by Steve Gannon
At the end of the shoe they changed dealers and brought out six new decks. I counted my winnings: nineteen stacks of five-thousand-dollar chips, ten per stack. I did the math. Almost a million, not counting my smaller chips.
I played on. Then something went wrong. I felt a prickling at the back of my neck. I could feel him behind me.
I glanced over my shoulder.
It was Holden.
“What . . . what are you doing here?” I croaked, barely able to speak.
“Sarah asked me to keep an eye on you,” he answered. A lie. Sarah didn’t even know I had been going out.
“So you followed me?”
“Not exactly,” he answered guiltily. “It was easy enough to track you down, though. It’s a small town.”
“Cards, sir?” the dealer asked.
I turned back to the table, my mind spinning. I couldn’t believe it. Holden. Numbly, I glanced at my hand.
It was all wrong, not the cards I had seen in the dream.
I could feel Holden’s eyes boring into my back. I lost the next four hands. Rising shakily, I tipped the dealer a white-and-orange five-thousand-dollar chip. “Please credit my winnings to my account,” I said.
“Yes, sir, Mr. Starling. And thank you.”
Determined to confront Holden, I turned.
He was gone.
A security guard accompanied me to the cashier’s office, where I was given a receipt for my winnings. Afterward the casino manager offered me a hotel suite, along with complimentary wine, food, companionship—anything I wanted. They didn’t want me leaving. I didn’t blame them. At that point I had over two million dollars of their money.
With a shrug, I accepted. Why not? I thought. I had nothing better to do. Besides, I was in no hurry to face the next part of my vision.
A bellhop escorted me to a penthouse on the twenty-ninth floor. The “Elvis” suite. After he’d gone, I locked the door and surveyed the well-appointed rooms—leather couches, surround-sound stereo, fully stocked bar, a big-screen TV. I avoided the TV. Doors led to several bedrooms, each boasting a king-sized bed and a sweeping view of the Strip. All were empty. I checked.
Satisfied that I was alone, I stepped onto a private balcony just beneath the big red Hilton sign atop the building. Bathed in its glow, I stood by the balcony wall, breathing in the night air and staring at the casino lights on the streets below. I had been out there for some time when I heard a knock at the door.
It was Holden.
My heart tripping like a jackhammer, I let him in—never taking my eyes off him, not even for an instant. My mouth went dry. I still couldn’t believe he was the one.
“You look like hell,” Holden noted, lurching past me. I could smell the reek of bourbon on his breath.
Was he drunk, or just acting that way to put me off guard?
“How ’bout a drink?” he suggested, slurring his words.
“No, thanks,” I answered, keeping my distance.
“Meant for me,” he chuckled, staggering around to the business end of the bar.
When he turned toward me again, I had the gun in my hand.
“What the hell . . .?”
“No more cat-and-mouse, Holden. Just tell me why. What did I ever do to you?”
He edged out from behind the bar. “C’mon, John. Quit kiddin’ around.”
“I’m not kidding, Holden. Tell me.”
He spread his hands, trying to smile. “Hey, pal, you never did anything to me.” He couldn’t take his eyes off the gun.
“Then why do you want to kill me?”
“Kill you? I just came up to ask for a loan. Figured you could afford it, seein’ how you just won big.” He licked his lips. “Listen . . . forget the loan. Just put down the gun.”
He had started to sweat. I saw a something in his eyes—fear, hate, maybe both. He glanced at the door as if he were expecting someone. Like a fool, I fell for it. As I looked over my shoulder, he rushed me. And at that moment I knew for sure—just as I had known what cards would be coming up in the casino. My nemesis was Holden.
I swung the pistol, connecting with the side of his head just above his left eye. He grunted and collapsed on the carpet, splayed out like a side of beef.
He was heavy. It took me several minutes to drag him outside and position him on the balcony wall. It was hard work, and I nearly lost him before getting him propped up in the corner just right. I was breathing hard when he came to.
“Jesus. What the . . .”
“Don’t move,” I ordered. “Not one inch. I’ll shoot you right now if you do.”
“What the hell are you doin’?” he said, his eyes wide with fear. I could tell he was about to make a move.
“Don’t,” I warned. “I know what you’re planning. It has to end now. There’s no other way.”
Holden’s eyes got even wider as I gave him his options: a quick and painless bullet, or the long drop behind him. His choice. It was the least I could do. After all, he had once been my friend.
He chose the bullet. “But let me do it myself,” he begged, unable to hide the crafty look in his eyes. If I’d had any lingering doubts, that look dispelled it.
Holden was balanced precariously on the balcony wall, a thirty-story drop behind him. “Sure, pal,” I said, handing him the gun and grabbing his ankles at the same time.
He leveled the pistol at me, just as I knew he would. “You’re crazy!” he shouted, attempted to scoot his butt forward off the wall.
I lifted his ankles to keep him from moving.
“Don’t make me shoot you!”
I lifted his feet even higher. He was close to going over. Panic filled his face.
“No!” he pleaded.
Then he pulled the trigger.
I heard the hammer click on the empty chamber. A live round was up next. Before he could pull the trigger a second time, I jerked his legs over his head. The gun clattered to the deck. “Good-bye, Holden,” I said.
He screamed all the way down.
At the coroner’s inquest I testified that Holden, drunk to the gills, had come up to the penthouse to borrow money. When I’d refused, he had climbed onto the balcony wall and threatened to jump. Of course at that point I had agreed to help him, but while climbing down he had accidentally slipped and fallen to his death.
A lie, but who would’ve believed the truth?
Oddly enough, it turned out that Holden actually was in financial trouble. That afternoon he had lost ten straight passes at the craps table. His luck had run out. Case closed.
Sarah convinced me to see Dr. O’Brien one more time. He put me on different pills. They even worked for a while, allowing me to get a few precious hours of sleep each night for almost a week. Then I had to double, triple, quadruple the dose. In the end they stopped working altogether.
Now I’m back in front of the TV again, watching my favorite show: cosmic background radiation, brought to you by the Big Bang. Night after night I see my reflection in the screen, watch myself die at the hands of the shadowy figure.
That’s right.
My nemesis is back.
But now I know who it is.
I’ve had plenty of time to think, and I’ve realized a couple of things. I was wrong about Holden. I see that now. Oh, he wasn’t innocent, not by a long shot. He was merely part of a more insidious plan.
Just like the cosmic background radiation, the answer was there all the time, staring me in the face. One night I finally saw it. Peering into the TV, I noticed something hauntingly familiar about my assailant. All at once I recognized that limber dancer’s stance, the set of her shoulders, the tilt of her head.
Sarah.
I can’t let on that I know what she and Holden were planning. I’ll be pleasant to her at breakfast, call her at work during the day, lie beside her at night till she falls asleep. And I’ll be very, very careful.
I know what I have to do. And when the time is right, I’ll do it. I have plenty of time to plan, plenty o
f time to make certain everything is perfect.
Plenty of time.
Twenty-four hours a day. Every day.
As I said, I have a problem . . .
I can’t sleep.
Final Exam
You will enter the (unintelligible) now.
The words thundered in my head, bouncing around inside my skull for what seemed like forever. “I’m not deaf, at least not yet,” I shot back with as much sarcasm as I could muster. “You don’t have to shout.”
Actually, shouting doesn’t come close to describing what they were doing. From the beginning, all of their commands had been delivered telepathically—the volume cranked up full and injected with maddening precision into my brain one syllable at a time, as if I were so stupid that everything had to be spelled out.
Fighting a wave of revulsion, I stared at the squirming thing on the deck—a glistening, sluglike cylinder around five meters long and two meters in diameter, with short slimy appendages studding its greenish-brown surface. At one end, an elliptical orifice opened and closed, winking at me like an obscene eye.
Enter now.
They had turned the volume down somewhat, but they were still spelling it out. I resented it like hell. No one likes being treated like an idiot, even if compared to them your IQ really is down in the amoeba range.
“What?” I asked aloud. Early on I had learned that they could read my thoughts, but I still hadn’t grown used to just thinking at them.
Enter.
“Enter what?”
The (unintelligible)!
I smiled, sensing a hint of irritation. Early on I had also learned that resistance was futile. So far any order I disobeyed had quickly resulted in punishment something akin to sticking your head in a power conduit, only worse. But I couldn’t stop myself. I have a stubborn streak a mile wide, and if they insisted on treating me like a moron—well, I figured on playing it to the hilt. Besides, I wanted to put off the inevitable for as long as possible.
Then the pain began, and I knew I couldn’t hold out much longer. Soon, no matter how hard I fought, I would be crawling into that wet, gaping mouth.
Three days back I had been on the bridge of the UFS Drake, one of the last two-man surveyships still operational in the fleet. We were stationed in the third quadrant of a constellation known as the Dragon’s Eye, orbiting NGC 11746915—a stellar binary that had recently turned into a particularly interesting subject for scientific study. The dual star system was composed of a small black hole circling a medium-sized G-type sun that had left the main sequence a million years back, swelling to a red giant. By gravitationally drawing a bridge of gas from the swollen primary, the black hole was gradually devouring its larger companion. In the process, it was releasing tremendous amounts of energy in the form of twin jets emanating from both poles of the singularity, along with intense radiation from the surrounding accretion disc.
We had been gathering data for just under two weeks when an alien spacecraft squeezed out of the black hole.
My first officer, Axle Chang, and I were on the observation deck at the time. Axle is short, with curly red hair, a razor-sharp mind, and a decidedly Irish temperament contrasting his otherwise Asian equanimity. An unusual combination, but Axle is an unusual guy. He can fix just about anything—be it atomic, electrical, mechanical, or photonic. You name it; Axle can make it work. A guy like him could mean the difference between life and death on an aging ship like the Drake, and I was lucky to have him.
“What the—” Axle bolted upright in his chair, spilling most of his coffee on the sensor console. “Captain, take a look at this!”
I leaned over Axle’s shoulder, staring at the three-dimensional image in the screen. I tried to swallow, but couldn’t.
Nothing is supposed to be able to escape the gravitational pull of a black hole. Nothing—not even light. The tidal effect created by just getting too close to a black hole is enough to rip ordinary matter to bits. “My God,” I whispered. “Look at the size of it.”
We looked.
Slowly, the craft oozed out of the singularity. The vessel looked like a huge, liquid-silver bubble and had to be at least a thousand kilometers in diameter, the size of a small moon.
“Are you recording this?” I asked, unable to control a quaver in my voice.
“Yes, sir,” Axle answered, his hands a blur on the sensors.
Seconds later the alien ship emerged completely, lighting up the event horizon with a brilliant flash. Spellbound, we watched as it pulsed and shimmered, bolts of energy discharging from its surface. Then, without warning, it was beside us—not five hundred kilometers from the Drake. We never saw it move. It was suddenly just . . . there.
Axle rose from the command console and stumbled backward, his face ashen. “Cap, something’s accessing our onboard computer. I don’t know how, but I—”
It’s hard to describe what happened next. One minute I was on the bridge, the next I found myself suspended in total, impenetrable darkness. I could feel nothing around me, not even the deck beneath my feet. With a sinking feeling, I began to suspect that I was no longer aboard the Drake . . .
Time passed.
My skin itched. My muscles twitched. Then thoughts and images began popping into my brain, flashing past as if someone were shuffling through my memories like riffling a deck of cards. “Hey!” I yelled. “Stop that!”
Actually, I tried to yell but couldn’t. I had no control of my body. But I did think it, and someone got the message.
Cooperate or suffer punishment.
I had always imagined that direct mind-to-mind communication, if it existed at all, would be soft and tenuous and mystical, like whispering tendrils of thought insinuated into your consciousness. This hurt. “What . . . what are you doing,” I demanded, screwing my eyes shut in concentration.
You are being examined. Afterward you will be tested.
“Tested for what?”
To determine whether your species is fit to join the brotherhood of servant races.
“You’re slavers, eh?” I was scared but trying to maintain a good front, figuring people were the same the galaxy over. Give ’em an inch and they think they own you. “What if I don’t want to join your so-called brotherhood?”
Irrelevant.
The response was accompanied by a searing bolt of pain that convinced me to keep my thoughts private, if possible. As I soon learned, it was not.
Their “examination” seemed endless. Occasionally they let me sleep, then woke me with a nudge of pain and began anew. Some of it wasn’t bad, like reliving experiences I had long forgotten—life as a kid on Mars, my first flight in an antigrav harness, listening to my Granddad’s stories about mining the asteroid belts—but for the most part what they did to me can only be described as a nightmare, a mental rape.
And then the real testing began.
Apparently using the same technique they had used to snatch me off the Drake, they shifted me to a glowing, cavernous chamber. Although the bright light in my new surroundings hurt my eyes, it felt good to be able to see once more. I had control of my body again, too. Squinting, I peered around the room. On all sides, luminous walls curved to a domed ceiling far above. The deck beneath my feet felt spongy and pliant, almost alive. Glowing a deep blood-red, a giant dodecahedral crystal sat in the center of the room atop a raised platform. Scattered around the crystal were peculiar-looking devices, many spouting tentacles and odd, jointed appendages.
No sign of my hosts.
Moments later I embarked on a battery of tests seemingly designed to determine my body’s capabilities. They controlled my every move; I was just along for the ride. I strutted across the chamber, raising my heels high off the deck. I carried objects tiny and delicate, heavy and large. I operated alien machines, pushed buttons, pulled levers. Some tasks proved impossible, like manipulating devices that seemed more suited to someone with tentacles than fingers. Other tasks I performed easily. They subjected me to heat, cold, electric
shock, taking everything to the extreme—how fast, how long, how much pain could I endure.
Somehow I lived through it. And in the end, I sensed that they considered me physically acceptable, if only marginally intelligent. But acceptable, nonetheless.
I felt miserable—not only from the testing, but because I realized that I had probably been instrumental in getting Homo sapiens into a world of trouble. Given the opportunity, I’d have simply dug in my heels and refused to be tested, or flunked on purpose, or whatever. I just never got the chance. Angrily, I wondered what they had planned for me next. Death? Or would I have the honor of joining their brotherhood as the first serving human?
Suddenly I heard a click. A section of bulkhead slid back, revealing a large recess.
An instant later it squirmed out.
I backed away in terror. Leaving a trail of slime, the thing on the deck slithered toward me, its hideous mouth opening and closing hungrily. “What the hell is that?” I croaked.
The (unintelligible) will complete your examination. Enter it now.
“Wait! What . . . what can you possibly learn from having that thing eat me?” I stammered, stalling for time.
Enter now.
I tried everything to avoid going in. Punishment is a great convincer, but I held out. After a while they lost patience, took control of my body, goose-stepped me across the chamber, forced me to my knees, and shoved my head into that horrible, slimy mouth.
A moment later I was in.
Paralyzed, I lay on my stomach in total darkness, steeling myself for the worst.
Nothing happened.
I groped around. The inky space surrounding me seemed inexplicably large. The surface pressing into my cheek felt coarse and gritty. Strangely, my hands encountered nothing out to the sides or above me. Briefly I considered trying to back my way out of the slug. I quickly gave up that idea, reasoning I would simply be forced to reenter. Besides, for some reason I couldn’t locate the opening. Instead I sat, hugging my knees and shivering in the cold.
