Strangers (102 page)

“Here goes.”

“Love you,” she said.

“Love you,” he said, as surprised as she was by that statement.

Forty-two seconds.

He raised his hands over the nuclear device, and he felt the rings appearing immediately in his palms.

Forty seconds.

•

Brendan had broken out in a sweat.

Thirty-nine seconds.

He strained, trying to work the magic that he knew was in him. But though the stigmata burned on his palms, and in spite of the fact that he could feel the power surging in him, he could not focus on the urgent task. He kept thinking about what could go wrong, and that in some way he would be responsible if it did go wrong, and the more he thought the less he could direct the miraculous energy within him.

Thirty-four seconds.

Parker Faine pushed between two onlookers and dropped to his knees beside Brendan. “No offense, Father, but maybe the problem is that you, being a Jesuit, are just too damn prone to intellectualize. Maybe this requires going with your gut. Maybe what this needs is the wild-ass, go-for-it, try-anything, gonzo, berserker commitment of an artist.” He thrust his own large hands toward the detonator and shouted: “Come out of there you fucker!”

With a snap of wires, the detonator leapt out of its niche in the bomb package and straight into Parker’s hands.

There were cries of relief and congratulations, but Brendan said, “The clock’s still counting down.”

Eleven seconds.

“Yeah, but it’s not connected to the bomb anymore,” Parker said, grinning broadly.

Alvarado said, “But there’s a conventional explosive charge in the damn detonator.”

•

The detonator erupted out of the bomb, into Dom’s hands. He saw the clock still counting, and he sensed it had to be stopped even though there was no longer a chance of a nuclear explosion. So he simply
willed
it to stop, and the lighted numerals froze at 0:03.

•

0:03.

Parker, unaccustomed to the role of magician, panicked at this secondary crisis. Certain his power was depleted, he chose a course of action perfectly in character. With a war cry to rival John Wayne in one of the
Duke’s old movies, Parker turned and threw the detonator toward the far wall of the cavern, as if lobbing a grenade. He knew he could not cast it clear to the other side of the chamber, but he hoped he could pitch it far enough. Even as it left his hand, he flung himself to the floor, as the others had already done.

•

Dom was kissing Ginger when the explosion sounded overhead, and they both jumped. For an instant he thought Brendan had failed to disarm the other device, then realized a nuclear explosion would have brought the ceiling down on them.

“The detonator,” she said.

“Come on,” he said. “Let’s see if anyone’s hurt.”

The lift crawled upward. When they arrived at the second level, the main chamber was filled with scores of Depository staff members, all carrying guns and responding to the sound of battle.

Holding Ginger’s hand, Dom pushed through the crowd, toward the place where he had left Brendan with the first backpack nuke. He saw Faye, Sandy, and Ned. Then Brendan—alive, unhurt. Jorja, Marcie.

Parker loomed on his right and gave both him and Ginger a bear hug. “You shoulda seen me, kids. If they’d had
both
me and Audie Murphy, World War II would’ve been over in about six months.”

“I’m beginning to see why Dom admires you so,” Ginger said.

Parker raised his eyebrows. “But of course, my dear! To know me is to love me.”

A sudden cry of alarm rose, which jolted Dom because he thought all danger was past. When he turned, he saw that Falkirk had dodged away from Jack and Ernie in the turmoil and had wrenched a revolver from one of the Thunder Hill staff. Everyone fell back from him.

“For Christ’s sake,” Jack shouted, “it’s over, Colonel. It’s over, damn you.”

But Falkirk had no intention of resuming his private war. His gray translucent eyes shone with madness. “Yes,” he said. “It’s over, and I won’t be changed like the rest of you. You won’t get
me.
” Before anyone could reach him, or before anyone could think to tear the weapon from his hands with telekinetic power, he thrust the barrel of the revolver into his mouth and pulled the trigger.

With a cry of horror, Ginger looked away from the falling corpse, and Dom turned his head, too. It was not the bloody death itself that repelled but the stupid, pointless waste when, at last, humankind had within its grasp the secret of immortality.

3
Transcendence

As the staff of Thunder Hill filled the cavern, milling around the ship that most had never seen before, Ginger and Dom and the other witnesses followed Miles Bennell into the vessel.

The interior was not dramatic, but as plain as the exterior, with none of the complex and powerful machinery that one expected in a craft capable of such a journey. Miles Bennell explained that the builders had advanced beyond machinery as humankind understood it, perhaps even beyond physics as humankind understood it. There was one long chamber within, and it was for the most part gray, drab, featureless. The warm golden luminosity which had filled the vessel on the night of July 6—and which Brendan had remembered in his dreams—was not visible now. There was only a line of ordinary work lights that the scientists had strung for their convenience.

In spite of its plainness, the chamber had a warmth, appeal, and magic that, strangely enough, reminded Ginger of her father’s private office at the back of his first jewelry store in Brooklyn, the one he always used as his headquarters. The walls of that sanctum sanctorum had been decorated only with a calendar, and the furniture had been inexpensive, old, and well used. Plain. Even drab. But for Ginger, it had been a fine and magical room, because Jacob had seldom worked there but had squirreled away with one book or another, from which he’d often read to her. Sometimes it would be a mystery, or a fantasy about gnomes and witches, a story of other worlds, or a thriller about spies. And when Jacob read, his voice acquired a resonant and mesmerizing timbre. The reality of the gray little office faded, and for hours Ginger could believe herself to be investigating with Sherlock Holmes upon the misty moors, celebrating with the Hobbit Mr. Bilbo Baggins inside the Hill at Bag End, or with Jim and Will as they explored the terrible carnival in Mr. Bradbury’s lovely book. Jacob’s office hadn’t been only what it seemed to be. And although this ship bore no physical resemblance to Jacob’s office, it was similar in that it was more than it appeared; under its drab skin, it harbored wondrous things, great mysteries.

Spaced along each long wall were four coffinlike containers of a semitransparent, milky-blue substance that looked like carved quartz. These were, Miles Bennell explained, the beds in which the travelers had passed their long journey in a state of near-suspended animation, aging only the equivalent of one earth-year for every fifty that passed. As they dreamed, the fully automated ship proceeded through the void, reaching ahead
with an array of sensors and probes for indications of life in the hundreds of thousands of solar systems that it passed.

It did not escape Ginger’s notice that the top of each container was marked by two raised rings precisely the size of those that had appeared in Dom’s and Brendan’s hands.

“You told us they were dead when they got here,” Ned reminded Bennell. “But you never answered my question. What did they die from?”

“Time,” Bennell said. “Although the ship and all its devices continued to function well right through the descent and the landing there along I-80, the occupants had perished of old age long before they ever got here.”

Faye said, “But…you’ve told us they aged one year for every fifty that passed.”

“Yes,” Bennell said. “And from what we’ve learned about them, they’re long-lived by our standards. Five hundred years seems to be their average life-span.”

Standing with Marcie in his arms, Jack Twist said, “But, my God, at one year for fifty, they’d have to’ve been traveling twenty-five thousand years to have died of old age!”

“Longer,” Bennell said. “In spite of their vast knowledge and technology, they never found a way to exceed the speed of light—186,000 miles per second. In fact, their ship cruises at ninety-eight percent of that, something like 182,000 miles per second. Fast, yes, but not fast enough when you consider the distances involved. Our own galaxy—in which they’re our neighbors—has a diameter of 80,000 light-years, or about 240,000
trillion
miles. They tried to pinpoint the location of their home world for us through tridimensional galactic diagrams. We believe they come from a place more than 31,000 light-years around the perimeter of the galaxy from us. And since they travel at just under the speed of light, that means they left home a little less than 32,000 years ago. Even with their lives extended by suspended animation, they must have perished nearly 10,000 years ago.”

Ginger found herself shaking again, as she had shaken upon first turning her gaze upon the ancient ship. She touched the nearest of the milky-blue containers, which seemed to her to be a powerful testimony to compassion and empathy beyond human understanding, the embodiment of a sacrifice that staggered the mind and humbled the heart. To have willingly given up the comforts of home, to have left their world and all their kind to travel such distances on the mere
hope
of being able to help a struggling species at the far, far end….

Bennell’s voice had grown lower as he spoke, and now it was as soft as if he had been speaking in a church. “They died twenty-five thousand
light-years from home. They were already dead when humankind still lived in caves and was just beginning to learn the basics of agriculture. When these…incredible journeyers died, the entire population of our world was only about five million, fewer people than now live in New York alone. During the past ten thousand years, while we’ve struggled out of the dirt and broken our backs to build a shaky civilization always teetering on the edge of destruction, those eight dead seekers were coming steadily toward us across the vastness of the galactic rim.”

Ginger saw Brendan touch the other corner of the coffin on which she’d rested her own hands. Tears glistened in his eyes. She knew what he was thinking. As a priest, he had taken vows of poverty and celibacy and had forsworn many of the pleasures of secular life as an offering to God. He knew the meaning of sacrifice, but none of his sacrifices compared to what these beings had given up in the name of
their
cause.

Parker said, “But to have found five other intelligent species when the distances are so great and the odds so small, they must send out a great many of these ships.”

“We think they dispatch hundreds a year, maybe even thousands—and had been doing so for longer than 100,000 years before this vessel left port. As I said, it’s their religion and their racial purpose combined. All the other five species they discovered were within 15,000 light-years from their world. And remember, even when they locate an intelligence at
that
distance, they don’t know of it until 15,000 years after the discovery, for it takes that long for the message of the contact to reach home again. Are you beginning to grasp the depth and scale of their commitment?”

“Most ships,” Ernie said, “must go out and never come back—and never meet with any success. Most of them just cruise on and on into endless space while the crew perishes, as this crew perished.”

“Yes,” Bennell said.

“And yet they keep going,” Dom said.

“And yet they keep going,” Bennell said.

“We may never meet others of them face-to-face,” Ned said.

“Give humanity a hundred years to learn to apply all the knowledge and technology they brought us,” Bennell said. “Then give us another…oh, at least one thousand years more to mature to the point where we’re capable of making that same commitment. Then a ship will be launched, manned by a human crew in suspended animation. And possibly we’ll find a way to improve the process, so that they don’t age at all or age far more slowly. None of us will be alive to watch it take off, but it will go. I know in my heart it will. Then…32,000 years after
that,
our distant descendants will be there, returning the call, remaking the contact these creatures don’t even know they’ve established.”

They stood in stunned silence, trying to grasp the immensity of what Bennell envisioned.

Ginger felt a chill of the most delicious and indescribable nature.

Brendan said, “It’s God’s scale. We’re talking about…thinking, planning, and
doing
on God’s scale rather than mankind’s.”

Parker said, “Sort of makes it a whole lot less important who’s going to win this year’s World Series, doesn’t it?”

Dom put his hands upon the rings that were featured on the top of that particular suspended-animation chamber around which everyone was gathered. He said, “I believe only six of the crew were dead,
fully
dead that night in July, Dr. Bennell. I’m beginning to recall what happened when we entered this ship, and I feel as if we were called to two of these containers by something that still lived within them.
Barely
lived but was not yet entirely dead.”

“Yes,” Brendan said, tears weaving down his cheeks now. “In fact, I remember the golden light was coming from two of these boxes and that it exerted not only an obvious but subliminal attraction. I was compelled to come and put my hands upon the rings. And when I put them here…somehow I knew that, beneath the lid, something was desperately clinging to life, not for its own sake but for the sake of passing on some gift. And by putting its own hands against the inner surface of those conductive rings…it gave me what it had come so far to give. Then it died at last. I didn’t know what was in me then, exactly. I suppose it would have taken some time to understand, to learn how to use the power. But before I ever had a chance, we were taken into custody.”

“Alive,” Bennell said—shocked, fascinated. “Well, the condition of the eight bodies…two were virtually turned to dust…two more were badly decomposed…apparently because their suspended-animation boxes had shut down once they died. Four were in much better condition, and two seemed perfectly preserved. But we never dared imagine…”