Oh, and yes, Dr. Delantero has described the end rather accurately. He will turn out — though the knowledge would not be likely to please him — to have been right about what will happen when that drop of strange matter is spilled on the floor at Green Meadow III Nuclear Power Plant. Or at least to be right when it counts.
After all, the universe is His creation. He can still tinker with it if He wishes, so long as He doesn’t thereby change what is already known to be true. (Well, He can, naturally, and sometimes does, but those instances are called miracles. We’re not considering a miracle here. In fact, miracles have been strictly enjoined in this case; deniability, you know.)
But there is still much of the real universe that is not known to human beings, not charted, not yet proved, and in that vast terra incognita God can do as He wills, with no miracle involved. Human science, for instance, has reached the point with strange matter where two theories have been proposed, of more or less equal probability. The spilled drop of strange matter might result in Dr. Philpott’s infinitesimal speck lying on the floor, quickly dissipated. Equally, it might result in Dr. Delantero’s destruction of the planet by conversion of its entire mass to strange matter.
To prove either of those theories true would not, in Earth terms, constitute a miracle. Either theory could join the web of the already known without in any way rupturing the fabric of observed reality. Therefore, although I do not know which of those theories has been correct up till now, I know for certain which of them is correct as of this moment.
That is, after all, why I am here. To transmute the entire Earth, and everything on it, to a ball bearing.
35
In the end, it was easier to steal an empty school bus than try to board one of those carrying the Green Meadow cadre. The buses didn’t pick up the supervisors and managers at home, to begin with, but only brought them from a well-guarded parking lot four miles away. Also, each bus carried its own armed private security guard. But the buses had been leased from a transportation company that serviced some of the public and most of the private schools in that part of New York State, and its large parking lot, usually at least half full of buses not at that moment in use, was barely guarded at all.
By this time, the demonstrations had been going on for months and the strike for weeks, and everybody was into the daily routine of it. There was a known role to be played by everyone who showed up at the plant gates: demonstrators, strikers, working cadre, police, private security force, media crews, and the large yellow buses saying things like Istanfayle Consolidated School District on their sides but always with the same company name — Kelly Transit, in green script within an outlined shamrock — on the door. Most of the drivers were women, most of the guards riding shotgun wore rent-a-cop dark blue uniforms. Sometimes the buses were nearly empty when they drove into the plant; they were never completely full.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” Grigor asked.
“Of course, I am,” Frank said. “It was my idea.”
“But I have nothing to lose,” Grigor pointed out. “If you are caught—”
“That’s not gonna happen,” Frank assured him. “Win or lose, they don’t lay a hand on me. That’s a little promise I made myself.”
“But why? Why do you want to do it?”
“For money.” Frank grinned. “I’m a simple guy, money’s enough for me. You do your speeches, you warn the world, you get everybody’s attention, that’s all okay by me. But when they get their atom factory back is after I get mine. Or you’ll see a joke.”
Frank was the pro, he was the one who knew how to do all this stuff. He drove down into New York and rented a cop uniform from a theatrical costume supplier. Up in New Hampshire, he bought three pistols in three pawnshops; two of them would probably blow your hand off if you tried to fire them, but that was okay. They were just for show The third one would have to be able to shoot, but not at anybody; just to attract attention.
Back in Stockbridge, he rooted through the worn old clothing Jack Auston had left behind and outfitted himself with old grease-stained dark green chinos and a dark red plaid shirt. He bought a clipboard and some standard inventory forms from a local stationer, skipped shaving one day, and went down to Kelly Transit. Walking into the big parking area, he strolled over to the dispatcher’s window, consulted his clipboard, and said, “I’m here to pick up number 271.”
It was four-thirty in the afternoon, and the dispatcher was almost at the end of his workday. More important, in half an hour there would be a shift change at Green Meadow; if things went well, Kelly Transit’s bus number 271 would be the first to arrive with the replacement staff.
The dispatcher looked up from his crossword puzzle, frowned at Frank, and said, “Who says?”
“Hyatt Garage,” Frank said, as though he didn’t care what happened next, one way or the other.
“I’m not sure it’s in.”
It was; Frank had noted the number of the bus he wanted as he’d walked across the yard. But he shrugged and said, “That’s okay, pal, I’ll go back to the garage.” And turned away.
“Hold it, hold it, I didn’t say it wasn’t here.”
Frank stopped and looked at the guy. “Make up your mind, okay? I wanna go home tonight.”
“We all do,” the dispatcher said, and made a big show of looking at his dispatch sheets before he said, “Yeah, it’s in. It’ll be around here somewhere. Hold on.”
Frank held on. The dispatcher reached around behind himself, took a set of keys from the many rows of hooks on the wall, finally got up from his stool, and came thumping around and out the door. “Let’s see,” he said, peering at the tag with the keys, then squinting out at his yard full of buses. “Should be right around here.”
Frank didn’t help, but still the dispatcher took only three minutes to find the bus standing in front of him. 271 was painted on the rear emergency door and like an eyebrow above the left side of the windshield. Messenger of God Parish School was painted on both sides, in block black letters, beneath the rows of windows.
“Looks like that might be it,” the dispatcher said.
“If you say so.”
The dispatcher had Frank sign a form — “George Washington,” he scrawled — then gave him the keys, and Frank drove on out of there.
Maria Elena said, “Then this will do it.” Do what? Accomplish what? She didn’t care. She refused to even look at such questions. She had her answer: “Then this will do it.”
She knew what she knew, and that was enough. She knew that movement was life, and stillness was death, and she’d been dead too long. She knew that a group with a goal was life and a solitary person without a goal was death, and she’d been dead too long. She knew that a singer was alive, and a person without a song (without, now, even the records and memories of the songs that had been) was dead, and that she’d been dead too long. She knew that death would come anyway, to all of them, some sooner than others, and that it was wrong for her to be dead before she was dead. That Frank made her feel alive, and Frank wanted to do this, and to do something was better, infinitely better, than the nothing she had been doing for so long.