Work Text:
Stuart Radzinsky sits perched on a desk in the corner of the room and watches the rain streaming down the window, sipping from time to time from a cup of water. Paper, not glass. He's already broken one, and it's hard to get glass shipped out on the sub.
The rain beads on the window and runs down it in wandering rivulets. It blurs the world beyond into a grey haze, turning the compound to lead and silver and stone. The air is cool and damp, even inside, and the conference room fills with a dim, quiet gloom. It's been raining for three days now, stopping abruptly and restarting just as suddenly, and for all he knows it will rain for thirty more. He cursed the rain until yesterday morning, when the temperature dropped sixty degrees and it snowed a foot deep, to the delight of the polar bears and no one else. After that he'd been happy to see the rain again.
"Are you still there?"
Nobody talks about it, but nobody needs to. They can all feel it. The world is tilting on its axis, wobbling like a struck top. The instruments are picking up earthquakes, magnetic quakes, high-altitude lightning; two days ago they nearly had to evacuate when new volcanic vents and geysers opened in unexpected places, old lava tubes coughing up magma like an aging smoker. In the end they decided to stay only because attempting to leave right now would be even more dangerous. Off in the distance the storms trail waterspouts through the sea like searching fingers. The last time the rain stopped one of the stations reported a heat burst, a sudden and inexplicable pocket of plummeting, scorching air. Then the skies opened up with a torrent of hail, icy diamonds the size of marbles hurtling out of a clear blue sky, and three people had to go to the Staff for head trauma. Giant waves keep crashing out on the shoals and reefs, monsters that rise sixty, eighty, a hundred feet out of calm seas before they smash down with spine-snapping force. They loom like great chunks of rough-hewn gemstone, like raw jade and sapphire and aquamarine, curling and breaking in torrents of vicious whitewater, washing up coral shrapnel gouged from the reefs. On the rare clear evenings the aurora carves up the sky with red and green fire. The moon rises and sets in a different phase each night, and the stars jitter and wheel, unpredictable, as the world slews and the island careens through space and time.
Stuart leans the side of his forehead against the glass, cool against his skin, and watches his breath fog up the windowpane. The droplets covering the other side vanish and reform in a staccato rhythm, building ephemeral fractals. Horace and Pierre are arguing. Pierre is only gesturing with his right arm, his left still hanging limp by his side, hand wrapped in a mass of bandages. They've been arguing for hours now. At least, he thinks it's been hours. He hasn't been paying attention, not necessarily because he doesn't want to. It's hard to hold on to the present, to count time and remember where he is. When the dizziness hits, he breathes in deep and closes his eyes and hopes it'll go away. Sometimes it does. Sometimes it doesn't, and he wakes up on the tiled floor of the kitchen with glass shards around him and orange juice all over the floor. He's taken to not wearing his glasses whenever he can get away with it. He doesn't want to have to grind new lenses.
"Are you still there?"
HARDTACK-TEAK. That's what he keeps remembering, at a time like this, when he needs to be awake and aware and useful. That's all he keeps coming back to. HARDTACK-TEAK. Nineteen years ago they'd let off a nuke forty-eight miles up over Johnson Island just to see what would happen. The fission debris flooded the ionosphere and blocked out long-range radio across the entire Pacific. Eight hours later when the electromagnetic fog had begun to disperse, the first message finally got through to the test site from headquarters, a timorous, hesitant call out across the open ocean: "Are you still there?"
It's been four days since the Incident - it's remarkable how people can somehow pronounce the capital letter - but he only remembers three. That's a new thing for him, not remembering. The first had been spent at the Staff, feverish, drifting in and out of awareness. As soon as his mind had recollected itself, though, he'd left, overruling Dr. Colfax. Anything was better than lying in that bed listening to Eric and Jerry die by inches as the radiation burned through them, waiting for the nurse in the white starched collar and the pale green scrubs to come to their bedside with the syringe, full to the brim, and push one last dose of painkiller into their veins. Lying there waiting for it to happen to him. Colfax told him to come back when he started showing symptoms. It would happen in another day, he pronounced, if not sooner.
But Stuart isn't sick. Neither is Pierre. He hasn't told the astrophysicist what he overheard in the Staff, but he doesn't have to. They both know. The island isn't done with them yet.
Stuart lifts his head from the windowpane, tries to refocus on Horace and Pierre. With an effort of will he tunes back in to his fellow scientists' conversation, just in time to hear Pierre shouting, "Fix it? Fix it?! We still have no idea what went wrong! We don't even know what that device was!"
"Primary," says Stuart, before he realizes he's spoken out loud. It's his first word on the subject.
Horace and Pierre look over at him like they've forgotten he's there. They've been ignoring him. Normally he'd be angry about that. Right now he's not sure. The ionosphere is boiling. "Are you still there?"
"What was that, Stuart?" asks Horace gently.
"It was a primary," says Stuart a little louder. His own voice sounds hoarse, unfamiliar. "From the outer casing I'd say a modified Robin, W45 series, mid-1950s vintage. Airgap lens design, double shockwave compression. It's part of a hydrogen bomb," he adds curtly, when no one seems to grasp the magnitude of this.
The primary. That neat, compact little cylinder, like an overgrown thermos or a truncated map case. An intricate device, heavy and dense, machined with the precision of the finest scientific instruments; blank and bland and dangerous as hell, a trigger like a loaded gun held to the temple of the world. They used to frighten him more than he would ever admit, the brutal knowledge of them, the awareness of what that perfect little device was meant to do.
Horace glances over at Pierre. "How'd they get a hydrogen bomb?" he wonders.
Stuart looks up at him, for a brief moment breaking through. "I don't know, Horace," he says with a kind of raw, desperate incomprehension. "Why did they throw a nuclear warhead down my well?"
Horace looks at Pierre again, hesitant. The flash of anger burns itself out, and Stuart closes his eyes and lets his head fall back against the windowpane, listening to the cool drumbeat of the rain on the other side.