Watkins cringed from the touch.
Shaddack did not move his hand, and he spoke with the fervor of an
evangelist. He was a cool evangelist, however, whose message did not
involve the hot passion of religious conviction but the icy power of
logic, reason.
"You're one of the New People now, and that does not just mean that
you're stronger and quicker than ordinary men, and it doesn't just mean
you're virtually invulnerable to disease and have a greater power to
mend your injuries than anything any faith healer ever dreamed of. It
also means you're clearer of mind, more rational than the Old People-so
if you consider Eddie's death carefully and in the context of the
miracle we're working here, you'll see that the price he paid was not
too great. Don't deal with this situation emotionally, Loman; that's
definitely not the way of New People. We're making a world that'll be
more efficient, more ordered, and infinitely more stable precisely
because men and women will have the power to control their emotions, to
view every problem and event with the analytical coolness of a computer.
Look at Eddie Vaidoski's death as but another datum in the great flow of
data that is the birth of the New People. You've got the power in you
now to transcend human emotional limitations, and when you do transcend
them, you'll know true peace and happiness for the first time in your
life."
After a while Loman Watkins raised his head. He turned to look up at
Shaddack.
"Will this really lead to peace?"
"Yes.When there's no one left unconverted, will there be brotherhood at
last?"
"Yes.Tranquillity?
"Eternal."
The Talbot house on Conquistador was a three-story redwood with lots
of big windows. The property was sloped, and steep stone steps led up
from the sidewalk to a shallow porch. No - 177 streetlamps lit that
block, and there were no walkway or landscape lights at Talbot's, for
which Sam was grateful.
Tessa Lockland stood close to him on the porch as he pressed the buzzer,
just as she had stayed close all the way from the laundry. Above the
noisy rustle of the wind in the trees, he could hear the doorbell ring
inside.
Looking back toward Conquistador, Tessa said, "Sometimes it seems more
like a morgue than a town, peopled by the dead, but then . . . Then?"
". . . in spite of the silence and the stillness, you can feel the
energy of the place, tremendous pent-up energy, as if there's a huge
hidden machine just beneath the streets, beneath the ground . . . and
as if the houses are filled with machinery, too, all of it powered up
and straining at cogs and gears, just waiting for someone to engage a
clutch and set it all in motion."
That was exactly Moonlight Cove, but Sam had not been able to put the
feeling of the place into words. He rang the bell again and said, "I
thought filmmakers were required to be borderline illiterates.
"
"Most Hollywood filmmakers are, but I'm an outcast documentarian, so I'm
permitted to think-as long as I don't do too much of it."
"Who's there?" said a tinny voice, startling Sam. It came from an
intercom speaker that he'd not noticed.
"Who's there, please?
" Sam leaned close to the intercom.
"Mr. Talbot? Harold Talbot?
"
"Yes. Whore you?"
"Sam Booker," he said quietly, so his voice would not carry past the
perimeter of Talbot's porch.
"Sorry to wake you, but I've come in response to your letter of October
eighth.
Talbot was silent. Then the intercom clicked, and he said, "I'm on the
third floor. I'll need time to get down there. Meanwhile I'll send
Moose. Please give him your ID so he can bring it to me. I have no
Bureau ID," Sam whispered.
"I'm undercover here. Driver's license?" Talbot asked.
"Yes.
"That's enough." He clicked off.
"Moose?" Tessa asked.
"Damned if I know," Sam said.
They waited almost a minute, feeling vulnerable on the exposed porch,
and they were both startled again when a dog pushed out through a pet
door they had not seen, brushing between their legs. For an instant Sam
didn't realize what it was, and he stumbled backward in surprise, nearly
losing his balance.
Stooping to pet the dog, Tessa whispered, "Moose?"
A flicker of light had come through the small swinging door with the
dog; but that was gone now that the door was closed. The dog was black
and hardly visible in the night.
Squatting beside it, letting it lick his hand, Sam said, "I'm supposed
to give my ID to you?"
The dog wuffed softly, as if answering in the affirmative.
"You'll eat it," Sam said.
Tessa said, "He won't."
"How do you know?"
"He's a good dog."
"I don't trust him."
"I guess that's your job."
"Huh?"
"Not to trust anyone."
"And my nature."
"Trust him," she insisted.
He offered his wallet. The dog plucked it from Sam's hand, held it in
his teeth, and went back into the house through the pet door.
They stood on the dark porch for another few minutes, while Sam tried to
stifle his yawns. It was after two in the morning, and he was
considering adding a fifth item to his list of reasons for living good
Mexican food, Guinness Stout, Goldie Haw n, fear of death, and sleep.
Blissful sleep. Then he heard the clack and rattle of locks being
laboriously disengaged, and the door finally opened inward on a dimly
lighted hallway.
Harry Talbot waited in his motorized wheelchair, dressed in blue pajamas
and a green robe. His head was tilted slightly to the left in a
permanently quizzical angle that was part of his Vietnam legacy. He was
a handsome man, though his face was prematurely aged, too deeply lined
for that of a forty-year-old.
- 179 His thick hair was half white, and his eyes were ancient. Sam
could see that Talbot had once been a strapping young man, though he was
now soft from years of paralysis. One hand lay in his lap, the palm up,
fingers half curled, useless. He was a living monument to what might
have been, to hopes destroyed, to dreams incinerated, a grim remembrance
of war pressed between the pages of time.
As Tessa and Sam entered and closed the door behind them, Harry Talbot
extended his good hand and said, "God, am I glad to see you!" His smile
transformed him astonishingly. It was the bright, broad, warm, and
genuine smile of a man who believed he was perched in the lap of the
gods, with too many blessings to count.
Moose returned Sam's wallet, uneaten.
After leaving Shaddack's house on the north point, but before
returning to headquarters to coordinate the assignments of the hundred
men who were being sent to him from New Wave, Loman Watkins stopped at
his home on Iceberry Way, on the north side of town. It was a modest,
two-story, three-bedroom, Monterey-style house, white with pale-blue
&
nbsp; trim, nestled among conifers.
He stood for a moment in the driveway beside his patrol car, studying
the place. He had loved it as if it were a castle, but he could not
find that love in himself now. He remembered much happiness related to
the house, to his family, but he could not feel the memory of that
happiness. A lot of laughter had graced life in that dwelling, but now
the laughter had faded until recollection of it was too faint even to
induce a smile in remembrance. Besides, these days, his smiles were all
counterfeit, with no humor behind them.
The odd thing was that laughter and joy had been a part of his life as
late as this past August. It had all seeped away only within the past
couple of months, after the Change. Yet it seemed an ancient memory.
Funny.
Actually, not so funny at all.
When he went inside he found the first floor dark and silent. A vague,
stale odor lingered in the deserted rooms.
He climbed the stairs. In the unlighted, second-floor hallway he saw a
soft glow along the bottom of the closed door to Denny's bedroom. He
went in and found the boy sitting at his desk, in front of the computer.
The PC had an oversize screen, and currently that was the only light in
the room.
Denny did not look up from the terminal.
The boy was eighteen years old, no longer a child; therefore, he had
been converted with his mother, shortly after Loman himself had been put
through the Change. He was two inches taller than his dad and better
looking. He'd always done well in school, and on IQ tests he'd scored
so high it spooked Loman a bit to think his kid was that smart. He had
always been proud of Denny. Now, at his son's side, staring down at
him, Loman tried to resurrect that pride but could not find it. Denny
had not fallen from favor; he had done nothing to earn his father's
disapproval. But pride, like so many other emotions, seemed an
encumbrance to the higher consciousness of the New People and interfered
with their more efficient thought patterns.
Even before the Change, Denny had been a computer fanatic, one of those
kids who called themselves hackers, to whom computers were not only
tools, not only fun and games, but a way of life. After the conversion,
his intelligence and high-tech experience were put to use by New Wave.
He was provided with a more powerful home terminal and a modern link to
the supercomputer at New Wave headquarters-a behemoth that, according to
Denny's description, incorporated four thousand miles of wiring and
thirty-three thousand high-speed processing units which, for reasons
Loman didn't understand, they called Sun, though perhaps that was its
name because all research at New Wave made heavy use of the machine and
therefore revolved around it. As Loman stood beside his son, voluminous
data flickered - 181 across the terminal screen. Words, numbers,
graphs, and charts appeared and disappeared at such speed that only one
of the New People, with somewhat heightened senses and powerfully
heightened concentration, could extract meaning from them.
in fact Loman could not read them because he had not undergone the
training that Denny had received from New Wave. Besides, he'd had
neither the time nor the need to learn to fully focus his new powers of
concentration.
But Denny absorbed the rushing waves of data, staring blankly at the
screen, no frown lines in his brow, his face completely relaxed. Since
being converted, the boy was as much a solidstate electronic entity as
he was flesh and blood, and that new part of him related to the computer
with an intimacy that exceeded any man-machine relationship any of the
Old People had ever known.
Loman knew that his son was learning about the Moonhawk Project.
Ultimately he would join the task group at New Wave that was endlessly
refining the software and hardware related to the project, working to
make each generation of New People superior to-and more efficient
than-the one before it.
An endless river of data washed across the screen.
Denny stared unblinkingly for so long that tears would have formed in
his eyes if he had been one of the Old People.
The light of the ever-moving data danced on the walls and sent a
continuous blur of shadows chasing around the room.
Loman put one hand on the boy's shoulder.
Denny did not look up or in any way respond. His lips began to move, as
if he were talking, but he made no sound. He was speaking to himself,
oblivious of his father.
In a garrulous, evangelistic moment, Thomas Shaddack had spoken of one
day developing a link that would connect a computer directly to a
surgically implanted socket in the base of the human spine, thereby
merging real and artificial intelligence. Loman had not understood why
such a thing was either wise or desirable, and Shaddack had said, "The
New People are a bridge between man and machine, Loman. But one day our
species will entirely cross that bridge, become one with the machines,
because only then will mankind be completely efficient, completely in
control."
"Denny," Loman said softly.
The boy did not respond.
At last Loman left the room.
Across the hall and at the end of it was the master bedroom. Grace was
lying on the bed, in the dark.
Of course, since the Change, she could never be entirely blinded by a
mere insufficiency of light, for her eyesight had improved. Even in
this lightless room, she could see-as Loman could-the shapes of the
furniture and some textures, though few details. For them, the night
world was no longer black but darkish gray.
He sat on the edge of the mattress.
"Hello."
She said nothing.
He put one hand on her head and stroked her long auburn hair. He
touched her face and found her cheeks wet with tears, a detail that even
his improved eyes could not discern.
Crying. She was crying, and that jolted him because he had never seen
one of the New People cry.
His heartbeat accelerated, and a brief but wonderful thrill of hope
throbbed through him. Perhaps the deadening of emotions was a transient
condition.
"What is it?" he asked.
"What're you crying about?"
"I'm afraid."
The pulse of hope swiftly faded. Fear had brought her to tears, fear
and the desolation associated with it, and he already knew those
feelings were a part of this brave new world, those and no other.
"Afraid of what?"
"I can't sleep," Grace said.
"But you don't need to sleep."
"Don't I?
"None of us needs to sleep any more."
Prior to the Change, men and women had needed to sleep because the human
body, being strictly a biological mechanism, was terribly inefficient.
Downtime was required to rest and repair the damage of the day, to deal
with the toxic substances absorbed from the external world and the
toxics created internally. But in the New People, every bodily process
and function was su
perbly regulated. Nature's work had been highly
refined. Every organ, every system, every cell operated at a far higher
efficiency, producing less waste, casting off waste faster than - 183
before, cleansing and rejuvenating itself every hour of the day. Cirace
knew that as well as he did.
"I long for sleep," she said.
"All you're feeling is the pull of habit."
'Too many hours in the day now."
"We'll fill up the time. The new world will be a busy one."
"What're we going to do in this new world when it comes?"
"Shaddack will tell us."
"Meanwhile . . ."
"Patience," he said.
"I'm afraid."
"Patience. I yearn for sleep, hunger for it."
"We don't need to sleep," he said, exhibiting the patience that he had
encouraged in her.
"We don't need sleep," she said cryptically, "but we need to sleep."
They were both silent a while.
Then she took his hand in hers, and moved it to her breasts. She was
nude.
He tried to pull away from her, for he was afraid of what might happen,
Dean Koontz - (1989) Page 24
