“No,” Len said. His—lips felt curiously cold. “But do you really expect that they’ll do it? Those men and women?”

“Our people got those vials one week ago. They believe they contain radioactive particles to be charted by our Sky-Cruise satellites. That’s all they need to know, isn’t it, Len?”

“Yes, Billy.”

“And if things do go from bad to… to worse, no one will ever know. Project Blue was uninfiltrated to the very end, we’re sure of that. A new virus, a mutation… our opposite numbers may suspect, but there won’t be time enough. Share and share alike, Len.”

“Yes.”

Starkey was looking at the monitors again. “My daughter gave me a book of poems some years ago. By a man named Yeets. She said every military man should read Yeets. I think it was her idea of a joke. You ever heard of Yeets, Len?”

“I think so,” Creighton said, considering and rejecting the idea of telling Starkey the man’s name was pronounced Yates.

“I read every line,” Starkey said, as he peered into the eternal silence of the cafeteria. “Mostly because she thought I wouldn’t. It’s a mistake to become too predictable. I didn’t understand much of it—I believe the man must have been crazy—but I read it. Funny poetry. Didn’t always rhyme. But there was one poem in that book that I’ve never been able to get out of my mind. It seemed as if that man was describing everything I dedicated my life to, its hopelessness, its damned nobility. He said that things fall apart. He said the center doesn’t hold. I believe he meant that things get flaky, Len. That’s what I believe he meant. Yeets knew that sooner or later things get goddam flaky around the edges even if he didn’t know anything else.”

“Yes, sir,” Creighton said quietly.

“The end of it gave me goosebumps the first time I read it, and it still does. I’ve got that part by heart. ‘What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’”

Creighton stood silent. He had nothing to say.

“The beast is on its way,” Starkey said, turning around. He was weeping and grinning. “It’s on its way, and it’s a good deal rougher than that fellow Yeets ever could have imagined. Things are falling apart. The job is to hold as much as we can for as long as we can.”

“Yes, sir,” Creighton said, and for the first time he felt the sting of tears in his own eyes. “Yes, Billy.”

Starkey put out his hand and Creighton took it in both of his own. Starkey’s hand was old and cold, like the shed skin of a snake in which some small prairie animal has died, leaving its own fragile skeleton within the husk of the reptile. Tears overspilled the lower arcs of Starkey’s eyes and ran down his meticulously shaved cheeks.

“I have business to attend to,” Starkey said.

“Yes, sir.”

Starkey slipped his West Point ring off his right hand and his wedding band off his left. “For Cindy,” he said. “For my daughter. See that she gets them, Len.”

“I will.”

Starkey went to the door.

“Billy?” Len Creighton called after him.

Starkey turned.

Creighton stood ramrod straight, the tears still running down his own cheeks. He saluted.

Starkey returned it and then stepped out the door.

The elevator hummed efficiently, marking off the floors. An alarm began to hoot—mournfully, as if it somehow knew it was warning of a situation which had already become a lost cause—when he used his special key to open it at the top, so he could enter the motor-pool area. Starkey imagined Len Creighton watching him on a succession of monitors as he first picked out a jeep and then drove it across the desert floor of the sprawling test site and through a gate marked HIGH SECURITY ZONE NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT SPECIAL CLEARANCE. The checkpoints looked like turnpike tollbooths. They were still manned, but the soldiers behind the yellowish glass were dead and rapidly mummifying in the dry desert heat. The booths were bulletproof, but they hadn’t been germproof. Their glazed and sunken eyes stared vacantly at Starkey as he motored past, the only moving thing along the tangle of dirt roads among the Quonset huts and low cinderblock buildings.

He stopped outside a squat blockhouse with a sign reading ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE WITHOUT A-1-A CLEARANCE on the door. He used one key to get in, and another to summon the elevator. A guard, dead as a doornail and stiff as a poker, stared at him from the glass-encased security station to the left of the elevator doors. When the elevator arrived and the doors opened, Starkey stepped in quickly. He seemed to feel the gaze of the dead guard on him, a small weight of eyes like two dusty stones.

The elevator sank so rapidly his stomach turned over. A bell dinged softly when it came to a halt. The doors slid open, and the sweet odor of decay hit him like a soft slap. It wasn’t too strong because the air purifiers were still working, but not even the purifiers could dispose of that smell completely. When a man has died, he wants you to know about it, Starkey thought.

There were almost a dozen bodies sprawled in front of the elevator. Starkey minced among them, not wanting to tread on a decaying, waxy hand or trip over an outstretched leg. That might make him scream, and he most definitely didn’t want to do that. You didn’t want to scream in a tomb because the sound of it might drive you mad, and that’s exactly where he was: in a tomb. It looked like a well-financed scientific research project, but what it really was now was a tomb.

The elevator doors slid shut behind him; there was a hum as it began to go up automatically. It wouldn’t come down again unless somebody else keyed it, Starkey knew; as soon as the installation’s integrity had been breached, the computers had switched all the elevators to the general containment program. Why were these poor men and women lying here? Obviously they had been hoping the computers would fuck up the switch-over to the emergency procedures. Why not? It even had a certain logic. Everything else had fucked up.

Starkey walked down the corridor which led to the cafeteria, his heels clicking hollowly. Above, the fluorescents embedded in their long fixtures like inverted ice-cube trays threw a hard, shadowless light. There were more bodies. A man and a woman with their clothes off and holes in their heads. They screwed, Starkey thought, and then he shot her, and then he shot himself. Love among the viruses. The pistol, an army-issue .45, was still clutched in his hand. The tile floor was spotted with blood and gray stuff that looked like oatmeal. He felt a terrible and thankfully transient urge to bend down and touch the dead woman’s breasts, to see if they were hard or flaccid.

Farther down the hall a man sat with his back propped against a closed door, a sign tied around his neck with a shoelace. His chin had fallen forward, obscuring what was written there. Starkey put his fingers under the man’s chin and pushed his head back. As he did so, the man’s eyeballs fell back into his head with a meaty little thud. The words on the sign had been written in red Magic Marker. NOW YOU KNOW IT WORKS, the sign said. ANY QUESTIONS?

Starkey let go of the man’s chin. The head remained cocked at its stiff angle, the dark eye sockets staring raptly upward. Starkey stepped back. He was crying again. He suspected he was crying because he didn’t have any questions.

The cafeteria doors were propped open. Outside them was a large cork bulletin board. There was to have been a league bowl-off on June 20, Starkey saw. The Grim Gutterballers vs. The First Strikers for the Project championship. Also, Anna Floss wanted a ride to Denver or Boulder on July 9. She would share driving and expenses. Also, Richard Betts wanted to give away some friendly pups, half collie and half St. Bernard. Also, there were weekly nondenominational religious services in the caf.

Starkey read every announcement on the bulletin board, and then he went inside.