Calculating God (29 page)

“Oh, God,” I said, invoking the entity they believed in but I did not. I looked at Christine. “Creationists.”

The man with the submachine gun was growing impatient. “Enough,” he said. He aimed the gun at Christine. “Drop that phone.”

She did so; it hit the marble floor with a clang and its flip-down mouthpiece broke free.

“We came here to do a job of work,” said the man with the gun. “Y’all are going to lie down on the ground, and I’m going to finish that work. Cooter, cover them.” He returned to the gallery.

The other man reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a pistol. He aimed it at us. “Y’all heard the man,” he said. “Lie down.”

Christine lowered herself to the ground. Hollus and the other Forhilnor hunkered down in a way I’d never seen before, lowering their spherical torsos enough that they touched the floor. The two Wreeds just stood there, either baffled or perhaps physiologically incapable of lying down.

And I did not lie down, either. I was terrified—no doubt about it. My heart was pounding, and I could feel sweat on my forehead. But these fossils were priceless, dammitall—among the most important in the entire world. And I was the one who had arranged for them to all be on public display in one place.

I took a step forward. “Please,” I said.

More staccato gunfire from inside the gallery. It was almost as if the bullets were tearing into me; I could picture the shales shattering, the remains of
Opabinia
and
Wiwaxia
and
Anomalocaris
and
Canadia
that had survived 500 million years exploding into clouds of dust.

“Don’t,” I said, genuine pleading in my voice. “Don’t do that.”

“Stay back,” said the short-haired man. “You just stay where you are.”

I took in air through my mouth; I didn’t want to die—but I was going to, regardless. Whether it happened tonight or a few months from now, it was going to happen. I took another step forward. “If you believe in the Bible,” I said, “then you’ve got to believe in the Ten Commandments. And one of them”—I knew I’d have made a more convincing argument if I’d known which one—“says ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ” I took another couple of steps toward him. “You may want to destroy those fossils, but I can’t believe that you’d kill me.”

“I will,” said the man.

More bursts of gunfire, counterpointed by the sounds of breaking glass and shattering rock. My chest felt like it was going to explode. “No,” I said, “you won’t. God wouldn’t forgive you for that.”

He jabbed the gun in my direction; we were maybe fifteen meters apart. “I’ve already killed,” he said. It sounded like a confession, and there was what seemed to be genuine anguish in his voice. “That clinic; that doctor . . .”

More gunfire, echoing and reverberating.

My God, I thought. The abortion-clinic bombers . . .

I swallowed deeply. “That was an accident,” I said, guessing. “You can’t shoot me in cold blood.”

“I’ll do it,” said the man the other one had called Cooter. “So help me, I’ll do it. Now you stay back!”

If only Hollus
weren’t
here in the flesh. If she were present as her holographic projection, she could manipulate solid object without having to worry about being harmed by the bullets. But she was all too real, and all too vulnerable—as were the other extraterrestrials.

Suddenly, I became conscious of the sound of sirens growing closer and closer, barely audible here, inside the museum. Cooter must have heard them, too. He turned his head and called out to his partner, “The cops!”

The other man reemerged from the temporary-exhibitions gallery. I wondered how many of the fossils he’d managed to destroy. He cocked his head, listening. At first he didn’t seem to be able to hear the sirens; doubtless the gunfire still echoed in his ears. But a moment later he nodded and gestured with his submachine gun for us to start moving. Christine got to her feet; the two Forhilnors lifted their torsos off the ground.

“We’re getting out of here,” said the man. “Each of you put your hands up.”

I lifted my arms; so did Christine. Hollus and the other Forhilnor exchanged a glance, then each lifted their two arms, as well. The Wreeds followed suit a moment later, each lifting all four arms and splaying all twenty-three fingers. The man who wasn’t Cooter—he was taller and older than Cooter—ushered us farther into the darkened Rotunda. From there we had a clear view out the glass-doored vestibule. Five uniformed Emergency Task Force officers were beetling up the outside stairs to the museum’s glass entrance. Two were brandishing heavy guns. One had a bullhorn. “This is the police,” called that cop, the sound distorted as it passed through the two layers of glass. “We have the building surrounded. Come out with your hands up.”

The man with the submachine gun gestured for us to keep moving. The four aliens were bringing up the rear, forming a wall between us humans on the inside and the police on the outside. I wished now that I hadn’t told Hollus to land her shuttle out back on Philosopher’s Walk. If the cops had seen the shuttle, they might have realized that the aliens weren’t the holographic projections they’d read about in the newspapers but instead were the real thing. As it stood, some hotshot might assume that he could pick off the two armed men standing behind the aliens by shooting through the projections.

We made it out of the Rotunda, up the four steps to the marble landing between the two stairwells, each with its central totem pole, and then—

And then everything went to hell.

Coming quietly up the stairwell on our right from the basement was a uniformed ETF officer, wearing a bulletproof vest and brandishing an assault weapon. The cops had cleverly made a public stand outside the main entrance while sending a contingent up through the staff entrance from the alleyway between the ROM and the planetarium.

“J. D.,”
shouted the man with the buzz cut, catching sight of the cop,
“look!”

J. D. swung his gun and opened fire. The cop was blown backward, down the wide stone steps, his bulletproof vest being put to the test as it erupted in numerous places, bleeding out white fabric stuffing.

While J. D. was distracted, the cops on the front steps had somehow opened one door—the one at the far left, as they faced it, the one that was designed for wheelchair access; perhaps the ROM security guard had given them the key. Two cops, safe behind riot shields, were now inside the vestibule. The inner doors didn’t lock—there was no need for that. One of the officers reached forward and must have touched the red button that operated the door for handicapped patrons. It swung slowly open. The cops were silhouetted by streetlamps and the revolving red lights of their vehicles out on the street.

“Stop where you are,” shouted J. D. across the Rotunda, its wide diameter separating our motley group from the cops. “We have hostages.”

The cop with the bullhorn was one of those now inside, and he felt compelled to keep using it. “We know the aliens aren’t real,” he said, his words reverberating in the darkened, domed Rotunda. “Put your hands up and come out.”

J. D. jerked his large gun at me. “Tell them who you are.”

With the shape my lungs were in, it was hard for me to shout, but I cupped my hands around my mouth and did the best I could. “I’m Thomas Jericho,” I said. “I’m a curator here.” I pointed at Christine. “This is Christine Dorati. She’s the museum’s director and president.”

J. D. shouted. “We get safe passage out of here, or these two die.”

The two cops hunkered down behind their riot shields. After a few moments of consultation, the bullhorn erupted again. “What are your terms?”

Even I knew he was stalling. Cooter looked first at the southern staircase, which led up, and then at the northern staircase, which led both up and down. He must have thought he saw something move—it could have been a mouse; a giant, old building like the museum has plenty of them. He fired a shot down the northern staircase. It hit the stone steps, jagged shards went flying, and—

And one of them hit Barbulkan, the second Forhilnor—

And Barbulkan’s left mouth made a sound like “Ooof!” and his right mouth went
“Hup!”

And a carnation of bright-red blood exploded from one of his legs, and a flap of bubble-wrap skin hung loose from where the stone fragment had hit—

And Cooter said, “Holy God!”

And J. D. turned around, and he said, “Sweet Jesus.”

And they both apparently realized it at the same moment. The aliens weren’t projections; they weren’t holograms.

They were real.

And suddenly they knew they had the most valuable hostages in the history of the world.

J. D. stepped backward, moving behind the group; he’d apparently realized he’d been insufficiently covering the four aliens. “Are you all real?” he said.

The aliens were silent. My heart was jumping. J. D. aimed his submachine gun at the left leg of one of the Wreeds. “One burst from this gun will blow your leg right off.” He let this sink in for a moment. “I ask again, are you real?”

Hollus spoke up. “They” “are” “real.” “We” “all” “are.” A satisfied smile spread across J. D.’s face. He shouted to the police. “The aliens aren’t projections,” he said. “They’re real. We’ve got
six
hostages here. I want all of you cops to withdraw. At the first sign of any trick, I will kill one of the hostages—and it won’t be a human.”

“You don’t want to be a murderer,” called the cop over the megaphone.

“I
won’t
be a murderer,” J. D. shouted back. “Murder is the killing of another human being. You won’t be able to find anything to charge me with. Now, withdraw fully and completely, or these aliens die.”

“One hostage will do as well as six,” called the same cop. “Let five of them go, and we’ll talk.”

J. D. and Cooter looked at each other. Six hostages
was
an unwieldy group; they might have an easier time controlling the situation if they didn’t have to worry about so many. On the other hand, by having the six form a circle, with J. D. and Cooter at the center, they could be protected from sharpshooters firing from just about any direction.

“No way,” shouted J. D. “You guys—you’re like a SWAT team, right? So you must have come here in a van or truck. We want you to back off, far away from the museum, leaving that van with its motor running and the keys in it. We’ll drive it to the airport, along with as many of the aliens as will fit, and we want a plane waiting there to take us”—he faltered “well, to take us wherever we decide to go.”

“We can’t do that,” said the cop through his megaphone.

J. D. shrugged a little. “I will kill one hostage sixty seconds from now, if y’all are still here.” He turned to the man with the crew cut. “Cooter?”

Cooter nodded, looked at his watch, and started counting down. “Sixty. Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight.”

The cop with the bullhorn turned around and spoke to someone behind him. I could see him pointing, presumable indicating the direction to which his force should withdraw on foot.

“Fifty-six. Fifty-five. Fifty-four.”

Hollus’s eyestalks had stopped weaving in and out and had instead locked at their maximum separation. I’d seen her do that before when she had heard something that interested her. Whatever it was, I hadn’t heard it yet.

“Fifty-two. Fifty-one. Fifty.”

The cops were moving out of the glass vestibule, but they were making a lot of noise about it. The one with the bullhorn kept speaking. “All right,” he said. “All right. We’re withdrawing.” His magnified voice echoed through the Rotunda. “We’re backing away.”

It seemed to me he was talking unnecessarily, but—

But then I heard the sound Hollus had heard: a faint rumbling. The elevator, to our left, was descending in its shaft; someone had called it down to the lower level. The cop with the bullhorn was deliberately trying to drown out the sound.

“Forty-one. Forty. Thirty-nine.”

It would be suicide, I thought, for whoever would get in the car; J. D. could blow away the occupant as soon as the metal doors split down the middle and started to slide away.

“Thirty-one. Thirty. Twenty-nine.”

“We’re leaving,” shouted the cop. “We’re going.”

The elevator was coming back up now. Above the doors was a row of square indicator lights—B, 1, 2, 3—indicating which floor the car was currently on. I dared steal a glance at it. The “1” had just winked out, and, a moment later, the “2” lit up. Brilliant! Either whoever was in the elevator had known about the balconies on the second floor, overlooking the Rotunda, or else the ROM’s own security guard, who must have let the police in, had told him.

“Eighteen. Seventeen. Sixteen.”

As the “2” lit up, I did my part to muffle the sound of the elevator doors opening by coughing loudly; if there was one thing I did well these days, it was cough.

The “2” was staying lit; the doors must have opened by now, but J. D. and Cooter hadn’t heard them. Still, presumably one or more armed cops had now exited onto the second floor—the one that housed the Dinosaur and Discovery Galleries.

“Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven.”

“All right,” called the ETF officer with the megaphone. “All right. We’re leaving.” At this distance I couldn’t tell if he was making eye contact with the officers on the darkened balcony. We were still by the elevator; I didn’t dare tip my eyes up, lest I give away the presence of the people on the floor above.

“Nine. Eight. Seven.”

The cops moved out of the vestibule, exiting into the dark night. I watched them sink from view as they headed down the stone steps to the sidewalk.

“Six. Five. Four.”

The red lights from the roofs of the cruisers that had been sweeping through the Rotunda started to pull away; one set of lights—presumably from the ETF van—continued to rotate.

“Three. Two. One.”

I looked at Christine. She nodded almost imperceptibly; she knew what was happening, too.

“Zero!” said Cooter.

“All, right,” said J. D. “Let’s move out.”

I’d spent much of the last seven months worrying about what it was going to be like to die—but I hadn’t thought that I would see someone else die before I did. My heart was pounding like the jackhammers we use to break up overburden. J. D., I figured, had only seconds to live.