Then it turned out Grigor couldn’t walk, not more than a dozen steps. “I’m sorry, Frank,” he said, with a shamed smile. “I think I hid this from the staff people—”
“You hid it from us all.”
“But I cannot possibly walk from here to another building.”
“No problem,” Frank said. “I’ll carry you.”
He did, and Maria Elena damn near had to carry Pami, too. She was also a lot weaker than anybody had known, staggering like a crackhead forced to walk in the middle of the high. Maria Elena took her arm and helped her steer a straight line.
It was the first they’d been outside since they’d taken over the plant, the first they’d seen the outside. It was a bright day, but not sunny, with very high white clouds and low humidity, so that the whole world had a look of flat clarity. The air wasn’t really cold, but there was still a touch of oncoming winter in its crispness, a sharp sensation in the nose, too faint to be called a smell. The deciduous trees and shrubs were far along in their seasonal color display, so that the conifers looked an even darker green.
The concrete paths curving between the buildings were clean and neat and empty, as though these four were the last people on Earth, the slope-shouldered man carrying the feather-light bundle of the second man, the sturdily built woman leading the skinny little black girl who tottered and reeled as though about to fall at every step. The four made their slow and uneven way along the paths toward the lab, moving as though to the tinny sound of a toy piano that only they could hear.
The lab beyond the turbine building was the smallest of the structures within the plant perimeter. A separate windowless concrete-block rectangle two stories high, it had entrances on three sides. The main front entrance, a pair of black metal doors that faced a neat curving concrete path flanked by low tasteful plantings, had been dead-bolted on the inside, in addition to the locks, so they couldn’t get in that way.
“Wait,” Frank told his group, and walked around to the left, to the single door, also black metal, that opened onto a path directly to the nearby turbine building. This too had been bolted on the inside.
“They’re beginning to piss me off,” Frank informed the others, as he walked by on his way to the right side entrance, another pair of black metal doors, this one on a higher level, opening onto a loading dock over a blacktop driveway. A dozen black plastic trash cans were lined up on the loading dock, along the wall beside the doors. This was where deliveries were made and unwanted materials taken out, and the construction of the loading dock and doors had made dead bolts impractical here. Frank opened the two locks, and then the right-hand door. “More like it,” he said, and went back to get the others.
Seated on a lab stool, leaning on a metal table, Philpott was dictating, and Cindy was taking it down in her private shorthand:
“The S-drop is stable. It is not, as many of my fellow scientists feared or hoped, or at least theorized, quasistable. It has not decayed into a different form. The radiation monitor shows gamma ray activity where we know the S-drop to be. It stops when we stop feeding the drop, and begins again when the drop is fed. At this point, its mass is still below the lowest limits of human vision, but when the current disturbance here at the facility has come to an end, it is my intention to feed the drop further, until it is large enough to be seen by the naked eye. To make it any larger than that, however—”
“Professor.”
There was something so strange in Chang’s voice that Philpott didn’t even think to protest at the interruption. He looked over at the boy, and saw him staring toward the corridor door. Pretending the fear he felt was only irritation, Philpott swiveled around on the stool.
42
The four people who stepped into the lab room were not at all what Philpott had expected the invaders of the plant to be. Of the four, only the man waving the pistol with such easy familiarity looked at all like Philpott’s idea of a terrorist. And only the rather exotic-looking woman had anything of the manner of a fanatic. The other man and woman were both very obviously sick; horribly sick, both of them.
Yes, of course. The man would be the Russian, the spokesman for the group, the fireman who’d been poisoned at Chernobyl. Could the black woman also have been there? That seemed so unlikely, and yet she was clearly as sick as the Russian. In fact, there was such an air of hopelessness and dejection and desperation about this entire quartet that Philpott’s first immediate reaction was pity.
A reaction that didn’t last. Quasistable, it immediately decayed into irritation and outrage. “I suppose we must obey your orders now,” he said, speaking to the man with the pistol, the obvious leader. “But I would ask you please not to disturb anything in this room. You can gain nothing by it, and I could lose a great deal.”
“I saw you on television,” the man said.
Of course. If this is fame, Philpott thought, I’d prefer to do without it. “I have been on television,” he agreed.
“You’re gonna be on television again,” the man said, with a faint tough-guy smile that didn’t fool Philpott for a second. “When you explain how you yourself, all by yourself, made the breakthrough that got us all out of this place and let everybody get back to normal.”
Philpott’s smile now was pitying; but sardonically and deliberately so. “Is that what you think?” he said. “That I will make any difference?”
“Sure you will.” The man gestured with the pistol. “They want their power plant back, but they don’t think we’re serious about that. They’ll want you back even more, and you can talk. You can let them know we really are serious.”
Philpott had only a few seconds to decide how to handle this. Go along with them, keep quiet, agree to their fantasies? Or disabuse them of the notion they would ever under any circumstances successfully complete whatever childish scheme they were acting out here?
Marlon Philpott was, first and foremost, a scientist, a rational man. His strong tendency would have been to come down on the side of reality versus fantasy in any case, but this time there was an even more cogent reason to be realistic from the outset with these people: their fantasies were keeping a lot of men and women from getting on with their normal lives. Including, now, himself.
If this unfortunate incident were to end without bloodshed, it seemed to Philpott, it would only happen after the invaders had accepted the hopelessness of their position. Therefore, he said, “I’m sorry, but you know, it really won’t work. I’ll do what you say, of course — you have the gun — but please, when it fails, don’t put the blame on me.”
There was such calm conviction in his words that they had no choice but to hear them, to at least think about what he was saying. The Russian, who had crossed to sit on the nearest stool while Philpott was speaking, and who leaned his back now wearily — weakly — against the wall, said, “Why must we fail?”
He sounds reasonable, Philpott thought, surprised and saddened by the realization. With unexpected empathy, he suddenly saw the route — like tracking a molecule through its invisible journey — whereby an ordinary small-town fireman could be transformed by something like Chernobyl not merely into a person subsumed by his terminal illness but into this person, blundering into this totally untenable position in one last doomed effort to make his life have meant something.