My house had vanished in a moment of tremendous heat, but there had been no explosion—all the damage was caused by radiated heat, and the wave of superheated air. The police report said there had been a thunderclap, as if the burning house had disappeared so suddenly that the air had rushed back inaudibly.
All the grass and trees in the yard were scorched and dead.
We stood on the blackened lawn and stared, for many long minutes; our luggage was in a pile beside us, and the cab had long since gone on its way. No one came out to talk to us; perhaps because none of them had a window facing our way through which they could see, but more likely it was just a matter of the human desire not to stand too close to bad luck. After a long time, Helen said, “Do you suppose there’s anything known to exist in everyday life, anywhere, that could make this happen?”
“Not that I know about. And it’s the kind of thing they might have mentioned when I was an undergrad in physics.”
“Was it intended, perhaps, to get you?”
“Could have been, I suppose, but you’d think that someone who could summon a completely unknown physical force with this much energy would be capable of ringing my doorbell, or even just phoning, and finding out if I was home, first.” I shook my head. “A couple days ago, things made sense.”
“It will be at least a couple days before they begin to make any sense again,” a voice said behind us. We turned and found that Geoffrey Iphwin was there, as was a beautiful old real Rolls-Royce, with a real human driver at the wheel. Just behind and ahead of it, two small armored cars had parked. “Right now I don’t think I can give you an explanation that will make any sense to you, at least not sense that you could use for anything, and part of the problem is that I don’t begin to understand everything myself. But if you will come along, I can pretty well assure your safety—at least as well as I can assure mine—and after that perhaps we can begin to fight back, and force the world to make a little more sense, eh?”
He ran in little mincing steps over to the site where my house had been, his eye seeming to catch and stop at the many places where the sand had been baked into little fused pockets by the intense heat, and now reflected the late-afternoon sun with a sort of soft brown shine. He looked back at us, his expression mild and soft. “If you want entirely out of all of this, I can just write out a check for enough to get you a new house, give you some time and money to resettle, and probably but not definitely, make it clear enough so that you’ll be left alone. But I’m afraid if you want to press on, there’s not much alternative—you’re going to be in danger, and you’re in for the duration.”
“Can’t you even tell us what the sides are?”
Iphwin shrugged. “The Reichs and their governments are mostly on the other side. Is that good enough?”
“Good enough for me,” Helen said, with surprising vehemence, and then I noticed I was nodding vigorously.
“All right, then,” Iphwin said. “I’m afraid you will have to come with me, then. At the moment the other side is moving much, much faster than I anticipated they would. I do apologize—my underestimating them is what has allowed them to do these things to you, and it’s also why I shall have to bring you further and deeper into the situation, much sooner than I would have preferred. And I’m also afraid that you won’t be happy when you find out how many of the shocks you are feeling, or are going to feel, are very much my fault. I really do deeply hope that when it all becomes clearer, you will be able to forgive me.”
We threw our bags into his car. When Helen had been shooting she had seemed bigger and stronger, and now she struggled more than I’d have expected to move her suitcase. Iphwin took us back to the harbor, where his people had already gassed and serviced the Skyjump. By dark, we were a very long way north, in one of the guest suites in the Big Sapphire, surrounded by the sea just north of Surabaya, unpacking and trying to figure out where life would take us next.
Unpacking didn’t take me long—all I had was what I had taken for a weekend, and the clothes I had emergency-ordered would be delivered here Monday while I was working. Helen had stopped for some more things from her place, but it didn’t take her twenty minutes to pack or unpack—she was pretty typical of female academics, not much on clothes. When we were all done, it was only seven at night, we should theoretically have just been sitting down to our second dinner in Saigon, and there was absolutely nothing to do.
Naturally we decided to put on the headsets and see if we could find any of our friends in the VR chat room. I could tell immediately that tonight was going to be all right, because not only was everyone there, but I drew Bogart and Helen drew Bergman again. The first thing I did, of course, was get rid of the stupid cigarette that made it hard to breathe or taste anything, and the second thing I did was corner Paul Henreid, grab his lapels, and tell him to buzz off and keep his eyes off my girl if he wanted to leave the place alive. Then I stopped by the piano and told Sam I wanted a selection from the classics, and he settled into a nice Debussy piece, dreamy and romantic, instead of the corny old thing’ he usually played. As far as I was concerned, I had saved the picture.
I sat down at the table to find everyone babbling at once. “Suppose I asked whether anybody here could tell this story coherently?” I said, pulling my chair up.
Helen really did wear Ingrid Bergman well; she turned to me with a calm stare, paused a moment, and said, “Well, then you would be disappointed with the answer. But at least everyone here agrees that it started with Terri. And the good news is, if we can make sense out of it, we can probably get some idea of how we got released from jail.”
Terri was being pretty moderate, for Terri—she was being Yvonne, of whom Claude Rains had once said, “All by herself, she may constitute an entire second front.” She leaned back in an angly, awkward way that would have told anyone at once that that body was being worn by a teenager, and said, “You might know that since I have to go to the special American expat school and since my father is a rich man, I don’t get out much. In fact I usually can only go to regular school events or to parties at my parents’ friends’ houses. I get real bored a lot of the time, because there’s only so much homework you can do, and only so much chat room time. Plus of course I hate to admit it, but I’m kind of nosy.
“And then the thought occurred to me that Eric—he’s a buddy of mine at school that has this crush on me, but thank god I’m not that desperate, but he’s really sweet and will do almost anything for me—Eric had given me a neat little program that would track people’s real net addresses while they were in the chat room, so I could see who I was really talking to, and I had had it running for months. And so ... well, gee, I just think, anybody having a romantic holiday in the Far East, and all... oh, I wanted to know just what you guys were up to. I know you told me where you’d be staying and I know you told me all about it, but for some reason the signal broke up right when you said it, or I was distracted, or something. And that was why I tried tracing you, figuring you’d be doing something romantic. I hope you don’t mind being spied on.”
My first thought was, Why not? everyone else does, but I swallowed that comment—I figured it might embarrass her—and said, “Considering the result, we ought to thank you.”
“Well, it was weird, because the geographic coordinates it gave were for somewhere in—”
The world froze.
“Signal just broke up,” I said. “Where did you say?”
“It broke up on my end too,” she said. “Your coordinates—”