wouldn’t be here without you, so thanks. With your brother out there…”
“Stop,” Jennifer waved Rad off. “Didn’t seem much point wishing I could get James fixed if the world ended, right?”
“True enough,” said Rad. Then he saw his hat on the floor. He scooped it up and put it on. The band was cold against his skin. “And Kane?” He turned to Nimrod. “He’s dead, I take it?”
Nimrod’s mustache rolled under his nose as he surveyed the blue boundary of the portal. “I don’t think he was ever alive, not really.”
“Never alive?”
“Well,” said Nimrod, waving his hands. “Alive, in a sense, the same as the Fissure is alive. But like Evelyn, it wasn’t him. He was an echo, an afterimage.”
Rad nodded. “A ghost. Like her?”
“Indeed. Evelyn McHale died in 1947 at the bottom of the Empire State Building. The Director of Atoms for Peace was not the same woman, not really.”
Rad pondered this, but it all seemed too big, too dreamlike. He wasn’t really sure Nimrod knew as much as he claimed, and while there was an empty sadness at the thought that Kane had never come back to the Empire State, not really, there was a calmness too, melancholic and cool but one that filled Rad with a kind of nervous hope.
He turned to Soma Street, to the Empire State. To his home.
“Sir!”
Rad turned as two of Nimrod’s agents rushed in, the same men Grieves had left to help up top. Nimrod frowned.
“Yes?”
“It’s Carson, sir,” said the agent in front.
Rad froze. “What about him?”
“He’s in a bad way. He said to get Captain Nimrod.”
Rad turned to Nimrod. Nimrod brushed his mustache with the back of a thick finger.
FIFTY-SIX
They stood in front of the portal: Rad and Jennifer and two of Evelyn’s robots and two of Nimrod’s agents. The two robots carried the metal body of James Jones between them, while Nimrod’s agents held a stretcher, on which lay Captain Carson. The old man breathed deeply but too slowly for Rad’s liking, and when he exhaled there was an asthmatic rattle.
“He’ll be better when you get across, trust me,” said Nimrod, his eyes on his other self. “The incompatibility sickness is making his condition worsen. Are you ready?”
Rad pulled his collar up and his hat down, and he looked at Jennifer. She nodded.
“And the sooner we get back, the sooner we can work on getting James help,” she said, looking down at her brother’s lifeless machine body.
Rad frowned. Inside he hoped she was right, but he also knew that getting James fixed, if that was even possible, depended largely on whether Carson would pull through. Carson and his New York counterpart were their best hope, but Rad wasn’t too sure about relying so much on Nimrod’s co-operation.
“OK,” he said, turning to Nimrod. “We’re ready.”
“Very good,” said Nimrod. “These robots will obey your every command. With luck, they will be able to overcome the programming of the robots on the other side, and those will in turn begin reprogramming their brethren – and so on, and so forth. The process will be exponential. When you are ready, simply give them the command, and they will go about their work.”
Rad shook his head. “There’s an awful lot of assuming going on there. You should come with us. We’ll need your expertise, not just with the robots but with James here too.”
“I have much to do here,” said Nimrod, “but I shall try to be quick. With the portal open, we can come and go as we please.”
Jennifer tapped Rad’s arm. “We need to go.”
Rad nodded. He shook Mr Grieves’s hand and reached out for Nimrod’s, but the Captain merely took a step backwards and bowed.
“Quickly, detective.”
Rad frowned. He turned to the robots and the two agents.
“Follow me,” he said, then he hunched his shoulders and walked into the Empire State, the others right behind.
They watched Rad and Jennifer for a moment, and then Mr Grieves coughed. Nimrod turned to him.
“Excuse me, sir,” said Mr Grieves. “We’re still federal fugitives, aren’t we? Even with Evelyn gone…”
“Yes,” said Nimrod, fire in his eyes. “There is something we need to do.” He turned to the two robots behind him. “Come with me.”
In Soma Street the hour was early, but there was something different. Rad paused, letting the others go ahead, as he looked at the sky. Morning would come soon, and it was still cold, colder than the coldest winter in the Empire State, but the deadly bite was missing, the chill that made Rad