Burt charged. The gun in Talib’s hand coughed twice, scored twice. Hill stumbled, collapsed face forward as another explosion, very close by, rocked the chamber, a support beam crashing down between Crane and Newcombe.
“Are you satisfied?” Crane screamed, rising to his knees, thick dust blowing through the chamber, Newcombe trying to cover his face with his free hand. “You’ve killed her! You’ve killed the baby.” Crane broke down, bending at the waist, crying, his face buried in his hands.
“Crane,” Talib said, moving closer. “I never meant … for this … I never—”
“Kill me!” Crane screamed, looking up at him. “Would you have the human decency to spare me this pain?”
“Crane,” Talib whispered.
“For God’s sake, kill me! Kill me!”
Talib raised the gun, his lips sputtering. His hand began to shake uncontrollably and his breath came in sobbing gasps. He dropped the gun. Tears running down his face, he grabbed Ishmael by the collar and dragged him into the thick dust clouds blowing through the corridor.
Crane quavered on his knees, crying. As he turned to jump into the tube he heard the moans.
A dust-and-blood-covered Burt Hill grabbed his shoulders.
“C-Crane,” Hill said in a rasp. “We’ve got to … got to …” He stumbled, fell to one knee.
Crane stared down the tube, then turned reluctantly from it. “Damn you for being alive,” he muttered. Tearing himself from the lip, not selfish enough to force Burt to die with him, he cursed before he climbed over the fallen beam, got to Burt, and levered him to his feet.
“C-can’t hardly breathe,” Hill said.
“Dust,” Crane said, knowing the man couldn’t hear him. “You’ve probably got a punctured lung.”
Somehow he got Hill in his cart, negotiated the crossbeam in their path. He took off, the area of Tube #21 collapsing behind them, burying his entire life for all time.
He got them back to the shaft service elevator, large chunks of cavern wall and ceiling crashing to the ground. He clumsily unbolted his helmet and carried Hill to the elevator, stumbling inside with him.
The door closed. He hit the Up arrow as the cavern ceiling gave way completely. They were moving.
Crane didn’t remember the trip up. Hill had a sucking chest wound and a superficial wound in the forearm. The sucking sound meant the wound had to be closed quickly.
He removed the burn suit’s plasteel gloves, using one to cover the wound. A container of lead putty was in his utility bag. He used it around the edges of the glove to seal it to Hill’s skin and create a vacuum. Then he rolled Burt onto his injured side to ease the breathing in his good lung. If he were to survive, he’d need help quickly.
He sat with the groaning man, cradling his head, crying. It was over. Everything. Over. What kind of a fool had he been to think he could change the course of history? What arrogance. Life was pain and nothing else. His mind held one image only—Lanie and Charlie frozen on their event horizon, his wife’s eyes filled with a kind of celestial disappointment.
He heard a bell and realized they’d reached topside. The door slid open into the equipment shed. As he rose, dragging Burt with him, a massive explosion blew them both out of the elevator, collapsing the shaft completely, the equipment shed shaking to rubble all around them.
He stared into the night. The sound of distant sirens provided music. Helos overhead danced spotlights all around him. Beauty in the midst of horror. He stared up at a starfield that was startlingly brilliant and cold … and wondrous through the haze of his tears. The Moon was round, full, the letters YOU printed on its surface in blood red. You. YOU.
The mausoleum was very old. It was marble with pillars like the Parthenon and decorated with cherubs whose faces were dark from years of exposure to the elements. There was some lateral fracturing near its base, and a couple of large jagged cracks on the vault itself indicated some seismic meandering in the area. Crane had chosen this mausoleum because it was directly across from the memorial graves of Lanie and Charlie, and he could sit scrunched up on its steps below ground level without being seen. He sat perfectly still, like one of the cherubs, wearing sunglasses and a mild sunblock.
The funeral for Lanie and Charlie had been large and ostentatious. Crane saw to that. Their bodies were lost, of course, so empty coffins had been ceremoniously paraded through town and brought here for burial before a large gathering. People felt as if they knew the Cranes, so public had been their lives. Thousands had turned out. All camheads, of course. Even a Yo-Yu representative had given a eulogy that had rivaled Liang’s for sheer triteness and empty condolence.
Lanie would have hated every minute of it just as Crane did, but he was putting on a show for one, and if it worked, the sham funeral and all the agony it had caused him would have been worthwhile.
NOI had gotten away. Talib and his ilk apparently rat-holed in their maze of underground passageways, sitting out the furor. And quite an amazing furor there was. Brother Ishmael had miscalculated public reaction to his savage attack on the compound; the viddy of the G being cut in half and going through the windshield of Ishmael’s truck was replayed over and over around the world. But worse, a cam attached to Brother Ishmael showed him standing happily by as Lanie and Charlie died. Everyone’s heart, regardless of their position on the Imperial Valley Project issue, went out to the baby. The public was clamoring for Liang to mete out the most severe justice to the “holy” man and his henchman, Abu Talib, the only two faces the public had seen.
Crane crept slowly up the stone stairs and looked at Lanie’s and the baby’s memorial graves fifty feet away on the gently rolling hills of Forest Lawn. In the far distance, he could see a figure moving slowly in his direction, constantly checking over his shoulder.
The dead, hollow shell that had once been Lewis Crane felt a spark ignite within. Hatred, pure and simple. He was surprised that he still could feel any emotion.
He padded the P fiber and wished the answering voice a belated happy Independence Day. Then he padded off and climbed the stairs.
The figure reached the graves and stood, head bowed. He was dressed in the green coveralls of the cemetery’s groundskeepers. A wide-brimmed hat was pulled down over his face, but Crane would recognize Abu Talib/Daniel Newcombe if the man were covered with fur and barking like a dog.
Talib looked up, his eyes betraying no emotion as Crane stopped in front of him.
“I’ve never in my whole life wished anyone dead before,” Crane said. “But you I could kill with my own hands.”
“I loved her, Crane,” Talib said, tears filling his eyes. “I wouldn’t have hurt her … or your child for the world. I’m so sorry.”
“I’ve been waiting for you, you know.”
“I knew the risk when I came here. I-I just couldn’t stay away. Maybe I’m weak … I don’t know.”
“If it was me you wanted, you could have killed me any time. Why did you have to do it the way you did?”
The man looked at the ground. “We felt it was important to stop your work, not just you.”
“To stop science, Dan, is that what you were trying to do?”
“What difference does it make?”
“It makes a difference to me!” Crane screamed. “You’ve taken my life from me.” He grabbed the man’s coveralls with his good hand. “You’ve got to tell me why … you’ve got to!”
Talib’s lips moved, but no sound emerged. Finally, he said, “I don’t have any answers for you. I don’t know anything anymore. I’ve got this b-blood on my hands and I … I don’t know what to do to make it go away. You ask me how it all came to this? I don’t know. I keep trying to put it together, to … figure out … why. But it’s like I can’t think anymore, can’t g-grasp hold of a concept without it slipping away. I shot Burt. I-I shot him. Me! Is he … is he…”