Behind him, Buchan said gloomily, "Hell, you get these mobs all the time on highway fifteen. Most of 'em are stoned out of their skulls on all kinds of shit. They don't have a notion whether it's New Year's or Halloween."
Buchan turned his head as he emerged above the concrete emplacement. His face became a series of horizontal lines, compressed as if the muscles were attached to drawstrings that had been suddenly pulled tight. He moaned and clutched himself and bent over, mouth agape, and brought up the contents of his stomach.
Two days later Prothero called again from New York. He wanted to know the word on Hanamura. Chase said it was too early to expect a result, encouraging or otherwise. "I'll get through to you as soon as I hear anything," he added.
"You may not have to." Prothero's face was gray, the pouches underneath his eyes a livid purple. "They're evacuating the city. It isn't official yet, and when it is there'll be wholesale panic. I'm leaving right away. Is there room for one more in the Tomb?" he asked with gallows humor.
They'd often discussed the possibility--indeed the certainty--that one day New York would be evacuated, but now that it was actually here it still came as a blow. Another nail in the coffin. "What about Ingrid?" asked Chase.
"She's gone back to Sweden. Her parents are there and she wants to be with them."
"When are you planning to leave?" Prothero's wife had left him four years ago, Chase recalled, and his sons were married with families.
"Day after tomorrow."
"I want you to do me a favor," Chase said. "I have a friend in New York, Dr. Ruth Patton, who works at Manhattan Emergency on East Sixty-eighth. Will you tell her what's happening, Pro? I wouldn't like to think of her being trapped there when they blow the whistle."
"Sure, I'll tell her."
"If she decides to come with you, can you arrange transportation?"
Prothero nodded. "There's a convoy of trucks and buses leaving at midnight on Thursday. I'll find her a place if she wants to leave." He looked old and haggard. "She'd be wise to, Gavin. One week from today this town will go berserk."
23
Cy Skrote lay spread-eagled in the warm liquid darkness, the woman kneeling over him, her hair brushing the insides of his thighs. His right hand moved over the soft globular swell of her buttocks to the hot secret place and he both heard and felt her tremulous moan of rapture as his fingers slid deeper, exploring, and she widened herself to his stealthy infiltration. He had never desired a woman so much in his life and had never before received such pleasure from one. It was a fairy tale come true: the beautiful, unattainable princess who falls in love with the shy, bumbling peasant. That's how he'd felt at first--like a gauche young man ill at ease in the presence of an alluring, sensual creature who, quite incredibly, finds him equally attractive and desirable.
Skrote had never rated a second glance from any woman before. To blame was his unprepossessing appearance, his narrow chest, thin arms and legs, and a fair skin that the sun brought out in blotches. Neither was he handsome. His eyes were large and heavily lidded and set close together, separated by a beaked nose that a childhood accident had done nothing to improve.
Knowing he presented a rather feeble figure to the world had made him retire inside himself, obeying a natural human impulse to protect the self from being hurt. He wasn't attractive to the opposite sex and that was that. So the circle had reinforced itself and become vicious: He would make no effort to become what he knew he wasn't, and the result had been a defensive, unsure, introverted thirty-three-year-old with the emotional maturity of a teen-ager.
Then from out of nowhere this marvelous, magical experience had grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and tossed him over the moon, and Cy Skrote was still reeling from it.
She had been at Starbuck for several weeks before they struck up an acquaintance. He'd noticed her of course (there wasn't a man on the base who hadn't), but she'd been so utterly out of reach that he hadn't even fantasized about her, as he often did with desirable women seen at a distance. Skrote didn't even know her name, only that she was one of the scientific observers sent by the Russians as part of the reciprocal inspection pact. They were granted access to the research in Zone 2, while a team of American observers was allowed the same freedom at the USSR research center in Kazakhstan.
