Mission (11 page)

I reached out. His fingers tightened round mine. Incredible. It's a word I've used before. I'm afraid it crops up quite a few times in this story. But like he said, there
are
no words to describe these things. This music seemed to flow through me. I didn't so much hear it as sense it. It was what the ad-men call a ‘total experience'. An exquisite, vibrant melody that I can't describe. It wasn't a symphony type-thing, or something put together on a moog synthesiser. All I know is that I didn't want it to end. My heart felt as if it was going to burst with – well, there is only one way to describe it – pure joy.

And then he let go of my hand. And the music stopped. Just like that. And there were these tears rolling down my face. So I pretended I had something in my eye, like I do in the movies. You know, like when Dustin Hoffman dies on the bus at the end of
Midnight Cowboy,
or when Bambi's mother gets shot.

‘Not bad,' I said. Stopping to blow my nose. ‘So much for progress.' I kept my eyes on my handkerchief as I rolled it up into a ball. ‘Do your people think they're going to be able to get on top of this time-warp problem you have?' Coming after the previous passage, that may sound an odd question, but I wanted to get back to a relatively simple subject before I broke down and cried for real.

‘I'm not sure,' he replied. ‘They sent a signal back up the line. We'll just have to wait and see what happens.'

My heartbeat began to slow down to something like its normal rate. ‘Those guys up there who are manning the longships in the rescue fleet. Are they all Celestials like you, Michael and Gabriel?'

‘Yes,' he said.

‘Does that mean we're unique? Or are there other places where Celestials have occupied intelligent life-forms?'

He paused before replying. ‘There are – other Mannish worlds,' he admitted.

‘In this galaxy?' I asked.

He shook his head. ‘No. You're the only people we have in this one. Earth was the prime. The seed-bed from which life was to be carried to the stars. But the programme was interrupted by the Second War of Secession.'

It was a chilling thought to realise that we were alone. All those billions of stars in the Milky Way spiralling round the incandescent core with their attendant planets and moons. Each with a “To Let” sign in the window. ‘Tell me about the Mannish,' I said. ‘Are they like us?'

The question seemed to amuse him. ‘There's a family resemblance.' He turned his attention back to the red flower.

‘Is that all?' I queried. ‘Where are they? What are they called? Do they have arms and legs and everything else in the right places? What do they do for a living?'

He raised his eyes to mine. ‘You're not ready for the rest. The time when Man is to meet his brothers is still to come.'

‘You mean in another Age?' I said, determined to get an answer to something.

‘Yes.'

‘Okay,' I said. ‘How many ages are there? If the past and the future exist now you must, at least, be able to tell me that.'

‘There are seven Ages,' he said evenly.

This is not exactly how it came out but I've written it down in the form of a list to make it easier to understand:

The Ages Past
1st Age – The Age of Light
2nd Age – The Age of Creation
3rd Age – The Age of Darkness
The Present Age
4th Age – The Age of Life
The Ages to come
5th Age – The Age of Love
6th Age – The Age of Wisdom
7th Age – The Age of Glory

Once again he declined to go into details but I did manage to elicit one additional item of information. We are, apparently, nearing the end of the Fourth Age, and I gathered that the Fifth Age is when the good times are supposed to roll. ‘Soon' was the word he used but what that means is anybody's guess. On the time scale the Empire is using that could be next Monday, or a million years from now.

I changed course yet again and tried to question him about the longships. ‘Come on,' I said. ‘I saw
Star Wars
five times. Humour me.'

He put the red flower to his nose and eyed me indulgently. ‘What can I tell you? That it is twice as big as Manhattan Island and can
carry half as many people? Or that it is commanded by a Pro-Consul of the Empire? You mustn't let your fascination with the hardware mislead you. As I told you before, that's not really what it's all about. The only thing you need to understand fully, with the totality of your being, is who and what you are and your relationship to me. Once you acquire that knowledge, all your questions will be answered.'

‘Okay,' I said. ‘I'll try and bear that in mind.'

Miriam came out on to the porch. She gave a sharp sigh as she saw me sitting there in my robe. ‘I thought you were going round the garden.'

I looked at The Man then up at her. ‘We decided to talk instead.'

‘Breakfast is ready. Are you going to eat like that or are you planning to get dressed?'

‘Give me a couple of minutes and I'll make you proud of me. I gave her a sunny smile but she didn't see it. She was looking past me at The Man. And she didn't look sixteen any more. I turned and saw why.

The mat was empty. But he'd left us the red flower. Miriam picked it up before I could get out of the chair. I suddenly felt cheated, but inside there was also this almost inconsolable sense of loss. I could see that Miriam felt it too. Perhaps even more than I did. What we both needed to do more than anything else at that moment was to put our arms around each other.

But we didn't.

I just bared my teeth and said, ‘You and your fucking breakfast…' Which shows, I guess, just how much I still had to learn.

Needless to say, that slip of the tongue meant that the rest of the weekend was shot to hell. The silence that hung over the breakfast table would have earned us a free ticket to a Trappist monastery. It was Miriam who finally broke the ice but it didn't help to raise the temperature.

‘You look as if you've got a lot to get through here. I think I'd better drive over to Scarsdale. After all, they were expecting me.'

Scarsdale was where her parents lived. ‘Sure. Good idea.' It was the wrong thing to say but part of me enjoys being mean-spirited now and then. I shrugged. ‘Listen – if that's what you want to do.'

Of course it was. She already had her coat on. Maybe I could have persuaded her to take it off but it was too much hassle. Besides, it was true. I really did need to make up for the time I'd lost on the Saturday having my mind bent by footnotes from the Two Hundred Million
Year War. If that sounds flip, it is because I was doing my damnedest to play it down. What we had become involved in was absolutely incredible. What we had seen and heard was fantastic. Unforgettable. But the look I'd seen in Miriam's eyes when he'd produced the stigmata had scared the hell out of me. I might be long on questions and short on answers but I was sure of one thing: as two of the smallest cogs in the Celestial machine, we ran the risk of being ground to pieces. The only way to stay sane, whole and healthy was by keeping a firm grip on reality. And that's what I planned to do on behalf of both of us. Even if it meant playing the bad guy.

I opened the front door but didn't offer to carry her overnight bag. We walked down to where she had parked the Pontiac. We both chewed on our teeth until we got there. She tossed the bag into the back and got in.

I leaned against the inside of the door as she went to close it. The window was up and it was obvious that she wasn't going to roll it down. ‘Listen,' I said. ‘I'm sorry I went over the top when The Man disappeared. I don't know why any of this is happening, or what it is were getting into. Maybe we ought to take some time to work out where we go from here.'

‘Take all the time you want.' She switched on the ignition.

‘What do you want me to do with all the food?' I said.

She threw me a bleak glance. ‘Ship it to the Vietnamese Boat People.'

If I could have stood the pain, I'd have left my arm in the door as she slammed it shut. Just to ruin her weekened. But as I'm a devout coward, I lifted it prudently out of the way. I stepped back and watched her do a tight-lipped three-point turn, then waved her out of my life. It wasn't the first time she hadn't waved back and I knew it would not be the last. And what made us so different? People had been arguing over The Man for centuries. I went back inside and immersed myself in the heady world of patent infringements.

Now I don't know how closely you've been following this but some of you may have detected a certain schizoid quality in my reactions to The Man and what he'd been laying on us. If you'd have been there when it was happening, I think you might have been a little confused too. I no longer doubted the validity of the experience. I was just doing my level best, as I've already said, not to go overboard. I had suspended both belief and disbelief. I was trying to cling to the middle ground, somewhere between awe and derision but the deepseated
cynicism with which I regarded most of the things of this world and certainly all of the next, kept bringing me back to earth. I wanted to hear more; to discover all he knew. But I didn't want to be drafted into this Man's army and, despite the voice inside my head which kept egging me on, I was not about to volunteer.

And there was another problem. This game of chronological hide-and-seek we'd got mixed up in threatened to cut us off from the people around us. After all, The Man could come back again. For days instead of hours. How long could we conceal this historical time-bomb that had been dropped in our laps just because some cosmic body-snatcher didn't know his quarks from his mesons?

Suppose someone started back-tracking from that empty drawer in the morgue towards us? Or if friend Fowler got visions of winning a Nobel Prize by going public with his analysis of that blood sample? And I could envisage the Monday morning small talk at the office.
Hi, Leo. Have a good weekend?
Mmm, I was up at Sleepy Hollow and a couple of friends dropped in.
Oh, yeah. Anybody special?
No. Just Miriam and a guy called Jesus.

It was a terrifying thought but as I sat there in front of those depositions, I couldn't think of one person Miriam and I could tell who wouldn't think we had flipped our lids.

I diluted my anxiety with a generous shot of bourbon, waded through the rest of my paperwork then drove back into town to avoid the inevitable Monday morning pile-up. It was around eleven as I let myself into my apartment. I checked with the answering service but there was no message from Miriam. I toyed with the idea of ringing her in case she'd tried to reach me at Sleepy Hollow, then thought better of it. If and when she wanted to get in touch, she would know where to find me. I went to bed with the Good Book and checked over a few key passages before I turned the light out. At least I knew where he'd gone. The Man had a date with the rest of the boys in Bethany. To break some bread and show Thomas his stigmata. And according to the Book, Thomas, who'd been out of town all week, was even more impressed than we were.

On the Monday morning, I spent an extra half-hour in bed and thought about the exercises I should have been doing and about phoning Miriam. By the time the cab called for me – my regular eight a.m. pick-up – I hadn't done either. But to even things up, I walked the last five blocks with a dime ready in my fingers but, as it happened, all the pay-phones I passed were in use.

I rode up in the elevator with Joe Gutzman, the senior partner and founder of the law firm. Joe was a small, dapper silver-haired man whose tan identified him as a dedicated sun-lamp worshipper. His mind was as precise as the Cartier watch on his wrist and he cost as much by the hour. He always looked as if he were about to smile but rarely did. Joe had two great sorrows in his life. The first was his son David, who had swapped a law career for an Israeli Air Force Skyhawk jet and had gone down over the Sinai desert during the Yom Kippur War with a SAM-7 missile up his tailpipe. The second was his daughter Joanna who, at the age of twenty-eight was still unmarried, in spite of the fact that she could pass for Brooke Shields on a dark street. In her case, I was the joint cause of Joe's sorrow. He had tried everything he could think of to get us together short of throwing his daughter naked into my bath. Career-wise, the advantages were obvious. Joanna was also a nice intelligent girl. It just didn't gel. The chemistry wasn't right. But I valued Joe's fatherly interest in my career and his oblique, but affectionate, regard. In my arrogance, I liked to think that it was due to my innate talent. That I had earned my place in the sun without falling all over his daughter. But another part of me knows that sometimes, when he comes into my office to talk, it's not me he sees but the shadow of his lost son.

Joe favoured me with a quizzical glance. They're something he uses a lot in cross-examination and he likes to keep in practice. ‘Have a good weekend?'

This could have been my big moment. There were eleven people in the elevator, eyes averted, all minding their own business. I could have jolted them all with the news. Embarrassed the hell out of them. Emptied the elevator at the next floor. But I didn't. ‘Not bad,' I said. ‘I've been gearing up on the Delaware case. We're in court today. Going for that injunction against Cleveland Glass.'

‘Oh, yes,' nodded Joe. ‘Are we going to win that one?'

‘Of course,' I said smoothly. ‘I'm handling it exactly as you suggested.' Rule One for rising young lawyers: if you don't marry the boss's daughter, learn how to kiss ass.

I took my share of mail from Nancy at the switchboard and dropped it on Linda's desk as I went through to my own office. Linda is my secretary. The cover was still on her typewriter. Linda is not a clock-watcher. Which means she always starts late. But she stays late too. So things even out. On top of which she can spell. What more can you expect these days?