Control and Loss of Control

Control and Loss of Control shapes both the government’s response to the July crisis and Colonel Leland Falkirk’s increasingly unstable command. The Army uses quarantine, secrecy, and memory modification to contain knowledge of what happened; Falkirk makes control a personal creed and treats uncertainty as an existential threat. Yet each attempt to impose order exposes fractures in the operation and intensifies the possibility of a catastrophic loss of control.

Quarantine and the Management of Knowledge

The crisis first appears to the people around the Tranquility Motel as a toxic spill. Faye Block’s registry places the closure on Friday, July 6: a truck carrying dangerous chemicals was reportedly headed to Shenkfield, and the motel remained closed until Tuesday while authorities controlled the situation. Guests were ordered to evacuate in their own cars. Ned and Sandy Sarver could go to their trailer near Beowawe because it lay outside the quarantine area. The account presents control as something made visible through ordinary administrative measures: a closed road, an evacuation order, and a motel forced to suspend business.

The newspaper record makes the measures look less routine. Army units attached to Shenkfield closed a ten-mile stretch of I-80 and established roadblocks before notifying the Elko County Sheriff or Nevada State Police. Local authorities were excluded from maintaining the quarantine line and from planning for the possibility that changing conditions could spread nerve gas. The sheriff protested that the Army had displaced civilian authority; by the time he sought a judge’s intervention, the emergency was ending and the jurisdictional dispute had become moot. The crisis therefore involved not just control of a dangerous area but control over who could manage it, what information they received, and which account of events would prevail.

Dom and Ginger read the security arrangements as evidence that the official explanation was inadequate. Ginger reasoned that the DERO company had been used because its personnel could be trusted with something highly classified, not because an ordinary chemical spill required them. The timing of the roadblocks also suggested to them that the Army might have had advance warning. These remain inferences rather than confirmed explanations, but they make the distinction between public safety and secrecy central to the investigation: measures presented as protection may also keep witnesses and civilian officials away from whatever the Army is guarding.

Falkirk’s Creed of Control

For Falkirk, control is not merely a military procedure but the principle by which a life is supposed to remain intact. He believes that desire and impulse must be mastered, that reason must resist superstition, and that fear must be subdued. He learned to endure pain as a way of reducing fear, having been beaten and punished by religiously fanatical parents who claimed that the devil was in him. His memories of Pentecostal services, where his parents fell, screamed, and thrashed in religious abandon, helped shape his contempt for religious experience. The narrative connects his insistence on rational self-command to a childhood in which authority used both religious language and physical punishment to claim control over him.

That discipline gives Falkirk a sense of competence: he believes he can control himself, his men, his life, and any assignment entrusted to him. But the Thunder Hill operation brings his methods and assumptions under pressure. He struggles to breathe when events begin to fly apart, and recognizes that he is closer to panic than he has been in more than forty years. The threat is not simply that he might lose command of a particular operation. His identity depends on the belief that disciplined control can master fear and disorder, so evidence that the situation is slipping from him threatens the foundation of his self-image.

Falkirk responds by tightening his demands. He insists that the witnesses and others who might be infected must be eradicated if necessary, including children and priests, and plans a conference call to secure agreement on a hard policy. He treats violence as an instrument for restoring control and frames disclosure as a danger that could obstruct the war he believes is underway. Foster Polnichev argues instead that the observed healings and telekinetic abilities may be beneficial, and that maintaining the cover-up has become too costly. Falkirk answers this possibility by construing it as enemy deception. His certainty does not resolve the uncertainty; it makes disagreement itself appear to him as evidence of danger.

A Cover-Up That Cannot Be Fully Directed

The operation’s instability is organizational as well as personal. The CIA’s specialists in memory modification had promised to suppress the Tranquility witnesses’ memories, but the effects of the July experience prove difficult to contain. As memory blocks deteriorate, the agencies try another round of repression and alteration, illegally holding the Salcoe family incommunicado in Monterey. Falkirk doubts that the effort can succeed. The number of agencies involved, including the FBI, CIA, and a DERO company, creates a problem of divided authority: there are too many participants for any one commander to guarantee the result.

The policy dispute becomes explicit during the conference call. Polnichev, the FBI director, and the President’s national security adviser agree that the cover-up is no longer tenable. The miraculous cures performed by Brendan Cronin and Winton Tolk, and the telekinetic powers displayed by Dominick Corvaisis and Emmy Halbourg, are presented as evidence that the consequences of July 6 may be beneficial. Falkirk counters that the people assessing the threat may themselves be compromised. The conflict is not a simple division between a unified government and its opponents: officials within the operation disagree over what the evidence means and whether secrecy still serves its purpose.

Parker Faine’s escape from the Salcoe operation further weakens Falkirk’s position. The family is moved to a safe house, but the intruder is identified as Corvaisis’s friend and disappears after reaching San Francisco. Polnichev treats the escape as confirmation that containment is failing. Falkirk, by contrast, reads growing disagreement and apparent evidence of benefit through his fear of infection and conquest. He can still issue orders, but no longer commands a shared interpretation of events. The cover-up’s failure lies partly in this widening gap between the authority to impose a policy and the ability to make others believe in it.

The Red Moons and the Break in Composure

At the Blocks’ kitchen table, Falkirk encounters a child’s album filled with photographs and drawings of red moons. Outside, DERO troops search the property in a raging wind, and vehicles move around behind the motel. Lieutenant Horner reports that the motel rooms are empty and that the witnesses have escaped overland, leaving only vague tire tracks in the snow. Even in the middle of that setback, Falkirk turns pages calmly and takes pride in appearing unfazed.

Then the repeated image overwhelms that performance. After turning page after page of red moons, he hurls the album across the kitchen. Its pictures scatter; he smashes a smiling bear jar, scattering broken chocolate-chip cookies among the moons, and sweeps or throws other kitchen objects across the room. He pauses to breathe evenly, leaves calmly, and goes to study the county map with Horner. The scene makes the gap between outward command and inward disorder concrete: the calm walk and measured breathing return, but they follow an eruption that has already destroyed the room’s domestic order. The red moons are not a confirmed explanation for Falkirk’s reaction; their force in the scene comes from their repetition and from the contrast between his claimed composure and the violence of his response.

Thematic Significance

The novel repeatedly joins control to the production of an official version of reality. Roadblocks determine who can approach the quarantine zone; military secrecy limits what civilian authorities can know; memory modification tries to govern what witnesses can remember. Yet the records, returning memories, escapes, and disputes among officials make clear that control over bodies and information is never identical to control over truth. Each containment measure generates new evidence of the effort to contain something.

Falkirk embodies the personal cost of treating uncertainty as an enemy that can be defeated by force. His childhood taught him to associate safety with self-command, and his military role gives that discipline institutional reach. But the operation confronts him with events he cannot explain and colleagues he cannot persuade. As his control of the situation weakens, he does not become more receptive to uncertainty; he interprets uncertainty as proof that even harsher control is required. The resulting irony is central to the concept: the effort to prevent disorder becomes one of its engines, while the rigid insistence on command reveals how little command can guarantee.