“Yeah,” Alleluia said. “What are you talking about, anyway?”
Tom looked from one to the other—Alleluia, Father Christie, poor terrified April, the blissed-out Ferguson. All right, he thought. This is the moment. At long last, the Time is here. Let it begin.
“It’s a long story,” he said.
And he began to tell them all about the wonderful thing that was soon to come.
He began to tell them all about the Crossing.
2
Elszabet said, “The latest estimate from the county highway authorities is that there are three hundred thousand of them. The woman I spoke to said that the figure might be off by as much as fifty thousand either way, but there was no real hope of getting an accurate count because they were spread out so wide and because it was hard to tell how many were traveling in each vehicle. I think you all understand that even if the estimate is too high by a hundred thousand, we’ve got a real problem on our hands.”
“What makes you think they’ll be coming anywhere near us?” Dante Corelli asked.
Elszabet took a deep breath. She was feeling ragged. Dreams and visions were surfacing with bewildering frequency now, for her, for everyone. Just an hour ago the full Nine Suns had erupted in her brain, this time richly detailed and sequential, not only the huge cyclopean alien form against the rocky landscape but a whole elaborate rite involving beings of several planetary types, almost a ballet. And looking at the faces of her staff around the big conference table, she knew the same thing must be happening to them. Dante, Patel, Waldstein, even Dan Robinson, who had had so much trouble experiencing the dreams once upon a time: everyone was fully receptive now, everyone was being bombarded by the vivid throbbing pulsating images of strange worlds.
“They have to pass reasonably close,” she said. “Where they are now, there aren’t that many options for going north. You can’t drive thousands of cars and buses and trucks through a forest. And they’ll start butting up against the mountains of the coastal range, which will force them closer and closer to the ocean. It’s already too late for them to turn inland and go up by Ukiah way, because there aren’t any decent roads that a mob that big can use to cross the mountains from where they’re located now. So they can’t help but be funneled toward Mendocino, and as they come swarming through there it’s pretty likely that some of them will start spilling over onto our land. Perhaps a lot of them, or the whole horde, maybe. What I want to do is put up an energy wall across the whole western side of our property so that when they come up the coast they’ll have to keep toward the ocean.”
“Do we have the equipment for that?” Bill Waldstein asked.
“I talked to Lew Arcidiacono about that just now. He says we probably do, or at least enough to protect us on the side facing Mendocino. What we might have to do is keep moving the equipment around from place to place on an ad hoc basis all along our western perimeter until these tumbondé people have gone past.”
Dan Robinson said, “Sounds like we’ll need the entire staff for that.”
“More than just the staff,” said Elszabet. “Lew tells me that we’ll need dozens of people out there on the line, some to patrol, some to haul equipment, some to operate the generators. That’s going to take everybody we have, and then some.”
“Patients too?” said Dante Corelli.
Elszabet nodded. “We may have to use some of them.”
“I don’t like that,” Dan Robinson said.
“The most stable ones. Tomás Menendez, say, Father Christie, Philippa, Martin Clare, maybe even Alleluia—”
“Alleluia is stable?” Waldstein asked.
“On her good days she is. And think of how strong she is. She could probably carry a generator in each hand. We might want to give each patient a twenty-milligram nick of pax before we send them out, but I think there’s no question we’re going to have to use some of them on the lines.”
“Furthermore,” Naresh Patel said, “if we do have to have the entire staff on the front line, it would be a good idea to keep the patients out there with us so we can keep watch on them for the duration of the emergency.”
“Good point,” Robinson said. “We can’t just leave them back here to amuse themselves while we’re setting up the energy wall.”
Waldstein said, “Are you sure this is going to happen, Elszabet? This ferocious onslaught of berserk cultists?”
“They aren’t necessarily ferocious or berserk. But there’s an awful lot of them and they’re in the county and coming in this direction, Bill. Would you like to gamble that they’ll politely go around us without trampling so much as a blade of grass at the Center? I wouldn’t. I’d rather risk wasting a little effort in protecting ourselves than fold my arms and find out that we’re smack in their path.”
“Agreed,” Dante Corelli said.
“We have no choice, I think,” Dan said.
“I think you’re the only one here who has serious doubts, Bill,” Elszabet said.
“Not serious doubts. I just wonder if it’s all really necessary. But you’re right that there’s a real risk of trouble and we’re better off taking whatever precautions we can. I’d like to know something else, though. While we’re busy fending off this potential invasion, what are we going to do with this Tom of yours?”
“Tom?”
“You know. Your fiery-eyed psychotic friend who’s been filling all our heads with his craziness. Do you think it’s safe to let him run around loose?”
“What are you suggesting, Bill?” Dan Robinson asked.
“I’m suggesting that we can’t function effectively if we’re having hallucinations like this every ninety minutes or so. That’s been my experience the last two or three days, and I think everyone else can report the same thing. Drifting in and out of Nine Suns, Green World, the Double Star planets—we have a powerful and dangerous telepath in our midst. He’s messing up our heads. We’re entirely at his mercy. And now if there’s a real crisis marching up the road toward us—”
Robinson said, “Tom isn’t psychotic. Those aren’t hallucinations.”
“I know. What they are is newsreel shots of actual other planets, right? Come off it, Dan.”
“How can you doubt that now?”
Waldstein stared at him. “Are you serious?”
“Bill, you saw the stuff Leo Kresh sent us, the relay photos from the Starprobe satellite. We have unquestionable proof now that Green World, at least, exists. Surely you won’t try to dispute the fact, after seeing that material, that what we’ve been calling the Green World dream is a detailed and exact view of one of the planets of the star Proxima Centauri. And that Tom, far from being psychotic, actually has some kind of telepathic means of picking up images from distant solar systems and relaying them to other minds over a wide geographical range.”
“That’s bullshit,” Waldstein said.
Elszabet said, “Bill, how can you—”
Waldstein swung around fiercely toward her, hunching forward, face flushed. “How do we know those pictures came from Proxima Centauri? How do we know that Tom doesn’t have some way of hocus-pocusing the receivers at Cal Tech that picked those relays up, the same way he hocus-pocuses our minds? I’ll grant you that he’s a telepath with astounding abilities. But not that he’s scanning planets dozens of light-years away. The whole thing’s his own cockeyed fantasy, top to bottom, and he’s spewing it out into millions of other people. I feel invaded by this crap myself. I feel soiled. I think he’s a menace, Elszabet.”
Quietly she said, “I don’t. I believe his visions are genuine ones and that the Starprobe relay confirms it. He’s in tune with the whole cosmos. He’s opening the universe to us in the most amazing way—”