'What's this?' His wrinkled mouth turned down, puzzled. `t1 white card?'
Carl obviously didn't need him either, so he turned about and headed for the door that-led to Zeke.
'Wait, please,' Dr. Blau said, and signaled the muscled orderly to stop Carl.
Carl proceeded without hesitation, and the orderly grabbed his left arm to stop him. The shout of electricity was louder than the orderly's yelp as the invisible force about Carl heaved the man away.
Dr. Blau crouched over the fallen man and saw that -he was stunned senseless but his vital functions were stable.
Carl approached the locked and bolted door that opened to the rose garden and the detention cubicles. The lock sparked open and the bolt clacked aside.
'Please, stop.' Dr. Blau's voice was conciliatory. 'What are you doing?'
Carl responded to the concern in the doctor's voice. 'I'm looking for my friend,' Carl answered. 'My best friend. Zeke Zhdarnov. He's here, I know it.'
'Who are you?' the doctor asked with a compressed whine.
'Me?' Carl smiled coldly. In his three-piece suit, with the stiff white collar standing up to the belligerent thrust of his jaw, he had the appearance of an underworld muscleman. 'I'm just a friend of his.'
Dr. Blau followed Carl in a hurried shuffle. Carl walked under the rose arbor, directly to the gate of Zeke's cubicle.
'ZeeZee, are you in there?' Carl called. 'Get out here, sucker. It's checkout time.'
Zeke was inspelled, sitting out of sight on his cot. An ocean of light surged against him like breakers against a jetty. He had been tranced since dawn. He had woken from a nightmare of a giant trilobite devouring a screaming woman, and the fright that shocked him awake vibrated with the relief of waking into the pelagic rhythms of the Field.
For three hours he had shot through the silvered surges like a surfer. His body and its senses were merely the coast of his being, the landfall of choice, where the freedom of the light in him found will. But he was far away from that beach when Carl called to him.
The sound of his childhood name rose like an immense wave and skimmed him directly to shore.
Zeke's eyes splashed open. He was hugely awake.
A generative energy coursed in the fibers of his meat, and his bones felt weightless.
'Zeebo, if you don't come out of there now,' Carl spoke loudly, 'I'm coming in.'
Zeke unwound from his crosslegged position, stood up, and got around the corner in time to see the mesh of the steel door flash with diamond-hard light and clang o$' its stone-rooted-hinges.
The glare hazed away, and he saw the stocky silhouette of a well-dressed man and behind him the skinny shade of Dr. Blau.
Colors swarmed into focus, and he was facing a man whose cinderblock shape, with much imagination; contained the formerly shapeless body of Carl Schirmer.
'You!' Zeke's breath jumped, though just an inch behind his startlement, he was emptiness itself. The prophecy had come true: Harsh reality was a dream. He played his part: 'I had given up hope.' '
'I guess that's why I'm here,' Carl replied. .He was stunned by Zeke's appearance. The man before him was a Blake etching come to life: job-bearded, the gelid light -in his broad stare holy as health.
'Let's get out of here. This place is creepy.'
'No,' Dr. Blau said flatly, his hair friseured by the ionization of the blast, his face pale as a fishbelly. 'You can't go yet. I must speak with you. Who are you?'
'I told you,' Carl said. 'I'm his friend.'
'I'm his friend, too,' the doctor said. 'You must tell me what is going on. How did you do this?' He gestured at the broken, metal-twisted hinges and the fallen gate.
'Don't you recognize him?' Zeke said in a voice like dust.
'It's Alfred Omega.'
Carl shot him a surprised stare. Alfred Omega had not appeared in Shards of Tine, and Carl was uneasy about his identity being revealed. There was the warehouse in Barlow to protect.
'Let's go, ZeeZee.' Carl took Zeke's arm and guided him out of the cell.
``Wait a sec.' Zeke freed his arm. 'I have to get something.' He skipped back into the cell, and while he was gone, Dr. Blau approached Carl.
'Alfred Omega,' the doctor said, his voice fugal with fear and awe. 'That's the name Zeke began using in his delusions after he arrived here. Have you been in contact with him? Is this some ploy?'
Carl looked at him, bored.
'How did you blast open this gate?' The doctor looked again at the hinges, which were not blasted so much as ripped.
'Who are you?'
'Doc,' Carl said gently, 'the world is stranger than you'll ever guess.'
Zeke reappeared with a black-and-white school composition notebook under his arm. 'The journal of my madness,' he said with a smile bright as a joke. 'It's all real, isn't it? Timesend? The urg?'
