“Someone doing an impersonation?”

“If it was, then there's someone out there who makes Rich Little look like an amateur.”

“Did he sound as if he-”

Bryce broke off in mid-sentence, and both he and Jenny turned as Lisa ran through the archway.

The girl motioned to them. “Come on! Quick! Something weird is happening in the kitchen.”

Before Bryce could stop her, she ran back the way she had come.

Several men started after her, drawing their guns as they went, and Bryce ordered them to halt. “Stay here. Stay on the job.”

Jenny had already sprinted after the girl.

Bryce hurried into the dining room, caught up with Jenny, moved ahead of her, drew his revolver, and followed Lisa through the swinging doors into the hotel kitchen.

The three men assigned to this shift of kitchen duty-Gordy Brogan, Henry Wong, and Max Dunbar-had put down their can openers and cooking utensils in favor of their service revolvers, but they didn't know what to aim at. They glanced up at Bryce, looking disconcerted and baffled.

“Here we go 'round the mulberry bush,

the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush.”

The air was filled with a child's singing. A little boy. His voice was clear and fragile and sweet.

“Here we go 'round the mulberry bush,

so early in the moooorrrninnnggg!”

“The sink,” Lisa said, pointing.

Puzzled, Bryce went to the nearest of three double sinks. Jenny came close behind him.

The song had changed. The voice was the same:

“This old man, he plays one;

he plays nicknack on my drum,

With a nicknack, paddywack,

give a dog a bone-”

The child's voice was coming out of the drain in the sink, as if he were trapped far down in the pipes.

“-this old man goes rolling home.”

For metronomic seconds, Bryce listened with spellbound intensity. He was speechless.

He glanced at Jenny. She gave him the same astonished stare that he had seen on his men's faces when he had first pushed through the swinging doors.

“It just started all of a sudden,” Lisa said, raising her voice above the singing.

“When?” Bryce asked.

“A couple of minutes ago,” Gordy Brogan said.

“I was standing at the sink,” Max Dunbar said. He was a burly, hairy, rough-looking man with warm, shy brown eyes.

“When the singing started up… Jesus, I must've jumped two feet!”

The song changed again. The sweetness was replaced by a cloying, almost mocking piety:

“Jesus loves me, this I know,

for the Bible tells me so.”

“I don't like this,” Henry Wong said, “How can it be?”

“Little ones to Him are drawn.

They are weak, but He is strong.”

Nothing about the singing was overtly threatening; yet, like the noises Bryce and Jenny had heard on the telephone, the child's tender voice, issuing from such an unlikely source, was unnerving. Creepy.

“Yes, Jesus loves me.

Yes, Jesus loves me.

Yes, Jesus-”

The singing abruptly ceased.

“Thank God!” Max Dunbar said with a shudder of relief, as if the child's melodic crooning had been unbearably harsh, grating, off-key. “That voice was drilling right through to the roots of my teeth!”

After several seconds had passed in silence, Bryce began to lean toward the drain, to peer into it-

–and Jenny said maybe he shouldn't-

–and something exploded out of that dark, round hole.

Everyone cried out, and Lisa screamed, and Bryce staggered back in fear and surprise, cursing himself for not being more careful, jerking his revolver up, bringing the muzzle to bear on the thing that came out of the drain.

But it was only water.

A long, high-pressure stream of exceptionally filthy, greasy water shot almost to the ceiling and rained down over everything. It was a short burst, only a second or two, spraying in every direction.

Some of the foul droplets struck Bryce's face. Dark blotches appeared on the front of his shirt. The stuff stank.

It was exactly what you would expect to gush out of a backed-up drain: dirty brown water, threads of gummy sludge, bits of this morning's breakfast scraps which had been run through the garbage disposal.

Gordy got a roll of paper towels, and they all scrubbed at their faces and blotted at the stains on their clothes.

They were still wiping at themselves, still waiting to see if the singing would begin again, when Tal Whitman pushed open one of the swinging doors. “Bryce, we just got a call. General Copperfield and his team reached the roadblock and were passed through a couple of minutes ago.”

Chapter 23 – The Crisis Team

Snowfield looked freshly scrubbed and tranquil in the crystalline light of morning. A breeze stirred the trees. The sky was cloudless.

Coming out of the inn, with Bryce and Frank and Doc Paige and a few of the others behind him, Tal glanced up at the sun, the sight of which unlocked a memory of his childhood in Harlem. He used to buy penny candy at Boaz’s Newsstand, which was at the opposite end of the block from his Aunt Becky’s apartment. He favored the lemondrops. They were the prettiest shade of yellow he had ever seen. And now this morning, he saw that the sun was precisely that shade of yellow, hanging up there like an enormous lemondrop. It brought back the sight and sounds and smells of Boaz’s with surprising force.

Lisa moved up beside Tal, and they all stopped on the sidewalk, facing downhill, waiting for the arrival of the CBW Defence unit.

Nothing moved at the bottom of the hill. The mountainside was silent. Evidently, Copperfield’s team was some distance away.

Waiting in the lemon sunshine, Tal wondered if Boaz's Newsstand was still doing business at its old location. Most likely, it was now just another empty store, filthy and vandalized. Or maybe it was selling magazines, tobacco, and candy only as a front for pushing dope.

As he grew older, he became ever more acutely aware of a tendency toward degeneration in all things. Nice neighborhoods somehow became shabby neighborhoods; shabby neighborhoods became seedy neighborhoods; seedy neighborhoods became slums. Order giving way to chaos. You saw it everywhere these days. More homicides this year than last. Greater and greater abuse of drugs. Spiraling rates of assault, rape, burglary. What saved Tal from being a pessimist about mankind's future was his fervent conviction that good people – people like Bryce, Frank, and Doc Paige; people like his Aunt Becky-could stern the tide of devolution and maybe even turn it back now and then.

But his faith in the power of good people and responsible actions was facing a severe test here in Snowfield. This evil seemed unbeatable.

“Listen!” Gordy Brogan said, “I hear engines.”

Tal looked at Bryce. “I thought they weren't expected until around noon. They're three hours early.”

“Noon was the latest possible arrival time,” Bryce said. “Copperfield wanted to make it sooner if he could. Judging from the conversation I had with him, he's a tough taskmaster, the kind of guy who usually gets exactly what he wants out of his people.”

“Just like you, huh?” Tal asked.

Bryce regarded him from under sleepy, drooping eyelids. “Me? Tough? Why, I'm a pussycat.”

Tal grinned. “So's a panther.”

“Here they come!”

At the bottom of Skyline Road, a large vehicle drove into view, and the sound of its laboring engine grew louder.

There were three large vehicles in the CBW Civilian Defense Unit. Jenny watched them as they crawled slowly up the long, sloped street toward the Hilltop Inn.

Leading the procession was a gleaming, white motor home, a lumbering thirty-six foot behemoth that had been somewhat modified. It had no doors or windows along its flank. The only entrance evidently was at the back. The curved, wraparound windshield of the cab was tinted very dark, so you couldn't see inside, and it appeared to be made of much thicker glass than that used in ordinary motor homes. There was no identification on the vehicle, no project name, no indication that it was army property. The license plate was standard California issue. Anonymity during transport was clearly part of Copperfield's program.

Behind the first motor home came a second. Bringing up the rear was an unmarked truck pulling a thirty-foot, plain gray trailer. Even the truck's windows were tinted, armor-thick glass.

Not certain that the driver of the lead vehicle had seen their group standing in front of the Hilltop, Bryce stepped into the street and waved his arms over his head.

The payloads in the motor homes and in the truck were obviously quite heavy. Their engines strained hard, and they ground their way up the street, moving slower than ten miles an hour, then slower than five, inching, groaning, grinding. When at last they reached the Hilltop, they kept on going, made a right-hand turn at the corner, and swung into the cross street that flanked the inn.

Jenny, Bryce, and the others went around to the side of the inn as the motorcade pulled up to the curb and parked. All of the east-west streets in Snowfield ran across the broad face of the mountain, so that most of them were level. It was much easier to park and secure the three vehicles there than on the steeply sloped Skyline Road.

Jenny stood on the sidewalk, watching the rear door of the first motor home, waiting for someone to come out.

The three overheated engines were switched off, one after the other, and silence fell in with a weight of its own.

Jenny's spirits were higher than they had been since she'd driven into Snowfield last night. The specialists had arrived. Like most Americans, she had enormous faith in specialists, in technology, and in science. In fact, she probably had more faith than most, for she was a specialist herself, a woman of science. Soon, they would understand what had killed Hilda Beck and the Liebermanns and all the others. The specialists had arrived. The cavalry had ridden in at last.

The back door of the truck opened first, and men jumped down. They were dressed for operations in a biologically contaminated atmosphere. They were wearing the white, airtight vinyl suits of the type developed for NASA, with large helmets that had oversize, plexiglass faceplates. Each man carried his own air supply tank on his back, as well as a briefcase-size waste purification and reclamation system.

Curiously, Jenny did not, at first, think of the men as resembling astronauts. They seemed like followers of some strange religion, resplendent in their priestly raiments.

Half a dozen agile men had scrambled out of the truck. More were still coming when Jenny realized that they were heavily armed. They spread out around both sides of their caravan and took up positions between their transport and the people on the sidewalk, facing away from the vehicles. These men weren't scientists. They were support troops. Their names were stenciled on their helmets, just above their faceplates: SGT. HARKER, PW. PODOR, PVT. PASCAM, LT. UNDERHILL. They brought up their guns and aimed outward, securing a perimeter in a determined fashion that brooked no interference.

To her shock and confusion, Jenny found herself staring into the muzzle of a submachine gun.

Taking a step toward the troops, Bryce said, “What the hell is the meaning of this?”

Sergeant Harker, nearest to Bryce, swung his gun toward the sky and fired a short burst of warning shots.

Bryce stopped abruptly.

Tal and Frank reached automatically for their own sidearms.

“No!” Bryce shouted, “No shooting, for Christ's sake! We're on the same side.”

One of the soldiers spoke. Lieutenant Underhill. His voice issued tinnily from a small radio amplifier in a six-inch-square box on his chest. “Please stay back from the vehicles. Our first duty is to guard the integrity of the labs, and we will do so at all costs.”

“Damn it,” Bryce said, “we're not going to cause any trouble. I'm the one who called for you in the first place.”

“Stay back,” Underhill insisted.

The rear door of the first motor home finally opened. The four individuals who came out were also dressed in airtight suits, but they were not soldiers. They moved unhurriedly. They were unarmed. One of them was a woman; Jenny caught a glimpse of a strikingly lovely, female, oriental face. The names on their helmets weren't preceded by designation of rank: BETTENBY, VALDEZ, NIVEN, YAMAGUCHI. These were the civilian physicians and scientists who, in an extreme chemical biological warfare emergency, walked away from their private lives in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, and other Western cities, putting themselves at Copperfield's disposal. According to Bryce, there was one such team in the West, one in the East, and one in the Southern-Gulf states.

Six men came out of the second motor home. GOLDSTEIN, ROBERTS, COPPERFIELD, HOUK. The last two were in unmarked suits, no names above their faceplates. They moved up the line, staying behind the armed soldiers, and joined up with Bettenby, Valdez, Niven, and Yamaguchi.

Those ten conducted a brief conversation among themselves, by way of intersuit radio. Jenny could see their lips moving behind their plexiglass visors, but the squawk boxes on their chests did not transmit a word, which meant they had the capability to conduct both public and strictly private discussions. For the time being, they were opting for privacy.

But why? Jenny wondered. They don't have anything to hide from us. Do they?

General Copperfield, the tallest of the twenty, turned away from the group at the rear of the first motor home, stepped onto the sidewalk, and approached Bryce.

Before Copperfield took the initiative, Bryce stepped up to him, “General, I demand to know why we're being held at gunpoint.”

“Sorry,” Copperfield said. He turned to the stone-faced troopers and said, “Okay, men. It's a no-sweat situation. Parade rest.”

Because of the air tanks they were carrying, the soldiers couldn't comfortably assume a classic parade rest position. But, moving with the fluid harmony of a precision drill team, they immediately slung their submachine guns from their shoulders, spread their feet precisely twelve inches apart, put their arms straight down at their sides, and stood motionless, facing forward.

Bryce had been correct when he'd told Tal that Copperfield sounded like a tough taskmaster. It was obvious to Jenny that there was no discipline problem in the general's unit.

Turning to Bryce again, smiling through his faceplate, Copperfield said, “That better?”

“Better,” Bryce said, “But I still want an explanation.”

“Just SOP,” Copperfield said, “Standard Operating Procedure. It's part of the normal drill. We don't have anything against you or your people, Sheriff. You are Sheriff Hammond, aren't you? I remember you from the conference in Chicago last year.”