Richard gripped the cassette case and looked through the milky transparency of the floor, down toward the base of the three-thousand-foot pyramid. Silent bursts of light passed between the bulerite floors, strange fish swimming through what should have been solid matter. The entire Bulero Complex seemed dreamlike, about to dissolve.
He hurried to the elevator, knowing that he might not reach the lobby before the building disintegrated. As he passed a giant window, he glimpsed the vast burning ruin of Chicago, its tiers caved in as in New York, the strange glow of anomalous forces becoming visible in the blue twilight.
Thanks, Jack, he said silently. You killed yourself, but you haven’t got me yet. He thought of the frenzy of the last week, feeling grateful that it had been possible to evacuate all the employees to nonbulerite areas.
Miraculously, the elevator doors opened. A small kindness. He might never reach the shuttle, even if he got down to the lobby and out of the complex. He stepped inside and the doors closed, leaving him in darkness as the world fell away and he clasped Carlos Bulero’s records to himself. They had better be worth it. The future would have to redeem the past. It had taken him many hours to find them among Jack’s records, misfiled where only he could have found them easily; and there was no guarantee that they were not Jack’s carefully edited copies of the original papers.
Richard’s weight increased as the elevator slowed to a stop. The doors opened, revealing a floor of white light. A dark figure was coming toward the elevator, gun in hand. A looter.
“Wait!” Mike Basil shouted as Richard stepped out and turned right quickly. “I’ve got the car.”
Richard stopped as Basil walked up to him. “What are you doing here, Mike? You should be at the shuttleport. Did the rest of our people get out of the area?”
“I’m glad I found you. There’s not much time.”
“Why should you care?”
Mike noticed the cassette case. “I was Jack’s friend, as much as that was possible.”
“Let’s get out of here before his handiwork ends our friendship,” Richard said.
Mike smiled, then turned and led the way out through the main entrance to the waiting car, where he got into the driver’s seat. Richard threw the cassette case into the back seat and got in next to him.
The vehicle moved down the driveway leading out of the thousand-acre world headquarters of Bulero Enterprises. The tree-lined road was empty.
Mike did not release the car when they reached the automated road. “It goes out intermittently,” he said. “No use taking a chance.”
He turned right and the car gained speed.
“Do you think we’ll have enough power at the launch laser?” Richard asked.
“We should, since it’s powered by our own fusion plant. That’s bulerite-enclosed, but there have been no signs of instability yet.”
“How about the shuttle itself?”
“Its bulerite is too young to go; it’ll last long enough.”
The Bulero Industrial Spaceport appeared in the distance. Richard saw the launch pad, a brightly lit cut-off cone against the darkening sky. As the car drew closer, a shuttle went up, riding a thick column of ruby red laser light; in a moment the roar grew very loud, dying away slowly as the vehicle disappeared overhead. The beam followed for a minute, imparting the last of its heat energy to the fuel mixture in the ship’s reaction chamber, then winked out.
Another minute later, Richard saw the last shuttle coming into vertical position on the pad.
A mob of people pressed in around the main gate, while guards struggled to clear the way. The car came to a stop at the edge of the crowd.
A voice boomed over the public address system: “Please proceed to the airport, or to boost-train terminals. We have no way to evacuate you here. This is an earth-to-orbit line only.”
“We’ll have to go around them,” Mike said.
They opened their doors and got out. Richard reached into the back seat and grabbed the black case.
“Let’s go,” Basil said. Richard remembered that Mike was armed.
Basil started to lead the way around the crowd. The crowd was oblivious to them, shouting at the guards. They reached the fence easily and started to push through toward the gate.
A pair of hands shoved Richard against the fence. “Who do you think you are?” a voiced demanded.
“Another bigshot,” a second voice answered as Richard held himself up against the fence. A hand reached for the case.
“Where are you going, bigshot?” the first voice asked.
A roar went up from the crowd, signaling some new response from the guards. Richard pulled the case away and held it close.
“Come on!” Mike whispered, and helped him along.
“Watch it!” a voice shouted. Richard took a deep breath of the summer air, expecting to be shoved again.
“Mr. Basil!” one of the uniformed men said, and opened a way past the line of guards.
Mike pushed Richard through and followed. Another cry went up from the mob.
“There’s no way to avoid angering them,” Mike said inside the gate.
Richard stopped and looked back. The guards were retreating inside and closing the gate.
“Come on!” Mike shouted.
“The fence may be bulerite,” Richard said, “but the ground it’s standing in isn’t. The crowd can still press it flat.”
The mass of people was now pushing against the gate.
“Even if we took a few with us,” Mike said, “the rest would mob the facility and prevent us from taking off. We can’t risk damage to the laser controls.”
The gate seemed to move; the floodlights flickered. Richard hesitated. People clambered onto the gate.
“Come on!” Mike repeated.
The guards fired tear gas grenades, but a few figures reached the top and jumped inside.
Richard turned and ran after Basil, catching up with him as the other reached an empty port car.
They got in and Basil pulled away, heading for the launch pad. As he looked back, Richard noticed that the guards seemed to have quieted the crowd.
“Another bunch will be back later,” Mike said.
The address system crackled, then a voice said: “Attention all personnel. This is a nuclear alert. Repeat: This is a nuclear alert. Please go to your shelters. Warheads will reach us within twenty minutes. This is not a drill.”
Mike pulled up to the pad as the warning was repeated. The shuttle towered a hundred and fifty feet above them, bright and silvery in the floodlights.
“The crowd’s broken through the fence,” Mike said. He jumped out and ran toward the lift cage. Richard stuffed the case into his shirt and followed. “Sada will wait for us,” Mike said as the elevator door closed.
“But will the laser work if the city is struck?” Richard asked.
“We only need it for a few minutes,” Mike said.
The cage opened. Toshiro Sada, the shuttle pilot, was standing on the ramp, motioning for them to board.
Basil pushed Richard ahead. “Thanks,” Richard heard Mike say to Sada as they went up the ramp into the shuttle’s midsection.
Inside, most of the seats were full. Richard climbed up the floor rungs and approached the first pair of empty seats. Mike struggled along next to him and they strapped in, facing straight up.
Richard looked out through the port at his right. How can this be happening? He turned and looked into Mike’s face, which was close to his in the cramped seats.
“Somebody has decided to cut himself a piece of the world,” Mike said quietly.
“Do you think we’ll respond?”
There was a look of resignation in Mike’s blue eyes. “I don’t see how we can avoid it. Some of the warheads are bound to get through. The best we can hope for is a measured, target-by-target response—but if the war doesn’t finish us, the bulerite will.”
We might have had a chance with the war alone.
Richard felt a vibration. Below him, he knew, the laser beam had come to life, nursing the shuttle with heat energy. The shuttle started to rise slowly, gaining speed as it fed on the awesome power of the beam, which would follow the craft until it reached escape velocity.
Bulero Port fell away; clouds rushed by the porthole. In a minute stars appeared on the horizon. The acceleration pinned Richard to his seat, squeezing a few tears out of his eyes. He tried to breathe more deeply, knowing that he would have a bruise from the case in his shirt.
The shuttle shook a little; then the acceleration cut off and the weight was lifted from him. He saw the western curve of the earth at his right, where the sun was being prevented from setting by the shuttle’s climb. The Pacific came into view on the blue-violet horizon.
Two flashes appeared, false suns rising and suddenly fading.
“Los Angeles and San Francisco,” Mike said. “Chicago is probably gone below us.”
The shuttle continued its climb into the west, tipping over into a horizontal position as it made orbit. The rungs retracted into what was now the floor, creating an aisle.
The stars grew numerous over the dying earth. Thanks, Jack, Richard thought. The planet might have destroyed itself without you, but you helped eradicate my world, where I might have made my mark. Yet a part of him looked away, telling him that he would have gone from the cage of earth as he had gone from home, that the bulerite disaster had only delayed him. If it had not been for Margot’s return to earth, and the lingering help that he had given Bulero Enterprises, he would have been on the moon when all this happened. Now the war was quickening his departure, and he felt guilty.
A new fear crept into his mind. “Do you think Asterome might become a target?”
“Depends,” Mike said, “on who started the war, and who they think Asterome will side with.”
“Is Asterome armed?” He thought of Margot and his family.
“I don’t know, but there would be enough time for Alard to send out a crew to trigger or disarm the warheads some ways off. One might get through.”
He and Mike might reach Asterome just before it died.
“Sada will know if missiles are headed for Asterome,” Mike said. “They’ll be on radar before we enter a trajectory for L-5. Let’s go sit up front.”
The Bulero passengers were watching the war as Richard and Basil drifted out of their seats into the aisle.
“Mr. Bulero, remember me?”
Richard looked toward a redheaded man in the seat ahead.
“I fixed your intercom in the office last week.”
“Oh—yes, how are you?”
“My wife and kid didn’t get out of New York.”
“I’m sorry, Hank.”
“The way I see it is that the rest of us have to go on.” Hank stared fixedly at Richard for a moment, looking for a confirmation; there was terror in the man’s green eyes.
“I think so, Hank,” Richard said as he turned away and drifted forward.
When they reached the bulkhead, Richard caught a glimpse of nuclear flashes through the port at his right; he tried not to look.