Armageddon Crazy

"I figure that this is close enough to the shooting to qualify as a secondary investigation point, and I've secured the premises accordingly."

Dreisler sighed as if he were getting weary of all this sparring. He held out the tracy on his wrist. "Do you know how long it would take me to get a ruling in my favor on this?"

Carlisle raised his hand. Enough was enough. "I know you can run me out of here at any time, but if you do, I'll be back with the first camera crew I come across. There's media all over the neighborhood. They were tipped and they went live with the killings before the censors could get in and blanket it. They'll love this."

Dreisler looked Carlisle up and down as if really seeing him for the first time. "Well, well, you don't give up too easily, do you, Carlisle?"

"Just doing my job."

Dreisler smiled. "The classic Nuremberg answer. I tell you what, Lieutenant Carlisle. While your men are doing their work, why don't you and I go somewhere on our own and talk about terrorism?"

THREE

Mansard

There was a chill wind blowing off the river and across the landfill. Charlie Mansard huddled his shoulders deeper into the bulk of his sheepskin coat. Behind him, the lights of the city had taken on their nighttime unreality. Mansard glanced back at them. All his life he had worked with lights, but they never lost their essential magic. It was ironic that light and illusion should have become his stable reality. He fished in his coat pocket for his other stable reality, pulled out the silver hip flask, and took a quick nip of scotch.

"Is there any coffee?"

Rita poured steaming coffee from a vacuum flask and held out the Styrofoam cup to him.

"You want to call a break so we can all get warm?"

Mansard shook his head. "Absolutely not. I want to get on with it."

Mansard had never transcended the elemental fear that the device would simply refuse to work. In the last minutes before the field test of the scale model, the tension was unbearable. If anything went wrong at this point, it would be a long way back to the drawing board. He turned to the nearest production assistant and pointed to the communicator on his belt. "Give me that."

He all but barked into the radio. "Are we ready yet?"

The unruffled voice of Jimmy Gadd came back to him through the tiny speaker. "Not quite, boss. Just a couple more minutes."

Mansard impatiently stamped his feet as he handed back the communicator.

Rita was as calm as Gadd. "Do you want an Equital?"

"No, I don't. I don't want any pills." In fact, he had taken two uppers on the way down to the landfill.

Rita sniffed. "If you don't calm down, you'll burst a blood vessel."

"I'm perfectly calm."

"Sure you are."

Mansard turned and faced the towering cityscape. "They could have blacked out the twin towers for us."

"They threw a shitfit. Said they couldn't do it, just for the test of a model."

Mansard turned back on the offending skyscrapers and faced the river. "Screw them."

The PA had his communicator to his ear. "It's Gadd, Mr. Mansard. He's ready to go."

Charlie Mansard held out his hand for the unit. "How is it, Jimmy? You can roll it?"

"Everything on line, boss. Zero on the fault deck."

"Okay, then, let's get to it."

Bono, the chief engineer, was already punching buttons on the portable masterboard. Rita handed Mansard a bullhorn. Mansard took a final look around.

"Okay, ladies and gentlemen, here we go. Fog up."

A dozen or more pillars of vapor rose straight up into the night sky from a point some fifty yards away. At first they were thin individual strands, but quickly they thickened and solidified into a single cohesive column.

"Fog ru

Mansard nodded. "Put up the reference points."

A complex constellation of bright green stars appeared in the column of mist.

"Image up to one-third."

In the mist ghostly figures were shaping themselves around the green stars. They were too faint, however, for Mansard to make out any details.

"So far so good. Bring in the base structure nice and slow. We don't want any overload this early in the game."

The ghostly figures began to solidify until they were static sculptures of white light. Now it was possible to see exactly what they were. The four mounted figures of horror on their equally terrible steeds stood motioness in the mist: War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death, each over fifteen feet tall and perfect in every detail – the cowl of Death, the ornate armor and plumed helmet of War, the outstretched arm and rotting flesh of Pestilence, and the hollow skull eyes and sunken cheeks of Famine. Mansard rubbed his hands together. The design was holding together very well. About the only blemish was the tip of the spear that War brandished aloft. If flickered and wavered. The image came and went.

Mansard spoke urgently into the communicator. "Jimmy, what's the story on that spear?"

"It's too long. It's projecting beyond the effective apex of the fog generators."

"Will we have the same problem on the full-size version?"

"If anything, it'll be worse. We can't expect the same fog apex on the real thing."

"Damn."

"Do you want us to rerig it?"

"No. We can fix it on this end by simply lowering the figure's arm."

Mansard walked over to Bono at the masterboard. After a short discussion, the engineer put up a schematic on the main function monitor and nursed a simple joystick. In a perfectly natural movement, War dipped his lance until the tip came into sharp focus.

"That's good. Let's color the matrix."

It was like the dawn of some medieval hallucination. As the color came up, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse took on a ghastly solidity. The colors vibrated into the night.

Jimmy Gadd whooped through the communicator. "How's that, boss? Right on the master drawing or what?"

Mansard gri

The colors were, in fact, perfect: the graveyard, damp earth brown of Death's robes, the glowing red coals that were his horse's eyes, the sheen of orange fire on War's blue-black armor – it was all there, just as Mansard had dreamed it, and it was awesome.

"Okay, here comes the big test. Run the animation up to fifty percent speed."

Bono nodded. "Ru

The Four Horsemen slowly started to move. The horses raised one foot and then another. Their heads nodded ponderously, their nostrils flared, and their manes fa

"How's the power load holding up?"

"Everything's in the green."

"Let's ease it up toward normal. Pull back immediately if anything starts to redline."

"Stop sweating it, boss. It's all going fine."

Mansard knew that Bono was right, but he would never admit it. "Just watch out for an overload."

The Four Horsemen began to gather speed. Mansard was transfixed. When those images were scaled up to nearly a hundred feet tall, they would blow the city away. There had really been nothing like it before.

"Up to normal motion."

The horses' hooves pounded the empty air in eerie silence. Their necks stretched and strained; their glowing eyes bulged from skull sockets. Death swung his scythe, and the outstretched arm of Pestilence broadcast contagion across the Earth.

Mansard rubbed his hands together. "How's it holding up?"

"It's holding. Quit worrying."

Mansard started to walk toward the shining images. He glanced back at the lighted apartment windows of the Tribeck Tower. What the hell would they think of this apparition on the landfill? Not that he particularly cared. The general population had become so goddamn weird that they deserved all they got. He stepped carefully over the snaking cables that co