Greek tragedy, when you know what's coming but the fascination lies in watching it unfold. With a steady and precise movement, barely pausing to register its choice of each successive letter, the glass spelled out “M-A-G-G- I-E.”
Drew's breath came in a ragged gasp. Her hands rose to cover the lower part of her face in a gesture oddly reminiscent of Maggie when she was taken by surprise or alarmed by something. The rest of them sat silent, wondering what there was to say and who would say it first.
“Keep touching the glass,” Sam said, maintaining his tone of professional calm, like a surgeon demanding a fresh instrument in the operating room. Two or three wavering fingertips returned to renew contact, Drew's last of all.
“Please tell us,” Sam said, “why you call yourself Maggie.”
The glass shot out from under their hands as though fired from a gun. It missed Sam and Roger by inches and shattered against the wall. The whole thing happened so fast that they didn't have time to react, just sat in a frozen silence broken only by a ringing echo of the impact.
A guttural rumble came from Pete's throat as he slumped in his chair and his head fell forward on his chest. At first Joanna thought that he must have been hit by a shard of flying glass. But there was no blood, no sign of any wound. She realized what was happening. It was an almost exact replay of the grotesque performance put on by Murray Ray that day at Camp Starburst when he'd pretended to receive telepathic knowledge of the death of the husband of that poor woman in the audience. But this, Joanna knew, was no performance.
Pete's head rolled on his shoulders and he moaned loudly. They all erupted in movement. There were shouts of alarm.
“He's having a fit. Call a doctor!”
“No!” The word came from Sam as an order. “That's no fit. Wait.”
He moved closer to Pete and reached out to touch his shoulder gingerly. “Pete…?”
The head snapped back and the face that leered up at Sam was no longer Pete's. The eyes had rolled back half into their sockets, and the lips were drawn back over his teeth in a rictus grin.
Two chairs went over, then a third, as everyone jumped back to put some distance between themselves and this thing that had appeared in their midst. There were gasps of shock, muttered blasphemies. Joanna saw Drew cross herself the way she'd seen Maggie do on the video. Only Sam remained fully in control of his responses, not letting go of Pete's shoulder as though the contact somehow grounded them both in a shared reality. “Who are you?” he said.
The rolled-back eyes focused up at him, and the teeth parted slightly. But the sound that came through them had nothing of Pete's voice in it. Nor was there any movement of his lips or jaw coordinated with the words. It was as though his body had no more life than a ventriloquist's dummy, its words projected from some hidden source elsewhere.
“She will not destroy me…not her…not you…not anybody…”
The moment the words were uttered, his eyes closed and he fell slackly sideways. He would have hit the concrete floor if Sam hadn't caught him. He came to with a start, like someone who had momentarily fallen asleep and hoped that no one else had noticed. But he found himself encircled by anxious faces.
“Hey, what's up?” he asked, looking from one to another. “I'm sorry, I guess I dropped off there for a second. Did I miss something?”
Sam strode over to one of the two video cameras and pressed a switch to eject the cassette. Nothing happened. He tried again. Still nothing. Frowning, he traced the cable from the camera to the transformer.
Pete came over, curious, and saw the problem right away. “Somebody's pulled the plug out of the wall, for God's sake…!” He replaced the plug in its socket. A handful of indicators glowed as power returned to the system. “How in the heck did that happen? I checked that plug myself before we started.”
25
Pete looked around the group like somebody who still half suspected that he was the victim of a practical joke. Sam had told him what had happened and the others had corroborated every detail. The fact that there was no video or sound recording was something that none of them could explain. Pete had to take their story on trust.
“Joanna, would you do me a favor?” Sam asked. “Go upstairs and see if Peggy or any of the others are still there. I'd like to bring them in on this.”
But the lab was empty, most of the rooms dark. She went back down the steps to the basement. Pete was sitting at the table with his head in his hands, shaken.
“I believe you,” he said. “Of course I do. It's just that…wow!..The idea takes some getting used to.”
Sam glanced questioningly at Joanna as she came in. She shook her head to indicate that they'd all left upstairs. He looked at his watch. “Listen,” he said, addressing everyone, “it's a quarter past nine. Normally we'd have packed up and gone home by now. I don't know how you all feel about this, but I think it might be worthwhile to go on.”
“To achieve what exactly?” Roger asked.
Sam spread his hands to suggest that he was open to anything. “To see what happens. I think we're at a very interesting point in this whole process.”
Drew's soft voice pierced the brief silence with complete clarity. “I think Maggie was right. I don't know what it is or how we've done it, but I think we've come up with something bad. And now we have to get rid of it. You always said, Sam, that we could dematerialize this thing if we had to. I think now's the time.”
Sam accepted her opinion with a shrug of qualified acquiescence. “I think dematerializing something before it's actually materialized may be putting the cart before the horse. But, if that's how you feel…” He looked around at the others. “How about the rest of you? Do you all agree with Drew?”
“I have to say I do,” Barry said. “If I'm honest, I don't like what's happening. You know what it makes me think of? Did you ever see that film Forbidden Planet? Where this whole race of geniuses gets wiped out by a machine they've built to cater to their every whim? Only what they didn't bargain for was that it would respond as much to their collective ‘id’ as to their ‘ego.’ So they got wiped out by monsters that the machine created out of the dark side of their own minds. I think maybe what's happening here has something to do with the dark side of our minds.”
Ward Riley's mouth twitched disapprovingly at the corners. “I saw that film years ago and wasn't much impressed by it. The idea that a people of such brilliance could have overlooked such a possibility and made no provision for it was deeply unconvincing. I think we should beware of looking to Hollywood for any kind of intellectual guidance.”
“So what's your take on all this, Ward?” Sam asked him.
Ward stroked his chin and pursed his mouth a moment. “I think Maggie's death was natural, but we've been caught up in a collective response to it that owes more to superstition than to reason. I believe that's what is behind the phenomena we've been experiencing.”
Sam turned to Joanna. “How about you? Any thoughts?”
It was a hard one to call. “Speaking as a journalist, I've got enough material and more for a story. Speaking as one of the team, I don't know. I don't know if I want out, or if I want to see what happens next.” She paused. “I think maybe I want to see what happens next.”
She registered an almost subliminal twitch at the corner of Sam's eye. She could barely believe it, but he had given her a wink of complicity. She had to stop herself from laughing out loud. The gesture was in such bad taste in the circumstances, so wholly inappropriate, that it was hysterical. But then she realized that, of course, he hadn't winked at all. She had read something that simply wasn't there into the involuntary movement of a facial muscle. A wave of alarm swept over her. She was coming adrift from reality, losing all sense of proportion and perspective. She also felt suddenly vulnerable, as though everybody in the room must have seen her mistake and now knew what was happening to her. Just as quickly she realized that nobody was paying her any attention. They were all too fixed on the dilemma before them.
Sam turned to Roger. “What do you think?”
