He rushed on before she could speak again. “When the doorway senses a motor, electrical activity above a certain level, it turns off, just like that, and then turns on again as soon as quiet returns. The thing isn’t gone during that period; it’s just not working. The activity doesn’t force it out, is what I’m saying. Nothing has forced it out of anywhere yet, except fire. And that doesn’t seem to have any effect at all on the sender, the source, whatever it is. Maybe it doesn’t even know a receiver, a doorway and its field have been destroyed. Maybe its programming doesn’t allow for that. Maybe there is a time limit involved. After so long, it stops, the sending mechanism scans for a new location and sets up a new field there. We don’t know. Maybe it can just attach itself to a carbon based material, wood, and when the wood burns it collapses.”
Constance had not moved as he talked, almost too fast to follow. Suddenly he stood up and went to the counter, brought back the coffee carafe and poured for them all. He looked inside his cup, took it to the sink and put it down, and brought out a clean one from the cabinet. Outside, the silent snow continued to accumulate; birds streaked to the sheltered feeder, away again in flashes of red and black. She thought of a show she had seen, people talking about organic methods of pest control. “If you put these granules down,” a bearded man had said, sprinkling tiny pellets on a table, spreading them with a pencil point, “the ants find them irresistible, don’t you see. We have a film.” She had watched the ants struggling with the grains that had assumed gigantic proportions among them. “They get them inside the colony and with the humidity and warmth, the pellets emit fungus spores,” the bearded man had gone on. “Deadly to the ants, of course.” Time bombs, she had thought, and switched channels. Time bombs. Would the doorways be like that? Time bombs? In her mind she could see men struggling to cut away a door frame from the surrounding walls and floor, without warping it, without touching the opening at all. They could do it, she realized. They could haul it away and set it up in a laboratory somewhere, and when the laboratory power was turned off, it would go to work with its diameter of madness reaching out for a mile all around. Or would sensors tell it to increase its power? Or not to function at all? Or do something altogether different? What it had done to Charlie was different; no one else had exhibited his symptoms. Maybe it would emit fungus spores, deadly, of course. She knew she was on the verge of insane laughter, and forced herself to lift her cup, to sip the steaming coffee, to stop seeing ants and bearded men talking about death too nonchalantly.
She kept her gaze on her cup then, and said, “You didn’t answer my question. What’s wrong with you? Do you know?”
He shrugged and said almost lazily, “Nothing much. I think we’ve got a tiger by the tail, the biggest damn tiger in the world, and it’s taking us here and there as it wants.”
She knew he was evading her again, and he knew she was well aware that he had not yet answered her, and by now she must know that he would not. Could not, he corrected. There had been few secrets over the twenty-five years of their marriage, but now and then there was a secret. Now there was a secret, he corrected again. The others had not lasted very long.
The snow was letting up slightly; the sky was lightening. When it stopped he would get out the snow blower and start working on the driveway, the walks around the house. He groused about clearing snow, but in fact there were times when he enjoyed the labor, enjoyed the still cold air and the pure beauty of a world under wraps. He would enjoy it that afternoon. The unanswered question hung over them heavily, silencing John who did not know their many varied ways of communicating but seemed to understand that no new business should be raised right now. Constance continued to watch the cardinals at the feeder, but her gaze did not shift to follow their flight, to focus on newcomers. Charlie looked at the snow but he saw the cramped black space, smelled strange air, felt pressure against his head that grew and grew until he wanted to swipe at his hair, knock it away. And he saw the doorway that John had described with loathing and terror. But to Charlie it was not a thing to fear. It was velvety blackness that would be welcoming, that yearned for him even as he yearned for it. During the past few weeks he had dreamed of that doorway several times. In his dreams he walked toward it at first, then ran, and then, miraculously, the way it can happen in dreams, he flew unencumbered by his awkward body, and, flying, had gone to it joyously, only to come awake in a sweat.
He knew he would not get near an area where it operated. He knew he would resist the temptation to approach, to see it for himself. He knew it was insane to think anything else
about it. And yet, he thought bleakly, he felt like
a bee so loaded with pollen it could hardly fly, and was unable not to launch itself and return to the hive. Programmed to take home pollen, it could do nothing else. Something had invaded his head, he thought clearly, and it wanted to follow its programming and go home. Knowing this made all the other things he knew about the doorway and his need to stay away from it inoperable.
Chapter 17
We fear others
, Constance thought that
afternoon at the front window, watching Charlie clear the driveway, because we don’t understand their values. And even more because we suspect they have no regard for ours. John Loesser came into view with a shovel to attack the front walk and steps. Sometimes his scar from the plastic surgery seemed a bright red line of warning; other times it was invisible altogether. She wondered if he saw it every time he shaved, if he touched it now and then, remembering. And she wondered if he realized that she was immune also, if he had thought through what it meant for those who had had the wrenching headache, the assault of pain, and then looked up uninvaded. Polly had come away like that. And she had also.
It was inhuman; there was no defense, and she was deathly afraid of it, whatever it was. John was immune, she was, but Charlie had been affected. She no longer saw his red jacket, the snow plume, the emerging black driveway. Charlie had been affected, she said again, hearing the words in her head. How? She did not know and if he knew he would not say. But she accepted that the only way he would be safe was if they found and destroyed whatever it was that operated the doorways and the fields of insanity that surrounded them. How many times had countless humans come to that same awareness? There is the foreigner, the alien, the enemy that must be killed.
She thought of the presentation she had prepared for the meeting of psychologists and psychiatrists in San Francisco, how vehemently she had denied that xenophobia was innate, how rigorous had been her arguments proving it was a learned response. In theory she might still take that position, but in practice, now that every cell in her body seemed sensitized to a threat, when she could see how Charlie had changed because of contact with the alien presence, now she knew that something more primitive than her reasonable mind was motivating her, dictating her every thought. And that more primitive part knew the strange other had to be destroyed.
Abruptly she turned from the window to go to the kitchen to make apple pie for dessert. Hot apple pie and cheese. John was a better cook than she was and he would make dinner, but she would make the pie. She almost wished she had a gingham dress and a starched apron with apples and strawberries appliquéd on it; she would be certain to rub flour on one cheek, have the house fragrant with spices—cinnamon and cloves—and the men coming in from their chores in the frozen wasteland would realize the American dream. She stifled a giggle that threatened to turn into a moan and went about her own chore of making pie.
“I hardly ever use the electric stove in the winter,” she said later to John, who was studying the wood range with interest. “Even for pie,” she added. “Of course, in the summer it’s a different matter.”
“It’s a no-win situation,” Charlie said, tired but feeling good from his exertions with the snow. His face was ruddy, his eyes bright. He and Constance were at the table, leaving the cooking area to John, who had never cooked on a wood stove. “I cut the wood for exercise, and she makes things like pies.”
“Use the electric stove,” Constance said. “That one takes getting used to—” The phone rang and she reached behind her and picked it up. “Yes?” She listened for moment, then said to Charlie, “It’s Byron, for you.”
Everything changed. They had been at ease, and now the air was thick with tension. Charlie’s voice was charged, probably not noticeably to anyone but Constance, but she knew. He sounded more relaxed than ever, sleepy, but his eyes had lost their shine and now looked blank, blind even. He listened, then said, “How do you know that?” Listened again. “Can’t,” he said then. “In case you haven’t heard, we’re snowed in. Be a couple of days before anything moves around here.” This time he listened longer and then drawled, “How are things, Fred?”
Foley, Constance thought, Fred Foley, the FBI agent. Now they made a tableau, John unmoving at the stove, Charlie looking asleep with the phone at his ear, she frozen at the table. The cat Brutus stalked into the room and glared at them, turned, and left again.
Finally Charlie said, “Sure, Fred. Sure. If I see him I’ll tell him.” Very gently he hung up. “They want you,” he said, glancing at John. “I said I’d tell you if I see you.”
“They know I’m here?”
“They seem to think you’re in New York somewhere, in the city. Byron said Beatrice told them.”
John shook his head. “I didn’t tell her where I was. She couldn’t have told them.”
“They really want you,” Charlie said kindly. “If they think they can find you through her, well… Anyway, Byron and Foley will be in the city tomorrow, if they can get a flight in, or the next day. They said to tell you they’ll wipe the slate clean, whatever you’ve done in the past, all forgiven, understandable.”
“Dear God,” Constance whispered. “It’s started again, hasn’t it?”
“Well, they didn’t say that in just so many words,” Charlie said. “But if they’re looking for John to run point for them, I’d assume it has started again.” He crossed the kitchen to stand at the wood stove with John. “Now, you tell me what kind of heat you want, and I’ll tell you which wood will provide it. Quick and hot, the little sticks of apple wood. Medium and sustained, the oak.”
“They must have clamped down on information going into the mainframe,” John said, looking past Charlie. “There wasn’t anything yesterday.”
“I suspect that’s right,” Charlie said. “And they do have resources, you know.”
“I should go.”
“Snowed in, remember? Snowplows hit our road out front after the interstates are clear, and the federal highways, and the state roads. We’re way down on the list. Let’s build up the fire now.”
He built the fire while John started chopping onions and carrots. He admired the way a master chef handled the knife and food he dealt with, seeming to pay no attention at all to what he was doing, but instead to be thinking out loud.
“Beatrice must have mentioned to Byron Weston that she had talked to me,” John said, at the counter. “They’re tapping her phone, the
bastards. Flying in to New York. Must be within
driving distance then. Probably have it sealed off already, if they can get to it. Might be snowed in. No leaks this time. No way to find out where it is.” The knife stopped in midair, then resumed. The carrots had been reduced to the size of rice, the onions almost to a mush. He pushed everything to one side and started on garlic. The knife blade flashed with precision. “They don’t need me if they just want to burn it out. They want to study it, have someone who can go in and out for them.”
He stopped cutting and turned to look at Constance. “What do you want?” she asked.
“I want it utterly destroyed. To hell with their studies.”
He resumed chopping.
Charlie stood out of the way, listening, watching, his arms crossed. So far he had found no fault with anything John said. Strange, he thought then, he had tried to interest Foley, Sid Levy, anyone, had told them everything—nearly everything, anyway. And now that they were involved he just wanted them all out again. He had wanted them to use their vast powers of destruction, and now… . If you call on the gods to hurl thunderbolts, you’d better be pretty damn nimble. Byron Weston had been excited, unable to conceal his excitement over the phone. Chance of a lifetime, Charlie thought soberly, the find of the century, of the millennium. A bunch of kids playing with dynamite caps.
“I could get in touch with them,” John said, cutting parsley now. “Find out where the damn thing is, then split.”
Charlie snorted and turned to the table where Constance sat, very watchful, very still. “Martinis,” he said. “We are asking this guest to cook without a martini at hand.”
She set the table while he mixed drinks, and then they turned on the radio for news: it was all about the storm and road problems and school closings. When it became obvious that no one was listening, Charlie turned it off again.
“Sid Levy,” he said suddenly. John Loesser was stuffing chicken breasts with the vegetables he had sautéed. He glanced at Charlie with no understanding, and continued his work, frowning in abstraction. Charlie looked at Constance. “Sid might know where the thing is supposed to be.”
He left the kitchen and returned in a moment with his telephone directory, already open, his finger on one of the names. He made the call from the kitchen.
Neither Constance nor John spoke or moved as Charlie performed on the telephone. He had an index card that he shook before the mouthpiece; he scraped the phone with his finger; he blew long whistling breaths across it, all the time complaining that he could not hear, please speak up, slower, louder, they were having a blizzard, for God’s sake! “I told you,” he said, although he had not told Sid this before, “I can’t hear you any more than I could hear Fred Foley. Where? Say it again! Where?” He crumpled the card and blew across the mouthpiece and listened intently. “I’ll call you back tomorrow, or the next day. Are you there, Sid? Can you hear me? I’ll call back when the lines are in order again.”
He hung up. “Lake Pike, New Jersey,” he said softly. “We’re to meet at a hotel in Lake Pike and go on from there.” Constance had already gone for the atlas. They pored over it together and located the small village at the edge of Kittatinny Mountain. “Deceptive,” he murmured then, studying the surrounding countryside. “Summer houses, boys’ camps, fishing camps on the lake, and the river, what, five miles from town? Skiing nearby. Deceptive. It looks empty and is probably crawling with people.”
It was rugged, mountainous country, probably not plowed out all winter, and humming with traffic all summer. Their atlas did not show the topographic features of the area, but Charlie could remember it generally from past trips—steep hills, rottenslate hills, fast mountain brooks dammed here and there to make brilliant blue lakes that came complete with A-frames and trailers, retreats for religious groups, boy scout and girl scout camps, and hunting and fishing resorts. Two hours from New York, when the roads were passable. Two hours from home, when the roads were passable. And now with the snow storm in the area, it might as well be on the moon as far as accessibility was concerned. Of course, he thought then, the army had snowplows, too. National Guard plows? Foley would find a way to get in; there would be personnel to see to it if he had any priority at all.
They were at dinner when they heard the snowplow on the road in front of the house. Charlie had not completely finished the driveway. He had learned not to dig it all the way out until after the plow had gone by. Otherwise he had to do it twice. An hour of work, he thought distantly. Tomorrow, after one hour of work, he would be mobile again. Heading toward New Jersey.
“This is wonderful,” Constance was saying to John. “Not quite chicken Kiev; better, I think. I’d like to keep you.” She spoke to John Loesser, but her gaze was on Charlie, had returned to him again and again; she felt almost that she could follow his thoughts about the snow, the driveway. “Sit still, John,” she said lightly, “I’ll clear and bring coffee and pie. Charlie, ice cream or cheese?”
He nodded, caught himself, and said cheese. The cheese was pale sharp New York cheddar; the pie was spicy and fragrant and warm; the coffee excellent dark Colombian. Charlie brought in Cognac. So very civilized, Constance thought. So very civilized.
“You know,” Charlie said then, “only three percent of arson fire cases are solved annually?” John shook his head in amazement. “Fact. We know who did it most of the time, but proof is hard. Very hard. The evidence goes up in smoke, you see. So this guy has a big insurance policy on his warehouse, say, and it burns while he’s at dinner with a dozen other people. We know it’s arson, and we know who is responsible, but so what? He collects and that’s that.” He sipped his coffee, touched the Cognac to his lips, and sighed in contentment. “Sometimes when we go in there’s still a wall standing, maybe a lot of walls standing, and we know they won’t stand very long, so we set a charge and tumble them ourselves. With proper precautions, of course. Lots of ways to tumble those walls, depending on what else is in the building. Chemicals, that’s one thing; natural gas, something else. Wooden frame, concrete, lots of steel beams—they’re all different, take different approaches.”
“What are we going to do, Charlie?” Constance asked then in a low, steady voice.
He shook his head.
“It’s us, or no one,” she said. “Not you alone. Not you and John. Us.”
“I should have finished the job years ago,” John said. “I didn’t know how. My little Molotov cocktail! Tell me what to do, Charlie. How to do it. That’s all I want to know. How.”
“Can you ski?” Constance asked him.
“Afraid not.”
Constance said, “Look at the map.” She got up and brought it to the dining room table. “Here’s Lake Pike. Let’s say what we’re looking for is within a ten mile radius.” She consulted the scale and then measured off about an inch from the village, traced a rough circle with that diameter. “What we want is somewhere in there. Hills, mountains, brooks, the lake. And all snowed in, I bet. They’ll plow the road, maybe even the driveway to the hotel we’re after, but they’ll also have people there to keep out intruders. We’re intruders. So, if we go in at all, it has to be off the road, off the driveways, through woods, through snow that may be hip deep, deeper even. Skis or snowshoes. Can you manage snowshoes?”
“I’m from Virginia, Constance. Not too much chance to learn skiing or snowshoes. If you can get in, so can I, if I have to wade through it up to my chin.”
She brushed that aside. “Tomorrow morning while Charlie is finishing the driveway, I’ll give you a lesson. You can practice when we go to town to get the charge. MacPeters will have the stuff you need, won’t he?” she asked Charlie in the same breath. MacPeters was with the volunteer fire department.
He nodded, watching her with amusement as she turned back to John Loesser, whose look was not at all amused.
“Cross-country skiing isn’t a thing like downhill,” she said. “If you can balance at all, you
can do it. And you don’t go very fast or anything
like that. It’s rather like walking with funny shoes. You’ll see in the morning.” She added, generously, Charlie thought, “Don’t worry about it. Maybe there won’t be enough snow over there to worry about. More coffee?”