—“You will go to Paramount Pictures, Annie and Eddy!”
—“Washington, D.C. The little brown house! Fritz and Bettina. Make those dollars count!”
—“For you, Christopher and Eloise, air tickets to Disneyworld! Bring sweaters for the air-conditioning!”
But inside, he fought down fear, his mind going again to the communications shack and the screens there, and his watchers, who would be riveted to CNN, Al Jazeera, BBC. WAITING FOR NEWS FROM AFRICA TO START!
He was in agony that the red phone would ring again. It had happened before when he failed.
Everyone, even kings, are afraid of someone, Harlan Maas knew. And he was terrified of the voice on that phone.
But outwardly he smiled so the group would think that nothing was wrong. He stood tall. He was the embodiment of worldly confidence and gentle command. He rolled his left sleeve up to expose blue veins on his pale, thin arm.
Harlan announced, “Now, all of you! Let’s line up and give each other the final round of shots.”
FIVE
Chris Vekey walked into the Wilson High School gym, and the sheer normalcy of it — after the horrors she’d seen last night — almost knocked her off her feet. For the next thirty minutes, for her daughter’s sake and the sake of sanity, she’d try to block out the situation in Nevada and the photos from Somalia sent in by Joe Rush. Her experience told her she needed this short break. Her role as a mother filled her with protectiveness. She looked out at the smiling kids and her gut clenched up.
Meet Rush’s plane. Find out if he’s infected. Find out if he thinks the Somalis started it. The Sixth Fleet is in the Indian Ocean, ready to blow those fuckers to smithereens. Homza believes it’s out of Africa. Consensus is, coordinated attack.
But in here, take a breath. For the next thirty minutes, another world. Eighty kids putting last-minute touches on exhibits that they hoped would win a prize and scholarship to college. Chris had worked in medical emergencies before. She’d worked in slums in Houston, and Los Angeles, and in shanty towns in Accra. She’d learned a long time ago that in an emergency you took solace where you could find it or you lost effectiveness. You controlled your fears and grabbed the nap, ate the meal, did whatever the thing was that relaxed you, if you were lucky enough to get a few minutes to do it. That break made you sharper, and could, in the end, mean the difference between a win and a loss.
Burke had been livid when he’d learned she was here.
“You’re where? A high school science fair?”
“Do you have children, Burke?”
“I don’t have that joy, Chris, no.”
“I was up until four A.M. on Nevada. Rush doesn’t get in for two more hours. YOU need six hours of sleep to do your job, you once told me. I need four. So back off. This is my break. It’s how I stay clear. There’s nothing for me to do until he gets in and I assume you want me in top shape, right?”
Burke had backed down. He usually listened to any reasoning that made you better at your job. Well, as long as the person saying it wasn’t Joe Rush.
Twenty minutes to go.
Burke had said, chilling her, “Two nurses have come down with it in Nevada, twenty hours after treating the first victims.”
Washington, she knew, was where too many parents forgot their children while concentrating on work. Sorry, son, I can’t see your Little League game because there’s a key meeting at the Pentagon. But I promise that we’ll have time together next summer. I know I said that last summer, but this year will be different.
Next thing you know, you shove your kid aside for a smaller meeting, not an emergency, and then something less important, and then to just write a memo, and before you know it, years have passed, the kid’s on drugs, the kid disappears to college or some ashram and you never hear from her again. Tell a kid that they’re unimportant long enough, they’ll believe it.
The fair was due to open in fifteen minutes, 9:30 A.M., and the tenth graders competing for the opportunity to present at the World Science Festival in New York made frantic last-minute adjustments, as if this, a project, meant the end of the world. The work lay along four aisles of fold-out tables, between the basketball backboards and folded-up stands — a cornucopia of science dreams, mini-robots, racks of test tubes, jury-rigged computers, hydroponic tomatoes, and, Chris thought with pride, my girl Aya’s project!
Washington! She’d lived here for twelve years now and was always struck by the way the city juxtaposed the mighty and the mundane. Nuclear war may be imminent but my kid needs braces. The economy grew by 4.5 percent but take the garbage out because it smells! The defense satellite system sucked up another billion dollars, and Ralph the plumber needs four hundred. I know you’re the senator from Alaska, dear, but mop up that bathroom floor right now!
The gym smelled of coffee and wood polish and sweat from last night’s b-ball game, where Aya had been a happy cheerleader. It smelled of the cupcakes that one mom had baked to bribe judges, and expensive aftershave from the few dads here, mixed with a cheaper kind from the teen boys.
And the projects. How fast is your computer? by Charles Jason, fifteen. The race between solar-powered bristlebots, tiny automats made from heads of toothbrushes. How to block a Wi-Fi signal. What is smog made of? Chris couldn’t believe that fifteen-year-olds had come up with all this stuff.
Mostly moms at the tables with their kids, but a few dads here, too, clad in better-than-usual gray suits, which ID’d them as high-level government or K Street types. Chris batting away a sudden vision of a nineteen-year-old girl in Nevada, her face eaten away as if by acid… and at the same time watching Aya arrange connections between a homemade plywood box, two cheap seven-year-old Dell laptops rummaged from friends’ basements, and a small red plastic unit that looked more like a toy. Aya’s poster. HOW I PROVED OUR SUPERMARKET LIED ABOUT FISH IT SELLS.
Aya, only a few years younger than those hideously mangled drone crews out West, in new crisp jeans and a red Abercrombie sweater, behind her table, muttering words she’d been practicing for the judges. “Anyone can now do DNA experiments in their very own home, like I did!”
“Win or not, you’re the best,” Chris told her daughter.
Aya’s mood jerking back and forth, one minute filled with excitement over the science, the next fearful over the competition. “It’s amazing, Mom. Used to be that if you wanted to do genetics, it was impossible unless you’re rich. Like, just a centrifuge costs, like, six thousand dollars.”
“Don’t say ‘like,’ honey. Just say the words.”
“Whatever! Anyway, my Cathal Garvey does the same thing, spins samples, separates components. I saved my babysitting money. The Cathal cost only sixty bucks! And this little disk? See the slots in it? It spins tissue samples at 33,000 rpms, 51,000 g’s, that’s 18,000 more than the centrifuge, which costs a lot more!”
“I’m proud of you,” Chris said, meaning it.
“You can mix tomato genes with pig genes! Amazing!”
Chris grew aware of another mom looking with ill-disguised antagonism between Aya’s exhibit and her own son’s, a half dozen bits of labeled cocoa, wood, bananas, and brazil nuts. SUSTAINABLE CROPS FROM TROPICAL FORESTS.