Authors: Robert Silverberg
“For about ten minutes, it did. But what it looks like is that they have backup Primes. Which is something that Borgmann’s files didn’t tell me.”
“No! Oh, Jesus, Andy! Jesus!”
“Once I got the picture of what was going on in Los Angeles,” Andy said, “I went back in and hunted around and discovered that there’s evidently another Prime in London, and one in Istanbul, and the original one still in Prague. And more, maybe. They’re all interchangeable and linked in series. If one dies, the next one is activated right away.”
“Jesus,” Frank said again. And then, anguishedly: “What about Rasheed? And the others.”
“All okay. Rasheed’s currently riding with Charlie, traveling westward on the Foothill Freeway, somewhere near La Canada. Cheryl’s coming right up behind him. Mark’s on the Golden State Freeway in the vicinity of Mission Hills, heading north.”
“Well, thank God for that much. But I thought we had them beaten,” Frank said.
“Me too, for about five minutes.”
“Finished them all off at once, with one big bang.”
“That would have been nice, wouldn’t it? Well, we gave them a pretty good hit, anyway. But now they’re banging us back. And then, I guess, everything will go on pretty much as before.” The sound that came over the line from Andy was one that Frank interpreted as laughter, more or less. “Makes you feel like shit, doesn’t it, cuz?”
“I thought we had them,” Frank said. “I really did.”
A sensation that was entirely new to him, a feeling of utter and overwhelming hopelessness, swept through him like a cold bitter wind. They had been so completely absorbed in the project for so long, convinced that it would bring them to their goal. They had given it their best shot: all that ingenuity, all that sweat, all that bravery. Rasheed walking right into the lion’s den and sticking the bomb to the wall. And for what? For what? There had been one little fact they didn’t know; and because of it they hadn’t accomplished a damn thing.
It was maddening. Frank wanted to yell and kick and break things. But that wouldn’t make anything any better. He drew a deep breath, another, another. It didn’t help. He might just as well have been breathing ashes.
“God
damn
it, Andy. You worked so hard.”
“We all did. The only trouble was that the theory behind what we were doing didn’t happen to be valid. —Look, kiddo, just get yourself back to the ranch, and we’ll try to figure out something else, okay? I’ve got other calls to make. See you in about an hour, Frank Over and out.”
Over, yes. Out.
Try not to think about it, Frank told himself. It hurts too much to think. Pretend you’re Rasheed. Empty your mind of everything except the job of getting home.
That worked, for a while. Then it didn’t.
And then, about an hour later, he had something new to think about. He was far up the coast, just past Carpinteria, practically on the outskirts of Santa Barbara, when he saw strange streaks of light in the sky ahead of him, something that might have been a golden comet that exploded into a shower of green and purple sparkles. Fireworks? He heard muffled booming sounds. A moment later the dark slim shapes of three swiftly moving planes passed overhead, high up, heading south, back toward Los Angeles.
A bombing mission? All the way up here?
He told the audio to kick in.
“Andy? Andy?”
The crackle of static. Otherwise, silence.
“Andy?”
He kept trying. No reply from the ranch.
He was past Summerland now, past Montecito, moving on into downtown Santa Barbara. The familiar hills of home rose up back of the city. Another couple of miles up the freeway and he would be able to see the ranch itself, nestling high on its mountain among the folded canyons that sheltered it.
And now Frank saw it. Or the place where he knew it to be. Smoke was rising from it, not a gigantic black pillar like the one he had seen when leaving Los Angeles, but only a small spiraling trail, wisping out at its upper end and losing itself in the darkening late-afternoon sky.
Stunned, he traversed the city and made his way up the mountain road, keeping his eyes on the smoke and trying to make himself believe that it was coming from some other hilltop. The road twisted about so much as it ascended that perspectives were tricky, and for a time Frank actually did believe that the fire was on another hill entirely, but then he was on the final stretch, where the road hooked around and leveled out on the approach to the ranch gate, and there could be no doubt of it. The ranch had been bombed. All these years it had been sacrosanct, as though exempt by some special sanction from the direct touch of the conquerors. But that exemption had ended now.
He gave the signal that would open the gate, and the bars went sliding back.
As he drove in, down the little road, Frank could see that the main house was on fire. Flames were dancing across its rear facade. The whole front of the building looked to be gone, and the tiled roof over the middle section had fallen in. There was a shallow crater behind the house, where the path to the communications center had been. The communications center itself was still standing, but it had taken some damage, and appeared to have been knocked off its foundation. Most of the other structures, the minor outbuildings, looked more or less intact. Little fires were burning here and there in the trees behind them.
Through the haze and smoke Frank saw a small figure wandering about outside, moving as though in a daze. Cindy. Ancient, tottering little Cindy. Her face was smudged and blackened. He got out of the car and ran toward her, and embraced her. It was like clutching a bundle of sticks.
“Frank,” she said. “Oh, look at everything, Frank! Look at it!”
“I saw the planes leaving. Three of them, I saw.”
“Three, yes. They came right overhead. They fired missiles, but a lot of them missed. Some didn’t. The one direct hit, that was a good one.”
“I see. The main house. Is anyone else alive?”
“Some,” she said. “Some. It’s bad, Frank.”
He nodded. He caught sight of Andy, now, standing in the skewed doorway of the communications center. He looked about ready to drop from exhaustion. Somehow, though, he managed a grin, the smirking one-side-of-the- mouth Andy-grin that always looked so sneaky and false to Frank. But that grin was a welcome sight now.
Frank went trotting over to him.
“You okay?”
The grin became a weary smile. “Fine, yes. Real fine. A little concussion, is all. Not too serious. Slight dislocation of the brain, nothing more. But the whole communications system got wrecked. If you were wondering why I’ve been off the air, now you know.” Andy pointed to the crater on the path. “They didn’t miss by much. And the main house—”
“I can see.”
“We were leading a charmed life up here for a hell of a long time, boy. But I guess we tried one little trick too many. It all happened very fast, the raid. Whoosh, whoosh, whoosh, blam, blam, blam, and they were here and gone. Of course, they might come back and finish the job half an hour from now.”
“You think?”
“Who knows? Anything’s possible.”
“Where are the others?” Frank asked, glancing around. “What about my father?”
Andy hesitated just a moment too long. “I’m sorry to have to tell you this, Frank Anson was in the main house when the bomb hit it. —I’m very sorry, Frank. Very sorry.”
A dull thudding sensation was all that Frank felt. The real shock, he suspected, was going to hit later.
“My father was in there with him,” Andy added. “My mother, too.”
“Oh, Andy. Andy.”
“And also your father’s sister.” Andy stumbled over the name. “—Les—Leh—Lesl—” He was right at the edge of collapse, Frank realized.
“Leslyn,” Frank supplied. “You ought to go inside and get off your feet, Andy.”
“Yes. I really should, shouldn’t I?” But he stayed where he was, bracing himself against the frame of the door. His voice came to Frank as though from very far away: “Mike is okay. Cassandra, too. And La-La. Lorraine, I mean. Peggy was pretty badly hurt. She may not pull through. I’m not sure what happened to Julie. The whole ranch-hand compound got smashed. But Khalid’s place wasn’t even touched. It’s the infirmary for the survivors, right now. Alike and Khalid went into the main house and brought out anybody who was still alive, just before the roof fell in. Cassandra’s looking after them.”
Frank made a vague sound of acknowledgment. Turning away from Andy for a moment, he stared across the way, toward the burning building. Through his numbed mind went the thought of the Colonel’s books, of the maps and charts in the chart room, of all that history of the vanished free human world going up in flames. He wondered why he should think about anything as irrelevant as that just now.
“My brothers and sisters?” he asked.
“Most of them okay, just shaken up. But one of your brothers died. I don’t know if it was Martin or James.” Andy gave him a sheepish look. “Sony about that, Frank: I never could keep them straight in my head.” In a mechanical way he went on, now that Frank had started him going again: “My sister Sabrina, she’s okay. Not Irene. As for Jane—Ansonia—”
“All right,” Frank said. “I don’t need to hear the whole list now. You ought to get yourself over to Khalid’s house and lie down, Andy. You hear me?
Go over there and lie down.”
“Yeah,” Andy said. “That sounds like a good idea.” He went lurching away.
Frank glanced up and off toward the left, where the road that came from town could be seen, snaking along the flank of the mountain. The other cars would be arriving soon— Cheryl, Mark, Charlie. Some splendid homecoming this would to be for them, too, after the excitement of the grand and glorious expedition to Los Angeles. Perhaps they already knew of the mission’s failure. But then, to learn of the raid on the house, to see the damage, to hear of the deaths—
Rasheed was the only one who would ride with the blow, Frank suspected, out of the entire group that had gone to Los Angeles. The strangely superhuman Rasheed, who had been designed and constructed by his father, the equally strange Khalid, to handle any kind of jolt without batting an eye. That eerie detachment of his, the otherworldly calm that had allowed him to venture right into the den of Entity Prime and fasten a bomb to the wall: that would carry him through the shock of returning to the gutted ranch without any difficulty at all. Of course, Rasheed’s mother and father and brothers and sisters hadn’t been touched. And he might not have given a damn about the success or failure of the mission in the first place. Did Rasheed give a damn about anything? Probably not.
And very likely that was the attitude they would all need to cultivate now: detachment, indifference, resignation. There was no hope left, was there? No remaining fantasies to cling to now.
He walked slowly back toward the parking area.
Cindy was still standing by his car, running her hands over its sleek flanks in a weird caressing way. It occurred to Frank that the frail old woman’s mind must be gone, that she had been driven insane by the noise and fury of the bombing raid; but she turned toward him as he approached, and he saw the unmistakable clear, cool look of sanity in her eyes.
“He told you who the dead ones are?” she asked him.
“Most of them, I guess. Steve, Lisa, Leslyn, and others, too. One of my brothers. And my father, too.”
“Poor Anson, yes. Let me tell you something, though. It was just as well, I think, that he died when he did.”
The casual brutality of the remark startled him. But Frank had seen on other occasions how merciless the very old could be.
“Just as well? Why do you say that?”
Cindy waved one claw-like hand at the scene of destruction. “He couldn’t have lived with himself after seeing
this,
Frank. His grandfather’s ranch in ruins. Half the family dead. And the Entities still running the world, despite everything. He was a very proud man, your father. All the Carmichaels are.” The hand swiveled around and came to rest across Frank’s forearm, grasping it tightly. Her eyes glittered up into his like those of a witch. “It was bad enough for him when Tony was killed. But Anson would have died a thousand deaths a day if he had survived
this.
Knowing that his second great plan for ridding the world of the Entities had been an even bigger failure than the first— that it had ended by bringing all this wreckage upon us. He’s a lot better off not being here now. A lot better off.”
Better off? Could that be true? Frank needed to think about that.
He disengaged his arm and took a few steps away from her, toward the jumble of blackened granite and flagstone that was the smoldering house, and dug the toe of his boot into the heaps of charred wood scattered along the path.
The bitter smell of burning things stung his nostrils. Cindy’s harsh words sounded and resounded in his ears, a doleful clamor that would not cease.
Anson would have died a thousand deaths a day—a thousand deaths—a thousand deaths—
His great plan a failure—
A failure—
A failure—
Failure —failure —failure —failure—
After a few moments it seemed to Frank that he could almost agree with her about Anson. He could never have withstood the immensity of the fiasco, the totality of it. It would have wrecked him. Not that that made his death any easier to accept, though. Or any of the rest of this. It was hard to take, all of it. It stripped all meaning from everything Frank had ever believed in. They had made their big move, and it had failed, and that was that. The game was over and they had lost. Wasn’t that the truth? And now what? Frank wondered.