The Cloud Atlas (18 page)

3. State and county agricultural agents should monitor livestock and crops for trends and vulnerabilities. A separate, detailed bulletin is being prepared for veterinary authorities.

4.

WHAT REMAINED OF the Kirby balloon was heaped in a corner of a truck bed.

It was dirty and gray with stiff folds, and had all the appearance- to me, as I think of it now-of a roadside heap of late winter snow. Along with the balloon was a pie-sized piece of metal that I recognized as the balloon's gas relief valve. Also present was the control frame, seemingly intact. The incendiary and antipersonnel bombs were gone (over the Pacific, one hoped, and not in some farmer's field-or the cab of the truck), and the demolition block was nowhere to be seen. But these all seemed like ancient and simpleminded fears now. So a bomb explodes. So someone loses a limb or dies. Show me the canister where the rats live. Show me the fleas that have carried the plague thousands of miles, across the ocean from Japan and across the centuries from the Middle Ages.

We'd landed on an empty road leading into town and had taxied into a field adjoining a small farmhouse. Within minutes, everyone was there: the widow from the farmhouse, the man whose truck now held the balloon-Will McDermott, the apparent sheriff-and lastly, via bicycle, the AP stringer, Samuel Leavit. Gurley dismissed the widow, scowled at Leavit, and finally settled on McDermott.

McDermott had raised his right hand in greeting, but it was his left arm that had caught my eye. A gentle breeze had picked up his empty left sleeve, causing it to flap momentarily back to life. I had seen Gurley take note and relax. A man he could do business with.

“That's an entrance,” McDermott said, nodding to the plane.

“Wasn't my choice of landing spots,” Gurley said. “But you know- pilots.”

The man's face darkened a bit. “I do. I am one. Was one.”

“I'm sorry,” I blurted out.

Gurley winced and then turned to McDermott. “You're the sheriff?”

“Sheriff's somewhere in the Pacific,” McDermott said. “I'm the man with the sheriff's truck. But I've got what you need.”

This is the point when he'd led us around to the back of the truck. Gurley and I had exchanged a quick glance. We'd left the germ warfare gear in the plane, assuming that we'd be led to the balloon after meeting with the local authorities. Instead, we'd had it delivered. We watched the sheriff and stringer wander back around. There was nothing we could do but follow. Gurley went first, and I watched the back of his head as he walked. The officer defuses the bomb.

“Now this,” McDermott said, reaching for the control frame, “this I don't get at all.”

“Don't!” I shouted. Gurley looked at me, furious one moment and anxious the next.

McDermott toppled back like he'd been shot, and then relaxed, straightened up. “Easy on me, Sergeant,” he said. “I don't take too well to sudden noises nowadays, not that I ever did.”

He looked carefully at both of us, and read too much in our faces. “This isn't a weather balloon.”

“Yeah,” said Leavit. “Why's the Army need to know the weather in Wyoming?”

“Back off, AP,” Gurley growled.

“What's going on?” Leavit asked. “This is big.”

It was, especially for me. My first performance in front of Gurley. And civilians. And germs. Now that I make my living as a priest, it would be nice to look back on moments such as this and remember how a sudden burst of prayer powered me through. But it didn't happen that way. Nothing happened. I simply took a deep breath, and then held it, suddenly worried I'd already breathed in some deadly germ. I twitched the tiniest bit when Lily's face flashed in my mind, but then it was gone, and I swung up into the truck bed. I could take care of this. Somehow.

“Careful, Sergeant,” Gurley said, and with that, I knew he was willing to play along. Probably because the primary risk so far was me blowing some part of my body off.

“Should I get the-” I looked at Gurley and nodded toward the plane. Gurley looked back at me, struggling to keep a perfectly blank look on his face, but still making his response perfectly clear: we'll
not
be hauling out a giant crate marked with a skull and crossbones, and then donning gas masks and suits in front of a reporter.

“The what?” said Leavit.

“Cookies and milk,” Gurley said. “We so like to entertain our civilian guests. Please, gentlemen, let us step away while the sergeant makes his inspection.” Nobody moved. Gurley looked around, and then shrugged.

I had to believe that any live animal or insect would have bounced out and off the truck on the drive over. Or died on the flight over. But still, I kept an eye out for them, or anything else odd as I worked through my standard procedures.

First: check to see that none of the fuses is smoking. (If they are, run. They were always in such a tangle, you never had enough time to figure out which one to cut.) The truck bed was dusty, but I didn't think I saw any smoke. Now for the demolition block, which was probably hiding in its usual spot. I was tilting the frame onto its side and had just spotted the demo block when Gurley stopped me.

“Sergeant!” I watched his face as he worked out a new strategy, one that began with a rather sick smile. “Step down for a moment, Sergeant, if you would, please.”

“There's a story here,” Leavit replied, staring at Gurley, who was worth staring at right then. The captain was running his hands all over the truck, ducking underneath, around, like he'd forgotten something. “What're you up to, Captain?” Leavit said. I wasn't sure either, but I could see Gurley picking a day like today to detonate himself. He suddenly swatted the side of the truck bed so forcefully that even McDer-mott jumped. And unlike me, McDermott didn't know that hidden in the mess in his truck was that demo block, a little two-pound brick of picric acid. Just above the gas tank, from the looks of it. And who knows what else.

A cat sidled up behind the truck and sat, expectant.

“Hop up,” Gurley said to Leavit. I wanted to back away, but I couldn't without attracting attention. I watched as the reporter examined the balloon's black powder-laced carcass. I suppose part of me knew there was no way the contraption could go off, not without a lit fuse, not if it had already crossed an ocean, crashed, been kicked around, and then manhandled into the back of a truck-but still, you don't watch someone get that close to explosives and not hold your breath. We had McDermott right there, after all. The man was missing an arm. Gurley, a leg. I still had the memory of Gottschalk's hand in mine. And Gurley and I both had our newfound fears.

“I'd join you, but…” Gurley said, stepping back, and then leaning over, rapping the wooden part of his leg with his knuckles. He completed his performance with a shrug, but Leavit missed it; he was just fascinated with what he'd found. What I saw in his eyes reminded me of the first time I'd seen a balloon, back on that hillside in California. Your face just went blank; the mind couldn't be bothered with fixing an expression while it hungrily swallowed up everything it saw.

Gurley let Leavit have all the time he needed, hoping, I'm sure, that the reporter would get around to kicking or poking it, and then that would be that. Boom. For a moment, I wondered why Gurley didn't realize that a reporter getting injured or killed would make our mysterious balloon an even bigger story. But then I saw the way Gurley was taking in the scene with almost leering delight, and I realized it didn't matter how big the story got, or whether the blast killed all of us and sent the old woman's house tumbling end-over-end onto the south lawn of the White House. To have an irritant, an enemy, obliterated: the pleasure was worth any amount of resulting pain.

Leavit looked up with half a smile on his face, the same kind of smile I'd worn when I'd spotted that balloon at Shuyak, or better yet, the same kind of smile I had when I was, what, nine? and first opened a ship model kit someone had donated to the nuns for an orphan's Christmas. All of those pieces in there, all tiny and perfect and important, all of them adding up to something if you only had time and patience to put it all together just right. These balloons were something like that. They had that look. They didn't look machine made; they looked handmade-little irregularities caught the eye here and there, a bolt that was a fraction too long a piece of metal that stuck up in a funny way the way a seam was joined. Sergeant Redes would have muttered something about the shoddy workmanship of Japanese bombmakers, but I was struck by something else. It looked like something you could make-and what really made you stop and stare was the realization that someone
had
made it. Just like I'd always wanted that ship model to come to life and really float, or heck, blast a horn and steam away from my hand in the bathtub, or just like Leavit probably wanted some kit plane he'd once worked on to really take off and fly, someone had wanted this balloon to fly.

And it had. That was the most amazing part, and Leavit didn't even know that yet. Someone had built it, and it had really flown-all the way across the ocean, from the shores of some island far across the Pacific to a place in Wyoming that probably none of those Japanese folks who had made it had ever heard about. Didn't matter. It was all part of a dream anyway.

Now Leavit was crouching a little lower to look at the contraption, and I awoke, incredulous that I'd let things go this long. He was a few inches from being maimed or killed, and taking a few of us with him. I scanned frantically from where I stood for an oddly shaped or colored canister, crafted of that supposedly telltale porcelain, probably with air holes, or mesh-

“It's a remarkable device,” Gurley said, his face flushed.

“I'll say,” Leavit said. “It's Jap, isn't it?”

“Well,” Gurley said slowly, rolling his eyes at McDermott, like they were two old friends who knew better. McDermott did know better. So did I. I hurried around to the other side of the truck, took a deep breath, regretted it, and climbed back up over the side.

“It's a hell of a thing, is what it is,” I said as enthusiastically as I could. I finished scanning. It was clear. Looked just like all the others had. Except-

“Can I quote you on that?” Leavit said, not even looking up. “Need your name, rank, age, and hometown.”

Now Gurley stepped closer, and when he spoke, I could tell from the tone of his voice that he was upset I'd screwed up his plan to have Leavit explode. I suppose I was a little touched; Gurley's being upset must have meant that he didn't want to see me blown up, and that was some kind of progress for us. “I'm afraid you
can't
quote him on that,” Gurley said, rather seriously, and now I was the only one who could tell he was still acting. He turned around to include McDermott. Leavit looked up, and Gurley offered him a hand down from the truck. His other hand was a fist. Leavit took one last look at the device, then at me, and then climbed down. “You can't quote him, or me, really, because this is very, very, secret,” Gurley said. He looked around and then announced that this was an “experimental targeting device” of the Canadian Expedition Force. McDermott's eyes went a little wider, and mine did as well. That he'd made it Canadian was the kind of useless flourish Gurley adored.

“But I'm telling you
none of this.
If word gets out about what the Canadians are doing…” He looked skyward.

“There's a story here, Captain, I'm sorry,” Leavit answered.

“There is,” Gurley said, drawing himself up, and turning Leavit by the elbow toward the plane. “But frankly, it's not to be found in the back of this truck.” He turned to me. “Sergeant, log the serial number off it and then do whatever you like with it-box it up or burn it. But let's go.
Quickly
.” I needed another second or two of Gurley's gaze to understand what he was up to, but I didn't get it. Certainly he didn't want me to burn anything. I checked his shoulders, his posture, to see if he was going back into that stance; perhaps he was going to take Leavit off and pummel the memory out of him. He still had the one hand clenched in a fist.

With them safely out of earshot, McDermott turned to me. “Your captain's a funny man, Sergeant.”

“He has a way of doing things, sir,” I said briskly.

“I never knew a man like him in my army,” McDermott said.

“There isn't one, sir,” I said, climbing into the truck bed one more time, trying to figure out what struck me as different about this balloon. It was the control frame. The top tier. It looked different. Had it been damaged? There was an oily stain. From the demo block? Something else? I'd seen the demo block, hadn't I, when I'd examined it the first time? Only the demo block? I looked for Gurley saw him loading Leavit into the plane, panicked, and then tilted the control frame away from me, holding my breath.

I was never so relieved to see two pounds of picric acid in all my life. Nothing else, just the block. My old fears returned in a rush. The picric acid was extremely explosive, too explosive to leave where it was as we transported the control frame. As I pried it off, the two pounds felt like two hundred. There are objects like that. Ronnie's Comfort One bracelet, for one. The Host, for another, when I elevate it during Mass. I intone, “the Body of Christ,” and some days, I'm certain, I'm hoisting all 170-odd pounds of him.

I stepped out of the truck bed, carefully, and looked over what I'd left behind. It could travel. The demo block could travel, too, but I didn't want it to. I wanted to leave it right here in Kirby But the rule was to recover everything now. McDermott drove it all over to the plane, with me in the passenger seat, demo block on my lap. He helped me crate the control frame, and watched suspiciously as I did all I could to render the demo block safe. Then I thanked him and climbed aboard.

McDermott stopped me. “What was that?” he asked, looking at the crate we'd just loaded.

I looked, too. If there had been any rats aboard, they'd left before we'd gotten there. Maybe they'd never gotten on.

“A relief,” I said, and shut the door.

WE SPENT AN HOUR flying Leavit around Wyoming. Gurley had told him that the Army was investigating the region for a whole new network of “intracontinental defense bases.” He pointed out one imaginary site after another. He was in full performance mode, charming and arch, though I knew he was tense-he kept that one fist clenched the entire time, at his side, or behind his back. But Leavit didn't notice, he was too delighted with his scoop. The story he later wrote caused a bit of consternation among Gurley's higher-ups and Wyoming 's congressional delegation, but the matter was soon forgotten.