"You see anything?" he said.
"No."
I returned to Mae. She had found everything. She had coiled magnesium fuse. She had flare guns. She had portable halogen flashlights. She had head-mounted lamps with big elastic bands. She had small binoculars and night-vision goggles. She had a field radio. And she had oxygen bottles and clear-plastic gas masks. I was uneasy when I recognized that these were the same plastic masks I had seen on the men in the SSVT van back in California last night, except they weren't silvered.
And then I thought, Was it only last night? It was. Hardly twenty-four hours had passed.
It felt to me like a month.
Mae was dividing everything into the three backpacks. Watching her, I realized that she was the only one of us with actual field experience. In comparison, we were all stay-at-homes, theoreticians. I was surprised how dependent on her I felt tonight. Bobby hefted the nearest pack and grunted. "You really think we need all this stuff, Mae?"
"It's not like you have to carry it; we're driving. And yes, better safe than sorry."
"Okay, fine, but I mean-a field radio?"
"You never know."
"Who you gonna call?"
"The thing is, Bobby," she said, "if it turns out you need any of this stuff, you really need it."
"Yeah, but it's-"
Mae picked up the second backpack, and slung it over her shoulder. She handled the weight easily. She looked at Bobby. "You were saying?"
"Never mind."
I picked up the third backpack. It wasn't bad. Bobby was complaining because he was scared. It was true that the oxygen bottle was a little larger and heavier than I would have liked, and it fitted awkwardly into the backpack. But Mae insisted we have extra oxygen. Bobby said nervously, "Extra oxygen? How big do you guys think this hiding place is?"
"I have no idea," Mae said. "But the most recent swarms are much larger." She went to the sink, and picked up the radiation counter. But when she unplugged it from the wall, she saw the battery was dead. We had to hunt for a new battery, unscrew the case, replace the battery. I was worried the replacement would be dead, too. If it was, we were finished.
Mae said, "We better be careful with the night-vision goggles, too. I don't know how good any of the batteries are for the stuff we have."
But the counter clicked loudly. The battery indicator glowed. "Full power," she said. "It'll last four hours."
"Let's get started," I said.
It was 10:43 P.M.
The radiation counter went crazy when we came to the Toyota, clicking so rapidly the sound was continuous. Holding the wand in front of her, Mae left the car, walked into the desert. She turned west and the clicks diminished. She went east and they picked up again. But as she continued east, the clicks slowed. She turned north, and they increased. "North," she said.
I got on the bike, gunned the engine.
Bobby rumbled out of the shed on the All-Terrain Vehicle, with its fat rear tires and bicycle handlebars. The ATV looked ungainly but I knew it was probably better suited to night travel in the desert.
Mae got on the back of my bike, leaned over to hold the wand near the ground, and said, "Okay. Let's go."
We started off into the desert, under a cloudless night sky.
The headlight on the bike bounced up and down, jerking the shadows on the terrain ahead, making it difficult to see what was coming. The desert that had looked so flat and featureless in daylight was now revealed to have sandy dips, rock-filled beds, and deep arroyos that came up without warning. It took all my attention to keep the bike upright-particularly since Mae was continuously calling to me, "Go left ... now right ... now right ... okay, too much, left ..." Sometimes we had to make a full circle until she could be certain of the right path. If anybody followed our track in daylight, they'd think the driver must be drunk, it twisted and turned so much. The bike jumped and swerved on rough ground. We were now several miles from the lab, and I was starting to worry. I could hear the counter clicks, and they were becoming less frequent. It was getting hard to distinguish the swarm trail from the background radiation. I didn't understand why that should happen but there was no question it was. If we didn't locate the swarm hiding place soon, we'd lose the trail entirely. Mae was worried, too. She kept bending over closer and closer to the ground, with one hand on the wand and one hand around my waist. And I had to go slower, because the trail was becoming so faint. We lost the trail, found it, went off it again. Under the black canopy of stars, we backtracked, turned in circles. I caught myself holding my breath. And at last I was going around and around in the same spot, trying not to feel desperate. I made the circle three times, then four, but to no avail: the counter in Mae's hand just clicked randomly. And suddenly it was clear to us that the trail was truly lost. We were out here in the middle of nowhere, driving in circles.
We had lost the trail.
Exhaustion hit me suddenly, and hard. I had been running on adrenaline all day and now that I was finally defeated a deep weariness came over my body. My eyes drooped. I felt as if I could go to sleep standing on the bike.
Behind me, Mae sat up and said, "Don't worry, okay?"
"What do you mean?" I said wearily. "My plan has totally failed, Mae."
"Maybe not yet," she said.
Bobby pulled up close to us. "You guys look behind you?" he said.
"Why?"
"Look back," he said. "Look how far we've come."
I turned and looked over my shoulder. To the south, I saw the bright lights of the fabrication building, surprisingly close. We couldn't be more than a mile or two away. We must have traveled in a big semicircle, eventually turning back toward our starting point. "That's weird."