CHAPTER 16:
The powers of Nature all about me lay revealed
February 24, 1943: Needham, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
At three in the morning, outside a dilapidated hotel on the outskirts of Boston, in the midst of a snow storm, a small boy stood solemnly outside Thomas Arnold’s door. Arnold’s first instinct after opening the door was to look beyond the child for his parents or something which would indicate the boy’s origin, but all he saw past the semi-circle of the parking lights was a copse of naked, dead trees pelted by a sheet of falling snow. Behind the child the lot was empty, and the night was cold. Arnold looked down at the kid, then down at the .45 in his own hand. Something told him to keep it out anyway. The child showed no fear, nor any other emotion for that matter. The kid considered Arnold and the gun with equal and wholly alien indifference.
The kid’s pale face was framed by perfectly combed, greased-down hair that was parted with an antiseptic precision which made Arnold flinch. The boy wore a complete set of black clothing, finely tailored for his tiny frame—so perfectly that Arnold thought for a moment he had opened the door to a well-dressed midget; but no, the kid’s face was blemishless and wrinkle-free. Arnold guessed he couldn’t be much older than eight, but something about his eyes (which never seemed to blink) and the stern set of his features told Arnold something was not right. In fact, something about the child was terribly wrong. The feeling he had gotten on the beach at the Cap de la Hague poured over him again, leaving him numb and lost. Somehow, his mind was telling him that he was in the presence of something greater than human experience.
The kid stood as still as a statue, pale, emotionless, clutching a small box-camera at the threshold of the door while the heat rapidly bled out of the room.
Seconds ticked by and snow gathered.
“Come in,” Arnold finally said, thinking of deals with the devil. Things like this did not happen to normal people, he was thinking. Normal lives did not involve meetings like this, he was thinking, but the kid and the circumstances remained, defying reason and order without explanation.
The boy entered, walking with almost comical efficiency to the exact center of the room. Turning on his tiny heel, the kid considered Arnold like a player would consider a chess piece, then placed his small box-camera down on the dresser and simply waited. Now, in the light, Arnold saw that the camera was not quite a camera, but an odd assortment of parts in a camera case, with a green filigreed lens like the bottom of a cola bottle. The device looked more utilitarian that a bunch of junk. It looked like it had been fashioned carefully and with great purpose.
Arnold shut the door to the winter wind, turned up the heat on the old radiator and put his jacket back on, slowly, while considering the kid. He looked like shit, he supposed, sweat stains and ragged red beard, but he didn’t think that mattered to his guest. Arnold sat carefully back down in the filthy easy chair and propped his feet up on the bed. The gun never left his hand and his eyes never left the child. All the while the kid stared back like a still life, his eyes empty and flat like a painting.
“What do you want?” Arnold asked. Something terrible flickered in the child’s eyes. It was a look of intense concentration barely hidden behind a wall of bland passivity.
“I have come to explain things to you,” the child said. His sprightly voice sounded like a series of recorded statements strung together to form a whole sentence. Something about the cadence, the way the sentence did not rise and fall naturally, put Arnold in mind of animals trained to speak for human amusement. This is the way the dead would sound if they could talk, Arnold thought to himself and shuddered.
“About...?”
“Time,” the thing in the boy’s body said, pronouncing the word with the conviction of one who had great experience with the subject at hand.
It took Arnold a moment to place why the child seemed so odd, so different from other children. He, it, stayed completely still, its arms uncomfortably at its sides, its back perfectly straight, its eyes unblinking and distant.
Arnold’s voice came out of his mouth like something had pulled the words out of him. Only after uttering them did Arnold realize he had said something:
“You’re from the library... You’re like the thing that was in Peaslee.”
“Yes.”
“Shit.” Arnold had the urge to pick up the phone and call Cook, but something told him that if he tried, he would find out what the box-camera which was not a box-camera could do. The boy unfolded his hands in an exacting imitation of a human gesture of calm composure, but the emulation ended there. Nothing of the emotion bled through the child’s flat voice as it spoke what sounded like a carefully prepared statement.
“We share mutual goals. My species wishes to study and maintain those species which exist in the interim which comes between our first age on your world and our second age. We travel to your time to study your culture, and to correct...flaws in the chain of events you call history. We mean humanity no harm.”
“Flaws,” Arnold repeated.
“Yes. Fractures. Mistakes which arise. One such mistake exists in a human body now. This being is one of my kind. It seeks to destroy humanity. You will know it as Dr. Smith.”
“Dr. Smith?”
“Yes. You have not met it yet, but it is to accompany you on your voyage to Africa. It is the same being which inhabited Nathaniel Peaslee, and which has now moved into another human shell. We are hunting it. It must be stopped. It seeks the destruction of the place you know as Thule. This will cause numerous events to occur which will bring about the demise of your race, the breakdown of the natural causality of time, and the elimination of the future in which we will exist.” The last word echoed in the cheap room. Exist. We will exist, Arnold thought. Oh my God. Will exist. The future spoken of like a carpenter speaks of a house not yet completed—a room will be placed here, the stairs will be there... Jesus.
Outside the wind whipped, whistling around the eaves of the roof of the bungalow. Beyond this room, Arnold wanly hoped, the real world continued to exist. It was difficult to tell from the vantage point of the easy chair.
“How did you find me?” Arnold blurted out. It was the first thing to occur to him, and it sounded foolish as it left his mouth.
“Wingate Peaslee was questioned at length in Pnakotus, the library you speak of, 150 million years before now. He gave us your name, and the names of others in your group. Through certain other facts which were gleaned by our agents in your historical records, we were able to find you particularly, amidst your species, in time. We had millennia to do so.”
“Peaslee’s in Australia.”
“That is where the exchange took place.”
“When? How?” Arnold balked, fear rising in his voice. They could get anybody, it seemed. Anyone at all.
“We had knowledge that Wingate Peaslee would return there in this year. Our agents were waiting for him. He has been returned to this time unharmed.”
“So what now? I know where Smith is, or I guess I can find him. He’s posing as an expert in African history.”
“We wish to remove it from this time without disturbing the order of things.”
“How?”
“It must be permitted to proceed to the point where its plan is almost realized. Then it may be safely eliminated. Fewer secondary events will occur, the closer it is to its plan’s completion.”
Arnold scratched his head, a movement that grounded him once more in reality—he was talking to an eight-year-old about the nature of time at three in the morning in the middle of a snow storm. All the evidence available indicated that the thing in the kid was born in another, alien form, at least 150 million years before. Arnold swallowed and cleared his throat. It seemed too small an opening to breathe through, all of a sudden.
“Secondary events?” he croaked.
“This is unimportant.”
“No, no, explain it...please.” Arnold found himself spellbound by the creature inside the boy�
�s body. There was something obscene about gaining such knowledge so readily, and Arnold could feel it settling into his mind like a thick, foul secretion. It felt wrong, but the draw of ultimate truth was undeniable. The child continued as if reciting from a textbook:
“The elimination of a disruption from the chain of causality causes numerous unforeseen secondary events which often prove to be even more difficult to eliminate than the original threat. The closer to an actual crux event a correction is made, the fewer secondary events occur. If Smith is eliminated now, so far from the crux event, there could be unfortunate aftereffects.”
Arnold rubbed his eyes briskly and stood up, then immediately sat back down as his head swam. The walls of the room seemed to close in. He could not be sure but the light seemed to flicker.
“And the crux event is the destruction of this... Thule?” his voice said from far away.
“Yes.”
“And you want me to eliminate him there?”
“Eliminate it there. Yes.” It indicated the box-camera. “This is a weapon which will eliminate its consciousness when the time is right. It has been disguised as a human device, a camera, so it may escape Smith’s detection.” The child-thing lifted the box-camera from the dresser with concise movements and handed it to Arnold, who forced himself to take it. Arnold’s first response to the boy coming towards him was to leap up from the easy chair and back away, but he held his ground and composure—barely.
The box was light as a feather, and Arnold could see tiny looping arcs of bronze wire strung inside the black wood frame, connecting an amazing array of tiny green sheets of glass which were cut into complex assortments of squares, triangles and circles.
“Use it only when you arrive at Thule with Smith.”
“How does it...work?” Arnold stood, carefully considering the box in his hands.
“Depress the red button to make it...work.”
Arnold flipped the box over and saw a small, plain, red button embedded in a rough hole punched through the wood casing.
“But only when Smith is at Thule. It is most important that the device is not activated before then, for any reason. Do not speak of this meeting to others or you may inadvertently destroy your species.”
“Yes. All right. I got it. Yes.” Arnold found he was close to tears, for no reason he could place.
The child turned suddenly, causing Arnold to jump backwards towards the bed. The boy opened the door carefully, with precise movements, like a musician playing a well-rehearsed piece of music. An arctic wind poured in, rich with snow, and the small boy trudged out into the night without shutting the door.
“Wait!” Arnold shouted after him, rushing to the open door, nose and ears stinging in the harsh wind.
Halfway across the parking lot, illuminated beneath the yellow lamps in an empty snow field, the boy looked like a shadow come to life as he turned. The boy’s eyes were nothing more than black pits of shadow, and the sheets of snow falling gave the scene a crazed tilting feel, as if the entire area were rushing about on some huge, unseen machine. Arnold felt himself go light-headed again.
“What’s in Thule?” Arnold shouted out into the wind.
“Chaos,” the child replied through the falling snow, his voice hoarse with effort. He, it, turned again and disappeared into the storm.
When Arnold shut the door again the silence of the room enveloped him, but only for a second. The calm was broken by a pounding on the wall above the bed. The banging shook the cheap wall and sent a yellowed photograph of the New York City skyline crashing to the floor in an explosion of glass. A muffled voice shouted profanities at him through the thin wood, a reprimand brought on by too much alcohol or too little sleep. Apparently his neighbor had had enough of Arnold’s three A.M. conversation.
So, Arnold thought to himself, the real world is still there after all. Looking down at the alien device in his hands, he tried not to wonder how much longer the world as he knew it might last.
CHAPTER 17:
I, for this, have been committed
February 24, 1943: Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
Thomas Arnold loaded his gear onto the PBY2 Coronado, head bent down to keep the freezing, salt-laden wind from tearing into his face. Past the huge flying boat the uninviting waters of Boston harbor were laden with chunks of ice and rich white caps of rolling waves. A Navy officer from the Naval Air Transport Service, bundled in a pea coat, stepped down the gangplank and offered to move the rest of Arnold’s equipment aboard. He smiled and joked and laughed despite the cold, all of which was lost on Arnold, whose eyes were far away. Frozen, he watched as the little man efficiently moved his gear into the storage bay beneath the wing.
“Can I take that for you, sir?” the man was saying to him, for the second time. He pointed at the box Arnold clutched in both hands.
“No,” Arnold replied, finally, and walked up the gangplank. Behind him, the Navy man began to whistle a tune. Three little fishes.
Arnold settled into his chair in the back of the Coronado, in a small portion of the aircraft which had been fitted for passengers, and tried to relax. He checked the small black box on his lap, checked the tape he had carefully sealed over the red button. He lifted the lid and looked at the innards for—what? It seemed all right to him, for all he knew.
“Excuse me.” A gruff voice, next to Arnold’s left ear made him sit bolt upright. He shut the box quickly.
Arnold turned in his seat and found himself looking at a disheveled man in his late forties. The man’s brown hair, frizzed and dirty, had faded to grey at the edges and his untrimmed beard was sprinkled with white patches. His clothes were a mish-mash of unrelated styles and his breath and body odor were foul. He wore an odd satchel of woven wool around his shoulders, which hung at his waist like a small hammock. Inside it, Arnold could see, were a cluster of books. The late Dr. Peaslee had described such satchels in his account of the library at Pnakotus.
“Yeah?” Arnold said, affecting an air of indifference, but he knew already this was Dr. Smith. There was no moment of realization or conclusion for Arnold, just the sure knowledge that what was speaking to him was not human. He found with some fear that the feeling of talking to something other than human was becoming a commonplace thing.
“I am Dr. Smith and you are Thomas Arnold,” it said, plainly, and pushed its way into the adjacent seat across the aisle. Certainly, it was much more skilled at human mimicry than the thing that Arnold had met the night before. But even so, something about the way it sat, completely upright, and the way it simply stared at Arnold, blandly, without blinking, would seem out of place to even the most common person.
“Yeah.” It was all that Arnold could say.
“I have extensive knowledge of the region to which we are journeying,” it stated.
“Good.”
The door to their small bulkhead shot open with a bang and Arnold jumped, almost dropping the box from his lap. The Navy Air Transport Service man smiled into their nearly empty cabin.
“Guess you guys get the first-class treatment,” he said. “We’re closing up the plane, and we’ll be off in about twenty five minutes.” The little man shut the door again behind him, and when Arnold turned to look back at Smith—at it—he found it considering him quietly, as if it had been watching him the whole time, studying his reactions.
Arnold quickly looked away. It seemed whatever he did, he incriminated himself. Arnold studied the box on his lap for a moment before tearing his eyes away from it. Instead he looked out the window, away from Smith.
“What is that, please?” Smith asked, and Arnold’s heart jumped in his chest. Everything seemed muffled beneath the insistent pounding of his heart in his ears. What if it recognized the weapon? Should Arnold trigger the device here and hope for the best? He looked into the eyes of the devil across the aisle and calmly lifted the box. Arnold placed the box carefully on the seat next to him, the one away from Smith, underneath the window. Outside the porthole-like wind
ow, sailors were casting off moorings and two of the four engines of the immense plane leapt life belching a thick, grey smoke.
“My camera,” Arnold said quietly, looking back into Smith’s empty eyes.
“Yes. A chemical emulsion camera.” Smith looked away, straight ahead.
Arnold settled in, he placed his jacket over the”camera,” pulled his hat down over his eyes and feigned sleep so he would not have to talk to it any longer. Something in his mind begged for rest, for escape from the thing on the plane beside him, but Arnold knew that what he had set about doing must be done. This was about the world. The whole world.
He could feel Smith’s eyes crawling over his body as he reclined in the chair. Every nerve in his body remained ready to spring at any moment, and he tried his best to drift off, but sleep would not come. Again and again he heard the voice of the little boy shout back from the snow storm, and saw the form disappear into the night, a shadow moving among shadows, like a specter foretelling imminent death.
Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Page 20
