His breath coming in harsh gasps, the old man emerged from the Main Street entrance to the old Gates Building. The garage was around the corner, attached to a little annex that housed an insurance agency. There were a few cars creeping along Main Street, but no pedestrians. Wally Van Zandt’s energy station was closed and so was everything else in sight. The snow sifted down more thickly with every passing moment. The forecast had predicted an additional 15 cents by morning.
Rogi fumbled with the old-fashioned brass key to open the side door of the garage. He had a zapper in the groundcar to operate the overhead, but he’d balked at installing a modern electronic lock on the other door. The old Schlage was perfectly good for another century or two. Besides, crime was almost nonexistent in Hanover.
He got the door open at last and cast about gingerly within the dark garage with his farsight. The inside light had been broken for months. He was trembling a little and cursed himself for a cowardly old fool afraid of bogeymen. But in his semi-spifflicated and confused mental state Rogi half remembered looking into another dark space and seeing there the hideous sight of Shannon O’Connor Tremblay in the arms of Victor—the pair of them shimmering in a violet-blue aura as the monster drained her life from her. And Vic grinning as he raised his face from the last font of vital energy, at the base of her spine.
Victor had discarded Shannon’s pitiable husk and taken control of him. Controlled him like a marionette until sheer chance had allowed him to escape. And then caught him again, down beneath the chalet with the storm winds shrieking and the mountain quaking—
Slowly he shuffled into the dark garage, and then gave a terrified squawk as he tripped over Marcel’s old cat carrier, which he’d been meaning to clean out someday and donate to the next church rummage sale. Connard! Forgot to scan below his knees. If the monsters had been waiting, they could have cut him off at the ankles!… But enough of this foolishness. Into the car.
“Uncle Rogi? Are you in there?”
He gasped and gave a great start and spun around, and then almost gibbered in relief as he saw that it was only a girl silhouetted against the lamplit snowfall outside the garage. She had on a red skisuit.
“Uncle Rogi, it’s Madeleine. I’m so glad I found you!” Her voice was tremulous. “Can you come down the street to the house? Something seems to have happened to Jacqui, and Herta’s still at the movies with Marie!”
He stood with one hand on the groundcar’s doorlatch, his mouth hanging open stupidly. Something happened to the housekeeper? Madeleine and young Luc home alone? If only he could think straight …
“Uncle Rogi, come on! Please!”
“Yes, of course. I’m coming.”
“Hurry!” She was off, running ahead, and he groaned as he slogged along in her wake. It was a block and a half to Paul’s house, across Currier Place, past the darkened library. Madeleine was almost there. Rogi was surprised to see an egg parked in the side driveway. Not Paul’s silver Maserati, though. Who had a red rhocraft this year? Wasn’t it Anne? And hadn’t Maddy said she and Luc were home alone?
She was on the porch, and the front door was opening, and another teenage girl was there. Which cousin was it? Liane? Michelle? The half-screened auras of the adolescents made them scan all alike.
“Come quick, Uncle Rogi!” the second girl exclaimed.
Muttering under his breath, feeling very nearly sober again, he stumped up the snowy steps. Madeleine held the door open. He saw other youngsters inside, their minds emanating anxiety and fear. Saw a stocky adult form clad in slacks and a red sweater lying on the floor of the hallway behind the children.
Saw that the four young people waiting for him inside were Maddy, Celine, Quint, and Parni.
Remembered.
Rogi stopped. Eyes bulging, mouth open but incapable of utterance, he took hold of one of the porch trellis posts to steady himself.
“Quick!” one of the children said. “Jacqui doesn’t seem to be breathing. Come in.”
Rogi slowly shook his head.
“If you don’t,” Madeleine said, “we’ll have to bring you in.”
Her coercion reached for him, and so did that of the three others. But the Hydra metaconcert was a shaky one, for they were frightened, too. He slammed down his mental barrier and they lost their grip.
Closing his eyes against the horror of them, his mind screaming first for Marc, then for Jack, then finally for the Family Ghost, Rogi tore off one glove with his teeth and dug his bare hand beneath his parka into his pants pocket. The Hydra metaconcert was reorganizing itself, trying to make four as efficient as five had been.
“No, you don’t, damn you!” he cried aloud.
He pulled a jingling little bundle free of the pocket fabric. With his eyes still tightly shut, he held high the key ring with the fob that looked like a red glass marble in a silvery cage. The fob that the kids had always jokingly referred to as the Great Carbuncle. The fob that the Family Ghost had given him, that had miraculously flashed and called down the Intervention—
Even behind his eyelids, Rogi saw the sudden blaze of light, heard the young voices and minds scream and then suddenly cut off.
He stood beside his groundcar, in the garage.
East South Street was quiet in the heavily falling snow.
“Sacré nom de nom, am I dreaming?”
There were keys in his hand. One glove was missing. He clawed open the car door, fell into the seat, started the vehicle, backed out onto the snow-covered pavement. For some reason, the melting grids had not yet been turned on. Probably the damned sensors were on the fritz again. It was always happening on the side streets—
There was a sound like a clap of thunder. Stunned, he stared in the direction of Paul’s house. Not thunder, not an explosion—a sonic boom. A rhocraft taking off at illegal velocity, vanishing into the swirling whiteness in a split second.
Marc! Jack! They’re getting away!
There was no farspoken reply.
Rogi called telepathically again, then gave it up with a curse of despair. Were both of them asleep? What should he do? There was no phone in the old Volvo, and his farsenses were too befuddled to follow the soaring egg more than a few hundred meters into the air. He couldn’t make out the registration.
To hell with the little bastards! It was Jack who needed him. He gunned the car foolishly, making the wheels spin, nearly hitting a small tree. Then he regained control of the vehicle and himself and set off down Main Street as fast as he could go. He mind-called Jack’s name every few minutes, growing more and more agitated when there was no reply, even though he knew very well that the child was locked in an impregnable mental refuge when he slept.
Rogi skirted the Green, went north on College Street past the Old Row and Rollins Chapel, past Steele Hall. He was almost there now. Just turn onto Maynard and into the old hospital parking lot. The streets were heated here and the pavement steaming. The snow and the steam intermingled and the streetlights gleamed fuzzy yellow and Rogi’s car headlights made two white cones and the scattered lighted windows of the hospital were bluish-green and pale gold except for the one window that shone as red-orange as a setting sun.
Rogi stood beside his car, staring at that window dumfounded.
Another car swung around the corner onto Maynard, screeched up to him. The window hissed down, and he was amazed to hear Marc’s voice shouting at him.
“Get in! No time to walk! We’ll go to the emergency entrance!”
Then Rogi heard the approaching fire engines.
42
FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD
THE SECURITY GUARD HAD LOOKED UP FROM HIS BOOK-PLAQUE alertly as the elevator door opened, but then he relaxed, for he recognized the distinguished person who emerged and came up to him with an anxious expression, exuding vibes of authority and irresistible coercion.
“Dr. Colette Roy is on her way up. There’s an abnormal readout showing on Jack’s EEG monitor. He could be in serious trouble. Quickly, man!
Open the door!”
It never occurred to the guard to refuse … even though he readily admitted afterward that he had been given specific orders to admit no one except the private-duty nurse and the night supervisor—most specifically no member of the Remillard family. The person must have coerced him, he declared.
Even when he was rigorously interrogated later by forensic redactors, the guard could not recall who that person was. His memories had been wiped blank. He did not even remember what happened after he deactivated the alarms and opened the door. Marc and I and the firefighters found him lying unconscious beside his chair in the hall, two bewildered nurses and a young physician attempting to revive him.
Jack’s door was once again locked, and the medical personnel were unable to override the security system. They insisted to us that the young patient was perfectly all right, since the monitors at the nearby station showed no problem.
I grabbed the young doctor’s hand and slammed it flat against the door. “Feel that, you blithering idiot!”
The man yelped. “Damn! That’s hot!”
“Break the door down!” Marc cried. “The room’s on fire, and the oxygen line is feeding it! My little brother’s in there!”
The Fire Chief was examining the guard’s elaborate control box, a thing the size of a small file cabinet. “According to this, there’s a sigma-field laced through the walls and floor and ceiling and door. We’ll have to cut it off before we can get in. And the door lock’s time-set for two hours from now. Shit! It’s probably cerametal, too. You guys bring in the heavy-duty laser blade and the rest of the gear. I’ll get on the horn to MaxSec for the sigma override code.”
Marc and I stared at each other in numb despair as the Chief began speaking urgently into the tiny boom mike of his helmet communicator. A room full of smoke and flame—and Jack’s life being sustained by the most delicate kind of apparatus. He had probably perished almost as soon as the fire started.
The Chief began prodding the keypads of the control box, following the instructions being relayed from the security company headquarters. Something lit up green, and he said: “Field’s off! Hit the lock!”
Clumsy in their protective garb, the firefighters shouldered us and the doctor and nurses aside and began trying to cut into the door with a dazzling yellow photon beam. I heard the hospital fire alarm go off belatedly, and the doctor and one nurse dashed off to do whatever they were supposed to do. The other nurse led the stupefied security man away.
“You called the fire department?” I asked Marc.
He nodded grimly. “I was finally able to scan Jack’s room with my farsight when I was three blocks away, and I saw the flames. There was a phone in the car I stole.”
Marc and I were forced to withdraw a short distance down the hall as the firefighters brought up still another piece of apparatus to attack the lock. The security company had done a very good job making Jack’s hospital room unassailable. At that moment the ceiling sprinklers in the hall turned on, and I was vaguely aware of patients being efficiently evacuated. I remembered there were not too many housed in this wing, which was devoted to experimental forms of care. Somebody tried to force us to retreat, but Marc stonewalled him with his coercion and we huddled miserably together as the water sprayed down onto our heads and little gouts of molten metal popped here and there from the cutting torch like miniature meteors.
Progress was evidently being made. A technician wielding some kind of gargantuan drill had taken the place of the laser operator, attacking not the lock but the doorframe adjacent to it. Five firefighters hovered behind him, readying a hose and various kinds of nontoxic extinguishing chemicals. As the drill shrieked, the lights in the corridor suddenly went out. The firefighters switched on portable lanterns. The racket around us was numbing.
I had no idea what was going on behind that all-but-impervious door. I didn’t want to know. My own farsight was worthless. Tears were pouring down my face along with the deluge from the sprinklers and I blubbered incoherently. Marc was silent at my side, his face pale as chalk and his eyes dark-circled. He had on a worn down coat and a pair of work boots without socks. He seemed to be wearing nothing but a bathrobe underneath.
The Fire Chief gave a triumphant shout, and the man with the drill stepped back. The Chief put something into the hole in the doorframe, stepped back, and punched a small hand-held keypad. There was a dull whump! followed by a little puff of smoke. The door now opened when the Chief kicked it with one booted foot.
A spurt of flame and a great cloud of dark smoke rolled out. The firefighters pressed forward, plying their hoses and chemical canisters. There were shouts. More firefighters hauled a smoke evacuator up, thrust its intake nozzle into the room, and switched it on. Marc and I crouched on the floor under the meager shelter of my sodden parka, coughing.
So this is the way it ends, I thought. The greatest mind the human race has ever known, kept alive against all odds by the best modern medical technology, perishing ignominiously in a fire, one of the most ancient of disasters. Had the four Hydras done it? At the time I thought so; but later, of course, the culprit was proved to be Fury. Unknown Fury, who had psychocreatively fuzzed his image so that even the room cameras had transmitted no identifiable picture to the security company, although the tapes showed how the fire had been started.
Fury had used the simplest kind of incendiary device: a glass bottle filled with flammable j-fuel, fitted with a wick. The oxygen line leading into Jack’s life-support unit had been torn out, the blazing bottle smashed on the floor, and the door quickly slammed as the culprit fled. Meanwhile, the brilliant brain wrapped in rotting flesh had slept on oblivious, knowing himself to be safe from mental attack behind his own powerful mind-barriers, safe from physical attack inside an array of expensive security equipment.
Without the added oxygen, the fire might have burned itself out harmlessly in a few minutes. With oxygen to feed it, it had roared into an inferno, searing and melting the delicate and ingenious mechanisms that supported the last remnants of living tissue in which Jack’s mind resided.
The Chief yelled something.
The ceiling sprinklers shut off, and so did the hoses held by the firefighters. No more smoke came from within the ruined sickroom. The Chief shone his lantern into the darkness. Suddenly Marc’s lethargy fell away. He was on his feet, shoving the astonished man aside, stumbling into the sodden, charred mess.
I was behind him.
The window was broken, and snow blew in. Water dripped from the ceiling and pooled on the littered floor. Cooling metal ticked, and the wind moaned softly. The lantern light behind Marc and me dimly illuminated a scene of steaming chaos—twisted and blackened remnants of furniture, collapsed equipment cabinets, the ruined hulk of the life-support unit that had occupied the center of the room. There was a charcoal smell and a sharp chemical stench of melted plass. For the merest instant, as a fresh gust of icy wind blew in, I imagined that I smelled something else—something incongruously sweet, almost like Pernod or licorice or anise. I was weeping like a baby and could barely see, but memory told me that I had known that fragrance last on a misty plateau high above a tropical island, and in my dazed misery I had fleet recollections of Teresa: alive and embracing her newborn son in a snowbound cabin … lying still and cold in her bed … smiling at me from amid garlands of ferns and flowers.
Marc now stood just inside the door, with me and the firefighters pressing behind him. He grabbed one of the lanterns and swept the light about the large room.
We saw lingering wisps of steam laced with snowflakes. Contorted pieces of burned equipment like incinerated bones. Some fragments of pale, fragile ashy substance that reminded me for a second of the little white roses Jack had fashioned at Christmas with his creative metafaculty …
Psychocreativity.
He was so very good at that.
The lantern beam moved far to one side, to the dark corner at the left of the door. Both Marc and I saw him, and both o
f us cried out.
A man.
Crouched almost in a fetal position, with his arms curled protectively about his head, his body as perfect as that of Michelangelo’s David, completely naked and clean except for his feet, ankle-deep in the filthy water. His arms moved. He raised his head to look at us, a bewildered expression on his face. He was perhaps in his twenties, dark-haired, quite good-looking, with the distinctive aquiline nose of the Remillards. He smiled hesitantly at Marc and me, and we goggled at him, bereft of speech and nearly frightened out of our wits. The Fire Chief was doing his best to push past us, cursing good-naturedly, trying to see what held us enthralled.
I’ve completed the first part of the work.
“Ti-Jean?” I whispered. “But it can’t be you—”
The young man’s face lost its bemused look. His perfect form seemed to dim and go translucent before my astounded eyes, becoming as insubstantial as the tendrils of steam that the storm wind plucked and tore. Instead of a beautiful mature male body I saw all at once a naked brain—not a raw or repugnant denuded organ but a thing supremely elegant and correct—suspended in air. It was attached to nothing and sustained by nothing except the atmosphere, photons of light, and its own conquering psychocreative mindpower.
And then the brain vanished in turn, and a little boy stood there in the corner, shivering slightly but still smiling. He seemed to be about three or four years old.
“This body is more appropriate for now,” he said. “Don’t you think so? At least until people get a little more used to me.”
Marc handed me the lantern. I followed him as he walked into the room, and the Fire Chief and a couple of his cohorts pushed in behind me. They uttered awed exclamations.
Marc knelt in the muck, holding one of the little boy’s hands in his own uninjured one. Jack was not a phantom or any other sort of illusion. Marc’s hand was very dirty, and he soiled the child’s clean flesh as they touched each other.
“Just like the Christmas roses?” Marc asked Jack.