Nor, as he came closer and she saw him more clearly, could she be sure he was a man. Manlike, yes, but not entirely human and not heavenly. For one thing, he was black.
Disturbed, she slowed her climb and finally stopped, standing on the stairs and staring up at the one who was descending toward her. His ears were high and pointed and his face was narrow, like a fox’s. The lips were thin and the mouth was wide. His eyes were slanted and they were yellow, like a cat’s eyes, with no white showing in them. He was so black that he shone like a polished shoe.
What his body might be like or what he wore, she never even noticed. She was so fascinated, so hypnotized, so repelled by the face that she noticed nothing else.
He stood two steps above her. He raised a hand and shook a finger at her, as a parent or a teacher might shake a finger in rebuke. His voice thundered.
“Naughty!” he shouted at her. “Naughty! Naughty! Naughty!”
She turned about and fled, running down the stairs, with that single word hammering in her brain. She tripped and fell and rolled. She tried to stop herself, to recover her balance, but there was no way to recover from the fall. She kept rolling, bouncing on the steps, end-over-end and spinning.
And then she was no longer falling and she sat up dazedly. She had reached the bottom and was sitting on the road that came up to the stairs. The mist had cleared and she saw the rabble, packed tight on either side of the road, but not encroaching on it, as if there might be an invisible fence that held them off. They were jam-packed on either side of the road and they were laughing at her, hooting at her, jeering at her, making obscene gestures at her.
She scrambled to her feet and turned to face the stairs. The one who had come to meet her was standing on the bottom step. He still was shaking a finger at her and shouting.
“Naughty! Naughty! Naughty!”
Chapter Twenty-five
Jill had gone to the library; Hubert had left an hour or so before, off on some errand of his own. Tennyson sat in front of the fireplace, fascinated by the flame. In just a little while he was due at the clinic, although more than likely there’d not be much to do there. Vatican and End of Nothing humans seemed to be an unnaturally healthy lot. Except for Mary, he had tended no serious illnesses since he had been there. Minor complaints—a few common colds, an ulcerated tooth, a couple of backaches, occasional upset stomachs, one sprained ankle, and that had been all.
And now Mary was off to Heaven for the second time. He wondered idly what possibly could have happened to make her decide to try it once again. The last word he had had was that she had been unalterably opposed to returning there. And what, he wondered, would she find there—a renewed conviction that she really had found Heaven, or would she return with doubt? It could not be Heaven, he told himself; the whole idea was ridiculous, akin to the psychotically induced visions and revelations that filled the history of Earth’s medieval age.
He slumped lower on the couch, staring at the fire. In just a short time, he reminded himself sharply, he’d have to get out of here and walk down to the clinic. There might be people waiting.
He felt an uneasiness, thinking it. And why, he wondered, should he be uneasy thinking of the people who might be waiting at the clinic? He hauled himself to a normal sitting position and craned his neck to look around the room. There was no one there and that was not strange, for he had known that there was no one there. He was alone and yet, quite suddenly, he was positive that he was not alone.
He rose to his feet and whirled around, his back to the fire so that he could examine the other side of the room, seeking out the shape that was lurking there. There was no one, nothing, lurking. He was sure of that. Still the uneasiness refused to go away. There was no reassurance in the emptiness of the room. There was, he was certain, something there, someone or something in the room with him.
He forced himself to speak, croaking rather than actually speaking. “Who is there?”
As if in answer to the question, he saw it in one corner, next to the spindly gilded chair that stood beside the table with the marble top—the faint glint of drifting diamond dust.
“So it’s you,” he said, and as he spoke the glitter disappeared and there was nothing beside the gilded chair. Yet he still felt its presence. The glitter was gone, but the thing that glittered had not gone away.
Questions surged inside him, howling to get out. Who are you? What are you? Why are you here? But he did not voice them. He stood quite frozen, not moving from where he stood, still staring at the corner where he had seen the glitter.
Something spoke inside of him.
—I am here, it said. I am here inside of you. I am in your mind. Do you wish that I should leave?
It was a gentle voice (if it was a voice). Gentle and gentlemanly. He could not move a muscle. Terror—and yet it wasn’t terror—held him in its grip. He struggled to speak, struggled to think, and yet there was no word or thought. His mind was frozen with his body.
—Do you wish that I should leave?
Words came to Tennyson.
—No, he said, not speaking aloud, but only in his mind. No, don’t leave, but please explain yourself. You belong to Decker. Do you bring me word from Decker?
—I do not belong to Decker. I belong to no one. I am a free agent and I am Decker’s friend. That is all I am. I can talk with him, but I cannot be a part of him.
—You can be a part of me. Why can you be a part of me and not a part of Decker?
—I am Whisperer. That is what Decker calls me. It serves as well as any name.
—You did not answer my question, Whisperer. Why can you be a part of me and not a part of Decker?
—I am Decker’s friend. He is the only friend I have. I tested him long and hard to be sure he was a friend. I have tried with others and they might have been friends as well, but they did not hear me, did not recognize me. They did not know I was there.
—And now?
—I tried with Decker, but there was no getting inside of him. Talk with him, yes, but no getting in his mind. On that first day, I felt you might be the one.
—And now you’ll desert Decker? Whisperer, you can’t do that to him. I will not do that to him. I will not steal his friend.
—I will not desert him. But can I be with you?
—You mean you’ll not insist?
—No, not insist. You say go, I go. You say stay away, I’ll stay away. But, please!
This, thought Tennyson, this is all insane. It is not happening. I must be imagining it. There is no such thing.
The door burst open and Ecuyer stood within it.
“Jason,” he shouted, “you must come with me. You must come immediately.”
“Why, of course,” said Tennyson. “What is the trouble?”
“Mary is back from Heaven,” said Ecuyer, “and she’s a basket case.”
Chapter Twenty-six
Again, Decker relived the moment. For years he had not thought of it, but now, ever since he had gone back to the boat, he had thought of it often, running the filmstrip of memory through again, with the old and faded recollection becoming the sharper with each rerunning.
He reached out and touched the metal box that stood upon the desk, the box he’d brought back from the lifeboat. It would all be there, he thought, in the records that the ship had made. But he flinched away from opening it and getting at the records. Perhaps, he told himself, he should have left them in the boat, where they had rested for twelve years, virtually forgotten.
Why was it, he wondered, that he hesitated to listen to the records? Was it that he feared the terror would be there? Could the ship have recorded the terror? Could it still lie there, as fresh and raw as it had been that day so many years before? He crinkled up his face in an effort at concentration. He had known that ship, had sailed it for years, had known every twist and turn of it, had loved it, been proud of it, talked to it in the lonely hours in the depths of space. At times, or so it seemed, the ship had talked back to him.
There was about it only one thing of which he had not been certain, and that was the true capabilities of the recordings that it made. That they had been detailed and clear, that they had missed nothing of significance, of that he was very certain. They recorded locations and distances, pegged coordinates within a small fraction of their value, pinpointed temperatures, pressures, chemical components, gravitational values, sniffed out life if life was present, sought out nonapparent dangers. But emotions—could they peg emotions? Could they have put on record that overwhelming terror that had driven his tough and seasoned crew in a mad frenzy for the lifeboats?
He sat at the desk, his fingers still touching the metal of the box, and closed his eyes the better to remember, seeking out, for the tenth time or more in the last few days, that one elusive thing that had escaped his memory.
They had been heading toward the deeper recesses of the Coonskin system when the warp had seized them. Strange thing, he thought—he’d always considered it to be a warp, that storied, unexplained rift in the space-time continuum that was little more than legend, a rift that had hurled the ship into another time and/or space. There were rich, tall tales told of such happenings in every bar of every frontier planet, but the fact of their telling by the ones who told them, swearing solemnly and often to the veracity of the tales, did little to confirm the existence of the warps, or even the most remote possibility of them.
But warp or not, something violent had happened to the ship. Seemingly, as was always the case in FTL flight, the ship had been hanging in black nothingness, with no semblance of motion, when it had staggered, lurching and careening through whatever limbo of foreverness in which it had been situated. Decker remembered that he had been standing alone before one of the forward vision ports, staring out into the featureless emptiness outside the ship, fascinated, as he always had been, by the utter lack of any aspect that might be used to characterize it. It was black and it was empty and that was all it was. The blackness, however, failed in being actually black; it was black because there was nothing there, and empty not with any sense of deprivation, but by the fact also of there being nothing there, not an emptiness achieved by taking away what had been there, but empty because there never had been anything—and, more than likely, never would be anything. Many times he had wondered what it was that attracted him to this desolate and barren blankness and never, in all his wondering, had he ever arrived at any hint of its attraction for him.
Under his feet, the deck had heaved and thrown him sprawling. He had hit the deck and skidded, his direction changing as the ship yawed and tumbled. He had sought to stabilize himself, had clutched at stationary objects, missing some, his fingers sliding off those few that he could grasp. He had banged against something solid and bounced off it. And, suddenly, he had hit his head a glancing blow on some hard and solid object and the world was filled with shooting stars.
He may have been knocked out for a time, of that he never had been sure. He had thought back on it many times and never could be sure.
The next thing he recalled was trying to pull himself erect, trying to climb one of the pilot chairs set before the navigation panels. His head buzzed and there was far-off screaming—the full-throated screams of frightened men, the raw, uninhibited howling of men so terrorized that they had lost control.
The damn fools, he had thought—what is the matter with them? But even as he wondered it, he knew what was the matter with them. The terror struck him straight between the eyes. It filled the ship to a point of suffocation and it hammered at him as if it were physical rather than emotional. Somewhere, the words booming but muffled by the terror, a great voice was shouting, but he could not make out the words.
The ship no longer bucked and heaved. He clung to the chair to keep himself from falling. When he tried to stand, his legs buckled under him. He glanced at the vision ports and saw that the black emptiness was gone; the ship was back in normal space.
The terror came in waves, buffeting him, striking him as an opponent might strike him with knotted fists. His stomach churned. Still clinging to the chair, he bent over, retching, trying to vomit but unable to.
Sheer terror. Nothing visible to indicate where the terror might be coming from; nothing to show why it should be visited upon him. Pure essence of terror without reason and all the time that background, booming voice shouting at him—at him personally, not at someone else or others, but centered on him personally. Intermingled with the booming voice, between the cracks of the booming voice, he could still hear the far and increasingly farther off howling of the crew, fleeing the terror, leaving him behind. He heard a thud and then another thud and knew that the thuds were the sounds of lifeboats launching.
By now he was on his feet and his legs seemed more sturdy under him. He put a hand to his head and felt the hank of sopping hair pasted against his skull. His hand came back red and dripping. He pushed away from the chair, aiming himself at the nearest vision port. Reeling across the deck, he reached the hull and clutched at it with his fingers, his face almost touching the hard crystal of the port.
Beneath the ship lay a planetary surface and it was far too close. Roads, thin from the distance that he viewed them, converged like the spokes of a wheel upon a central hub that lay just ahead of him. The ship, he knew, was in a tight orbit and closing fast. It was only a few minutes, more than likely, from crashing. Had it not been for the waves of terror that still came crashing in upon him, he would have heard, he knew, the thin, shrill whistle of the craft cutting into atmosphere.
His body was trying to shrivel, to sink in upon itself, drawing in and withering as a fallen apple, lying in the grass, would wither through a winter. He clutched tighter at the metal hull, although there was nothing he could clutch, but nevertheless he continued, insanely trying to sink his fingers into the very metal. Staring down and ahead, he saw more clearly now the hub upon which the roads converged. The hub was a height, a pyramid, an upthrust of rock that soared above the flatness of the surrounding countryside. The roads, he saw, did not terminate at the base of the great rock upthrust, but climbed the slope, arrowing upward toward the center of the hub.
For an instant only he saw the center of the hub, a sudden upheaval of spearlike structures that seemed to be reaching up as if to grasp him and impale him. And as he saw the center of the hub, he knew instinctively the source of the terror that was beating in upon him. With a cry wrenched from his throat, he reeled back from the port and for an instant stood cringing, undecided. Then years of training spoke to him subconsciously and he wheeled about to rush to the instrument panel. His hand reached out to seize the flight recorder. He jerked it free and, tucking it underneath his arm, turned and ran.
He had heard only two thuds, he remembered, and if that was correct, there was still a lifeboat left. Sweat broke out and ran down his body at the thought that he might have missed a thud and all the boats were gone.
His memory had not played him false. There had been only two thuds. The third boat was still in place.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Mary struggled to sit up.
“They threw me out,” she cried. “They threw me out of Heaven!”
The struggle ceased and she fell back onto the pillow. Fine-spun, foamy spittle clung and bubbled at the corners of her mouth. Her eyes stared wildly, with the look of seeing nothing.
The nurse handed Tennyson the syringe, and he jabbed the needle into Mary’s arm, pushed the plunger slowly home. He handed the syringe back to the nurse.
Mary lifted a hand and clawed feebly at the air. She mumbled and after a time words came from the mumble. “Big and black. He shook a finger at me.”
Her head sank back more tightly on the pillow. The lids came down across the manic eyes. She tried to lift a hand, fingers flexed for clawing, but then the hand fell down onto the sheet and the fingers lost their hooklike attitude.
Tennyson looked across the bed at Ecuyer. “Tell me what happened. Exactly how it happen
ed.”
“She came out of the experience,” said Ecuyer. “I know that’s an awkward way to say it, but the only way that fits—she came out of the experience raving. I think raving with fright.…”
“Does this happen sometimes? Does it happen to other Listeners?”
“At times,” said Ecuyer. “Not often. Very seldom, in fact. Sometimes they do come back upset from a particularly bad scene, but ordinarily it’s only surface fright, superficial fright. They realize the experience no longer obtains, that they are safely home and there’s nothing now to harm them—there never was anything to harm them. In particularly bad instances, an experience may leave a mark upon them. They may dream about it. But the effect is transitory; in a short time it goes away. I have never seen anything as bad as this. Mary’s reaction is the worst I have ever seen.”
“She’ll be all right now,” said Tennyson. “The sedation is fairly heavy. She won’t come out of it for several hours, and when she does, she should be fairly woozy. Her sensory centers will be dulled. Even if she remembers, the impact of her memory should not be violent. After that, we’ll see.”
“She still thinks that she found Heaven,” said Ecuyer. “Even thrown out, she still thinks it’s Heaven. That’s what hit her so hard. You can imagine the emotional repercussions. To find Heaven and then be thrown out.”
“Did she say more? I mean earlier. More than she said just now.”
Ecuyer shook his head. “A few details, is all. There was this man—black and huge. He threw her down the stairs. Down the Golden Stairs. She rolled all the way to the bottom. She is convinced she is black and blue from bruises.”
“There’s not a mark upon her.”
“Of course not, but she thinks there is. This experience, Jason, was very real to her. Vivid in its cruelty and rejection.”