“Hysteria,” Donald muttered.
“Hysteria and homebrew. If you think affordable DNA sequencers were a scare, or those cloning kits that made the rounds, imagine kids programming nanos in their basements, sharing their designs on the web. It would be worse than when they started printing those plastic guns in those cheap extruder kits. Who knows what they might try and target just for fun? It starts with the neighbor’s cat. The next weekend, someone wipes out an entire species by accident.”
“You said it might not ever end, even if we were gone. Does that mean they’re still out there? The nanos?”
Erskine glanced toward the ceiling. “The world outside isn’t just being scrubbed of humans right now, if that’s what you’re asking. It’s being reset. All of our experiments are being removed. By the grace of God, it’ll be a very long time indeed before we think to perform them again.”
Donald remembered from orientation that the combined shifts would last five hundred years. Half a millennia of living underground. How much scrubbing was necessary? And what was to keep them from heading down that same path a second time? How would any of them unlearn the potential dangers? You don’t get the fire back in the box once you’ve unleashed it.
“You asked me if Victor had regrets—” Erskine coughed into his fist and nodded. “I do think he felt something close to that once. It was something he said to me as he was coming off his eighth or ninth shift, I don’t remember which. I think I was heading into my sixth. This was just after the two of you worked together, after that nasty business with Silo 12—”
“My first shift,” Donald said, since Erskine seemed to be counting. He wanted to add that it was his only shift. It was his final shift.
“Yes, of course.” Erskine adjusted his glasses. “I’m sure you knew him well enough to know that he didn’t show his emotions often.”
“He was difficult to read,” Donald agreed. He knew almost nothing of the man he had just helped to bury.
“So you’ll appreciate this, I think. We were riding the lift together, and Vic turns to me and says how hard it is to sit there at that desk of his and see what we were doing to the men across the hall. He meant you, of course. People in your position.”
Donald tried to imagine the man he knew saying such a thing. He wanted to believe it.
“But that’s not what really struck me. I’ve never seen him sadder than when he said the following. He said—” Erskine rested a hand on the pod. “He said that sitting there, watching you people work at your desks, getting to know you—he often thought that the world would be a better place with people like you in charge.”
“People like me?” Donald shook his head. “What does that even mean?”
Erskine smiled. “I asked him precisely that. His response was that it was a burden doing what he knew to be correct, to be sound and logical.” Erskine ran one hand across the pod as if he could touch his daughter within. “And how much simpler things would be, how much better for us all, if we had people brave enough to do what was right, instead.”
•16•
It was that night that Anna came to him. After a day of numbness and dwelling on death, of eating the meals brought down by Thurman and not tasting a bite, of watching her set up a computer for him and spread out folders of notes, she came to him in the darkness.
Donald complained. He tried to push her away. She sat on the edge of the cot and held his wrists while he sobbed and grew feeble. He thought of Erskine’s story, on what it meant to do the right thing rather than the correct thing, what the difference was. He thought this as an old lover draped herself across him, her hand on the back of his neck, her cheek on his shoulder, lying there against him while he wept.
A century of sleep had weakened him, he thought. A century of sleep and the knowledge that Mick and Helen had lived a life together. He felt suddenly angry at her. Not at Anna, whose breath he could feel on his neck, but at Helen. Angry at her for not holding out, for not living alone, for not getting his messages and meeting him over the hill where he could store her beauty away forever.
Anna kissed his cheek and whispered that everything would be okay. Fresh tears flowed down Donald’s face as he realized that he was everything Victor had assumed he wasn’t. He was a miserable human being for wishing his wife to be lonely so that he could sleep at night a hundred years later. He was a miserable human being for denying her that solace when Anna’s touch made him feel so much better.
“I can’t,” he whispered for the dozenth time.