Her forward motion stopped just as she touched down, landing into the wind as she’d been taught. Perfect. No awkward nose dive this time. A couple of the other kids ran up to help her get out of the harness. She had flown fifteen hundred feet in half a minute. She was sputtering with wonder and delight.
Taking off her helmet, she turned to look at Mike way up there on the peak, just beginning his run to lift-off. An unexpected gust of wind snarled her hair, riffled the sleeve of her nylon jacket. It was much stronger than the gust which had momentarily caused her trouble not long after she became airborne.
If the tricky cross winds continued they would have to call it quits for the day, and she badly wanted to fly one more time … but Mike was aloft now, soaring higher than she had dared go, his yellow sail almost transparent against the burning blue. Little salutory winks of sun from the brightwork of his harness, the visor of his helmet: he was as beautiful as the stars of God.
She cheered and waved her arms, but then Mike seemed tempted by his power, he went so high it looked as if he would never come down; she was afraid that in a final demonstration of his freedom he would choose to soar above the peaks themselves and disappear over the great rim of the earth.
Two minutes, three minutes. Then, reluctantly, Mike drifted down toward the meadow.
It was as if he’d run into a wall up there.
He stopped, crazily, and for a few disastrous moments his legs thrashed as the delta sail, caught by wind-shear, ripped and puffed like a yellow burst of smoke from a cannon. Mike tried to regain control of the damaged kite but it turned, sadly crippled, toward the cliff rising steeply at one end of the meadow. He spun like a scrap of paper in the air, then was taken helplessly by another bad gust which pushed him farther down—and faster—and oh, suddenly much too fast, plummeting then with only pennants of sail left streaming above him: down he went five hundred feet or more, striking the naked rock a blow that put out the sun, put out her eyes, left her writhing in thick meadow grass, breathless in the ringing dark—
Sickened by disaster, Gillian struggled up from the comforter which Larue had thrown over her as she lay on the floor, lay—how long? She didn’t know. Her only point of orientation in the darkened bedroom was the night light of the ringing phone.
“Larue?”
She might have been deeply asleep on the bed, Gillian couldn’t tell. She reached the telephone before it could ring again.
“Larue, I’m very sorry to call at this hour, it’s Avery Bellaver and I must speak—”
“Dad?”
“Gillian, is that—I’m so happy to hear your voice, I—I was afraid—”
“Afraid of what?”
“Never mind that now Gillian, you’ll have to come home tonight after all. I’ll be at the door in about twenty minutes.”
“What? Why?”
“Please give Larue my apologies.”
“Apol—? Daddy, I don’t have any idea what you’re—”
“We can discuss it when I see you.”
Her father rang off without saying goodbye, something he did only when supremely distracted. Gillian sat holding the receiver of the telephone, too surprised to think very clearly. So untypical, what had got into him?
“Larue,” she whispered, “are you awake?”
Nothing from Larue. Gillian fumbled for the pull chain of a lamp and filled the room with golden light. Larue was not in the bed. Gillian rose, turned, caught sight of herself in a free-standing mirror.
Big drops of blood drying in, turning to rust on the front of the blue nightgown.
Frantically Gillian went to her knees and pawed at the comforter. She uncovered more bloodstains, as if Larue had hemorrhaged suddenly while bending over to cover her.
And blood had spilled nearby on the velvet pile carpet, not in drops but in ropes, a slaughterhouse trail to the dressing room and beyond, to the closed bathroom door.
There, bloody handprints on the white wood. A considerable spill on the floor.
Screaming, Gillian threw her weight against the door. It yielded, but not enough. Gillian screamed and screamed and fell back in a daze as Bjorn, the Swedish houseman, came running in.
—Terrible nosebleeds when I was a kid. I used to get so nauseated and dizzy I’d—
“She’s fainted in there! She’s bleeding to death! Get her out, get her out.”
Bjorn set his shoulder to the door and moved it a stubborn inch at a time. Larue was lying inside on the floor, face up, blocking entry. She looked as if someone had taken an ax to her. Bjorn wedged his way into the door space. He tried to find a pulse. He stayed hunkered over Larue for a long time, two fingers against her throat.
His wife Aase came in, glanced at Gillian, looked over Bjorn’s shoulder. Then Aase looked away and took several deep breaths. She turned back and grasped Bjorn’s shoulder with a hard hand. She said his name sharply. She had to shake him to rouse him. He came up weeping. He wiped his fingers on his pajama top. Soon it was red as the flag. His wife closed the bathroom door. They both looked at Gillian.
“Get here out of there!”
The woman shook her head.
“What is the matter with you people? She’s bleeding to death!”
“Dead already,” Aase said.
She didn’t take her eyes off Gillian, even as her husband broke down and sobbed. Gillian was curiously dry-eyed. But something happened in her eyes, some dire shift-toward madness.
“That’s—she—you—”
“I’m sorry; dead,” the woman repeated.
Gillian made a gagging sound. “But—how much do you think I can stand?” she said reasonably. She was standing against one wall of the dressing room, hands pressed flat against the paneling. Her skin tone changed first to a deep rose shade shadowed with blue. As she grew more and more rigid almost every muscle stood out beneath the skin, sinew and vessel and many bones were delineated against white wood. It was a freakish and riveting exhibition. “How much, how much?” Her teeth were bared. Her eyes looked like polished bone. There was so much tension in her throat it seem impossible she could go on breathing. Her eyes went from the man to the woman. And back again. And faster. They were filled with such violence, violence in the face of the inexplicable and unendurable, that the woman turned cold. Aase was afraid that Gillian would spring at them, with a psychotic strength that would ultimately destroy her. But not before she did Bjorn and herself considerable harm.
Aase pulled Bjorn gently by the arm—led her distraught husband past the crouching Gillian, who watched them with a savage interest but didn’t move. The woman’s heart was beating violently. She avoided the bloody places on the carpet and sat Bjorn down and grabbed the telephone, keeping a wary eye on the dressing room as she dialed for help.
Inside, Gillian made another small, critical sound of suffering. But nothing happened. Nothing changed.
Chapter Sixteen
THURSDAY, JANUARY 12
At two-thirty in the afternoon the temperature at Psi Faculty was three degrees above zero. The sky was so blue and clear it hurt to look at it. But another storm was moving down out of Canada, moving fast. It was thirty-six hours away, and it threatened to be a big one. Already they’d had two blizzards since Christmas, two and a half additional feet of snow, drifts to seven feet. Snowplows were still at work on the back roads between the campus and frozen Lake Celeste.
A security caravan stopped in front of the administration building. Childermass, wearing a black astrakhan coat and hat, got out of the middle car. Gwyneth Charles, muffled to the bridge of her nose, waited for him on the steps. Her head was bent in contemplation, or weariness.
“Hello, kiddo,” Childermass said.
He had last seen his niece a month ago. Now all he could see of her was eyes. In thirty days her eyes seemed to have aged at least ten years. They were slow to react; they reflected the blue daylight but held no certain light of their own. He touched her. She was shivering inside her greatcoat.
“You�
��ve been working too hard,” Childermass said.
“Hell, yes.” Her voice was raspy, as if she had a bad throat. “We all have.”
“And how’s the Boy Wonder?”
Gwyneth didn’t answer him. She stared for frigid seconds, eyes narrowed as if she suspected irreverence; then she turned abruptly and went into the Gothic building.
Childermass followed with his bodyguard and caught up to Gwyn in a windowless conference room. Granny Sig was there, fussing over the complicated sixteen-track audio and the color videotape equipment. Childermass, who loathed deviates because they usually meant trouble in his business, nodded perfunctorily. Granny Sig beamed at him and shut down the lights as Gwyneth was taking off her coat.
Childermass sat in an armchair facing a wall of ten television screens, the largest of which was nearly four feet square. In the semidarkness Gwyn lit a cigarette. He didn’t miss the trembling of her hands.
“We thought you ought to see a rerun of his New Year’s Eve performance before you see Robin himself. We’ll show you Robin on the center screen. Relevant data will play back on the surrounding screens, and we’ve included full audio as well.”
Gwyn looked at Granny Sig and dropped into a chair a few feet from Childermass. Granny Sig’s fingers played over the console, punching buttons and turning knobs. Tapes rolled; pictures appeared with superimposed dates.
Childermass recognized the town square of Bradbury, Maryland, and the mesh-enclosed stock car. He smiled, imagining the discomfort—and, perhaps, the terror—of the VIPs locked inside. He cherished the memory of how his rival Byron Todfield had looked seconds after puking on himself; too bad there wasn’t a record of their conversation as they waited in the dusk for the thrill of their lives.
Then he shifted his attention to an exterior view of a geodesic dome on the campus of Psi Faculty, the “cold lab” in which Robin Sandza did his extraordinary work. The dome was silvery in the waning light of the last day of December. Because of the power of the electromagnetic field which he generated when he was working, and its gory effects on the susceptible, Robin had been removed at least three hundred yards from everyone.
And there he was, on the big screen: four views. A close-up, with his face partly obscured by billowing breath; left and right profile; a full shot of him sitting in his padded pedestal chair, surrounded by equipment. Superimposed on the screen was the Fahrenheit temperature in the cold lab, just one degree above zero. Below that a light-emitting diode clock was splitting seconds almost faster than the eye could follow. For protection against the cold and for ease in monitoring vital signs, Robin wore a space-flight suit without the goldfish-bowl helmet. Lighting in the dome was subdued. On one of the sound tracks Childermass could hear the boy breathing, and the voices of technicians became audible.
—Pulse 92, still dropping …
—Disturbance of the magnetic field during the PK trial was of a stochastical character with a parametrical resonance on a frequency of five cycles …
—We now have differentiation between the P and T waves; heart action remains slightly arrhythmic …
The pictures on the screen jumped as a cut was made. The clock advanced two and a half minutes.
Gwyn’s voice: Robin, we’re putting the Bradbury circuits up on your screen. Do you want to give it a run now?
Robin nodded. Childermass looked at the videotape of the stock car. He looked back at Robin, who was focused intently on the TV monitors in the cold lab, breathing clouds, suggesting the awesome power of a locomotive waiting in a train shed. Although he knew what the outcome was going to be, Childermass fidgeted impatiently in his seat. He looked curiously at an echoencephalogram of Robin’s brain, wondering what it all meant to the experts.
—Activity increasing in the occipital lobe and reticular formations …
—Pulse rising …
—We’re detecting spin waves in the fluctuating force field …
—Pulse 180 and climbing rapidly …
—Gradient level 40 to 1 …
—We have a very strong electrostatic field fluctuation …
—Heartbeat, brain waves and force field fluctuations are in ratio …
—Pulse 240!
“He’s there,” Gwyneth murmured, reliving the event.
Robin was breathing explosively. On the Bradbury screen the stock car came to life, and Childermass laughed out loud. Gwyneth sat slumped in her own chair, fingers steepled. Childermass enjoyed the spectacle of the careening car for a few moments, and then he said
“Do you know how he does it? From three hundred miles away? I mean, can you express it mathematically?”
“Not yet. But the distance involved is not important. Try thinking in terms of time and not of space. Time isn’t propagated like light waves—it appears instantaneously everywhere. If you conceive of time as a form of primal energy coeffecting known mechanical and chemical activity, the theory, at least, is easy to grasp.”
Childermass grimaced and watched the rest of the action, almost leaping out of his seat at the near-collision of the car with the train. As the stock car came softly to a stop the Bradbury screens went blank.
There were sounds of celebration and congratulation on the audio tape, but these faded swiftly; more screens darkened, leaving Robin alone and slumped in his chair, literally drunk: his eyes were wild but he laughed euphorically, pounding the console arm of his chair with a fist, turning lights on and off and on again in his freezing dome.
“What’s the matter with him?” Childermass said, startled by the display of erratic behavior.
Robin giggled and gasped and moaned.
Granny Sig replied. “Euphoria; shock; pain. He’s still fourteen years old. And he doesn’t know how to handle it.”
“Handle what?”
“Psychologically Robin is torn between the knowledge that he is both omnipotent and potentially lethal in the exercise of his powers. Then there’s a more familiar dilemma. Our problems evolve quickly, but our bodies evolve slowly. And our emotions never change.”
Gwyn, unable to look any longer at the spectacle of Robin on the screen, put her face in her hands. Granny Sig, taking pity on her, stopped all the machines and brought up the lights in the room.
“We’d better go now,” Gwyn said. “I don’t like leaving him by himself for too long at a time.”
“I thought I was going to see some of the latest trials. Don’t you have film?”
“Something always seems to be wrong with our film; it’s a common phenomenon in cases of materialization. We’ve tried three experiments so far, exciting, but all failures. Here’s a rough analogy. Water has a simple molecular structure. Boil it at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, it turns to vapor, or steam. Chill and condense the vapor, and you have water again. Any child can do it. Robin, by electromagnetically disturbing the cells of, say, a hamster, can change it into something inanimate: the only limitations are his creative concepts. He can produce a woodcarving, or a clay vase. But of course we don’t get the hamster back. That’s the part that defeats and frustrates him: composing a living entity from earth and wood. He succeeds in constructing facsimiles, actual fur and nails and skin on the outside. The insides are composed of amorphous squamous cells without genetic identity. The cells are idiot cells. Because they are unspecialized, without purpose, they’re easily exhausted, and they quickly reach the Hayflick limit. After that—”
“I’d like to see one of his creations.”
Gwyn shook her head. “No matter how carefully we preserve them, they dematerialize soon after dissection, like the entrails and tumors produced by the psychic surgeons of the Philippines during their healing rituals.”
“Robin keeps trying, though.”
“Oh, yes. He keeps trying.”
In winter those employed at Psi Faculty commonly got around campus on snowmobiles or touring skis. Granny Sig despised the snarling racket of the machines and, because of her bulk, skis were not a practical alternative. To solve her transport
ation problem she had purchased an antique sleigh. It was pulled by two black Morgan geldings that stood dropping rich turds in the icy sunlight at the foot of the steps of the administration building.
Childermass looked unhappily at the sleigh and said, “Don’t you have a car?”
“I’m just an old-fashioned girl,” the transvestite replied, largely because she knew it would annoy him.
“If I thought your asshole was as nimble as your mouth I’d marry you,” Childermass said. They let it go at that.
A security man drove the sleigh. The passengers sat bundled in lap robes facing each other in twos: Childermass and his bodyguard, Granny Sig and Gwyneth. All eyes were impenetrable behind dark glasses. No one attempted small talk. They were conveyed like fugitive czarists along a glazed road beneath walls of snow. The Morgans ran with taut high heads. The day echoed bells. They were pursued by a flickering shadow-show; trees dropped crackling showers of ice as the sleigh flew by.
When they arrived at the house where Robin lived with Gwyneth they saw him on the far side of the lake, sprinting around the swept ice on his racing blades. Robin took no notice of them. They went upstairs to Gwyn’s second-floor study and observed him from the box window. Childermass used a pair of 15X Vixen binoculars, which effectively placed Robin in the room with him.
Gwyn didn’t make a sound when Robin took a nasty spill, but she reacted as if someone had jerked her up short with a noose around the neck. He went spinning clockwise toward a pile of snowy rock, hitting hard. Fortunately he was well-padded. Childermass, lowering the glasses, glanced at Gwyn. She turned away from him, a hand going involuntarily to her face; she hid her anxiety as if it were a sty.
Robin got up slowly. Childermass studied Robin’s face as he clawed at the rough ice. Rarely had he seen such anger. When Robin was upright he attacked the ice again, arms scything across his body as he raced along.
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