"Now, wait."

"I've been waiting all day. And hearing!" She turned on David. "You sob a lot, a.s.shole. Sob with pleasure. You sound like a complete jerk when you're f.u.c.king, did you know that? And you're even worse than Marian says. You're not only a self-centered piece of s.h.i.t, you're an incompetent doctor. If we could get out of here, or we could get the G.o.dd.a.m.n phone working, your license would be history. And it will be. Because when this is over, you're going down, Doc." Now the jewel-hard eyes returned to Caroline. "Like his d.i.c.k? Tell him to wash it next time, between f.u.c.k toys." Her voice dropped low now. "Guys like him-human garbage-they end up in pieces. Be warned." She strode out. "There's a list on your desk, Doctor," she said over her shoulder. "The patients you missed, the problems you ignored."

Silence followed. Hardly above a whisper, he said, "It's dark. We've been here all day."

"An uncontrolled move through time."

"I have a problem with her now, Caroline. Big problem."

"I have to go work on my painting."

"I know."

Their eyes met, and their hearts danced, but it was a slow dance, full of sorrow and full of fear.

She wanted to stay with him but she could not stay with him, there wasn't time. She left, moving quickly down the halls, intent on her task.

Neither of them was aware of the other eyes that watched them via the surveillance system, Katrina's eyes, or the true intensity, the towering fury, of the hate that was there.

DAVID FORD'S JOURNAL: FIVE I've always moved too fast with women, and now I've got two of them on my case. It's happened before and I've always been ashamed, and I feel that now.

Caroline Light wants my love but I just do not feel anything there. Katie wants it and, again, I just want the comfort of her body.

Both women are furious at me, of course, but I'm dealing now with a new issue, and they're going to have to wait their turn. To be frank, I believe that I know what Herbert Acton did to look into the future.

Educated as I am in modern science, I have always viewed alchemy as the first primitive fumbling of what became chemistry. However, what I now suspect paints a different picture. Alchemy, as we have known it through history, is the degenerated remnant of a chemistry far more advanced than what we have now.

The shibboleth has always been that the "philosopher's stone" is supposedly capable of turning something like lead or iron into gold. In the Middle Ages, mountebanks went about in Europe using sleight of hand to convince the wealthy that they could do this, with the intention of fleecing them.

There is a truth behind it, though, and it is the explanation, I am convinced, for Herbert Acton's abilities. And, in fact, as I write this, I feel a sort of deja vu again, as if the words are a kind of echo. I would surmise that this is information from our cla.s.s, being drawn through the amnesia.

What this ancient science concerned, I believe, were manipulations that are presently far beyond our ability. It was able to see into the future, and, I think, holds the promise of actually enabling physical movement through time-an orderly, organized version of what happened to that dire wolf in Utah.

I have made a most interesting discovery about this room. It contains a time machine-not one that can enable physical time travel, but one that can facilitate the sort of seeing that Herbert Acton was so expert at. I think of it as a time telescope, and it stands on this desk, the Tiffany masterwork that is far more than a desk lamp.

It was the alchemical colors that revealed the lamp's true purpose to me. The master who created them understood the uses of light frequencies, and when I close my eyes and let the colors wash across my forehead, I am able to see brilliant images of the future. In other words, the legend of the crystal ball or the magic lantern is about lamps like this.

Accelerating vision into the future-perhaps bodies, too-need have nothing to do with arcane contraptions like supercolliders. It has to do with changing the temporal frequency of the body, and that can be done with light.

You look into a color of the type produced by this lamp until, when you close your eyes, it fills your head-and then, after a few moments, you will see what for me are flickering, indistinct visions, but which for a master like Herbert Acton must have been exquisitely detailed images.

Even with my limited skills, though, I have seen the future, and, frankly, I am terrified. Not because of what is there, but rather what is not.

In my mind's eye, for example, I can see this room as it will be later tonight, empty, the darkness flickering from the auroras.

Then something else happens, involving strange light rising in the east-a piercing violet object in the sky. And that light-the color is like that of the Great Elixir, a light frequency of great power, both creative and destructive.

No sooner does this light wash in through the windows than all light disappears. It's not night, it's another kind of dark entirely. When I tried to see into it, it almost seemed to want to suck me in, as if it was in some way hungry. I think that I was seeing the absence of reality itself, the absolute emptiness that surrounds the universe, that is, what exists before light has come and after it has faded, beyond the limits of time.

In other words, we are almost at the end of time, probably just days away, or even hours.

And yet, it's not the entire and complete end, because something else is there, a glimmer in the black ocean.

I think this is the beginning of new life on earth, thousands of years from now.

And getting there is our goal, and it is why Caroline refers to her painting as a navigation tool. As she paints, she is looking in her mind's eye at a specific spot on the Earth of the future, the place she briefly took me to. Once the painting is finished, everybody who sees it, and is properly prepared-no doubt by consuming the substance they're manufacturing in the arc furnace-will supposedly be able to navigate to the point in time it depicts.

I have also seen our world as it is right now, and what I have seen has almost made me sweat blood, because h.e.l.l is unfolding here, and it is far, far worse than I imagined. Even as desperate as we are here at the clinic, compared to what's going on outside, we are a splendid palace shining in the middle of a wasteland.

For example, the farm belt all over the world is a gigantic desert of brown, ruined crops. I sailed from Iowa to Texas on the lamp's magical wings, and saw nothing but stubble and burning cities and long lines of dead cars on the roads, and everywhere bloated, dead cattle, and people in their millions cutting and eating the carrion meat.

Also, I saw ever more of the huge objects that I glimpsed out my window the other night, drifting over the face of the land, lingering over cities, marching in enormous platoons across the suffering world. I saw them drawing people into themselves in vast numbers, but I could not see what was happening to them. I do remember, though, that it was beautiful. Were these the biblical elect, then, those who have finished with earthly life, being raised up? Or was it something else, the harvest of mankind, perhaps, as slaves or as a DNA pool?

I could see what was happening, but there was n.o.body to tell me why.

I have also seen people cutting themselves to the bone-literally butchering themselves-to get rid of the strange quasi-physical shadows like the ones on Katie's neck and probably on Tom Dryden. I fear that I know why, and I fear for them both. Katie seems a good person and Tom is innocuous, but we do hide our darkness, we humans.

Taken together-the vision of the lake of fire from Revelation, and these two encounters with those huge objects, I think that what I am seeing is the beginning of a legendary event, the actual, physical judgment of man.

At the thought, my guts congeal, my heart overspeeds. This whole planet is on death row, and I feel it not only as a member of human society and a man responsible for a lot of lives, I feel it personally. I am the one whose energy will enable us to take our first step across time. That's why I am identified with Quetzalcoatl who was, among many other things, the G.o.d of new beginnings.

My impulse is to throw myself into my work, and I have a lot of work to do. My primary immediate responsibility is clear: be sure this place is not destroyed before we've completed what we've been put here to do.

I wish that I could say that I was confident, but I am not confident at all. We know literally not a thing about whoever killed Mrs. Denman, and until we do know that, everybody here is in danger, and so is our mission.

Undoubtedly, somebody has at least an inkling of what we are going to attempt, and wants to take our knowledge and use it in our stead.

I look to Mr. Acton's final letter to me. It warns David that Goliath is coming-in fact, that Goliath is here now. But who is Goliath, a person, a storm, some new fire about to be spit from the sun?

No doubt Goliath is many things, but one of them must be that violet light-the highest color of alchemical growth and also the color of ultimate death. The light is an incredible poison, and it's coming. But it isn't the only aspect of the giant. Goliath has servants.

As I am apparently David to this Goliath, it's worth asking just how I sling my stone into his forehead. The light must come from the supernova that was mentioned in the doc.u.ment Mrs. Denman gave me to read. Maybe we're getting close enough to it to see its core as a distinct stellar object.

A supernova's core emanates sterilizing sheets of gamma rays.

As I sit here, night is coming on, the worst time.

I go to one of my majestic windows, to the glowing, bizarre darkness. Frankly, when I looked into the future, I was surprised that I did not see that the sun had gone supernova. Such things happen all the time, with one stellar explosion blasting nearby stars with so much energy that they explode, too.

I cannot see around to the east very well, but it looks as if there is a violet-purple tint off beyond the limits of my vision.

This distant star-previously unknown to science-is, in reality, what controls life on earth. I know from modern paleoastronomy that light of this monster first washed the earth forty thousand years ago, leaving a huge swath of the planet, from Australia through southern and central Africa, empty of large, plains-dwelling animals. They died because they could not hide from the gamma rays. It came again during the end of the last Ice Age, and once again, the plains-dwelling animals, the mammoths, the mastodons, and so many others, were decimated.

So violet is the highest, and therefore also the most dangerous light, and as I sit here looking into my lamp, I ask for direction, but get only silence in reply, and darkness in my mind's eye.

Purple is the light of evolution. But evolution also means death. Ask the dinosaurs-and ask, also, mankind. Are we destined to follow them into final species death?

We have reached the end of the game. The rules are cast aside, but still we play on, deep into the night.

And I am left with the question, What is my stone, what is my sling? How do I slay Goliath?

13.

THE TRACK OF THE CAT.

Mack had moved swiftly through the countryside, but thought better of entering Raleigh during the day. He needed to work fast, but he also had to stay alive, and that was going to take some care. For all of his skills, anyone with a good rifle and a good eye would be a danger to him. He wished that he could have brought the young guard's rifle with him, but if it had been gone when he woke up, even though he would have had no memory of what had happened, he'd have known that something was wrong and raised the alarm.

Hiding in a barn, Mack hadn't rested, he hadn't been able to. When so many people were waiting on you and things were deteriorating this fast, the tension was appalling.

After the sun had at last set, he climbed down from the hayloft and surveyed the farm. It was as quiet as it had been when he'd come here. He needed food and, above all, water, so he decided to take a chance on the house.

He'd had a great deal of field training, so he knew how unsafe it was to expose yourself to dark windows, but it couldn't be helped.

It was pointless to conceal himself, so he just strode forward.

When he returned to the Acton Clinic, all exhausted and apologetic, he would use the same technique. He would let them lock him in again. The window was hopeless, but there was an escape route through the air-conditioning ducts in his room, and one of his jobs in Raleigh was to go to the county building department and look at the plans of the patient wing. He had not killed yet, but when he got back there, he was going to do a good deal of that, and a good deal of information extraction.

By the time he reached the house, he knew that it was empty.

The fridge was warm, but there was a half-finished bottle of c.o.ke inside, flat and hot. He drank it all. The water taps didn't even drip when he turned on the faucets, so he got a pitcher out of the cabinet and banged through the house to the nearest bathroom. There was water in the toilet tank, which he pitchered out and drank. Down the hall, he saw a woman's legs in the doorway of a bedroom. The rest of her was sprawled out of sight.

He left the house and found a pickup in the garage but its electronics were fried so he headed off down the road on foot. With the setting of the sun, the sky had turned an odd pinkish-purple color, something that was new. Pinkish purple, with long, shimmering sheets of green auroras cutting through it. Beautiful, indeed, and so could death be beautiful.

By the time he reached the outskirts of town it was full night, and now it could be seen that the odd color of the sky was centered on a faint thickening brightness low on the northeastern horizon. What was it? He knew little about astronomy, but it had the look of something that the world would come to wish had not appeared.

Most of the houses he pa.s.sed were dark, but some contained faint, flickering glows of candlelight, and one or two the brighter light of oil lamps. He had no real plan, except to see what he could do to stir these people up against the clinic. They hated it, of course, but they needed leadership to go up there and cause mayhem.

As he drew closer to the town center, he was stopped by something he had not seen in many years, not since his days in Mexico, when drug cartels sometimes did it to terrify locals into serving them.

On a street lamp about halfway into the town, a man had been hung ... and, he noted, hung badly. The body was covered with blood from the neck, because they'd hauled him up without tying his hands, leaving him to struggle with the knot while he choked. Ugly way to do it, probably because they were clueless about the process. Under the body, dogs snarled at one another as they licked the blood in the street.

A number of storefronts were burned out, and he could smell death in the air. More dogs could be heard in the darkness, and as he pa.s.sed the ones beneath the hanged man, some of them gave him a predatory appraisal. Once a dog has tasted blood, it is dangerous, always. Not wanting to have to fight off the whole pack, he gave them a wide berth, and did not meet their eyes.

You could give a dog a heart attack by shattering its muzzle with the right kind of blow, but six or seven dogs would keep you d.a.m.n busy, and you would absorb damage.

Ahead, there was a restaurant showing a flicker of candles in the front window. Inside, he could see the shadows of many people. Good, this was what he'd been looking for. Desperate people band together, at least when they still believe that they might have some way to save themselves. Only later, when they understand the hopelessness of their situation, do they turn on one another. In another couple of days that would happen here. In fact, he was probably lucky that it hadn't already happened.

He went to the door and paused, evaluating the crowd. There were men, women, and children present, so this was probably some kind of survivorship gathering. Safe enough.

He stepped in. Voices rumbled around him, angry and desperate ones, and the children were crying, many of them. A few were playing.

"We're real hungry, John," a male voice said. "You gotta find a way."

"We need to do some urban foraging," the man in front, probably the mayor, said.

"We've scoured the town, G.o.dd.a.m.n it," somebody shouted. Rage. Terror. They were just about to turn on one another.

Mack took a breath and raised his voice. "Excuse me."

They froze like frightened mice, then turned all at once. Suspicion in the faces. Women swept their children behind them. He was acutely aware of the fact that the room was full of guns.

He held up his hands. "Hey, I'm unarmed." He looked from face to face, smiling just enough but not too much. His next words were crucial, and he had thought about them carefully.

"I just escaped from the Acton Clinic."

An immediate murmur, more suspicion in the faces. All expected. He was playing them.

"I'm not a crazy, okay!"

They quieted down a little.

"Let him talk," the man at the front of the room said. He was pudgy, but his eyes were hollow. That was one famished fat man up there. He must be almost crazy with hunger, probably dropping ten pounds a day.

"I'm an a.s.sistant chef."

A guy with a deer rifle said, "What do you mean, you escaped? Why does an a.s.sistant chef need to escape?"

"That G.o.dd.a.m.n place is a palace! There's tons of food, tons tons of it. They've got enough to feed their d.a.m.n psychos for a year. It's enough to get this whole town through this thing-I mean, if there's another side to it, G.o.d willing." Then he stopped. Time to let it sink in. Time to let them chew. of it. They've got enough to feed their d.a.m.n psychos for a year. It's enough to get this whole town through this thing-I mean, if there's another side to it, G.o.d willing." Then he stopped. Time to let it sink in. Time to let them chew.

"How much food exactly?" a woman asked.

"Try a hundred dressed hogs, forty beeves, maybe a quarter ton of prepared meats, not to mention a whole huge bas.e.m.e.nt storage area full of canned goods for long-term use. That's a d.a.m.n Versailles palace up there on that hill, and they have no right to keep all that food just for a bunch of loonies. No right, not when good, normal people who are the backbone of the country need it! That's why I escaped. I want to help people who need help ... folks who're healthy and normal." He laughed, made it bitter. "That palace up there is full of people who this world doesn't even need. But it needs you." He pointed to a little girl peeking out from behind her mother's dress. "It needs her."

"They got more guns than we have, man."

General a.s.sent.

"Yeah, I know. You've gone up there and taken a few shots, I know that, too."

"I did that," the same voice said. He stepped out of the crowd. He was a young guy, about thirty. He had a preteen boy in tow who looked as tough as he did. "I'm two tours in 'Stan. I was on rotation stateside when this thing started. And if we try on the Acton Clinic, I can tell you as a soldier that a lot of us are gonna get wasted."

Mack let silence follow that statement. They needed to taste their fear, then be pulled out of it. "How long has it been since you folks got anything to eat?"

People looked around at each other. "Three days," the man in the front said.

"Okay, I had three squares before I came out. I think it was the steak that made me make my move, eating it, knowing that at least some decent, normal folk down here could be eating what the crazies were gobbling. And the patients get a lot better than we do. It's like a d.a.m.n cruise ship up there."

Another voice rose, this a kid of about fifteen. "Mister, they signal. They use SSB code bursts. I pick them up on my scanner. So they could signal for help."