The Border - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Robert McCammon (ч. 5)

“This is a gift too,” he said. “It has to be. The question is…what was it created to give?”

“We’ll never know,” said Beale.

“It looks like fear,” Ethan decided.

“What?” This time it was Jefferson who posed the question.

“Like fear. A small black cube of fear.” That statement caused the seed of an idea to grow roots. “Tell me…any one of you…what do the people of your planet collectively fear?”

“Alien invasion,” Dave said. “Or for two alien tribes to be fighting over us.”

“More than that,” Ethan urged. “Some fear that’s been a real possibility for a long time, much longer than their war.”

“Total destruction,” Olivia offered.

“How?” Ethan kept examining the cube as he waited for an answer.

“Nuclear bombs,” Jefferson said. “Or…I don’t know…The End, I guess. Like what killed the dinosaurs.”

“The strike of a huge asteroid,” the President added. “Even now…I mean, before all this…we know they’re out there. Some have passed pretty close, but we’ve kept it secret. We thought that if one of those hit us again, it could be the end of all life.”

“And you were defenseless against those,” said Ethan, who already knew the answer.

“We had emergency plans, but we would’ve only gotten one chance, and if we failed, it would be all over.”

Ethan felt he needed to cough up blood again. How long could he keep this body going? He didn’t know.

Fear…an asteroid strike…the end of all life…one chance and if we failed it would be all over.

Something resonated within him. He could not see into the cube, could not discern its alien workings or its purpose, but like the idea of the White Mansion, he could not put out of his consciousness the progression of fear…an asteroid strike…the end of all life…one chance and if we failed it would be all over…

“I have to find a way into this,” the peacekeeper said, his voice thick.

He had just finished saying this when a siren went off and the cool female voice said from a speaker in the ceiling: “Intruder on Level One…Intruder on Level Two…Intruder on all levels…multiple intruders…warning…warning…multiple intruders on all levels…”

Ethan knew they had come to kill him. Time was running out for everyone in this room and for every human who huddled in a shelter all across this world. They were on their way, and they would not wait for this form to fall and his true essence to break free.

The black cube sat in his palm. Fear, he thought. End of all life. One chance. One.

They were coming.

Thirty-Four.

“It’s impossible!” Beale’s eyes were wild. “Nothing can get in here!”

“Warning…warning…multiple intruders on all levels,” said the female voice, its cool computerized cheerfulness now completely out of place. “Echo Sierra. Repeat…Echo Sierra.”

“What does that mean?” Dave demanded.

“Worst case scenario. Everybody stays on lockdown while the Special Ops soldiers work…but there aren’t any here.” Beale left them in the artifacts room to confer with Derryman and Winslett, who both looked as if they were ready to climb the walls. Corporal Suarez had taken a position where he could watch the steel door, his rifle at the ready.

“He says nothing can get in here,” Jefferson said. His face had become a swamp of sweat. “That’s what he thought about the White Mansion too. Ethan, do you know where they are and how many?”

“Many signals,” Ethan answered, but he was giving most of his concentration to the black cube. The siren was still sounding, a high oscillating noise. Pain nagged at him, pulling him away from his task. “They’re not far from this room,” he added. “They’re fighting each other right now, which gives us some time.”

Dave thumbed the safety off his automatic rifle. He offered the pistol to Olivia, who gladly took it.

“I know this cube is a gift,” Ethan said. “It has to open up, somehow.”

“By the time you figure that out we’ll be dead.” Jefferson looked with some consternation at the pistol in Olivia’s hand. “Don’t I get a gun? How about letting me hold that one?”

“I’m fine as it is, thanks,” she told him.

“You can hold this.” Ethan held the cube out to Jefferson.

“I don’t want that damned thing. It scares the hell out of me.”

“Please hold it. I need a free hand.”

Reluctantly, Jefferson took the cube and held it before him in his right palm. “Echo Sierra…Echo Sierra,” the computerized voice repeated, but no Special Ops soldiers were coming to their rescue.

“How much time do you think we have?” Dave asked, watching the door and the walls.

“I have no…” Idea, Ethan was about to say. But an idea did pierce through, and that idea was: Time.

The greatest gift.

A thousand permutations went through his mind in a matter of seconds. A thousand odds were weighed, a thousand combinations and possibilities. He looked at the digital clock on the far wall, which had just changed over to 20:52.

“I’m going to try something,” he said. “Every civilization recognizes the concept of a positive and a null, which would be to you one and zero. In your language, binary code. Whatever happens,” he told Jefferson, “don’t drop it.”

“What’s going to happen?”

Ethan ignored him. The clock still showed 20:52.

He spoke the number calmly and clearly in binary code: “One, zero zero zero, zero zero zero, zero zero one, zero zero.”

The cube did not open.

Jefferson felt nothing, no movement nor heat from the object.

Two small squares suddenly illuminated on the top. Jefferson gave a little yelp but he didn’t drop it.

Within each square were two symbols that pulsed with white light. Jefferson thought they looked like Chinese markings. The other sides of the cube remained black.

“What is it?” Dave asked. “How’d you know to do that?”

“It’s a timepiece,” Ethan said. “I spoke the current time in binary code. It’s set itself to recognize the time system here and react to a human voice. And…I didn’t know for certain, but I assumed that the cube might respond to something other than touch.” He saw that Beale, Derryman and Winslett had noticed the glowing cube and they were coming in, with the President leading the way.

“What’s that thing doing?” Winslett asked, a frantic note in his voice, before Beale could speak. “Is it a bomb?”

“No. It’s…an alien clock,” Ethan decided to say for the sake of simplicity and simple minds. “I woke it up.”

“A clock? What the hell good is that?” Derryman asked sharply.

“Warning…warning…multiple intruders on all levels,” said the female voice. “Echo Sierra…Echo Sierra.” It sounded now as if the computer had begun to plead for help.

“We’re going to be under attack very soon,” the peacekeeper said. “Cyphers are going to be coming through the walls. Before they do, I need to tell you about this.” He held his hand out for it and Jefferson gladly gave it up. “I know where it came from. I recognize the symbols. And it’s a little more than just a clock.”

“What, then?” Beale prompted.

“This is the greatest gift you’ve been given, sir. It’s your world’s second chance.”

“Explain that.”

“The civilization that brought this to you is very old. They were the first to use the dimensional lightpaths. They might have witnessed an asteroid strike to your planet, eons ago. They brought this as a gift to prevent the destruction of your world in the repeat of such a strike or some other catastrophe. We can use it now. I can read the symbols, I can activate the power in this.”

“Power? What power?” Beale eyed the cube warily. “What does it do?”

Ethan smiled faintly, in spite of the pain that was steadily breaking this body down. Oh, there was so much they did not know and could not yet understand…

“It’s a time machine,” he said.

No one spoke. It was a frozen moment, though from beyond the steel door there came the muffled noise of what might have been an explosion. Ethan could envision the Cyphers and Gorgons fighting out there, locked in deadly close-quarters combat.

“Such a thing doesn’t exist,” said Derryman. “It can’t exist.”

“This has its limitations,” Ethan went on. “It can reverse time but not leap it forward. That’s the point of the gift. To go back and have a second chance…a gift of time to destroy an asteroid, to avert a war, or prevent any other disaster.”

“You’re saying…with this thing we can erase what’s happened?” Beale asked. “Go back in time?”

“With limitations. As I understand this creation, it can be used only once. And…I think going back more than two years is…how would you say…pushing the envelope. Your minds are such that the reversal of that much time may cause memory holes. Some will be able to remember and some not.”

Something slammed against the steel door, but for the moment it held.

“Echo Sierra…Echo Sierra…” It was a lost voice calling out for a lost cause.

“There may be other repercussions,” the peacekeeper said. “Honestly, I just don’t know.”

Beale drew a long breath, held it and then exhaled. “Can you program it?”

“Yes.”

“For when?”

“To be as safe as possible…the latest date. The third day of your April month, two years ago. I can program the device to…” Ethan paused to study the symbols. “I think…to revert time back to within a few minutes before the Gorgons came through the portals.”

“That’s cutting it damned close, if it even works!” Winslett said.

“And what if it does work?” Jefferson asked. “So what if you can reel back time? You can’t stop the Gorgons from coming through! They destroyed the armies of the world in a couple of days! What’s to keep everything from happening all over again?”

Ethan nodded, the silver eyes intense but under them the dark circles of exhaustion and physical injury. A smear of blood showed at the left corner of his mouth.

“I can,” he said.

“How?”

“In my true form…I can leave you with another gift. I can use my energy to create for you a permanent protective web around your planet. It can be tuned like the strings of an instrument to the harmonics of both Gorgon and Cypher warships. But if the Gorgons can’t get through,” he said, “the Cyphers will never come here. There will never be a fight for the border. Some will know it happened…some will have their memories of this erased.” He looked at Dave and Olivia and then back to the President. “It’ll make for a very interesting and challenging future.”

“My God,” Beale said. “If it works like you say, how will the world handle this?”

“I hope as what it’s supposed to be, a second chance.”

The President looked to Derryman and Winslett for help, but they were as lost as the lost voice and the lost cause. It was his decision to make, and what was the alternative?

He was about to say Do it when the first Cypher soldier blurred through the wall into the chamber outside the artifacts room. The creature was behind Corporal Suarez, who swiveled around and immediately opened fire.

The second Cypher soldier that followed blew Suarez apart with a double bolt of death from its energy weapon.

“Do it,” Beale ordered.

What Ethan needed was his own gift of time. The two Cypher soldiers were striding toward the artifacts room. Three more of them were ghosting from the wall. Dave fired through the glass, breaking it to pieces, and Olivia opened up with the pistol.

“Take it!” Ethan told Jefferson, holding the cube out. The creature that had killed Suarez was turning, bringing its blaster to bear on them. Jefferson scooped the cube from Ethan’s hand. The peacekeeper’s arm thrust forward and from the palm five spears of lightning shot out, one for each Cypher. The soldiers were hit, lifted off their feet and burned into black scarecrows when they slammed against the wall, where they flowed to the floor like streams of grease.

More were ghosting in. Dave and Olivia were still shooting through the broken glass but the Cyphers vibrated so fast the bullets passed through their bodies. Two of the soldiers fired as they materialized and four red orbs of flame with white-hot centers flew at the artifacts room. Ethan was able to deflect all four, sending them sizzling through the wall, but he realized even he in this weakened body was going to soon be overpowered. Five more soldiers were sliding into the chamber. Thirteen Cyphers were there within twenty feet, and all of them aimed their blasters in unison at the seven targets.

With human sweat on his face and human blood on his mouth, the peacekeeper swept his hand in a rapid motion across the row of soldiers.

How many thousands of burning bullets left him? So many that, to him, he saw only a solid wall of them, flying outward with awesome velocity. They tore into and through the Cyphers, ripped them into flaming black pieces and splattered the walls and ceiling with clots of glistening red-and-yellow-streaked intestines. The last soldier to be obliterated was able to fire its weapon, but since half of the creature was already gone by the time the black-gloved finger twitched on the fleshy trigger, the double spheres shot up through the reinforced metal ceiling into the original rock of the silver mine. A rain of small stones fell amid a storm of dust. Two soldiers that had been coming through a wall now gleaming with Cypher guts slid away, as if deciding in their robotic logic that retreat was advance in a different direction.

“They’ll be back,” said Ethan, who coughed blood into a hand that was his gunsight. He staggered, and the President caught him. “I need time to program it,” he said, the voice raspy and weak. “We’re not safe here. Get into that room.” He nodded in the direction of the steel door that led to the surgery.

“Let’s go,” Beale said. Then, to Jefferson, “Hold onto that thing.”

They left the shattered artifact room and moved through the pall of rock dust, with Beale in the lead and Dave guarding the rear. Ethan was helped along by Olivia. He was aware of entities pressing in, of things not fully formed lurking in the haze, but whether they were Cypher or Gorgon, he didn’t know. Whichever it was, a terrible danger was very close.

They were about fifteen feet from the door when Dave heard what might have been a soft whistling like the displacement of air; or maybe it was a whirring sound, like a little machine in motion.

It was coming from his left.

He turned in that direction, his rifle barrel coming up because he knew already.

Vope had materialized only a few feet away. Vope was perfect again, as perfect as the Gorgons could create the masquerade of a human being.

Dave fired into the thing’s face and blew its right cheek off. Before he could take a second shot he saw the mouth hitch into what might have been a smile of triumph, just as the mottled spike drove itself into the right side of his chest. It wrenched free, and Dave fell to his knees.

There was no time for shock. With a cry of outrage and pain, Olivia emptied her last three bullets into the creature’s head. Vope staggered back, counterfeit human blood flowing down the face. The spiked arm and the arm with the ebony snake-head writhed in the air, the snake’s metal fangs darting out to seize and crush Olivia’s skull.

Ethan did not let that happen.

His rage emerged as a massive silver whip of energy that tore Vope to shreds in the blink of an eye. The face, now devoid of emotion, disintegrated. What little remained of the body was thrown backwards into the haze, and that small part ignited into white flame and exploded into nothingness.

“Help him…help him,” Ethan pleaded. Derryman and Winslett reached down and dragged Dave through the steel door. Beale slammed it shut and threw two locks.

Olivia had burst into tears, her knuckles white on the empty pistol. Ethan knelt down beside Dave, who reached out for him and grasped the front of his t-shirt.

“Damn,” Dave whispered, more in frustration than in pain. He was a ruin. He was his own Visible Man, open to the world. His hand trembled, and his face had gone deathly pale. He had lost his rifle and the baseball cap. His sweat-damp hair was sticking up in wild cowlicks.

Ethan searched his eyes and saw the dying of the light.

“Rest,” the peacekeeper said.

“I…I…” Dave couldn’t speak, he couldn’t get anything out. Yet he had so much to say. A coldness was creeping up. So much to say, to both Ethan and Olivia. To Jefferson, as well. He wanted to put his arms around Olivia one last time and tell her how much he loved and respected her, but he knew it was not to be. He hoped she knew; he thought she did. She knelt beside him too and took his other hand, and she held it tightly. It was getting hard for him to think, hard to realize exactly where he was and what had happened. It had been so fast. He thought as as he started to drift away…one thing he had learned…life was not fair and there were hard blows you had to take on the chin, like it or not. A test, he thought. Was that really what it was all about? If so…he hoped he’d scored at least a passing grade. His sunken eyes found the glowing cube in Jefferson’s hand. He pulled Ethan close, his mouth against the ear of a human boy.

“I believe in you,” he whispered.

And he left the world with the small sigh of a man who had worked hard all his life, seen much trial and tribulation, but had known joy and love too, in what used to be. He left the world holding tight to a being from another planet or another dimension or another reality, and as the life departed and the hand fell away, the peacekeeper stood up with Beale’s help. Ethan was himself dazed and unsteady but not defeated, and he touched his silver eyes where they were wet. Then he knew fully what it was to be a human, and he was in awe of them.

Olivia got to her feet. She stared down at Dave for a moment, and when she looked into Ethan’s eyes again she was stone-faced and resolute. “Do what you need to do,” she told him. “Do what you can.”

They stood in an area where surgeons prepared themselves to explore the bodies of beings from other worlds. There was a long green ceramic sink where the surgeons scrubbed their hands before they put on the rubber gloves and took up their scalpels. A pair of doors led into the operating room, and a large plate-glass window afforded a view to the two stainless steel operating tables, the concave mirror lights and the other necessary equipment. Ethan noted two cameras set up to capture all the details.

“Hold it out,” Ethan said to Jefferson.

There came the muffled noise of another explosion, a massive one, from somewhere else on the level. The floor shook beneath their feet. The Gorgons and Cyphers were still at their forever war, and they would fight each other into eternity on balls of rock, ice, and fire that sat astride the border.

“Hurry,” the President urged.

But it could not be hurried, because even though the peacekeeper knew the symbols, the task still had to be done with care. The creature who had brought this gift had intended to absorb the earthly languages, which would be child’s play for that advanced civilization. Then detailed instruction would be given to whoever was chosen to receive it, and hopefully that person was wise enough to grasp the power in this timepiece.

But that hadn’t happened, and Ethan figured the bearer of this had wound up being dissected on one of those operating room tables.

Ethan recognized that the upper symbols on the two squares stood for the representation of Furthermost Distance, which would be the year. The lower symbols stood for one and zero, again the binary code. Ethan entered the year by pressing the squares a total of eleven times. They turned from glowing white to red. That designation of the Year—the furthermost distance in time away from the present moment—was accepted.

The squares became white again. The upper symbols changed to the representation of Middle Distance, which would be the day. April 3^rd was the 93^rd day of the Earth year, thus Ethan entered the binary code of 1011101. The squares turned red, accepting the day.

Once more the squares turned white. The upper symbols altered themselves to the representation of Nearest Distance, which would be the time in hours and minutes.

Ethan recalled JayDee saying I remember the time exactly. It was eighteen minutes after ten.

That was when John Douglas had been alerted by a nurse to watch the explosions in the sky on the television newcasts and the Gorgon ships were beginning their ominous arrival around the planet. Ethan decided to input the time as ten o’clock, 1111101000 in binary code. The timepiece was aligned to the S-4 installation’s twenty-four-hour clock and would correctly read that number as morning and not night.

“When I enter this,” he told them, “the process will start. I don’t know what it will feel like to you. I do know I’ll have no more need for this body, and I’ll release it. Are you ready?”

“Ready,” said the President. His facial tic had stopped, but a muscle worked in his jaw.

“I am,” Jefferson said. He was glassy-eyed. “Christ…I hope this does what you say it will.”

Foggy Winslett nodded.

“Yes,” Derryman said.

Ethan looked at Olivia. “Are you ready?”

She stared down at Dave and then she lifted her weary, shocked eyes to his. “Will…everyone who died…will they be alive again?”

“That’s the plan,” he answered.

“Vincent,” she said, “and Dave too. All of them.” The tears crept down her cheeks. “Oh, my God.”

“I’m going to finish this.” He sensed activity beyond the steel door. “Goodbye, Olivia,” he said, and he wanted to hug her and thank her for all she had done but the river of time was moving. He quickly reached out to the cube in Jefferson’s hand to input the final code.

He had entered seven digits when the enemy came.

Before Ethan could react, two Cypher energy spheres tore into the room through the door. One hit Derryman in its passage, blasting away most of the upper part of his body. Derryman’s legs and lower torso staggered and the single remaining arm reached around as if searching for its missing parts, the rags of its suit jacket on fire. The next two spheres blew the mangled door inward along with much of the wall. The slab of steel and chunks of broken concrete edged with fire hurtled into the room. A shockwave took everyone off their feet and the sheet of plateglass shattered. Jefferson went down as a fist-sized piece of concrete broke his collarbone on the right side. The cube fell to a floor that was suddenly littered with flaming debris.

Ethan was on his knees. Blood streamed from a gash above his left eye, and a small fragment of concrete had scorched a streak across his left cheek. His broken arm had come out of its sling and hung uselessly. The pain that thrummed through him was nearly paralyzing. He was stunned, just on the edge of losing consciousness. He made out a figure striding through the ragged opening: a single Cypher soldier, its blaster ready for another burst of double fire. He recognized the small red glyph of an honored killing machine etched on the lower right slope of the faceplate; this was the soldier that had executed Bennett Jackson.

Deathbringer’s circuits worked. The soldier was aware of its primary target ahead and slightly to the left, in a posture of helplessness though that was deceiving. But there was something else of importance here; it gave off an electrical vibration Deathbringer had never before experienced. This object was shaped like a cube and was lying near the primary target. The object bore two illuminated squares. In an instant Deathbringer’s schematics identified this object as an unknown threat to be destroyed, and the Cypher soldier altered the aim of its blaster to burn this cube into melted ruin.

A piece of concrete hit Deathbringer’s faceplate and caused a second’s disruption.

“No,” the President gasped from where he’d pulled himself up from the rubble, half of his face a mask of blood. Ethan felt something else enter the room. It was behind him. It was cold, deadly, and unspeakable.

The Cypher soldier felt it too and swiveled to take aim with its energy weapon, but before that could happen a spear of liquid was already in the air and had passed over the peacekeeper.

Deathbringer began to vibrate out. It was quick, but this time it was not quick enough. The liquid splattered across its faceplate and instantly started burning through it. The vibration ceased; the Cypher ghosted back in, and as the acid melted through the faceplate material and destroyed the underlying schematics and life directives, the soldier’s body began to writhe and twist as if to tear itself to pieces. The blaster fired as the trigger finger convulsed. A pair of burning spheres shot between Ethan and Jefferson and smashed into the operating room’s equipment. The soldier twisted in two directions as if upper and lower parts of its body were coming unscrewed in the middle. The energy weapon fired again, and the spheres tore through the wall behind Olivia, who clung to the floor and to the tattered remnants of her sanity.

As Deathbringer spun and convulsed and the acid ate its lifeforce away, Ethan turned his head and caught sight of what stood behind him.

It was only a brief glimpse before it changed into the image of a human woman with long, lank brown hair and sad eyes in a face that used to be pretty. She wore jeans and a white blouse edged with pink around the collar. An instant before the illusion was created, the creature had been a nightmare thing whose scaly yellow flesh was banded with black and red. It had worn a shapeless, leathery black gown, and the scarlet pupils of the unblinking eyes were both repulsive and hypnotic.

The sad-eyed woman spoke.

“My Jefferson,” she said, with a Southern accent. “Betrayed his lover. Such a bad boy.”

Jefferson saw Regina standing there, but he knew what this really was and so did the peacekeeper. A pulsing pain began at the back of Jefferson’s neck; in another heartbeat it had grown to a force that squeezed the tears of agony from his swollen eyes. He thought it was about to blow his head off.

“You,” said the Gorgon queen. Her gaze shifted to Ethan. “Caused us concern. What are you?”

Ethan was barely able to answer. There was blood in his mouth, his lungs were hitching for breath and this body was all but done.

“Not your toy,” he managed to whisper. “Your master.”

She smiled faintly and with great contempt.

But her smile faltered when four more Cypher soldiers came through the broken wall, and the peacekeeper knew it was his moment.

The cube was within reach. There were three digits of the binary code to enter: three zeroes. The illuminated squares were on top of the cube; they were always on top, no matter how the cube lay.

He reached out and was able to enter two zeroes before the queen realized that what he was doing was a threat. The face rippled, and the mask fell away like a shimmering mirage. Revealed there was the hideous, cobra-like visage that could freeze the heart of any human, and as Jefferson Jericho’s head pulsed toward explosion and the Cypher soldiers aimed their energy weapons, the queen of the Gorgons hissed a stream of acid from her fanged mouth, flying at the face of the boy who defied her.

The peacekeeper entered the final digit as acid splattered across the forehead, nose and into the silver eyes.

He saw the squares turn red before his eyes were burned out.

He burst free from the ruined body, a being of total energy like a writhing electrical storm that shot out bolts of lightning in all directions and grew larger to fill the room, the level, the entire installation, the sky from horizon to horizon, and to envelop the entirety of the embattled planet Earth.

The walls of reality warped.

Holes began to break through the construction that separated the Present and the Past. Olivia had the sensation of her body no longer on the floor of this destroyed room. It seemed to her that her body had not moved, but the room itself had suddenly fallen away. She was drifting in a twilight world where unrecognizable shapes and images rushed past her, and their motion caused her to spin as if all gravity had ceased to exist. She was on a Tilt-A-Whirl at a carnival, spinning so fast she couldn’t catch her breath, and she wanted someone to stop it…stop it please…but it didn’t stop, and she tried to cry out, but her voice was gone, everything had become a gray blur, and all sounds were muffled thunder.

She spun and spun and spun, and she thought she would sue someone when this was over, she would sue the owners and Vincent would help her, because nobody could stand this, she couldn’t breathe, she couldn’t speak, it wasn’t right that someone didn’t stop this, no human could bear it, and as strange and horrible pictures tumbled through her mind she feared for her sanity, and she thought in panic God help me I’m coming apart…

Thirty-Five.

He was working on the wooden fence on the western edge of his property that the March wind had gnawed down last week. He wore his dark blue baseball cap, old comfortable jeans, a brown t-shirt, and a tan-colored jacket. In like a lamb, out like a lion, he thought. It had been one hell of a lion this—

And then Dave McKane staggered and dropped his hammer, because something terrible was coming. He looked at his wristwatch, a gift from Cheryl on their tenth anniversary. It was one minute after ten. Something was coming from the sky. It was crazy, yeah…crazy…because the sky was cloudless and blue and the sun was warming up and…

Something was coming.

He ran for the house, calling his wife’s name. He ran past the pickup truck and the camper, which for some strange reason he envisioned scorched with flame and sitting on four melted tires. He was losing his mind. Right out of the blue, on a beautiful day, he was going insane.

“Dave! What’s wrong with you?” Cheryl said when he burst like a wild man through the screened door and took it off its hinges on his way into the kitchen. He tossed it aside. He was all nerves, had the shakes, needed a drink, a cigarette, wow was he screwed up. Thank Christ the boys were in school, they couldn’t see their old man the bad-ass scared shitless because he was, and that was God’s truth.

“Dave? Dave?” Cheryl, a small-boned woman who had the biggest heart Dave had ever known, followed her husband through the house to the front room. He kept checking his watch, but he wasn’t sure why. He picked up the remote control, dropped it, fumbled to pick it up again, and turned on the flatscreen.

“What is wrong with you?” she asked. “You’re actin’ crazy!”

“Uh-huh.” He turned the channel to CNN. The newscaster was talking about a protest movement in Washington, a few thousand people had gathered who wanted to go to a flat tax, and spokesmen for both parties were saying they liked that idea, but Dave knew they were lying, both parties were full of liars who didn’t care about anything but their own wallets and their grip on power, they were fighting all the time and it was an endless war with the citizens caught in the middle. “Wait,” he told Cheryl, and he checked the Bulova again. “Just wait.”

He changed the channel to Fox News. Over there two men and a woman were arguing that the President shouldn’t go on his European trip with all these problems at home, he was shirking his duty to the American people, he was pandering to Europe, he was a Missouri Democrat who didn’t know the meaning of responsibility, he was weak-willed and anyway his wife was no Jackie Kennedy, Laura Bush, or for that matter no Michelle Obama. Then they ended with laughter over the statement that Beale had better get ready for a “Repeal” and they went on to the stock market reports from Indonesia.

Dave turned back to CNN. The timestamp on the network said it was 10:09. His watch was one minute slow. Now the newscaster had gone on to a report of an American cargo ship being threatened by Somalian pirates last night but they’d been turned away by a patrol boat.

“Lordy!” Cheryl said. “What’s so important about watching the news today?”

“Something’s coming,” he told her before he could stop it from getting out.

“What?”

“Coming from the sky. Listen…I don’t know…I feel messed up.”

“You’re scaring me,” she said. “Cut it out.”

He lit a cigarette with his Bic and drew it in as if it were the last smoke he would have in this world.

“What happened out there? Dave, talk to me!” She put her arm around his shoulders and found he was trembling, which really put the fear in her. Her husband wasn’t scared of anything, he would fight the Devil if he thought it was right. But now…

“This is the third of April?” he asked.

“You know it is! Your birthday is in two weeks, you’ve been—”

“Wait.” Dave blew smoke through his nostrils. “Wait and watch.”

She waited, her heart pounding and her arm around the trembling shoulders. He made a soft noise like a cry down deep in his soul, and that sound almost put her on the cell phone for an ambulance because she had never, ever seen him like this before.

Another long and terrible minute went past, during which Dave smoked in silence and Cheryl said nothing.

The CNN newscaster then began to talk to a specialist in the housing market about mortgage rates and such, and what would happen if this or that took place and how people were going to cope.

“I don’t know what we’re supposed to be waiting for,” Cheryl said.

Dave rubbed a hand across his forehead. Bits and pieces were coming back; it was like a big jigsaw puzzle of memories in his head, and some slid right in but some wouldn’t fit. He wanted to throw up because his stomach roiled, but he was afraid to leave the TV.

That portion of the news ended, and the newscaster turned to the anti-government protests in Bangkok that had started last week and had so far caused three deaths and twelve injuries in clashes between protesters and police. A young man with slicked-back black hair and wearing studious-looking glasses came on; it was night, with a few lights burning behind him. Dave didn’t know how many hours Thailand was ahead of Colorado but he figured it had to be nearly the next day over there.

The young man was asked the question, “What’s the situation there tonight, Craig?”

Craig started to speak into his microphone but then stopped; his face was pale and his eyes were both dazed and terrified behind the glasses. He looked up toward the sky and then back to the camera, and suddenly there was a noise like two or three sonic booms overlapping each other, and Craig threw up a hand as if to shield his face from some horrible sight. “Oh Jesus, oh Jesus!” he cried out, nearly sobbing, and he lurched from the scene as the camera turned from him to scan the sky. At first there was nothing in the sky but darkness. The camera searched back and forth, enough to make any viewer ill with motion sickness. It found the half moon and what appeared to be the lights of a passing jetliner.

“We’re having a situation there, evidently,” the newcaster said over the visual, his voice tight but measured and calm in the way that all newscasters must sound to ease the fears of their audience. “Some kind of situation. We may have just heard a bomb explosion. Craig, are you there? Craig?”

The camera jiggled back and forth, turning the nightime lights into blurry ribbons of color. It picked out Thai people on the street, some standing in groups talking, others walking around as if just waking up from a bad dream. A man who appeared to be wearing a sleep robe suddenly ran past the camera hollering and shrieking with his hands in the air.

Craig was back on-camera. “Jim?” he said. He spoke with a British accent. A lock of black hair had come free and hung over one eye. “Jim, can you hear me?”

“We can hear you, go ahead.”

“This is crazy,” Cheryl said, and Dave drew hard on his cigarette again.

“They didn’t come!” Craig sounded choked. “Jim, they didn’t come!”

“I’m sorry, I’m not getting that! What?”

“They didn’t come!” Craig repeated, and now he had begun to weep. “Oh Christ…Jesus…they didn’t come…like they did last time, and I was standing right here…right here, the very same. I heard the noise, but they didn’t come!”

Ethan, Dave thought. The peacekeeper. The alien timepiece at the S-4 installation. It worked. And he said he would keep the Gorgons from coming through, and if they didn’t come neither would the Cyphers.

“Jim, don’t you remember?” Craig called out. Behind him a car rocketed along the street, its driver wildly honking the horn.

The scene went to black.

It stayed that way for maybe six seconds.

Then Jim the CNN newscaster came back on, and he was talking to someone off to the right but there was no sound. He shrugged and made a gesture with his arms that said I have no damned idea what’s wrong with Craig, and then the network went to a commercial for SafeLite autoglass repair.

Dave looked at his wife through the screen of cigarette smoke. A little worry line between her eyes seemed to be a mile deep. He was about to ask her if she remembered any of it but of course she didn’t, because if she had she would’ve known that time had been reeled back, they’d been given a second chance, and the Gorgons weren’t coming. Maybe they were trying to get through, and that’s what caused the noise over Bangkok, but they were hitting the protective web the peacekeeper had created. Dave checked his watch. It was 10:17. They weren’t coming, because by this time on that morning of April third, he and Cheryl had been standing here watching the first amateur videos of the Gorgon ships sliding through the blasts, and then Cheryl had said Dear God we’ve got to go get the boys.

Cheryl’s cell chimed. “It’s the school,” she said, and she answered it.

Dave turned to Fox News. “…a little confused here,” said the blonde woman who sat at the desk between the two men. She was holding an earpiece in her ear with one finger, trying to get information and relay it as quickly as possible. “Okay…what we’re getting is…”

“We’ve got to get to the school right now,” Cheryl said. She was already going for her jacket and purse.

“What is it, baby?”

“It’s Mike. That was Mrs. Serling in the office. Mike’s crying, he’s having some kind of fit. He’s begging to come home. Dave, what’s happening?”

Mike remembers, Dave realized. Maybe it’s not all clear to him, but he’s remembering something.

“…dementia going on,” the blonde woman on Fox said. “We’re getting…just a minute…reports of…I’m sorry, I’ve lost that connection.”

“Hold on.” One of the men also was listening through an earpiece. “We’re putting up a crawl, it should be up in just a few seconds. A bit of odd news, I guess.”

“What’s not odd news these days?” asked the other man, and he gave a nervous laugh.

“Not an emergency,” the first man went on, holding up a hand as if to restrain the audience from reaching for their cellphones in a panic. “Reports coming in of…get this, odd news like I said…multiple sonic booms in the sky over Chicago, Atlanta, and New York…well, I didn’t hear anything, did you?”

“Not me,” said the other man. “There’s the crawl.”

Across the bottom of the screen, the words were as the man had already said: Multiple sonic booms reported over several cities, unknown origin.

“I’m getting…what?” The blonde woman was no longer on her earpiece, but was talking to someone off-camera. She returned her attention to the audience, and she was cool and collected when she said, “We’re getting preliminary reports that the sounds—and they’re being identified as sonic booms—have been heard over Moscow and Helsinki. We’ll be getting more details on this later, I’m sure, but we’ll have to let the scientists figure this one out, folks.”

“I’m no scientist but one thing I’m pretty sure of,” said the man who’d given the nervous laugh. He was smiling, and for the moment he was everyone’s good friend and hand-holder. “It’s not the end of the world. We’re going to go to break and then we’re coming right back with investment tips from Doctor Money.”

“Let’s go,” Cheryl urged. “Mike needs us.”

“Yeah,” Dave said. He turned the flatscreen off. Cheryl was alive. The boys were alive. The world was alive, and there were no Gray Men. A rush of emotion almost knocked him down. Cheryl was moving toward the door, in a hurry to go get their younger son. “Yesterday,” he said before she could reach for the doorknob. “What happened yesterday?”

“What? Yesterday? You don’t remember?”

“Tell me.”

She gave him a look now that told him she was really frightened, and that either he was out of his head—unlikely, for such a steady head as his—or that…she didn’t really know, but she thought whatever it was had something to do with that craziness on TV. And that hooking those things together sounded crazy, too. “We got up,” she said in a quiet voice, “I took the boys to school, you cut down the rest of the dead tree, and then you went to work. You said Hank Lockhart’s new porch was going to be an easy project. I talked to Mom about Ann’s insurance settlement from the wreck. UPS brought that package from Amazon about two o’clock.”

“Oh yeah,” he recalled. “The Civil War book.”

“You came home, we had dinner—meatloaf, turnip greens, and mashed potatoes, if you don’t remember my cooking—and then we watched a little TV. You helped Steven with his math homework. About ten o’clock Randall called to ask you to work at the bar this weekend. Then we turned in. It was just a normal day and night.” Her blonde eyebrows went up. “Am I missing anything?”

Dave looked down at the floor of the house he loved. He thought that if he started laughing he might not be able to stop and then it might turn to tears and…oh Christ, what was he going to do with the memories that were becoming clearer and clearer in his mind? He remembered the pain of that spiked arm going into him; he remembered the helpless frustration of being taken from that nightmare world before he was ready, of not being able to see the thing through with the alien timepiece. After that, he didn’t remember anything…but who knew whether he might recall something of being dead or not?

The peacekeeper had said it: Some will know it happened…some will have their memories of this erased.

He wondered how many would remember. One in fifty? One in a hundred, or one in a thousand? Would the President remember, or the First Lady? And how about the unknown boy who had taken the name of Ethan Gaines? Would he ever know what he had been such a crucial part of? How many would recall that they had died, or found gray splotches on their bodies before the agony set in that transformed their flesh and bones? He hoped no one would remember past that point. He hoped the greater power at least was kinder than that. He was sure he would find out, in time.

Time.

It was what Hannah had asked for. Her request in the bed at the White Mansion.

More time.

“Let me hold you for a minute,” Dave said, and he took a few steps and put his arms around Cheryl, and he thought he could squeeze her so hard she could merge right into him, become so close heart-to-heart and soul-to-soul that never for a moment would they ever truly be apart again. He would hug the boys the same way, and they were going to travel and do some things that were fun, things they’d wanted to do and been putting off, because what was the point of getting a second chance if you didn’t use it? He would have a good long talk with Mike, and he would make sure the boy knew those things were not coming back, not ever, and he had the promise of a very special Spacekid that it was so.

“I love you so much,” he told her, and his eyes filled with tears but he didn’t let her see; that would send her way over the edge. He was able to wipe his eyes on the sleeve of his jacket and then he kissed her cheek and her forehead and her lips, her body warm and alive against his, but it was time…time…time to go get their boy.

As they walked to the pickup truck from the house, hand in hand, Dave heard the tolling of a distant church bell. It carried through the bright, clear air. Someone else remembers, he thought. They are telling the world, in their own way. It was not a funereal sound, it was not a sound of sadness or loss or surrender. It was the sound of a new beginning.

Just like Ethan said, Dave thought as Cheryl got behind the wheel and he climbed into the passenger side…this was going to make for an interesting and challenging future.

He wouldn’t miss it for the world.

Olivia and Victor Quintero were riding horses on their ranch just after ten o’clock in the morning. They had a dinner party to attend tomorrow night, a group of friends they got together with every couple of months. It was going to be at The Melting Pot on East Mountain Avenue. Olivia and Victor were talking about planning a cruise to the Greek islands in the autumn, because both of them had always wanted to see the blue Aegean and the home of the heroes.

They stopped for awhile and sat under some trees that were just about to start blooming. The world was waking up again from what had seemed like a very long winter. They had so much to look forward to. Tonight they were looking forward to lighting up the chiminea and watching the stars come out, having a glass of wine and just talking about life in the way that lovers who are also great friends do.

Simple pleasures were very often the best. Both Olivia and Victor understood that time was a gift to be cherished. And if anyone doubted that, they could always get a straight answer from the Magic Eight Ball.

At eighteen minutes after ten, Dr. John Douglas was doing paperwork in his office, catching up with insurance forms, when one of his nurses knocked on the door and looked in.

“Can I get you some coffee?” she asked.

“No, thanks. I’m fine. Just have this stuff to do. Oh…will you do me a big favor and call Deborah for me? Ask her if she wants me to stop by the Whole Foods and pick up some pasta for…no, check that…I’ll call her myself, in just a few minutes.”

“All right.” She frowned, and he knew something was wrong.

“What is it, Sophie?”

“Well…it’s strange. It’s on TV, on all the stations. They’re saying people are hearing these sonic booms everywhere. Like all around the world. Just sonic booms, and that’s all.”

“Hm,” JayDee said. “I’ve never heard of anything like that before.”

“I know, it’s really strange. It’s getting people freaked out.”

“Could be a meteor blowing up in the atmosphere, I guess. But that wouldn’t be all around the world, would it? I don’t know, I’m just an old doctor.”

“Do you want to come take a look? They’re playing videos people have taken, and you can hear the sounds.”

He surveyed the dreaded paperwork. Any excuse to get up and away from his desk. But…no.

“I’d better stick with this for right now. Maybe later, thank you.”

Sophie hadn’t been gone but a few minutes when the phone rang. It was Deborah, calling from home. Her younger sister in San Fransisco had just phoned with the weirdest story she’d ever heard in her life, something about spaceships and aliens and a war being fought and…it was just weird. Deborah said she thought the two hits of LSD Sissy took back at Berkeley must be showing up now, after all these years.

“I wouldn’t doubt that,” JayDee said. “Listen…I may be home early. Do you want me to stop by Whole Foods and pick up some pasta?”

Deborah said that would be great, and she was going to call Sissy back to try to settle her down.

“Good for you,” he told her. “And tell her if she’s smoking pot, to cut back on that too.” Then he said he loved her, and he hung up the phone, and there was still all that darn paperwork to get done.

When the ungodly blast went off in the sky almost over her head, Regina Jericho dropped the pistol in the grass and looked up.

There was nothing. Only sky, with a few slowly drifting clouds.

Jefferson sat in the blue Adirondack chair, overlooking the pasture and his kingdom of New Eden. The shadows of the big oak moved in a soft wind. He looked at the gun and then into Regina’s face, and she thought that something was different about his eyes…something…but she didn’t know what it was, because she thought she had never really known this man at all. She thought about reaching for the gun again and finishing the job. That hadn’t been the voice of God up there saving Jefferson Jericho from paying for his sins; it had just been an Air Force jet or something breaking the sound barrier.

He said quietly, “Don’t throw your life away, Regina.”

She paused with her hand outstretched to retrieve the pistol. But then she straightened up, because he was right.

“I’ll ruin you,” she said. “I’ll call every lawyer in Nashville, I’ll get the detective’s testimony, I’ll tear you to pieces. I won’t let you hurt anybody else, Jefferson. You’re done. Do you hear me? You are done.”

He gave her the faintest trace of a smile.

“All right,” he said.

“I mean it! I’m going in and make some calls and there’s not a damned thing you can do to stop me, you bastard! I know where all the skeletons are buried!”

“Yes, you do,” he agreed. When she started to pick up the pistol again, to take it back to the desk in his office because she realized killing him that way would be suicide and there were other ways to kill him, he said, “You can leave the gun where it is.”

“You’re going to be so sorry!” she promised. “So sorry you were ever born!” Without looking at him again, without soiling her eyes on his dirty presence, she turned away and walked back along the path to the English-style mansion of his dreams, in the land of his crooked rainbows, and when she was on her cell phone in the hallway she heard a small pop that might have been—must have been—a car backfiring down in New Eden, where the sunlight made the copper-accented roofs glow like heavenly gold and the Church of the High Rollers might have been made of white wax, on the verge of melting.

“Kevin Austin,” said Mr. Novotny. “You’re up!”

The boy stood up from his desk. His heart was beating hard. He was nervous, even after all his careful work and preparation. He picked up the model of the Visible Man and took it to the front of the classroom to begin.

Kidneys, stomach. Large intestine, small intestine, pancreas. Liver, spleen, lungs. Brain, heart.

It had occurred to him, as he’d constructed the model and put the project together, that the Visible Man was lacking something very important, and it was such a vital part of a human being but it could never be shown in any science class because it was a thing intangible, unable to be weighed or measured, yet without this component Man was truly an empty shell.

That intangible thing was called a soul. When any of these organs were damaged and life was threatened, it was the power of the soul that kicked in to keep the flesh going. It was the driving force that said a person either lie down, gave up hope and died, or had the strength to live one more day…and one more…and one more again.

For some reason Kevin had had strength of purpose on his mind lately. He had been thinking about the soul, about how some people fell under hardship and some people got up dusty and bloody and kept going no matter what. His mom, for instance, after the very tough divorce. The Visible Man could show all the wonders of the human body, all the magnificent constructions and connections, but it could not reveal what made up a hero, who fought the good fight from day to day and never gave up.

He was talking about the brain, the seat of intelligence, when the door opened and Mrs. Bergeson looked in. She wore a frightened expression, which put Kevin and the entire class instantly on edge.

“Something is happening,” she told Mr. Novotny. “It’s on all the news, everywhere. Something is happening.”

“What is it?”

“Strange sounds in the sky,” she said. “Sonic booms. Hundreds of them, all around the world. I thought…you being a science teacher, you might want to come look at the newscasts.”

Mr. Novotny paused, his hand up to his chin and a finger tapping. Then he said, “I’m sure there’s a rational explanation, and I’m sure the news people will work it to death. Right now, Kevin’s giving his presentation.”

“You mean you—”

“Will catch it later, yes, and thank you for the information,” he said, and when she’d retreated he told Kevin to continue.

Kidneys, stomach. Large intestine, small intestine, pancreas. Liver, spleen, lungs. Brain, heart.

Not nearly all that made up a human being.

Not nearly all.

He’d never thought about what he was going to do with his life, but he wondered what being a doctor would be like. He seemed to remember somebody saying—and maybe this was on TV—that Every kid who ever grew up to be a doctor probably put that thing together.

He couldn’t remember exactly where he’d heard that said, but it sounded right.

As Kevin continued—the report was not long enough to be boring nor short enough to be skimpy on the facts, his mom had helped him time it—he had a strange experience.

Some part of his brain said he ought to go bowling one Saturday night. And he ought to go up to Fort Collins, to the Bowl-A-Rama there.

Now that was strange.

When he finished, he didn’t know what else to say. He thought he’d done well; he’d done the best he could, and what more could anyone ask?

Kevin picked up the Visible Man. He said, “I guess I’m done.”

Then he went back to his seat, and the day went on.

Table of Contents

Part One

One

Two

Three

Four

Five