Stidge said, “Why don’t you get off my back, Charley? But for me you’d be dead back there with Tamale and Choke.”
“That’s right,” Charley said. “Stidge saved us, do you know that, Tom? Very quick with his spike, Stidge is. There were these three vigilantes at the roadblock, big energy-wall up, and somehow Stidge slipped around behind them—” He shrugged. “It’s been a rough couple weeks, Tom. We missed you.”
“I bet you did.”
“No. Seriously. You were our luck, Tom. So long as you were with us, everything seemed to go okay. All your nutty stuff, your visions, your worlds, they were like a charm for us. We got into trouble, we got right out again. Since they took you away in that copter it’s been lousy. Choke, Tamale, they shot them into pieces. Didn’t even ask questions. That’s why we came back here, Tom.”
“Why?”
“For you. We’re going to make a run for the south, warm weather, Mexico, maybe. Rainy season’s coming on any minute. We’ll head down the Valley, maybe over into the desert, cut around San Diego and down into Baja. You come with us, okay? We got plenty of the room in the van, now.”
“The Crossing’s almost here, Charley. Doesn’t make any sense, going to Mexico or anywhere else now. A couple of weeks, we’ll be up there in the sky.”
He heard Stidge snickering, Mujer muttering.
Charley said, “That so? Hell, you can do the Crossing just as easy from Baja, can’t you? And be a lot warmer until it happens, right?”
“I’m going to stay here, Charley.”
“At the goddamn Center?”
“Yeah. There are people here I want to help. When the Time of the Crossing comes, I want to guide them. I tell you what, though. You stay here, I’ll help you too. You were good to me. I want you to be among the first to Cross. You stay out here in the woods, in the van, and I’ll come to you when it begins. Okay? That’s a promise. Let me help Ferguson over, and April, and Dr. Elszabet and some of the others and then I’ll be back here to help you. Another week, maybe. Maybe even less, Charley.”
“You want him,” Mujer said, “let’s just put him in the van and go, you hear, Charley?”
Charley shook his head. “No. I don’t want that.” To Tom he said, “You come with us, Tom.”
“I told you, I got things to do here.”
“You know what’s going to happen to you, you stay here? You’ll get run over by the lunatic crazy army that’s marching this way. They’ll be here, another day or two, the whole goddamn swarm of them, and when they come they’ll tear the place apart.”
“I don’t know anything about that, Charley,” Tom said, frowning.
“Nobody told you? That’s all we heard out there, last couple of days. About a million and a half crazies, some gang of nuts, marching toward the North Pole, they say. Going there to meet God. Some kind of god, anyway. Started in San Diego, been collecting people all up the coast. Heading straight this way, like a plague of locusts, chewing up everything in sight. That’s why we’re going to get out of this end of the state. Double back around them to the east, head south while all the fun and games is going on up here. It won’t be safe for you, Tom. Come on with us. We’ll clear out in the morning.”
“It won’t matter what’s going on here, when the Crossing begins.”
“It’s supposed to be like a traveling riot,” Charley said. “It’s real wild. Guy like you, you don’t want to be mixed up in stuff like that.”
“It won’t matter,” Tom said. “Look, I got to get back. I want to wash up, have dinner, talk to a few people. You come on to the Center with me, all right? They’ll take you in. They’re really good there. Dr. Elszabet, she’ll welcome you the same way she did me. And then we’ll all be together when the Crossing starts. What do you say, Charley?”
“Nothing doing. We’re clearing out. This won’t be no place to be when those marchers get here. You come give us good luck again, Tom.”
“The place for good luck is right here.”
“Tom—”
“I got to go now.”
“You think about it,” Charley said. “We’ll camp out here tonight. In the morning, you come back, we’ll still be here. You can go south with us.”
“You want him, we ought to just grab him,” Mujer said again.
“Shut it,” Charley said. “See you tomorrow, Tom?”
“You come into the Center tomorrow,” Tom said. “Tonight, even. They got good eating there.”
He turned and walked away into the shadows. It was much darker now. Definite hint of rain, maybe tonight, maybe not until morning. Were they going to run up behind him and grab him? No, he thought, Charley wasn’t like that. Charley had a sort of honor about him. Tom felt sorry about the scratchers. Come with us, be our luck: yeah. But he couldn’t. His place was here. Maybe in the morning he’d hike back out again and try to talk them into staying. He hoped they wouldn’t try to grab him then. Not with the Crossing so close—to take him away from his new friends here, before he could help them—no, that would be bad. He’d have to think about it some.
He was back in the main part of the Center in twenty minutes. Into his little cabin, edge of the woods. A good long shower, and he sat crosslegged on the floor beside his bed for a time, doing his thinking. Then over to the big building, the dinner place. The others were there already, Ed Ferguson and Father Christie, and the beautiful artificial woman Alleluia, and fat April, all sitting together at one of the long tables. Ferguson was still glowing. You could see the glow on him from halfway across the room. It was a good feeling, Tom thought, knowing that by the laying on of hands he had brought a joyous vision to that unhappy man. He went over to them.
Alleluia said, “He told us you gave him a space dream.”
“I showed him how to open himself to a vision, yes,” Tom said. “Can I sit with you?”
“Here,” said Father Christie. “Right here, next to me. You’re a remarkable person, you know that, Tom?”
“I wanted to help him.”
“How’d you do it?” Alleluia asked.
“I spoke with him for a while. I showed him the powers that lay within him. That was all.”
“It’s amazing,” said Alleluia. “He’s like someone else now.”
“He’s like himself now,” Tom said. “The real self that was inside him all along. We are all becoming ourselves. We will all be fulfilled soon.”
This is the moment, he thought. Tell them. About the Crossing. Tell them now.
But then April said to him in a small little voice, “You know what? You scare me.” She was on the far side of the table, shrinking back from him as though she was afraid she’d catch a disease from him. She was trembling and her face was red. Tom hoped she wouldn’t go into another fit and fall over.
“I do?” he said.
“You have the visions inside you, don’t you? Like a power all coiled up in there. And when I’m this close to you I can feel it,” April said. Her cheeks were burning. She wasn’t able to look him in the eye. “The other worlds, pressing in. It’s frightening. The other worlds are very beautiful, you know. But it’s all frightening. I wish none of this was happening.”
“No, child,” Father Christie said. “What’s happening is the imminence of the advent of the Lord upon the Earth. There’s nothing to fear. This is the moment we’ve been awaiting for more than two thousand years.”
Tom looked at Ferguson. He was far away, smiling in the deepest bliss.
He said to April, “Don’t be afraid. Father Christie’s right. This is a wonderful thing that’s about to happen.”
“I don’t understand,” April told him.