They had an enormous task before them, because one of the most improbable truths about mankind is that the vast majority of people are good, and would not need to sink away into the long contemplation that draws the evil, ever so slowly, to face themselves.
Had we not been rendered soul blind by the catastrophe that destroyed our pre-Egyptian civilization, the coming of the great objects would not have been mysterious to us. But it was mysterious, it was very mysterious, and the immense, drifting shapes only added terror to terror, and people hid, and hid their children, and dared not look upon these machineries of rescue.
Aboard, this caused neither surprise nor concern. If you looked into the workings of these machines, you would find that they were old and worn, full of humble signs that they were somebody’s home.
In this immense universe of ours, worlds die every day, so the objects and their crews were always busy, flashing from one catastrophe to the next, harvesting the spiritual produce of planets in cataclysm with the industry and care of the good farmers that they were.
David had been watching these objects in his mind’s eye, when he heard screams.
They were not cries of madness but of pain—no, agony. Terrible human agony was involved.
“Katie,” he called as he went through the outer office, but she was already far along the hall. As he reached the top of the grand staircase, he saw her at the bottom, turning toward the back of the building and the patients’ activity area.
He slid along the broad mahogany planks of the priceless floor of the front hallway, his stomach churning and congealed. Was there fire down there, or somebody being torn apart by some escaped jacket case, or had one of the dociles suddenly gone berserk?
He went through the empty dining room with its splendid crystal and silver laid out already for tomorrow’s breakfast, and then to the steel door that led into the patient wing.
The uproar was coming, as he had anticipated, from the activity area, which was filled with a white, chalky light unlike any he had ever seen before. Was it radiation from the sun? But why only these windows? So, no.
Katie stood in the doorway, and David stopped beside her. For the first moment, a scene of true terror often makes no sense to the eyes, and that was the case here. What David saw were crowding black silhouettes, all pressed up against the barred armor-glass windows that, at better times, let sunlight flood this space. Then he realized that they were patients, all peering out the windows.
In among the figures was somebody moving quickly, racing back and forth and screaming, and then he saw her run like a mad thing through the parted crowd and leap at least six feet into the air, hurling herself against the outside doors with a horrible crunch.
“Let me through,” he shouted as he went toward her. Katie remained standing, transfixed.
As the crowd parted, David saw two injured people on the floor, Sam Taylor and Beverly Cross. Sam cradled his right arm. Beverly looked up from a swollen face as he passed.
“Careful, David,” she said, “she’s real bad.”
It was Linda Fairbrother.
Caroline was near her. “She’s breaking herself to pieces. David, help her!”
She leaped at the door again, then bounced back and hit the floor with a sickening slap and lay still, a lovely woman covered with bruises, her nose a mass of purple flesh, one eye swollen closed, in the glaring white ocean of the light that shone through the windows and the glass of the door.
“Linda,” he said, kneeling beside her shattered body, “Linda, I am here to help you. I can help you.”
“Let her out,” Caroline cried.
From outside, there rose another sound, low at first, then gaining strength, finally becoming the enormous howl of what must be the largest siren in the history of the world.
As it grew louder, Linda’s body stiffened. Then her good eye swam to the front and stared up into the light.
“David, get back!” Caroline drew him away from Linda.
As if being drawn by some sort of invisible rope, she rose up, knocking him aside in the process. Then she ran toward the door, gathering speed fast. He leaped at her, felt his head and shoulders connect with her body, noted the rigor of extreme panic, then felt himself thrown aside like a rag.
While he tumbled helplessly against Caroline, Linda slammed against the door, hammering it with her hands and shrieking, then leaping against it again and again, so fast that the sound of her body hitting the thick glass was like a series of cannon blasts.
Dear heaven, he had never seen a symptom like this, never in his life.
“Hurry,” Caroline snapped.
If she was going to survive, he saw that he had to open the doors, but if he did, other patients would certainly go out into that light and God only knew what it was.
“All right,” he shouted, “everybody across the room. Staff, help me here—get them back—all of you, get back, give her space.”
Caroline made a gesture, and everybody moved back. David made note of this. Even the staff were watching her for instructions.
Linda leaped up and began slamming against the door again, jumping four or five feet into the air each time.
“Do it, David! Let her out!”
A haze of blood appeared around her, and as the air filled with the smell of it, he went close, shielding himself as best he could, and finally managed to swipe the fingerprint reader.
It didn’t work.
“Keys, my God, I need keys!”
Again Linda hit the door, again and again. Caroline and Linda’s desperate, tear-streaked lover, Tom Dryden, tried to control her.
“Glen! Glen MacNamara, I need keys!” David looked desperately around the room. “Get Glen, somebody!”
The siren came again, rising, wailing, a soul-whipping sound that turned Linda into a human piston, driving her again and again and again into the thick, unyielding door.
“Doctor,” Tom shouted, “sedate her! Get a damn shot in her!”
Then Glen was pushing through the crowd, his dirty white shirt soaked with sweat. “I was afraid we’d lose that damn locking system,” he said as he thrust a key into the door and threw it open at last.
Linda went racing out, her body lurching from broken bones, her face now a purple blotch, unrecognizable. Tom followed her into the light, laughing and eager, and both seemed almost to be dancing, their anguish transformed in an instant to lilting joy.
David followed them, and when the light struck him he was suffused with an exquisite sensation, at once physical and emotional, a surging shiver of delight that was coupled to poignant nostalgia, and he thought,
He saw in the light a ladder hanging down—and it was old, with bent rungs, but made of silver metal that gave off a gorgeous glow.
He remembered his grandfather’s friend’s description of the thing that Father Heim had seen at Fatima, and knew that, even then, they had been preparing.
Linda dragged herself, a white mass of bone protruding from her left leg, her fingers crazy from breaks, her breath coming in warbling sighs as she sucked air past swollen lips and broken teeth. Tom assisted her, an arm around her waist.
“You look to the injured in there, David,” Caroline said. “We’ve got this under control.”
As Linda was flooded by the light and her body became white with it, she began to reflect its whiteness. He saw her bones melt back into her skin and her face grow normal again—but then more, it was a shining face, full of the joy and energy of some higher world, and David had the sense that he was in the presence of a great and dignified being that was returning home.
Before his eyes, this ordinary, humble patient was transfigured into a being of grandeur, naked in her physical perfection, ascending in the healing flood of light.
An obscure sort of sorrow flickered in his heart then. Caroline’s hand slipped into his, and he knew that she had the same question, Why not me?
