Then his body swept all thought away and his loins shuddered and his blood hummed, and the glorious, dying explosion came, and she smiled and was excited, too, at least that's how she appeared, and he came to rest on her and in her.

They shared a silence that was marred only by the twisting of the wind as it worried the eaves of the old building.

"Have you noticed the scene on that lampshade?" she asked, her voice full of warmth ... and, he thought, a certain triumph. He had thought himself the seducer, but this Katie was a clever woman.

"This is the room where he took his mistresses. He had dozens of them, you know."

She came up onto her elbow, then kissed him on the cheek, a tentative sort of a peck. "David, you have got to be about the cutest guy who ever came here."

"I thought you really did not like me."

She kissed him again, this time on the edge of his mouth.

"Please just melt a little, okay, David?"

Then she kissed him full on the lips, pressing him down into the thick and giving pillows. He opened his mouth, letting the kiss penetrate, enjoying her sudden aggression.

They swam together across the gulf of the night. He let himself be intoxicated by her, and, drifting between sleep and wakefulness, he made love to her again. Toward dawn, he slept deeply.

It was then that the dreams came, his mind flowing so seamlessly into its own reality that he had essentially no idea that he was, in fact, dreaming.

The first one involved the opening of the bedroom door. Although, later, he understood that he must have been asleep, he seemed to hear a click, and to sit up and look toward the door. However, n.o.body came in. Instead, a shadow appeared a few feet in front of it, a human shadow. Or no, it wasn't a shadow, it was more solid than that. He watched it move forward, and thought that it was something that was coated in a darkness deeper than any normal darkness, and felt emanating from it what he could only describe as a wave of hate. His first impulse was to push away from it, and then next thing he knew, Katie was shaking him.

He looked up into her face, dark with night shadows, alive with light from the flickering sky.

"You were having a nightmare," she said. "You were really going strong."

"I saw somebody in here."

"What? Paranoid about a place like this? What could could be the matter with my beautiful man?" be the matter with my beautiful man?"

They laughed together, but he felt little conviction. That had not been a nightmare, it had been a whole level more intense than that. It had been a cla.s.sic pavor nocturnus, a parasomnia disorder. Cla.s.sically, also, he had felt as if he was still awake, when actually he had been deep in slow wave sleep.

"G.o.d, what if I'm hypoglycemic? That's all I need."

"You want a test? I can look for one in supply."

"Nah, it's not that. It's just stress."

"You're the doctor." She slid close to him, and they kissed, and he felt that she could not only inspire him s.e.xually, she could be warm and comfortable in the night, and he began to drift off again.

He did not drift off, though. Instead, when he heard her breath change to a sleep rhythm, he found himself growing uneasy. He was lying with his back to the room, and he began to get the impression that this was a mistake, because the figure-or was the word "phantom"?-was still there.

Finally, he turned over and looked out into the room. The door was securely locked and chained, and there was no other way to get in here. Or was there? In an old place like this, especially a room where mistresses had been entertained, there might be hidden access.

Then, without seeing anything specific, he knew that the presence was approaching the bed. Despite the fact that his scientific mind could not for an instant believe such a thing-knew it to be impossible-it appeared that a vividly alive but invisible presence was now standing right beside the bed.

He knew that this was a return of the pavor nocturnus, an effect that was common with this type of sleep disturbance, but that did not change what he was feeling, and now he noticed a very strange sensation, a vibrating coldness that moved across the skin of his chest. He looked down at his nakedness, and saw a flurry of goose b.u.mps rise where it was touching him.

There was somebody there, he knew it. But he couldn't see see them. them.

Why not?

This was some sort of schizophrenic hallucination, it had to be. But he didn't possess any genes for schizophrenia, and none of the single nucleotide polymorphism a.s.sociated with delusions.

So, was there somebody actually in here?

He raised himself up on his elbow. Beside him, Katie moaned softly.

He fumbled for the lamp, finally turning it on-and thought he saw the door slip closed, and jumped up and ran to it and threw it open.

The hallway was empty.

A vivid dream, then.

The next thing he knew, he was standing at the window, the one that looked out over the parking area and the trees. Overhead, an enormous object, brilliant with lights, moved majestically past. It was no plane, this thing, and it was absolutely ma.s.sive. Gigantic. And behind it was another, and above them two more, and then he raised his eyes and an awe of surpa.s.sing power captured him, for he saw hundreds and thousands of these gigantic things, stretching off into the sky until the sky itself was swallowed in auroral discharges.

Then he was inside one of these things, surrounded by columns of light that he somehow knew were living beings, ascended to great heights of the heart, and filled with love so intense that it seemed to thrust him back into early childhood, and he saw his mother and father on the beach at Cape May, Dad calling out, Mother lying with cuc.u.mber slices on her eyes, Jack the terrier barking, a tiny girl singing general praises of the day.

They were angels, a fact which he seemed instinctively to know, and he felt absolutely naked in their light. They were so deeply right and so deeply true that he cried out, or imagined that he did, for they also radiated a sense of joy and purity that was without the slightest question the most glorious, the most innocent, and the yet the most awesome emotion he had ever known.

He felt also, though, a certain sadness and he lunged at it in his soul and demanded that it leave him but it did not leave him, far from it, for the next thing he knew he was in darkness absolute, crushed by waves of sick terror. The most glorious of all dreams had turned in an instant into the black and formless mother of all nightmares.

He was moving past stone, down some sort of deep fissure. There came a sensation of heat. Soon, the rock around them was glowing and the heat had become a horrible pain, more like being sanded than burned, but it was hideous. Again and again he threw himself against the walls, back and forth, back and forth, but there was no escape.

Objectively, he knew how serious a seamless, absolute break with reality like this was. Stress induced, yes, so vivid it was the next thing to psychosis.

He went deeper, and as he did the heat rose and he writhed and fought, hammering his fists and kicking, reduced to the frenzy of a panicked child.

Cries came around him, and he could see forms embedded in the walls now, bright, blazing human shapes, and they were all crying out their innocence, but they were not innocent, he could hear it in their tone, a despairing cacophony that bore within it the discordant note of the lie.

A new pain joined the fire, a very definite pain in his right wrist.

And there was somebody yelling, and again and again he was hammering his wrist against the edge of the bedside table, and the exquisite old lamp was bouncing.

Gasping, he wallowed in the sheets, then held his wrist. Jesus G.o.d in heaven, had he broken it? No, just the skin, but he had hammered the devil out of it.

"What happened ..."

The room was normal, everything quiet. His clock said six forty-five. "Katie?"

His bed was empty. She was gone, and he had to ask himself if she had ever been there.

He knew this imagery, of course. The Christian heaven and h.e.l.l. So he'd dreamed it, that's all that had happened, and no matter how vivid, it had been, in the end, just a dream. A symptom of stress, perhaps, but not the psychotic break he had feared.

A sudden voice from the little sitting room beside his bedroom startled him. Male, but who was it? n.o.body on staff sounded like that. He threw open the door.

"Excuse me-"

He recognized the voice of The Today Show The Today Show's Craig Harding. They were in the window at Rockefeller Center, and people were looking in on them. So the solar storm, also, must have pa.s.sed and the satellites had switched on again, and the world had resumed. As he dressed, he listened hungrily to the news, which was basically about all the disruptions. But they were disruptions, not the end of the world.

He allowed himself to hope that Mrs. Denman's white paper had been wrong.

In his luxurious marble shower, he imagined that the foaming body shampoo was washing off the madness of the night. For sure. If the solar storm was gone, life would return to normal very quickly now.

By the time he was striding down to the staff dining room for breakfast, he had put his dream aside.

As he descended the stairs, Glen MacNamara stood waiting for him.

"We have a patient missing."

He absorbed this.

"Sam Taylor lost Mack."

"When?"

He paused. "Yesterday afternoon."

"What? Why wasn't I informed, Glen?" Why wasn't I informed, Glen?"

"n.o.body was informed. Sam was knocked out."

"But Mack's on lockdown! Surely the staff noticed this when he didn't turn up at lights out."

"Sam asked for time while he looked for him."

"All night?"

"He let me know about ten."

"Glen, it's seven o'clock in the morning and the director of this inst.i.tution is just finding this out?"

"Doctor, I didn't see the need to wake you up. What could you do? This is my issue."

David was about to really get into Glen MacNamara, but the truth was that he was right. He couldn't have done anything to help.

"Okay," he said finally. "Could Mack pose a danger to us?"

"It would be d.a.m.n surprising if we ever saw or heard anything about him again. If you want me to guess, I'd say he won't last a week out there. It's h.e.l.l, Doc. I'm telling you, from the smoke columns I see and all the infrastructure problems, folks are tearing each other apart." He gestured toward the dining room. "Toast, bacon, coffee, and Gatorade. In here, everybody's outraged. Out there, it would be a feast."

They went in together. As he crossed to the buffet, Katie came close to him, discreetly touching his hand.

"At least that sc.u.mbag is gone," she said quietly. "n.o.body cared for him." She brightened. "And anyway, the cable's back and the sun looks better, and I've got a feeling we're getting past this thing."

Mrs. Denman's paper had warned that the solar system was headed much deeper into the supernova's debris field. Much deeper.

The truth insinuated itself into his mind. They had not come to the edge of the storm at all.

This was the eye.

12.

GOLIATH.

Caroline woke up on her first morning in the general patient population in a state of intense unease. She didn't actually wake up, because she hadn't slept. She'd lain there with her eyes closed, worrying, primarily about David. She had a letter for him written by Herbert Acton, but it was not to be handed to him until he remembered his past, and to her that meant remembering their time together, their shared innocent life.

Herbert Acton had warned about this period right at the omega point, that it was too unsure for him to see into it clearly, so his instructions about these final days were vague.

Beyond the borders of history, which is where mankind was now, nothing was certain, and as the evil came to understand their fate, their efforts to escape it were going to make them incredibly dangerous. Many of them would actually want all of mankind to be destroyed, if they were destroyed.

David had remembered a lot, she could sense that. But if he did not remember her, he was not on mission, and time had run out.

Intending to confront him late last night, she had gone to his bedroom. She had hoped to feed him some of the potent white powder gold they had created in the arc furnace, and see if that helped.

Oddly, the door had been unlocked. When she slipped inside, she had discovered why: Katrina Starnes had come in before her, and was sharing his bed. Carelessly-or perhaps out of an unconscious desire to broadcast her conquest-she had failed to pull the door closed.

She had never been warned about him falling in love with anybody else, and she was appalled and deeply saddened.

She had stood there, her face flaming with embarra.s.sment, her heart wretched, her mind at a loss as to what to do now. They were too involved with each other to notice her, and she had quietly retreated.

When she'd returned to her room, all she could do was cry into her pillow.

The first thing she'd done waking up this morning was to arrange an appointment with him. "We'll need to squeeze you in," Katie had said in concealing, velvet tones, "but I think I can get you fifteen minutes."

Katie was no fool. She sensed a rival, and no way was Caroline getting any more of his time than that.

Well, Katie was going to be hurt and there was nothing Caroline could do about it. She'd been hurt herself last night, hurt terribly, watching them in their pleasure.

She had been a.s.sured by her father that David would remember everything the moment he laid eyes on her. If there were any gaps, she could show him his trigger, which was an image of Quetzalcoatl.

Neither thing had worked, and she was no longer able to contact her father for further advice, not unless the phones returned, which they had not. So she waited now, sitting with her hands folded, watching Katrina bring David his morning coffee.

As Katie crossed the room, her body spoke to Caroline of its conquest. And by the way she laid the cup near his hand, with a too-furtive glance toward his lower extremities, she knew that she was remembering him in his pa.s.sion.

She fought back her anger and jealousy, but Katie sensed her feelings and her eyes darted at her, and there was between them a moment of daggers. Then Katie went flouncing out, her cheeks brushed with rose ... and Caroline was horrified to glimpse, just above the edge of the young woman's neckline, a telltale shadowy darkness from a mark concealed below.

Katie was judged! Caroline felt actually queasy-physically ill. This was the first person she'd seen with a mark, but there were going to be a lot of them, she knew that.

At the omega point, bodies ceased to conceal souls, and some became like light and others like darkness and others-workers like her and the rest of the cla.s.s-shouldered the burden of life and kept on.

It was hard to be so evil that there could be no redemption, so what terrible things had Katie done? She looked like a sweet young nurse, the last person you'd expect to see in such a situation.