Tom O'Bedlam

1

It was starting to get dark, earlier than usual. Some clouds starting to drift over from the north, maybe even a little rain tonight, Tom thought. The first of the season. Last night clear and sharp and cool, the moonlight strong and bright; tonight, maybe, rain. A change in the weather, perhaps heralding other, bigger changes just ahead. Go back to the room, take a nice shower, fix yourself up for dinner. Afterward have a talk with some of the people here, this Ferguson, the fat girl April, some of the others. The Time of the Crossing was getting close. Like the coming of the rain: the season was changing.

“Let’s go,” he said to Ferguson. “We been out here for hours. Time to head back.”

“Yeah,” Ferguson said. “Sure.” He sounded half-awake, or less than half: vague, dreamy, furry. He had been that way since Tom had given him the vision. Sitting quietly under the giant trees, smiling, shaking his head from time to time, saying almost nothing at all. It was as though the Green World dream had stunned him. Or was it something else, Tom wondered? Was it that somebody had turned to him at last and said, Look, man, I care for you, me, an absolute stranger with not a damn thing to gain, I just want you to stop hurting and this is what I can do for you. Maybe no one had ever said anything like that to him before, Tom thought.

“Come on, then. Up.”

“Yeah. Yeah. I’m coming.”

“Give you a hand. Here.”

Tom pulled Ferguson to his feet. He was a big powerful man, plenty of beef on him. Getting him up was work. Ferguson wobbled a little, rocking back and forth. Easy, Tom thought. Get your balance. He hoped Ferguson wasn’t going to fall. He remembered what it had been like catching hold of April when she went over. Easy. Easy.

Ferguson managed to steady himself. They started toward the trail back to the Center.

“You think I’m going to get the space dreams all the time now?” Ferguson asked. “Without you having to do that to me, I mean?”

“Sure,” Tom said. “Why not? You’re wide open. You always were, except you wouldn’t let it. Now you know how to let it.”

“What a beautiful thing. That green world. I understand now, the fuss. I want to see the other ones too, you know? All seven of them.”

Tom said, “There are more than seven.”

“There are?”

“The seven are just the main ones, the strongest visions. There are others. Thousands. Millions. An infinity. Some have come to me only once, for a fraction of a second. Some only a couple of times, years apart. But the main seven, they come all the time. Those are the ones that I can give to others, the strong ones, the main ones.”

“Jesus,” Ferguson said. “Millions of worlds.”

“Look up there,” said Tom. “You know how many stars you can see when the sky is clear? And those are just the bright ones near by. This galaxy, it’s a hundred thousand light-years from end to end. You know how many stars there are in a hundred thousand light-years? And that’s just this galaxy. They’ve got nebulas out there that are whole galaxies in themselves. Andromeda. Cygnus A. The Magellanic Clouds. Full of stars, and all the stars have planets. Makes you dizzy, just to think. This funny little planet… what gall, saying we’re the only stuff there is in the universe. You know?”

“Yeah,” Ferguson said. “Yeah. Jesus, what was I doing all my life? What was I thinking of?”

Lost in the vision, still. Floating along with his head in the stars. He seemed to be altogether different now, that cold knot in his breast gone, his face smoother, younger-looking, more at ease. Well, Tom thought, that won’t last. You don’t get completely transformed in one single flash, no matter what. The old sad mean bitter cold Ed Ferguson might come back, probably would, an hour from now, a day, a week, sooner or later. Unless something big was done to change him, very soon now, while he was still open and vulnerable. Tom gave that some thought.

“Tom?” a sudden voice whispered out of the underbrush. “Hey, you, Tom!”

He looked around. A face in the shadows, blue eyes, thin lips, little scars all over the cheeks. A hand beckoning to him, pointing, signaling him to get rid of Ferguson and come over there.

Buffalo, it was. Hiding there like a ghost.

Tom shook his head. Pointed toward the Center, pointed at Ferguson.

Buffalo gestured again, more urgently. Whispered again.

“Come here, will you? Charley’s here. Wants to see you.”

“All right,” Tom said, frowning. “Wait.”

He trotted forward, catching up with Ferguson, who by now was twenty, thirty paces ahead. “You go on back,” he said. “I’m going to stay out here another five minutes, okay?”

Ferguson didn’t seem curious about that. Right now the Green World was more vivid to him, he figured, than anything that might be going on here in the woods. “Yeah,” Ferguson said. “Sure.”

“I just need to be alone a little bit.”

“Yeah. Sure.”

He went trudging on. Tom hesitated, watching him go; then he turned back into the deeper forest. Buffalo stepped out from behind an enormous tree.

“That was the guy from the highway, wasn’t it? The one who hurt his leg, the one with the dark-haired girl?”

“That’s right,” Tom said. “Why are you here? What does Charley want with me, Buffalo?”

“To see you, man. To talk to you. He misses you, you know that? We all do.” Buffalo winked. “Hey, you look good, Tom! Got yourself cleaned up a little, huh? New pair of jeans, new shirt, everything fresh. This a pretty good place here, this Center?”

“It’s all right,” said Tom. “A lot of fine people here. I like it.”

“I bet. Well, come on. Come on. This way, right back here. Charley wants to see you.”

Buffalo led the way between the great trees, across a meadow thick with clumps of leathery ferns. A few more of the scratchers were hunkered down in a secluded little glade near a stream that had just about run dry. Charley was there, looking tired and gloomy. Mujer. Stidge. White-haired Nicholas. They all seemed even scruffier than usual, a worn-out, beat-up group of men. Tom wasn’t happy to see them. He hadn’t expected ever to see them again.

“There he is!” Charley called out. “Son of a bitch, look at the new outfit! They gave you a bath, too, put some food in your belly, huh? Hey, there, Tom! Tom, how you been?”

“Charley.”

“Sight for sore eyes,” Charley said. “You been doing okay. Hasn’t been going so good for us, you know.”

“No?”

“We ran into a little trouble, up Ukiah way. Tamale and Choke, they were ambushed and killed.”

“I thought they were back out there with the van.”

“Van’s in here,” said Charley. “We floated it right between the trees, got it a little ways back in the meadow. Tamale and Choke, uh-uh. Rest of us, we were lucky to get away.”

“Not so lucky, them,” Tom said. “The Time of the Crossing’s almost here. What a time to get killed, missing out on all the splendor, on the redemption.”

“Give you a bath, it don’t change you any, I see,” Charley said, smiling faintly. “The green world and the Loollymooly planet and all the rest. That’s okay. We dream the visions too. Loolymoolly and everything. Mujer, Buffalo, me. Stidge says he doesn’t. That right, Stidge? You never get a vision, huh, you sour-faced bastard?”

Stidge said, “Why don’t you get off my back, Charley? But for me you’d be dead back there with Tamale and Choke.”

“That’s right,” Charley said. “Stidge saved us, do you know that, Tom? Very quick with his spike, Stidge is. There were these three vigilantes at the roadblock, big energy-wall up, and somehow Stidge slipped around behind them—” He shrugged. “It’s been a rough couple weeks, Tom. We missed you.”

“I bet you did.”

“No. Seriously. You were our luck, Tom. So long as you were with us, everything seemed to go okay. All your nutty stuff, your visions, your worlds, they were like a charm for us. We got into trouble, we got right out again. Since they took you away in that copter it’s been lousy. Choke, Tamale, they shot them into pieces. Didn’t even ask questions. That’s why we came back here, Tom.”

“Why?”

“For you. We’re going to make a run for the south, warm weather, Mexico, maybe. Rainy season’s coming on any minute. We’ll head down the Valley, maybe over into the desert, cut around San Diego and down into Baja. You come with us, okay? We got plenty of the room in the van, now.”

“The Crossing’s almost here, Charley. Doesn’t make any sense, going to Mexico or anywhere else now. A couple of weeks, we’ll be up there in the sky.”

He heard Stidge snickering, Mujer muttering.

Charley said, “That so? Hell, you can do the Crossing just as easy from Baja, can’t you? And be a lot warmer until it happens, right?”

“I’m going to stay here, Charley.”

“At the goddamn Center?”

“Yeah. There are people here I want to help. When the Time of the Crossing comes, I want to guide them. I tell you what, though. You stay here, I’ll help you too. You were good to me. I want you to be among the first to Cross. You stay out here in the woods, in the van, and I’ll come to you when it begins. Okay? That’s a promise. Let me help Ferguson over, and April, and Dr. Elszabet and some of the others and then I’ll be back here to help you. Another week, maybe. Maybe even less, Charley.”

“You want him,” Mujer said, “let’s just put him in the van and go, you hear, Charley?”

Charley shook his head. “No. I don’t want that.” To Tom he said, “You come with us, Tom.”

“I told you, I got things to do here.”

“You know what’s going to happen to you, you stay here? You’ll get run over by the lunatic crazy army that’s marching this way. They’ll be here, another day or two, the whole goddamn swarm of them, and when they come they’ll tear the place apart.”

“I don’t know anything about that, Charley,” Tom said, frowning.

“Nobody told you? That’s all we heard out there, last couple of days. About a million and a half crazies, some gang of nuts, marching toward the North Pole, they say. Going there to meet God. Some kind of god, anyway. Started in San Diego, been collecting people all up the coast. Heading straight this way, like a plague of locusts, chewing up everything in sight. That’s why we’re going to get out of this end of the state. Double back around them to the east, head south while all the fun and games is going on up here. It won’t be safe for you, Tom. Come on with us. We’ll clear out in the morning.”

“It won’t matter what’s going on here, when the Crossing begins.”

“It’s supposed to be like a traveling riot,” Charley said. “It’s real wild. Guy like you, you don’t want to be mixed up in stuff like that.”

“It won’t matter,” Tom said. “Look, I got to get back. I want to wash up, have dinner, talk to a few people. You come on to the Center with me, all right? They’ll take you in. They’re really good there. Dr. Elszabet, she’ll welcome you the same way she did me. And then we’ll all be together when the Crossing starts. What do you say, Charley?”

“Nothing doing. We’re clearing out. This won’t be no place to be when those marchers get here. You come give us good luck again, Tom.”

“The place for good luck is right here.”

“Tom—”

“I got to go now.”

“You think about it,” Charley said. “We’ll camp out here tonight. In the morning, you come back, we’ll still be here. You can go south with us.”

“You want him, we ought to just grab him,” Mujer said again.

“Shut it,” Charley said. “See you tomorrow, Tom?”

“You come into the Center tomorrow,” Tom said. “Tonight, even. They got good eating there.”

He turned and walked away into the shadows. It was much darker now. Definite hint of rain, maybe tonight, maybe not until morning. Were they going to run up behind him and grab him? No, he thought, Charley wasn’t like that. Charley had a sort of honor about him. Tom felt sorry about the scratchers. Come with us, be our luck: yeah. But he couldn’t. His place was here. Maybe in the morning he’d hike back out again and try to talk them into staying. He hoped they wouldn’t try to grab him then. Not with the Crossing so close—to take him away from his new friends here, before he could help them—no, that would be bad. He’d have to think about it some.

He was back in the main part of the Center in twenty minutes. Into his little cabin, edge of the woods. A good long shower, and he sat crosslegged on the floor beside his bed for a time, doing his thinking. Then over to the big building, the dinner place. The others were there already, Ed Ferguson and Father Christie, and the beautiful artificial woman Alleluia, and fat April, all sitting together at one of the long tables. Ferguson was still glowing. You could see the glow on him from halfway across the room. It was a good feeling, Tom thought, knowing that by the laying on of hands he had brought a joyous vision to that unhappy man. He went over to them.

Alleluia said, “He told us you gave him a space dream.”

“I showed him how to open himself to a vision, yes,” Tom said. “Can I sit with you?”

“Here,” said Father Christie. “Right here, next to me. You’re a remarkable person, you know that, Tom?”

“I wanted to help him.”

“How’d you do it?” Alleluia asked.

“I spoke with him for a while. I showed him the powers that lay within him. That was all.”

“It’s amazing,” said Alleluia. “He’s like someone else now.”

“He’s like himself now,” Tom said. “The real self that was inside him all along. We are all becoming ourselves. We will all be fulfilled soon.”

This is the moment, he thought. Tell them. About the Crossing. Tell them now.

But then April said to him in a small little voice, “You know what? You scare me.” She was on the far side of the table, shrinking back from him as though she was afraid she’d catch a disease from him. She was trembling and her face was red. Tom hoped she wouldn’t go into another fit and fall over.

“I do?” he said.

“You have the visions inside you, don’t you? Like a power all coiled up in there. And when I’m this close to you I can feel it,” April said. Her cheeks were burning. She wasn’t able to look him in the eye. “The other worlds, pressing in. It’s frightening. The other worlds are very beautiful, you know. But it’s all frightening. I wish none of this was happening.”

“No, child,” Father Christie said. “What’s happening is the imminence of the advent of the Lord upon the Earth. There’s nothing to fear. This is the moment we’ve been awaiting for more than two thousand years.”

Tom looked at Ferguson. He was far away, smiling in the deepest bliss.

He said to April, “Don’t be afraid. Father Christie’s right. This is a wonderful thing that’s about to happen.”

“I don’t understand,” April told him.

“Yeah,” Alleluia said. “What are you talking about, anyway?”

Tom looked from one to the other—Alleluia, Father Christie, poor terrified April, the blissed-out Ferguson. All right, he thought. This is the moment. At long last, the Time is here. Let it begin.

“It’s a long story,” he said.

And he began to tell them all about the wonderful thing that was soon to come.

He began to tell them all about the Crossing.

2

Elszabet said, “The latest estimate from the county highway authorities is that there are three hundred thousand of them. The woman I spoke to said that the figure might be off by as much as fifty thousand either way, but there was no real hope of getting an accurate count because they were spread out so wide and because it was hard to tell how many were traveling in each vehicle. I think you all understand that even if the estimate is too high by a hundred thousand, we’ve got a real problem on our hands.”

“What makes you think they’ll be coming anywhere near us?” Dante Corelli asked.

Elszabet took a deep breath. She was feeling ragged. Dreams and visions were surfacing with bewildering frequency now, for her, for everyone. Just an hour ago the full Nine Suns had erupted in her brain, this time richly detailed and sequential, not only the huge cyclopean alien form against the rocky landscape but a whole elaborate rite involving beings of several planetary types, almost a ballet. And looking at the faces of her staff around the big conference table, she knew the same thing must be happening to them. Dante, Patel, Waldstein, even Dan Robinson, who had had so much trouble experiencing the dreams once upon a time: everyone was fully receptive now, everyone was being bombarded by the vivid throbbing pulsating images of strange worlds.

“They have to pass reasonably close,” she said. “Where they are now, there aren’t that many options for going north. You can’t drive thousands of cars and buses and trucks through a forest. And they’ll start butting up against the mountains of the coastal range, which will force them closer and closer to the ocean. It’s already too late for them to turn inland and go up by Ukiah way, because there aren’t any decent roads that a mob that big can use to cross the mountains from where they’re located now. So they can’t help but be funneled toward Mendocino, and as they come swarming through there it’s pretty likely that some of them will start spilling over onto our land. Perhaps a lot of them, or the whole horde, maybe. What I want to do is put up an energy wall across the whole western side of our property so that when they come up the coast they’ll have to keep toward the ocean.”

“Do we have the equipment for that?” Bill Waldstein asked.

“I talked to Lew Arcidiacono about that just now. He says we probably do, or at least enough to protect us on the side facing Mendocino. What we might have to do is keep moving the equipment around from place to place on an ad hoc basis all along our western perimeter until these tumbondé people have gone past.”

Dan Robinson said, “Sounds like we’ll need the entire staff for that.”

“More than just the staff,” said Elszabet. “Lew tells me that we’ll need dozens of people out there on the line, some to patrol, some to haul equipment, some to operate the generators. That’s going to take everybody we have, and then some.”

“Patients too?” said Dante Corelli.

Elszabet nodded. “We may have to use some of them.”

“I don’t like that,” Dan Robinson said.

“The most stable ones. Tomás Menendez, say, Father Christie, Philippa, Martin Clare, maybe even Alleluia—”

“Alleluia is stable?” Waldstein asked.

“On her good days she is. And think of how strong she is. She could probably carry a generator in each hand. We might want to give each patient a twenty-milligram nick of pax before we send them out, but I think there’s no question we’re going to have to use some of them on the lines.”

“Furthermore,” Naresh Patel said, “if we do have to have the entire staff on the front line, it would be a good idea to keep the patients out there with us so we can keep watch on them for the duration of the emergency.”

“Good point,” Robinson said. “We can’t just leave them back here to amuse themselves while we’re setting up the energy wall.”

Waldstein said, “Are you sure this is going to happen, Elszabet? This ferocious onslaught of berserk cultists?”

“They aren’t necessarily ferocious or berserk. But there’s an awful lot of them and they’re in the county and coming in this direction, Bill. Would you like to gamble that they’ll politely go around us without trampling so much as a blade of grass at the Center? I wouldn’t. I’d rather risk wasting a little effort in protecting ourselves than fold my arms and find out that we’re smack in their path.”

“Agreed,” Dante Corelli said.

“We have no choice, I think,” Dan said.

“I think you’re the only one here who has serious doubts, Bill,” Elszabet said.

“Not serious doubts. I just wonder if it’s all really necessary. But you’re right that there’s a real risk of trouble and we’re better off taking whatever precautions we can. I’d like to know something else, though. While we’re busy fending off this potential invasion, what are we going to do with this Tom of yours?”

“Tom?”

“You know. Your fiery-eyed psychotic friend who’s been filling all our heads with his craziness. Do you think it’s safe to let him run around loose?”

“What are you suggesting, Bill?” Dan Robinson asked.

“I’m suggesting that we can’t function effectively if we’re having hallucinations like this every ninety minutes or so. That’s been my experience the last two or three days, and I think everyone else can report the same thing. Drifting in and out of Nine Suns, Green World, the Double Star planets—we have a powerful and dangerous telepath in our midst. He’s messing up our heads. We’re entirely at his mercy. And now if there’s a real crisis marching up the road toward us—”

Robinson said, “Tom isn’t psychotic. Those aren’t hallucinations.”

“I know. What they are is newsreel shots of actual other planets, right? Come off it, Dan.”

“How can you doubt that now?”

Waldstein stared at him. “Are you serious?”

“Bill, you saw the stuff Leo Kresh sent us, the relay photos from the Starprobe satellite. We have unquestionable proof now that Green World, at least, exists. Surely you won’t try to dispute the fact, after seeing that material, that what we’ve been calling the Green World dream is a detailed and exact view of one of the planets of the star Proxima Centauri. And that Tom, far from being psychotic, actually has some kind of telepathic means of picking up images from distant solar systems and relaying them to other minds over a wide geographical range.”

“That’s bullshit,” Waldstein said.

Elszabet said, “Bill, how can you—”

Waldstein swung around fiercely toward her, hunching forward, face flushed. “How do we know those pictures came from Proxima Centauri? How do we know that Tom doesn’t have some way of hocus-pocusing the receivers at Cal Tech that picked those relays up, the same way he hocus-pocuses our minds? I’ll grant you that he’s a telepath with astounding abilities. But not that he’s scanning planets dozens of light-years away. The whole thing’s his own cockeyed fantasy, top to bottom, and he’s spewing it out into millions of other people. I feel invaded by this crap myself. I feel soiled. I think he’s a menace, Elszabet.”

Quietly she said, “I don’t. I believe his visions are genuine ones and that the Starprobe relay confirms it. He’s in tune with the whole cosmos. He’s opening the universe to us in the most amazing way—”

“Elszabet!”

“No, don’t look at me that way, Bill. I’m not crazy. I’ve spent hours talking with him. Have you? He’s a gentle holy man with the most fantastic power any human being has ever had. And if what he’s told me is true, his powers are ripening to the point where it will actually be possible for human beings to travel instantaneously to the worlds we’ve been seeing in our—visions. He says that we’re going—”

“For God’s sake, Elszabet!”

“Let me finish. He says a time is coming soon—the Time of the Crossing, he calls it—when our minds will begin jumping across space to those worlds. We’ll all abandon Earth. Earth is done for; Earth has had it. The universe is calling us. Does that sound crazy, Bill? Sure it does. But what if it’s true? We already have the evidence of the Starprobe photos. I don’t think Tom’s a madman, Bill. He’s a disturbed individual in some ways, yes, he’s been whipped around by the enormous thing within him, he’s pretty far off center, sure, but he’s not crazy. He might just be able to open the whole universe to us. I believe that, Bill.”

Waldstein looked stunned, shaking his head. “Jesus Christ, Elszabet. Jesus Christ!”

“So the answer to your question is no, I don’t think we need to restrain Tom in any way while the tumbondé people are passing through. And afterward I think it would be a good idea for us to drop everything else and devote our skills to finding out what Tom is really all about. Okay? And unless there are serious objections, I’d like to get back to the topic of how we can prepare ourselves for the possibility that hundreds of thousands of trespassers may soon—”

“May I say just one more thing, Elszabet?”

Elszabet sighed. “Go ahead, Bill.”

“Starprobe or no Starprobe, I’m still not convinced that this man is in any genuine contact with real-world extraterrestrial planets. But if he is, and if this Crossing you speak of is in any way possible, then I don’t think we should just lock him up. I think we should kill him right away—”

“Bill!”

“I mean it. Don’t you see the danger? Suppose he can really do it. Send the minds of everybody who’s ever had a space dream off to other planets. Leaving what behind, empty husks? Wipe out the whole human race, depopulate the Earth? Doesn’t that idea bother you in the slightest? ” Waldstein shook his head. He pressed his hands against his face. “Jesus, I can’t believe I’m sitting here seriously discussing this lunacy. One last try: Either Tom is crazy and dangerous to everybody’s mental health because of his ability to transmit hallucinations, or he’s sane and dangerous to everybody’s life because he’s getting ready to empty the world of people. Okay? Okay? Whichever way it is, he’s a menace.”

Naresh Patel said calmly, “I have a proposal. Let’s devote our energies now to the task of defending the Center against the trespassers. I gather that they are moving steadily toward some destination far to the north of us and will be a potential threat to us only for the next day or two. After that, let’s examine Tom closely and attempt to determine the nature and range of his abilities; and if protective action seems desirable to take then, we can consider it at that time.”

“Seconded,” said Dan Robinson.

“Bill?” Elszabet said.

Waldstein clapped his hands together in a gesture of resignation. “Whatever you want. I hope to hell he leaves for Mars in half an hour. And takes the entire bunch of you with him.”

3

Ferguson didn’t sleep at all that night. He lay awake the whole night long, and the whole night long his head swarmed with wonders. The space dreams came to him by twos and threes. He wasn’t sure they could really be called dreams because he wasn’t asleep: but he saw the other worlds, turning under their suns of many colors. He saw strange intricate creatures moving about, speaking in languages no human ear had ever heard. He saw gleaming wondrous cities of strange design. He saw—

He saw—

He saw—

A couple of times he cried out in the dark, the things that he was seeing were so beautiful.

“You okay?” Tomás Menendez asked from the far side of the room.

“The visions don’t stop,” Ferguson said.

“Do you see Chungirá-He-Will-Come? Do you see Maguali-ga?” Ferguson shrugged. “I see the whole shebang. It’s the most amazing thing ever happened to me.”

Out of the darkness Nick Double Rainbow muttered, “Son of a bitch, I’m trying to sleep!”

“I’m having visions,” Ferguson said.

“Well, fuck your visions.”

“It is the great time,” said Tomás Menendez. “The opening of the gate will soon occur. Now you must fill your heart with love, Nick, and let the gods spill through into you. As Ed is doing. Do you see how happy Ed is now?”

Nine suns blazed on the screen of Ferguson’s mind. A gigantic weird-looking thing with one brilliant eye on the top of its head turned toward him and held out many arms and called him by his name. Then the image went away, and he saw a different landscape, a white sun in the sky and a yellow one, and even weirder-looking beings that seemed to be riding around in automobiles made out of water were traveling to and fro. And then—and then—

It isn’t ever going to stop, Ferguson thought. On and on and on, one after another. You wanted space dreams, Ed baby? Okay, now you’ve got space dreams.

Joy overflowed in him and tears came to his eyes again.

He had never cried so much in his life, not since he was a baby. He couldn’t stop. He was like a fountain. But that was all right. The tears were washing his soul. It felt good to cry. Tom had touched something inside him, Tom had opened him up somehow, and now the tears were rushing through him like the spring thaw, washing away all kinds of ancient grime and garbage. They should see me now, he thought. Blubbering like this. Everyone who knew me in Los Angeles, they wouldn’t believe it. Poor Ed has flipped his lid. Crying all the time, and loving it. Poor Ed. Poor nutty Ed.

Look, that’s the blue star, the one that’s so hot it melts the ground. The shimmering floating city. The shining ghostlike people. Gorgeous! Gorgeous!

His pillow was soaked with tears.

God, it felt good. Cry all you want, Ferguson told himself. And then cry some more. Clean yourself out, fellow. Whatever thing is happening to you, it’s all right. Just let it happen. The way Tom had said:Just for once, let everything go, let it all open up. Let grace come flooding in.

He couldn’t just lie still. He got up, walked around the room, held onto the door, to the cabinet, to the sink, anything that would steady him. The world swayed around him. He was spinning, spinning—it would be so easy, he thought, just to let go, let himself go floating off into space—

Tomás Menendez stood beside him. “It is a wonderful time, no? The gods are breaking through. Chungirá-He-Will-Come arrives on Earth, or perhaps we will go to Chungirá, I do not know which. But everything will be changed.”

“Shut the fuck up. ” From Nick Double Rainbow.

Ferguson smiled. “Now I see the red sun and the blue one, and a bridge of light streaming between them. Christ, that red sun, it takes up half the sky!”

“It is the vision of Chungirá,” said Menendez. “Come, let us go outside. Stand under the stars, let Chungirá enter your soul.”

“A big white wall of stone,” Ferguson murmured. “It’s the thing Lacy saw. Alleluia. Now me. The golden thing with the curving horns.”

Menendez had him by the elbow, guiding him into the hallway out to the steps of the dormitory building. Ferguson didn’t care. He would go wherever Menendez wanted to take him. He saw only the giant red sun, throbbing and pulsing, and the blue one beside it, pounding his mind like a gong. And the wonderful being with the curving horns. Reaching toward him. Calling to him. An arch of blazing light stretching across the heavens.

He followed Menendez out of the building. Light sprinkles of moisture struck his cheeks. The air smelled different: clean, fresh, new. Somewhere during the night the rainy season had begun: soft rain, gentle rain, quietly pattering down. He had almost forgotten what rain was like, all these dry months. But here it was, finally. That was all right, Ferguson thought. I’ll just stand here in the rain, get myself clean outside as well as in. It seemed to be almost morning. Ferguson didn’t feel at all as though he had gone without sleep. His mind was alert, active, wide open. The horned figure was going through the same movement again and again, turning, reaching out, raising its arms, turning sideways. And turning again.

Ferguson stared. He saw the staff office building, the red building, the dark looming massive trees beyond. But all those things were misty and insubstantial, almost transparent. What had real density and substance was the shining white block and the huge figure that stood on top of it. And the red sun, and the blue one. He lifted his face toward them. Rain streamed down his forehead. He had no idea how long he stood there. A minute, an hour, how could he tell?

Then the vision faded. The real world returned, solid, visible. Ferguson looked around, feeling a little dazed.

He was standing on the front porch of the dormitory building with Tomás Menendez beside him. It was raining lightly. The sky was gray but getting brighter. A figure in a yellow rain-slicker came jogging by, heading toward the far side of the Center. Teddy Lansford, it was.

“What is it, time for pick already?” Ferguson called.

Lansford paused a moment, running in place in the rain. “No pick today,” he said.

“You kidding?”

“Not today. Not for anybody. Dr. Lewis says.”

“Why?” Ferguson asked, baffled. “What’s so special, today?” But Lansford was gone already, sprinting off into the rainy morning. Ferguson swung around and saw other figures emerging from the dorm, crowding out onto the porch as if to see if it was really raining. April, Alleluia, Philippa, a couple of the others. “No pick today!” Ferguson said to them. “It’s a pick holiday!”

“Why?” April asked.

“Dr. Lewis says,” Ferguson told her with a shrug.

Which set them all into excited discussion. Ferguson stood to one side, scarcely listening. It didn’t matter to him, one way or the other, about pick this morning. What had happened to him couldn’t be taken away. If they picked the visions from his mind new visions would come. He was fundamentally different now, that much he knew. He was changed forever. Just as well there was no pick today, he figured, because he wanted time to think, to analyze what had happened to him yesterday, how Tom had changed him. Taking him by the hands, opening him to the visions-Ferguson didn’t want to lose his memories of all that. But he realized it would be no big deal if he did. The important thing was not what had happened but who he was now, and who he was was someone else from the person who had been riding around in his head yesterday. He leaned against the porch wall. The wind picked up a little, blowing rain inward at him. He didn’t move. It felt fine, the rain. This early in the season the rain wasn’t too cold.

Dante Corelli appeared out of the mists. She looked as if she’d been up all night too. She trotted up on the porch and clapped her hands. “All right, everybody. Get yourselves up to the mess hall and have some breakfast, and then assemble in the gymnasium. Pick’s canceled today.”

Alleluia said, “What’s going on, Dante?”

“A little trouble, nothing too major. There’s a big parade, sort of, coming this way, thousands of people who have been marching all the way from San Diego. Some kind of religious thing, that’s what I hear. They’re supposed to be traveling through Mendocino today, but we think that some of them might just go astray and wind up in here and cause some difficulties. So we’re going to put up energy walls around the Center and keep them out. That’s all. Nothing for anybody to get worried about, no cause for alarm, but it’s going to be a sort of unusual day.”

Tomás Menendez, standing next to Ferguson, said as if to himself, “The Senhor is here! It is the Senhor!”

“What was that?” Ferguson asked.

“He has come here because this is the Seventh Place!” Menendez said.

“Who has?” Ferguson asked. But Menendez, his face flushed, his eyes glowing strangely, turned and walked past him, back into the dormitory, without replying. Well, okay, Ferguson thought. Like Dante says, it’s going to be a sort of unusual day.

Dante trotted off toward the headquarters building. “Remember, everyone,” she called, looking back at them. “Breakfast right away, and then over to the gym.”

Ferguson went inside to get dressed. Father Christie came up beside him. “How are you this morning, son?”

“I didn’t sleep. Fantastic stuff going on in my head all night.”

“But are you well?”

“The best I’ve ever been, Father. These visions. The things I’ve seen. I don’t know, I can’t stop—crying—crying from happiness-look, I’m doing it again—”

“Let it happen,” said the priest. He was crying too, suddenly. “These are the great days, the days of the prophecy, when He brings every work into judgment. I was up all night too, do you know? Reading the Bible, that’s what I was doing.” The priest laughed. “You wouldn’t believe how long it has been, the Bible and me. But I read right through the night. The Revelation of Saint John, over and over. The Lamb which is in the midst of the throne shall feed us, and shall lead us unto living fountains of waters: and God shall wipe away all tears from our eyes. But first we must weep, if He is to wipe away our tears. Isn’t that right?”

“I never was able to cry, Father. But now I can’t seem to stop.”

“Go on. Cry all you like. This is the day when the seventh seal shall be opened, and the seven angels will sound the seven trumpets. Believe me, son. You aren’t Catholic, are you?”

“Me? No.”

“That makes no difference. I’ll bless you all the same when the time comes. How could I deny the blessing to anyone on this day?”

“What’s going to happen today?” Ferguson said. He felt very easy, relaxed. He was just floating along.

“The Omega and the Alpha,” said a voice from the other end of the hall. “The end and the beginning.”

Ferguson felt new visions stream through his mind. Shining worlds sprang up and blazed in him. He was floating still.

“Tom?”

“This is the day when it begins,” Tom said, coming toward him. “The Time of the Crossing. I feel it within me, the strength, the power. Will you be the first to go, Ed?”

“Me? Go?”

“To make the Crossing.”

Ferguson stared. “Where to?”

“I think, to the Double Kingdom. They are willing to receive you. I can feel it, their willingness. Their two suns burn like fire in my heart today, the red and the blue.”

Ferguson became aware that April was standing beside him, that Alleluia had appeared from somewhere and was at his elbow too. Indistinctly he said, “We’re supposed to go get breakfast right away, and then—the gym—”

Tom’s eyes were fixed on his. “Accept the Crossing, Ed. Someone must be the first, and you are the chosen one. Open the way for the rest of us. Once the first Crossing is made, the next ones will be easier, and it will get easier and easier and easier. Will you? Now?”

“You want me—to go to some other star—”

“You will drop this body, yes. For a better one in a better place. This corruptible must put on incorruption. This mortal must put on incorruptibility. And death is swallowed up in victory.”

Ferguson studied him uneasily. They were all crowding close about him now. “Wait a second,” he said. He wasn’t floating so much now. He felt heavier now. “I’m not sure. Ease off a little. I’m not sure. What all this means.”

“No one will force you,” Tom said.

“Just let me think. Let me think.”

Tomás Menendez appeared. His face was radiant. “This is the day when Chungirá will come!”

“Yes,” Tom said. “And Ed here, he’s going to be the first to make the Crossing into the stars. I know he will. He’ll go to the Double Kingdom.”

“He will go to Chungirá,” Menendez said. “And that will be the signal; and then Chungirá will come to us. Yes. Yes, I know it.” Menendez seemed to be speaking out of a trance. “The Senhor is very close. I can feel him. Come, we will send Ferguson to Chungirá; and then I will go to the Senhor, I will welcome his coming. I will be Maguali-ga; I will be the opener of the gate.” He put his hand on Ferguson’s wrist. “You are ready, Ed? You will accept?”

Ferguson shook his head slowly, trying to understand. He would drop the body. He would make the Crossing. He would go to some other planet. The first twitches and flickers of fear began to awaken in him. What were they trying to say? What did they want to do to him? He would die, right? That was what all this meant, this dropping the body. Yes? No? He didn’t understand any of this. For a moment all the old suspicions flared in him. They were trying to put something over on him, weren’t they? They wanted to use him. They wanted to hurt him.

He said, “Am I going to die?”

“Your life will only just be beginning,” Tom said.

They surrounded him, moving in close, smiling, stroking him. April, Alleluia. Father Christie, Menendez, Tom. Telling him that they loved him, that they envied him, that they would follow him very soon. But he had to be the first. He was the one who was ready. Is that so? he wondered. Am I ready? How do they know?

“Someone must be the first,” Tom said.

“Let me think. Let me think.”

“Let him think,” said Father Christie. “He mustn’t be pushed.”

Ferguson sucked his breath in deep and hard down to the bottom of his lungs. Visions were starting to rise in him again. The Green World, gentle glistening glades. The world of light. All the worlds of the heavens shining in his mind. Vast beings walking to and fro. They wanted to send him there. They wanted him to be the first. He felt that cold knot of suspicions loosening, melting, draining away.

He wasn’t interested in dying. But would it be dying if he made the Crossing? Would it? Would it?

“Don’t say anything,” someone said. “Just let him work it out.”

Hey, why not? Ferguson thought. Feeling lighter again. The floating sensation coming back.

Do it, he thought. For once in your crappy life, do it. You be the one to go. Show them the way. Do it for them. Maybe even do it for yourself, who knows, but at least do it for them. For once in your life, just once. What do you have to lose? What’s so wonderful for you here on Earth that you want to stay? Do it, Ed. Do it. Do it.

He blinked, shook his head, smiled. “Yes,” he said. “Go ahead. Send me. Wherever you want.”

“Are you certain?” Tom said.

Ferguson nodded. It surprised him, how calm he was. How completely willing, eager, unafraid, now. Father Christie, by his side, was murmuring in Latin. Praying for him? Probably. All right, let him pray. A little praying couldn’t hurt. Everything was going to be okay. He was smiling. He was totally at peace. He couldn’t remember ever having felt this way before.

“Everyone join hands,” Tom said. His voice seemed to be coming from a vast distance. “Join hands, stand close around us, focus your minds. Help me help him to Cross, all of you. I can’t do it alone, but with your help we can manage it. And you, Ed. Put your hands in mine. The way you did yesterday in the forest. Put your hands in mine.”

4

Elszabet left her office, went down the hall to the double door at the end and stepped through, out into the storm. It was about eight in the morning and everything seemed under control so far. She paused on the porch to check the little communications system she was wearing. “Lew?” she said. “Lew, can you hear me?” Transmitter and receiver and bone-induction speaker, the three units together smaller than a fingernail, taped just back of her right ear. Tiny microphone mounted along her cheek. Military equipment: if there was going to be a war today, she would have to be the general.

Arcidiacono said, “I hear you clear, Elszabet.” It sounded as if he were standing right next to her.

The rain was starting to get serious now. It was riding a stiff wind down from the north and pounding hard against the sides of the buildings in gusty cascades. Elszabet figured that was a bit of luck on their side. The marchers, the tumbondé people, were less likely to go wandering where they didn’t belong if it was raining, wasn’t that so? They’d stay inside their buses and vans and just keep right on going toward the North Pole, or wherever it was that their prophet was leading them.

So she hoped, anyway. All the same, it seemed like a good idea to get the energy walls up and keep them up until the marchers had gone through. Just in case a couple of hundred thousand strangers saw the Center sitting there at the edge of the woods looking warm and snug and decided to come in out of the wet for a while.

She said to Arcidiacono, “What’s going on out there?”

“All quiet. We’re still setting up the generators. You get any news from the county police about the tumbondés?”

“Just talked to them. They say the marchers haven’t broken camp yet this morning.”

“Where are they staying, do you know?”

“Seems like they’re all over. There’s one main batch of them just outside Mendo but they spread far and wide, both sides of Highway One. Closest group maybe two-point-five kilometers south and west of us.”

“Jesus,” said Arcidiacono. “Pretty close.”

“You ready to handle it, if they start coming through in an hour or so?”

“Whenever. We’ll be ready here. I’m not worrying.”

“Okay,” Elszabet said. “If you’re not worried I’m not. Everything’s going to be okay, Lew. Sure you have enough people?”

“For now,” the technician said. “Little later, once they get on the move, I’ll want more. So we can start shifting the equipment from place to place.”

“We’ll all be out there by then. I’ll check back every fifteen minutes.”

“Do that, yes,” Arcidiacono said.

Elszabet gave the receiver a light tap, switching it over to B frequency, Dante Corelli in the gym fifty meters away. “It’s me, Elszabet,” she said. “Just testing. Everything okay there?”

“Pretty much. Patients are straggling in from breakfast.”

“They know what’s going on?”

“More or less. I’ve told them the general outlines. Nobody’s particularly alarmed. Bill Waldstein gives each one a little shot of pax as they show up—we minimize it, we say it’s just to keep them relaxed, nothing to fret about. A lot of visions happening. Everybody here’s pretty spacy right now, Elszabet.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“I wonder, on account of the rain, do we really want to bring them out to the perimeter? We could just keep them all here, pax them out, couple of supervisory personnel—”

“Let’s wait and see,” Elszabet said. “Maybe the whole thing’s going to be a false alarm anyway.”

“You think so?”

“That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

“Listen,” Dante said, “I’m still missing a few of them. Maybe you ought to phone up to the mess hall and get them hustling across here, okay?”

“Who’s not there yet?”

“Well, April, Ed Ferguson, Father Christie. No, here comes Father Christie now. So it’s just April and Ed. Otherwise the whole crew’s in the gym.”

“Tom there too?”

“No. No, I don’t know where he is.”

“We ought to know. If he turns up, call me.”

“I will,” Dante said.

“And I’ll check on the other missing ones. I’m talking to you from right outside the mess hall now anyway. If they’re in there I’ll have them over to you in five minutes or less.”

Elszabet walked around to the mess hall side of the GHQ building and peered in. No one in sight except one of the kids from town who cleaned up the dirty trays and swept the floor. “I’m looking for a couple of patients,” she said. “April Cranshaw? Big round plump woman, about thirty years old? And Mr. Ferguson? You know which one he is?”

The boy nodded. “Sure, I know them, Dr. Lewis. I don’t think either one came in for breakfast today.”

“No?”

“That April, she’s hard to miss, you know.”

Elszabet smiled. “I’d like to find them. If they wander in while you’re still here, will you call over to the gym, tell Dante Corelli? Then send them over there.”

“Sure thing, Dr. Lewis.”

“And have you seen Tom? You know, the new one, the one with the peculiar eyes?”

“Tom, yeah. He hasn’t been here this morning either.”

“Strange. Tom’s someone who hates to miss a meal. Well, same thing there. If you see him, call Dante.”

“Right, Dr. Lewis.”

Elszabet went outside again. She felt curiously peaceful, an eye-of-the-hurricane kind of feeling. First thing, she thought, head over to the dorm, see if maybe April was still in bed, or Ferguson. Morning like this, they might just have decided not to get up, especially since there had been no pick-call today.

The rain whipped at her face. Nastier and nastier, almost like a real midwinter storm. The ground was soaking everything up, it was so dry after five straight months of fair weather, but if the stuff continued to come down like this they’d be sloshing around in mud by tonight. In the summer months you tended to forget, she thought, how messy the rainy season could be.

First find April and Ferguson, yes. Then track down Tom. And then she’d have to get herself out toward the front gate to see how Lew Arcidiacono was coming along with the energy-wall installation. After that it would just be a matter of waiting out the day, doing what she could to make sure that the marchers from San Diego went around the Center instead of straight through it. The marchers were a problem she didn’t really need at this time, a stupid extraneous distraction. She knew that Tom was the big event that she should be dealing with right now, Tom and his visions, his almost magical powers, Tom and his galactic worlds—the worlds that she understood now, thanks to the Starprobe cameras, to be the real thing, actual authentic inhabited planets that were sending beckoning images of themselves through the strange mind of this one man of Earth—

As if on cue something tickled at the corners of Elszabet’s mind. Eerie light began to glow behind her eyes. No, she thought furiously. Not now. For God’s sake, not now.

Everything she saw was casting twin shadows, one outlined in yellow, one in reddish orange. In the sky a pale pink nebula sprawled like some great octopus across the horizon. And creatures moving around, spherical, blue-skinned, clusters of tentacles wiggling on their heads. She recognized that landscape, those stars, those spherical beings. Double Star Three was drifting into her mind. Right this minute, out here in the driving rain, as she walked from the mess hall toward the dorms, she was sliding away into that other world.

No, she thought. No. No. No.

She staggered a couple of steps, went lurching into a big rhododendron in the middle of the lawn, grabbed a couple of its branches and held on tight, dizzy, swaying, fighting the vision back. This is a rhododendron bush, she told herself. This is a rainy morning in October, 2103. This is Mendocino County, California, planet Earth. I am Elszabet Lewis and I am a human being native to planet Earth and I need to have all my wits about me today.

A rasping voice behind her said, “You all right, lady? You need some help?”

She swung around, startled, disoriented. Double Star Three shattered into fragments and fell away from her, and she found herself facing three strangers. Rough-looking types, nasty-looking. One with a thick black beard and deep-set eyes almost buried in black rings, one with a lean face scarred all over with the deep craters of some skin disease, and one, short and ugly with a wild thatch of red hair, who seemed even meaner than the other two.

Elszabet faced them and, as coolly as she could, brushed her hand against her hair, switching the transmitter on. It should still be tuned to B frequency. Dante Corelli would be picking it up right over there in the gym.

“Who are you?” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“You don’t need to be scared, ma’am,” said the one with the scarred face. “We don’t mean no harm. We thought you was sick or something, hanging there on that bush.”

“I asked you who you were,” she said, a little more crisply. It annoyed her that the scar-faced man thought she was frightened, even though it was true. “I asked you what you were doing here.”

“Well, we—we—” the one with the scars began.

“Shut up, Buffalo,” the one with the black beard said. Then to Elszabet: “We were just passing through. Trying to find a friend who seems to have strayed in here.”

“A friend?”

“Man named Tom, maybe you know him. Tall, skinny, a little strange-looking—”

“I know who you mean, yes. Do you know that you’re on private property, Mr.—Mr.—”

“I’m Charley.”

“Charley. You’re with the tumbondé march, is that it?”

“You mean the San Diego mob? All those crazies? Hey, no, not us. We’re just traveling through. We thought maybe we could find our friend Tom, take him with us, move along before the crazies hit. You know how many they got out there, just down the road?”

Elszabet could see Dante now emerging from the gym, two or three others with her. They were keeping back, watching cautiously, listening in on Elszabet’s conversation with the three strangers. Elszabet said, “Your friend Tom’s not around right now. And in any case I don’t think he plans to go anywhere. What I suggest you do is take yourselves off our grounds right away, for your own good, okay? As you say, there’s quite a mob just down the road, and if they break in here I can’t be responsible for your safety. Besides which, you happen to be trespassing.”

“You just let us talk to Tom a minute, then we—”

“No.”

Dante was gesturing as if to say, Give me a signal, I’ll knock them out. Dante was terrific with the anesthetic-dart gun at almost any range up to a hundred meters. But Elszabet wasn’t so sure. Certainly these three were armed: knives, spikes, maybe guns. That looked like a laser bracelet on the black-bearded man’s wrist. If Dante opened fire, one of them might have time to fire back and it wouldn’t be anesthetic pellets he’d be firing.

The red-haired one said, “Charley, look behind us.”

“What’s back there, Stidge?”

“Couple people. Watching us.”

Charley nodded. Very carefully he turned and looked.

“What you want to do?” Stidge asked. “Grab this one, make her help us find Tom?”

“No,” Charley said. “Nothing like that, Stidge.” To Elszabet he said, “We don’t mean no trouble. We’re going to move along. You see our friend Tom, you give him our regards, okay?” He was gesturing to the others, and they were starting to slip away toward the woods, the scar-faced one first, then Stidge. Charley remained where he was another moment, until the other two were out of sight in the trees. “Hope we didn’t trouble you any, ma’am,” he said. “We’re just passing through, on our way. All right?” He was edging away as he spoke. “You tell Tom that Charley and the boys were looking for him, okay?”

Then he was gone too. Elszabet realized that she was shivering: soaked through and more than a little shaken up. A delayed reaction was sweeping over her. Her teeth chattered. Some flickering fragments of space visions were dancing at the outer reaches of her mind, like pale transparent flames dancing on the embers of a bonfire.

Dante came running toward her, Teddy Lansford just behind.

“Everything all right?” Dante asked.

Elszabet brushed at the rain streaming across her forehead and fought back a shudder. “I’ll be okay. I’m a little wobbly, I guess.”

“Who were they?”

“I think they were the scratchers Tom used to travel with. Looking for him. They want to get out of the neighborhood before the tumbondé people pass through, and they want to take Tom with them wherever they’re going.”

“Grubby bastards,” Dante said. “As if we didn’t have enough problems to deal with today, we have to have scratchers too.”

“Should we call the police?” Lansford asked.

Dante laughed. “Police? What police? Any police this county has, they’re down by Mendo trying to control the tumbondé mob this morning. No, we’ll have to watch out for those three ourselves. In our spare time.” She looked at Elszabet. “You’re still pretty shaky, aren’t you?”

“I was trying to sidetrack a space vision. And then I turned around and there were three scary-looking strangers standing right behind me. Yeah, I’m still shaky.”

“Maybe this’ll help,” said Dante. She stepped closer and put her hands on Elszabet’s back and shoulders, and began to move things around in there, rearranging bones and muscles and ligaments as though she were shuffling papers on a desk. Elszabet gasped in surprise and pain at first, but then she felt the tension and distress beginning to leave her, and she swayed back against Dante, letting it happen. Gradually a sense of some balance returned to her. “There,” Dante said finally. “That a little better now?”

“Oh, my. Absolutely tremendous.”

“Loosen up the back, it loosens up the mind. Hey, did you ever find out where April and Ferguson were?”

Elszabet put her hand to her lips. “God. I forgot all about them. I was on my way over to the dorm when the vision started to hit and then—”

Suddenly the voice of Lew Arcidiacono said out of the speaker just back of her right ear, “Elszabet? I think it’s starting now. We’ve got the word that there’s a whole mess of tumbondé people not very far down the road and they’re probably going to be heading smack in our direction very soon.”

Elszabet switched to A frequency. “Terrific. How are you doing with the energy walls?”

“We’ve got a solid line of defense up all along the probable line of approach. But if the march gets sloppy they may begin to come at us from one of the unshielded sides. I can use all the extra personnel you can send down here now.”

“Right. I’ll have Dante head out your way with everyone she has. Stay in touch, Lew.”

“What’s happening?” Dante asked.

“They’re getting near us,” Elszabet said. “The tumbondé crowd, just a little way down the road.”

“Here we go, huh?”

“We’ll be able to handle it. But Lew’s calling for help on the front line. Take everybody from the gym and go on down there pronto, okay? I’ll look in at the dorm for April and Ferguson and meet you there in five minutes.”

“I’m on my way,” Dante said.

Elszabet summoned up a fragile grin. “Thanks for the backrub,” she said.

The dormitory building lay twenty paces to her right. She trotted over, slipping and sliding on the muddied path and rain-slicked grass. The storm was getting worse all the time. Half-stumbling, Elszabet pulled herself up onto the dorm porch and went clomping into the building, leaving big muddy tracks. “Hello?” she called. “Anybody here?”

All quiet. She wandered down the hallway, peering into this room, and that, the little dens where her unhappy patients passed their unhappy days. No sign of anyone around. At the far end of the hall she paused at number seven, Ed Ferguson’s room. As she touched her hand to the doorplate she heard odd crooning sounds coming from inside, deep, heavy, slow.

April squatted crosslegged in the middle of the floor, rocking steadily back and forth, singing tonelessly to herself, sobbing a little. Behind her, half-obscured by the big woman’s bulk, Ed Ferguson was sitting motionless on the floor, leaning against one of the beds, his head thrown back and his arms dangling alongside his hips. He looked drugged.

Elszabet went first to April and dug her fingers into the soft flesh of the big woman’s shoulder, trying to slow her rocking.

“April? April, it’s me, Elszabet. It’s all right. Don’t be afraid. What’s the matter, April?”

“Nothing. There isn’t anything the matter.” Thick husky voice, heavy with emotion. “I’m fine, Elszabet.” Tears running down her face. She would not look up. Rocking even harder now, she began to sing again. “It’s raining, it’s pouring, the old man is snoring—”

The song gave way to the sort of rhythmic humming a woman who was holding a baby might make, and then to unintelligible crooning. But April seemed calm, at least. She seemed lost in some private world. Elszabet rose and walked over to Ferguson. He didn’t move at all. The look on his face was unfamiliar, a strangely benign expression that completely altered his normal tense and sour appearance; at a quick glance she might not have been able to recognize this man as the grim, bitter, gloomy Ed Ferguson. He was transfigured. His eyes were wide and shining with some ineffable bliss; his face was relaxed, almost slack; his mouth was drawn back in a broad smile of the deepest happiness.

So extraordinary was that beatific expression of Ferguson’s that it was another moment before Elszabet realized that his eyes were remaining open without blinking, that he didn’t seem to be drawing breath.

She knelt beside him, alarmed. “Ed?” she said sharply, shaking him. “Ed? Can you hear me?” She put her hand to his chest and felt for a heartbeat. She listened for the sounds of breathing. She grasped his limp cool wrist and searched as best she knew how for a pulse. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing at all.

She looked across at April, who was rocking harder and harder. She was singing another children’s song, one that seemed almost familiar, but her voice was so blurred and indistinct that Elszabet was unable to make out any of the words. “April, what happened to Ed Ferguson?”

“To Ed Ferguson,” April repeated very carefully, as if examining those sounds to discover some possible meaning in them.

“To Ed, yes. I want to know what happened to Ed.”

“To Ed. To Ed. Oh, Ed ” April giggled. “He made the Crossing. Tom helped him do it. We all held hands, and Tom sent him to the Double Kingdom.”

“He what?”

“It was very easy, very smooth. Ed just let go. He just dropped the body, that’s all he did. And off he went to the Double Kingdom.”

Good God, Elszabet thought.

“Who was here with you then?”

“Oh, everybody.”

“Who?”

“Well, there was Tom, and Father Christie, and Tomás and…” April’s voice trailed off. She disappeared once more into gibberish and began rocking again. In the middle of it she became still and turned to Elszabet and said in a completely lucid voice, “I’m scared, Elszabet. Tom said that we’re all going to be going over there soon. To the stars. Is that right, Elszabet? It’s the time, he said. He has the full power now, and he’s going to send us all, one by one, just like he sent Ed. I suppose I’ll go soon. Isn’t that so? I don’t know where I’ll be going, though. I don’t know what it’ll be like for me there. It can’t be any worse than it’s been for me here, can it? But even so, I’m scared. I’m so scared, Elszabet.” And she began to sob again, and then to sing once more.

Elszabet shook Ferguson again. His head lolled over.

Dead? Really? The idea stunned her. She felt her cheeks flush hot with guilt. Ferguson, dead? One of my patients, dead? That lolling head, those sightless eyes. Elszabet shivered. All this talk of Crossings, of shining alien worlds, seemed bizarre and absurd to her now against this ugly unanswerable reality. Over and over again she heard herself thinking. One of my patients is dead. No patient had ever died at the Center before. Suddenly—with all the chaos swirling outside-—the riot and the skulking scratchers and Tom going around doing God only knew what kind of witchcraft—there was just one thought in Elszabet’s head, which was that someone who had been entrusted to her care had died. All the work she had done this year with Ferguson, the elaborate tests, the closely watched charts, the counselling, the carefully monitored pick program—and there he was. Dead.

Maybe he wasn’t, not really. Maybe he was just in some kind of deep trance. She was no doctor. She had never seen a dead person this close. There were states of consciousness, she knew, that seemed just like death but were merely suspended animation. Maybe he was in one of those. She said to April, “What exactly did Tom do to him, can you tell me? When he made the Crossing. What was it like?”

But April was far away. Elszabet crouched beside Ferguson, feeling numb. Rain drummed hard on the rooftop. Somewhere down near the main road a huge mob of cultists was wandering around just outside the Center, and on the other side in the woods three sinister-looking scratchers were lurking about, and Tom had gone God knew where, and here was Ferguson dead or maybe in a trance, and April—

She heard footsteps in the hall. Jesus, what now?

Someone out there calling her name. “Elszabet? Elszabet? ” Bill Waldstein, it sounded like.

“I’m in room seven.”

Waldstein came running in at full tilt, nearly tripped over April, and brought himself to an abrupt skidding halt. “Dante was worried about you and sent me over to see how you were doing,” he said, then noticed Ferguson. “What the hell—?”

“I think he’s dead, Bill. But you’d know better. Please take a look at him…”

Waldstein stared. “Dead?”

“I think so. But check it. You’re a doctor, not me.”

Waldstein bent over Ferguson, probing him here and there. “Like an empty sack,” he said. “There’s nobody here.”

“Dead, you mean?”

“Sometimes it’s hard to be completely sure just by looking. But he seems plenty dead to me. Nobody home at all. Christ, look at that empty grin on his face.”

“April says that Tom showed him how to make the Crossing.”

“The Crossing?”

“He’s gone off to some star, April says. They all held hands and sent him somewhere.”

Waldstein glanced at April: rocking, crooning, sobbing. He turned his head slowly from side to side. “Ferguson went to another star, you’re telling me? To another star? Jesus, Elszabet!”

“I don’t know where he is. I’ve told you what April told me. He’s dead, isn’t he? What from? If he didn’t make the Crossing, what did he die of, a man in apparent perfect health? She said they all held hands, Tom, Father Christie, Tomás—”

“And you believe this?”

“I believe they did what April says they did, yes. That they joined hands and performed some sort of rite. And I even half-believe that Tom really did send him off to one of the star worlds… more than half-believe, maybe. Look at his face, Bill. Look at his face. Have you ever seen such a blissful expression? It’s the way somebody would look who knows he’s going straight to heaven. But Ferguson didn’t believe in heaven.”

“And now he’s on some star?”

“Maybe he is,” Elszabet said. “How would I know?”

Waldstein stared at her. “We ought to find Tom and kill him right this minute.”

“What are you saying, Bill?”

“Listen, there are no two ways about this. Are you going to let him wander around this place murdering people?”

Elszabet gestured helplessly. She didn’t know what answer to make. Murder? That wasn’t the right word, she thought. Tom wouldn’t murder anyone. But yet—but yet—if Tom had touched Ferguson as April had said, and Ferguson had died—

Waldstein said, “If Tom is for real, if he’s genuinely able to lift people out of their bodies and ship them who knows where and leave nothing but an empty shell behind, then he’s the most dangerous man in the world. He’s a one-man horror show. He can just walk around from place to place, making Crossings or whatever for people until there’s nobody left alive. Just snap his fingers and send people to the goddamn stars—you think that’s a good thing? You think that’s something we should allow him to do?” She looked at him but still couldn’t find anything to say. He went on, “That’s if you believe any of this crazy garbage. And if you don’t, well, we still have the problem of finding out how he managed to kill Ferguson and—”

There was a sudden crackling noise out of the speaker taped behind Elszabet’s ear. She heard Arcidiacono’s voice, ragged, muffled, almost hysterical.

“Say that again?” she told him.

Waldstein began to speak. She held up her hand to shush him. “Not you, Bill.” Into her microphone she said, “I didn’t hear what you were just saying, Lew. Slow down. Give it to me clearly.”

“I said Tomás Menendez just switched off one of the energy walls and the tumbondés are pouring through our line.”

“Oh, Lew, no. No. ”

“We had everything under control. Colossal mob of them out there, but they couldn’t get in. Menendez was carrying generators around. Working as hard as anybody. Then he seemed to spot someone he knew out there in that mob, and he yelled that he was the opener of the gate, or something. And he opened it. He turned the wall right off. We’ve got thousands of them coming into the Center right this minute, Elszabet. Millions of them. I don’t know. They’re all over the place. Another two minutes, they’ll be down your way.”

“Oh, my God,” she said. A strange tranquility began to come over her. She felt almost like laughing.

“What’s he telling you?” Waldstein asked.

Elszabet closed her eyes and shook her head. “The wall is down, the tumbondé people are coming in. Oh, Jesus, Bill. That’s the finish. Here we go. Jesus, here we go.”