The Prayer Machine

by Christopher Hodder-Williams

  Her eyes seemed large. Strange. Fixed on some point just beyond him. ‘You might … strike lucky. I was lucky to find that garbage dump.’

  ‘We mustn’t push our luck too far.’

  ‘You’re afraid of what you might find out,’ she said.

  ‘After this afternoon’s horror show, who wouldn’t be?’

  ‘You won’t settle down for the treatment tonight if you can’t resolve anything. The rabbit is an enigma. This may not be, Neil. Phone him.’

  It was an odd moment. Heat haze lifted from the tarmac around Cathedral Square, then remained rippling over the grass and apparently buckling the metal of parked cars. Yet the shimmer in the atmosphere did not seem like ordinary heat convection. Not only that. The events that kept occurring were seemingly ahead of the motives which dictated actions. It was as if holes punched in an endless loop of paper tape — twisted paper tape — were sequencing mutual thoughts and actions as remorselessly as they would a computer.

  For instance, Neil made no conscious decision when he led the way into the hotel and picked up a phone.

  For instance, Neil was not properly surprised to find he could remember the telephone extension of the crew room belonging to an airline with whom he had had no dealings for years.

  … Yet the information he got back still froze him somewhere in the spine — just as the spectacle of the transmuted rabbit had done.

  The man he eventually got hold of at the other end was the senior training captain of the line. Evidently the name Prentice meant something to him though at first he was cagey, as if trying to gauge what part Prentice had played in those claustrophobic events that had been erased from the flight deck tape and apparently from people’s minds also.

  But it was evident that this latter didn’t apply; and in the end the senior training captain referred to the eerie moment in the sky that had linked a handful of people with an unexplained phenomenon. And what he said was, in a horrible way, metalogically credible.

  Neil held the receiver slightly away from his ear, so that Ann Marie could get it first hand. ‘… It was nearly six months ago. Captain Rogers took off for a routine flight from here to New York. Luckily it was a freight trip: no passengers were involved.

  ‘I was … uneasy about Captain Rogers for reasons you may well guess. Shortly before the flight I checked him out very thoroughly both on the simulator and thereafter in the cockpit. He came out of it A1 so I had no excuse to ground him. After the check flight he seemed to have some sort of a premonition. He referred to you, stating that he didn’t want to precipitate any contact with you but that should you try to get in touch with him I was to assist in any way I could. I agreed; but I could see that he was in a quandary. On the one hand he clearly felt guilty about “his reticence on the subject” — as he put it — and on the other he was unwilling to take any initiative. His state of mind did nothing to ease mine and I put him on freight service.

  ‘On the day he took off everything seemed normal. Fifteen or twenty minutes after take-off he reported he had reached his cruising altitude of thirty-three thousand feet. Then …’

  Ann Marie’s eyes were on Neil’s. They were introverted, frightened eyes that seemed to sense the kind of thing that was coming. She was so close to Neil in the phone booth that he could feel her heart thumping against his own body. ‘Then, shortly thereafter, we got a brief, tense message about what Rogers then described as “clear air turbulance”. Rogers reported that he’d throttled right back and put the aircraft into a steep climb to lose speed, yet the aircraft was becoming impossible to control and he radioed a MAYDAY. Air Traffic Control immediately ordered a snap fix on his position. Meanwhile Rogers was becoming increasingly difficult to hear and his voice had a garbled quality as if some other pilot was sending carrier at the same time. But he said something about a “vortex”, some kind of a spiral cyclone that was shaking the aircraft violently and throwing the instruments haywire. He said the giros had tumbled and he thought he might even be flying upside down. It was evident that this “turbulence” was shaking the aeroplane to pieces.

  ‘We didn’t get much more. Till he suddenly shouted in a panic on the radio. It seemed utter drivel —’

  ‘Have you got the exact words?’

  ‘I have the transcript up in my operations office. If you hang on a minute I’ll go and get it. You must not, of course, leak any of this to the press.’

  ‘I shan’t do that.’

  There followed an agonising delay and Neil had to insert two more coins to keep the line open. Neither he nor Ann Marie spoke.

  At last the man came back on the line. ‘I can’t see how anyone can make any sense out of this but here is what we got from the tape. He was shouting wildly one moment, whispering, as if stupefied with terror, the next. “It’s coming back at us through Time!” Those were his first crazy words. He went on: “They warned me by radio — only was it really the radio?, my God, what’s happening? … They warned me to alter course. It was too late. This aircraft isn’t moving; the sky is moving past it!” There came a pause, maybe five seconds. Then he screamed, “You must be ready, back there! Back in the seventies! It’s like a great ball, a huge black ball with nothing inside it … and nothing is the word, it’s a kind of hole, and I’m being sucked towards the hole. But it’s coming from the future, travelling backward and coming straight at you. You must prepare. You must … Christ, what — ” ’ The words seemed the more eerie from being dictated flat.

  Neil said, ‘That’s all?’

  ‘Not quite. He stopped transmitting but there was a long, descending whistle, it came several times, like the noise given off sometimes from celestial pulsars.’

  ‘What about the wreckage?’

  ‘There was none.’

  ‘Nothing? Not even a life jacket?’

  ‘He wasn’t over the sea.’

  ‘What was his position?’

  ‘Well, let’s see … twenty minutes West of Heathrow I’d say, from the flight plan … I’m just looking through the accident report. Where are you speaking from?’

  ‘Exeter.’

  ‘That,’ said the captain grimly, ‘is one hell of a coincidence.’

  Neil felt Ann Marie’s hand grip his arm tightly. ‘Go on.’

  Ann Marie whispered, ‘I think I know what’s coming. My whole spine. It is as if it is … electric.’

  ‘Mr Prentice? Yes, it was a Class-A Fix, between seven and eight nautical miles West of Exeter. Over a place called Norton …’

  *

  ‘Ann Marie.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘There’s something we’ve got to face. Being in love with you isn’t going to stop me getting lost in space … that is what you were hoping?’

  ‘How do you know this … this loving from me cannot help?’

  ‘Because the girl in the trance had your voice.’

  *

  ‘Mr Prentice?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m Richardson.’

  ‘Oh yes, I remember you from yesterday.’

  ‘You’ve made yourself an insufferable nuisance already, Mr Prentice. And now you waste the lab’s time with an idiotic joke. As you know very well, what you brought them for vivisection was a plastic rabbit. It is made of pure polythene and it couldn’t have come from a dump on Dartmoor because there is no such dump in any of our National Parks, let alone that one. What made you do it?’

  ‘Oh, just for giggles, I assure you.’

  ‘I won’t attempt to comment. Dr Schuber is waiting for you. I shall not be participating in this mumbo jumbo but I hope you don’t add too much to yesterday’s confusion.’

  ‘I shall try not to.’

  ‘Then cut out that backwards talk. It won’t fool anybody for long. I know a music hall act that can do it better.’

  Neil said, ‘Remind me to get tickets.’

  4

  Ann Marie’s voice lingered across a huge plateau. She seemed remote and yet intimate at the same time — a
tryst lasting through and beyond infinity, caressing him, merging with his mind like the music of the spheres.

  It didn’t matter what she said; indeed he could only discern the flavour of her words rather than the content. She was the audible equivalent of an abstract painting, conveying a certain emotional theme but not in tangible form.

  Sometimes he saw her face, vignetted in stray light from the trail of irridescent comets which latticed the universe; then there would be a rushing sensation, a plummeting through black space, a narrow tunnel through uncertainty and overlapping strips of time.

  Now, the rubies of before were micro-distant stars, wheeling on the fringe of the Galaxy, growing huge as you approached them, then dilating into pinpoints as you left them lightyears behind …

  No voices now; nothing organic or intelligible. A spiral nebula that should have taken billions of years to rotate turned on its axis visibly, until it suddenly contracted into a compressed entity the size of a single thought, yet weighing more than all the stars in the Milky Way, pulling all matter into its hole, an implosion in space that sucked in everything from planets the size of Saturn to stars bigger than the sun. Their light and heat were extinguished as if a film had been reversed, so that what had been formation of matter from Stella gas ran backwards, segments of the universe folding on themselves and disintegrating. Spheres that had been there before could not now be imagined, because energy could not exist without time.

  Then, from all this, a globule condensed and began to glow. It reached flashpoint and generated Existence. It hurled time-rocks into a chasm that had not before even contained Space. The time-rocks congealed into continuous belts of universal time and the cinema could now run once more. From physical Nothing a gas-cloud formed then solidified and fragmented into separate stars, till planets re-formed and cooled, and a trail in the Earth’s sky became the moon, and Life began to emerge, creeping things and swimming things and Jurassic reptiles. Continents shifted and pushed up mountains glowing red from lava. Icebergs converged from the poles and melted into torrential rivers that cut fissures in the fossil-granite. Living tissue evolved and condensed into three dimensions and you suddenly found that this living tissue was You.

  Yet it was also like waking from a dream, falling … falling … until you were aware that you were lying down and had somehow to contrive to stand up. Your stomach dropped from under you in the somersault; and there was this conviction that a PON EM had a double meaning … it was both a black hole and yet was also the one tiny slit left in your mind through which you could communicate — once every so often — with those who had populated your former life.

  ‘You must say you’re from Central Pool.’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Better not ask questions. I’m just a nurse. You never saw me. Communicon?’

  ‘What’s “communicon”?’

  ‘You must be an Archaic. You came through the PONEM?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s an infringement. How do you date?’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘From which era have you emerged?’

  ‘Nineteen seventy-six.’

  ‘Sponsor? — Who was your therapist?’

  ‘Dr Jane Schuber.’

  ‘I’ll see you are sent by ambol to Dr Krister’s surgery. You can trust Dr Krister but not his colleague. You must say nothing until Krister has checked there is no fono bugging. Are you fitted with intermesh?’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Then you’re not. That makes you a problem.’

  ‘Where am I now?’

  ‘Avoid archaic words. You mean nano.’

  ‘Where am I nano?’

  ‘The IoM unit.’

  ‘That still exists?’

  ‘Obviously. Repeat: no more questions. I’ll call an ambol. Don’t be surprised if they give you a shot and keep you unconscious. They get a lot of violent patients. And anyway I don’t want them to have the opportunity to communicon — you might reveal too much without knowing it. For instance, you don’t have intermesh. That could lead to some awkward questions. Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  *

  Voices, again.

  But very different voices. They were nextdoor, behind a thin partition. The accent was midatlantic, the syntax easy to understand but evolved considerably since the 1970s.

  For a moment, Neil couldn’t orientate himself. Where was the tape-recorder, with the slowly revolving spools? … But this was another surgery, not the operating theatre of before. More puzzling still, much of the equipment was totally unfamiliar.

  Neil listened intently.

  ‘… He’s in the isoroom.’

  ‘Kin, there’s something odd about this. His clothes were not in the locker and there are no documents. Are you sure you’re not harbouring political patients?’

  ‘All I know is he came here in an ambol from Central Pool.’

  ‘Central Pool know nothing about him. I checked.’

  ‘The point is, he’s ill. Let’s take care of that first.’

  ‘How? Without a diagnosis?’ This man sounded hostile. ‘We’d better get his data from the infopoint.’

  ‘I’d rather you stayed out of it.’

  ‘If that man in there is a genuine case I’ll grow leaves. And I don’t want to get incrimed by your fringe activities.’

  Neil couldn’t concentrate for long. He knew he was ill, knew he was psychotic, knew he couldn’t tell fantasy from fact … His mind wandered. Yet he tried to observe. Fact or fiction, it was worthwhile noting his environment. It would be a check on whether things remained consistent — he knew that schizophrenic trips implied unstable surroundings that constantly changed from the viewpoint of the patient.

  It did not strike him, at this point, that he was applying sane analysis to his predicament. All he knew was what he could see, hear and witness. Yet he still doubted his own perception. Where were the ordinary things? — the light switches, the windows, the sink taps, towel rails, the door?

  The voices shed little light on these curious deficiencies. ‘… people down at the PONEM?’

  ‘Are you out of your craze? If he came in that way you must report it.’

  ‘At the expense of the patient?’

  ‘If you don’t, Kin, it will be at the expense of yourself. You know the rules.’

  ‘I don’t like the rules.’

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t persist in your rebellious attitude. It’s very awkward for me.’

  ‘Look Wels, I happen to know who that patient is.’

  ‘And you’re determined to conceal it?’

  ‘You’re giving me plenty of raison for doing so …’

  Neil tried to remember names. There had been a nun in the other dream, surely? But had she remained a nun? He had some recollection of her being two people … and yet it was more complicated even than that. Her voice had somehow addressed him in this PONEM, light-years ago, and then she had been wizened with old age, yet young in manner and in speech. Did schizophrenia duplicate people? — present them at different times in different forms?

  But the search for the mental patients was something he remembered all right. Aloud he said, ‘Cobalt-sixty.’

  ‘He said something!’

  ‘Are you sure? When he got here in the ambol he was not conscious. Look, I’m sorry, Kin, but I’m going to access the Puter.’

  ‘Give me just one week to sort it all out.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘I could get him cleared through Central Pool.’

  ‘Not without faking the files.’

  ‘So I do that.’

  ‘You really have got the wheel between your hands, haven’t you. I’ll make a deal, Kin. If you tell me who he really is — or who you at least think he is — I’ll reconsider my actions. But if you don’t I’ll go straight to an infopoint and call up the records.’

  ‘There’s no need. I know who he is.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘From the pictu
re on a book wrapper. There was an autobiography.’

  ‘I see! Then we certainly are talking about the PONEM! You’re mad! … There’s only been one book written in the entire history of the Institute of Metapsychology. Which means —’

  Krister cut in: ‘Which means you can keep out of this.’

  ‘What happens when he needs to use the intermesh he hasn’t got?’

  ‘I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.’

  ‘And fono?’

  ‘That too.’

  ‘You’re still completely out of your craze. Anyway, I think you’re wrong. Look at his physique. He’s a manual jobber.’

  ‘I don’t agree. Everybody had a better physique in those days. And if we took more care of our bodies instead of rushing about everywhere in magnecraft we wouldn’t be so stunted — mentally or physically — as we have become. I’m going to talk to the patient nano.’

  ‘Okay, I can’t stop you. Just don’t forget there’s fono in there, that’s all.’

  ‘I shall have him in here when it comes to conducting a serious talkthrough.’

  ‘Not with me here, you won’t.’

  ‘Look, Wels, you needn’t have anything to do with it. Alibi yourself. Go to Central Pool and help with the new intakes. They’ve asked you over and over. Just leave me to it.’

  ‘Okay. But if you go down, you’re not taking me with you.’

  ‘Communicon.’

  Kin Krister stood there thoughtfully, watched Wels Narbiton on video as he climbed in his magnecraft and drove off …

  ‘Morrow, Mr Prentice. How are you feeling?’

  ‘Not so hot.’

  ‘Have you been feeling very hot?’

  ‘I mean … not very well.’

  ‘Do you recall coming here in the ambol?’

  ‘No. I was under sedation.’

  ‘Do you know why?’

  ‘They said —’

  ‘Who said?’

  ‘A nurse. She said I might say something compromising.’

  ‘Any idea who she was?’

  ‘No. All she said was that you could be trusted, but your partner couldn’t.’

  ‘She meant Dr Narbiton?’