If the man screamed, his voice was blotted out by a cymballike crash of thunder.
THE ENDING
Saturday, August 27, 1977
5:00 A.M.
THE MESS HALL at the logging camp was a rectangle, eighty feet by forty feet. Sam and Rya sat behind a dining table at one end of the long room. A single-file line of weary lumbermen stretched from their table across the hail and out the door at the far end.
As each man stepped up to the table, Sam used the power of the key-lock program to restructure his memory. When the new recollections were firmly implanted, he excused the man-and Rya struck a name from the Big Union Supply Company’s employee list.
Between the thirtieth and the thirty-first subject, Rya said to Sam, “How do you feel?”
“How do you feel?”
“I’m not the one who was shot.”
“You’ve been hurt too,” he said.
“All I feel is-grown up.”
“More than that.”
“And sad,” she said.
“And sad.”
“Because it’ll never be the same. Not ever.” Her lips trembled She cleared her throat. “Now, how’s your leg?”
“About a yard long,” he said.
He pulled on her chin.
She pulled on his beard.
He managed to get a smile from her, and that was better medicine than Doc Troutman’s antibiotics.
6:30 A.M.
The storm clouds had begun to break up two hours ago. Dawn brought welcome shafts of autumn sunlight.
In the dense pine forest, half a mile above Black River, three men lowered the remains of Dawson, and the bodies of Salsbury and Klinger into a common grave.
“All right,” Jenny told them. “Fill it in.”
With each shovelful of dirt that struck the corpses, she felt more alive.
9:30 A.M.
After a refueling stop in Augusta, the hornetlike helicopter put down on the landing pad behind the Greenwich house at nine thirty in the morning.
“Get it gassed up and serviced for a trip back to Black River this evening,” Paul said.
“Yes, sir,” Malcolm Spencer said.
“Then go home and get some sleep. Be back here by seven o’clock this evening. That should give us both time to rest.”
“I can use it,” Spencer said.
Paul got out of the helicopter and stretched. He had showered and shaved and changed clothes before leaving Maine, but that had refreshed him only temporarily. He was stiff, sore, and tired deep in his bones.
He went to the rear door of the stone house and knocked. A servant answered. She was a plump, pleasant-faced woman in her fifties. Her hair was tied back in a bun. Her hands were white with flour. “Yes, sir?”
“I am the key.”
“I am the lock.” –
“Let me in.”
She stepped out of his way.
Inside, he said, “Where’s the computer?”
“The what, sir?” she asked.
“The computer. Dawson’s computer.”
“I haven’t any idea, sir.”
He nodded. “Okay. Forget about me. Go back to whatever you were doing.” He looked around the elaborately equipped kitchen. “Doing a bit of baking, I see. Go ahead with it Forget that I was ever here.”
Humming to herself, she returned to the counter beside the oven.
He poked about on his own until he located the computer room. When he found it, he sat before one of the programming consoles and typed out the access code that he had gotten from Salsbury.
The computer responded on all of its read-out screens:
PROCEED
Pecking at the typewriter keys with one finger, doing precisely what Salsbury had told him to do, he ordered it to:
ERASE ALL STORED DATA
Five seconds later the read-out screen flickered:
ALL STORED DATA ERASED
That message disappeared from the tubes, and his second order was displayed for a few seconds:
ERASE ALL PROGRAMS
It said:
REQUEST CONFIRMATION
OF LAST DIRECTIVE
So weary that the letters on the keys blurred before him, Paul again typed:
ERASE ALL PROGRAM!
Those three words shimmered on the green background for perhaps half a minute. Then they blinked several times, vanished.
He typed the words “Black River” and asked for a read-out and a full print-out of associated data.
The computer did nothing.
Next, he typed the words “key-lock” and asked for a read-out and a full print-out of all information in that file.