mark identified them as being below the human level, lacking higher morality, compassion, and judgment. This is why it was called the mark of the beast. It meant, simply, that your life had left you more animal than human.
From outside, there came the snarling of big vehicles, then the squealing of brakes, followed by voices.
“That’s the general,” Mack said. “He’s seen the truck.”
“He knows about your truck? How?”
“We have communications. Just enough.”
David looked doubtful. “May I ask—”
“Just fix the damn portal. Do it now!”
Caroline realized that Mack did not know how General Wylie had found them. A lucky guess, perhaps.
David picked up the portal. “Caroline, we have to do this.”
There wasn’t a thing she could do to change it. All she could think was that he was buying time, so she took it from him. Up close like this, it was indistinguishable from a window. It was marvelous, just the most extraordinary thing she’d ever seen. But what would she do to make Mack think she’d changed it?
“It has to be tuned to the people who’re going to use it,” David said. “It works like a fingerprint reader. Let us—Caroline, print Mack to it.”
Dear God, he was going to trick Mack into doing the same thing that Katie had done.
She had no choice but to go along. “Give me your hand, Mack,” she said. Touching his damp skin was horrible. There was a sense of the corpse about it, not like the skin of a living person.
The judged were still moving and breathing, but they were already outside of life, in a state where no further change could take place. They just didn’t know it yet.
She positioned her hand in his, so that her palm faced the portal and his hand enclosed hers. She had no idea what she was doing, she was just trying to make something up that he would believe.
“This is doing what?”
“Imprinting you,” she said. “Then you can go through.”
“What about my people?”
David said, “You imprint them. Do it the same way.”
“Do you feel anything yet, Mack?”
“Yeah, actually, the same thing I felt before. Warmth.”
“You tried this before?”
“It nearly burned me like it did her. Jesus!”
Caroline drew his hand away. “Okay, you’re imprinted.”
He addressed himself to David. “There’s a general out there. I am going to imprint some of his men and send them through your portal. If all goes well, we will take it and put it to good use. But if not, you are going to experience hell firsthand, both of you, until we are told the truth about how to make it work.”
“I don’t know what else to tell you,” David said. “You just imprint and step through. That’s all.”
“You are a poor liar, David.”
Outside, the snarling of the big vehicles was joined by a ferocious thunder of weapons.
“Those praying crazies,” Mack said pleasantly. “He’ll kill ’em all just to tidy the place up.”
He picked up the portal and went to the door. He opened it. “I need a guard in here right now.”
“Mack,” came a gruff voice. “How the hell are you?”
The door closed.
“Come on,” David said softly.
As David led her toward the front of the restaurant, the kitchen door was opening again.
They went through into the wrecked dining room, with sunlight glaring in through the shattered windows, tables smashed, chairs upended, and a great splash of blood across one wall.
Behind them, they heard a curse. The young soldier sent to guard them had discovered that the room was empty.
“Quick!”
She followed David into the street. The door by which they’d entered the restaurant opened onto the alley beside it, but this one faced directly into the street where the convoy was parked. Closest was an enormous machine with a slanted front. It was bigger than a truck, emblazoned with three stars, flying a general’s flag, and painted with a lurid image of skeletal Cimil, the Mayan god of the underworld. Atop the vehicle was a remote- controlled .50-caliber machine gun—which immediately moved toward David and Caroline.
“Down!”
But then it whirled, its motors screaming, spinning upward toward a huge silver object that was just appearing overhead.
Caroline felt washed by the sacredness that these silver objects seemed to carry with them like a sort of force field. The urge, when they were near, was to drop to your knees.
The heavily armed soldiers looked extremely uneasy, clutching their weapons, looking up. Around the convoy, in piles, sprawled, twisted, and bloody, were hundreds of bodies, the remains of the people who had been on their knees. Piled among the dead adults were their dead children.
There was a huge sound, a hissing thud, and light shone down from the silver device, flooding the convoy in powder white. A moment later, one of the soldiers cried out, leaped from his vehicle, and throwing off his helmet, began rising.
“Stop that man,” General Wylie shouted. “Shoot him!”
The machine gun fired, bullets streaming toward the rising soldier… and then sparks appeared in the light around him, a pattern that grew as the gun continued to fire.
“The bullets are stopping,” Caroline said. She gripped David’s hand as they both watched, awed by the magnificent and flawless display of technological power they were seeing.
Then the convoy command vehicle’s hatch flew open and three young soldiers piled out, also throwing aside their helmets and leaping, then rising into the light. General Wylie emptied his pistol at them, but with the same lack of effect that the machine gunner had experienced.
“Launch grenades,” the general roared, and another soldier pulled a bulky-looking item out of one of the vehicles, loaded it with a large projectile, and fired it upward.
With a clap of thunder and a burst of flame, it shot into the light and exploded—or started to. The projectile cracked apart in slow motion, the burning gasses and shrapnel oozing into a mushroom shape and stopping, the explosion frozen like a flower dotted with bits of steel. As if it was as light as the air itself, the frozen explosion drifted away on the breeze.
As this was happening, there came from the bodies all around the convoy a stirring and a groaning, and, at the same time, from the great machine above waves of what could only be described as directed emotion—waves of love, in fact, that made David and Caroline draw closer together, and made them both wish the same wish, that they, also, could join the mysteries unfolding above. Except… they didn’t, actually. They were workers and needed elsewhere, and—if they could only reach it—an important task was waiting for them.
The heaps of dead began coming to their feet, their wounds disappearing, life returning to their bodies. For an instant, David found himself looking directly into the eyes of one of them, and in the instant that he was connected to this man, David relived his whole life, not in linear memory, but as a compressed, stunningly poignant, and fragile instant of pure emotion, and it was good, so good that it hurt and he sobbed aloud, unable to contain his emotion.
Beside him Caroline also sobbed, and the dead began to rise into what at first seemed to be a great, round opening in the bottom of the craft. But as his eyes followed them, he saw that this was not an opening in the ship, but in the universe itself, for its velvet, living darkness was spread with a spectacle of stars.
Around them, more and more of the slaughtered rose upward, disappearing into the star garden at the heart of the machine.
He saw, at the very top of this perfect sky, the constellation of the Pleiades, the Sailing Ones, so clear that the vivid colors of the stars was clearly visible, the magenta of Pleione and the faint red of its blazing hydrogen ring, the white of Alcyone, and the iridescent blue of Electra.
As he watched, the people ascended in increasing numbers, rising one after another, and he saw them go sailing upward, and transform as they did into bright points of light.
Then the last of them were swept up into the fountain of stars. As suddenly as it had opened, the gateway in
