Alternities (50 page)

“Not that bad an idea, actually,” Davis said thoughtfully. “If family integrity is at the top of your list, that’s not such a bad way to go.”

After the sexologist came a cultural anthropologist, who also came through unscathed despite substantial overlap with her immediate predecessor. Dating habits. Social legislation. Family migration. Marriage and divorce.

It was when the team of two educators attempted to put Wallace through a multidisciplinary assessment that Bayshore finally blew up.

“No, no, no, no,” Bayshore said, slapping the tabletop for punctuation. “We had enough of this yesterday. You aren’t going to know what his wrong answers mean. There’s more than enough people right here who couldn’t tell you half that stuff. Let’s at least focus on what he does know and build from there.”

“Rich, this is worth doing, believe me—”

“I want somebody who knows something he knows,” Bayshore said stubbornly. “Get me a—what do you know?” he asked, turning to Wallace. “What’re your hobbies?”

“Uh… baseball. Music—”

“So get a sportswriter in here. Get somebody from Hot List magazine.”

“Certainly. Let’s turn this into a trivia contest.”

“At least we can deal with something concrete.”

“I told you last night that details don’t matter. We’re trying to get the broader picture—”

“Then ask him about the other alternities. He’s been to—what, three of them?”

Wallace nodded.

“I’m trying to keep the process orderly, the most familiar first—” Davis began.

Bayshore shot up out of his seat and smashed his clipboard down on the desk with a clatter. “Goddamn it, can’t anyone do what I ask them to?” he demanded. In the stunned silence that followed, he stomped out of the room. A moment later the front door slammed.

Wallace and Shan found each other’s hand beneath the edge of the table and flashed smiles that were not half as reassuring as they were meant to be. The two educators sat wide-eyed and petrified. Davis just shook his head slowly back and forth.

“This is not like him,” he said, tight-lipped. “He’s losing it, and things are falling apart.” Davis fixed his gaze on Wallace. “Nothing personal, son, but I wish to God I’d never heard of you.”

Davis glanced down at the binder propped open on his lap and flipped backward to a divider. “All right,” he said, wearily rubbing his forehead with the fingertips of one hand. “Tell us what you can about Alternity Red.”

Bayshore had still not returned by midafternoon, when the helicopter bearing Warren Eden lighted on the meadow.

Wallace and Shan came out on the porch to watch, curious for their first glimpse of their notorious visitor. Davis ran out to the meadow to attend to protocol. But Eden did not stand on protocol. Before Davis was halfway to the aircraft, Eden was out and walking upslope toward the house.

A slender six feet tall, Eden wore a shapeless gray-green overcoat, a dark-green scarf around his throat, wrinkled blue jeans, white sneakers. His hair was a gray and white lion’s mane, combed straight back from a broad smooth forehead, blowing in the rotor downwash. A short black-streaked beard sprouting from his jawline made him look gnomelike despite his height.

“Do geniuses have to look scruffy?” Wallace asked. “Is it part of the rules, or something?”

Shan gave him an elbow in the ribs. “You’re terrible.”

“I thought he was supposed to be this young wunderkind. He looks older than my dad.”

“I’ve seen pictures of him. I guess he went gray in his twenties.”

“Too much heat under the hood,” Wallace gibed.

Shan frowned instead of laughing. “You’d better get those out of your system before he gets up here.”

“I’m trying.”

“Inferiority complex?”

“Maybe a little. I never met a genius before.”

“Don’t meet one now. Meet a person.”

Moving with long easy strides, Eden swept through the gap between the hedges and up the stairs to the porch. He almost walked past Wallace and Shan, then hesitated and looked sideways at them.

“You’re the fellow responsible for all the fuss?”

“I’m Rayne Wallace.”

The newcomer gestured toward the door, inviting them back inside. “I’m Warren Eden. Let’s talk.”

Alone among those who had made the pilgrimage to the safe house, Eden took no notes as he listened to Wallace’s stories. He sat in his chair in an almost meditative state, his eyes and mind alert, his body at rest. His apparent inner peace seemed to exude a calming influence on everyone, and the air of panic which had seized the house earlier in the day melted away.

Wallace felt the change inside himself with wonder. He did not understand it, but the man seemed to have a tangible presence which extended beyond his physical body, almost as if he was radiating some sort of energy to the room.

It was nothing as shallow as charisma, nothing as simple as authority. Though Eden said or did nothing overt to accomplish it, from the moment he arrived he was in control. Even Bayshore bowed to it. When he finally returned, half an hour after Eden arrived, he slipped wordlessly into an empty chair, content to be a spectator.

Long before that, Wallace’s anxieties had been allayed. In the last thirty-six hours, he had been quizzed, interrogated, interviewed, cross-examined, and scrutinized. He had feared that facing Eden would feel like the worst moments of that experience times a hundred—his credibility disputed, his inadequacies revealed.

But Eden’s voice lacked any note of challenge or skepticism. Before Wallace had spoken a word, he knew that Eden would believe him.

“I’ve seen photographs of the Indianapolis gate house,” Eden said. “Please tell me about the others. What are they like? Tell me about each one.”

“The Yellow gate is in England, in a ruined castle. Dunstanburgh, on a hill overlooking the North Sea.”

“Massive stone,” Eden said. “Masonry, like the Scottish Rite Cathedral.”

“Yes.”

“How much of it stands?”

“The keep. The gate house. Some of the perimeter wall.”

“Where do you find the gate?”

“Inside one of the buildings. Usually the keep.”

“Always inside?”

“Always—”

“Talk me through a transit. Tell me what you perceive.”

“When you come through the gate, there’s a junction—”

“How many branches are there?”

“Three. Almost always three.”

“Close your eyes and see them. Point. Show me.”

“There. There. And there.”

“Where are we going?”

“Red. It’s the simplest of the routes—”

“You say you can feel the gate. What does it feel like?”

“Like being tickled from the inside. A crawly sensation when you get close. When I first pick it up, it seems more like I hear it. But not with my ears. I can cover my ears with my hands and I hear it just the same.”

“Is the pitch high or low?”

“It’s not so much a pitch as a… a smear of sound. But it goes higher as you get closer. Until you can’t hear it anymore. Then you start to feel it. That’s how you can track the gate down in a big gate station, like the Bellevue Strat.”

“Can everyone hear it?”

“They have to train you. Some can’t learn to pick it out of the background. I heard it right away—”

“Do you breathe while you’re in the maze?”

“I never stopped to notice—”

“Suppose you walk through the Boston gate at noon. What time is it when you come through at Dunstanburgh?”

“Later.”

“How much later?”

“If you go through in the afternoon, it’ll be dark there.”

“England is five hours ahead of us, sun time. But that’s not what I was asking. How long does a transit take?”

“Oh. A minute—five minutes. It seems longer.”

“Is it ever?”

“There were stories about a cracker that got lost and was in the maze for three hours. Oh—”

“Problem?”

“I guess we do breathe in there—”

“And the policeman simply disappeared?”

“Like he was eaten up by the maze—”

“Tell me about the Shadow—”

The clearing skies over the safe house were dissolving to a violet-black by the time Eden said, “Thank you, Rayne. I have no more questions.” He looked at Bayshore. “You’re the project coordinator?”

“I’m Richard Bayshore,” was the answer.

“When can I have access to the Indianapolis site?”

“We haven’t made a decision about what action to take there.”

Gracile and expressionless, Eden rose from his chair. “When do you expect to make a decision?”

“The President wants to hear more from us before scheduling an action caucus.”

“I see.”

“Is there a problem?”

“No,” the scientist said, collecting his coat and scarf. “You have a room for me?”

Davis answered, “The first door on the left, upstairs. Your bag is there.”

“Thank you,” he said, and turned to leave.

“Wait a minute,” Wallace said, jumping to his feet. “Aren’t you going to tell us what you think?”

Eden looked back. “I’d like some time to assemble those thoughts. Besides, you realize that without access to the Indianapolis site, anything I might say would be provisional.”

“Understood,” Bayshore said, also rising. “But I think everyone here would like to hear at least your general impressions.”

Frowning, Eden looked down at the carpet as he considered. “At this point, there’s only one observation I feel confident enough to share,” he said. His head came up and his eyes found Bayshore’s. “With apologies, Director, I must tell you that questions of who and why remain in order.”

“Why is that?”

“Because this is not a natural phenomenon. We are dealing with an artifact.”

Swaddled in a light blanket stolen from their bed, Wallace and Shan huddled together on the porch roof and surveyed the night skies over the safe house.

“This is the best time of year,” Shan said raptly. “With the Winter Hexagon still above the horizon, but the nights warm enough to let you enjoy it. We’ll have perfect seeing until the moon rises.”

Wallace shook his head. “Of everything that’s strange here, the hardest thing to accept is that there’s people actually living on the moon. And the pictures of the earth from space—”

She nodded and squeezed his hand. “If we’re out long enough, we might see one of the SA stations.”

“You can see them? How long is long enough?”

“S-1—that’s the big equatorial station—goes over every ninety minutes. Or we might get lucky and catch S-2, the polar station.”

Wallace snuggled closer. “I hope one goes over before Eden’s ready and they call us back downstairs,” he said.

“It’s not much to see,” she warned. “Just a light crossing the sky.”

“I don’t care.” He craned his head and looked up toward the zenith. “They all have names, don’t they? I don’t know anything about the stars.”

“Then let me teach you something,” she said. “There—see that very bright star just above the trees?”

“I see it.”

“That’s Sirius, the Dog Star. It’s the brightest star in the sky, at any season.”

“Why the Dog Star?”

“It’s in the constellation Canis Major—the Big Dog.”

“What was that thing you said earlier? The Winter Hexagon?”

Five minutes later, he had memorized the names of the bright stars marking out a great figure enclosing a third of the sky—Sirius, Procyon, Pollux and Castor, Capella, Aldebaran, Rigel. The names were just sounds to him, the stars just points of light of subtly different colors. But the circumstance and the company made it special, and he tried to stretch himself and see the skies as Shan did.

“Until yesterday, I didn’t realize how beautiful this part of the country was,” he said. “We came through on the train when we left Indiana for Boston, but it was nighttime. I slept most of the way between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.”