'I'm going to talk with her.'
'You're not going back?'
'I want to see for myself if the authorities are on to us.'
Zeke slapped his forehead as if suddenly comprehending.
'Of coursel And if they are?'
'Confront them.' Carl pointed his left arm at a screwdriver on a workbench and it propellered into the air and stabbed ,a wind-gusting paper scrap to the plank wall of the storage shed. 'I'll make a deal. We still have the trump cards.'
'Yeah,' Zeke concurred in a breath of awe that went flat.
'For now'
Carl glanced up at the blue silence of the sky. 'For now'
That night while Zeke slept in one of the mobile homes parked at the site, Carl stood outside and used his lance to magnetically stroke the sleep channels in his friend's brain.
When he was sure that Zeke was slumbering deeply, he entered the trailer and went directly to Zeke's notebook. He opened it to the latest entry and by the scalloped light from his lance, he read:
'Carl called today, from central Iowa. I've flown out of my past and am interfacing the future here in Ames. The old horror is over: My mind is clear again. But a new horror-threatens. Carl carries the urg's spore. The whole planet is endangered by his presence. He is a
living nightmare and also the gateway to forever. I feel as if I were in a B-movie: Should I kill or worship him? If he bleeds on me, I'd be adamized. Do I want. that? In an infinite cosmos all directions are strange.'
Carl returned the notebook to where he'd found it and left quietly. The next day Zeke did not wake up. Nor-the day after that. The armor, through the magnetic caress of the lance, had stroked him into a psychic trance. Zeke floated in a region fringing four-space. Carl called this egoless, dimensionful area the Zone. It was the emptiness where he dumped all undesirable thoughts. For Zeke, this new, dreamwide state was the pivot of the Moment, the needle's eye through which he could thread his attention into any space at all.
Zeke found himself circling like smoke through a room of bronzed light. Sheelagh sat in a reclining chair, her scalp and fingers wired to a console where three technicians sat. The elderly, snake-eyed woman interrogating her wore an officer's lapel pin identifying her as Commander Leonard. She was obviously having a hard time believing Sheelagh's story, even though the technicians were confirming her testimony.
That scene unwalled to a vista of stars. The blue cloud-gained sphere of the earth lifted into view, and Zeke realized he was flying with Carl. He could feel Carl's thoughts, slow-bursting like flowers, as he pondered his life. He had just come from Sheelagh's apartment, but she was not there. The moon stared from the dark side of the earth. '
A sudden lassitude pollarded Zeke's sensations, and when he came to he was in his bed in the mobile home. He felt gigantic with understanding. Everything in the last two years finally made sense. The inspelling he had used to write Shards of Time and the telepathic surges that had followed in the asylum were the result of Carl's armor. Zeke had been in union with it long
before Carl even arrived on earth. Rimstalkers were four-space beings. To them, Carl and Zeke, as lifelong companions, were one worldline. The armor's inspiriting was Zeke's inspelling.
The Rimstalkers had been in four-space communion with Zeke all his life--and at last he recognized the phantasmal daydreams of those dreary afternoons at St. Tim's as the armor's tesseratic presence. And the intuition that had rolled him to his feet that night in Nam on earth-one when the enemy were swarming toward him-the sixth sense that had gums him through the bamboo to the riverbank rathive where he had holed up till an ARVN patrol found him the next morning-that luck was his lifelong bond to the armor. He and the armor had been interfused all along; at a level deeper than time. The contact was purposeless, merely the overspill of knowing Carl, who was the true contact with the Rimstalkers.
If Zeke hadn't felt sorry for that spindly, doe-eyed twerp the other kids liked to head-dunk in the toilet bowls and forcefeed cockroaches, he would never have found the vantage from where the world is transparent.
The strong sunlight diffusing through the glass roof of the warehouse reminded Carl of the blue brightness of the Welkyn. He sat in a hammock-chair and surveyed the expansive interior. The living area had a waxed wooden floor, round, cushiony chairs, tapestries and bookshelves to hide the support ribbing, and a wallsized TV screen with an imaging, computer hookup and an enormous video library. When he lay back in the hammock and rocked among the hanging plants under the liana arbor, a peaceful ambience saturated him.
The butcherblock kitchen had a seawater aquarium -built inta the counters. Zeke was sitting on a barstool with a frosty bottle of Lone Star in his hand, watching the. fish. Since Carl had told him about the spore and
Zeke had informed Carl of his bond with the light lancer armor, they had become closer. Their secrets had bonded them.
And their time together once more had the relaxed spontaneity of their early friendship.
Zeke looked through the aquarium and. with a waterbent smile said: 'A toast to the Continuum.'
Carl picked up his lukewarm bottle from the soil bed of the hydrangea beside him. 'if there is a Continuum.' He swigged the flat beer. 'And if there's not.' He drank again.
'You still think the universe is finite? After all your misadventures?' Zeke looked disappointed. 'What's the objection this time?'
Over the last few days as they put the finishing touches on the warehouse, Zeke had explained the cosmology he intuited from their bond with the armor. The expansion of the universe was the result of the repellent force of radiation inertia, the pressure of light pushing the galaxies apart. The weakness of radiation thrust required enormities of time to cause a response, and so the Continuum never reached static equilibrium. The -slow-motion seething activity of the galaxies pendulumed eternally with internal expansions and contractions in a dynamic balance.
'What about Olber's Paradox?' Carl asked. 'I read once that-'
