“You think so?”
“That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”
“Listen,” Dante said, “I’m still missing a few of them. Maybe you ought to phone up to the mess hall and get them hustling across here, okay?”
“Who’s not there yet?”
“Well, April, Ed Ferguson, Father Christie. No, here comes Father Christie now. So it’s just April and Ed. Otherwise the whole crew’s in the gym.”
“Tom there too?”
“No. No, I don’t know where he is.”
“We ought to know. If he turns up, call me.”
“I will,” Dante said.
“And I’ll check on the other missing ones. I’m talking to you from right outside the mess hall now anyway. If they’re in there I’ll have them over to you in five minutes or less.”
Elszabet walked around to the mess hall side of the GHQ building and peered in. No one in sight except one of the kids from town who cleaned up the dirty trays and swept the floor. “I’m looking for a couple of patients,” she said. “April Cranshaw? Big round plump woman, about thirty years old? And Mr. Ferguson? You know which one he is?”
The boy nodded. “Sure, I know them, Dr. Lewis. I don’t think either one came in for breakfast today.”
“No?”
“That April, she’s hard to miss, you know.”
Elszabet smiled. “I’d like to find them. If they wander in while you’re still here, will you call over to the gym, tell Dante Corelli? Then send them over there.”
“Sure thing, Dr. Lewis.”
“And have you seen Tom? You know, the new one, the one with the peculiar eyes?”
“Tom, yeah. He hasn’t been here this morning either.”
“Strange. Tom’s someone who hates to miss a meal. Well, same thing there. If you see him, call Dante.”
“Right, Dr. Lewis.”
Elszabet went outside again. She felt curiously peaceful, an eye-of-the-hurricane kind of feeling. First thing, she thought, head over to the dorm, see if maybe April was still in bed, or Ferguson. Morning like this, they might just have decided not to get up, especially since there had been no pick-call today.
The rain whipped at her face. Nastier and nastier, almost like a real midwinter storm. The ground was soaking everything up, it was so dry after five straight months of fair weather, but if the stuff continued to come down like this they’d be sloshing around in mud by tonight. In the summer months you tended to forget, she thought, how messy the rainy season could be.
First find April and Ferguson, yes. Then track down Tom. And then she’d have to get herself out toward the front gate to see how Lew Arcidiacono was coming along with the energy-wall installation. After that it would just be a matter of waiting out the day, doing what she could to make sure that the marchers from San Diego went around the Center instead of straight through it. The marchers were a problem she didn’t really need at this time, a stupid extraneous distraction. She knew that Tom was the big event that she should be dealing with right now, Tom and his visions, his almost magical powers, Tom and his galactic worlds—the worlds that she understood now, thanks to the Starprobe cameras, to be the real thing, actual authentic inhabited planets that were sending beckoning images of themselves through the strange mind of this one man of Earth—
As if on cue something tickled at the corners of Elszabet’s mind. Eerie light began to glow behind her eyes. No, she thought furiously. Not now. For God’s sake, not now.
Everything she saw was casting twin shadows, one outlined in yellow, one in reddish orange. In the sky a pale pink nebula sprawled like some great octopus across the horizon. And creatures moving around, spherical, blue-skinned, clusters of tentacles wiggling on their heads. She recognized that landscape, those stars, those spherical beings. Double Star Three was drifting into her mind. Right this minute, out here in the driving rain, as she walked from the mess hall toward the dorms, she was sliding away into that other world.
No, she thought. No. No. No.
She staggered a couple of steps, went lurching into a big rhododendron in the middle of the lawn, grabbed a couple of its branches and held on tight, dizzy, swaying, fighting the vision back. This is a rhododendron bush, she told herself. This is a rainy morning in October, 2103. This is Mendocino County, California, planet Earth. I am Elszabet Lewis and I am a human being native to planet Earth and I need to have all my wits about me today.
A rasping voice behind her said, “You all right, lady? You need some help?”
She swung around, startled, disoriented. Double Star Three shattered into fragments and fell away from her, and she found herself facing three strangers. Rough-looking types, nasty-looking. One with a thick black beard and deep-set eyes almost buried in black rings, one with a lean face scarred all over with the deep craters of some skin disease, and one, short and ugly with a wild thatch of red hair, who seemed even meaner than the other two.
Elszabet faced them and, as coolly as she could, brushed her hand against her hair, switching the transmitter on. It should still be tuned to B frequency. Dante Corelli would be picking it up right over there in the gym.
“Who are you?” she said. “What are you doing here?”
“You don’t need to be scared, ma’am,” said the one with the scarred face. “We don’t mean no harm. We thought you was sick or something, hanging there on that bush.”
“I asked you who you were,” she said, a little more crisply. It annoyed her that the scar-faced man thought she was frightened, even though it was true. “I asked you what you were doing here.”
“Well, we—we—” the one with the scars began.
“Shut up, Buffalo,” the one with the black beard said. Then to Elszabet: “We were just passing through. Trying to find a friend who seems to have strayed in here.”
“A friend?”
“Man named Tom, maybe you know him. Tall, skinny, a little strange-looking—”
“I know who you mean, yes. Do you know that you’re on private property, Mr.—Mr.—”
“I’m Charley.”
“Charley. You’re with the tumbondé march, is that it?”
“You mean the San Diego mob? All those crazies? Hey, no, not us. We’re just traveling through. We thought maybe we could find our friend Tom, take him with us, move along before the crazies hit. You know how many they got out there, just down the road?”
Elszabet could see Dante now emerging from the gym, two or three others with her. They were keeping back, watching cautiously, listening in on Elszabet’s conversation with the three strangers. Elszabet said, “Your friend Tom’s not around right now. And in any case I don’t think he plans to go anywhere. What I suggest you do is take yourselves off our grounds right away, for your own good, okay? As you say, there’s quite a mob just down the road, and if they break in here I can’t be responsible for your safety. Besides which, you happen to be trespassing.”
“You just let us talk to Tom a minute, then we—”
“No.”
Dante was gesturing as if to say, Give me a signal, I’ll knock them out. Dante was terrific with the anesthetic-dart gun at almost any range up to a hundred meters. But Elszabet wasn’t so sure. Certainly these three were armed: knives, spikes, maybe guns. That looked like a laser bracelet on the black-bearded man’s wrist. If Dante opened fire, one of them might have time to fire back and it wouldn’t be anesthetic pellets he’d be firing.
The red-haired one said, “Charley, look behind us.”
“What’s back there, Stidge?”
“Couple people. Watching us.”
Charley nodded. Very carefully he turned and looked.