His feet found the freezing wood of the floor. The room was even bigger than he had imagined from his perch on the bed. The ceiling hung above him like the sky. Before him, at least thirty feet away, was the giant’s door, still ajar. A faint bit of music played from the other room. Arnold crept forward, coaxing a million different creaks and groans from the unusually thick and long planks on the floor.
Arnold slid the door open, pulling on the rusted knob with both, baby-smooth hands. He had to reach slightly up to do so. As the door swung wide to reveal the other room, Arnold held his breath.
Light flooded in from two immense, cracked windows, illuminating another huge room. As Arnold shuffled in and could see more clearly, the light sparkled off a million fragmented pieces of metal, glass and bits of mirror scattered on the floor. Outside the window, lost in the sun, was the facade of another tenement.
Arnold shuffled into the room. Some huge machine, like the inner workings of a Phillips radio, had been smashed beyond repair in the center of the room and spread about evenly. The destruction had occurred with great care, it seemed, reminding Arnold of his OSS training on how to destroy radios and code-books to avoid their capture. It was the room’s only feature except for an overturned table. From the room beyond, perhaps the next door neighbor’s, a radio played quietly. The male voice, thick and resonant and resoundingly controlled, trilled through the wall:
You must remember this:
A kiss is still a kiss
A sigh is just a sigh
The sentimental things apply, as time goes by
He had never heard the song before.
As he moved forward, complex patterns of light rose from the wreckage on the floor, reflections off the debris spiraling in the air, distorting the room, giving him a feeling of disjointedness, adding to the dreamlike sensation which already permeated the scene. His breath leapt out of him, rising in the sunlight like steam, when he was no longer able to hold it in. He had nearly forgotten he was holding it at all.
Arnold stood near the edge of the debris, poised in the sunlight, naked and afraid. Afraid of something he already somehow knew. Afraid of something. Some fact which was already in his mind but which he could not see, would not see.
Thomas Arnold looked down on a hundred upturned pieces of shattered mirror which lay among the detritus.
A hundred reflections of the serene, blameless face of an eight-year-old boy looked back at him.
He began to scream.
CHAPTER 29:
I crave for death, I long for rest
February 28, 1943: Tobin Ranges, Gibson Desert, Australia
Night fell on the western desert and Joe Camp fell with it. It was seven and a half hours since his departure from the safety of the cave and he now understood the severe mistake he’d made venturing out in the blazing Australian sun. An hour into his march, all the strength had left his limbs, leaving him a stumbling stick-figure in an endless sea of red-brown dunes. His lips were cracked, his eyes were sunblind and his water was nearly gone. Half caught up in some mad, internal monologue, he noted his knees giving way like a man marking time, simply watching for some only marginally interesting event—in this case, the end of his life. There was no pain. In fact there was no sensation at all when he hit the sand. His body was a numb appendage, a ragged waste of rapidly dwindling liquids which would surely be used up after tonight.
The cool darkness swept over him like a drug, lulling him into a dull stupor. Unmoving. Paralyzed.
Then—the light.
In the distance a dancing, ghostly light, red, green and purple, appeared in the darkness like a storm of color on the lip of the world. Camp found his feet slowly, first stumbling up to his hands and knees and then to a swaying, crouch as the world rocked and tilted around him. The light still shone in the dark, a beacon, drawing him forward to the edge of the map, the place where the cartographer might mark “here there be dragons.” The light was mesmerizing. It drew him, unmindful of danger, like he was being tugged forward on an invisible tether.
He staggered ahead, attempting to keep the light in his field of vision, his feet sinking into the greedy sand as soft dunes pulled on his boots, sucking them in to trip him. Twice he fell to his hands and knees; once he sank up to his wrists in the sand. The sand beneath him was lit by the sky and the ghost-light like snow in the moonlight. Golden, blue and red motes of solid color winked in and out as they caught the light like tiny mirrors.
Squinting and raising his head from the sand, Joe Camp focused his stinging eyes as well as he could on the distant light and saw shadows passing before them. Blurry man-shapes flitted back and forth, backlit by the brilliance of the blaze on the horizon. The light was real. It was there, an actual thing in the dark, not some figment of his thirst and exhaustion.
He fumbled with his canteen and drank the rest of his water in one long gulp. It was a gamble, but he would not make it to the light without more water, and even if it proved to be just as dry as the rest of the desert, so what? At least he would see it, whatever it was, before he was gone. What little energy he had left swelled within him as he drank, and the warm water assuaged some deep demand of his body which had kept him in a daze. Joe Camp stood and started forward once more, his feet rising and falling in an odd, loose rhythm.
The light winked at him from the dark, drawing him in like the embrace of an old friend.
Huge blocks of sandstone were lit in stark highlights by the light ahead. Camp could make out little on their black, shadowed surfaces except that they were wind-eaten and rough. Once perfectly carved and solid, he was sure, each was as large as a tank. They were spread about on the dunes like the immense wood blocks of some unimaginably huge child. It looked like someone had blown up a pyramid the size of Giza, and these rocks were the detritus from the horrific explosion.
He chews the stones of the earth for his food, those ‘at are too hard, he spits them out. Old Muluwari’s voice giggled in the dark and Camp leaned against a stone for support, squinting ahead into the dark. He was here to see the Nulla now. Steuben and Peaslee were on their own; the OSS could look out for itself. The war was like some distant thing he had read of in a book once. He was here to see the Nulla. He was here to learn the truth about the world.
Through an immense thoroughfare of sand-blasted, randomly scattered rocks, over rolling red-brown dunes in the dark, the light stood out prominently on the hill ahead, like a colorful star fallen to earth, still sputtering. Closer than before. Much closer.
Without knowing why, exhausted and scarecrow-thin, Joe Camp began to run towards it.
The amorphous light, rich in colors too varying and fleeting to be individually identified by Camp’s wonder-filled eyes, swirled like a silent storm on the crest of the hill. It cast harsh, piercing highlights on the destroyed masonry and on Camp’s face, illuminating the Australian desert with an eerie, stop-motion flicker. But the light cycled too rapidly for the darkness to take hold even for a moment.
Camp watched in gape-jawed bewilderment as the silent spectacle continued before him.
There was nothing really to be done. He had no illusions about his chances. His weaponry was pathetic if he was up against something with access to the technology he had seen in the cave, and he would never survive a return trip through the desert. His choices had been made long ago. He was in free-fall now. He had been ever since he had been rescued in Port Hedland. All he could choose now was his point of impact.
The Nulla was here, it was waiting, and Camp could feel it. He had been drawn here, across time, through circumstance to the very edge of human knowledge. Would he falter now?
Unfamiliar shadows flickered within the light, calling to him, suggesting shapes of things never before seen by human eyes, promising eternity.
Joe Camp dropped his gear and weapon in the sand and began to climb the hill.
“Joe,” the voice said from the light.
“Yes,” Camp replied, his eyes clenched, a waver in his voice
. An indistinct shadow was visible, barely, in the halo of light as Camp slowly inched forward up the sandy incline.
“I have waited a long time for you,” it said.
Joe Camp recognized the voice. He entered the light.
The light died with a click and faded to a dull, light green pearlescence which illuminated a small dome around the crest of the hill. Maljarna, the aborigine, stood next to a half-destroyed masonry block which had become an impromptu table. On top of it sat a huge, baroque bronze and steel machine. The machine was composed of mirrors, rods and pistons which swung and spun in complex patterns which were, now that the machine was shut down, slowly spinning to a halt. The undersea-green glow bled out from the interior of the device and illuminated Maljarna’s squat, broad face in a strange way. The aborigine’s eyes glowed a luminescent yellow, his teeth a deep green. The man smiled as he saw Joe approach. He held out his empty hands and beckoned the American closer.
“Joe. My time here has almost ended. I must return home now,” Maljarna said, his face showing a nearly imperceptible sadness which played across his features like an afterthought. “It will be sad. I will miss this place. This time. This form. Your kind is far more giving, beautiful and intelligent than most of my race believe. I will do my best to teach them of these things.”
“Where’s home, Mal?” Joe mumbled, but something in him already knew.
Camp stood next to Maljarna and clasped the aborigine’s hand in his own. Goodness bled out of him like a wave. Camp tried to smile, tried to be reassuring, but found his mind wandering. Their eyes locked.
“Before all this. I will show you.” Mal gestured to the ruins strewn across the desert. “Touch the machine.”
Joe Camp reached forward with trembling hands. It was the hardest thing he had ever done in his life.
The light rushed in, pushing all distinction out of Camp’s mind. All was lost in a blinding warmth, in a perfect, clear white light. Camp shut his eyes against it, but the insistent beams pierced through his lids directly into his mind. There was too much coming in. Too much light. Camp buckled at the knees, or imagined he did; he could no longer feel the ground or the gentle wind. Everything was the light.
Silent. Total.
Then sounds. The rising and falling buzz of crickets and less recognizable insects. Distant whines of machinery. Sonorous bleats like those produced by elephants. The wind whistling through high peaks. The cooling wind, rich with the smell of salt water and other, more subtle odors.
Despite the glare Joe Camp forced his eyes open to an alien land couched in a warm, summer night.
The piercing light was gone, like it had never been there at all, and Camp stared in wonder at the world as it had been before.
A gigantic city-scape unfurled before him, lit here and there by small white and yellow lights. The immense buildings, many of which were constructed like ziggurats, with dozens of levels rich with hanging gardens and verandahs filled with exotic plants, stretched to the edge of vision and rose to monstrous heights. The furthest looked like distant mathematical peaks, like a scientific imitation of geology. This pattern of imitating nature continued with canyons of light which were strung beneath these structures, huge roads for unguessable machines to traverse. Then, as Joe Camp watched, a machine of silver and bronze, larger than a city bus, shot down the thoroughfare faster than a fighter plane. It was gone in seconds, too quickly for Camp to spot any crew or its method of propulsion.
The stones which made up the foundation of the building he stood on matched, at least basically in size, those ruined blocks he had seen in the desert. Everything about the scene was absolutely real. He was actually on a verandah in some alien city. Tears filled Joe Camp’s eyes and his knees buckled.
Through the tears Camp looked to the too-bright night sky, which held incomprehensible patterns of alien stars. In a thousand million years the stars would find the positions of his youth, and once again he would be able to find his way by them. The pattern above was like a complex dance through which a billion suns kept time. It was all so simple. The universe was a clock. A countdown to the world as he knew it. The world after.
“This is my home,” Maljarna said to him, and the ruined blocks of the desert faded back in around Joe Camp suddenly. The two men stood once more among the ruins, in the world after.
“I have been here, awaiting this moment, for more time than you can imagine. My kind has had agents here since the beginning, stopping those who trespass on our knowledge, our greatest achievement, the library hidden beneath these sands. The total of all the knowledge of my people.”
“So...there is no Maljarna?”
“Maljarna is one of my forms. I have been here so long and have learned so much of your kind’s ways, I can pass undetected when I wish. I have been many men, many women, in many times. Since these people came to this land, I and others of my kind have weaved our way throughout their history. Waiting and watching.”
“Waiting for what?”
“For a time when the library could no longer reside here safely.”
“So there is no Nulla?” Camp whispered.
“There is always a Nulla. My kind is careful not to interfere in your species’ affairs more than is necessary. We have been, for some time, a Nulla to your kind, as a punishment will be a Nulla for a young child. A terrible danger which threatens when rules, albeit vague ones, are broken. All races, even ours, have their Nulla. We have woven beliefs and what you call magic to prevent your kind from discovering our caches of knowledge. Other species, above us, have done the same in a careful pattern which imitates the architecture of the universe.” Maljarna smiled, but now Camp could almost see the thing inside of Maljarna, the thing which moved his body like a puppet. A wisdom so ancient that it dwarfed human civilizations stared out at him from behind mild, wide-set eyes.
“Why did you kidnap the Americans? Peaslee? Steuben?”
“We needed information about what your group was up to. From their interrogations in the ancient past, we created a document which we placed in our library, millions of years before your men were kidnapped. It was to lead a traitor of our kind on a more direct, and therefore more predictable, path. We did not harm anyone. We have set everything back as it was. It is our way.”
“A traitor?”
“The one thing we cannot fully account for in time is the action of another of our kind. This makes a traitor very dangerous. The earlier the plan of the traitor is thwarted, the more likely the traitor is to compose another, more effective plan, or else that plan’s prevention will cause some other destructive outcome which then must be corrected. Correcting time is a very precise process. We allowed the traitor to compose a plan and find the necessary elements, elements we chose to leave in plain sight. Bait for our trap. For this reason only did we interfere by interrogating your agents in the past. This is why the library is here and has not been moved. The ability is well within our means. It is a large trap for those of our kind who stray. It is well known among my kind that it holds many secrets.”
“This interrogation—” Camp sputtered.
“Led the traitor on a very precise course. Even now it follows it. We are waiting at its journey’s end.”
“What about the others? The man at the building?”
“The man who posed as Steuben worked for the British government. They have learned of the library and have chosen to kill to keep such a secret, even from their allies. We dealt with them using our methods. The library must not fall into human hands. It would ruin...history.”
“What’s in the library?”
“Everything. Before and after this time. Everything, encompassed in books which will last forever, untouched and pure for our kind to recover in the future.”
“Everything,” Joe whispered, his face full of reverence.
“It must be removed from human reach. The books are a dangerous tool. Too dangerous for a species so obsessed with time and location as humanity. It will take some time befo
re your species grows beyond its unsound temporal provincialism. Then, perhaps, contact will be made between our two species.”
“I...I think I understand,” Camp mumbled.
“This will all be removed by my kind, and you must return and report that it is so. That nothing remains here. Otherwise others will come, and they may uncover something we overlook.
“I have grown...fond of you, Joe Camp. You represent to me what is good about being human. There is a feeling I cannot name which fills me when I perform an act of selflessness on behalf of another human. Where I risk my existence for another, less fortunate being. You do this without thinking. Perhaps someday we shall meet again. Until then, this all must remain secret. You must tell your leaders only that this place is gone, now, that nothing remains here but dust.”
“I will try.”
“You will not need to try. Watch.” With a click, the machine to Maljarna’s right sputtered to terrible life.
Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Page 29
