But pockets of darkness remained, and the constantly moving light enlivened the shadows as well.
“What now?” Holly asked softly.
Jim noticed that something had happened to the yellow tablet on the floor between them. “Look.”
Words had appeared on the top third of the first page. They looked as if they had been formed by a finger dipped in ink:
I AM WITH YOU.
6
Holly had been distracted — to say the least! — by the light-show, but she did not think that Jim could have leaned to the tablet and printed the words with the felt-tip pen or any other instrument without drawing her attention. Yet she found it hard to believe that some disembodied presence had conveyed the message.
“I think we're being encouraged to ask questions,” Jim said.
“Then ask it what it is,” she said at once.
He wrote a question on the second tablet, which he was holding, and showed it to her:
As they watched, the answer appeared on the first tablet, which lay between and slightly in front of them at such an angle that they could both read it. The words were not burnt onto the paper and were not formed by ink that dripped magically from the air. Instead, the irregular, wavery letters appeared as dim gray shapes and grew darker as they seemed to float up out of the paper, as though a page of the tablet were not one-five-hundredth of an inch thick but a pool of liquid many feet deep. She recognized immediately that this was similar to the effect she had seen earlier when the balls of light had risen to the center of the pond before bursting and casting concentric rings of illumination outward through the water; this was, as well, how the light had first welled up in the limestone walls before the blocks had become thoroughly translucent.
THE FRIEND.
Who are you? The Friend.
It seemed to be an odd self-description. Not “your friend” or “a friend” but
For an alien intelligence, if indeed that's all it was, the name had curious spiritual implications, connotations of divinity. Men had given God many names — Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Zeus, Aesir — but even more titles. God was The Almighty, The Eternal Being, The Infinite, The Father, The Savior, The Creator, The Light. The Friend seemed to fit right into that list.
Jim quickly wrote another question and showed it to Holly:
ANOTHER WORLD.
Which could mean anything from heaven to Mars.
YES.
“My God,” Holly said, awed in spite of herself.
So much for the great hereafter.
She looked up from the tablet and met Jim's eyes. They seemed to shine brighter than ever, although the chrome-yellow light had imparted to them an exceptional green tint.
Restless with excitement, she rose onto her knees, then eased back again, sitting on her calves. The top tablet page was filled with the entity's responses. Holly equivocated only briefly, then tore it off and set it aside, so they could see the second page. She glanced back and forth between Jim's questions and the rapidly appearing answers.
YES.
YES.
YES.
10,000 YEARS.
As she stared at that figure, it seemed to Holly that this moment was more like a dream than some of the actual dreams she'd been having lately. After so much mystery, there were answers — but they seemed to be coming too easily. She did not know what she had expected, but she had not imagined that the murkiness in which they had been operating would clear as quickly as if a drop of a magical universal detergent had been dropped into it.
“Ask her why she's here,” Holly said, tearing off the second sheet and putting it with the first.
Jim was surprised.
“Why not?”
He brightened. “Why not?” he agreed.
He turned to a new page in his own tablet and wrote her question:
Floating up through the paper to the surface: TO OBSERVE, TO STUDY, TO HELP MANKIND.
“You know what this is like?” Holly said.
“What's it like?”
“An episode of
“The old TV show?”
“Yeah.”
“Wasn't that before your time?”
“It's on cable.”
“But what do you mean it's like an episode of
She frowned at TO OBSERVE, TO STUDY, TO HELP MANKIND and said, “Don't you think it's a little … trite?”
“Trite?” He was irritated. “No, I don't. Because I haven't any idea what alien contact
“I'm sorry. I don't know … it's just… okay, let's see where this leads.”
She had to admit that she was no less awed than she had been when the light had first appeared in the walls. Her heart continued to thud hard and fast, and she was still unable to draw a really deep breath. She still felt that they were in the presence of something superhuman, maybe even a higher power by one definition or another, and she was humbled by it. Considering what she had seen in the pond, the pulsing luminescence even now swimming through the wall, and the words that kept shimmering into view on the tablet, she would have been hopelessly stupid if she had
Undeniably, however, her sense of wonder was dulled by the feeling that this entity was structuring the encounter like an old movie or TV script. With a sarcastic note in his voice, Jim had said that he had too little experience with alien contact to have developed any expectations that could be disappointed. But that was not true. Having grown up in the sixties and seventies, he had been as media-saturated as she had been. They'd been exposed to the same TV shows and movies, magazines and books; science fiction had been a major influence in popular culture all their lives. He had acquired plenty of detailed expectations about what alien contact would be like — and the entity in the wall was playing to all of them. Holly's only conscious expectation had been that a
