“Come with us,” Hemingway says, beckoning from the hallway.
He follows them, willy-nilly. They lead him to the highest floor of the building and through a doorway that leads onto the roof. The sky is a wondrous black star-speckled vault overhead. Heavy tropic warmth hangs over Paris this December night. Just before them lies the river, glinting by the light of a crescent moon. The row of ancient bookstalls along its rim is visible, and the bulk of the Louvre across the way, and the spires of Notre Dame far off to the right.
“What time is it?” Einstein asks.
“Almost midnight,” says Picasso. “Shall we do it, Vjong?”
“As good a time as any,” Cleversmith says, and touches two tiny contacts together.
For a moment nothing happens. Then there is a deafening sound and a fiery lance spurts up out of the glass pyramid in the courtyard of the museum on the far side of the river. Two straight fissures appear in the courtyard’s pavement, crossing at 90-degree angles, and quickly the entire surface of the courtyard peels upward and outward along the lines of the subterranean incision, hurling two quadrants toward the river and flipping the other two backward into the streets of the Right Bank. As the explosion gathers force, the thick-walled medieval buildings of the surrounding quadrangle of the Louvre are carried high into the air, the inner walls giving way first, then the dark line of the roof. Into the air go the hoarded treasures of the ages, Mona Lisa and the Winged Victory of Samothrace, Venus de Milo and the Law-Codex of Hammurabi, Rembrandt and Botticelli, Michelangelo and Rubens, Titian and Brueghel and Bosch, all soaring grandly overhead. The citizenry of Paris, having heard that great boom, rush into the streets to watch the spectacle. The midnight sky is raining the billion fragments of a million masterpieces. The crowd is cheering.
And then an even greater cry goes up, wrung spontaneously from 10,000 throats. The hour of the new millennium has come. It is, very suddenly, the year 3000. Fireworks erupt everywhere, a dazzling sky-splitting display, brilliant reds and purples and greens forming sphere within sphere within sphere. Hemingway and Picasso are dancing together about the rooftop, the big man and the small. Einstein does a wild solo, flinging his arms about. Cleversmith stands statue still, head thrown back, face a mask of ecstasy. Vulpius, who has begun to tremble with strange excitement, is surprised to find himself cheering with all the rest. Unexpected tears of joy stream from his eyes. He is no longer able to deny the logic of these men’s madness. The iron hand of the past has been flung aside. The new era will begin with a clean slate.