Текст книги "The End Is Nigh"

Автор книги: Jack McDevitt

Соавторы: Nancy Kress
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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

“He had a GPS chip on him, so his friends could find him,” I defend myself. “And he had some way of triggering it. Maybe a simple check-in sequence online. I don’t know. Maybe you can back trace that.” I’m trying to help clean up. But no one looks happy. I’m grasping at straws.

“You let him get away,” the agent repeats, and kicks a chair.

“Is it even possible?” Toto asks. “You can’t really think he’s able to hack into our nuclear launch system?”

His eyes widen as he reads the room. Everyone in here believes it.

“To get into the nuke codes.” I look at them, following Toto’s thinking. “Aren’t there, like, daily changes of the code. Security. Chain of command. Two people to turn the switch and all that?”

The FBI agent stares down at me. “Well, Haswell thinks he’s found a way around it. And seeing as that he was able to take over someone’s car to try and kill them, we can’t afford to take the chance he’s bluffing, can we?”

Haswell had said he was going to push the power switch. System reset. What kind of system reset do you think a guy like Haswell’s planning if the FBI says he’s trying to get his hands on nuke launch codes?

A chill runs down my spine.

• • • •

They cut us loose a few hours later. We flee town, tails tucked between our legs.

“Goddamnit, Toto. This is worse than Florida,” I shout. My laptop’s been seized, as well as my phone. I’m probably going to have a criminal record. The suits ensconced in their air-conditioned, glass palaces would throw me out the door twice as hard now. No normal office job life on the table now, not even as a back up.

And that didn’t even matter, did it? I’m freaking about the wrong shit. Because Haswell might be trying to launch nukes. Or sell the codes. Hold us all hostage. Or something horrific. Whatever he’s going to do once he gets them, it can’t be good.

“I’m sorry,” Toto says softly.

“Fuck!” I hit the dashboard. “Why’d you have to try and fix everything? If you’d just left it alone. Let me keep trying for an office job.”

“I’m sorry,” Toto says again. He looks beat, head bowed and shoulders slumped.

I soften. “No, I’m not being fair. Not your fault. I should have scanned for signals. Should have…” I stop. I’ve been thinking about how to track him. How to hunt down his trail. I want to stop this from fucking everything up even more.

But now I’m thinking we need to find where he’s going. We need to skate to the puck.

“Overalls,” I say to Toto. “

Overalls

.”

• • • •

We don’t have a phone. We don’t have a computer. We have a car, and I make Toto spin us back around. There are ICBMs hiding underground around the small town in concrete silos, scattered between the farms. Strange crops. Blank spots in the map. “Since budget cuts, they’ve been outsourcing some plant maintenance for the military. Risky, so the background checks on it are high, but the money is good. No one gets to touch the missiles, but obviously Haswell’s found a way in. He was wearing overalls for one of the companies handling silo maintenance.”

Toto speeds up. Something falls off the Corolla and bounces into the ditch. We’re wobbling like a bad amusement ride but making good time.

“No one’s gonna listen to us, a couple of crazies showing up at a secure military installation. We should go into town and tell the feds.”

“We forced Haswell’s hand. He’s going to hurry now.” Reboot the machine, he had said. “Let me talk to the guards when we get there.”

“They’re gonna shoot you,” Toto predicts.

I’m quiet for a while. They’ll be armed. Won’t take any kind of threat peaceably. Hell, they’ll kill Haswell if they realize what he is up to.

Which is why, I realize, Haswell isn’t going to be trapped in the silo when the damn thing surprisingly launches.

“Stop. Stop! Now!”

Toto obliges. “What?”

“He doesn’t want to get shot.” I kick the door open, as it doesn’t want to swing on its warped hinges. Toto has stopped on the shoulder of the road.

I clamber onto the back of the Corolla and onto the roof, surveying the flat horizon of land stretching away. It’s approaching dusk. I’m looking for something tall enough Haswell can broadcast from.

I spot blinking aircraft hazard lights hanging in the air.

I jump down to the ground. “There.”

Haswell needs line of sight, and somewhere to swamp the world with a powerful wireless signal to access the electronics he’s snuck into the missile silo… or silos. Haswell needs a tower. I start trying to wave down passing cars, and up begging to borrow a phone for a second off a wary looking older man in a minivan.

I can’t reach the sheriff. The FBI puts me on hold. I leave messages for them both, give back the cellphone, and head back to the car.

We’re going to have to do this ourselves.

Toto sees the look on my face and knows.

Once more into the breach

.

I drive, hunkered down over the wheel and looking up into the dusk for the blinking lights that will guide us in. He kicks the glovebox with a knee and pulls out a thick, gray revolver with what looks like a forearm-long barrel.

As we pass from asphalt into dirt service road, the car skidding and kicking up dust, Toto flicks the chamber open and calmly, expertly, inserts six bullets.

“You can get out,” I say, voice quavering slightly. “I can go in alone.”

“It’s my mess, too. I’m not leaving your side.”

I hide my relief. A minute later I slam the car through a wire mesh fence and come skidding to a halt near the electric company truck that slammed into us earlier. The front end of it is all twisted up from the impact. There’s another truck just past it, near the foot of the massive radio antenna. Thick coaxial cables snake out of the van and up to the tower’s base.

There are computers lined up on folding tables, all plugged into thick bundles of fibers. They’re being powered by a large bank of batteries on the ground under. It’s a full mobile server setup.

The Corolla’s hood starts leaking steam, obscuring everything. The engine coughs, sputters, and then dies.

Sorry Toto. I’ll try to make this up to you

. Somehow.

But Toto doesn’t seem to care. He’s out through the door with that massive gun, lips pressed tight, murder in his eyes. And I’m suddenly seeing the enforcer. The guy who, if he isn’t teamed up with me, lapses back to that other person. The person who causes people to step aside nervously.

“Stay behind me,” Toto orders.

I do as I’m told.

“Hey!” one of the men who crashed into us yells as he steps out from around the van. He has a pistol in his hand, and Toto doesn’t bother saying anything back. He aims the revolver and the world splits apart with a crack. Blood splatters the logo on the side of the white van and the man clutches his chest.

Toto keeps walking forward. He shoots him again, in the knee and yanks the man’s pistol away from his trembling hands.

“Safety’s still on,” Toto notes in disgust. He pushes the small lever and hands me the acquired pistol. “If it moves, shoot it.”

“Stop!” someone shouts. “There’s no reason to hurt anyone.”

Haswell steps out in the open, hands up. He looks a bit pale.

“Where’s the other one,” Toto growls. “Tell him to come out.”

“Danny!” Haswell shouts. “Drop the gun and step out.”

A young man steps around the van, holding a shotgun. He tosses it into the dirt.

“It’s too late,” Haswell says to us. “It’s already running, so there’s nothing you can do now. It’s all over.”

And he smiles. Wide, terrifyingly enthusiastic, and full of vision.

• • • •

I’m rooting around the servers, Toto by my side, trying to figure out what I can do. Trying to figure out what the fuck Haswell has done. Toto’s got both men covered by the large revolver, but he’s looking over at me.

“Well?”

“Give me time,” I mutter.

“It’s too late,” Haswell shouts at us.

“To undo killing that many people? I sure as hell hope not!”

There’s a pause behind me. I glance back at Haswell, who looks at me like I’m an idiot. “Kill them?

I’m

not going to kill anyone. I’ve set the missiles to burst in the air.”

Our eyes lock.

I get it.

Reboot.

Decades ago, when scientists used to test nuclear bombs out in the open, they set one off high in the atmosphere over the Pacific. And electronics died all throughout Hawaii and up to the West Coast. That’s how we found out that some bombs set off an electromagnetic pulse. Not as big a deal in the 1950s.

But today?

The electromagnetic pulse will slag most consumer-grade electronics. No more iPhones. No more internet. No more fancy car with GPS and collision-avoidance. No more flatscreen TVs. No more cable.

“Those fucking anti-intellectuals, the ones who can’t live without all the things the nerds invented, how will they make it now?” Haswell asks. “They decry our checking into social media; they mock our favorite shows. But they all depend on us. And you know what, we

carry

them no more. People like you and me, we’re the natural leaders. We are the inventors, the tinkerers, the ones who should lead it all.”

“Can’t lead shit if all our toys are dead,” I say, stepping forward. I can’t recall the missiles, I can’t change where they are headed. I need more time to understand how to undo it all, and time is something we don’t have.

Toto pokes around at the laptops as I stare in horror at Haswell.

“There’s an exclusion zone programmed into the bursts,” Haswell explains. “A place that already has the facilities, the technologies, the

right

people to lead. We will be a beacon in the dark. Unlike the Neanderthals on the science oversight committees who are literally against the concept of science itself until it puts in their pacemakers,

we

will be scientists. In charge of it all. Understand? Come with me. Come to the valley. Come build the new, orderly world. There’s a place for you.”

“A place?”

“You tracked me down. Who else could have done that? But you drive a shitty econo-car. Look, document leaks show us what kind of society these old baby-boomer politicians are creating: a police state. Caged in ‘free speech zones’ and no-knock raids. The whole ‘if you’ve done nothing you’ve got nothing to fear’ bullshit. We’ve become a bad operating system with so many patches on some old command line interface that we can barely run. It’s time to reset. I’ve got a van with shielded electronics and enough gasoline to get us back there. I’ll bring you with me into the new age. I hate to see wasted talent.”

And as he says that, I hear the rumble of a rocket motor kicking on. The ground shakes as if a giant is tearing free from the rock underneath us all. I’m about to witness the first moments of something so vast and terrible that the work of H.P. Lovecraft is a cheerful kid’s book by comparison.

Toto shoots Haswell in the kneecap. The man drops to the dust, writhing and screaming. Danny looks ready to jump for his weapon, so Toto shoots him in the stomach and picks up the shotgun.

He opens the hood of the van Haswell told us was ready for the EMP blast and nods. “It’ll keep working. Come on.”

“But…”

“We don’t want to be waiting around. We need to take care of our own shit, now.”

All around us, on the edges of the night horizon, ICBMs glare as they begin to rise above their groundhog holes and lumber into the sky.

• • • •

“Where do you want to go?” Toto asks at last. He’s driving. I have my face up against the window, looking out at the contrails heading higher and higher.

“I don’t know,” I say. “The countryside. Somewhere with clean water and deer to hunt. Guns will still work after the pulse.”

Toto grimaces. “Before my family moved out to the countryside, we lived near one of the coasts. Got hit by a hurricane. It wasn’t all Hollywood and shit. People don’t run around screaming; we’ve been making communities for hundreds of years. Mostly in disaster, we pitch in, clean up, figure out how to muddle through.”

“Like the blackout,” I say. When the power went out, and people came out to light things up with their phones or car headlights. Even in our shitty neighborhood.

“Those people masturbating about the end of all things? They think they’re not plugged into a larger network of people who produce the things they need. That’s trade. More powerful than one jackass with a piece. A hundred people who actually build the guns, they’re more powerful. Besides, you can’t fucking eat gold and ammo. Medics, farmers, they’re always going to be needed. What you do is find a good town, with good farms, clean water near a mountain. I know a few.”

“We could go to the valley,” I suggest.

“I don’t think they’ll do as well as Haswell thought,” Toto says grimly.

“What do you mean?”

“First, answer me this: Did you agree with him? I remember, when you used to talk to me in school. About how you were treated. Do you think he had the right idea?”

“What the fuck?” I stare at Toto. “I got kicked around a bit for having my nose in a book. But you know what, everyone’s an expert at something. I don’t know shit about making my car run, doesn’t mean I think my mechanic is less of a human being because I understand TCP/IP protocols and he doesn’t.”

“Good.” Toto nods. “You didn’t ask me what I was doing on those laptops. Probably neither you or Haswell figured someone like me would know enough to change the code. We couldn’t send them all into the sea, or stop them. But I could launch one more, to cover that exclusion zone. Didn’t want to be made a peasant of. Figure if the apocalypse is coming, should be equally distributed.”

I would laugh, if it wasn’t the actual end of the world.

• • • •

Toto pulls to a stop after a few minutes. We’re far enough away not to worry about the feds. Hopefully Haswell is right that the truck is hardened against the pulse, which should be coming at any moment.

We get out and stand in front of the truck and look at the skies.

“I got this off the dead one,” Toto says, and hands me a phone. “If there was ever someone you wanted to call and get things right with, you’ve got a couple minutes, I figure, before the cell network goes down.”

I look down at the phone. “I’d be calling you. No one else out there gives a shit if I live or die, you know?”

I toss it back at him, and he tosses it into the bushes.

Toto looks at me. “Hey…”

“You’re getting all sentimental.”

“If it’s more than the EMP. I gotta say: you know I love you, right?”

It’s going to be okay, I think, as the artificial, nuclear sunrise suddenly lights up the air above the highest clouds.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Tobias S. Buckell is a Caribbean-born speculative fiction writer who grew up in Grenada, the British Virgin Islands, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He has written several novels, including the

New York Times

bestseller

Halo: The Cole Protocol

, the Xenowealth series, and

Artic Rising

. His short fiction has appeared in magazines such as

Lightspeed, Analog, Clarkesworld

, and

Subterranean

, and in anthologies such as

Armored, All-Star Zeppelin Adventure Stories

, and

Under the Moons of Mars

. He currently lives in Ohio with a pair of dogs, a pair of cats, twin daughters, and his wife.

Jamie Ford – THIS UNKEMPT WORLD IS FALLING TO PIECES

May 1910

Young Darwin Chinn Qi didn’t smell smoke, but as instructed, he opened the heavy iron callbox and pulled the fire alarm just the same, alerting guests and the staff of Seattle’s opulent Sorrento Hotel that the

Sidereal Tramp

had finally arrived.

The great comet had many names: Astral Visitor, Celestial Vagrant, Sky Rover, even Flammarion’s Folly—but “The Tramp” had finally caught on in all the newspapers and on the wires. Darwin thought the name sounded much better than the less sensational and plainly named

Smoking Comet of 1882

, which had been visible in broad daylight but had hardly elicited such worldwide excitement (and widespread panic).

He wished he’d seen the last one, but Darwin was only fifteen years old. He wasn’t even alive when the previous comet passed by. That last apparition appeared long before he’d been born in Hong Kong—the bastard son of a sailor in the British Royal Navy and a Chinese woman. He’d been given to a mission home for half-breeds, shipped to Seattle, and sold into service.

Not a bad life, such as it is

, Darwin thought. He hadn’t learned a trade, but he could speak and read proper English. And better to die a prince in Washington’s newest and finest hotel than live as king of the tarpaper shacks down on the mudflats.

Darwin had been to the stinking South Puget Sound once, during an especially low tide. He didn’t envy the poor grunts working enormous steam-powered Iron Chinks, digging geoduck clams out of oil-soaked mud for half-pennies a pound.

Darwin continued daydreaming as he stood at attention while gentlemen in tuxedos and ladies in formal gowns made of copper lamé pulled on their long, silken dinner gloves and hurried to the elevator queue, waiting impatiently to reach the Top O’ the Town restaurant on the seventh floor. Then he caught a knowing glance down the hall from Mr. Rosenberg, the hotel owner, and hurried to the smoking parlor. He hoisted a large humidor made from Spanish cedar and caught the servants lift to the top floor, which smelled like fresh calla lilies and prime rib.

Guests were lounging in the tearooms and newly appointed moon-rooms, listening to Betty Hall Clark sing

Wild Cherries

and spoony ragtime on the auto-piano, while

oohing

and

aahing

at the Aurora Borealis—luminous ribbons of purple and blue-green that bled into the night sky—the opening act before what might be the grandest of all finales. Meanwhile the more daring patrons ventured out onto the Florentine loggia and rooftop garden, leaning over the balcony to get a better view of the horizon and the lights from sailboats that deckled Lake Washington, bobbing up and down, moving slowly on the water, shimmering like fireflies in honey. A few of the more intrepid guests wore gas masks atop their heads like party hats, while many of the older ladies veiled themselves in birdcage lace and toted comet umbrellas to fend off any errant dust and soot drifting down from the sky.

As Darwin found a place for the humidor and offered Cuban cigars for ten-cents apiece, Lucy Stringfellow walked by in a shiny pink mini-dress with matching cap. She toted a silver cigarette tray, offering tobacco for the ladies as well as comet pills. The fashionable blue mints had been laced with colloidal silver to ward off bad humors and also had the pleasing effect of turning one’s skin the color of sterling ash.

“Hello,

Dashing

,” she teased and blew him a kiss. “I’ll love you until the end of time. Or sunrise, whichever comes first.”

Lucy was a year older, an inch taller, and always called him

Daunting, Daring, Dancing

–anything but his adoptive name—even the occasional

Darling

, which always made Darwin delightfully uncomfortable.

He caught her eye and then looked away. “Do you think we’re really going see it tonight? Because crying wolf is bad for business.”

Lucy nodded at the horizon. “Mr. Rosenberg said the Hydrographic Office just got a message from a ship at sea. Then the telegraph went down. He says that’s how we can know for sure when the Sidereal Tramp is close. The northern lights come out and then all the wires stop working.”

The telegraphic services not working made Darwin feel, well—not quite scared—but certainly more nervous than he’d expected; after all, the headlines in the

Seattle Star

had been going on for weeks about Camille Flammarion, the French astronomer who had declared that the Earth would pass through the Tramp’s tail for five hours, which was—according to Flammarion’s scientific calculations—millions of miles long and made of something called cyanogen, which sounded ominous, indeed.

Flammarion had warned:

The Terrible Tramp would impregnate our atmosphere with poison and most certainly cause a ruinous catastrophe for every living thing—mind blindness, all manners of sickness, and even death

.

While in England, someone from the Royal Greenwich Observatory said that massive tides might cause the Pacific Ocean to empty itself into the Atlantic.

Darwin didn’t know what to believe and neither did anyone else. From atop the Sorrento he had a clear view of the Luddites at St. James Cathedral, which was holding an all-night prayer vigil. It seemed that all over Seattle—all over the world perhaps—people were either confessing their sins, or busy committing new ones.

“You look rather pale,” Lucy said. “You feeling alright, dearest darling?”

Darwin blushed.

“The cigar smoke doesn’t agree with me,” he lied, pretending to cough as the color came back to his cheeks. He knew that while Seattle’s gilded elite celebrated, many of those on the street had other plans. Some left, as the comet got closer, to hide in caves or the abandoned mines of Mount Rainier. Other poor souls, tormented by fear, religious fervor, or both, had committed suicide, quickly, with a bullet or by electrocution, or slowly, by drinking their fears away, one glass, one bottle, one cask of homemade apple-gin at a time. And the jails were overflowing with comet-crazed people. Darwin had even read about a sheriff in Oklahoma who rescued a girl who was about to be sacrificed by her stepfather to a band of end-of-the-world fanatics.

Darwin feigned a smile.

“I’ll make us some pearl tea,” Lucy said. “After the party. We’ll have our own celebration—why not live a little, while we still can?”

Darwin watched as she smiled and walked away.

In my dreams

.

They’d lived under the same grand roof for three years but had never been alone, not even for a minute, and had hardly spent any non-working, non-dining time together. Darwin resided in the east wing of the walkup basement with the colored men of the kitchen staff, custodians, and boiler mechanics, while Lucy lived one floor below with the rest of the resident female workers. Only Mr. Elliot, the majordomo, was allowed to live on the ground floor, and aside from group meals, which Mr. Elliot grudgingly tolerated, their boss frowned on social contact between the men and women. Though lately some of the doe-eyed servants had met up on their rare days off. But the couples were invariably discovered and, apocalypse or not, they found their employment contracts voided.

Darwin wondered (and worried) that Lucy had caught comet-fever and was willing to take that chance on his behalf. But as he heard hooting and a wild commotion from the balcony, he wondered if

he

was willing to meet that risk.

“Here’s to the end of the world!” a woman shouted, above the boisterous piano and the popping of a dozen champagne corks.

Darwin shut the humidor’s lid as everyone rushed outside or pressed their faces to the windows to get a better look.

The end of the world has become a joke

, Darwin thought,

a debate to be hashed out in the editorial pages of newspapers

.

“It’s here! Glory, it’s huge!” someone hollered.

“Good Lord,” a man stammered, his voice cracking. “Why is it so damn close?”

Darwin watched in awe as white lights exploded, silhouetting men with long-tailed jackets and women draped in fur cloaks and shawls. Then the laughs and jovial cheers dissolved into panicked shrieks and the sound of glass breaking. Darwin ducked as he heard thunderous booming, and the windows rattled in their panes. He smelled smoke, and burning, like fetid sulfur as fire and lightning filled the night sky. Scores of patrons swarmed back inside like ants caught in a rainstorm, climbing over each other and the serving staff. So many people piled into the elevator that the brass gate wouldn’t close and the lift remained a wobbling, jerking cage of mewling bodies and fine haberdashery.

Darwin chewed his lip and squeezed through the frenzied crowd, past drunk men at the bar who guzzled their drinks, and around the piano player who began Chopin’s

Funeral March

in earnest, her head down, eyes closed.

He finally found Lucy crouched beneath a serving table and helped her up.

“Follow me,” he said, as he took her hand and guided her against the tide of terrified revelers, past the balcony doors, which were filled with smoke and flashing luminescence. They hurried toward the servants’ stairs. He put his hand around her waist and led her down the serpentine steps, down seven floors, pausing on the ground level as he heard screams from the foyer and the sound of pottery shattering.

“It’s not safe out there,” he said, unsure if she could hear him. Then he led her down two more flights, through a long hallway, past the cellar and into the boiler room.

“What are we doing down here?” Lucy asked, catching her breath.

“If the Tramp is that close we’re safer below ground,” Darwin looked around the dimly lit room, which was a cave of load-bearing columns, metal pipes, clanking pistons, and machinery that ran the length of the high, joisted ceiling. An enormous boiler, the size of a locomotive engine, dominated the center of the room, radiating heat. “This place is built like the Airship Kentucky.”

“But the poison vapors outside, the comet dust,” Lucy said. “Won’t that come through the doors, the cracks in the walls… ?”

“This way.” Darwin cut her off and led her inside the large coal bin. He climbed a pile of black rock and closed the coal chute, then he scrambled down and closed the heavy iron coal bin doors, sealing out light and smoke and the terrifying world above. He remembered that gas masks used filters lined with crushed charcoal.

This room might filter out the toxic fumes

, he hoped, as they sat down and huddled into the pile. He felt her hip, smelled her perfume mixed with sweat amid the smoky coal. He brushed her bare leg for a moment before he found her fingers laced between his.

The room was pitch black.

“This… this can’t be happening,” Lucy whispered. “I didn’t believe it…”

Darwin didn’t answer. He held her hand and listened, straining to hear something, anything above the pounding of his heart and his worried breathing. He heard what sounded like sirens in the distance and the muffled cries of people shouting. He couldn’t quite accept that the world was ending, but he recognized fear when he saw it, when he felt it.

“Darling, Daring…

Dying

.” Lucy sniffled. “

I don’t want to die… want to die…

”

“We’re not dead yet.” Darwin tried to talk about something—anything—to fill the silence, the dread of not knowing. “You know, my last name is Qi. It’s sometimes a lucky name because in Chinese it means life, or breath, or

air

–that’s a good omen, right? Though it’s kind of a funny thing too because in the mission home where I grew up, they told me the Chinese fable about the Qi Dynasty. They were the most backward of all people because they worried about anything and everything. The Qi literally thought the sky was falling—like Chicken Little. And now look at us. The sky

is

falling.”

As the sirens faded, the world grew quiet. He heard her breathing soften. He felt it proper to let go of her hand but he didn’t want to. He held on tighter.

“I’m not laughing,” she said. And then she did, just a little.

“See,” he said. “The end of the world’s not so bad. All we need is that cup of pearl tea, with lemon.” He squeezed her hand. “Quickly, tell me about your family.”

She sneezed twice from the coal dust and Darwin blessed her out of social habit, though he didn’t practice any such primitive religion.

“What family?” she said as the coal settled beneath them. Her voice echoed in the hollow steel chamber. “My parents came down from Vancouver to work in the copper mines. My father contracted green lung from the dust and couldn’t work. I was the youngest of seven mouths to feed so they sold me—put me in service, just like you—until I’m eighteen, just like you. I haven’t seen them in years. They’re probably dead now, or will be soon.”

Darwin understood the same sadness. The same bitter loneliness. He imagined suffering through the end of the world, only to be the last two survivors.

She patted his arm. “You can be my family.”

He mulled that over—the good and bad. Lucy had hinted, smiled, flirted, and nearly broken the rules to catch his eye. Part of him had known this all along and a part of him (the doubting, insecure part) had half-pretended to be oblivious—better to be wrong in his apprehension than right in her possible rejection. Where does that leave them now?

Family

. Darwin thought.

Like husband and wife, or kissing cousins?

Before he could ask, he startled at the clanging of the fire bell in the distance—the same alarm he’d pulled earlier—but this time he heard three sharp rings.

Then silence.

“Thank goodness,” Darwin whispered. “We’re in luck.” He helped Lucy to her feet and opened the creaking, groaning, coal room doors. “That beautiful sound was the all-clear signal. We just might live to see the morning after all.”

“You’re sure?” She hesitated. “Is it really safe?”

“There’s only one way to find out.”

They took turns dusting each other off in the shadowy darkness—turning, smiling, laughing, and gently touching. He took her hand and boldly kissed it once, then wiped off the coal dust where his lips had been.

Why not?

he thought as he paused, grateful for catastrophe. Then he let go.

As they stepped into the corridor, they squinted at Mr. Elliot and a custodian who Darwin didn’t recognize. Each of them carried a matchless flashlight. The majordomo bit down on his pipe and grunted, “Jeezus and Mary! I had better

never

catch you two down here again in this state of… aloneness.” He pointed to the stairwell. “Clean yourself up and get back to your stations—hurry along now. The show is over but the party will continue as planned and you still have guests to serve.”

“But… the Tramp… ,” Lucy protested.

“What Tramp? Get upstairs,” Mr. Elliot barked. “Now!”

They hurried along the servants’ stairwell, then waved goodbye as they split up to go change into new liveries on their respective floors. Darwin, though, couldn’t wait to abate his curiosity. He peeked into the octagonal-shaped lobby where a host of guests were collecting themselves and waiters were offering everyone free cocktails and comet pills. He wandered from the stairwell out the front door and down the steps to the circular porte-cochére where three police motorcars were parked and a patrol of mounted officers clip-clopped by in the cold, brisk Seattle night. Darwin’s mouth fell open as he looked above the smoke that had settled in the Italian garden; he saw a fire engine, ladder extended, pumping water into the trees that were still ablaze. Above that queer spectacle floated a massive airship; a hot air balloon half the size of the hotel, hovered above the seventh floor balcony. Below the basket was an enormous wooden platform, still smoking, sparking, glowing with fireworks and a neon contraption that read DRINK REAL OLYMPIA BEER from the CLAUSSEN SWEENEY BREWING COMPANY. Darwin heard police officers with bullhorns shouting at the aeronauts to come down and face charges for public nuisance and disturbing the peace.