“Okay,” Reese said.
“It may not work at all.”
“Do it,” Reese said.“Let’s go.” He didn’t know if it was the sugar, the aftereffects of circulatory shock, or Verb’s dazzling light show, but he was euphoric, nearly manic. He got to his feet, felt like he was flying through the universe without a ship.
“Crunch!”
In the darkness between two arms of the galaxy, a cold, cloudy rectangle began to glow, then shimmered and fluoresced into an oily rainbow of colors. Reese took a halting step toward it, disoriented by the invisibility of the physical room. Large, soft hands moved over his injured arm, attaching the parachute and some kind of knapsack. He shrugged into the harness, wincing at the pressure over the wound, and tightened all the straps. He pushed his helmet back into place and switched the radio to ext.
“What do I do?” he asked, his mouth dry again.
“You just walk through.The next thing you know you’ll be there. Even if you were conscious, which you won’t be, there’s no such thing as time when you’re moving that fast.”
Reese felt himself nodding. He slid one foot forward, and his ankle brushed the edge of a desk; he felt his way around it with his good hand, never taking his eyes from the glistening doorway. He could see the hard metal edges now, could almost reach it if he stretched out his hand.
The room flooded with light.
He turned, saw a suited figure crawling out of the lock.
“Reese,” said a droning, mechanical voice from the suit.“Reese, stop.”
“Kane?”
Kane pulled the helmet off.“Reese! For God’s sake, man, get away from there!” In the harsh light of the airlock Kane’s face was lunar white, his eyes luminous craters. Reese could read comprehension in his expression, but no understanding.Their eyes locked, and Reese felt the anguish of Kane’s rootlessness, the depth of his betrayal.
Explain it to him, Reese thought.Tell him that you’re not some Greek hero, noble, selfless, dealing justice with swift, righteous arrows. Tell him he’s on his own.Tell him.
The biggest of the children, a giant with the distorted jaw and fingers of acromegaly, put a hand against Kane’s chest, and Reese saw him flinch from the pain in his ribs.
“I’m sorry,” Reese whispered, his suit radio turning the words flat and metallic.“I’m sorry, Kane. But you don’t need me anymore.”As he heard his own words, Reese realized they were true.“You never did,” he said.
He raised one hand, the cold in his chest and testicles consuming him, robbing him of his voice. He turned away from Kane and walked slowly through the shimmering doorway.
Three hours,” Curtis said,“seven minutes, and about fifteen
seconds left.”
“Maybe they’re bluffing,” Molly said.
She’d been through too much, too quickly, she thought: Dian’s murder, Kane’s arrest, the Russian threat, and now this, her first sight of Curtis’s inner sanctum. She’d seen the bank of monitors at his secretary’s desk, but nothing had prepared her for this, another entire room that opened out of the back of his office, lined on both sides with monitor screens.
At the far end of the room sat one of Curtis’s lieutenants, a bearded, good-looking Brazilian named Alonzo who’d once made a rather blatant and unsuccessful pass at her. He’d been carrying on an obvious attempt to ignore her bickering with Curtis for over fifteen minutes now.
“Russian technology, you know,” Molly went on.“It’s not exactly dependable.”
Unlike this stuff, she thought.The cameras could be operated by remote control, and each held up to three hours of continuous updated information that could be replayed in programmable sequences. It shocked and frightened Molly that so many of the colony’s resources could have been diverted into such a comprehensive and insidious program of surveillance.They had let it happen, all of them had, and she was just as guilty as anyone else.
“They offered us a demonstration,” Curtis said nastily.“You want to take them up on it? What would you like to lose? The ice reservoirs, maybe? How about the cave, and all the kids up there, and that god-damned secret project of yours? All we have to do is ask.”
It seemed to Molly that he had been walking for some time now along the cliff-edge of some kind of epiphany, a revelation that would fuse the disparate aspects of his personality into a single, unified whole. Maybe, she thought, it would turn out to be a true apotheosis, that he would somehow save Frontera in a bare-chested act of heroism. More likely it would be a spectacular, shattering collapse. He was coming unraveled at an ever-increasing rate, caught in some kind of runaway neurogenic disaster.
“Okay,” she said.“Okay.They’re not bluffing. So how much longer are you going to just sit here?” His cameras had followed Mayakenska as she’d taken her walk, then followed her back to her room.The house was dark now,Valentin sitting on a spotlit stool in the kitchen to phone in the hourly codes.They now had three of those calls on tape.
“Until I think of something,” Curtis said,“Like figure out the codes, or something.”
“They’re using mission designations from the Salyut program,” Molly said.“I saw them in a book once.They probably have to be in chronological order or something. But I don’t see what that gives us.”
Curtis looked startled, then embarrassed.“You’re probably right. It’s not much, but it’s a start. If we have to, now we can—”
“Curtis,”Alonzo said.“You’d better look at this.”
Molly spun around in her chair and followed his pointing finger.All she could see was an ordinary star field.
“Christ!” Curtis shouted.“That’s the camera in the cave! Are they jamming us?”
“I don’t think so,”Alonzo said. His nerves, Molly thought, were suffering too; she could see nasty red discolorations through the beard on the underside of his chin.‘‘I think it’s some kind of holo projection in the cave itself.”
“Back up the memory,” Curtis ordered,“and put it on another unit.” Molly watched as a second screen filled with the star field.Then the stars winked out, and she could see Verb bent over a suited figure.
“Reese!” she said. Her chair shot away as she came to her feet. “He’s hurt. Back up the camera at the south lock, catch him on the way out.”
Alonzo glanced at Curtis, who nodded.“Do it.”
On a third screen Molly watched Reese move backward in time, backing out of the airlock, turning, lurching into Blok’s unconscious body as it rose from the floor. She watched a bullet dig itself out of the wall and suck a thin line of smoke into the barrel of Blok’s gun.
“Oh my Christ,” Molly said.
On the real-time screen an oily pool of light had formed in the center of the cave.A shadow moved across it: Reese, in his suit, silhouetted against the opalescent field of energy.
“Stop him!” Molly shouted.“For God’s sake, somebody stop him!” She lunged for the microphone to radio the cave, but Curtis wrenched her away by one arm.
“No,” he said. His head shone in the dim flickering light of the screens, reflected images distorting his features.“I want to see this.”
“He can’t...they can’t let him go through there! It isn’t tested! He—”
The milky glow touched the edges of Reese’s suit, flared, and consumed him.
Curtis let go of her arm, and Molly sank into one of the chairs, feeling betrayed, frightened, on the verge of hysteria.
“Well,” Curtis said.“This is getting really interesting. Do you want to tell me some more about how those kids are just playing around with theoretical physics? About how we should just let the Russians have anything they want? Jesus, Molly, I can’t believe you let things get this far without telling me.”
My father, she thought.The words carried an eerie emotional weight. She’d always called him Reese, never Father, never Daddy. Daddy was the stranger who had lived with her mother and died with her on the Gerard K. O’Neill. There were no precut words that fit Reese and what he meant to her.