Or did he have it? What had she said, on the plane? I think you’re angry all the time. A seething volcano inside him, she said, with a tight lid clamped down on it to keep it from erupting. Was that true? He didn’t know. He always felt calm; but perhaps, somewhere deep down inside, he was really raging with red-hot fury, killing Richie Burke a hundred times a day, killing all those who had made his life such a misery ever since the moment when he had understood that his mother was gone and his father was a monster and the world was under the control of bizarre, bewildering creatures who ruled, so it seemed, purely by whim and savage caprice.
Perhaps so. He didn’t choose to look within and see.
But he was sure that there were no hidden volcanoes in this woman Cindy. She seemed to take life as it came, easily, day by day; very likely always had. Khalid wanted to know more about her, who she was, what her existence had been like before the Entities came, why she had become a quisling, all of that. But probably he would never ask. He was not used to asking people such things about themselves.
He left the car, walked around a little, glanced up at the moon and stars as night settled in. It was very quiet here, and with the coming of darkness the day’s blistering warmth was fleeing into the thin desert air. Already it had become quite cool. There were scrabbling sounds somewhere nearby: animals, he supposed. Lions? Tigers? Did they have such things in California? This was a wild land, fierce and harsh. It made England seem very placid. He sat on the ground beside the car and watched shooting stars go streaking across the black dome overhead.
“Khalid?” Cindy called, after a time. “You out there? What are you doing?”
“Just looking at the sky,” he said.
She had rested enough, she told him. He got back in, and they drove onward. Sometime during the night they came to the exit for Barstow.
“We died ten miles back,” she said. “It was all over so fast we never knew what was happening.”
A little before dawn, as they were descending a long gentle curve in a hilly part of the route, Khalid saw the turquoise lights of an Entity transport convoy far below, making its way uphill toward them. Cindy did not appear to notice.
“Entities,” he said, after a moment.
“Where?”
“That light down there.”
“Where? Where? Oh. Shit! Sharp eyes you have.—Who would expect them to be driving around in a place like this in the middle of the night? But of course, why wouldn’t they?” She swerved the car roughly to the left and brought it to a screeching halt on the outer margin of the freeway.
He frowned at her. “What are you doing?”
“Come on. Get out and let’s run for it. We’ve got to hide in that ravine until they go past.”
“Why is that?”
“Come on,” she said. She was anything but serene now. “We’re supposed to be dead! If they detect us, and decide to check out our I.D.—”
“They will pay no attention to us, I think.”
“How do you know? Oh, Jesus, Jesus, you idiot” She could not wait any longer. She made a furious snorting sound and leaped from the car, plunging off straightaway into the steep brushy drop alongside the highway. Khalid remained where he was. He watched her dwindle into the darkness until the angle of the ravine hid her from his sight; and then he leaned back against the head-rest of his seat and waited for the Entity transport to approach.
He wondered whether they would notice him, sitting here in a parked car by the side of a dark road in an empty landscape, and whether they would care. Could they reach into his mind and see that he was Khalid Haleem Burke, who had died in an accident some hours earlier on this road, on the other side of the city called Barstow? Would they know anything about the supposed accident without consulting their computer net? Why would they bother? Why would they care?
Perhaps, he thought, they would look into his mind as they went past and discover that he was the person who had killed a member of their species seven years ago on the highway between Salisbury and Stonehenge. In that case he had made a mistake, very likely, by remaining here, staying within range of their telepathy, instead of running off into the underbrush with Cindy.
The image blossomed in his mind of that night long ago on the road to Stonehenge, the beautiful angelic creature standing in the transport wagon, the gun, the crosshairs, the head perfectly targeted. Squeezing the trigger, seeing the angel’s head burst apart, the bright fountain of flame, the radiant fragments flying outward, the greenish-red cloud of alien blood swiftly expanding into the air. The other Entity going into that frantic convulsion as its companion’s spirit went whirling out into the darkness. He was as good as dead, Khalid knew, if the Entities detected that image as they passed by.
He pushed it aside. He emptied his mind entirely. He sealed it off from intruders with iron bands.
I am no one at all. I am not here.
Glimmers of turquoise light now ascended heavenward right in front of him. The transport had almost reached the top of the hill.
Khalid waited for it in utter tranquillity.
He was not there. There was no one at all in the car.
Three aliens rode in the transport: one of the big ones who were the Entities, and two of the lesser kind, the Spooks. Khalid ignored the Spooks and fixed his eyes in wonder on the Entity, enraptured as always by its magical gleaming beauty. His soul went out to it in love and admiration. If they had stopped and asked him to give them the world, he would have given it to them. But of course they already owned it.
He wondered why, as he watched the convoy go by, he had never become a quisling, if he admired the Entities so much. But the answer came just as quickly. He had no desire to serve them, only to worship their beauty. It was an aesthetic thing. A sunrise was beautiful too, or a snowcapped mountain, or a lake that reflected the red glow of the end of day. But one did not enroll in the service of a mountain or a lake or a sunrise simply because one thought it was beautiful.
He let the time slide along: five minutes, ten. Then he left the car and called down to Cindy, in the ravine, “They’re gone, now. You can come back.”
A faint, distant reply came to him: “Are you sure?”
“I sat here and watched them go by.”
It was a while before she reappeared. At last she came scrambling up out of the brush, out of breath and looking very rumpled and flustered and flushed. Collapsing down next to him in the car, she said, between deep gulps of air, “They—didn’t bother—you—at all?”
“No. Went right by, paid no attention. I told you that they wouldn’t. I wasn’t there.”
“It was crazy to take the chance.”
“Maybe I’m crazy,” Khalid said cheerfully, as she started the car and pulled back out onto the freeway.
“I don’t think you are,” she said, after a moment. “Why did you do it?”
“To be able to look at them,” he told her, in absolute sincerity. “They are so beautiful, Cindy. They are like magical creatures to me. Jinn. Angels.”
She swiveled around in her seat and gave him a long strange look. “You really are something unusual, Khalid.”
He made no answer to that. What could he say?
After another lengthy silent stretch she said, “I lost my cool back there, I guess. There wasn’t any real reason why they’d have stopped to interrogate us, was there?”
“No.”
“But I was afraid. A quisling and a detainee out driving together on an empty road late at night, well beyond the city that I was supposed to be taking you to, and both our I.D.s already invalidated on the master net because we’ve been reported as dead—we’d have been in a mess. I panicked.”
A little way farther onward she said, breaking the next silence into which they had slipped, “Exactly what was it that you did, Khalid, to get yourself interned in the first place?”
He hesitated not at all. “I killed an Entity.”
“You what?”
“In England, outside Salisbury. The one that was shot along the side of a road. I did it, with a special kind of gun that I took from my father. They collected everyone in the five towns closest to the place of the killing and
