Rayna followed him to the door. His goodbye kiss was polite but distant—a testament of ritual, not affection. Fragments of memory and bits of emotional flotsam merged in a cloud of murky, half-formed thoughts, and Rayna’s brain ached as she struggled to produce some appropriate comment. In the end, she could only watch in doleful silence as Keith left the apartment.
Closing the door behind him, she inhaled again and shoved her hands into the pockets of her loose-fitting jumpdress, her fingers exploring the odds and ends that she’d transferred from her bed stand before leaving the hospital. All at once, a fingertip brushed the edge of a calling card—Althea Milgrom’s calling card.
Rayna shivered and walked to the patio door, passing her hand through the invisible beam that signaled the door to close.
Must be getting late, she thought. She looked at her watch: Quarter to five. Guess I should eat something. She didn’t feel much like eating, but they’d warned her about that. Side effect of the medication, they’d said. Ought to wear off by tomorrow. Right. If that’s the only thing affecting my appetite. She grunted and reluctantly ordered something from the Tans-Mat Food Service. Hungry or not, she knew she had to eat. What I really need, though, is a good night’s sleep.
She was picking at a light supper when her CompuNews alarm went off. The sound made her lose what little interest in food she still had. For a while, she sat, unmoving, as if mesmerized by the electronic tone. Finally, she realized she would have to take the computer off alert status if she didn’t want such alarms disturbing her throughout the night.
Once at the terminal, though, her curiosity overcame her revulsion at the thought of more bad news, and she keyed in a display of the latest bulletin—one about another escalation of trouble in the Middle East. She shook her head in resignation and took the system off alert. She could always check the news briefs later, she thought—when she felt up to it. But as she began to walk away, the heading on another item caught her eye:
MERCHANTER LAWSUITS TIE UP COURT TIME
A SERIES OF LAWSUITS FILED ON BEHALF OF MEMBERS AND EX-MEMBERS OF THE UNITED EARTH MERCHANT FLEET IS TYING UP MORE AND MORE COURT TIME, BOTH IN INDIVIDUAL COUNTRIES AND IN THE WORLD COURT, OFFICIAL RECORDS REVEAL.
“WE JUST WANT TO ESTABLISH A SYSTEM OF LEGALLY RECOGNIZED RIGHTS FOR MERCHANTERS,” SAID FORMER MERCHANT FLEET LT. HENRY TAUBER, PLAINTIFF IN THE FIRST OF THESE LAWSUITS. TAUBER’S ATTORNEY, KEITH G. DANIELS OF LOS ANGELES, HAS FILED SIMILAR ACTIONS IN FIVE OTHER INDIVIDUAL AND CLASS-ACTION CASES. MORE THAN 100 SIMILAR CASES HAVE BEEN FILED WORLDWIDE.
SOME OFFICIALS FEAR THAT THESE CASES MAY INCREASE BAD FEELINGS BETWEEN EARTH AND THE COLONIES IN THE ASTEROID BELT, SINCE SEVERAL COLONIES HAVE BEEN NAMED AS DEFENDANTS. TAUBER, HOWEVER, DISMISSED THE CONCERN AS “JUST ANOTHER ASTIE EXCUSE FOR TAKING ADVANTAGE OF MERCHANTERS.”
Rayna blinked in disbelief. The words floated before her. She read the bulletin three more times and then, still shaken, put it on audio and listened as a computer-simulated voice repeated the story. There it was: Henry Tauber and Keith Daniels—allies in a lawsuit. And in what else? she wondered, nervously jamming her hands into her pockets.
Once again, she felt the edge of Althea Milgrom’s calling card. Hand still buried inside the pocket, she rotated the card between thumb and middle finger, her mind racing. What was Keith up to? Why hadn’t he told her about this? How dare he play fast and loose with her trust! How dare he pervert his legal skills in the service of a madman! She shook with a churning blend of fury and despair.
Maybe he just filed those lawsuits to increase his credibility with Tauber.... Of course. That’s it. It’s just part of this undercover game of his. But if that’s so, why didn’t he tell me about it? And why is he so set against my getting in touch with Althea Milgrom? She pulled the card from her pocket and examined it. Should she call? It must all be part of Keith’s plan. We’re in this together, Keith and I. He wouldn’t just....
She clamped her teeth together. It was no good. Maybe Keith was just trying to ingratiate himself more with Tauber. She hoped so. She couldn’t bear the thought that he was really part of Tauber’s scheme. She held the calling card out before her, staring at it, challenging it, begging it to tell her what to do. She wanted desperately to believe in Keith, but could she afford to take a chance when the fate of the entire Earth, not to mention the Asteroid Belt colonies, might depend on what she did?
With trembling hand, she slid the calling card into the “read” slot of her communicator. It wasn’t until she heard the device’s familiar hum that she began to consider what she was going to say when the head of the CDN answered. As it happened, she needn’t have worried, because it wasn’t Milgrom’s image that appeared on the screen.
“Althea Milgrom’s office,” announced a man with doughy-looking skin, a hawk-like nose and a face that seemed at once young and old. “Special Assistant Derek Marsden speaking.”
“My name is Rayna—”
”Oh, Miss Kingman!” Marsden interrupted, breaking into a genuinely warm smile. “Of course! Mrs. Milgrom isn’t here just now. You can try again tomorrow morning, if you wish. I know she was hoping you’d call. This is her 24-hour number. She only gives it to special people.”
“That’s very flattering.”
“I’ve been instructed to arrange a tour for you at a time when Althea can be here. She wants to show you around personally.”
“As I said, Mr. Marsden, “that’s very flattering, but—”
“Nothing to do with flattery, Miss Kingman. This is gratitude. We’re all grateful. Althea’s a terrific woman, and every one of us at CDN headquarters wants to shake your hand!”
Rayna tried not to let her anxiety show. Now that she’d decided to talk to Milgrom, she felt an acute urgency about doing just that. She wasn’t interested in compliments or small talk. “The thing is, I need to talk with her very soon.”
Marsden appeared to punch a series of keys and examine a terminal screen adjacent to the communicator camera.
“Hmmmm,” he said. “How about day after tomorrow? Three in the afternoon?”
Rayna frowned. “Is that the best you can do? I was hoping to see her tomorrow.”
Marsden checked the schedule again.
“I’m sorry, but Althea’s tied up all day tomorrow. Three the next afternoon is the soonest we can manage.”
“Then I guess that will have to do, Mr. Marsden. Thank you.”
“We’ll look forward to seeing you then, Miss Kingman.” He smiled and cut the connection.
Rayna stared dumbly at the blank screen for several seconds. It was done now—for better or worse. Questions and doubts bombarded her in a vicious attack. She made her way to her bed and lay down. She stared, unseeing, at the ceiling, tormented by fuzzy-edged thoughts of Keith, of Henry Tauber, of Althea Milgrom. Light and shadow formed abstract images to taunt her as her mind tried to make sense of what was happening. Was it minutes or hours that she remained in that halfway state between wakefulness and dreaming? She knew only that her eyelids had grown heavy, much too heavy to keep open. And so she surrendered to exhaustion, falling at last into a troubled sleep.
Chapter 24: Castles in the Air
She is walking along a country road lined with wildflowers of red and yellow and orange. She has no idea where she is, but she’s sure this is where she wants to be. The air, crisp and cool against her bare arms, tastes fresh and clean, conjuring up thoughts of snow-covered mountains. As if cued by her, hexagons of icy lace begin to drift down out of a clear, blue sky. She extends her tongue and catches a few snowflakes, relishing the moment like a six-year-old discovering brightly wrapped packages on Christmas morning.
I wonder why I haven’t walked here before, Rayna asks herself as the ground begins to whiten. Despite the sudden drop in temperature, she feels no chill. She is warmed by an uncanny sense of well-being.
She approaches a stand of trees. How she loves the scent of the woods! Passing the towering sequoias that guard its pe
rimeter, she makes her way, deep into a forest wonderland.
Green! It isn’t a color; it’s a symphony! There, in the shadows, it has a bluish-black cast. Here, before her, leaves like bright emeralds. There, to her right, foliage of pale jade. She walks onward, the thickening growth forming a dim cavern as the sun winks at her through the treetops above.
She comes upon a clearing. A shimmering beam angles its way through surrounding branches to illuminate the open ground like a divine spotlight. As she stands within that circle of brightness, a shiver spreads through her body. It is a shiver not only of cold but of fear, for she now realizes that she has lost her way. She crosses the clearing, pulse loud in her ears. Suddenly, a huge face looms up before her.
The face hovers, disembodied, and studies her in heart-stopping silence. It’s a familiar face. An imposing face. Al Frederick’s face.
Rayna aims her footsteps along a path to one side of the enormous visage, but as she nears the trees, the face drifts into position to block her progress. She reorients herself and starts forward again, but the face anticipates her and moves into her way once more.
“Stop that!” she yells. “Let me pass!”
The giant eyes grow soft and warm, and the mouth twitches briefly into a slight smile. The features dim to transparency, revealing a carefully prepared route leading out of the woods. “Follow me,” the face manages to say without words. “I will show you the way.”
Reluctantly, Rayna forces herself to pass through the suspended image of Al Frederick and onto the path beyond. Gradually, the trees along the way thin until she finally emerges from the wood.
To her great surprise, she finds herself before Keith’s building. She glances up toward his third-floor apartment but is distracted by a most unusual sight: There, floating above the building on a blanket of pastel-colored clouds, is a large, ornate palace, its turrets piercing the firmament like skyrockets.
Rayna squints against the sun and tries to study the amazing sight as passersby jostle her on the street. “Look!” she says, pointing heavenward. “What do you make of that?”
But the others only stare at her and continue on their way, some with a pitying shake of the head. It is then that she realizes that the palace above her is not alone. They are everywhere—castles ringing the entire Earth. How she knows this, she isn’t quite sure, but know it she does, just as certainly as if she were gazing down upon the scene from the celestial sphere.
And then, all at once, she is, indeed, looking down—looking down on the very spot she just occupied—for, gowned as a fairy-tale princess, she now stands at the castle’s battlements. Next to her, Keith smiles in his royal finery and waves as if to a throng of adoring subjects. Then he takes her in his arms and kisses her.
Willingly at first, she kisses him back. But moments later, his touch grows rough, his manner, possessive. She pushes him away and stares, horrified, at his face. His eyes are still blue, but not the warm, expressive blue she has come to know so well. This is a soulless blue, hard and cold as steel. Gone, too, are the familiar curls of his light-brown hair, replaced by a close-cropped military haircut. And part of his right earlobe is missing.
She gasps and turns from him, looking about feverishly for some kind of help. The nearest castles must be miles away, she reasons, and yet she can see the people who stand at their ramparts as if they were only a few feet distant. To her right, she notices, are Vince Barnard and another man she doesn’t recognize.
Rayna’s companion—she realizes it is no longer Keith—gestures to the next castle. Almost immediately, soldiers rush out to grab the man with Barnard. After a struggle, they lift the man up and fling him from the parapet to the Earth below.
Rayna shrieks and covers her eyes. Yet her curiosity ultimately forces her to look in sick fascination while a body with splayed limbs plunges downward into infinity, the form growing smaller and smaller until it becomes a tiny white dot, stark against a background of blackness.
Looking up, she catches sight of another castle. Althea Milgrom stands at the battlements, straight and strong, with Derek Marsden at her side. Milgrom smiles and waves to Rayna, who is dumfounded by the presence of the second man in Milgrom’s castle. Keith! She glances again at the figure beside her, now clothed in the uniform of a Merchant Fleet lieutenant. More confused than ever, she looks back toward Milgrom. As she watches, a dark shadow falls upon Milgrom’s castle.
Rayna turns to question the man next to her, but he is gone. She is perplexed but not especially disturbed by this development, as her missing companion has made her increasingly uneasy. Meanwhile, the ominous shadow spreads, and Rayna searches the sky for its source. From the corner of her eye, she detects a movement in Barnard’s castle and swivels her head in that direction. The lieutenant is next to Barnard now, gesturing wildly as the shadow deepens.
“I have to stop this!” Rayna says aloud. But what to do? Her body begins to tremble, and she squeezes her eyelids shut in a desperate attempt to block the tears of frustration that she knows will come. Without warning, a comforting arm encircles her. She opens startled eyes to find Keith once more beside her.
“It’s up to us,” he tells her. “We must hold back the shadow.”
“But how...?”
Keith shakes his head sadly.
“Look!” Rayna shouts. From Milgrom’s castle, a beacon of light cuts through the gloom. “Maybe they can help.”
But before Keith or Rayna can act, the shadow is on them. It is a heavy shadow, thick with power, and where the edge of it touches Rayna’s skin, it burns with an unnatural cold too intense to resist.
Then she sees the ship. It is an immense, living construct that seems to grow larger as she watches, and as it grows, the shadow grows as well. She can see right through the massive, evil thing, and there, at the controls, stands the lieutenant.
Rayna turns to Keith for encouragement, but he is frozen, imprisoned by the shadow. She looks toward Milgrom’s castle but can no longer make it out in the darkness. Meanwhile, the part of the shadow that touches her continues to grow denser and darker and colder by the moment....
Then, once again, the huge countenance of Al Frederick appears before her. It traverses the murky cloud, and as the face crosses the umbra, the darkness thins and dissipates. At last, the face passes over the ship itself.
“Follow me,” Al Frederick’s eyes tell her. Another oversized face appears next to his. It is a female face—a face with large, hazel eyes and a small, straight nose. It is Rayna’s face.
“I will show you the way,” Al Frederick’s image says in her mind. And then the great faces merge. An instant later, the malevolent ship shatters into a myriad of tiny black specks, the shards flying harmlessly off into an infinite void.
Chapter 25: Proving Their Mettle
Rayna rubbed her hands together and tried to relax. Milgrom would definitely be here. They’d assured her of that. The director of the Consolidated Data Network was tending to the latest CDN crisis (there seemed to be more of those than ever lately), but she would be here within the hour.
Rayna knew she could wait at home, of course. The proliferation of Trans-Mat facilities made that sort of thing easy enough nowadays. You just waited for your business appointment at some agreed-upon coordinates, and when they were ready for you, they’d let you know, and Trans-Mat would get you there in seconds.
But Rayna preferred it right here in the small lobby of the CDN’s Los Angeles-based Western headquarters. Last night had been another rough one, as random scenes from the previous night’s dream alternated with maddening periods of insomnia. If she waited for Milgrom at home, she might fall asleep—asleep and into another nightmare.
She never used to remember her dreams, but this one was impossible to forget. She wished she could forget it. It was so...vivid. When she considered it logically, the content of the dream couldn’t account for its traumatic impact. Yet, as she closed her eyes and tried to think of other things, the shimmering image of the cast
les and the hungry, dark shadow haunted her with an ominous foreboding.
Ever since she woke from the dream at four-thirty yesterday morning, body shaking and soaked with perspiration, she had tried to find some sense in it. That there was sense to be found, she had no doubt. Dreams were like that. They told you things you already knew but you didn’t know you knew.
Maybe the ghost of my dear departed grandfather is going to save the day in death as he did in life. She grunted at the notion and sipped coffee from a mug emblazoned with the CDN’s blue-and-gold emblem. At least I’ve been making good use of my time.
She’d spent most of the last day and a half studying Al Frederick’s papers and Alec Zorne’s book. Too bad old Azey didn’t write more for us ordinary folk, she thought. It was all so confusing. And yet, while the details of reality-matrix physics made her mind shudder, something seemed to connect. She felt, rather than understood, it.
“Miss Kingman!”
Wheeling into the room, Althea Milgrom greeted her warmly. “I’m so pleased you could come! Sorry about the delay. We have another communication from the colonies, and I....” She broke off and rolled her eyes in self-rebuke. “Excuse me. I promised myself I’d shut all this out of my mind for a while at least and simply enjoy your company.”
Rayna shook Milgrom’s extended hand. “What’s the problem with the colonies?”
“Oh, we don’t want to talk about that, now. Let me double-check the arrangements, and we can start the tour.” She began tapping some keys on a retractable mini-terminal built into her wheelchair.
Rayna reached out and laid a hand over the CDN director’s busy fingers. “I didn’t really come here for the tour, Mrs. Milgrom. I have some information that may be of interest to you.”
Milgrom’s keen eyes studied Rayna in awkward silence. Then, the older woman led the way into a richly paneled office, guiding her wheelchair into position behind a small writing desk.
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