Part 29 (1/2)
”Yes. There are 'celebrants,' as they term themselves, at the mine.”
”How'll we get in?”
”A ruse we have devised.”
”Like that getaway back there? That was pretty slick.”
Singh sent them jouncing along a rutted lane. Withered trees leaned against the pale stucco two-story buildings that lined the lane like children's blocks lined up not quite correctly. ”Men in customs, they would give word to people outside. If you had gone through with the others, a different reception party would have been waiting for you.”
”I see. But what about my bags?”
Patil had been peering forward at the gloomy jumble of buildings. His head jerked around to glare at Clay. ”You were not to bring more than your carry-on bag!”
”Look, I can't get by on that. Chrissake, that'd give me just one change of clothes--”
”You left bags there?”
”Well, yeah, I had just one--”
Clay stopped when he saw the look on the two men's faces.
Patil said with strained clarity, ”Your bags, they had identification tags?”
”Sure, airlines make you--”
”They will bring attention to you. There will be inquiries. The devotees will hear of it, inevitably, and know you have entered the country.” Clay licked his lips. ”h.e.l.l, I didn't think it was so important.”
The two lean Indians glanced at each other, their faces taking on a narrowing, leaden cast. ”Dr. Clay,” Patil said stiffly, ”the 'celebrants' believe, as do many, that Westerners deliberately destroyed our crops with their biotechnology.”
”j.a.panese companies' biologists did that, I thought,” Clay said diplomatically.
”Perhaps. Those who disturb us at the Kolar gold mine make no fine distinctions between biologists and physicists. They believe that we are disturbing the very bowels of the earth, helping to further the destruction, bringing on the very end of the world itself. Surely you can see that in India, the mother country of religious philosophy, such matters are important.”
”But your work, h.e.l.l, it's not a matter of life or death or anything.”
”On the contrary, the decay of the proton is precisely an issue of death.”
Clay settled back in his seat, puzzled, watching the silky night stream by, cloaking vague forms in its shadowed mysteries.
Clay insisted on the telephone call. A wan winter sun had already crawled partway up the sky before he awoke, and the two Indian physicists wanted to leave immediately. They had stopped while still in Bangalore, holing up in the cramped apartment of one of Patil's graduate students. As Clay took his first sip of tea, two other students had turned up with his bag, retrieved at a cost he never knew.
Clay said, ”I promised I'd call home. Look, my family's worried. They read the papers, they know the trouble here.”
Shaking his head slowly, Patil finished a sc.r.a.p of curled brown bread that appeared to be his only breakfast. His movements had a smooth liquid inertia, as if the sultry morning air oozed like jelly around him. They were sitting; at a low table that had one leg too short; the already rickety table kept lurching, slopping tea into their saucers. Clay had looked for something to prop up the leg, but the apartment was bare, as though no one lived here. They had slept on pallets beneath a single bare bulb. Through the open windows, bare of frames or gla.s.s, Clay had gotten fleeting glimpses of the neighborhood-rooms of random clutter, plaster peeling off slumped walls, revealing the thin steel cross-ribs of the buildings, stained windows adorned with gaudy pictures of many-armed G.o.ds, already sun-bleached and frayed. Children yelped and cried below, their voices reflected among the odd angles and apertures of the tangled streets, while carts rattled by and bare feet slapped the stones. Students had apparently stood guard last night, though Clay had never seen more than a quick motion in the shadows below as they arrived.
”You ask much of us,” Patil said. By morning light his walnut-brown face seemed gullied and worn. Lines radiated from his mouth toward intense eyes.
Clay sipped his tea before answering. A soft, strangely sweet smell wafted through the open window. They sat well back in the room so n.o.body could see in from the nearby buildings. He heard Singh tinkering downstairs with the van's engine.
”Okay, it's maybe slightly risky. But I want my people to know I got here all right.”
”There are few telephones here.”
”I only need one.”
”The system, often it does not work at all.”
”Gotta try.”
”Perhaps you do not understand--”
”I understand d.a.m.n well that ill can't even reach my people, I'm not going to hang out here for long. And if I don't see that your experiment works right, n.o.body'll believe you.”
”And your opinion depends upon ... ?”
Clay ticked off points on his fingers. ”On seeing the apparatus Checking your raw data. Running a trial case to see your system response. Then a null experiment--to verify your threshold level on each detector.” He held up five fingers. ”The works.”
Patil said gravely, ”Very good. We relish the opportunity to prove ourselves.”
”You'll get it.” Clay hoped to himself that they were wrong, but he suppressed that. He represented the faltering forefront of particle physics, and it would be embarra.s.sing if a backwater research team had beaten the world. Still, either way, he would end up being the expert on the Kolar program, and that was a smart career move in itself.
”Very well. I must make arrangements for the call, then. But I truly--”
”Just do it. Then we get down to business.” The telephone was behind two counters and three doors at a Ministry for Controls office. Patil did the bribing and cajoling inside and then brought Clay in from the back of the van. He had been lying down on the back seat so he could not be seen easily from the street.
The telephone itself was a heavy black plastic thing with a rotary dial that clicked like a sluggish insect as it whirled. Patil had been on it twice already, clearing international lines through Bombay. Clay got two false rings and a dead line. On the fourth try he heard a faint, somehow familiar buzzing. Then a hollow, distant click.
”Daddy, is that you?” Faint rock music in the background ”Sure, I just wanted to let you know I got to India okay.”
”Oh, Mommy will be so glad! We heard on the TV last night that there's trouble over there.”
Startled, Clay asked, ”What? Where's your mother?”
”Getting groceries. She'll be so mad she missed your call!”
”You tell her I'm fine, okay? But what trouble?”
”Something about a state leaving India. Lots of fighting, John Trimble said on the news.”
Clay never remembered the names of news announcers; he regarded them as faceless n.o.bodies reading prepared scripts, but for his daughter they were the voice of authority. ”Where?”
”Uh, the lower part.”
”There's nothing like that happening here, honey. I'm safe. Tell Mommy.”
”People have ice cream there?”
”Yeah, but I haven't seen any. You tell your mother what I said, remember?' About being safe?”
”Yes, she's been worried.”