The Omega Point

He knew that this was a return of the pavor nocturnus, an effect that was common with this type of sleep disturbance, but that did not change what he was feeling, and now he noticed a very strange sensation, a vibrating coldness that moved across the skin of his chest. He looked down at his nakedness, and saw a flurry of goose bumps rise where it was touching him.

There was somebody there, he knew it. But he couldn’t see them.

Why not?

This was some sort of schizophrenic hallucination, it had to be. But he didn’t possess any genes for schizophrenia, and none of the single nucleotide polymorphism associated with delusions.

So, was there somebody actually in here?

He raised himself up on his elbow. Beside him, Katie moaned softly.

He fumbled for the lamp, finally turning it on—and thought he saw the door slip closed, and jumped up and ran to it and threw it open.

The hallway was empty.

A vivid dream, then.

The next thing he knew, he was standing at the window, the one that looked out over the parking area and the trees. Overhead, an enormous object, brilliant with lights, moved majestically past. It was no plane, this thing, and it was absolutely massive. Gigantic. And behind it was another, and above them two more, and then he raised his eyes and an awe of surpassing power captured him, for he saw hundreds and thousands of these gigantic things, stretching off into the sky until the sky itself was swallowed in auroral discharges.

Then he was inside one of these things, surrounded by columns of light that he somehow knew were living beings, ascended to great heights of the heart, and filled with love so intense that it seemed to thrust him back into early childhood, and he saw his mother and father on the beach at Cape May, Dad calling out, Mother lying with cucumber slices on her eyes, Jack the terrier barking, a tiny girl singing general praises of the day.

They were angels, a fact which he seemed instinctively to know, and he felt absolutely naked in their light. They were so deeply right and so deeply true that he cried out, or imagined that he did, for they also radiated a sense of joy and purity that was without the slightest question the most glorious, the most innocent, and the yet the most awesome emotion he had ever known.

He felt also, though, a certain sadness and he lunged at it in his soul and demanded that it leave him but it did not leave him, far from it, for the next thing he knew he was in darkness absolute, crushed by waves of sick terror. The most glorious of all dreams had turned in an instant into the black and formless mother of all nightmares.

He was moving past stone, down some sort of deep fissure. There came a sensation of heat. Soon, the rock around them was glowing and the heat had become a horrible pain, more like being sanded than burned, but it was hideous. Again and again he threw himself against the walls, back and forth, back and forth, but there was no escape.

Objectively, he knew how serious a seamless, absolute break with reality like this was. Stress induced, yes, so vivid it was the next thing to psychosis.

He went deeper, and as he did the heat rose and he writhed and fought, hammering his fists and kicking, reduced to the frenzy of a panicked child.

Cries came around him, and he could see forms embedded in the walls now, bright, blazing human shapes, and they were all crying out their innocence, but they were not innocent, he could hear it in their tone, a despairing cacophony that bore within it the discordant note of the lie.

A new pain joined the fire, a very definite pain in his right wrist.

And there was somebody yelling, and again and again he was hammering his wrist against the edge of the bedside table, and the exquisite old lamp was bouncing.

Gasping, he wallowed in the sheets, then held his wrist. Jesus God in heaven, had he broken it? No, just the skin, but he had hammered the devil out of it.

“What happened…”

The room was normal, everything quiet. His clock said six forty-five. “Katie?”

His bed was empty. She was gone, and he had to ask himself if she had ever been there.

He knew this imagery, of course. The Christian heaven and hell. So he’d dreamed it, that’s all that had happened, and no matter how vivid, it had been, in the end, just a dream. A symptom of stress, perhaps, but not the psychotic break he had feared.

A sudden voice from the little sitting room beside his bedroom startled him. Male, but who was it? Nobody on staff sounded like that. He threw open the door.

“Excuse me—”

He recognized the voice of The Today Show’s Craig Harding. They were in the window at Rockefeller Center, and people were looking in on them. So the solar storm, also, must have passed and the satellites had switched on again, and the world had resumed. As he dressed, he listened hungrily to the news, which was basically about all the disruptions. But they were disruptions, not the end of the world.

He allowed himself to hope that Mrs. Denman’s white paper had been wrong.

In his luxurious marble shower, he imagined that the foaming body shampoo was washing off the madness of the night. For sure. If the solar storm was gone, life would return to normal very quickly now.

By the time he was striding down to the staff dining room for breakfast, he had put his dream aside.

As he descended the stairs, Glen MacNamara stood waiting for him.

“We have a patient missing.”

He absorbed this.

“Sam Taylor lost Mack.”

“When?”

He paused. “Yesterday afternoon.”

“What? Why wasn’t I informed, Glen?”

“Nobody was informed. Sam was knocked out.”

“But Mack’s on lockdown! Surely the staff noticed this when he didn’t turn up at lights out.”

“Sam asked for time while he looked for him.”

“All night?”

“He let me know about ten.”

“Glen, it’s seven o’clock in the morning and the director of this institution is just finding this out?”

“Doctor, I didn’t see the need to wake you up. What could you do? This is my issue.”

David was about to really get into Glen MacNamara, but the truth was that he was right. He couldn’t have done anything to help.

“Okay,” he said finally. “Could Mack pose a danger to us?”

“It would be damn surprising if we ever saw or heard anything about him again. If you want me to guess, I’d say he won’t last a week out there. It’s hell, Doc. I’m telling you, from the smoke columns I see and all the infrastructure problems, folks are tearing each other apart.” He gestured toward the dining room. “Toast, bacon, coffee, and Gatorade. In here, everybody’s outraged. Out there, it would be a feast.”

They went in together. As he crossed to the buffet, Katie came close to him, discreetly touching his hand.

“At least that scumbag is gone,” she said quietly. “Nobody cared for him.” She brightened. “And anyway, the cable’s back and the sun looks better, and I’ve got a feeling we’re getting past this thing.”

Mrs. Denman’s paper had warned that the solar system was headed much deeper into the supernova’s debris field. Much deeper.

The truth insinuated itself into his mind. They had not come to the edge of the storm at all.

This was the eye.

12. GOLIATH

Caroline woke up on her first morning in the general patient population in a state of intense unease. She