“You’re getting a little spooky,” he said.
“Me?”
“You’re so hostile.”
“I am not.”
He was frowning at her. “Looks like blind hostility to me.”
“It’s adversarial journalism. It’s the modern reporter’s tone and theme. You don’t question your subject and later explain him to readers, you attack him. You have an agenda, a version of the truth you want to report regardless of the full truth, and you fulfill it. I never approved of it, never indulged in it, which is why I was always losing out on stories and promotions to other reporters. Now, here, tonight, I’m all for the attack part. The big difference is, I do care about getting to the truth, not shaping it, and I just want to twist and yank some real facts out of this alien of ours.”
“Maybe he won’t show up.”
“He said he would.”
Jim shook his head. “But why should he if you’re going to be like this?”
“You’re saying he might be afraid of me? What kind of higher power is that?”
The bells rang, and she jumped in alarm.
Jim got to his feet. “Just take it easy.”
The bells fell silent, rang again, fell silent. When they rang a third time, a sullen red light appeared at one point in the wall. It grew more intense, assumed a brighter shade, then suddenly burst across the domed room like a blazing fireworks display, after which the bells stopped ringing and the multitude of sparks coalesced into the pulsing, constantly moving amoeba-like forms that they had seen before.
“Very dramatic,” Holly said. As the light swiftly progressed from red through orange to amber, she seized the initiative. “We would like you to dispense with the cumbersome way you answered our questions previously and simply speak to us directly.”
The Friend did not reply.
“Will you speak to us directly?”
No response.
Consulting the tablet that she held in one hand, she read the first question. “Are you the higher power that has been sending Jim on life-saving missions?”
She waited.
Silence.
She tried again.
Silence.
Stubbornly, she repeated the question.
The Friend did not speak, but Jim said, “Holly, look at this.”
She turned and saw him examining the other tablet. He held it toward her, flipping through the first ten or twelve pages. The eerie and inconstant light from the stone was bright enough to show her that the pages were filled with The Friend’s familiar printing.
Taking the tablet from him, she looked at the first line on the top page: YES. I AM THAT POWER.
Jim said, “He’s already answered every one of the questions we’ve prepared.”
Holly threw the tablet across the room. It hit the far window without breaking the glass, and clattered to the floor.
“Holly, you can’t—”
She cut him off with a sharp look.
The light moved through the transmuted limestone with greater agitation than before.
To The Friend, Holly said, “God gave Moses the Ten Commandments on tablets of stone, yeah, but He also had the courtesy to talk to him. If God can humble Himself to speak directly with human beings, then so can you.”
She did not look to see how Jim was reacting to her adversarial tack. All she cared about was that he not interrupt her.
When The Friend remained silent, she repeated the first question on her list. “Are you the higher power that has been sending Jim on life-saving missions?”
“Yes. I am that power. ” The voice was a soft, mellifluous baritone. Like the ringing of the bells, it seemed to come from all sides of them. The Friend did not materialize out of the wall in human form, did not sculpt a face from the limestone, but merely produced its voice out of thin air.
She asked the second question on her list. “How can you know these people are about to die?”
“I am an entity that lives in all aspects of time. ”
“What do you mean by that?”
“Past, present, and future. ”
“You can foresee the future?”
“I live in the future as well as in the past and present. ”
The light was coruscating through the walls with less agitation now, as if the alien presence had accepted her conditions and was mellow again.
Jim moved to her side. He put a hand on her arm and squeezed gently, as if to say “good work.”
She decided not to ask for any more clarification on the issue of its ability to see the future, for fear they would be off on a tangent and never get back on track before the creature next announced that it was departing. She returned to the prepared questions. “Why do you want these particular people saved?”
“To help mankind, ” it said sonorously. There might have been a note of pomposity in it, too, but that was hard to tell because the voice was so evenly modulated, almost machinelike.
“But when so many people are dying every day—and most of them are innocents—why have you singled out these particular people to be rescued?”
“They are special people. ”
“In what way are they special?”
“If allowed to live, each of them will make a major contribution to the betterment of mankind. ”
Jim said, “I’ll be damned.”
Holly had not been expecting that answer. It had the virtue of being fresh. But she was not sure she believed it. For one thing, she was bothered that The Friend’s voice was increasingly familiar to her. She was sure she had heard it before, and in a context that undermined its credibility now, in spite of its deep and authoritative tone. “Are you saying you not only see the future as it will be but as it might have been?”
“Yes.”
“Aren’t we back to your being God now?”
“No. I do not see as clearly as God. But I see. ”
In his boyish best humor again, Jim smiled at the kaleidoscopic patterns of light, obviously excited and pleased by all that he was hearing.
Holly turned away from the wall, crossed the room, squatted beside her suitcase, and opened it.
Jim loomed over her. “What’re you doing?”
“Looking for this,” she said, producing the notebook in which she had chronicled the discoveries she’d made while researching him. She got up, opened the notebook, and paged to the list of people whose lives he had saved prior to Flight 246. Addressing the entity throbbing through the limestone, she said, “May fifteenth. Atlanta, Georgia. Sam Newsome and his five-year-old daughter Emily. What are they going to contribute to humanity that makes them more important than all the other people who died that day?”
No answer was forthcoming.
“Well?” she demanded.
“Emily will become a great scientist and discover a cure for a major disease. ” Definitely a note of pomposity this time.
“What disease?”
“Why do you not believe me, Miss Thorne?” The Friend spoke as formally as an English butler on duty, yet in that response, Holly felt she heard the subtle pouting tone of a child under the dignified, reserved surface.
She said, “Tell me what disease, and maybe I’ll believe you.”
“Cancer. ”
“Which cancer? There are all types of cancer.”
“All cancers. ”
She referred to her notebook again. “June seventh. Corona, California. Louis Andretti.”
“He will father a child who will grow up to become a great diplomat.”
Better than dying of multiple rattlesnake bites, she thought.
She said, “June twenty-first. New York City. Thaddeus—”
“He will become a great artist whose work will give millions of people hope. ”
“He seemed like a nice kid,” Jim said happily, buying into the whole thing. “I liked him.”
Ignoring him, Holly said, “June thirtieth. San Francisco—”
“Rachael Steinberg will give birth to
a child who will become a great spiritual leader. ”
That voice was bugging her. She knew she had heard it before. But where?
“July fifth—”
“Miami, Florida. Carmen Diaz. She will give birth to a child who will become president of the United States. ”
Holly fanned herself with the notebook and said, “Why not president of the world?”
“July fourteenth. Houston, Texas. Amanda Cutter. She will give birth to a child who will be a great peacemaker. ”
“Why not the Second Coming?” Holly asked.
Jim had moved away from her. He was leaning against the wall between two windows, the display of light quietly exploding around him. “What’s the matter with you?” he asked.
“It’s all too much,” she said.
“What is?”
“Okay, it says it wants you to save special people.”
“To help mankind.”
“Sure, sure,” Holly said to the wall.
To Jim she said, “But these people are all just too special, don’t you think? Maybe it’s me, but it all seems overblown, it’s gotten trite again. Nobody’s growing up to be just a damned good doctor, or a businessman who creates a new industry and maybe ten thousand jobs, or an honest and courageous cop, or a terrific nurse. No, they’re great diplomats, great scientists, great politicians, great peace-makers. Great, great, great!”
“Is this adversarial journalism?”
“Damn right.”
He pushed away from the wall, used both hands to smooth his thick hair back from his forehead, and cocked his head at her. “I see your point, why it’s starting to sound like another episode of Outer Limits to you, but let’s think about this. It’s a crazy, extravagant situation. A being from another world, with powers that seem godlike to us, decides to use me to better the chances of the human race. Isn’t it logical that he’d send me out to save special, really special people instead of your theoretical business tycoon?”
“Oh, it’s logical,” she said. “It just doesn’t ring true to me, and I’ve got a fairly well-developed nose for deception.”
“Is that why you were a great success as a reporter?”
She might have laughed at the image of an alien, vastly superior to human beings, stooping to engage in a bickering match. But the impatience and poutiness she’d thought she detected as an undercurrent in some of its previous answers was now unmistakable, and the concept of a hypersensitive, resentful creature with godlike power was too unnerving to be funny at the moment.
“How’s that for a higher power?” she asked Jim. “Any second now, he’s going to call me a bitch.”
The Friend said nothing.
Consulting her notebook again, she said, “July twentieth. Steven Aimes. Birmingham, Alabama.”
Schools of light swam through the walls. The patterns were less graceful and less sensuous than before; if the lightshow had been the visual equivalent of one of Brahms’s most pacific symphonies, it was now more like the discordant wailing of bad progressive jazz.
“What about Steven Aimes?” she demanded, scared but remembering how an exertion of will had been met with respect before.
“I am going now. ”
“That was a short tide,” she said.
The amber light began to darken.
“The tides in the vessel are not regular or of equal duration. But I will return. ”
“What about Steven Aimes? He was fifty-seven, still capable of siring a great something-or-other, though maybe a little long in the tooth. Why did you save Steve?”
The voice grew somewhat deeper, slipping from baritone toward bass, and it hardened. “It would not be wise for you to attempt to leave. ”
She had been waiting for that. As soon as she heard the words, she knew she had been tensed in expectation of them.
Jim, however, was stunned. He turned, looking around at the dark-amber forms swirling and melding and splitting apart again, as if trying to figure out the biological geography of the thing, so he could look it in the eyes. “What do you mean by that? We’ll leave any time we want.”
“You must wait for my return. You will die if you attempt to leave. ”
“Don’t you want to help mankind anymore?” Holly asked sharply.
“Do not sleep. ”
Jim moved to Holly’s side. Whatever estrangement she had caused between her and Jim, by taking an aggressive stance with The Friend, was apparently behind them. He put an arm around her protectively.
“You dare not sleep. ”
The limestone was mottled with a deep red glow. “Dreams are doorways. ”
The bloody light went out.
The lantern provided the only illumination. And in the deeper darkness that followed The Friend’s departure, the quiet hiss of the burning gas was the only sound.
8
Holly stood at the head of the stairs, shining a flashlight into the gloom below. Jim supposed she was trying to make up her mind whether they really would be prevented from leaving the mill—and if so, how violently.
Watching her from where he sat on his sleeping bag, he could not understand why it was all turning sour.
He had come to the windmill because the bizarre and frightening events in his bedroom in Laguna Niguel, over eighteen hours ago, had made it impossible to continue ignoring the dark side to the mystery in which he had become enwrapped. Prior to that, he had been willing to drift along, doing what he was compelled to do, pulling people out of the fire at the last minute, a bemused but game superhero who had to rely on airplanes when he wanted to fly and who had to do his own laundry. But the increasing intrusion of The Enemy—whatever the hell it was—its undeniable evil and fierce hostility, no longer allowed Jim the luxury of ignorance. The Enemy was struggling to break through from some other place, another dimension perhaps, and it seemed to be getting closer on each attempt. Learning the truth about the higher power behind his activities had not been at the top of his agenda, because he had felt that enlightenment would be granted to him in time, but learning about The Enemy had come to seem urgently necessary for his survival—and Holly’s.
Nevertheless, he had traveled to the farm with the expectation that he would encounter good as well as evil, experience joy as well as fear. Whatever he learned by plunging into the unknown should at least leave him with a greater understanding of his sacred life-saving mission and the supernatural forces behind it. But now he was more confused than before he’d come. Some developments had filled him with the wonder and joy for which he longed: the ringing in the stone, for one; and the beautiful, almost divine, light that was the essence of The Friend. He had been moved to rapture by the revelation that he was not merely saving lives but saving people so special that their survival would improve the fate of the entire human race. But that spiritual bliss had been snatched away from him by the growing realization that The Friend was either not telling them the whole truth or, worst case, was not telling them anything true at all. The childish petulance of the creature was unnerving in the extreme, and now Jim was not sure that anything he had done since saving the Newsomes last May was in the service of good rather than evil.
Yet his fear was still tempered by hope. Though a splinter of despair had lodged in his heart and begun to fester, that spiritual infection was held in check by the core of optimism, however fragile, that had always been at the center of him.
Holly switched off the flashlight, returned from the open door, and sat down on her mattress. “I don’t know, maybe it was an empty threat, but there’s no way of telling till we try to leave.”
“You want to?”
She shook her head. “What’s the point in getting off the farm anyway? From everything we know, it can reach out to us anywhere we go. Right? I mean it reached you in Laguna Niguel, sent you on these missions, reached you out there in Nevada and sent you on to Boston to rescue Nicholas O’Conner.”
“I’ve felt it with me, at times, no matter where I’ve gone. In Houston, in
Florida, in France, in England—it guided me, let me know what was coming, so I could do the job it wanted done.”
Holly looked exhausted. She was drawn and paler than the eerie glow of the gas lantern could account for, and her eyes were shadowed with rings of weariness. She closed her eyes for a moment and pinched the bridge of her nose with thumb and forefinger, a strained look on her face, as if she was trying to suppress a headache.
With all his heart, Jim regretted that she had been drawn into this. But like his fear and despair, his regret was impure, tempered by the deep pleasure he took in her very presence. Though it was a selfish attitude, he was glad that she was with him, no matter where this strange night led them. He was no longer alone.
Still pinching the bridge of her nose, the lines in her forehead carved deep by her scowl, Holly said, “This creature isn’t restricted to the area near the pond, or just to psychic contact across great distances. It can manifest itself anywhere, judging by the scratches it left in my sides and the way it entered the ceiling of your bedroom this morning.”
“Well, now wait,” he said, “we know The Enemy can materialize over considerable distance, yes, but we don’t know that The Friend has that ability. It was The Enemy that came out of your dream and The Enemy that tried to reach us this morning.”
Holly opened her eyes and lowered her hand from her face. Her expression was bleak. “I think they’re one and the same.”
“What?”
“The Enemy and The Friend. I don’t believe two entities are living under the pond, in that starship, if there is a starship, which I guess there is. I think there’s only a single entity. The Friend and The Enemy are nothing more than different aspects of it.”
Holly’s implication was clear, but it was too frightening for Jim to accept immediately. He said, “You can’t be serious? You might as well be saying... it’s insane.”
“That is what I’m saying. It’s suffering the alien equivalent of a split personality. It’s acting out both personalities, but isn’t consciously aware of what it’s doing.” Jim’s almost desperate need to believe in The Friend as a separate and purely benign creature must have been evident in his face, for Holly took his right hand, held it in both hers, and hurried on before he could interrupt: “The childish petulance, the grandiosity of its claim to be reshaping the entire destiny of our species, the flamboyance of its apparitions, its sudden fluctuations between an attitude of syrupy goodwill and sullen anger, the way it lies so damned transparently yet deludes itself into believing it’s clever, its secretiveness about some issues when there is no apparent reason to be secretive—all of that makes sense if you figure we’re dealing with an unbalanced mind.”
He looked for flaws in her reasoning, and found one. “But you can’t believe an insane person, an insane alien individual, could pilot an unimaginably complex spacecraft across lightyears through countless dangers, while completely out of its mind.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that. Maybe the insanity set in after it got here. Or maybe it didn’t have to pilot the ship, maybe the ship is essentially automatic, an entirely robotic mechanism. Or maybe there were others of its kind aboard who piloted it, and maybe they’re all dead now. Jim, it’s never mentioned