The Alejandra Variations (6 page)

Both women at the check-in desk seemed happy with their jobs. He wondered if they had any idea what was going on in the world above. The activity in the room beyond them betrayed a certain quality of alarm or concern. But it probably would be their job not to be too interested.

He put on his security badge.

Staci turned to Melissa. "Sal," she said with a worried look, "I'll check back with you later. I want to get to the communications room. I've got to see what they're doing about Cole and the kids."

She spoke rather quickly, almost as if the words were getting in the way of her deepest feelings. Nicholas didn't have to be a mind reader to know what would be foremost in Staci's thoughts.

"Go ahead," Melissa nodded, her eyes full of compassion. "I'll be with Nick in the Play Room."

"Thanks," Staci said. She shot an almost embarrassed smile at Nicholas. He smiled back at her. They were all a team now, and every one of them had his and her priorities. Nicholas couldn't begrudge Staci her concern about her family.

Melissa walked him down the corridor, past the check-in desk. Her nod of recognition to the two security guards standing before the wide glass doors of the Play Room brought similar, if understandably grim, nods in return. The Plexiglas doors parted, and before them were row upon row of computer consoles.

Melissa said, "It doesn't look bad yet on the outside, but we're doing the best we can to locate and shelter the families of everyone involved with Foresee."

Nicholas glanced down into the auditoriumlike Play Room. Military personnel—and at least two dozen important-looking civilians—were hovering over computer consoles and television screens, their faces glowing in the preternaturally green light off of the boards before them.

He'd heard about the Play Room often enough from Derek Mallory and Melissa herself. It was more or less as he'd imagined it would be.

Melissa directed Nick to the top of the arena, where they could overlook the whole operation.

She pointed upward. "The dorms and recreation spaces are upstairs. We might as well get ourselves assigned to sleeping quarters, since we're going to be here until the President blows the halftime whistle." She tried to seem relaxed. "You should consider yourself lucky. Before your time, all this was nothing more than a mineshaft, some cots, and a few computers. It was Mnemos Five when I started. We've all come a long way since."

Nicholas marveled at the near-luxury of the Play Room and of Foresee itself. It was hard to believe that they were under eight hundred feet of solid mountain. The floors were richly carpeted, and someone had wisely set out a few decorative plants.

The place felt comfortable and homey. And he knew why it felt that way: in all likelihood it was going to be home for some time to come.

Nick said, "I'm doing fine. I can check out quarters later. Right now I think I'd like to see the layout of the place and get to work."

Melissa pondered Nicholas for a brief instant. She was concerned with both his mental health and his physical disposition. "Nick," she said, "I didn't much like that last little jaunt we put you through in Mnemos Nine. You've had some rough ones before, but nothing like that."

"Well, I'd like to be doing something. I'm a bit shaky, but I can still function," he told her.

"I'm still worried about you," she told him. "And Dr. Massingale wants to examine you later when he gets a chance. You're one of the very best Strategics we have. I don't want your nightmares to devour you."

"I'll be fine," he said.

Melissa led him down to a row of computer screens. She set aside her purse and briefing pouch. Several technicians were bent over a console that stood out from the others. On the wall before them were several monitoring screens. Nicholas realized that beyond that wall lay Mnemos Nine, languishing in its bath of supercool liquid helium, waiting for the next in-system link to be arranged.

A small fusion reactor, fueled by the hydrogen contained within artesian waters, would keep the computer and the Project headquarters functioning—independent of the topside world—for nearly a thousand years. Nicholas felt a trifle dwarfed knowing that beyond the walls was a machine so quick, so terribly efficient, that it could outthink any human being.

A door from another room off to their right opened, and a man dressed in slacks and a canary-colored cardigan came swaggering in as if he were stepping out onto a golf course.

"Hi, Chief," he called out to Melissa Salazar. "Hey, Nick. Glad to see you here for once."

"Derek," Nicholas smiled, stepping over. He shook his friend's hand eagerly.

Derek Mallory grinned broadly. "Sal said that you had a spat with the machine a couple days ago. Nice work."

"Thanks," Nick said. "I appreciate it. I hear you got to play frogman with Nelson."

"Nelson," Mallory said, shaking his head sadly. "That boy's got a long way to go. But he found that missile. Have to hand it to him."

Mallory was only a shade taller than Nick, and though in his mid-thirties, there was a salt-and-peppering of gray at his curly temples. Nick had always looked upon Derek as one of the few normal people at Foresee. Fortunately, Mallory was also a Strategic, where normalcy counted the most.

Though Derek now made Longmont his home, he had lived for a few years in Santa Barbara, where he and Nick had become friends. However, Mallory had never been able to abandon his native cliffrock of Colorado, and decided to move back—helped, unfortunately, by a divorce and a runaway sixteen-year-old daughter. Colorado was just the medicine he needed.

He and Nick would often rendezvous in southern Colorado to ski, taking in Aspen and Telluride when they could. And on occasion they'd even make it up into Utah, to ski Brighton or Solitude.

Melissa said, "Nick's just getting acquainted with the Play Room. Staci's gone over to communications to track down the rest of her family."

Nick gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. "And Reitinger's still down at the Tubes, playing with the trains."

"So, the gang's almost all here," Mallory said.

They faced the consoles which babysat Mnemos Nine. Nick turned to Derek. "On our way here, Staci was in-system watching things develop. She unplugged when the situation softened. Is there anything new going on?"

Mallory pointed to one particular screen. "Runciman's been guardedly mum about the incident. However, much of southern California saw the Vandenberg fireball; the explanation the media's been given is that an experimental rocket went haywire, just like the time two years ago when that missile fell onto Sisquoc. So far, it looks like the press has bought it. Intelligence reports that the State Department's already in the process of filing official complaints at the UN and in Geneva. But it doesn't look like war. Yet."

"I still don't like it," Nicholas muttered.

"It was a damn stupid thing to happen," Melissa said, not completely suppressing her anger.

Mallory pointed to one readout on a screen before them. "We've got a handful of Soviet warships just off Madagascar that have suddenly changed course."

"Where?" Nick asked. Around Madagascar, or anywhere along the east coast of Africa, there would be only one place of strategic interest for the Soviets: the Persian Gulf region.

But Mallory's answer surprised him entirely. "They're headed south, from what our satellites can tell."

"South?"

"And possibly west," Derek said.

There went the Persian Gulf theory. "But why would they do that?" Nicholas looked at the screen.

"Well, we can only guess, until all the data is ready for a trip into Mnemos. But the Russians might be off to counter the fleet we've got in the South Atlantic. That would be rather foolish, though, since there's a huge storm brewing there and the Soviets know it. I can't imagine the Russians risking a major naval excursion, with thirty-foot waves lashing their decks. Nor can the Pentagon."

Melissa stepped over to a console and began typing in a sequence which, as it appeared on the screens before them, indicated troop movements in South Africa. Nicholas knew that the mineral wealth of that part of Africa was tremendous, but he still couldn't fathom the rationale for Soviet agitation down there. Russia itself was a vast country, rich in both petroleum and a wide range of mineral resources. It could be that they were making sure the forces of the United States or western Europe wouldn't be able to get at the supplies of vanadium, manganese, gold, and bauxite so abundant there. Or perhaps the Russian convoy was moving toward the Falkland Islands and the oilfields beneath their shores that the U.S. depended so greatly upon. It could be the first step toward a blockade.

Mallory pointed at one of the computer screens. "We're getting some input right now from the Pentagon war room. Apparently, they've alerted all of our armed forces. They've even notified Heimdall Station in earth orbit. If anything happens up there, it'll mean our one platform against the three Salyut stations. It could be messy all the way around."

Nicholas didn't like the feel of it.

He knew human nature too well. He knew that tensions built up slowly, but sooner or later those tensions found release. He knew that if one or two nuclear devices were allowed to be detonated—even for saber-rattling purposes—it would then be easier for anyone, anywhere, to set off a bomb in his neighbor's territory. The escalation might be incremental—or it might be instant. The experts often disagreed. But the Mnemos Nine Environmental scenarios suggested that if even one or two warheads were used in bush wars in Africa or in desert skirmishes in Iran or Afghanistan, the radioactivity in the atmosphere would accumulate to dangerous levels. Strontium 90 and Cesium 137 would linger for many many years. Nitrogen in the upper atmosphere would be reconverted by
any
kind of nuclear detonation—and the ozone layer would be affected. Ultraviolet radiation would then pelt the planet, causing untold damage to all organisms living on the surface, particularly the small ones so important to the biological chains.

It was all part of the Mnemos Nine scenarios, and the banks in front of them were absorbing as much data as they could for future extrapolations.

Nicholas turned to Mallory. "How many other Strategics are here?"

"Stewart Flinn and Paul Northcott. Steve Childs is only an hour away. They got him into the Tube in Minnesota as soon as things started looking nasty."

Melissa Salazar had been speaking in low tones with the few technicians. She picked up a special telephone and spoke into it for a few seconds. After a brief spell of listening and shaking her head, she hung up.

"I'm afraid that you're going to have to get right into the thick of things, Nicholas," she said with a hand on his arm. Given the look in her eyes, and the somberness in her voice, Nicholas knew that, although she was being genuinely solicitous of his condition, she also had other things on her mind.

She said, "We've got to put you into an important scenario, if you think you're up to it. We'd give it to someone else, but it's just been discovered that there's something going on down in southern Arizona. That's your old stomping grounds. Massingale won't be here yet for—"

Nicholas held his hand up to stop her. "Don't worry, Sal. That's what I'm here for." Dr. Massingale would arrive while he was under, so there should be nothing risky about a small trip into the system.

Melissa seemed tense. "Derek here will be going under in an hour or so, because we want to monitor those trawlers. But this thing down around Tucson just came in."

While Nick could still feel the drift of the drugs within his system, he knew that he would be able to go with the scenario without any problem. He only wished that there could've been a
little
more time…

"All right, Sal," he said. "I wanted to see the couches anyway."

Melissa nodded grimly. "Let's go," she said.

Faster!
the impulses told him.
Faster!

But he couldn't press the gas pedal to the floor any harder than he was doing at the moment. His heart raced, and his hands, sweating feverishly in the harsh, desert heat, gripped the steering wheel as if it were the only tangible object in the known universe.

Outside the car, the wide dry desert rushed by. Here, inside the automobile, it seemed so peaceful and calm. But the voice on the radio speaker was virtually screaming with a desperation he'd never felt before in his life.

"It's war!" the announcer shouted hysterically.
"Everybody, it's war!"

The announcer on the long-distance radio station had interrupted the music to shout that there were flocks of armed Soviet bombers soaring over the north pole and that submarine-launched missiles were already falling on the cities of both coasts.

Now the radio stations—all of them—had gone off the air without any prior warning. The last voice Nick had heard had urged them all to get out of town, to get as far away from Tucson as they could. The announcer's voice had choked with sobs, and then the station's place on the dial was taken over by sudden silence.

And he couldn't drive fast enough.

In the back seat of the car were two children. His children.

But he didn't have any children.

He quickly looked back: yes, they were his. There was his daughter, only a month old, napping soundly, lost to the world. But the other child, an eighteen-month-old boy, was bouncing around in the backseat, having just awoken nervous and fidgety. The boy kept craning his head up for a look out of the side window of the car.

"Stay down," Nicholas commanded him. "Oh, sweet Jesus," he whispered to himself.

He felt dazed, bludgeoned by the entire sensory world.

Then he discovered that there was a woman beside him.

His wife. Yes, he thought. My wife.

She slowly turned to him in the agonized light of the sunset, a long, harried look on her face—a face suddenly become familiar, shifting and changing in the coruscating aura of the sunset.

"Oh, Nickie!" she exclaimed. "What are we going to do about Mother? What are we going to do?"