In the silence that followed, they watched as bright sparks flickered in waves across the new face of the moon.
“Jesus, it’s the fishing tackle lady,” Del said. He went into the crowd to the woman who had spoken out.
David saw that she and her husband and kids carried an extraordinary variety of angling equipment, and he thought that it might prove very useful if where they were going was as undeveloped as it appeared. So far, no matter what direction he had pointed the portal in, he hadn’t seen a sign of any sort of structure. He feared that a great many people were going to be thrown into a very primitive environment, and that was going to be a very hard situation for them to face, especially after the hellish conditions they were enduring here.
“It’s beautiful,” a voice said from behind them. David did not need to turn to know that Caroline was there. Suddenly and with great intensity, he remembered her body close to his, and her gentle, insistent ways.
“David,” she said, “I’m having a problem with the portal. It’s flickering. It looks like it’s failing somehow.”
Terror like lightning shot through him. He looked out at the crowd. “Don’t tell them,” he said, and followed her back into the building.
25. THE OMEGA POINT
Looking at it on its easel, David could see at once how it was changing. There was something dim and grainy about it now. He touched it. “It looks like a painting again,” he said.
The class was clustered around it. As it turned out, they had survived the worst of the assault by hiding in the attic and ductwork of the patient wing. They had been clever about hiding, and only two lives had been lost.
“Before we moved, I thought we should wait for dawn over there,” Caroline said. “I didn’t expect this.”
David did not say that he thought that Caroline had made a mistake. How could anybody be blamed for anything now?
He addressed the group. “We need to start getting people through. We need to do it right now.”
Nobody moved.
George Noonan said, “All those people, one by one? Through this?” He shook his head.
“I don’t see how we can help them,” Aaron added. “Not with such a small opening.”
“I think we have to,” a voice replied. It was Peggy Turnbull, who had been a tomboy in the days of their class, interested only in hunting and horses. In recent years, she had become a poet. Her false psychosis had been depression. He regarded her narrow face, pale in the candlelight. How long would this delicate creature survive in the wilderness that they would soon be entering?
At that moment, there was light so bright that it glared in through the blankets that had been hung over the windows, and from outside there came a howling uproar of terror.
There followed a clap of thunder so enormous that it shattered the few remaining windows.
“Bolide,” Mike said. “Big one. Hit just below the horizon, so better hold on.”
The world began shaking.
He grabbed David. “If we can go through that thing, we need to
The shaking got rapidly worse. Caroline and others staggered, then she fell to her knees. As David went to her, there arose from outside a clamor of shouts, followed by the chatter of an automatic weapon.
“NO!” David shouted, but his cry was lost in the thunder of the earthquake, as the whole patient wing trembled and cracks raced up the walls. Still, though, the earthquake increased, and David threw his body over Caroline, and could practically feel the ceiling above them getting ready to give way.
“We have to get it outside,” she shouted above the din of crackling plaster and collapsing window frames.
Again light, so intense this time that heat came with it, searing, burning, their exposed skin.
The air was sucked out of David’s lungs, and he thought that he must die.
“It’s coming down,” a voice cried, and then Glen and Mike were there, and everyone was running for the doors. Glen helped them up, and Caroline took the portal.
As they went toward the door that led into the side garden, the wall collapsed before them.
“The front,” George Noonan shouted. “It’s our only chance.”
They picked their way through the rubble of the front of the house, moving in a fog of dust almost too thick to navigate at all, but then there were lights ahead, bobbing closer. There came a girl of perhaps twenty, her tired face full of sadness. David remembered her from the bus, and thought,
An agony deeper than blood filled him, because he thought not only of her and the others outside, but all the millions who were suffering this without even the slight hope of survival represented by something like the portal.
“Help us,” the girl said, reaching out and taking David’s hand. “I buried my baby just a while ago. But I want to live. I want to live for him.”
In his heart, David felt that the baby had ascended, but he would explain it to the mother later. He found himself being led onto the front porch with its now teetering colonnade. Behind him, Caroline brought the portal and the class came with her, struggling, covered with dust, some of them nursing injuries. But nobody was screaming, and the house still stood, and the quake was subsiding into a series of more and more distant shudders, and thuds as if a giant was walking off into the forest behind the house.
Caroline raised the portal up before the crowd. “If we stay calm,” she shouted, “if we get in line and take our time—”
Susan Denman said, “Isn’t it holographic? I remember your dad taught us that it would be.”
“I know what he said, but look at it! We need to deal with what we have.”
“But this is all wrong, then! We didn’t give our lives to save a couple of hundred people. This is supposed to be about millions!”
Had they been lied to? Were they, in fact, the most elite of the elite?
She returned to the crowd. “Let’s start now, and nobody rush forward. Just take it easy—”
Without warning, a shock passed through the earth with such force that it hurled people flat, causing the whole crowd to drop in a confusion of possessions, pets, and terrified, screaming children.
The power of it caused trees to leap out of the ground as if they were being fired from buried cannons, and the Acton mansion itself, as strongly built as it was, shuddered and kept shuddering.
People were unable to stay on their feet, and David was no exception. Struggling, falling, clawing the heaving earth, it was like being in a nightmare where you ran but went nowhere.
“Get away from it,” he cried—but then Caroline pointed, and he looked up to the great roof and saw a figure there, a man with a rifle. “Glen,” he shouted, “get that man to come down off there!”
“He’s not one of mine, David!”
But David didn’t need to be told. He had recognized Mack the Cat. Despite the gigantic shaking, Mack remained absolutely still and steady as he raised the rifle and fired down, at first, David thought, at him and Caroline. But he was not shooting at them, he was shooting at the portal, and David understood instantly that he cared only for one thing now: if he couldn’t use it, nobody would.
It took all of his effort and all of his strength, but he managed to get to his feet and to stagger along the heaving ground and throw himself onto it, pressing it against the earth beneath him. The front of it was to the ground, and the back still seemed like nothing more than canvas stretched on a frame. But then he saw a bullet hole in it, and something like starlight leaking out onto the backing, as if the tear was oozing the blood of time.
Behind him there was a sound that was almost human, a great, grinding sigh, which for all the world sounded like the death rattle of a very old man. He turned in time to see the great mansion implode, the figure of Mack disappearing into the dust and chaos of its disintegration.
One after another, the great columns fell, and when the collapse had ended, David was struck by how very much the place resembled the rubble of an ancient Roman palace, and he felt the echo of ruins.
The dust grew as thick as the air in a cave. Around David there was now no more movement, nothing except
