“Wait just a minute,” Vorona said. “You’re not walking out of here without telling us how you’re going to proceed.”
“I think we have mind-control capabilities of our own that can be brought to bear on the situation. We can do this without revealing to the grays that we’re responsible. How is my business.”
“There’s one system that works,” Greenfield said, “the violence wire.”
“Duty calls, gentlemen,” Mike said as they started to filter into his living room for drinks. “There’s no time, not tonight. There is no time at all.”
He left, then, heading down to the garage in his basement. He needed to get to Wilton—which, of course, would turn out to be a trap. The larger question was how, exactly, did the trap work, and how could it be defeated?
If it could.
TWELVE
AS DAN ENTERED MARCIE’S OFFICE, he was enveloped in what he immediately perceived as an ominous silence. Behind her, the westering sun made a halo of her glowing russet hair. Her hands, holding what Dan presumed were his student evaluations, gleamed softly in the late light. Her skin was smooth and her features exotic, with large, frank eyes and lips that generally contained a hint of laughter—not the pleasantly sensual laughter that the face suggested, though. Marcie was first and foremost an administrator. She fired, gave bad news, and disciplined wayward professors for their crimes—drunkenness, sloth, and, of course, lechery.
He imagined her fingers touching him, and it was oddly thrilling. He blinked and shook the thought away.
She smiled, and he saw something unexpected: a sort of warmth.
“Given what I have here, it would have been useful to you,” she said, “if you could have gotten a little more support from faculty.”
“The student evaluations, ah—”
“I can’t give you details, Dan.”
“No, of course not.” Student evaluations at Bell were held secret from professors, so that they could be used as a tool and weapon of the administration. “But they’re bad, I assume.”
She laid the paper back in the file from which she’d taken it, aligned it with a long, deep red fingernail, and closed the manila folder.
From outside there came the distant strains of the Bell Ringers Band hammering away, improbably enough, at “Moon River,” the sound carried off on the stiff north wind that had come up around noon. Voices echoed along the hall, the comfortable laughter of some succulent coed making light, no doubt, of a flapping faculty admirer.
“Marcie,” he said. He stopped himself, astonished by a shocking and completely inappropriate sense of desire for her. She was doing nothing to seduce him. He looked at her right hand, lying there on the desk. If he reached across that two-foot space and laid his own hand on it, what would happen?
“Yes?” Her voice seemed almost to tremble. But why? Did she have to tell him no, and was she afraid to do that? But why should she be? He was no friend of hers and bad news was job one in this office. Poor student evaluations and no faculty support, open and shut case, toodle-oo.
“Marcie, look, we both know what’s going on here.”
She laughed a little, the nervous tinkle of a girl. “I think the problem is that your courses aren’t sexy.”
He had arrived at the edge of the cliff: poor evals, no support, now a negative on his courses. The next step would be, sorry, I cannot vote for tenure. “It’s physiological psychology,” he yammered. “Give me a couple of sections of abnorm, I’ll bring my comments way up.”
“That’s unlikely until you’re tenured.”
“But I can’t get tenured without good evals, and I can’t get those without good courses.”
“You’re Yossarianed, then. As we all are. Bell Yossarians us all.”
For a moment, he was at a loss. Then he remembered Catch-22. Yossarian was the character in the novel who was caught in a bureaucratic endless loop. Dan searched for something, anything, that might help him. He could drop a name. Pitiful, but it was what he had. “I knew a fellow when I was at Columbia—what was his name, Speed Vogel—who knew Heller.”
She made a note.
“What are you writing?”
“Knew friend of Heller.”
“Does it matter?”
“Not at all.”
He found himself watching her lips, the way she pressed them together, the slight and fascinating moisture at the corners of her mouth.
But why? Was he going mad? How could he feel this way for this woman who was about to wreck his life?
Did he want this so badly that he was willing to whore for it? Probably, but why would she want him? She had her pick of faculty masochists, eager to roll in the hay with their punisher. And yet, the only thing that was stopping him from leaping across that desk was the fear that any such action would backfire.
“Marcie,” he heard himself say, and he heard the roughness, the unmistakable sexuality in his tone. He almost slapped his hand over his mouth, but she looked up suddenly, blinking fast. Her eyebrows rose to the center of the forehead, her eyes filmed with tears that made them bright and awful.
“What’s the matter?” she asked in a horrible, low tone that made him think she feared him.
He remembered, suddenly, his seizure dream, going up into the dark womb of the sky, the cave in the silver moon. He shook it away, frightened for a moment that he was going into aura again. But no, it was only a memory.
She cleared her throat, lifted her hand, and brushed her lips with the back of it, smearing her lipstick a little. “Yes,” she whispered.
He said, “Is this the conference? My conference with my tenure advisor? We sit here staring helplessly at each other?”
“There’s nothing to discuss, Dan,” she said. She straightened herself, clasped her hands, and lifted her chin. She was beautiful, then, tragically beautiful. He could see her in the darkness, and she looked very afraid. But no, it wasn’t dark and she wasn’t scared. She looked across at him, her eyes steady. “It’s just—obviously, you know the student evaluations—well, you know, they’re often rather indifferent to the welfare of somebody they know has need.”
“They know I’m up for tenure?”
She nodded, her little mouth grave, her eyes flashing. “Oh, yes,” she said, and he knew, in that moment, that he must have her. He must do this, he could not help himself. He also knew that she was aware of the potential that existed between them. He went to his feet.
She looked down his body, then cleared her throat. Her cheeks had gone bright red. He stood before her like a little soldier at stiff attention. He said in his heart, Katelyn, I am so ashamed, but Marcie’s rising flush told him that there would be no escape for him.
She lifted her hand off the desk and reached toward him, her fingers extending.
They froze, then, remaining like that, him pressing his thighs against the edge of the desk, her reaching to the air six inches in front of his midriff.
Tears poured down her cheeks. She whispered, her voice an unsure murmur, “What happened last night?”
Something in him, some sort of inner door, fell open. He remembered the blaring confusions of his boyhood, the stars passing his face, the field of silver and the black opening, gaping.
“You heard about that?” He backed away from her desk.
Then he saw:
—A narrow steel cot, Marcie lying on it in heat, her face flushed and sweaty, her bush brown and touched as if by dew.
And he felt:
—His own nakedness delicious in the night air.
She gasped as if struck. “Dan,” she said, “Dan.” Her eyes widened, glistened, their green suddenly horrible to see, too glassy, too . . . hurt.
“Marcie, listen, uh—”
She stood up and came around the desk, entered his arms. She drew against him, drew close, and in the fur of his sweater he heard long and bitter sobs.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m so damn sorry.”
She pressed herself against him harder
. Then their lips were touching, asking one another if there should be more. If she—of all creatures, she—could be admitted to his sanctum?
He laid his hand on her back and pressed her closer to him, and delivered himself to her kiss.
THIRTEEN
LAUREN DID NOT HAVE SEXUAL feelings about Adam, of course, and the idea of him having such feelings for her was repellent. But there was something else there. He liked to explore her intensities—sexuality, anger, passion, loss, triumph, her slight kinks . . . those little fantasies that she sometimes relaxed with, of helplessness and ardor. And her childhood. Adam moved through her childhood memories like a tiger prowling the tall grass.
Normally, he was curiously empty of emotion himself. You’d almost be willing to believe he was a machine, he was so—not cold, that’s an emotion. Adam’s heart was empty. But earlier this morning, when he had been showing her the images of the dying cruise ship and the supermarket full of the starving, she had felt such a powerful sense of disquiet that she’d gotten the idea that they represented a great fear of his, and therefore of his whole species. They were a collective, connected in some esoteric way across the whole universe. She thought it had to do with quantum interconnected-ness. A gray could communicate instantly with a gray in another galaxy, but hardly at all with a human being.
She had come to feel that Adam’s ceaseless quest to share her heart was central to his meaning, and probably the meaning of them all.
They weren’t predators, like Mike thought, but people who had somehow become machines. They were smart enough to know that they were the most profound possible outsiders: they were functional, very much so, but had no access to the emotional universe that seemed to her to be the essence of being alive.
She lay staring at the living room ceiling, vaguely listening to Ted’s golf tournament on the TV. What was it? The Masters? She enjoyed golf, the precision of it, the struggle, the inner calm that was essential, as well as beating her dear Ted at a game . . . which she managed occasionally.
He was her shelter in the storm of desperation that defined Adam. She wondered if the grays had lost their souls. Was that their problem—they’d once been more fully alive than they were now, and they were searching the universe for some way to regain themselves?
Adam rejected every effort she made to find out about his people, his world, any of it. If she tried to penetrate his mind the way he did hers, by latching onto the pictures stored there, all she’d ever get was white light. Static. He blocked her.
It was a little sinister feeling, truth to tell. What did he have to hide?
She became aware of a siren outside, which was certainly unusual for University Park. This was not a siren-oriented neighborhood, no way. The deep, booming horn that accompanied it announced that it was a fire truck.
Well, that was more believable. There were dorm fires over on the two campuses every so often, usually involving mattresses or common-room couches. Once in a blue moon one of the beautiful old U. Park houses burned. Still, it would be extremely serious if the facility was threatened in any way, so she got up from the couch, went to the front hall, and put on her jacket.
“Hello,” Ted said as she passed through the living room.
“I’m going out. Back in a few.”
He knew not to ask, of course.
When she reached the street, she smelled a faint tang of smoke. Okay, that was to be expected if there was a fire in the area. She got in her car and drove to the facility. She was appalled, as she turned the corner, to see three big fire trucks in the street.
Her mouth went dry, she began mentally reviewing the steps that had to be taken to protect the secure areas. Nobody, no fireman, no fire inspector, must go down that elevator.
As she pulled into the driveway, she saw that the house itself was not burning, but there were firemen in the drive. She fumbled frantically through her purse looking for her credentials. Mike was in Washington and Andy was off. They often left Adam alone. He was safe down there, and when he wasn’t being interacted with, he lay as inert as an abandoned toy. If he began to move around, sensors would alert her and Andy, and they could watch him from their laptops. It had never happened, though.
She stepped out of the car and walked over to the firemen. Just the other side of their garden wall there was smoke.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“Grass fire, probably started by kids.”
“It’s not going to come over this far, is it?”
“No, ma’am. That’s why we’re here.”
“Okay, thank you. Listen, I’m going to be in the house. If there’s any change, please let me know.”
She entered by the front door. Before going down, she went first into her office and turned on her computer. After it had voice identified her, she pulled up the feed from Adam’s chamber.
Unlike the human eye, the camera simply saw what was in front of it. On camera, you could sometimes glimpse Adam. He could feel you watching, though, and would usually disappear in under a second.
She was shocked to find him pacing, the slim gray form speeding in a blur from wall to wall. At least he wasn’t flying around like some kind of gigantic berserk blowfly.
Immediately, she went to the elevator, pressed her thumb against the print reader, and stepped inside. She dropped down into the pit. Quickly, she prepped, just covering her face and hands with emollient and leaving it at that. Her skin was as stiff as leather anyway. She didn’t bother with an antihistamine shot, but she did stuff an epinephrine injector into the pocket of her slacks. Then she stepped into the lock, waited for the outer door to close, and entered the cage.
“Hi,” she said aloud. She went to her chair, sat down, closed her eyes, and directed her attention to the physical sensation of her body. By thus removing her attention from her thoughts, she signaled to Adam that he could enter her.
He rushed in with all the eagerness of a dog leaping to its master’s breast after a long absence . . . or a lion pouncing. It felt like both things when Adam came into her. This time, he didn’t go to her sexual memories, but rather to earliest childhood.
She found herself back home in Philly, in Mom’s study, and all the furniture was incredibly tall. She was gliding from chair to chair, and her heart was soaring. It was a place he’d gone to frequently, the moment she had taken her first steps.
She loved these memories Adam would bring up out of childhood’s amnesia. Because of him, she had remembered her birth and even before, a sort of secret communion with her mother in the womb.
Then he went to a moment in the living room when she was about two, when she had stood watching the sunlight slanting in through the window, and listened to the voice of the sun singing a song whose words were deeper in her than even Adam could reach.
The message of these excursions into her earliest life was clear: see what I am about to show you with the open eyes of a child. She emptied her mind even more and waited.
Drifting in like a dream, she saw the Earth from above. North America was wheeling slowly toward the sunset. But the coastlines were changed. Florida was just a narrow spike, half its usual size. The Caribbean was mostly featureless blue. The whole East Coast was submerged beneath a brown scar of filthy water. Then she saw numbers, and she realized that these were a series of dates, ranging from 2012 to 2077.
She sucked in breath. She now understood the cruise ship, the starving supermarket: Adam was warning her about a great catastrophe.
“Oh, Adam,” she said, “I’ll tell the colonel. I’ll be sure to tell him.”
He began shooting around like a rocket, slamming into the walls with hideous, crunching thuds.
“Adam!” She leaped up out of the chair, but he was whizzing now, racing so fast she could hear the bzzt of his passing but not see so much as a glimpse of gray skin or the gleam of one of his huge black eyes.
At that moment, without the slightest warning, thick smoke came pouring through every air-conditioning vent in
the room.
For an instant, she was frozen, her mind unable to take in what she was seeing.
The smoke roiled along the ceiling, and she saw that it was filled with glowing red streaks. The lights began flickering, grew dim.
“Adam,” she screamed, “we’ve got to get out!” In two strides she was across the room. She fumbled open the cover on the bail-out switch and hit it with the heel of her hand.
Sirens erupted, the facility went to emergency lighting, and the door to the lock slid open. “Adam,” she screamed, “Adam!”
The smoke came down like a curtain, turning everything inky dark. An instant later, the fire struck her head and neck with ferocious, terrifying heat. Covering her head, she dropped to the floor. “Adam! Come toward me, Adam, stay low!”
Nothing happened. There was bare visibility here, and it was hot and getting hotter. She could smell in the stink of the smoke the additional stench of her own singed hair. The next breath she took caused a reflex of a kind she didn’t know existed. The choking was a fearsome weight slammed down on her back, the gagging like some sort of spring unraveling in her throat.
She backed out through the airlock and into the control room. Here, meteors of plastic were dripping down from the ceiling.
She was sick with dread, she knew that she had lost Adam, but she also knew that she had to get out of this place fast or she would be burned to death. The elevator doors were open, but she would not dare to enter it. Feeling her way along, she came to the door of the emergency stair. She reached up into the heat and opened it. As she went through, smoke gushed in behind her, and she only just managed to get the door closed.
Crying and screaming, she opened it a crack, but there was nothing but smoke and now also flames licking into the shaft. “Adam! Adam! Adam!”
The door began to crackle, and heat hit her in the face even though she was low, and she had no choice but to slam it again.