Here on the surface, breathing became exceedingly difficult. The light in the "world" cylinder began to shimmer as the mirrors on the outside of the craft began coming apart. Darkness fell about him in patches, like clouds moving across the face of the sun on a volatile April afternoon. He had to find Eventide quickly.
He turned inward to the music. And again, the vision of love came to him, but only like a flash of summer lightning in a storm that blankets the countryside. The flash vanished and darkness pervaded.
Eventide was definitely near. He could feel it now.
He made sure the Malachi had the anesthetic needles in its clip instead of the regular bullets he always carried.
He set off parallel to the creekbed and found Eventide within minutes.
Up ahead, on the muddy bank of the creek, he saw Eventide, but he was with someone. The wind was blowing with a near hurricane force, and Eventide was wrestling with an attractive woman who already wore escape gear. The woman was a dreamling. Lanier couldn't hear them from where he stood, so he shouldered the rescue ball packet and ran toward them in the fierce wind.
The hair of the dreamling was long and shining. Eventide groped desperately for her, virtually oblivious to the conditions of the disintegrating world around him. She fought him off. Lanier couldn't catch a clear glimpse of her face, but assumed that she must have been beautiful.
Eventide screamed above the wind. The woman leaped up the bank in her silver suit.
"Eventide!" Lanier yelled at him. The ground swelled.
Earthquake
!
The woman looked back at him as Lanier climbed a boulder at the side of the creek. The dreamling looked around fearfully. She fled out of sight beyond the rise tuffed with ferns.
"It's her fault!" Eventide groaned as Lanier swept up on him, almost out of breath. Eventide was nearly blue from oxygen deprivation.
The ground tore horribly, and the sound of its wrenching filled Lanier's ears painfully. Given the thinness of the air, the sound of the cylinder pulling itself apart must have been tremendous indeed. Just beneath the ground surface area, the work levels were caving in. Acres of the prairie simply swelled downward, collapsing in the fury of the tremors that shook this fragile world.
Lanier couldn't believe what he was seeing. Huge chunks of land tore themselves up from the surface and floated away as if they were feathers blown about on the wind! Suddenly, Eventide rose, his eyes flaring wildly as he clutched his stomach.
The entire cylinder stopped rotating. Gravity had disappeared.
Lanier leaped, floating toward Perry Eventide, who twirled slowly in the air like a fetus curled up on itself. Eventide was crying hysterically.
"Eventide! I'm a Stalker! You're ill! I can get you out of this!" Just saying those words nearly exhausted him.
But just as he moved for him, darkness filled the entire world within the cylinder. The mirrors outside had shattered, broken into a thousand particles, and light stole from the world.
"Perry!" Lanier shook him, but the sound of his voice seemed strained. The air had thinned drastically. Boulders and sprays of lake water burst all around them.
"Oh, she did this to me," Eventide whimpered, his face smeared with mud and leavings of grass. He coughed violently.
They hadn't drifted too far about the suface when a massive crevasse appeared in the ground. The wind sucked them down into it.
"It's my fault," he moaned. Lanier gripped him with one hand, holding the rescue ball in the other. Things happened too fast for him to reach his Malachi. They would have been dead before the anesthetic took control.
He rolled and tumbled, managing to thrust the rescue ball packet in between his legs. Hastily, he removed a hypo from his medicine pouch. The rest of the contents of the medicine packet spilled out and shot away in the wind. But he held onto the hypo filled with Baktropol.
They tumbled down through the lower layers of the cylinder like debris being sucked down a drain.
Lanier twisted, gripping Eventide, and jabbed the hypodermic into his neck. Eventide doubled up painfully and screamed at the presence of the needle. Letting the hypo go, Lanier reached out desperately for a shorn girder of steel.
Breathing was almost impossible. It was like being at eighteen thousand feet. Lanier's head reeled for lack of oxygen. The few seconds it would take for the Baktropol to take effect were not going to be enough. He moved quickly.
Letting go when he felt himself to be in the best possible position, Lanier burst open the package that contained the aluminum rescue ball. Holding Eventide slackly between his legs, Lanier freed the zipper to the ball and thrust Eventide into it. As he did this, he distended the oxygen tube from the relief packet inside and plunged it into Eventide's gaping mouth. Eventide didn't struggle.
Seconds left. Everything was so incredibly, horribly real!
A long umbilical drifted away from the inflated ball. Lanier caught it and wrapped it quickly around his ankle as he floated.
From his collar, Lanier swiftly ripped open the pouch at the back of his neck and pulled out a plastic hood over his head. From his belt he withdrew a small mouth-filter and oxygen coil. The hood expanded with the flow of oxygen. Lanier whipped on his gloves and tore back the hermetic seal. It wasn't the best space suit in the world, but it would do for the time Eventide spent in this universe.
Hopefully
, he thought,
that will be only seconds
.
They blew into open space.
And like a nightmare, like the final cataclysmic scene from
Götterdämmerung
, the beautiful cylindrical world fell apart. Silently, caterwauling in space.
Lanier gyrated in the quiet of the void. He could see the taillights of various escape vessels fleeing in every direction. In the darkness, he could make out little of the full size of the cylinder, but he could spot the asteroid-sized pieces of the colony drift by. Shards of the mirror system that provided the light for the interior of the cylinder glittered like an incredible flashing constellation.
In the peace of space, Lanier could relax. The music now occupied his complete attention, since the crisis seemed to be over. Yet the music appeared to be waning, the vibrations losing their intensity.
Retrieving the umbilical to the space rescue ball, Lanier drifted with the music as everything began to slowly fade. The stars around him began losing their clarity, began winking out of existence. He drifted toward sleep. Only the sound of his own breathing filled his ears. Everything lost interest for him. Sleep. Sleep. He floated.
He woke. Lanier lay sprawled on the shining black floor of his workroom. A few meters away, Perry Eventide lay curled like a baby. The lights suddenly, brightly, snapped on and Christy unlocked the airtight door.
"Fran, are you all right?"
He shook his head, clearing his mind, trying to focus. He zipped off the air-hood. Bitter L.A. atmosphere greeted his lungs. Sweat peppered his forehead.
"Yes, I think so." He turned to Eventide. "I got him, though. It was scary this time. Really scary."
Eventide rolled over with a groan. Christy gasped. The two ambulance attendants, who had been waiting just outside the door, ran in around her.
"What happened to him?" She pointed. Eventide gripped his stomach, rolling over in a pool of blood. He was very pale.
Lanier peeled off his gloves and kneeled beside him. "Nothing," he said to her. "He was all right when I found him. It was rough, but we made it out."
Eventide winced, raising his right hand, which was covered with blood.
"She did this to me," he whispered. The attendants bent over him and lifted him carefully. "Oh, Jesus God," he cried. Blood bubbled at the corners of his mouth.
"He's been knifed," the first attendant said. "Just under the left lung, very deep."
They wheeled him out as fast as they could. The other attendant began working on the wound.
Lanier stood in amazement.
What had happened beside that drained creek
? He tried to recall.
Christy followed the attendants out to the idling ambulance. She frowned, knowing that
this
was the sort of thing that required a helicopter. Not a four-wheeler and a twenty- to thirty-minute ride into civilization.
Perry Eventide was pronounced dead on arrival at St. Luke's General Hospital in Thousand Oaks, owing, in part, to two efficient knife wounds, and another earthquake that broke two freeways strategically in half about eleven-thirty that morning. It took three hours to get Eventide to the hospital, and the ambulance driver perished from smog exposure when millions of automobiles stranded on the freeways in the Valley poured a record amount of pollutants into the air.
That day, three hundred and twelve people died trying to breathe on a hot summer afternoon in the bowl of the San Fernando Valley. Perry Eventide was not mentioned in the
Times
obituary tally.
Chapter Five
The Norfolk Rhapsody No. 1
Ralph Vaughan Williams
The President sat in the morning sunshine that leaned through the bulletproof glass of the Oval Office windows and whimsically considered renaming the office of the Secretary of State to Secretary of Chaos. Floyd Matkin had just been reported "vanished" at the preliminary summit conference in Bonn where the delicate negotiations between Saudi Arabia and Japan were taking place. She wasn't at all pleased with the situation.
War had nearly broken out between the two nations, and as a major ally to both, Katie Babcock didn't want the United States to appear as if it were siding with one nation over the other. The fact that Japan had bombed a major port because the Saudis refused to export what little oil they could spare to Japan caused a great deal of concern among the President, her aides, and Congress. She was having a hard enough time trying to keep the Joint Chiefs from filling the Indian Ocean with every ship the United States owned.
Now, Floyd Matkin, one of the best statesmen this country had ever produced, was gone.
"Rita." Katie stabbed the intercom.
"Yes, Katie, right here."
"Could you bring in the latest score sheet, and tell Ken I want to see him as soon as possible."
"Right."
Rita brought in the list that Katie requested. The Bureau of Statistics daily computed the number of "vanished" individuals at all levels of government employ, including all the major industries. Katie always perused it closely, especially for members of Congress and their staffs.
Floyd's name wasn't on it.
Yet
, she thought dismally. She tossed the sheet onto her desk, annoyed at the sluggishness of the system. She reached over for another cigarette and lit it with a quick, precise motion.
Ken Collins strolled inside the office. His tie loose, he seemed quite relaxed.
"What's up, Katie?"
She pointed to the list in front of her. "Look at this."
"I know. I got the new one this morning."
She stood up. "Well, Floyd isn't on it yet. I suppose it hasn't been confirmed that he's succumbed."
"No, we're waiting on the report. But they think he has gone under from the way the evidence was presented."
"What's the evidence?"
"Well, he went to a reception last night with the Saudi ambassador, and it turned out to be quite a party. A lot of people were there."
"I know. I got wind of it from Rita this morning." She inhaled stiffly on her cigarette.
"And they checked everyone's immunity card, so that they could provide a small orchestra."
"And?"
"As near as anyone can tell, he went outside with a companion and she came back alone. Or that's what they say."
"Wasn't he watched?"
"Hell, yes, he was watched," he said emphatically. "The Swiss and the Germans both had the place cordoned off. We had our own security people and no one could've left without being seen or detected."
"Who was his companion? I'm surprised we don't know these things." The implication was that "we" ought to know these things. Ken read it in the President's face.
"We don't know who she was. There were a lot of people present who had little or nothing to do with the conference. Mostly friends of friends. You know, a regular bash."
She nodded. "I assume the public doesn't know of this yet. Has it leaked?"
"We're trying to keep the lid on until it can be confirmed. The official word is that he's indisposed. Ill. We think the mission can proceed without him. The two ambassadors and their respective staffs have already met in private, so some of the air's been cleared."
Katie stood in a small cloud of smoke.
"What do you recommend we do about this? You know the public," she asked quite openly.
"Well," Ken rolled up his shirtsleeves, "we have the Undersecretary flying over right now, and we can let him handle our involvement in the negotiations. It's just more important that the ambassadors get together—and be seen together—at the conference. We can stay out of it, which we probably should, given the mess that we left in the Middle East."
"Well, at least too many bombs weren't used then." She walked around the desk. "We can give some of the credit to the Russians for helping with the evacuation. Who needed the Suez Canal anyway?"
Ken thought about Matkin's disappearance. "I've gone ahead and put in a petition for a Stalker since we managed to get the program that the orchestra played. If it's the case that Floyd went under to the orchestra's performance, then we should have no problem. Beyond that, we can only guess what made him vanish."
"OK, Ken," Katie said. "Keep me posted. I have enough to worry about today without this happening to Floyd. Especially now."
Collins smiled, not without affection. "Just leave things to us. We can skim most of the shit off the top for you."
She sat back in the chair behind the great desk.
"So, what's going on out front this morning?" She referred to the three thousand protestors that had assembled at dawn just beyond the front gates. Three thousand in filter-masks.