And now Mary was off to Heaven for the second time. He wondered idly what possibly could have happened to make her decide to try it once again. The last word he had had was that she had been unalterably opposed to returning there. And what, he wondered, would she find there — a renewed conviction that she really had found Heaven, or would she return with doubt? It could not be Heaven, he told himself; the whole idea was ridiculous, akin to the psychotically induced visions and revelations that filled the history of Earth's medieval age.
He slumped lower on the couch, staring at the fire. In just a short time, he reminded himself sharply, he'd have to get out of here and walk down to the clinic. There might be people waiting.
He felt an uneasiness, thinking it. And why, he wondered, should he be uneasy thinking of the people who might be waiting at the clinic? He hauled himself to a normal sitting position and craned his neck to look around the room. There was no one there and that was not strange, for he had known that there was no one there. He was alone and yet, quite suddenly, he was positive that he was not alone.
He rose to his feet and whirled around, his back to the fire so that he could examine the other side of the room, seeking out the shape that was lurking there. There was no one, nothing, lurking. He was sure of that. Still the uneasiness refused to go away. There was no reassurance in the emptiness of the room. There was, he was certain, something there, someone or something in the room with him.
He forced himself to speak, croaking rather than actually speaking. 'Who is there?
As if in answer to the question, he saw it in one corner, next to the spindly gilded chair that stood beside the table with the marble top — the faint glint of drifting diamond dust.
'So it's you, he said, and as he spoke the glitter disappeared and there was nothing beside the gilded chair. Yet he still felt its presence. The glitter was gone, but the thing that glittered had not gone away.
Questions surged inside him, howling to get out. Who are you?
What are you? Why are you here? But he did not voice them. He stood quite frozen, not moving from where he stood, still staring at the corner where he had seen the glitter.
Something spoke inside of him.
— I am here, it said. I am here inside of you. I am in your mind. Do you wish that I should leave?
It was a gentle voice (if it was a voice). Gentle and gentlemanly. He could not move a muscle. Terror — and yet it wasn't terror — held him in its grip. He struggled to speak, struggled to think, and yet there was no word or thought. His mind was frozen with his body.
— Do you wish that I should leave?
Words came to Tennyson.
— No, he said not speaking aloud, but only in his mind. No, don't leave, but please explain yourself. You belong to Decker. Do you bring me word from Decker?
— I do not belong to Decker. I belong to no one. I am a free agent and I am Decker's friend. That is all I am. I can talk with him, but I cannot be a part of him.
— You can be a part of me. Why can you be a part of me and not a part of Decker?
— I am Whisperer. That is what Decker calls me. It serves as well as any name.
— You did not answer my question, Whisperer. Why can you be a part of me and not a part of Decker?
— I am Decker's friend. He is the only friend I have. I tested him long and hard to be sure he was a friend. I have tried with others and they might have been friends as well, but they did not hear me, did not recognize me. They did not know I was there.
— And now?
— I tried with Decker, but there was no getting inside of him. Talk with him, yes, but no getting in his mind. On that first day, I felt you might be the one.
— And now you'll desert Decker? Whisperer, you can't do that to him. I will not do that to him. I will not steal his friend.
— I will not desert him. But can I be with you?
— You mean you'll not insist?
— No, not insist. You say go, I go. You say stay away, I'll stay away. But, please!
This, thought Tennyson, this is all insane. It is not happening. I must be imagining it. There is no such thing.
The door burst open and Ecuyer stood within it.
'Jason, he shouted,'you must come with me. You must come immediately.
'Why, of course, said Tennyson. 'What is the trouble?
'Mary is back from Heaven, said Ecuyer, 'and she's a basket case.
Twenty-six
Again, Decker relived the moment. For years he had not thought of it, but now, ever since he had gone back to the boat, he had thought of it often, running the filmstrip of memory through again, with the old and faded recollection becoming the sharper with each rerunning.
He reached out and touched the metal box that stood upon the desk, the box he'd brought back from the lifeboat. It would all be there, he thought, in the records that the ship had made. But he flinched away from opening it and getting at the records. Perhaps, he told himself, he should have left them in the boat, where they had rested for twelve years, virtually forgotten.
Why was it, he wondered, that he hesitated to listen to the records? Was it that he feared the terror would be there? Could the ship have recorded the terror? Could it still lie there, as fresh and raw as it had been that day so many years before? He crinkled up his face in an effort at concentration. He had known that ship, had sailed it for years, had known every twist and turn of it, had loved it, been proud of it, talked to it in the lonely hours in the depths of space. At times, or so it seemed, the ship had talked back to him.
There was about it only one thing of which he had not been certain, and that was the true capabilities of the recordings that it made. That they had been detailed and clear, that they had missed nothing of significance, of that he was very certain. They recorded locations and distances, pegged coordinates within a small fraction of their value, pinpointed temperatures, pressures, chemical components, gravitational values, sniffed out life if life was present, sought out non-apparent dangers. But emotions — could they peg emotions? Could they have put on record that overwhelming terror that had driven his tough and seasoned crew in a mad frenzy for the lifeboats?
He sat at the desk, his fingers still touching the metal of the box, and closed his eyes the better to remember, seeking out, for the tenth time or more in the last few days, that one elusive thing that had escaped his memory.
They had been heading toward the deeper recesses of the Coonskin system when the warp had seized them. Strange thing, he thought — he'd always considered it to be a warp, that storied, unexplained rift in the space-time continuum that was little more than legend, a rift that had hurled the ship into another time-and/or space. There were rich, tall tales told of such happenings in every bar of every frontier planet, but the fact of their telling by the ones who told them, swearing solemnly and often to the veracity of the tales, did little to confirm the existence of the warps, or even the most remote possibility of them.
But warp or not, something violent had happened to the ship. Seemingly, as was always the case in FTL flight, the ship had been hanging in black nothingness, with no semblance of motion, when it had staggered, lurching and careening through whatever limbo of foreverness in which it had been situated. Decker remembered that he had been standing alone before one of the forward vision ports, staring out into the featureless emptiness outside the ship, fascinated, as he always had been, by the utter lack of any aspect that might be used to characterize it. It was black and it was empty and that was all it was. The blackness, however, failed in being actually black; it was black because there was nothing there, and empty not with any sense of deprivation, but by the fact also of there being nothing there, not an emptiness achieved by taking away what had been there, but empty because there never had been anything — and, more than likely, never would be anything. Many times he had wondered what it was that attracted him to this desolate and barren blankness and never, in all his wondering, had he ever arrived at any hint of its attraction for him.