Highway of Eternity (3 page)

“Splendid pieces, both of them,” said Timothy.

“What I can't understand,” Emma told him sharply, “is why you must keep them loaded. Not only those two, but all the rest of them. A loaded gun is dangerous.”

“Completeness,” said Timothy. “Certainly even you can appreciate completeness. The ammunition is an integral part of a gun. Without it, a gun is incomplete.”

“That reasoning escapes me,” said Horace. “It always has.”

“I wasn't talking about the guns,” said David. “I am sorry now that I mentioned them. I was only trying to tell you that I met Martin and Stella. I stayed at their place for several nights.”

“What were they like?” asked Enid.

“Martin was a cold fish. A very cold fish. Talked very little and when he did, said nothing. I saw him only a few times, briefly each time. I had the feeling he resented my being there.”

“And Stella?”

“A cold fish, too. But in a different way. Bitchy cold. Watching you all the time but pretending that she wasn't.”

“Either of them seem dangerous? Dangerous to us, I mean.”

“No, not dangerous. Just uncomfortable.”

“We may be too complacent,” said Emma in her timid voice. “Events have gone too well for us for a number of years and we may have fallen into the notion they will keep on going well forever. Horace is the only one of us who stays alert. He keeps busy all the time. It seems to me that the rest of us, instead of criticizing him, should be doing something, too.”

“Timothy keeps as busy as Horace,” said Enid. “He spends all his time sifting through the books and scrolls that have been gathered for him. And who has gathered them for him? It has been David, going out to London and Paris and New York, taking the risk of leaving Hopkins Acre to collect them for him.”

“That may all be true, my dear,” said Emma, “but, tell me, what might you be doing?”

“Dear people,” protested Timothy, “we should not be quibbling with one another. And Enid, in her own way, does as much as all the rest of us, or more.”

David glanced down the table at Timothy, his soft-spoken, easy-going brother, and wondered how he put up with Emma and her lout of a husband. Even under the utmost provocation, he never raised his voice. With his saintlike face rimmed by his white and wispy beard, he was the quiet voice of reason before the tempests that at times rocked the family circle.

“Rather than argue,” said David, “about which of us is doing the most to solve the dilemma that we face, it seems to me that it might be better to admit that no one of us is really doing much that bears upon the problem. Why don't we, quite simply and honestly, admit that we are refugees, hunched here, huddling, hoping that no one finds us out. I would suggest that none of us, if our life depended on it, could define the problem.”

“I think some of us here may be on the right track,” said Horace, “and even if we're not, there are others looking for answers. The people in Athens and the Pleistocene …”

“That's exactly it,” said David. “Us, Athens, the Pleistocene, and New York, if Martin and Stella are still there. How many of us altogether?”

“The point,” said Horace, “is that there must be many other groups. Our three groups—our four groups, really—know of one another. There must be many, bound together as are our four groups, who do not know of us or other groups. This makes sense. Revolutionaries—and we, in a sense, are revolutionaries—are segregated in cells, with only minimal knowledge of one another.”

“For my part,” said David, stubbornly, “I still think we are pure and simple refugees—the ones who got away.”

They had finished with the mutton by this time and Nora came in to pick up the platter, returning with a steaming plum pudding that she placed in the center of the table. Emma reached out and pulled it closer.

“It's already cut,” she said. “Pass your dessert plates to me. There's sauce for those who wish it.”

“I saw Spike today,” said David, “when I was in the fields. He was playing that silly hopping game of his.”

“Poor Spike,” said Timothy. “He got sucked in with us. He came visiting. He was not one of the family, but he was there when it was time to go. We couldn't leave him there. I hope that he's been happy with us.”

“He seems happy enough,” said Enid.

“We're not about to find out if he is or not,” said Horace. “He can't talk with us.”

“He understands more than we think he does,” said David. “Don't ever make the mistake of thinking he is stupid.”

“He is an alien,” said Timothy. “He was a pet—no, that's not quite right—he had an association of some sort with a neighboring family. In those days there were some strange associations with the aliens, not all of them entirely understandable. At least to me they weren't.”

“With Henry it is different,” said Enid. “He is one of the family. His connection may be a little distant, but he is one of us. He came along willingly enough.”

“At times I worry about Henry,” said Timothy. “We don't see much of him.”

“He's busy,” said David. “Having a good time. Roaming the countryside beyond Hopkins Acre, scaring the hell out of all the villagers and country folk and perhaps some of the gentry who are still benighted enough to believe in ghosts. He brings in a lot of local information. Because of him, and only because of him, we know a great deal of what is going on out beyond the Acre.”

“Henry is no ghost,” said Emma, primly. “You shouldn't talk about him the way you do.”

“Of course he is no ghost,” David agreed, “but he looks enough like one to fool anybody who doesn't know.”

By common consent, they ceased their talk and settled down to the pudding, which was heavy, but exceedingly good.

I heard you talking of me, said a thought that was not a voice, but a thought so strong and clear that all at the table heard it.

“It's Henry,” Emma screeched, all flustered.

“Of course it is,” said Horace, croaking a little in his throat. “He delights in startling us at unseemly moments. He may be gone for days and then be at one's elbow, shouting in one's ear.”

“Pull yourself together, Henry,” said Timothy, “and sit down quietly in a chair. It is disquieting to be conversing with someone who is invisible.”

Henry pulled himself, or most of himself, enough together so that he could be seen, though dimly, and sat down in a chair at the foot of the table, opposite Timothy. He was a misty sort of thing, somewhat like a man, although carelessly shaped. But what he pulled together did not stay together too well; it kept drifting back and forth so that the shape of the chair which still could be seen through his tenuous substance wavered with his drifting back and forth.

You have enjoyed a disgustingly heavy meal, he told them. Everything heavy. The mutton heavy. The pudding heavy. It is this heavy eating that makes all of you as heavy as you are.

“I am not heavy,” Timothy told him. “I am so thin and stringy I totter in the wind.”

You never walk in the wind, said Henry. You never leave the house. For years, you have not felt the warmth of honest sunlight.

“You are almost never in the house,” said Horace. “You have more than your full share of sunlight.”

I live by sunlight, Henry told him. Certainly you are aware of that. The energy I pluck from the sun is what keeps me going. But it's not only the sun; it is other things as well. The sweet scent of pasture roses, the singing of the birds, the feel of naked soil, the whisper or the howling of the wind, the great, sweeping bowl of sky, the solid majesty of trees.

“You have an impressive catalog,” said David, drily.

It is yours as well.

“I have some of it,” said David. “I know of what you speak.”

“Have you seen Spike?” asked Horace.

Off and on I see him. He is confined to the bubble around Hopkins Acre. I am the only one of you who can pass through the bubble without the help of time. I do some wandering.

“The wandering's all right, if that is what you want to do,” said Horace. “But I wish you would cease your pestering of the natives. They look on you as a ghost. You have the neighborhood in a continual uproar.”

They like it, said Henry. Their lives are dry and dull. They enjoy being scared. They huddle in their chimney corners and tell one another tales. If it were not for me, they'd not have those tales to tell. But that's not what I am here about.

“What are you here about?”

There are those who are curious about the bubble, Henry answered. They don't know what it is, they're not sure of its exact location, but they sense it and are curious about it. They are sniffing all about.

“Not the natives, certainly. There's no way they could be aware of it. It has stood here for almost a century and a half and …”

Not the natives, Henry told him. Something else. Something from Outside.

A deep and solid silence clamped down upon the room. They all sat, glued to their chairs, staring back and forth at one another. An ancient fear came out of the darkness of the house, centering on this one well-lighted room.

Finally Horace stirred. He cleared his throat and said, “So it has finally happened. I think we knew all along that some day it would. We should have expected it. They have tracked us down.”

3

New York

A wrongness persisted, a sense of aberration, some factor not quite right, the feeling of a
corner.
But Boone could not pin it down; there seemed no way to reach it.

Corcoran had been going over the wall of the outermost room of the suite with his flashlight held only inches from the wall, bent forward in his effort to detect any sort of indication of a break in the smoothness of the wall. Now he halted and turned off the flash, swinging around to face Boone. Light from the street outside saved the room from darkness, but it was too dim for Boone to see Corcoran's face.

“It's hopeless,” Corcoran said. “There is nothing here. Yet I know that outside those windows over there, a structure of some sort is pasted to the outside of this building. I can't be wrong on that. I saw it.”

“I believe you, Jay,” said Boone. “There is a wrongness here. I can feel it.”

“You can't put a finger on it?”

“Not yet,” said Boone.

He walked to one of the windows and looked out into the street. With a start, he saw that it was deserted. No cabs slid smoothly along it, no one was on the sidewalks. Peering more closely, he saw movement in a darkened doorway of the building across the street, then another, darker bulk; and, for only a moment, a glint of light reflected off one of the bulks.

“Jay,” he asked, “when did you say they'd blow this building?”

“Sunday morning. Early Sunday morning.”

“It's Sunday morning now. There are cops across the street. I saw light flash off a badge.”

“Four or five o'clock. At first dawn. I checked other operations like this one. Always at first light, before a crowd would have a chance to gather. It's only a little after midnight. We still have several hours.”

“I'm not sure of that,” said Boone, “They could steal a march on us, do it before anyone thinks they'll do it. This is an old, socially historic place. The end of the Everest would be sure to draw a crowd. But if they blew it early, before anyone expected it …”

“They wouldn't do that,” said Corcoran, moving over to him. “They simply wouldn't …”

A dull thud hit them, buckling them at the knees, and the plaster of the suite began to crack, fissures starting at the corners of the ceiling to run obliquely across it. The floor began to sag.

Boone grasped desperately at Corcoran, throwing both arms around him tightly.

And they were in another place, in another suite, a suite where there was no plaster cracking, no slumping of the floor.

Corcoran pulled angrily away from Boone. “What the hell was that?” he shouted. “Why did you grab …?”

“The Everest is going down,” said Boone. “Look out the window. See the dust.”

“It can't be. We're still in the Everest.”

“Not any longer,” said Boone. “We're in that box you saw. We stepped around a corner.”

“What the hell!” cried Corcoran. “You mean to say …”

“It took a crisis, Jay. I should have realized that. I can do it only at the last moment, at the crisis point, when there is no hope.”

Corcoran looked at Boone accusingly. “You played a dirty trick on me. You didn't warn me.”

“I didn't know, myself. This freakness of mine is a survival trait. It doesn't work until there is a threat. That's the way it always happened. It's an instinctive response.”

“But always before you apparently were gone only for a while. You came back again. Will we be coming back …?”

Boone shook his head. “I don't think so. I only came back when it was safe. Here we'll be hanging in the air with a building falling underneath us. If we step back around the corner, we'll be falling, too. And before, I had no real place to go. Every time before, I stepped into a sort of limbo—a gray, flat world of some kind of fog, with no real features. But this time, we stepped into a real place—this box. I can't be entirely sure, but I think I'm right.”

“So this is it,” Corcoran said. “We are in Martin's hideout. What do we do now?”

“That's up to you,” Boone replied. “You wanted me to step around a corner. I did and took you with me. You are the one with all the questions. So start hunting for the answers.”

He looked around the room in which they found themselves. The furniture was strange—familiar as to form and function, but very oddly structured. Against the farther wall stood what could have been a fireplace, but which, he told himself, probably wasn't one. Above it hung a rather massive rectangular form that could have been a painting. But it was so far beyond even the wildest, most twisted works of the latest artists he had known that he fought against the thought that it could be a piece of art.