'There were just two people in Eden, Dan,' Levine said quietly.
'Well, maybe you'd need more than that,' Fogerty added. 'A few more.'
'It's not possible,' Helen said. 'She could cause a lot of damage. She could kill a lot of people, take down networks, destroy financial markets, maybe… hell, create chaos for a while in any case. If you add in the extra energy we're going to see at the zenith, then maybe there is the power inside Sundog to destroy entire cities, I guess. But we'd still be back after a while. We wouldn't forget how to make the internal combustion engine, how to organize the fabric of society.'
The room went quiet, and that made her feel cold.
'Are we all so sure?' Fogerty asked. 'Imagine walking out of this building into a world with no jobs or electricity, no money, no transportation, no workable form of government. Would it all go back to normal just because someone, three months down the road, found the on switch at the power company? Not necessarily. From her point of view, perhaps civilization — what we think of as civilization, at any rate — is a thin veneer on the mob, and the more we take that veneer for granted, the easier it is to bring the walls tumbling down when it disappears. Just look at Rwanda. Look at Albania, any number of former Eastern Bloc states. As I reminded you all once before, Gaia is the daughter of Chaos. And it's from Chaos that everything springs anew. That's the real threat, Mr President. What comes after. She's betting that it pays to burn your house down now and again, because what gets built in its place has to be better than anything that went before.'
'Won't get that far,' Barnside said quickly. 'We can stop these people.'
'How?' Tim Clarke asked, and the question almost sounded rhetorical.
Barnside glanced at the monitor. 'You secure at that end, Bevan?'
The thin pale face nodded.
'I would appreciate it if this is kept out of any briefing beyond this room, sir. We have someone inside,' Barnside said, staring at Helen Wagner, daring her to intervene. 'We've had someone there for a while.'
'Then why the hell don't we know where they are?' Clarke asked.
'No contact, sir. Maybe it's too dangerous, or impossible. I don't know. But once this thing starts to move further, we'll have news. Mark my word.'
'You'd better be right,' Clarke said, shaking his head. 'You people keep me posted on the hour and when anything significant develops. And let's tailor this for the press as much as possible. As far as the public's concerned this is just one big worldwide computer crash. Let them write to Bill Gates, for all I care. That's all. And Wagner? Find out what makes these people tick. Find someone who can explain that to me.'
Inside La Finca, Irwin Schulz watched Ellis Bevan mop his brow, watched Mo Sinclair following the video link at her workstation, unseen by the camera on top of the main monitor. He wondered how soon he could wake the deeply slumbering Michael Lieberman. Then he put that thought to one side, caught Helen Wagner's attention on the monitor, and said, 'This isn't enough. We need to talk to NASA and activate that Shuttle idea. We need to talk to them right now.'
CHAPTER 18
Potrero
Ravel meandered over the crest of the Potrero hill like a thin strand of hair straggling across the top of a bald head. At the summit, it almost didn't make it. The road came up from the direction of the city, turned into a dead end for cars, then narrowed into a jagged footpath through low trees and scrub, set on a good sixty-degree drop, until the terrain became a little less vertical farther down and the street returned. In the confined, pedestrian part the houses were timbered and individual, some tiny, some low, sprawling mansions. Vernon Sixsmith couldn't, for the life of him, work out what kind of neighbourhood this was. Whether these ramshackle timber boxes, some big enough to accommodate an entire commune in the wild old days, would fetch upward of a half a million dollars on account of their cuteness, or this was just a piece of Potrero that got passed by in the gentrification process and was left to go ragged at the edges all on its own.
The SWAT squad arrived first and hung around at the dead end of the street, out of sight, just watching the house, waiting for orders. The penetrating afternoon heat made their armoured vests feel like dead weights, caused the sweat to work up beneath the black uniforms, sit, greasy and constant, on the skin. An advance surveillance team of two, posing as Pacific Bell linesmen, had started working on the telegraph pole one house down from where Charley Pascal and maybe the rest of the Children too were now living. They were wired and live, and any moment now Vernon Sixsmith hoped to hear from them. Even from here he could see the gear they were using: a directional audio amplifier that would pick up any sound in the house, even the creaking of bedsprings (and they'd heard that one often enough). Plus a wireless tap on the line that could detect a single ring and, with a touch of luck, the number on the other end.
Sixsmith screwed his eyes shut, tried to squeeze away the constant headache, and picked up a pair of binoculars from the back seat of the car. He took a few steps, stopped to look at the sky: pale, cloudless blue, nothing in it but the yellow fire of the sun and the faint, distant trails of airliners painted high in the atmosphere. One thing he liked about San Francisco was the temperate weather. That was why, he thought, they got a touch fewer crazies than LA. Normally it was just a little too chilly to get really worked up about things. But something seemed to have changed these past few months. The year had begun with some of the worst floods Northern California had ever experienced. A week or two later the heat wave began. Constant dryness, constant sun. The sort of weather that might never end.
He shook his head, then concealed himself in the shade of a dusty oleander bush and looked at the house. It was single-storey, painted a pale pastel shade of green, with ragged roof tiles in need of some attention. The window frames were white flecked with brown where the wood was showing through. The front garden was a mess of overlong grass and discarded household goods: an old freezer, the remains of a washing machine, a cheap, off-white sideboard that had cracked at the seams and now mouldered in the deep grass like a corpse getting flyblown. All in all, this was a nice road, Sixsmith thought. The neighbours must have loved having Charley Pascal move in.
Correction: Charley Pascal and her cat. The Colourpoint Shorthair was still bugging him. He felt sure that if he closed his eyes he'd see its face — ET with a touch of fur — staring straight up at him, straight into his head, and saying, all feline aggression and spark: Yeah?
The earpiece crackled and he watched the phony linesman's mouth moving, down the road. 'We got activity,' the surveillance man said. 'Someone's playing music'
'You hear how many of them are in there? Which room?'
The distant head moved. 'The music's too loud to make out anything much else. It's in the right-hand front room. That's all.'
Sixsmith swore quietly to himself and was aware of the way Jimenez was smiling thinly at him, saying: This is your call, partner, your decision. The handbook asked for proof there was someone in the house before the SWAT people could wade in. Otherwise the suspect just might be around the corner shopping for groceries when they pulled out the mallets and handguns. He might watch from the end of the street, laugh dryly, and be gone with the wind.
But the handbook didn't really say what to do when there was nothing but music in a house that looked as dead as a corpse.