gone and night all there, he gave up. He got off his bed and got ready for supper, hoping maybe the Bad Thing was gone away and never coming back, hoping Julie was safe forever now, and hoping there was chocolate cake for dessert.
BOBBY CHARGED across the floor of the diamond-strewn crater, kicking at the bugs in his way. As he ran he told himself that his eyes had deceived him and that his mind was playing nasty tricks, that Frank had not actually teleported out of there without him. But when he arrived at the spot where Frank had been, he found only a couple of footprints in the powdery soil.
A shadow fell across him, and he looked up as the alien craft drifted in blimplike silence over the crater, coming to a full stop directly above him, still about five hundred feet overhead. It was nothing like starships in the movies, neither organic looking nor a flying chandelier. It was lozenge shaped, at least five hundred feet long, and perhaps two hundred feet in diameter. Immense. On the ends, sides, and top, it bristled with hundreds if not thousands of pointed black metal spines, big as church spires, which made it look a little like a mechanical porcupine in a permanent defensive posture. The underside, which Bobby could see best of all, was smooth, black, and featureless, lacking not only the massive spines but markings, remote sensors, portholes, airlocks, and all the other apparatus one might expect.
Bobby did not know if the ship’s repositioning was coincidental or whether he was under observation. If he was being watched, he didn’t want to think about the nature of the creatures that might be peering down at him, and he sure as hell didn’t want to consider what their intentions toward him might be. For every movie that featured an adorable alien with the power to turn kids’ bicycles into airborne vehicles, there were ten others in which the aliens were ravenous flesh eaters with dispositions so vicious as to make any New York head-waiter think twice about being rude, and Bobby was certain that this was one thing Hollywood had gotten right. It was a hostile universe out there, and dealing with his fellow human beings was scary enough for him; he didn’t need to make contact with a whole new race that had devised countless new cruelties of its own.
Besides, his capacity for terror was already filled to the brim, running over; he could contain no more. He was abandoned on a distant world, where the air—he began to suspect—might contain only enough oxygen and other required gases to keep him alive for a short while, insects the size of kittens were crawling all around him, and there was a possibility that a much smaller dead insect was actually fused with the tissue of one of his internal organs, and a psychotic blond giant with superhuman powers and a taste for blood was on his trail—and the odds were billions to one that he would ever see Julie again, or kiss her, or touch her, or see her smile.
A series of tremendous, throbbing vibrations issued from the ship and shook the ground around Bobby. His teeth chattered, and he nearly fell.
He looked for somewhere to hide. There was nothing in the crater to afford concealment, and nowhere to run on the flat plain beyond.
The vibrations stopped.
Even in the deep shadow thrown by the ship, Bobby saw a horde of identical insects begin to scuttle out of the boreholes in the crater walls, one after the other. They had been called forth.
Though no apparent openings appeared in the belly of the ship, a score or more of low-energy lasers—some yellow, some white, some blue, some red—began to play over the floor of the crater. Each beam was the diameter of a silver dollar, and each moved independently of the others. Like spotlights, they repeatedly swept the crater and everything in it, sometimes moving parallel to one another, sometimes crisscrossing one another, in a display that further disoriented Bobby and gave him the feeling that he was caught in the middle of a silent fireworks show.
He remembered what Manfred and Gavenall had told him about the crimson decorations along the rim of the bug’s shell, and he saw that the white lasers were focusing only on the insects, busily scanning the markings around each carapace. Their owners were taking roll call. He saw a white beam fidget over the broken corpus of one of the bugs he had kicked, and after a moment a red beam joined it to study the carcass. Then the red beam jumped to Bobby, and a couple of other beams of different hue also found him, as if he was a can of peas being identified and added to someone’s grocery bill at a supermarket checkout.
The floor of the crater was teeming with insects now, so many that Bobby could see neither the gray soil nor the litter of excreted diamonds over which they clambered. He told himself that they were not really bugs; they were just biological machines, engineered by the same race that had built the ship hanging over him. But that didn’t help much because they still looked more like bugs than like machines. They had been designed to mine diamonds; they were not attracted to him whatsoever; but their disinterest did not make him feel better, because his phobia guaranteed that he was interested in them. His shadow-chilled skin prickled with gooseflesh. Short-circuiting nerve endings sputtered with false reports of things crawling on him, so he felt as if bugs swarmed over him from head to foot. They were actually creeping over his shoes, but none of them tried to scurry up his legs; he was grateful, because he was sure he would go mad if they began to climb him.
He used his hand as a visor over his eyes, to avoid being dazzled by the lasers that were playing on him. He saw something gleaming in the scanner beams only a few feet away: a curved section of what appeared to be hollow steel tubing. It was sticking out of the powdery soil, partly buried, further concealed by the bugs that scurried and jittered around it. Nevertheless, at first sight Bobby knew what it was, and he was overcome with a horrible sinking feeling. He shuffled forward, trying not to crush any of the insects because, for all he knew, the alien penalty for the additional destruction of property might be instant incineration. When he could reach the glinting curve of metal, he seized it and pulled it loose of the soft earth. It was the missing railing from the hospital bed.
“How LONG?” Julie demanded.
“Twenty-one minutes,” Clint said.
They still stood near the chair where Frank had been sitting and beside which Bobby had been stooping.
Lee Chen had gotten off the sofa, so Jackie Jaxx could lie down. The magician-hypnotist had draped a damp washcloth over his forehead. Every couple of minutes he protested that he could not really make people disappear, though no one had accused him of being responsible for what had happened to Frank and Bobby.
Having retrieved a bottle of Scotch, glasses, and ice from the office wet bar, Lee Chen was pouring six stiff drinks, one for each person in the room, as well as for Frank and Bobby. “If you don’t need a drink to steady your nerves now,” Lee had said, “you’ll need one to celebrate when they come back safe.” He had already downed one Scotch himself. The drink he poured now would be his second. This was the first time in his life he had drunk hard liquor—or needed it.
“How long?” Julie demanded.
“Twenty-two minutes,” Clint said.
And I’m still sane, she thought wonderingly. Bobby, damn you, come back to me. Don’t you leave me alone forever. How am I going to dance alone? How am I going to live alone? How am I going to live?
BOBBY DROPPED the bed railing, and the lasers winked off, leaving him in the shadow of the spiny ship, which seemed darker than before the beams appeared. As he looked up to see what would happen next, another light issued from the underside of the craft, too pale to make him squint. This one was precisely the diameter of the crater. In that queer, pearly glow, the insects began to rise off the ground, as if they were weightless. At first only ten or twenty floated upward, but then twenty more and a hundred after that, rising as lazily and effortlessly as so many bits of dandelion fluff, turning slowly, their tarantula legs motionless, the eerie light gone out of their eyes, as if they had been switched off. In a minute or two, the floor of the crater was depopulated of insects, and the horde was being drawn up effortlessly in that sepulchral silence that accompanied all of the craft’s maneuvers except for
the base vibrations that had called the insect miners from their bores.
Then the silence was broken by a flutelike warble.
“Frank!” Bobby cried in relief, and turned as a gust of vile-smelling wind washed over him.
As the cold, hollow piping echoed across the crater again, there was a subtle change in the hue of the light that issued from the ship above. Now the thousands of red diamonds rose from the ash-gray soil in which they lay and followed the insects upward, gleaming dully here and brightly there, so many of them that it seemed as if Bobby was standing in a rain of blood.
Another whirl of evil-scented wind cast up a cloud of the ashy soil, reducing visibility, and Bobby turned in eager expectation of Frank’s arrival. Until he remembered that it might not be Frank but the brother.
The piping came a third time, and the subsequent puff of wind carried the dust away from him, so he saw Frank arrive less than ten feet from him.
“Thank God!”
As Bobby stepped forward, the pearly light underwent a second subtle change. Reaching for Frank’s hand, he felt himself become weightless. When he looked down he saw his feet drift off the floor of the crater.
Frank grabbed at his outstretched hand and seized it.
Nothing had ever felt better to Bobby than Frank’s firm grip, and for a moment he felt safe. Then he became aware that Frank had risen from the ground too. They were both being drawn upward in the wake of the insects and diamonds, toward the belly of the alien vessel, toward God-only-knew what nightmare inside.
Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
They were on Punaluu beach again, and the rain was coming down harder than before.
“Where the hell was that last place?” Bobby demanded, still holding fast to his client.
“I don’t know,” Frank said. “It scares the hell out of me, it’s so weird, but sometimes I seem to be ... drawn there.”
He hated Frank for having taken him there; he loved Frank for having returned for him. When he shouted above the rain, neither love nor hate was in his voice, just borderline hysteria: “I thought you could only travel to places you’ve been?”
“Not necessarily. Anyway, I’ve been there before.”
“But how did you get there the first time, it’s another world, it can’t have been familiar to you-right, Frank?”
“I don’t know. I just don’t understand any of it, Bobby.”
Though face to face with Frank, Bobby took a while to notice how much the man’s appearance had deteriorated since they had teleported from the Dakota & Dakota offices in Newport Beach. Although the storm once more had soaked him to the skin in seconds and left his clothes hanging on him shapelessly, it wasn’t just the rain that made him look disheveled, beaten, and sickly. His eyes were more sunken than ever; the whites of them were yellow, as if he had contracted jaundice, and the flesh around them was so darkly bruised that he appeared to have painted a pair of fake shiners on himself with black shoe polish. His skin was paler than pale, a deathly gray, and his lips were bluish, as though his circulatory system was failing. Bobby felt guilty about having shouted at him, so he put his free hand on Frank’s shoulder and told him he was sorry, that it was all right, that they were still fighting on the same side of this war, and that everything would turn out just fine—as long as Frank didn’t take them back to that crater.
Frank said, “Sometimes it’s like I’m almost in touch with ... with the minds of those people, creatures, whatever they are in that ship.” They were leaning on each other now, forehead to forehead, seeking mutual support in their exhaustion. “Maybe I’ve got another gift I’m not aware of, like for most of my life I wasn’t aware of being able to teleport until Candy backed me into a corner and tried to kill me. Maybe I’m mildly telepathic. Maybe the wavelength my telepathy functions on is the major wavelength of that race’s brain activity. Maybe I feel them out there, even across billions of light-years of space. Maybe that’s why I feel as if I’m being drawn to them, called to them.”
Pulling back a few inches from Frank, Bobby looked into his tortured eyes for a long moment. Then he smiled and pinched Frank’s cheek, and said, “You devil, you’ve really done a lot of thinking about this, haven’t you, really put the old noodle to work on it, huh?”
Frank smiled.
Bobby laughed.
Then they were both laughing, holding each other up by leaning into each other, the way teepee poles held one another up, and a part of their laugh was healthy, a release of tension, but part of it was that mad laughter that had troubled Bobby earlier. Clinging to his client, he said, “Frank, your life is chaos, you’re living in chaos, and you can’t go on like this. It’s going to destroy you.”
“I know.”
“You’ve got to find a way to stop it.”
“There is no way.”
“You’ve got to try, buddy, you’ve got to try. Nobody can handle this. I couldn’t live like this for one day, and you’ve done it for seven years!”
“No. It wasn’t this bad most of that time. It’s just lately, the last few months, it’s accelerated.”
“A few months,” Bobby said wonderingly. “Hell, if we don’t give your brother the slip soon and get back to the office and step off this merry-go-ground in the next few minutes, I swear to God I’m going to crack. Frank, I need order, order and stability, familiarity. I need to know that what I do today will determine where I am and who I am and what I have to show for it tomorrow. Nice orderly progression, Frank, cause and effect, logic and reason.”
Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
“HOW LONG?”
“Twenty-seven ... almost twenty-eight minutes.”
“Where the hell are they?”
“Julie,” Clint said, “I think you ought to sit down. You’re shaking like a leaf, your color’s not good.”
“I’m all right.”
Lee Chen handed her a glass of Scotch. “Have a drink.”
“No.”
“It might help,” Clint said.
She grabbed the glass from Lee, drained it in a couple of long swallows, and shoved it back into his hand.
“I’ll get you another,” he said.
“Thanks.”
From the sofa, Jackie Jaxx said, “Listen, is anyone going to sue me over this?”
Julie no longer sort of liked the hypnotist. She loathed him as much as she had loathed him when they had first met him in Vegas and taken on his case. She wanted to go kick his head in. Though she knew the urge to kick him was irrational, that he really had not been the cause of Bobby’s disappearance, she wanted to kick him anyway. That was the impulsive side of her, the quick-to-anger side of which she was not proud. But she couldn’t always control it, because it was part of her genetic makeup or, as Bobby suspected, a predilection to violent response that had begun to form in her on the day, in her childhood, when a drug-crazed sociopath had brutally killed her mother. Either way, she knew Bobby was sometimes dismayed by that dark side of her, much as he loved everything else, so she made a bargain with both Bobby and God: Listen, Bobby, wherever you are—and you listen, too, God—if this just ends well, if I can just have my Bobby back with me, I won’t be this way any more, I won’t want to kick in Jackie’s head any more, or anyone else’s head, either, I’ll turn over a new leaf, I swear I will, just let Bobby come back to me safe and sound.
THEY WERE on a beach again, but this one had white sand that was slightly phosphorescent in the early darkness. The strand disappeared into a medium-thick fog in both directions. No rain was falling, and the air was not as warm as it had been at Punaluu.
Bobby shivered in the chill, moist air. “Where are we?”
“I’m not sure,” Frank said, “but I think we’re probably on the Monterey Peninsula somewhere.” A car passed on a highway a hundred yards behind them. “That’s probably Seventeen-Mile Drive. You know it? The road from Carmel through Pebble Beach—”
r /> “I know it.”
“I love the peninsula, Big Sur to the south,” Frank said. “It’s another one of the places I was happy ... for a while.”
Their voices were strangely muffled by the mist. Bobby liked the solid ground beneath his feet, and the thought that he was not only on his own planet but in his own country and in his own state; but he would have preferred a place with more concrete details, where fog did not obscure the landscape. The white blindness of fog was another form of chaos, and he had had more than enough disorder to last him for the rest of his life.
Frank said, “Oh, and by the way, back there in Hawaii a minute ago, you were worried about giving Candy the slip, but you don’t need to be concerned. We lost him several stops ago in Kyoto, or maybe on the slopes of Mount Fuji.”
“For God’s sake, if we don’t have to worry about leading him back to the office, let’s go home.”
“Bobby, I don’t have—”
“Any control. Yeah, I know, I heard, it’s no big secret. But I’ll tell you something—you’ve got control on some level, way down deep in the subconscious, more control than you think you have.”
“No. I—”
“Yes. Because you came back to that crater for me,” Bobby said. “You told me you hate the place, that it’s more frightening than anywhere you’ve ever been, but you came back and got me. You didn’t leave me there with the bed railing.”
“Pure chance that I came back.”
“I don’t think so.”
Darkness.
Fireflies.
Velocity.
THEY MADE the soft, pretty bing-bong signal come out of the wall, because that was how they told all the people in The Home it was just ten minutes before supper was going to be eaten.
Derek was already out the door by the time Thomas got up from his chair. Derek liked food. Everyone liked food, of course. But Derek liked food enough for three people.
Thomas got to the doorway, and Derek was already down the hall, walking fast in that funny way he did, almost to The Dining Room. Thomas looked back at the window.
Night was at the window.
He didn’t like seeing night at the window, which was why he usually kept the drapes closed after the light went out of the world. But after he got himself ready for supper, he had tried to find the Bad Thing out there, and it helped a little to see the night when he was trying to send a mind-string into it.
The Bad Thing was still so far away it couldn’t be felt. But he wanted to try once more before going to eat food and Be Sociable. He reached out through the window, up into the big dark, spinning the mind-string toward where the Bad Thing used to be—and it was back. He felt it right away, knew it felt him, too, and he remembered the green toad eating the bouncy yellow flutterby, and he pulled back into his room faster than a toad tongue could snap out and catch him.
He didn’t know if he should be happy or scared that it was back. When it was gone away, Thomas was happy, because maybe it was going to be gone away a long time, but he was also a little scared because when it was gone away, he didn’t know exactly where it was.
It was back.
He waited in the doorway a while.
Then he went to eat food. There was roast chicken. There was frenched fries. There was carrots and peas. There was coleslaw. There was Homemade bread, and people said there was going to be some chocolate cake and ice cream for dessert, though the people that said it was dumb people, so you couldn’t be sure. It all looked good, and it smelled good, and it even tasted good. But Thomas kept thinking about how the flutterby might’ve tasted to the toad, and he couldn’t eat much of anything.
BOUNCING like two balls in tandem, they traveled to an empty lot in Las Vegas, where a cool desert wind spun a tumbleweed past them and where Frank said he had once lived in a house that was now demolished; to that cabin at the top of a snowy mountain meadow, where they had first teleported after leaving the office; to the graveyard in Santa Barbara; to the top of an Aztec ziggurat in the lush Mexican jungles, where the humid night air was full of buzzing mosquitoes and the cries of unknown beasts, and where Bobby almost fell down the terraced side of the pyramidal structure before he realized how high they were and how precariously perched; to the offices of Dakota & Dakota—
They were popping around so quickly, remaining in each place such a brief time—in fact, briefer with each stop—that for a moment he stood in a corner of his own office, blinking stupidly, before he realized where he was and what he had to do. He tore his hand away from Frank, and he said, “Stop it now, stop here.” But Frank vanished even as Bobby spoke.
Julie was all over him an instant later, hugging him so tightly that she hurt his ribs. He hugged her, too, and kissed her a long time before coming up for air. Her hair smelled clean, and her skin smelled sweeter than he remembered. Her eyes were brighter than memory allowed, and more beautiful.
Though by nature he was not much of a toucher, Clint put a hand on Bobby’s shoulder. “God, it’s good to see you, good to have you back.” There was even a catch in his voice. “Had us worried there for a while.”
Lee Chen handed him a glass of Scotch on the rocks. “Don’t do that again, okay?”