Episodul 26 · A Few More Minutes

— III —

The siren began as Doctor Elias Vey checked the final page of calculations. He looked up at the red lights above the laboratory door. For months he had worked through alarms. This time, people were running in the corridor.

He rubbed his eyes and put his glasses back on. He had grown thin during the winter, shoulders bowed above the desk, uncombed hair framing a long, hollow-cheeked face. The last checks would establish whether the device worked. Until then, he could not send the results below.

— They’re sealing Sector Three! someone shouted. Breach in the northern perimeter!

Elias pulled the page closer. Defending the complex was the army’s responsibility. His was to finish.

Several hundred meters beneath him lay the thing thousands of people had spent six years building. Most had contributed a piece without knowing the whole. In military orders, it was the first atomic weapon.

He hated the term. It made his work sound simple: a larger bomb to drop on people the man giving the order would never have to see. He had begun with a question about matter. The army had asked him to measure the answer in cities.

The door opened. His colleague came in with her coat unfastened, a folder against her chest and blood on her sleeve.

— Yours? Elias asked.

— No.

She bolted the door.

— They’re inside.

— The army will handle it.

— The Hunters, Elias.

His pencil stopped. He had seen photographs: command posts destroyed with their outer walls untouched, generals dead in locked rooms. There were stories of altered men and magic recovered from ruins. He had doubted the stories. The photographs were harder to dismiss.

— How long?

— Ten minutes. Perhaps less.

He checked the clock above his table.

— I need five.

— We have to go.

— Where?

The mountain had been chosen because nobody could reach them. Now the railway tunnel was their only way out, and the elevators could be locked from the command center. His colleague put her hand over his papers.

— We destroy these and go to the shelter.

— Six years.

— If they find us here, we lose more than six years.

He set down the pencil. Before the war he had been a professor, with a house too large for him after his wife’s death. Then a bomb fell on the eastern district, where his daughter lived.

When the army asked for help, he agreed before he knew what they wanted. Once he knew, he stayed.

He had believed such a weapon would make war impossible. Nobody could continue after seeing it used. Lately, he had been trying to remember what justified that certainty.

His colleague’s hand remained on the papers.

— Five minutes, he said.

She opened her folder.

— Three.

— Then stop interrupting me.

They compared values, passing sheets across the table. The siren made it difficult to hear each other. Elias had to write one number again because his hand was trembling.

An impact sounded somewhere in the complex. His colleague paused over a column. He checked the next line.

Another impact, closer. Gunfire.

— Elias.

— Almost.

He erased a symbol, checked the preceding line and wrote it again. For a few seconds, the war fell away. Six years had come down to a page, and the page held together. He felt an almost childish satisfaction.

The door bent inward.

His colleague backed toward the near end of the table. The next blow tore the bolt from the wall.

— Go! Elias shouted.

— Come with me!

He gathered the papers. A sheet slid away; he caught it against the table with his wrist. He could burn them. He looked at his daughter’s city in his mind, then at what he held.

Other cities might disappear because of this work. Perhaps others would be spared because it existed. He could not tell which possibility he was holding. He pressed the pages to his chest.

The door gave way.

The first man through wore black armor without insignia. His colleague drew a pistol. Before she could raise it, the Hunter caught her wrist and turned her arm down. Bone cracked. The pistol slid beneath the table.

She dropped to one knee. He kept her wrist, holding her where she could not rise without pulling against the break.

Elias backed toward the far end of the table. A second Hunter passed the kneeling woman and stopped in front of him.

— Doctor Elias Vey?

— Yes.

The weapon came up. Elias put the papers on the table and lifted his empty hand.

After six years and thousands of calculations, everything depended on a stranger who knew his name.

The clock was still moving. He had to send the results below, explain them, make sure they were understood.

— Wait.

The muzzle stayed level with his chest.

— You don’t understand what is here.

— We understand enough.

His colleague tried to straighten. The Hunter holding her arm pulled it lower, and her breath caught. Both men stood between them and the open door.

— Then you know killing me won’t stop this.

The man hesitated. Elias almost laughed. The idea existed. Burn the papers, kill everyone in the complex: someone would eventually reach the same questions.

The hesitation lasted less than a second. Elias saw it the way he saw an error in a column, all at once and too late to pretend he had not.

He dropped.

He had not done anything quickly in years. His knees struck the floor, his glasses slid down his nose, and the pistol was there beneath the table, against his colleague’s shoe, where it had stopped. His hand closed on it before he had finished deciding.

She stayed because I asked for five minutes.

The Hunter holding her arm stood three meters away, side on. Elias had never fired a gun. He knew what one did. A small mass, a great deal of speed, and armor made by men who had done the same arithmetic.

Not the chest. The neck.

He fired.

The noise filled the room and the inside of his skull. The Hunter jerked. The bullet had struck the armor below his arm, and the man glanced down at the place the way someone glances at a hand on his sleeve. He did not let go of her wrist.

Elias aimed higher. His hand would not stay where he put it. It had trembled over the number, and it trembled now, and the second shot went past the man’s shoulder into a steel cabinet.

The Hunter looked at him then.

Elias caught the edge of the table and pulled himself up for a third.

The bullet struck his chest. He stumbled against the table. The next hit beneath his collarbone, and his legs gave way. His arm swept the papers from the tabletop.

At first he felt surprise. Then the cold floor.

His colleague was shouting. He reached for the table leg but could not pull himself closer. A page settled in front of him: the final equation, the rubbed mark where he had erased the symbol.

Blood spread across it.

No.

His fingers fell short. He could see the folded corner. He tried again.

Just a little more.

He had spent his life measuring time. Two minutes had become larger than every number he had written.

His breath stopped.

The laboratory receded. He saw his body from above, his colleague beside him, the Hunters moving among the tables. Pages still slid across the floor.

The equation was the last thing he could see.

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