The eye returned to survey the bleachers, then gave way for the mouth.
“Yup, 1 think I see some of my friends from Alpha Centauri.”
A group of pilgrims cheered.
“And another group from Draconis—that must have been a long trip!”
“Sure was, Lex,” one of them shouted, “but it was worth it!”
Lex chuckled and the ground shook.
“Hope you Rooliks brought enough film.”
Everybody laughed. Roolik cameras had been clicking nonstop since the hole opened.
“Now, which one of my pilgrims would like a gift?”
The audience rose shouting “Me! me! me!” Some stood on their toes, others jumped for more height and raised their arms overhead. One jumping pilgrim slipped off the step and banged his head, but nobody seemed to notice.
“Now, now, no point in rioting. Everybody gets the gift of my love, and that’s the most important thing I have.”
The crowd quieted down and took seats. Lex’s eye was circling the hole.
“The pilgrim on the bottom step, in the pink dress. That’s right. Is your name Jianni?”
A girl with thick braids—she couldn’t have been more than twelve—got shakily to her feet. She lowered her head in shyness and covered her face with her hands. The middle-aged man and woman sitting next to her, undoubtedly her parents, whispered words of encouragement. Presently she said, “Lex?” in a high, thin voice.
“I can hardly hear you,” Lex said. “Tell me what you want, and use a great big voice like mine.”
“I’d like . . .” she began. “I’d like to go through the window and live in the other dimension with you.”
Both parents stared at their daughter in surprise, and the lines around Lex’s mouth showed that he was puzzled too.
“What a strange request. Why would you want that, Jianni?”
“Because—well, isn’t it true that if you live on the other side of the window you never grow old? I don’t want to grow old and have to die.”
“You wouldn’t like it on the other side,” Lex said softly. “It’s cold and lonely here and you’d miss your parents. Anyway you’ve got to grow up and have children of your own. When your death comes for you—and it won’t be for many, many years—you’ll greet it like an old friend. Isn’t there something else you’d like, Jianni?”
Lex’s mouth moved away from the hole, and out of the grayness came a high-pitched whinny. A hand appeared, a hand so enormous it could barely squeeze through the transdimensional window. On the pink, fleshy pillows of the palm stood a sleek chestnut Pegasus, the immature colt wings drooping on either side.
Lex slipped his entire arm through the hole in order to bring the back of his hand to the earth. The little girl ran forward and the Pegasus skipped off Lex’s palm and trotted over to meet her. She put her arms around its neck, pressing her cheek against the soft fur, murmuring words of endearment.
Her parents joined her. Her father whispered something to her and Jianni faced the window high above her head and called, “Thank you, Lex! Thank you!”
“Take good care of him,” Lex boomed.
While two priests led the party off the field, Lex singled out his second Supplicant, a slump-shouldered, middle-aged man whose one wish had always been for an expensive, robo-chauffeured MagLev limo.
Lex’s hand lowered a long, low-slung Victory Mark II, the most expensive around. Sliding into the back seat, the pilgrim was transformed; his shoulders squared, his head rose erect, his face took on the expression of a world-weary playboy. To see him being driven out of the amphitheater, one might have mistaken him for Federation Prez.
A young woman honeymooning with her husband requested, and received, a kitchen unit complete with dial-a-meal for her new home; a very old man was supplied with a robo-nurse so he would be less of a burden to his grown children. And so it went for the next hour, pilgrim after pilgrim making his request, large-handed Lex giving and giving and never exacting a favor in return, or a debt of gratitude.
“One last gift,” Lex said. "Who will it be?”
“Me! Me! Me!” everybody was shouting.
He chose a teenage boy who wanted a starship. It was always the children who asked for impossible things; requests the adults made were always fulfillable, boringly so.
“Wouldn’t fit through the window,” Lex apologized. “Anyway, a starship’s a big responsibility—you’re planning to join the spaceforce, aren’t you?”
The boy looked startled. “Mow’d you know?”
“I’ve got my ways. Seven or eight years from now, if you keep up your studies, the Federation may make you pilot of your own starship. Think you can wait that long?”
“Yeah.” Without much enthusiasm.
“In the meantime you can practice on one of these.”
Lex’s hand came out of the hole holding a championshipmodel skimmer, every teenage boy’s dream. Gingerly the giant hand passed it to the two little hands, and any disappointment was lost in the sparkle of sun on polished steel.
Lex withdrew his arm through the window—then stopped at the wrist.
Over the course of a lifetime the performer perfects his act. Problem spots are edited, routines ironed out. An economy prevails where every gesture has a purpose and every superfluous gesture has been eliminated. Unnecessary motions, no matter how slight, are noticed by the sensitive viewer.
Nick, raised on the Lifestylers, knew there was something wrong. He couldn’t define it, he simply knew. Lex shouldn’t have hesitated at the wrist, he should have drawn in his hand. What was going on?
The hand seemed to be stuck outside the hole. It turned and twisted, it narrowed itself and made a fist; still it could not withdraw. Nick thought he saw a bracelet of green light holding it in place like a handcuff, but the sun was so brilliant he could not be sure. Soon the hand was struggling like a trapped animal, and the audience, receiving the message of panic, became all abuzz with low anxious voices and nervous laughter.
“Something’s wrong,” somebody cried, and somebody else, “Get help!”
Several priests appeared at the door of the bottom of the bleachers, watched for a moment, then hurried back inside.
Nick felt Hali’s hand tighten around his arm.
“What is it?” she whispered.
“I don’t know, it’s never happened before. He seems to be—”
Nick didn’t finish, for at that moment a blade of green light flashed beneath Lex’s wrist and his skin curled back along a deep gash. Jets of arterial blood, brilliantly red, squirted seventy feet to the ground and sizzled against the parched earth. The puddle grew to a pond, fed by the nightmare waterfall, and the pond crept leisurely toward the bleachers, edges curled with surface tension like some vast scarlet amoeba eating up the desert.
Everyone was screaming and running every which way. Nick alone seemed to have kept his head. He tried to get Hali’s attention, but she had retreated into a kind of shock; her eyes were locked on the bleeding wrist, her body was rigid and shaking. Nick slapped her lightly across the face to no effect. He lifted her in his arms—she couldn’t have weighed more than thirty-five kilograms—and carried her along the steps, avoiding the pilgrims, who were running every which way without sense or purpose. One man pushed a woman aside and she tumbled down the steps, over the rail, into the sea of blood, which had by now spread to the foot of the bleachers. When she rose to her feet she was covered with blood from head to toe and her eyes and her mouth were three gaping black holes.
High above her the hand of Lex Largesse twitched spasmodically and then hung limp from its transdimensional window.
III
Mutagen 5 had three decks, the lowermost divided like a pie into three staterooms. Nick carried Hali into the room she had been using and laid her gently on the bed. Gradually her shaking subsided. He brought a jigger of brandy from the galley and, sitting on the bedside and supporting her head with one hand, trickled it between her lips.