The Chronoliths

She smiled forlornly as Ray puffed up.

We broke up after coffee, and I went to my room alone.

I thought about calling Janice and Kaitlin, but the desk manager interrupted my dial-out to tell me the bandwidth was at capacity and I would have to wait at least an hour. So I took a beer from the courtesy cooler and put my feet up on the windowsill and watched a car race down the dark streets of the exclusion zone. The floodlights on the Dome of the Rock made that structure look as venerable and solid as history itself, but in less than forty-eight hours there would be a taller and more dramatic monument a scant few miles away.

I woke at seven in the morning, restless but not hungry. I showered and dressed and wondered how far the security people would let me go if I tried to do a little sightseeing — a walk around the hotel, say. I decided to find out.

I was stopped at the elevator by one of two natty FBI men, who looked at me blankly. “Whereabouts you headed, chief?”

“Breakfast,” I said.

“We’ll need to see your badge first.”

“Badge?”

“Nobody gets on or off this floor without a badge.”

I don’t need no stinkin’ badge — but I did, apparently. “Who’s handing out badges?”

“You need to talk to the people who brought you, chief.”

Which didn’t take long, because Morris Torrance came hurtling up behind me, bade me a cheerful good morning and pi

The two men parted like the elevator doors they were guarding. They nodded to Morris, and the less aggressive of the two told me to have a nice day.

“Will do,” I said. “Chief.”

“It’s just a precaution,” Morris said as we rode down.

“Like harassing my father? Like reading my medical records?”

He shrugged. “Didn’t Sue explain any of this to you?”

“A little. You’re not just her bodyguard, are you?”

“But that, too.”

“You’re the warden.”

“She’s not in prison. She can go anywhere she wants.”

“As long as you know about it. As long as she’s watched.”

“It’s a kind of deal we made,” Morris said. “So where do you want to go, Scotty? Breakfast?”

“I need some air.”

“You want to do the tourist thing? You realize what a bad idea that is.”

“Call me curious.”

“Well — I can get us an IDF car with the right tags, I suppose. Even get us into the exclusion zone, if that’s really what you want.”

I didn’t answer.

“Otherwise,” he said, “you’re pretty much stuck in the hotel, the situation being what it is.”

“Do you enjoy this kind of work?”

“Let me tell you about that,” Morris said.

He borrowed a blue unmarked automobile with all-pass stickers pasted to the windshield and an elaborate GPS system sprawling onto the passenger side of the dash. He drove down Lehi Street while I stared (yet again) out the window.

It was another rainy day, date palms drooping along the boulevards. By daylight the streets were far from empty: there were civil-defense wardens at the major intersections, cops and IDF patrols everywhere, and only the exclusion zone around the anticipated touchdown site had been wholly evacuated.

Morris drove into the New City and turned onto King David Street, the heart of the exclusion zone.

The evacuation of a major urban area is more than just people-moving, though it’s that, certainly, on an almost unmanageably large scale. Some of it is engineering. Most of the damage a Chronolith causes is a result of the initial cold shock, the so-called thermal pulse. Close enough to the arrival, any container with liquid water in it will burst. Property owners in Jerusalem had been encouraged to drain their pipes before leaving, and the municipal authorities were trying to preserve the waterworks by depressurizing the core zone, though that would make firefighting difficult — and inevitably there would be fires, when volatile liquids and gases escaped containers ruptured or weakened by the cold. The gas mains had already been shut off. Theoretically, every toilet tank should have been emptied, every gas tank drained, every propane bottle removed. In reality, without an exhaustive door-to-door search, no such outcome could be guaranteed. And close to the arrival point, the thermal pulse would turn even a bottle of milk into a potentially lethal explosive device.

I didn’t speak as we drove past the shuttered businesses, windows striped with duct tape; the darkened skyscrapers, the King David Hotel as lifeless as a corpse.

“An empty city is an u

“Am I supposed to be reassured by that?”

“I’m just making conversation. The thing is, though, you have to admit it makes sense. There’s a logic to it.”

“Is there?”

“You’ve had the lecture.”

“The thing about coincidence? What Sue calls ‘tau turbulence’? I’m not sure how much of that to believe.”

“That,” Morris said, “but also how it looks to Congress and the Administration. Two true facts about the Chronoliths, Scotty. First, nobody knows how to make one. Second, that knowledge is being brewed up somewhere even as we speak. So we give Sue and people like Sue the means to figure out how to build such a thing, and maybe that’s precisely the wrong thing to do, the knowledge is set loose, maybe it gets into the wrong hands, and maybe none of this would have happened if we hadn’t opened the whole Pandora’s box in the first place.”

“That’s circular logic.”

“Does that make it wrong? In the situation we’re in, are you going to rule out a possibility because it doesn’t make a nice tight syllogism?”

I shrugged.

He said, “I’m not going to apologize for the way we looked into your past. It’s one of those things you do in a national emergency, like drafting people or holding food drives.”

“I didn’t know I’d been drafted.”

“Try thinking of it that way.”

“Because I went to school with Sue Chopra? Because I happened to be on the beach at Chumphon?”

“More like, because we’re all tied together by some rope we can’t quite see.”

“That’s… poetic.”

Morris drove silently for a time. The sun came through gaps in the cloud, pillars of light roaming the Judean hills.

“Scotty, I’m a reasonable person. I like to think so, anyhow. I still go to church every Sunday. Working for the FBI doesn’t make a person a monster. You know what the modern FBI is? It isn’t cops and robbers and trench coats and all that shit. I did twenty years of desk work at Quantico. I’m qualified on the firing range and all, but I’ve never discharged a weapon in a police situation. We’re not so different, you and I.”

“You don’t know what I am, Morris.”

“Okay, you’re right, I’m assuming, but for the sake of the argument let’s say we’re both normal people. Personally, I don’t believe in anything more supernatural than what you read about in the Bible, and I only believe that one day out of seven. People call me levelheaded. Boring, even. Do I strike you as boring?”

I let that one go.

He said, “But I have dreams, Scotty. The first time I saw the Chumphon thing was on a TV set in D.C. But the amazing thing is, I recognized it. Because I’d seen it before. Seen it in dreams. Nothing specific, nothing like prophecy, nothing I could prove to anybody. But I knew as soon as I saw it, that this was something that would be part of my life.”

He stared straight ahead. “It’ll be good if these clouds pass by tomorrow night,” he said. “Good for observation.”

“Morris,” I said, “is any of this the truth?”

“I wouldn’t shit you.”

“Why not?”

“Why not? Well, maybe because I recognized you, too, Scotty. From my dreams, I mean. First time I saw you. You and Sue both.”