The Omega Point

9. ORME

Mack appeared in a silk jacket and trousers, moving with that curious precision of his. As he slid into the patient’s chair in the nook that David had reserved for these sessions, David thought that he looked not like a mental patient with a severely distorted grasp of reality, but like some sort of vaudeville performer.

“We could become cannibals,” Mack said.

That certainly sounded like symptomatic production. He settled in for a real session with a real psychiatric patient… for once.

“What makes you say that?”

“No eggs at breakfast, therefore Acton is having supply problems. We could send raiding parties into the town.”

“Do you think cannibalism is a good idea?”

“I’m crazy, so of course I do. I want to know about the new intake.”

“You’ll meet her in the common areas.”

“Social Register?”

“I wouldn’t know, Mack.”

“Let me tell you about her. She’s at least thirty. She’s a self-commit who’s been having very serious second thoughts. And last night, when she was screaming in that so very pleasant padded cell of yours, and you went to observe her, you got, shall we say, sidetracked.”

What was this? Had this patient overheard something? Or had he been behind one of those welder’s masks, perhaps—another confinement patient being let out at night?

“Expand on that.”

“I think there are lots of surprises in the Acton Clinic. Right answer?”

“Therapeutic interaction isn’t about right answers. It’s about opening doors.”

“You see the sun this morning?”

“Have you seen the sun?”

“My point is that it looks like it’s had a bite taken out of it. The sunspot is gigantic.”

“What does that mean to you?”

“To me? That I won’t be alive in six months. Like you. Like everybody.”

“Are you sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Incidentally, the new intake—what’s her surname? Where’s she from?”

“We’re back to the new patient?”

“I just like to know who’s here. Who I might be dealing with. The world of the obscenely rich is not a large one. She and I might have played doctor as kids. If so, I’d like to renew the acquaintance.”

“Being in the CIA makes you rich?”

“Being the heir to Graham Mining makes you rich. I served my country for a dollar a year. And I was retired mental, okay? Is that what you want me to admit? That I was humiliated and ended up in this idiotic place, spilling my innermost secrets to a kid? Dr. Ford, I want just two things from you. First, I want to know the name of the new intake. I want to know who I’m living with. Second, I would like you to review my file and see if I really need to be on confinement.”

“You don’t think you should be?”

“Of course not! I don’t understand it at all.”

“Dr. Hunt did it because you have anger issues. Your daytime rights aren’t affected.”

“Except I have a goddamn armed guard when I go outside!”

“Armed with a tranquilizer gun. After Dr. Ullman passed away, you were very, very angry.” He did not bring up the fact that Mack had been AWOL at the time of the fire.

“Something was wrong that night, Doctor. And something was wrong last night, is wrong now, and has been wrong for weeks. And I don’t mean the sun or the economy or any of that crap. I mean that something is wrong here. Something is happening to this place, and yes, it scares me and when I am afraid, yes, I have an anger problem. Like those flashes last night? What was that? I had—” He stopped, shook his head.

“You had?”

“I don’t know. A dream. Not pretty.”

“You think the flashes were a dream?”

“Hell no, but they triggered something.”

“Can you describe it, Mack?”

“Um, sure. A demon. I saw a demon.”

David strove to maintain the therapeutic context, but at the same time was acutely aware of his own reaction to the flashes, but what he’d seen had hardly been a demon.

“You want to ask me something, Doctor. Go ahead.”

Mack was certainly perceptive. “What do you know about the flashes?”

“They’re making an ORME, and that’s pretty damn disturbing.”

“An ORME?”

“An orbitally rearranged monatomic element. Gold, would be my guess. The legendary philosopher’s stone.”

Those two words, “philosopher’s stone,” would ordinarily have evoked in him the quiet contempt of the scientist dealing with an ignorant member of the public who was silly enough to believe such twaddle.

That was not how he reacted now. “Go on.”

“It’s being made in their arc furnace. The ‘kiln.’ Look inside sometime.”

“I have. It looks like a kiln.”

“Not at night, Doc. That’s when they install their tungsten filament, and you’re looking at three thousand degrees sustained.”

“Isn’t that rather a high temperature?”

“Not for them. And this new lady, she’s their leader, I think. I think things are going into overdrive. She, um—God, you know, I’ve forgotten her name.”

“Caroline.”

“Haven’t we done this? Maybe the flashes erased my memory. I mean her last name. Is it Acton?”

David remained impassive.

“Is it Light, then? Is she a member of the Light family?”

Mack was fishing hard—too hard, David thought. He would not forget this. “Let’s get back to ORME,” he said. “It’s what?”

“An orbitally rearranged monatomic element is an element that’s not entirely confined to three-dimensional space. It’s torsioned into hyperspace. You eat it, and you extend into hyperspace, too.”

The philospher’s stone… they’d been taught about it in class. “It’s not just for philosophers and it’s not a stone, it’s a white powder.”

“And extending into hyperspace gets you what?”

“You’re outside of space and time. So you can see the past and the future. You can… maybe escape. Move around time or through it faster. Except, of course, for the problem.”

“Which is?”

“It’s total bullshit. All ingesting a heavy metal is gonna do is screw with your kidneys.”

“That would be my best guess, too.”

If a man’s stare could express the hunger of a tiger, Mack the Cat’s poisoned eyes expressed it now. At that moment, the session bell chimed softly and he leaped to attention and saluted. “Hup!”

David recalled Katie’s comment that Mack alternated between incipient serial killer and charming boy.

After he left, David slid aside the wall of book backs that concealed his electronics from patients. He keyed in Mack’s code, F-0188, and the system began following his transponder. David watched him go down the wide hallway past Katie’s office, then down two flights of stairs, the system automatically shifting from one camera to the next as it followed him.

He went into the art room where a number of other patients were painting and one was sculpting.

David closed the monitors. This was the very picture of a compliant patient.

He had fifteen minutes before his next appointment, which was Linda Fairbrother.

He pressed his intercom and said to Katie, “I’m going down to the art room to observe Mack. I’ll be back in time for Fairbrother.”

As he was closing his monitoring system, he saw Caroline Light sitting at an easel in the art room. Again, he pressed the intercom. “I see that Caroline is in the population.”

“Dr. Hunt said to release her.”

He went into the outer office. “But she’s under constant supervision?”

She gestured toward her bank of screens. “Absolutely. Sam’s on the job, watching her and Mack and keeping them apart.”

“Oh?”

“Mack has expressed interest in her.”

He was tempted to issue Sam a real gun and live rounds. He would immediately reinforce to Sam that he thought that Mack was potentially quite dangerous to her.

“Let Marian know that I’ll expect to discuss Caroline’s progress toward the end of the day. We’ll need to make a decision about where she sleeps tonight.”

Frankly, he hoped that she would fake more evidence of disturbance and justify another night under confinement—not that it helped, given her hidden power to apparently come and go as she pleased. He’d assumed that she’d had help from the staff—probably Fleigler—but now who knew, maybe she’d just walked through the walls.

This substance they were making—even the process of creating it affected the mind profoundly, and look what had happened to him when he drew close. He’d been somehow—was the right word “overcome”?—yes, overcome, and what had taken place next? He thought that they had probably carried him to his room.

But the state he had been in was not sleep, it was darker and deeper than sleep. Had he been outside of time, somehow? Was such a thing truly possible?

In any case, if just the manufacturing process was that disorienting, perhaps the substance was potent indeed. He could certainly understand why the group making it had been wearing welder’s masks.

White powder gold… it had been discussed in class—discussed a lot. He could see Mr. Light sitting on the edge of his desk speaking about it. Could see but not hear.

God, but the fog of amnesia was maddening. Maybe Katie knew more than she was saying. Maybe there would be some trigger to memory if he just talked about it all. “Katie, what’s your impression of what happened last night? Please be frank.”

“You were overwrought. It could happen to anybody.”

Not helpful. “Did I go out? Were you aware of that?”

She was silent. Then she reached out, her hand tentative. For a moment, he still hesitated, but when she began to withdraw it, he took it. They remained like that for a moment, and he felt that her hand was warm and small and very soft.

A moment later, it was over, and she turned away and busied herself with her files. He went down to watch Caroline and Mack, and try to feel his way a little further down the dark passage that was life at the Acton Clinic.