Tom O'Bedlam

“I didn’t sleep. Fantastic stuff going on in my head all night.”

  “But are you well?”

  “The best I’ve ever been, Father. These visions. The things I’ve seen. I don’t know, I can’t stop—crying—crying from happiness—look, I’m doing it again—”

  “Let it happen,” said the priest. He was crying too, suddenly. “These are the great days, the days of the prophecy, when He brings every work into judgment. I was up all night too, do you know? Reading the Bible, that’s what I was doing.” The priest laughed. “You wouldn’t believe how long it has been, the Bible and me. But I read right through the night. The Revelation of Saint John, over and over. The Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed us, and shall lead us unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes. But first we must weep, if He is to wipe away our tears. Isn’t that right?”

  “I never was able to cry, Father. But now I can’t seem to stop.”

  “Go on. Cry all you like. This is the day when the seventh seal shall be opened, and the seven angels will sound the seven trumpets. Believe me, son. You aren’t Catholic, are you?”

  “Me? No.”

  “That makes no difference. I’ll bless you all the same when the time comes. How could I deny the blessing to anyone on this day?”

  “What’s going to happen today?” Ferguson said. He felt very easy, relaxed. He was just floating along.

  “The Omega and the Alpha,” said a voice from the other end of the hall. “The end and the beginning.”

  Ferguson felt new visions stream through his mind. Shining worlds sprang up and blazed in him. He was floating still.

  “Tom?”

  “This is the day when it begins,” Tom said, coming toward him. “The Time of the Crossing. I feel it within me, the strength, the power. Will you be the first to go, Ed?”

  “Me? Go?”

  “To make the Crossing.”

  Ferguson stared. “Where to?”

  “I think, to the Double Kingdom. They are willing to receive you. I can feel it, their willingness. Their two suns burn like fire in my heart today, the red and the blue.”

  Ferguson became aware that April was standing beside him, that Alleluia had appeared from somewhere and was at his elbow too. Indistinctly he said, “We’re supposed to go get breakfast right away, and then—the gym—”

  Tom’s eyes were fixed on his. “Accept the Crossing, Ed. Someone must be the first, and you are the chosen one. Open the way for the rest of us. Once the first Crossing is made, the next ones will be easier, and it will get easier and easier and easier. Will you? Now?”

  “You want me—to go to some other star—”

  “You will drop this body, yes. For a better one in a better place. This corruptible must put on incorruption. This mortal must put on incorruptibility. And death is swallowed up in victory.”

  Ferguson studied him uneasily. They were all crowding close about him now. “Wait a second,” he said. He wasn’t floating so much now. He felt heavier now. “I’m not sure. Ease off a little. I’m not sure. What all this means.”

  “No one will force you,” Tom said.

  “Just let me think. Let me think.”

  Tomás Menendez appeared. His face was radiant. “This is the day when Chungirá will come!”

  “Yes,” Tom said. “And Ed here, he’s going to be the first to make the Crossing into the stars. I know he will. He’ll go to the Double Kingdom.”

  “He will go to Chungirá,” Menendez said. “And that will be the signal; and then Chungirá will come to us. Yes. Yes, I know it.” Menendez seemed to be speaking out of a trance. “The Senhor is very close. I can feel him. Come, we will send Ferguson to Chungirá; and then I will go to the Senhor, I will welcome his coming. I will be Maguali-ga; I will be the opener of the gate.” He put his hand on Ferguson’s wrist. “You are ready, Ed? You will accept?”

  Ferguson shook his head slowly, trying to understand. He would drop the body. He would make the Crossing. He would go to some other planet. The first twitches and flickers of fear began to awaken in him. What were they trying to say? What did they want to do to him? He would die, right? That was what all this meant, this dropping the body. Yes? No? He didn’t understand any of this. For a moment all the old suspicions flared in him. They were trying to put something over on him, weren’t they? They wanted to use him. They wanted to hurt him.

  He said, “Am I going to die?”

  “Your life will only just be beginning,” Tom said.

  They surrounded him, moving in close, smiling, stroking him. April, Alleluia. Father Christie, Menendez, Tom. Telling him that they loved him, that they envied him, that they would follow him very soon. But he had to be the first. He was the one who was ready. Is that so? he wondered. Am I ready? How do they know?

  “Someone must be the first,” Tom said.

  “Let me think. Let me think.”

  “Let him think,” said Father Christie. “He mustn’t be pushed.”

  Ferguson sucked his breath in deep and hard down to the bottom of his lungs. Visions were starting to rise in him again. The Green World, gentle glistening glades. The world of light. All the worlds of the heavens shining in his mind. Vast beings walking to and fro. They wanted to send him there. They wanted him to be the first. He felt that cold knot of suspicions loosening, melting, draining away.

  He wasn’t interested in dying. But would it be dying if he made the Crossing? Would it? Would it?

  “Don’t say anything,” someone said. “Just let him work it out.”

  Hey, why not? Ferguson thought. Feeling lighter again. The floating sensation coming back.

  Do it, he thought. For once in your crappy life, do it. You be the one to go. Show them the way. Do it for them. Maybe even do it for yourself, who knows, but at least do it for them. For once in your life, just once. What do you have to lose? What’s so wonderful for you here on Earth that you want to stay? Do it, Ed. Do it. Do it.

  He blinked, shook his head, smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Go ahead. Send me. Wherever you want.”

  “Are you certain?” Tom said.

  Ferguson nodded. It surprised him, how calm he was. How completely willing, eager, unafraid, now. Father Christie, by his side, was murmuring in Latin. Praying for him? Probably. All right, let him pray. A little praying couldn’t hurt. Everything was going to be okay. He was smiling. He was totally at peace. He couldn’t remember ever having felt this way before.

  “Everyone join hands,” Tom said. His voice seemed to be coming from a vast distance. “Join hands, stand close around us, focus your minds. Help me help him to Cross, all of you. I can’t do it alone, but with your help we can manage it. And you, Ed. Put your hands in mine. The way you did yesterday in the forest. Put your hands in mine.”

  4

  ELSZABET left her office, went down the hall to the double door at the end and stepped through, out into the storm. It was about eight in the morning and everything seemed under control so far. She paused on the porch to check the little communications system she was wearing. “Lew?” she said. “Lew, can you hear me?” Transmitter and receiver and bone-induction speaker, the three units together smaller than a fingernail, taped just back of her right ear. Tiny microphone mounted along her cheek. Military equipment: if there was going to be a war today, she would have to be the general.

  Arcidiacono said, “I hear you clear, Elszabet.” It sounded as if he were standing right next to her.

  The rain was starting to get serious now. It was riding a stiff wind down from the north and pounding hard against the sides of the buildings in gusty cascades. Elszabet figured that was a bit of luck on their side. The marchers, the tumbondé people, were less likely to go wandering where they didn’t belong if it was raining, wasn’t that so? They’d stay inside their buses and vans and just keep right on going toward the North Pole, or wherever it was that their prophet was leading them.

  So she hoped, anyway. All the same, it seemed l
ike a good idea to get the energy walls up and keep them up until the marchers had gone through. Just in case a couple of hundred thousand strangers saw the Center sitting there at the edge of the woods looking warm and snug and decided to come in out of the wet for a while.

  She said to Arcidiacono, “What’s going on out there?”

  “All quiet. We’re still setting up the generators. You get any news from the county police about the tumbondés?”

  “Just talked to them. They say the marchers haven’t broken camp yet this morning.”

  “Where are they staying, do you know?”

  “Seems like they’re all over. There’s one main batch of them just outside Mendo but they spread far and wide, both sides of Highway One. Closest group maybe two-point-five kilometers south and west of us.”

  “Jesus,” said Arcidiacono. “Pretty close.”

  “You ready to handle it, if they start coming through in an hour or so?”

  “Whenever. We’ll be ready here. I’m not worrying.”

  “Okay,” Elszabet said. “If you’re not worried I’m not. Everything’s going to be okay, Lew. Sure you have enough people?”

  “For now,” the technician said. “Little later, once they get on the move, I’ll want more. So we can start shifting the equipment from place to place.”

  “We’ll all be out there by then. I’ll check back every fifteen minutes.”

  “Do that, yes,” Arcidiacono said.

  Elszabet gave the receiver a light tap, switching it over to B frequency, Dante Corelli in the gym fifty meters away. “It’s me, Elszabet,” she said. “Just testing. Everything okay there?”

  “Pretty much. Patients are straggling in from breakfast.”

  “They know what’s going on?”

  “More or less. I’ve told them the general outlines. Nobody’s particularly alarmed. Bill Waldstein gives each one a little shot of pax as they show up—we minimize it, we say it’s just to keep them relaxed, nothing to fret about. A lot of visions happening. Everybody here’s pretty spacy right now, Elszabet.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “I wonder, on account of the rain, do we really want to bring them out to the perimeter? We could just keep them all here, pax them out, couple of supervisory personnel—”

  “Let’s wait and see,” Elszabet said. “Maybe the whole thing’s going to be a false alarm anyway.”

  “You think so?”

  “That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

  “Listen,” Dante said, “I’m still missing a few of them. Maybe you ought to phone up to the mess hall and get them hustling across here, okay?”

  “Who’s not there yet?”

  “Well, April, Ed Ferguson, Father Christie. No, here comes Father Christie now. So it’s just April and Ed. Otherwise the whole crew’s in the gym.”

  “Tom there too?”

  “No. No, I don’t know where he is.”

  “We ought to know. If he turns up, call me.”

  “I will,” Dante said.

  “And I’ll check on the other missing ones. I’m talking to you from right outside the mess hall now anyway. If they’re in there I’ll have them over to you in five minutes or less.”

  Elszabet walked around to the mess hall side of the GHQ building and peered in. No one in sight except one of the kids from town who cleaned up the dirty trays and swept the floor. “I’m looking for a couple of patients,” she said. “April Cranshaw? Big round plump woman, about thirty years old? And Mr. Ferguson? You know which one he is?”

  The boy nodded. “Sure, I know them, Dr. Lewis. I don’t think either one came in for breakfast today.”

  “No?”

  “That April, she’s hard to miss, you know.”

  Elszabet smiled. “I’d like to find them. If they wander in while you’re still here, will you call over to the gym, tell Dante Corelli? Then send them over there.”

  “Sure thing, Dr. Lewis.”

  “And have you seen Tom? You know, the new one, the one with the peculiar eyes?”

  “Tom, yeah. He hasn’t been here this morning either.”

  “Strange. Tom’s someone who hates to miss a meal. Well, same thing there. If you see him, call Dante.”

  “Right, Dr. Lewis.”

  Elszabet went outside again. She felt curiously peaceful, an eye-of-the-hurricane kind of feeling. First thing, she thought, head over to the dorm, see if maybe April was still in bed, or Ferguson. Morning like this, they might just have decided not to get up, especially since there had been no pick-call today.

  The rain whipped at her face. Nastier and nastier, almost like a real midwinter storm. The ground was soaking everything up, it was so dry after five straight months of fair weather, but if the stuff continued to come down like this they’d be sloshing around in mud by tonight. In the summer months you tended to forget, she thought, how messy the rainy season could be.

  First find April and Ferguson, yes. Then track down Tom. And then she’d have to get herself out toward the front gate to see how Lew Arcidiacono was coming along with the energy-wall installation. After that it would just be a matter of waiting out the day, doing what she could to make sure that the marchers from San Diego went around the Center instead of straight through it. The marchers were a problem she didn’t really need at this time, a stupid extraneous distraction. She knew that Tom was the big event that she should be dealing with right now, Tom and his visions, his almost magical powers, Tom and his galactic worlds—the worlds that she understood now, thanks to the Starprobe cameras, to be the real thing, actual authentic inhabited planets that were sending beckoning images of themselves through the strange mind of this one man of Earth—

  As if on cue something tickled at the corners of Elszabet’s mind. Eerie light began to glow behind her eyes. No, she thought furiously. Not now. For God’s sake, not now.

  Everything she saw was casting twin shadows, one outlined in yellow, one in reddish orange. In the sky a pale pink nebula sprawled like some great octopus across the horizon. And creatures moving around, spherical, blue-skinned, clusters of tentacles wiggling on their heads. She recognized that landscape, those stars, those spherical beings. Double Star Three was drifting into her mind. Right this minute, out here in the driving rain, as she walked from the mess hall toward the dorms, she was sliding away into that other world.

  No, she thought. No. No. No.

  She staggered a couple of steps, went lurching into a big rhododendron in the middle of the lawn, grabbed a couple of its branches and held on tight, dizzy, swaying, fighting the vision back. This is a rhododendron bush, she told herself. This is a rainy morning in October, 2103. This is Mendocino County, California, planet Earth. I am Elszabet Lewis and I am a human being native to planet Earth and I need to have all my wits about me today.

  A rasping voice behind her said, “You all right, lady? You need some help?”

  She swung around, startled, disoriented. Double Star Three shattered into fragments and fell away from her, and she found herself facing three strangers. Rough-looking types, nasty-looking. One with a thick black beard and deep-set eyes almost buried in black rings, one with a lean face scarred all over with the deep craters of some skin disease, and one, short and ugly with a wild thatch of red hair, who seemed even meaner than the other two.

  Elszabet faced them and, as coolly as she could, brushed her hand against her hair, switching the transmitter on. It should still be tuned to B frequency. Dante Corelli would be picking it up right over there in the gym.

  “Who are you?” she said. “What are you doing here?”

  “You don’t need to be scared, ma’am,” said the one with the scarred face. “We don’t mean no harm. We thought you was sick or something, hanging there on that bush.”

  “I asked you who you were,” she said, a little more crisply. It annoyed her that the scar-faced man thought she was frightened, even though it was true. “I asked you what you were doing here.”

  “Well, we
—we—” the one with the scars began.

  “Shut up, Buffalo,” the one with the black beard said. Then to Elszabet: “We were just passing through. Trying to find a friend who seems to have strayed in here.”

  “A friend?”

  “Man named Tom, maybe you know him. Tall, skinny, a little strange-looking—”

  “I know who you mean, yes. Do you know that you’re on private property, Mr.—Mr.—”

  “I’m Charley.”

  “Charley. You’re with the tumbondé march, is that it?”

  “You mean the San Diego mob? All those crazies? Hey, no, not us. We’re just traveling through. We thought maybe we could find our friend Tom, take him with us, move along before the crazies hit. You know how many they got out there, just down the road?”

  Elszabet could see Dante now emerging from the gym, two or three others with her. They were keeping back, watching cautiously, listening in on Elszabet’s conversation with the three strangers. Elszabet said, “Your friend Tom’s not around right now. And in any case I don’t think he plans to go anywhere. What I suggest you do is take yourselves off our grounds right away, for your own good, okay? As you say, there’s quite a mob just down the road, and if they break in here I can’t be responsible for your safety. Besides which, you happen to be trespassing.”

  “You just let us talk to Tom a minute, then we—”

  “No.”

  Dante was gesturing as if to say, Give me a signal, I’ll knock them out. Dante was terrific with the anesthetic-dart gun at almost any range up to a hundred meters. But Elszabet wasn’t so sure. Certainly these three were armed: knives, spikes, maybe guns. That looked like a laser bracelet on the black-bearded man’s wrist. If Dante opened fire, one of them might have time to fire back and it wouldn’t be anesthetic pellets he’d be firing.

  The red-haired one said, “Charley, look behind us.”

  “What’s back there, Stidge?”

  “Couple people. Watching us.”

  Charley nodded. Very carefully he turned and looked.

  “What you want to do?” Stidge asked. “Grab this one, make her help us find Tom?”