Midnight Read online

  Behind her the door to Shaddack’s enormous private office stood open. No lights were on in there. It was illuminated only by the light of the storm-torn day, which came through the blinds in ash-gray bands.

  “When will he be in?” Loman asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “No appointments?”

  “None.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “No.”

  Loman walked out. For a while he prowled the half-deserted corridors, offices, labs, and tech rooms, hoping to spot Shaddack.

  Before long, however, he decided that Shaddack was not lurking about the premises. Evidently the great man was staying mobile on this last day of Moonlight Cove’s conversion.

  Because of me, Loman thought. Because of what I said to him last. night at Peyser’s. He’s afraid of me, and he’s either staying mobile or gone to ground somewhere, making himself difficult to find.

  Loman left the building, returned to his patrol car, and set out in search of his maker.

  26

  In the downstairs half-bath off the kitchen, naked from the waist up, Sam sat on the closed lid of the commode, and Tessa performed the same kind of nursing duties she’d performed earlier for Chrissie. But Sam’s wounds were more serious than the girl’s.

  In a dime-size circle on his forehead, above his right eye, the skin had been tensed off, and in the center of the circle the flesh had been entirely eaten away, revealing a speck of bared bone about an eighth of an inch in diameter. Stanching the flow of blood from those tiny, severed capillaries required a few minutes of continuous pressure, followed by the application of iodine, a liberal coating of NuSkin, and a tightly taped gauze bandage. But even after all these efforts, the gauze slowly darkened with red stain.

  As Tessa worked on him, Sam told them what had happened:

  “… so if I hadn’t shot her in the head, just then … if I’d been a second or two slower, I think that damn thing, that probe, whatever it was, it would have bored right through my skull and sunk into my brain, and she’d have connected with me the way she was connected with that computer.”

  Her toga forsaken in favor of dry jeans and blouse, Chrissie stood just inside the bathroom, white-faced but wanting to hear all.

  Harry had pulled his wheelchair into the doorway.

  Moose was lying at Sam’s feet, rather than at Harry’s. The dog seemed to realize that at the moment the visitor needed comforting more than Harry did.

  Sam was colder to the touch than could be explained by his time in the chilly rain. He was trembling, and periodically the shivers that passed through him were so powerful that his teeth chattered.

  The more Sam talked, the colder Tessa became, too, and in time his shivers were communicated to her.

  His right wrist had been cut on both sides, when Harley Coltrane had gripped him with a powerful bony hand. No major blood vessels had been severed; neither gash required stitches, and Tessa quickly stopped the bleeding there. The bruises, which had barely begun to appear and would not fully flower for hours yet, were going to be worse than the cuts. He complained of pain in the joint, and his hand was weak, but she did not think that any bones had been broken or crushed.

  “… as if they’d somehow been given the ability to control their physical form,” Sam said shakily, “to make anything they wanted of themselves, mind over matter, just like Chrissie said when she told us about the priest, the one who started to become the creature from that movie.”

  The girl nodded.

  “I mean, they changed before my eyes, grew these probes, tried to spear me. Yet with this incredible control of their bodies, of their physical substance, all they apparently wanted to make of themselves was … something out of a bad dream.”

  The wound on his abdomen was the least of the three. As on his forehead, the skin was stripped away in a dime-sized circle, though the probe that had struck him there seemed to have been meant to burn rather than cut its way into him. His flesh was scorched, and the wound itself was pretty much cauterized.

  From his wheelchair Harry said, “Sam, do you think they’re really people who control themselves, who have chosen to become machinelike, or are they people who’ve somehow been taken over by machines, against their will?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam said. “It could be either, I guess.”

  “But how could they be taken over, how could this happen, how could such a change in the human body be accomplished? And how does what’s happened to the Coltranes tie in with the Boogeymen?”

  “Damned if I know,” Sam said. “Somehow it’s all related to New Wave. Got to be. And none of us here knows anything much about the cutting edge of that kind of technology, so we don’t even have the basic knowledge required to speculate intelligently. It might as well be magic to us, supernatural. The only way we’ll ever really understand what’s happened is to get help from outside, quarantine Moonlight Cove, seize New Wave’s labs and records, and reconstruct it the way fire marshals reconstruct the history of a fire from what they sift out of the ashes.”

  “Ashes?” Tessa asked as Sam stood up and as she helped him into his shirt. “This talk about fires and ashes—and other things you’ve said—make it sound as if you think whatever’s in Moonlight Cove is building real fast toward an explosion or something.”

  “It is,” he said.

  At first he tried to button his shirt with one hand, but then he allowed Tessa to do it for him. She noticed that his skin was still cold and that his shivers were not subsiding with time.

  He said, “All these murders they’ve got to cover up, these things that stalk the night … there’s a sense that a collapse has begun, that whatever they tried to do here isn’t turning out like they expected, and that the collapse is accelerating.” He was breathing too quickly, too shallowly. He paused, took a deeper breath. “What I saw in the Coltranes’ house … that didn’t look like anything anyone could have planned, not something you’d want to do to people or that they’d want for themselves. It looked like an experiment out of control, biology run amok, reality turned inside out, and I swear to God that if those kinds of secrets are hidden in the houses of this town, then the whole project has to be collapsing on New Wave right now, coming down fast and hard on their heads, whether they want to admit it or not. It’s all blowing up now, right now, one hell of an explosion, and we’re in the middle of it.”

  From the moment he’d stumbled through the kitchen door, dripping rain and blood, throughout the time Tessa had cleaned and bandaged his wounds, she had noticed something that frightened her more than his paleness and shivering. He kept touching them. He had embraced Tessa in the kitchen when she gasped at the sight of the bleeding hole in his forehead; he’d held her and leaned against her and assured her that he was okay. Primarily he seemed to be reassuring himself that she and Harry and Chrissie were okay, as if he had expected to come back and find them … changed. He hugged Chrissie, too, as if she were his own daughter, and he said, “It’ll be all right, everything’ll be all right,” when he saw how frightened she was. Harry held out a hand in concern, and Sam grasped it and was reluctant to let go. In the bathroom, while Tessa dressed his wounds, he had repeatedly touched her hands, her arms, and had once put a hand against her cheek as if wondering at the softness and warmth of her skin. He reached out to touch Chrissie, too, where she stood inside the bathroom door, patting her shoulder, holding her hand for a moment and giving it a reassuring squeeze. Until now he had not been a toucher. He had been reserved, self-contained, cool, even distant. But during the quarter of an hour he’d spent in the Coltrane house, he had been so profoundly shaken by what he had seen that his shell of self-imposed isolation had cracked wide open; he had come to want and need the human contact that, only a short while ago, he had not even ranked as desirable as good Mexican food, Guinness Stout, and Goldie Hawn films.

  When she contemplated the intensity of the horror necessary to transform him so completely and abruptly, T
essa was more frightened than ever because Sam Booker’s redemption seemed akin to that of a sinner who, on his deathbed, glimpsing hell, turns desperately to the god he once shunned, seeking comfort and reassurance. Was he less sure now of their chances of escaping? Perhaps he was seeking human contact because, having denied it to himself for so many years, he believed that only hours remained in which to experience the communion of his own kind before the great, deep endless darkness settled over them.

  27

  Shaddack awoke from his familiar and comforting dream of human and machine parts combined in a world-spanning engine of incalculable power and mysterious purpose. He was, as always, refreshed as much by the dream as by sleep itself.

  He got out of the van and stretched. Using tools he found in the garage, he forced open the connecting door to the late Paula Parkins’s house. He used her bathroom, then washed his hands and face.

  Upon returning to the garage, he raised the big door. He pulled the van out into the driveway, where it could better transmit and receive data by microwave.

  Rain was still falling, and depressions in the lawn were filled with water. Already wisps of fog stirred in the windless air, which probably meant the banks of fog that rolled in from the sea later in the day would be even denser than those last night.

  He took another ham sandwich and a Coke from the cooler and ate while using the van’s VDT to check on the progress of Moonhawk. The 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M. schedule for four hundred and fifty conversions was still under way. Already, at 12:50, slightly less than seven hours into the twelve-hour program, three hundred and nine had been injected with full-spectrum micro spheres. The conversion teams were well ahead of schedule.

  He checked on the progress of the search for Samuel Booker and the Lockland woman. Neither had been found.

  Shaddack should have been worried about their disappearance. But he was unconcerned. He had seen the moonhawk, after all, not once but three times, and he had no doubt that ultimately he would achieve all of his goals.

  The Foster girl was still missing too. He didn’t trouble himself about her either. She had probably encountered something deadly in the night. At times regressives could be useful.

  Perhaps Booker and the Lockland woman had fallen victim to those same creatures. It would be ironic if the regressives—the only flaw in the project, and a potentially serious one—should prove to have preserved the secret of Moonhawk.

  Through the VDT, he tried to reach Tucker at New Wave, then at his home, but the man was at neither place. Could Watkins be correct? Was Tucker a regressive and, like Peyser, unable to find his way back to human form? Was he out there in the woods right now, trapped in an altered state?

  Clicking off the computer, Shaddack sighed. After everyone had been converted at midnight, this first phase of Moonhawk would not be finished. Not quite. They’d evidently have a few messes to mop up.

  28

  In the cellar of the Icarus Colony, three bodies had become one. The resultant entity was without rigid shape, boneless, featureless, a mass of pulsing tissue that lived in spite of lacking a brain and heart and blood vessels, without organs of any kind. It was primal, a thick protein soup, brainless but aware, eyeless but seeing, earless but hearing, without a gut but hungry.

  The agglomerations of silicon microspheres had dissolved within it. That inner computer could no longer function in the radically altered substance of the creature, and in turn the beast had no use any more for the biological assistance that the microspheres had been designed to provide. Now it was not linked to Sun, the computer at New Wave. If the microwave transmitter there sent a death order, it would not receive the command—and would live.

  It had become the master of its physiology by reducing itself, to the uncomplicated essence of physical existence. Their three minds also had become one. The consiousness now dwelling in that darkness was as lacking in complex form as the amorphous, jellied body it inhabited.

  It had relinquished its memory because memories were recordings of events and relationships that had consequences, and consequences—good or bad—implied that one was responsible for one’s actions. Flight from responsibility had driven the creature to regression in the first place. Pain was another shedding memory—the pain of recalling what had been lost.

  Likewise, it had surrendered the capacity to consider the future, to plan, to dream.

  Now it had no past of which it was aware, and the concept of a future was beyond its ken. It lived only for the moment, Unthinking, unfeeling, uncaring.

  It had one need. To survive.

  And to survive, it needed only one thing. To feed.

  29

  The breakfast dishes had been cleared from the table while Sam was at the Coltranes’ house, battling monsters that apparently had been part human and part computer and part zombies—and maybe, for all they knew, part toaster oven. After Sam was bandaged, Chrissie gathered with him and Tessa and Harry around the kitchen table again, to listen to them discuss what action to take next.

  Moose stayed at Chrissie’s side, regarding her with soulful brown eyes, as if he adored her more than life itself. She couldn’t resist giving him all the petting and scratching-behind-the-ears that he wanted.

  “The greatest problem of our age,” Sam said, “is how to keep technological progress accelerating, how to use it to improve the quality of life—without being overwhelmed by it. Can we employ the computer to redesign our world, to remake our lives, without one day coming to worship it?” He blinked at Tessa and said, “It’s not a silly question.”

  Tessa frowned. “I didn’t say it was. Sometimes we have a blind trust in machines, a tendency to believe that whatever a computer tells us is gospel—”

  “To forget the old maxim,” Harry injected, “which says ‘garbage in, garbage out.’”

  “Exactly,” Tessa agreed. “Sometimes, when we get data or analyses from computers, we treat it as if the machines were all infallible. Which is dangerous because a computer application can be conceived, designed, and implemented by a madman, Perhaps not as easily as by a benign genius but certainly as effectively.”

  Sam said, “Yet people have a tendency—no, even a deep desire—to want to depend on the machines.”

  “Yeah,” Harry said, “that’s our sorry damn need to shift responsibility whenever we possibly can. A spineless desire to get out from under responsibility is in our genes, I swear it is, and the only way we get anywhere in this world is by constantly fighting our natural inclination to be utterly irresponsible. Sometimes I wonder if that’s what we got from the devil when Eve listened to the serpent and ate the apple—this aversion to responsibility. Most evil has it roots there.”

  Chrissie noticed this subject energized Harry. With his one good arm and a little help from his half-good leg, he levered himself higher in his wheelchair. Color seeped into his previously pale face. He made a fist of one hand and stared at it intently, as if holding something precious in that tight grip, as if he held the idea there and didn’t want to let go of it until he had fully explored it.

  He said, “Men steal and kill and lie and cheat because they, feel no responsibility for others. Politicians want power, and they want acclaim when their policies succeed, but they seldom stand up and take the responsibility for failure. The world’s full of people who want to tell you how to live your life, how to make heaven right here on earth, but when their ideas turn out half-baked, when it ends in Dachau or the Gulag or the mass murders that followed our departure from Southeast Asia, they turn their heads, avert their eyes, and pretend they had no responsibility for the slaughter.”

  He shuddered, and Chrissie shuddered too, though she was not entirely sure that she entirely understood everything he was, saying.

  “Jesus,” he continued, “if I’ve thought about this once, I’ve thought about it a thousand times, ten thousand, maybe because, of the war.”

  “Vietnam, you mean?” Tessa said.

  Harry nodded. He was still stari
ng at his fist. “In the war, to survive, you had to be responsible every minute of every day, unhesitatingly responsible for yourself, for your every action. You had to be responsible for your buddies, too, because survival wasn’t something that could be achieved alone. That was maybe the one positive thing about fighting in a war—it clarifies your thinking and makes you realize that a sense of responsibility is what separates good men from the damned. I don’t regret the war, not even considering what happened to me there. I learned that great lesson, learned to be responsible in all things, and I still feel responsible to the people we were fighting for, always will, and sometimes when I think of how we abandoned them to the killing fields, the mass graves, I lay awake at night and cry because they depended on me, and to the extent that I was a part of the process, I’m responsible for failing them.”

  They were all silent.

  Chrissie felt a peculiar pressure in her chest, the same feeling she always got in school when a teacher—any teacher, any subject—began to talk about something which had been previously unknown to her and which so impressed her that it changed the way she looked at the world. It didn’t happen often, but it was always both a scary and wonderful sensation. She felt it now, because of what Harry had said, but the sensation was ten times or a hundred times stronger than it had ever been when some new insight or idea had been passed to her in geography or math or science.

  Tessa said, “Harry, I think your sense of responsibility in this case is excessive.”

  He finally looked up from his fist. “No. it can never be. Your sense of responsibility to others can never be excessive.” He smiled at her. “But I know you just well enough to suspect you’re already aware of that, Tessa, whether you realize it or not.” He looked at Sam and said, “Some of those who came out of the war saw no good at all in it. When I meet up with them, I always suspect they were the ones who never learned the lesson, and I avoid them—though I suppose that’s unfair. Can’t help it. But when I meet a man from the war and see he learned the lesson, then I’d trust him with my life. Hell, I’d trust him with my soul, which in this case seems to be what they want to steal. You’ll get us out of this, Sam.” At last he opened his fist. “I’ve no doubt of that.”

  Tessa seemed surprised. To Sam she said, “You were in Vietnam?”

  Sam nodded. “Between junior college and the Bureau.”

  “But you never mentioned it. This morning, when we were eating breakfast, when you told me all the reasons you saw the world so differently from the way I saw it, you mentioned your wife’s death, the murder of your partners, your situation with your son, but not that.”

  Sam stared at his bandaged wrist for a while and finally said, “The war is the most personal experience of my life.”

  “What an odd thing to say.”

  “Not odd at all,” Harry said. “The most intense and the most personal.”

  Sam said, “If I’d not come to terms with it, I’d probably still talk about it, probably run on about it all the time. But I have come to terms with it. I’ve understood. And now to talk about it casually with someone I’ve just met would … well, cheapen it, I guess.”

  Tessa looked at Harry and said, “But you knew he was in Vietnam?”

  “Yes.”

  “Just knew it somehow.”

  “Yes.”

  Sam had been leaning over the table. Now he settled back in his chair. “Harry, I swear I’ll do my best to get us out of this. But I wish I had a better grasp of what we’re up against. It all comes from New Wave. But exactly what have they done, and how can it be stopped? And how can I hope to deal with it when, I don’t even understand it?”

  To that point Chrissie had felt that the conversation had been way over her head, even though all of it had been fascinating and though some of it had stirred the learning feeling in her But now she felt that she had to contribute: “Are you really sure it’s not aliens?”

  “We’re sure,” Tessa said, smiling at her, and Sam ruffled her hair.

  “Well,” Chrissie said, “what I mean is, maybe what went wrong at New Wave is that aliens landed there and used it as a base, and maybe they want to turn us all into machines, like the Coltranes, so we can serve them as slaves—which, when you think about it, is more sensible than wanting to eat us. They’re aliens, after all, which means they have alien stomachs and alien digestive juices, and we’d probably be real hard to digest, giving them heartburn, maybe even diarrhea.”

  Sam, who was sitting in the chair beside Chrissie, took both her hands and held them gently in his, as aware of her abraded palm as he was aware of his own injured wrist. “Chrissie, I don’t know if you’ve been paying too much attention to what Harry’s been saying—”

  “Oh, yes,” she said at once. “All of it.”

  “Well, then you’ll understand when I tell you that wanting to blame all these horrors on aliens is yet another way of shifting the responsibility from where it really belongs—on us, on people, on our very real and very great capacity to do harm to one another. it’s hard to believe that anybody, even crazy men, would want to make the Coltranes into what they became, but somebody evidently did want just that. If we try to blame it on aliens or the devil or God or trolls or whatever—we won’t be likely to see the situation clearly enough to figure out how to save ourselves. You understand?”

  “Sort of.”

  He smiled at her. He had a very nice smile, though he didn’t flash it much. “I think you understand it more than sort of.”

  “More than sort of,” Chrissie agreed. “It’d sure be nice if it was aliens, because we’d just have to find their nest or their hive or whatever, burn them out real good, maybe blow up their spaceship, and it would be over and done with. But if it’s not aliens, if it’s us—people like us—who did all this, then maybe it’s never quite over and done with.”

  30