The Cloud Atlas

I had to believe that any live animal or insect would have bounced out and off the truck on the drive over. Or died on the flight over. But still, I kept an eye out for them, or anything else odd as I worked through my standard procedures.

First: check to see that none of the fuses is smoking. (If they are, run. They were always in such a tangle, you never had enough time to figure out which one to cut.) The truck bed was dusty, but I didn't think I saw any smoke. Now for the demolition block, which was probably hiding in its usual spot. I was tilting the frame onto its side and had just spotted the demo block when Gurley stopped me.

“Sergeant!” I watched his face as he worked out a new strategy, one that began with a rather sick smile. “Step down for a moment, Sergeant, if you would, please.”

“There's a story here,” Leavit replied, staring at Gurley, who was worth staring at right then. The captain was running his hands all over the truck, ducking underneath, around, like he'd forgotten something. “What're you up to, Captain?” Leavit said. I wasn't sure either, but I could see Gurley picking a day like today to detonate himself. He suddenly swatted the side of the truck bed so forcefully that even McDer-mott jumped. And unlike me, McDermott didn't know that hidden in the mess in his truck was that demo block, a little two-pound brick of picric acid. Just above the gas tank, from the looks of it. And who knows what else.

A cat sidled up behind the truck and sat, expectant.

“Hop up,” Gurley said to Leavit. I wanted to back away, but I couldn't without attracting attention. I watched as the reporter examined the balloon's black powder-laced carcass. I suppose part of me knew there was no way the contraption could go off, not without a lit fuse, not if it had already crossed an ocean, crashed, been kicked around, and then manhandled into the back of a truck-but still, you don't watch someone get that close to explosives and not hold your breath. We had McDermott right there, after all. The man was missing an arm. Gurley, a leg. I still had the memory of Gottschalk's hand in mine. And Gurley and I both had our newfound fears.

“I'd join you, but…” Gurley said, stepping back, and then leaning over, rapping the wooden part of his leg with his knuckles. He completed his performance with a shrug, but Leavit missed it; he was just fascinated with what he'd found. What I saw in his eyes reminded me of the first time I'd seen a balloon, back on that hillside in California. Your face just went blank; the mind couldn't be bothered with fixing an expression while it hungrily swallowed up everything it saw.

Gurley let Leavit have all the time he needed, hoping, I'm sure, that the reporter would get around to kicking or poking it, and then that would be that. Boom. For a moment, I wondered why Gurley didn't realize that a reporter getting injured or killed would make our mysterious balloon an even bigger story. But then I saw the way Gurley was taking in the scene with almost leering delight, and I realized it didn't matter how big the story got, or whether the blast killed all of us and sent the old woman's house tumbling end-over-end onto the south lawn of the White House. To have an irritant, an enemy, obliterated: the pleasure was worth any amount of resulting pain.

Leavit looked up with half a smile on his face, the same kind of smile I'd worn when I'd spotted that balloon at Shuyak, or better yet, the same kind of smile I had when I was, what, nine? and first opened a ship model kit someone had donated to the nuns for an orphan's Christmas. All of those pieces in there, all tiny and perfect and important, all of them adding up to something if you only had time and patience to put it all together just right. These balloons were something like that. They had that look. They didn't look machine made; they looked handmade-little irregularities caught the eye here and there, a bolt that was a fraction too long a piece of metal that stuck up in a funny way the way a seam was joined. Sergeant Redes would have muttered something about the shoddy workmanship of Japanese bombmakers, but I was struck by something else. It looked like something you could make-and what really made you stop and stare was the realization that someone had made it. Just like I'd always wanted that ship model to come to life and really float, or heck, blast a horn and steam away from my hand in the bathtub, or just like Leavit probably wanted some kit plane he'd once worked on to really take off and fly, someone had wanted this balloon to fly.

And it had. That was the most amazing part, and Leavit didn't even know that yet. Someone had built it, and it had really flown-all the way across the ocean, from the shores of some island far across the Pacific to a place in Wyoming that probably none of those Japanese folks who had made it had ever heard about. Didn't matter. It was all part of a dream anyway.