake,” Redwood said. “It just fell right down the minute the bomb went off.”
“Is it alive?”
“It’s alive, all right. I can see it writhing. It’s lying there hollering blue murder. You have to cover your ears, practically.”
“Thank you,” Andy said. He felt a wild surge of joy go running through him like an electrical jolt.
Writhing. Hollering blue murder.
Music to his ears. Grinning, he switched to another line, and it was Clipper, calling in from far-off Santa Monica with news of great confusion there, and Rowboat waiting right behind him with a similar report from Pasadena. Someone had seen an Entity that seemed to be lying unconscious in the street, and someone else had seen four greatly agitated aliens of the Spook variety running around in mindless circles.
Andy felt a nudge from Steve, beside him. “Hey, tell us what’s going on.”
He realized that for the past couple of minutes he had been in Los Angeles in his mind. Los Angeles, with its writhing, shrieking Entities, was more vivid to him than the ranch. It was a serious effort for him to bring the scene in the communications center back into focus. Faces peered into his. Anson stood beside him now, and Mike, Cassandra, half a dozen others. Even Jill had turned up, though not Khalid. Staring eyes. Tense faces. They had figured out something of what had taken place by listening to his audio exchanges with the spotters within the city, but they only had part of the story, and now they wanted the rest of it, and they were all yelling questions at him at the same time.
Andy began yelling answers back at them. Telling them that Rasheed had done it, that the bomb had gone off, that Prime was dead, that the Entities were crazy with shock, that they were falling down in the streets and moaning—no,
shrieking
—shrieking like lunatics, all of them going berserk down there and probably all around the world too, a single great shriek coming out of every Entity at once, everywhere, a terrible sound that rose and fell like a siren,
yow wow wow wow yow—
“What? What? What? What are you trying to say, Andy?”
A ring of baffled faces confronted him. He suspected that he wasn’t getting the information to them quite in the right order, that carts were being put before horses, that he might in truth be babbling a little. He didn’t care. He had been in six places at once all morning, six at the very least, and now he just wanted to go off somewhere quiet and lie down for a while.
He wished he could hear that shriek, though. The stars themselves must be shrieking. The galaxies.
“We did it,” he blurted. “We won! Prime’s dead and the Entities are going nuts!”
That got through to them, all right.
Steve began to drum jubilantly on the table. Mike was dancing with Cassandra. Cindy was dancing with herself.
But Anson wasn’t dancing. He was standing all by himself in the middle of the room, looking a little dazed. “I just can’t believe that it worked,” he said wonderingly, slowly shaking his head. “It’s almost too good to be true.”
In one ear Andy heard his father telling Anson not to be such a goddamned pessimist for once, and in the other ear, the one that had the earpiece over it, he heard the spotter called Redwood, the one out by MacArthur Park, clamoring for his attention, begging for it. Telling him something very peculiar now was going on, that the Entity who had fallen down at the edge of the lake now was upright again and starting to move around pretty vigorously; and then Hawk was trying to cut in with some bulletin from his district, unsettling news from that quarter also, a few Entities apparently beginning to get themselves back together after that little fit that they had had. Two or three of the other spotters were trying to get through to Andy too, lighting up his whole switchboard. “LACON,” someone was saying. “LACON guys all over the place!”
Something fishy very definitely was occurring. Andy shook his hands furiously in the air. “Quiet, everyone!
Quiet!
Let me hear!”
The room was suddenly silent.
Andy listened to Hawk, listened to Clipper, listened to Rowboat and the rest of the spotters down there in Los Angeles. He cut from line to line, saying very little, just listening. Listening hard. No one around him said anything.
Then he looked up, at Anson, at Steve, at Cindy, Jill, La-La, going one by one around the room. All those inquiring eyes, pleading for information, staring at him, reading his face. Pins could drop and the sound would be like thunder. They all could tell from his expression, Andy knew, that the news was ungood. That some unexpected extra factor had entered the equation, something they had not in the least reckoned on, and the situation was not quite as satisfactory as had been thought. Might, in fact, be suddenly starting to look pretty disastrous.
“Well?” Steve asked.
Andy slowly shook his head. “Oh, shit,” was all he could bring himself to say. “Shit! Shit! Shit! Shit!”
Frank had left the freeway in favor of a surface-streets route that would take him around the place where the northernmost bulge of the city wall bisected Topanga Canyon Boulevard. Now, as he was moving quickly through the town of Reseda in the San Fernando Valley, he glanced at his rearview mirror and saw a great pillar of black smoke rising into the sky behind him.
That puzzled him at first. Then he realized what it probably was, and the excitement that he had felt ever since Andy had sent word of the successful detonation, the wild euphoria that had been powering him for the last forty minutes, evaporated faster than snow in July.
“Andy?” he said, on the audio channel to the ranch. “Andy, listen, there’s a big fire, or something, going on somewhere around Beverly Hills or Bel Air. I can see the smoke coming right up over the top of the hills, a huge plume rising, out there on the far side of Mulholland Drive.”
There was no immediate reply from the ranch.
“Andy? Andy, are you receiving me? This is Frank, at Reseda Boulevard and Sherman Way.”
He got back only crackling noises. The continued silence was unsettling. The column of smoke behind him was still rising. It looked to be half a mile high. Frank thought he heard the sound of distant explosions, now.
“Andy?”
Another minute or so, still no Andy.
Then: “Sorry. That you, Frank?” At last. “I’ve been busy. Where did you say you are?”
“Heading northward across the Valley along Reseda Boulevard. There’s a tremendous fire happening behind me.”
“I know. There are a lot of fires. The Entities are hitting back, doing reprisals for killing Prime.”
“Reprisals?”
The word went ricocheting around in Frank’s head, pummeling his brain.
“Damn right. LACON planes are bombing the shit out of everything all over town.”
“But the mission was successful,” Frank said uncomprehendingly. “Prime is dead.”
“Yes. Apparently he is.”
“And half an hour ago you told me the Entities all over the world were going completely around the bend from the shock of his death. That they were crazed and staggering, berserk with pain, falling down all over the place. They were finished, you said.”
“I did say that, yes.”
“So who ordered the reprisals?” Frank asked, pushing his words out slowly and thickly, as though trying to speak through wads of cotton.
“The Entities did.” Andy sounded tired, terribly tired. “They seem to have picked themselves up somehow and put themselves back together again. And they’ve sent out a whole armada of LACON people and other assorted quislings to make air raids, pretty much at random, from the looks of it, by way of showing how annoyed they are with us.”
Frank leaned forward over the steering wheel, breathing slowly in and out. It was hard, very hard, assimilating all this. “Then it was just a waste of time, everything we just did? Knocking out Prime didn’t really achieve anything?”