The Chronoliths by Robert Charles Wilson Page B

few paces, then stopped, breathless.
    “Remember that about me,” he said.
     
     
     

Chapter Eight
     
     
    When we came into Ben Gurion the airport was chaotic, crowded with fleeing tourists. The inbound El Al flight—delayed for four hours by weather, after a three-day “diplomatic” delay Sue refused to talk about—had been nearly empty. It would be filled to capacity on the way out, however. The evacuation of Jerusalem continued.
    I left the aircraft in a core group with Sue Chopra, Ray Mosley, and Morris Torrance, surrounded by a cordon of FBI agents with enhanced-vision eyetacts and concealed weapons, escorted in turn by five Israeli Defense Force conscripts in jeans and white T-shirts, Uzis slung over their shoulders, who met us at the foot of the ramp. We were conducted quickly through Israeli Customs and out of Ben Gurion to what looked like a
sheruti
, a private taxi van, commandeered for the emergency. Sue scooted into the seat beside me, still dazed by travel. Morris and Ray climbed in behind us, and the power plant hummed softly as the van pulled away.
    A monotonous rain slicked Highway One. The long line of cars crawling toward Tel Aviv glistened dully under a rack of clouds, but the Jerusalem-bound lanes were utterly empty. Ahead of us, vast public-service roadside screens announced the evacuation. Behind us, they marked the evacuation routes.
    “Makes you a little nervous,” Sue said, “going someplace everybody else is leaving.”
    The DDF man—he looked like a teenager—in the seat behind us snickered.
    Morris said, “There’s a lot of skepticism about this. A lot of resentment, too. The Likkud could lose the next election.”
    “But only if nothing happens,” Sue said.
    “Is there a chance of that?”
    “Slim to none.”
    The IDF man snorted again.
    A gust of rain rattled down on the
sheruti
. January and February are the rainy season in Israel. I turned my head to the window and watched a grove of olive trees bend to the wind. I was still thinking about what Sue had told me on the plane.
    She had been inaccessible for days after I drove back from my father’s house, smoothing over whatever diplomatic difficulty it was that had kept us in Baltimore until very nearly the last minute.
    I spent the week revising code and wasted a couple of evenings at a local bar with Morris and Ray.
    They were more pleasant company than I would have guessed. I was angry with Morris for tracking me down to my father’s house… but Morris Torrance was one of those men who make an art of affability. An art, or maybe a tool. He rebuffed anger like Superman bouncing bullets off his chest. He wasn’t dogmatic about the Chronoliths, nursed no particular convictions about the significance of Kuin, but his interest obviously ran deep. What this meant was that we could bullshit with him: float ideas, some wild, without fear of tripping over a religious or political fixation. Was this genuine? He did, after all, represent the FBI. Likely as not, everything we said to him found its way into a file folder. But Morris’s genius was that he made it seem not to matter.
    Even Ray Mosely opened up in Morris’s company. I had pegged Ray as one of those bright but socially-challenged types, his sexual radar locked hopelessly and inappropriately on Sue. There was some truth in this. But when he relaxed he revealed a passion for American League baseball that gave us some common ground. Ray liked the expansion team from his native Tucson and managed to piss off a guy at the neighboring table with some remarks about the Orioles. From which he did not back down when challenged. Ray was not a coward. He was lonely, but much of this was sheer intellectual loneliness. His conversation tended to trail off when he realized he had progressed to a level we couldn’t follow. He wasn’t condescending about it—at least, not very often—only visibly sad that he couldn’t share his thoughts.
    It was this loneliness, I think, that