“Don’t do me any favors,” Gordon choked. Macklin merely grinned and went back to his whittling.
A few minutes later the door at the back of the ruined store opened. “Go back and see to your women!” Macklin snapped. Charles Bezoar quickly closed the door to the win-dowless storage room — where Marcie and Heather presumably still tended the other prisoner Gordon had not yet seen.
“Just goes to show you, not every strong man is likable,” Macklin commented sourly. “He’s useful, though. For now.”
Gordon had no idea whether it was hours or a few minutes later when a trill call carried through the boarded windows. He thought it was only the cry of a river bird but Macklin reacted swiftly, blowing out the small oil lantern and throwing dust onto the fire.
“This is too good to miss,” he told Gordon. “The guys appear to have a good chase going. I hope you’ll excuse me for a few minutes?”
He grabbed Gordon’s hair. “Of course if you so much as make a sound while I’m gone, I’ll kill you the instant I get back. That’s a promise.”
Gordon could not shrug in his position. “Go join Nathan Holn in Hell,” he said.
Macklin smiled. “Undoubtedly, someday.” Then the augment was out the door, running through the darkness and rain.
Gordon hung while his pendulumlike swinging slowly abated. Then he took a deep breath and got to work.
Three times he tried to pull himself up to within reach of the rope around his ankles. Each time he fell back, grunting from the tearing agony of sudden, jerking gravity. The third time was almost too much to bear. His ears rang and he thought he almost heard voices.
Through tear-filled eyes he seemed to half see an audience to his struggle. All the ghosts he had accumulated over the years appeared to line the walls. It occurred to him that they were making book on his plight.
… take… it… Cyclops said for all of them, speaking in a code of rippling highlights in the fireplace coals.
“Go away,” Gordon muttered angrily, resenting his imagination. There was neither time nor energy to waste on such games. He hissed hard as he got ready for one more try, then heaved upward with all his might.
He barely caught the rope this time, slippery with dripping rain, and held on tightly with both hands. His whole body quaked from the strain, bent double like a folded pocket knife, but he knew he dare not let go. There just wasn’t anything left for another try.
With both hands fully occupied he couldn’t venture to untie himself. There was nothing to cut the rope with. Up, he concentrated. It’ll be better if you stand.
Slowly, he pulled himself up the rope, hand over hand. His muscles trembled, threatening cramps, and there was intense pain in his chest and back, but at last he “stood,” his ankles twisted in loops of cutting rope, holding on tight as he swung like a chandelier.
Over by the wall, Johnny Stevens cheered unabashedly. Tracy Smith and the other Army Scouts smiled. Pretty good, for a male, they seemed to say.
Cyclops sat in his cloud of supercooled mist, playing checkers with the smoking Franklin stove. They, too, seemed to approve.
Gordon tried lowering himself to get at the knots, but it put so much pressure on the loops around his ankles that he nearly fainted from the pain. He had to straighten out again.
Not that way. Ben Franklin shook his head. The Great Manipulator looked at him over the tops of his bifocals.
“Over the tops of his… over the t—” Gordon looked up at the stout beam from which the rope had been hung.
Up and over the top, then.
He raised his arms and wound the rope around them. You did this back in gymnastics class, before the war, he told himself as he began to pull.
Yeah. But now you’re an old man.
Tears flowed as he started hauling himself upward, hand over hand, helping where he could with his knees. In the blur between his eyelids, his ghosts seemed more real the more he struggled. They had graduated from imagination to first-class hallucinations.
“Go, Gordon!” Tracy called up to him.
Lieutenant Van gave him thumbs up. Johnny Stevens grinned encouragement alongside the woman who had saved his life back in the ruins of Eugene.
A skeletal shade in a paisley shirt and leather jacket grinned and gave him a fleshless thumbs up. Atop the bare skull lay a blue, peaked cap, its brass badge glimmering.
Even Cyclops ceased its nagging as Gordon gave the endless climb everything he had.
Up… he moaned, grabbing slick hemp and fighting the crushing hug of gravity. Up, you worthless intellectual.… Move or die…
One arm floundered over the top of the rough wooden beam. He held on and brought up the other to join it.
And that was all. There was no more to give. He hung by his armpits, unable to move any farther. Through the blur of his eyelashes, his phantoms all looked up at him, clearly disappointed.
“Oh, go chase yourselves,” he told them inwardly, unable even to speak aloud.
…Who will take responsibility… the coals in the fireplace glittered.
“You’re dead, Cyclops. You’re all dead! Leave me alone!” Utterly exhausted, Gordon closed his eyes to escape them.
Only there, in the blackness, he encountered the one ghost that remained. The one he had used the most shamelessly, and which had used him.
It was a nation. A world.
Faces, fading in and out with the entopic speckles behind his eyelids… millions of faces, betrayed and ruined but striving still…for a Restored United States.
For a Restored World.
For a fantasy… but one which refused obstinately to die — that could not die — not while he lived.
Gordon wondered, amazed. Was this why he’d lied for so long, why he had told such fairy tales?… because he needed them? Because he couldn’t let go of them? He answered himself,
Without them, I would have curled up and died.
Funny, he had never seen it quite that way before, in such startling clarity. In the darkness within himself the dream glowed — even if it existed nowhere else in the Universe — flickering like a diatom, like a bright mote hovering in a murky sea.
Amidst the otherwise total blackness, it was as if he stood in front of it. He seemed to take it in his hand, astonished by the light. The jewel grew. And in its facets he saw more than people, more than generations.
A future took shape around him, enveloping him, penetrating his heart.
When Gordon next opened his eyes, he was lying atop the beam, unable to recall how he had gotten there. Unbelievingly, he sat up blinking. A spectral light seemed to stream away from him in all directions, passing through the broken walls of the ruined building as if they were the dream stuff, and the brilliant rays the true reality. The radiance spread on and on, beyond limit. For a short time he felt as if he could see forever in that glow.
Then, as mysteriously as it had come, it passed. Energy appeared to flow back into whatever mysterious well he had tapped. In its wake, physical sensation returned, the reality of exhaustion and pain.
Trembling, Gordon fumbled with the knotted tourniquets around his ankles. His torn, bare feet were slippery with blood. When he finally got the ropes loosed, returning circulation felt like a million angry insects running riot inside his skin.
His ghosts were gone, at least; the cheering section seemed to have been taken up by that strange luminance, whatever it had been. Gordon wondered if they would ever return.
As the last loop fell away, he heard shots in the distance, the first since Macklin had left him alone here. Perhaps, he hoped, that meant Phil Bokuto wasn’t dead quite yet. Silently, he wished his friend luck.
He crouched down on the beam as footsteps approached the storeroom door. It opened slowly and Charles Bezoar stared at the empty room, at the limp, hanging rope. Panic filled the ex-lawyer’s eyes as he drew his automatic and stepped out.