‘He’s bluffing,’ said Randstable, who still hadn’t made an opening move. ‘I’ll give you a hundred to one odds he won’t do it.’
Sverre went to his writing desk and continued the Saga of Thor. Brat retargeted the missile.
‘Six… five… four…’
‘I don’t believe I have any,’ said Randstable.
‘Any what?’ asked Sverre.
‘Three…’
‘Survivor’s guilt,’ said Randstable.
‘Two…’
‘We can fix that,’ said Sverre.
An uncanny noise issued from the MARCH Hare. George thought of the cackling piped into the funhouse at the Wildgrove Apple Blossom Fair. Brat’s now flaccid fingers uncurled, and the little missile clattered impotently to the floor. Lying on the rug, it looked more toylike than ever.
‘I’ve never seen one of those before,’ said Sverre, pointing to Brat’s defenses with his quill pen.
The MARCH Hare collapsed on the sofa, guzzled some gin, and began mourning his dead country through hyperventilation and high-pitched wails.
Sverre left his desk, picked up the weapon. ‘What kind of guidance?’
‘Inertial navigation,’ muttered Randstable, ‘updated by terrain contour matching.’
‘Propulsion?’
‘Air breathing F-218 turbofan engine.’
‘Throw-weight?’
‘Nine pounds.’
Later that day, after the three Erebus evacuees were gone, Sverre ordered his officers and men to their main battle stations. The launch tubes were pressurized to match the outside ocean. The hatches opened. A small rocket in the rail of each Multiprong missile began to burn, boiling pools of water in the tubes. Steam built up, hurling the missiles to the surface, whereupon the main motors ignited. The stages fell away. Within fifteen minutes the warhead buses had scattered their sterile payloads across the Gulf of Mexico, from the Florida Keys to the vanished city of New Orleans.
Like all Philadelphia-class fleet ballistic missile submarines, SSBN 713 City of New York held within its lowest decks a labyrinth of forgotten passageways and unmarked corridors. Leaving Sverre’s cabin, George realized that he and Brat were for the moment not on speaking terms – he could tell by the general’s sour face, his aloof gait – and so he ran ahead, soon finding himself in the submarine equivalent of a back alley. Naked light bulbs swung on brown cords like phosphorescent spiders. The air was murky and still. He became aware of the boat’s sound, a fitful hum. Under other conditions, getting lost this way would have upset him, but he was still feeling extraordinarily good about his strategic decision. Thanks to him, the men, women, and children of the Soviet Union had been spared a retaliatory strike – my monument to Holly, he thought, as glorious and firm as any block of granite.
He pounded on doors. The echoes traveled up and down the empty corridor. He tested the latches. Every cabin was sealed as tight as the cottage-like tomb that the Sweetser family owned back in Rosehaven Cemetery. Fear weaved through his chest and bowels – a creeping conviction that Peach and Cobb would soon appear and inflict some new torture on him. Hell, anybody would have signed that ridiculous sales contract. Anybody. Black blood. Just like Mrs Covington. Certain facts should not be thought about too much. I shall think about something else. Holly saved Russia…
Beneath a nearby door, an orange glow advanced and retreated like surf. George approached, knocked.
‘Come in.’
A female voice. Entering, he saw a monster. He stopped dead and thought, yes, they’re on the loose again, trying to intimidate me…
It looked like a gigantic winged shark. The eyes shot blood, the nostrils flamed and smoked like the vents of a volcano.
He had seen this species before.
‘Hello, George.’
In the center of the cabin an old woman stood hunched over the sort of antique machine that, as he knew from taking Holly to the Boston Children’s Museum, was called a magic lantern. A cone of smoke-filled light spread toward the projected vulture. Shadows hovered above the woman’s nose and cheeks. She removed the vulture, slipped it under a stack of similar glass paintings.
‘Mrs Covington! I never expected to meet you here.’
‘It’s good to see you again, George.’
‘I did those pencil drafts we talked about.’ As usual, Mrs Covington’s presence filled him with well-being. ‘“She was better than she knew,” remember? “He never found out what he was doing here.” They looked pretty good. Design seven-oh-three-four. I guess they got burned up.’
‘We mustn’t dwell on Wildgrove,’ said Nadine. ‘I loved that town. The children. Nickie Frostig died in my arms. Blast wound.’ She gestured toward the glass slides. ‘Some people say these paintings show the future.’ Her raincoat looked wet and slimy, as if made of live eels. ‘Do you believe in prophecy?’
‘I’m a Unitarian, ma’am.’
‘They’ve been in my family for centuries – painted by Leonardo da Vinci during his last days. The seer Nostradamus – that brilliant, courageous, plague-fighting Renaissance scholar – dictated their content. Want to see the future, George?’
She inserted a new slide. A short, muscular, bearded man stood alone on a boundless plain of ice.
‘My goodness, I guess I really am going to Antarctica,’ he said.
She changed slides. George saw himself in the Silver Dollar Casino, playing poker with Randstable and Wengernook.
As the show continued, it proved far more varied and perplexing than the other such presentation he had seen that afternoon. Slide: George sitting at a banquet table, eating ham. Slide: Captain Sverre slashing his own forearm with a knife. Slide: the vulture again, devouring a dead penguin.
A happy family burst upon the wall – husband, wife, young child. They were dressed in scopas suits. The child’s suit was gold. Their various arms and torsos had fused in a complex hug. Their smiles threw back twice the brightness that the lantern flame provided.
No visual image, painted, photographed, or dreamed, had ever moved George so much as that adroitly rendered Leonardo. The child was Holly. Compared with this truth, his realization that the man was himself and that the woman was Dr Morning Valcourt seemed almost dull.
‘I know the man,’ said Nadine. ‘And I’ve seen the woman around here. But the child—’
‘It’s Holly!’ The future! Some people said these paintings showed the future!
‘Nobody except you got out of Wildgrove. Dr Valcourt told you that.’
‘But it looks like Holly.’
‘Exactly like her?’
‘Yes. Exactly. Perhaps not exactly. But… if it’s not Holly, then…’
Aubrey?
‘The sister we were going to give Holly?’ he asked.
‘Nobody except you got out of—’
All right. Not her sister. Who then? He studied Dr Valcourt’s glowing, flickering face. Though ill-equipped for smiling – he remembered her chilly persona, her brisk manner – she was doing an excellent job of it.
‘Holly’s stepsister? Dr Valcourt and I will marry and then have a baby girl?’
‘A reasonable interpretation.’
‘I’ll call her Aubrey.’
‘Lovely name. Do you like Dr Valcourt?’
‘Not at all.’ The wrong thing to say, he decided. ‘I’ll learn to like her.’ His bullet wound throbbed with excitement. ‘I’ll do anything to get Aubrey. Marry a snake.’
Nadine yanked the family portrait off the screen. ‘Evidently you will become a father again.’
He envisioned the Giant Ride mechanical horse from Sandy’s Sandwich Shop. Aubrey sat bouncing in the saddle, giggling, trilling. Horse. Donkey. Mule. Infertility… ‘No, that can’t be right either,’ he said. ‘I’m sterile as a mule. That’s what Dr Brust told me. My secondary spermatocytes… the radiation.’