John DeChancie
Paradox Alley
1
I don't know if God wears a beard. I've never had the pleasure of meeting Him. Frankly, I hope to delay that happy occasion for as long as possible.
The individual whose acquaintance I had just made didn't quite look the part, but I could have been persuaded otherwise right then. We had come a long way-all the way, it seemed, to the end of the universe. And here to greet us had been a surpassingly strange and beautiful creature possessed of a serenely transcendent, almost beatific aura. His foppish duds worked against the God image, though; I couldn't imagine the Supreme Being going around dressed like a Galactic Emperor out of some video space opera. And Carl, who stood beside me wearing a darkly subdued look, his fury temporarily spent, had seemed mighty sure of the identity of the person whose lights he had just punched out. I was fairly sure that Carl didn't think the guy was the King of Creation.
Even so, we had a problem on out hands. Judging from his patrician bearing and sartorial finery, the person Carl had assaulted looked very important. Extremely important. He quite possibly was in charge of this place, this world to which we had very recently been shanghaied. He had greeted us warmly, welcomed us. He'd invited us to lunch. What do we do? Quite without provocation, we smack the guy in the chops and knock him out. We were very possibly in deep trouble. Very possibly our ass was grass. I hoped that our host didn't own a power mower.
I looked down at the still form of the being-and he appeared for all the world to be a human being of the male persuasion-who had called himself Prime. He was lying prone, face in the grass, the back of his head partly hidden beneath bunched folds of his expansive green cape. The rest of the garment was spread out to his left over the ground.
I glanced around. No lightning bolts, no clap of doom..I looked across the valley. No activity immediately apparent in the vicinity of the immense green crystalline fortress that surmounted the hill on the other side. Could Prime possibly be alone here? The notion struck me as absurd, but anything was possible on this strange artificial planet.
"Carl," I said, "I can't take you anywhere."
"It's him," he answered flatly. "The voice that talked to me aboard the flying saucer. He's the one that nabbed me."
"Can you be sure? After all, you never actually saw him. Did you?"
Carl frowned and stared at the ground, thought a moment, then turned to me. "No, but it has to be him. I'll never forget that voice."
"Did the voice call itself Prime?"
"No. I don't remember it ever calling itself anything."
"Then you really can't be sure, can you?"
Carl shrugged, then grudgingly acknowledged the point with a tilt of his head. "I guess. Maybe." Then, quickly and with finality. "Nah. It's him."
"That's hardly the issue," said John Sukuma-Tayler behind us.
We turned. John stepped away from the rest of our companions, who were standing in a tight little knot. They were all shocked by what Carl had done, eyes edgy and expectant. I probably looked the same way, but was trying to hide it. Lori still stood with her hands cupped over her mouth. Susan was aghast; she looked ill. Sean was shaking his head. The rest of them gazed silently at Prime.
John, however, was angry. "Carl, that was an extremely stupid thing to do." He stopped and threw up his arms in exasperation. "As if we hadn't enough problems! No, you have to hit him. How could you? Carl, how could you do something so…" He groped for the appropriate superlative… so monumentally imbecilic? So…" He cast about for words, then brought up his hand and slapped his forehead. "Carl, you incredible idiot!"
It was slowly dawning on Carl. "Yeah. I guess it was a dumb thing to do."
"`A dumb thing to do,"' John repeated hollowly. He turned and appealed to the group. "'A dumb thing to do,"' he said again, nodding in mock approval. I had never seen John this ironic. He snapped his head around to fix Carl with a look of utter contempt. "You have a gift for understatement. Unfortunately, it makes your stupidity all the more colossal."
Carl scowled. "Ah, come off it. I just punched him. If he'd've done to you what he did to me-"
"That's hardly the point. Did you stop to consider what the consequences might have been for us-the rest of us? Did you stop a single instant and think? No. No, you-"
"Hold it, John," I said.
"Jake, you can't possibly think he was justified."
"No, it was dumb. But he's young. At his age, I might've done the same thing."
"No excuse."
"Probably not. But the whole question's kind of moot, isn't it?"
John's shoulders slumped. "Unfortunately, yes."
Liam detached himself from the group and walked toward us. "Isn't anybody going to see if he's all right?"
I knelt beside Prime. Gingerly, I uncovered his head. I put my hand on his copper-colored hair. It was as soft and silky as a baby's. I moved his head to the right and looked at his face. The eyes were closed, the face serene. With my thumb-gently, very gently-I pried the left eyelid open. The iris was coal black with tiny flecks of purple. The pupil didn't respond to light, and the eye wasn't moving., I reached for his wrist. Rolling up the pleated cuff proved to be difficult, so I ran a middle finger under his jaw, tracing a line along the left neck muscle near the throat, trying to find the carotid artery. The skin was smooth, sleek, and dry. He was warm, but his body temperature was slightly lower than normal, or so I thought. But who knew what was normal for him?
No carotid pulse. I looked at his left eye again, then swiveled his head to examine the right. Then I stood up.
"He might be dead," I said.
"Good God," John murmured.
"That's crazy," Carl said in almost a whisper.
"Oh, my." John came over to stand beside me. "Jake, are you… are you quite sure?"
"No. But he doesn't have a heartbeat, leastways none that I can detect. He's not breathing, I don't think. We should roll him over and… hell." I slapped my forehead. The past several minutes had been so disorienting that I had slipped into a sort of semiparalysis: Here, ostensibly, was a human being in need of help, and we were all standing around like dummies. I came out of it. "Darla! Run and get the medikit-know where it is?"
"Yes." She ran back to the truck. I got out the key and called Sam.
"This has all been very interesting," Sam observed.
"Sam, set up to monitor this guy's life signs."
"If he has any. Is he human?"
"Maybe, maybe not."
Carl was slowly shaking his head in disbelief. "Crazy. I just poked him one. It couldn't have been enough-"
"It was enough," John said acidly. Then he bent over slightly and peered at Prime's face. "Of all the bloody, beastly luck." He straightened and let out a long sigh. "Well, that's it, isn't it? We're all dead."
"Not yet," I said. "And he might not be either. My guess is he's not human. But human or not, Carl didn't hit him hard enough to kill him."
"But if he's not human, how do you know what it would take to kill him?"
"You have a point."
"I wish I didn't."
The others were edging forward now. Zoya and Yuri drew up closer and stopped.
"I wonder who he is," Yuri said. "What he is."
Darla came running with the medikit. I tore it open and took out two remote monitoring transponders.
"Help me roll him over, John."
We were about to do so when Lori screamed.
I whirled. Carl was lying on the ground. Sean evidently had caught him, and was now cradling Carl's head in his arms.
"What happened?" John said.
Sean gently cuffed Carl's cheeks a few times. "Fainted dead away, he did. Just keeled over."
I went over and crouched beside them, took Carl's wrist and felt for his pulse. It was slow and thin, dangerously so. "Is he okay?" Susan asked.