"I've taken it."

"How much have you taken?" Aaron asked.

"How much have you taken, Aaron? Any of you? I know the answer and so do you. Very d.a.m.n little, just like me. So what does that tell you? It doesn't work for me It doesn't work for me."

Glen asked, "Will you let Bev inject you?"

There was a stirring in the room.

"Look, I understand everything." He gestured toward the lamp. "I even understand how Herbert Acton saw into time. But I don't understand how this is going to help. Why would my brain require a megadose?"

"David," Caroline said, "once you wake up, you'll thank us."

"For injecting me with a heavy metal? I don't think so."

Glen said, "It isn't a heavy metal anymore."

"It's gold, for G.o.d's sake. If you think that's not a heavy metal, you missed high school science." He was thinking about the Beretta he'd been issued. If he could get to his desk, he could regain control of this situation.

Bev attempted to get behind him, but he turned as she did. "You can't put gold in somebody's veins."

"You can."

"What you made in that furnace is amateur chemistry. You can't inject somebody with amateur chemistry."

"It isn't amateur," Caroline said, "and it isn't chemistry." She gestured toward the glyphs above the door. "It induces the union of those two principles and results in an extension of consciousness beyond s.p.a.ce and time."

"Look, I'm a doctor and I can only say that ingesting a heavy metal is bad, but taking one in an injection is going to be catastrophic."

"You're in amnesia-"

"I've remembered everything, Caroline! The cla.s.s, all of it. So I don't need this-this attack. I do not need it." Again he looked toward the desk. The gun was in there.

"David, your amnesia is emotional. What the gold will do is open a door in you that's locked tight right now. The door to the heart."

"The heart has no place in this."

"David, the heart is everything! Without love to sustain us, we cannot make the journey."

"Look, folks, you need to face something, all of you. We aren't going to be making any journeys through time. Herbert Acton was incredibly accomplished, but he was also deluded. You can see into time. But actual, physical movement? Forget it."

He saw Glen's eyes flicker toward Sam, who came forward and was suddenly behind him with Beverly. Once again, David started to turn toward them, but this expert restrained him by immobilizing his arms just above the elbows.

Sam said, "Sorry, boss."

Glen said, "Either this happens with a struggle or without a struggle, it's your choice."

Part of him considered the provable skills of Herbert Acton and part of him the arrogance of these people-but then Bev removed the sheath from the needle and all of him felt anger.

"How dare you," he shouted, and he kicked at them.

"Hold him," Caroline said. "We need the neck!"

"Jesus G.o.d, NO!" But they swarmed him and immobilized him with their bodies. "Don't do this, this is insane!"

They forced him to the floor, they held his head so that he could not move it. He felt Bev swabbing the left side of his neck just above the carotid.

"Okay," she said, "you'll feel this one, hon."

The needle was fire and he bellowed; he twisted and writhed and tried to move his head enough to dislodge it but he could not dislodge it, and he felt the substance running like lava through the vein.

Then it hit his brain in an explosion of darting sparks, each of which seemed filled with information, and in the next instant he saw beyond words, beyond thought, beyond language itself, into the pure, wordless mathematics of hypers.p.a.ce.

Which he understood-and with it, also understood more of himself than ever before, that they were, in one sense, right about him, that he contained an enormous past stretching across eons among the living and eons among the dead. He saw, also, that a living man and a dead man are simply two aspects of one creature. The living form moves through life in an active state; a dead man is the same creature in its contemplative form, looking at what has been done, and in so doing seeing the truth of the self.

There came next a burst of pure physicality-bodily sensation in its purest form, the agony of pleasure and the agony of pain mixed together.

"Oh, G.o.d, G.o.d, I'm ... I think I'm having a stroke. You're giving me a stroke!"

"No," Caroline said. Her hand on his forehead was cool and firm, and the tears in her eyes gleamed.

Then something happened that he had not expected and could not expect. The rich, vivid sensation of his body seemed to concentrate until it was a single, burning point-and then his head, for want of a better word to explain total annihilation, exploded.

He had no eyes to see with, no ears to hear with, no sensation of the world around him.

He thought, They killed me. They're all crazy and they killed me. This was a blood sacrifice. They killed me. They're all crazy and they killed me. This was a blood sacrifice.

But the black that had enveloped him was not like the abyss he had glimpsed earlier. This darkness was vividly alive, and also changing, and it changed by degrees through all the colors that were on the Tiffany lamp, until it was a radiance, and suddenly he was no longer in a void, but back in his office.

He saw also within him another being who was not him but who occupied a place in hypers.p.a.ce that was at once everywhere and was deeply, profoundly specific. He saw that this being, who had been called Osiris, who had been called Christ, who had been called Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha, who had been called so many different names, was right here, right now, and he understood why the preflood ritual that was now known as communion, the sharing of the flesh, had been preserved, because to accept Him into your body was to accept Him into your soul.

He was looking up into a face. He reached up, and Caroline smiled, and kissed the tips of his fingers.

Around him was his cla.s.s, his deep friends, his companions in the Great Work.

"I remember," he said, his voice faint. He tried again, attempting to speak more strongly. "I remember. I remember how I love you."

At first, he'd been afraid and embarra.s.sed.

Dad had driven him into a world of Lamborghinis and Bentleys in an '88 Chevy Caprice. He had not understood then what he understood now, that he had been chosen not because his grandfather had happened to own a certain piece of land, but because he was, himself, exactly right for the role he was to perform.

"Mr. Acton didn't only see the future," he said, his voice faint. "We weren't chosen because of our lives, but because of our past lives. Nothing was an accident."

He had been a general, an admiral, he had led men and nations, and was an ancient being full of wisdom, and he could could perform the role being offered to him. In fact, he was the only one who could do it, the good leader. perform the role being offered to him. In fact, he was the only one who could do it, the good leader.

"I saw you," he said to Caroline, "you ..." She'd been perhaps ten, he twelve, but she had shone like a child made of sunlight.

He remembered sitting side by side with her under the apple tree-for there was such a tree in the garden of every house of the Acton Group, including his own. The color of the apple blossom, he knew now, was a memory trigger. When that red blush came to the sky, it would be time.

The color of the new star was no longer frightening to him, for it was the color of the highest energy, and the auroras combined with it to make the sky the subtle pink of apple blossom.

He looked at Caroline again, and, softly, secretly, his heart opened-and he saw at once how necessary this had been. Without love, there was no reason to continue the species at all, and there was a great plan and there were rules, and without love they could not fly through time.

"I remember my promise to you, Caroline."

She met his eyes with the warmest gaze he could ever remember, and at once for him everything changed. They had held innocent hands as kids, but there had been a deeper bond, the entwining love of souls that has carried humanity across so many perils and divides.

They came together and he enfolded her in his arms, and it felt good, it felt so very, very good.

An instant later, he broke away. In his new role, he had new responsibilities.

"The painting," he said. "Who's guarding it?"

Glen and Sam looked at each other.

"n.o.body? Is it n.o.body n.o.body?"

"David, we didn't think that-"

He didn't listen to the rest, he didn't need to. He was already running.

Please, G.o.d, that he not be too late.

17.

THE TOWNSPEOPLE.

"For G.o.d's sake, Glen, she's been dismembered! My dear G.o.d!" David felt as if he was watching himself from a distance as he stared down at the body of Marian Hunt. He knew that he was experiencing stress-induced dissociation, a symptom of shock. Claire Michaels, who had found her, sat slumped in a chair, her face in her hands.

If they had not needed to take the time to inject him, perhaps this wouldn't have happened.

Katrina said in a dull voice, "We need a blanket, David."

"Yes, of course. We need, uh, a body bag-Glen?"

"I'll get a couple of men to pull her out of here and clean up the blood. But we've got no communications, so this all has to be done with runners and my first priority is to locate and secure the person who did this, and I have to tell you that we've got perimeter issues. We had an incursion attempt earlier today, and there was one intruder injured."

"Where is he? Is he being treated?"

"They carried him off. I'm hopeful that it taught them a lesson." But then he stopped, listened.

David heard it, too, a chugging noise.

"What is it?"

Glen had gone pale.

"Automatic weapons fire," he said. "South wall."

"Ours?"

"That's an older-model machine gun, probably a Browning. The townies are back and my guess is that somebody's opened that back gate for them again."

There followed a sharp, rushing whisper.

"That's us. HK G40."

Then three cracking booms, sounding like a small cannon.

"Forty-five automatic. Civilian again. I need to get down there."

Cries echoed through the building. More chugging followed, and upstairs, gla.s.s breaking, followed by horrific screams.

"Somebody took a hit through the window," Glen said. The initial fear in his voice had been suppressed. In its place now was professional calm.

"We need to get everybody to safety," David said. "We need to bring the whole security team inside the building."

"David, begging to differ, you are telling us to begin our defense by retreating to our place of last refuge."

For a heartbreaking instant, David could see the boy in the man, the bright hope that had been there when they had been in cla.s.s together. Glen was tired now, very tired. David's heart went out to his friend.

Feet pounded on the stairs and a patient appeared, Tom Dryden. He was naked, his face tight, a grin that spoke agony. Without a word, he ran past them and into the recreation area. An instant later there was a wet thud, and he was slamming himself against the windows the same way Linda had slammed herself against the door. All across his back there was an area so black that it looked more like a great hole in him than any sort of sore.

Shouting that the great ships were gone, David ran to help him.

But he kept on, just as Linda had, smashing himself to pieces against the thick, relentlessly resistant gla.s.s.

"Stop! Take it easy!" David got to the door and threw it open. "Here, you can go!"

Still, Tom hurled himself against the window, which, David saw, was starting to develop long, ominous cracks. He really did not need a point of easy access, not with a firefight going on a few hundred yards away.

"You can go, Tom," he shouted. But Tom didn't want to leave by the door, or at all. He wanted to break himself against the window and the wall.

"Mr. Dryden," a female voice called, sharp and high. It was Katie.

"Don't get near him."

"He's like me."

"What do you mean, Katie?"

Her eyes glittered like dark jewels, and he could see defiance in them. She held up her hair, and on her neck, spreading up from her back, was a gleaming spot of deepest blackness.