Killing Time

post, ready to fire on the drones should the holographic system fail for any reason.

Moving in a deliberate manner, I climbed down the turret ladder and crept toward the stern of the ship. On entering Malcolm's quarters — which were styled after the captain's cabin of an old sailing ship, with a wide, mock- leaded window set in the rearmost section of the hull — I initially thought he must still have been in the observation dome; but then I caught sight of his overturned wheelchair behind a rough-hewn wooden table. His body was caught under the thing and sprawled out across the floor.

'Malcolm!' I cried urgently but quietly, for the drones were visible outside the window. I rushed over, carefully moved the wheelchair, and then lifted him up, shocked and appalled by how light his body was. There was a captain's box bed set into one bulkhead, and I put him in it, loosening his collar and checking for a pulse.

But try as I might, I couldn't find one.

CHAPTER 33

Malcolm's return to consciousness had nothing to do with any efforts of mine, for I had not even begun to administer resuscitating measures when his entire body jerked upward as if it had received a strong electric shock. His lungs took in a huge gulp of air and he began to cough hard, though it didn't seem that the noise was loud or distinct enough to attract the attention of our observers. I poured a glass of water from a pewter jug and got him to swallow some of it, and once his breathing had returned to something like normal he whispered:

'How long was I gone?'

'I don't know,' I answered. 'I found you on the floor.' I raised my eyebrows in question. 'You had no pulse, Malcolm.'

He drank a little more water and nodded. 'Yes,' he breathed. 'It happens — more often these days, actually.' Lying back, he tried to calm his body. 'One of the more unpredictable symptoms of my condition — spontaneous shutdown of the most basic functions. But it never lasts long.' He looked at the wooden ceiling of his bed in seemingly casual frustration. 'I wish I could remember whether or not I dream while it's happening…'

'Have you determined what triggers it?' I asked, slightly amazed by his attitude. 'Does exhaustion play a part?'

He shrugged. 'Quite probably. However…' He rolled over and looked outside, frowning when he saw the drones. 'Still there, eh? Well, exhausted or not, I've got to get back to Eli—'

But the man couldn't even sit up straight. 'You're not going anywhere just now,' I said; and as he reached for his transdermal injector I took it away from him. 'And I don't think self-medication following a neuroparalytic crisis of some kind is really called for, either.'

Ever since our first encounter I had recognized that Malcolm's pride was more important to him than almost anything: he desperately needed to feel that he wasn't helpless and would go to almost inhuman lengths to avoid that impression. Thus I wasn't at all sure how he would react to the doctorly dictates I was issuing. But surprisingly, he did no more than glance at me with an expression of acceptance, rather like that of a boy who's been told he has to stay home from school. 'All right,' he said calmly. 'But I'll need my chair.' He actually seemed somewhat relieved at the prospect of being forced to rest for a bit, though I knew he would never admit it; so I simply nodded and maneuvered the wheelchair over to his bed, letting him get into it himself. 'Thank you, Gideon,' he said, as if in reply to my not assisting him.

'Just be thankful that your sister worries about you,' I said. 'God knows how long you might've stayed on that floor if she hadn't asked me to come down. Or what shape you would've been in when we finally did find you.'

He acknowledged the statement by holding up a hand. Then, after a moment's pause, he looked at me with evident curiosity. 'You and Larissa — you care for each other very deeply, it seems.' Assuming that he was still groggy, I smiled in a cajoling way. 'What's it like?' he asked.

I had anticipated Malcolm's eventually asking many questions about my relationship with his sister, but this was not one of them. His disorientation, I determined, must have been greater than I'd originally estimated. 'You mean — what's it like to be in love with your sister?' I said.

'To be in love with any woman,' Malcolm said. 'And to have her love you — what's that like?'

As he was speaking, I realized from the clarity of both his gaze and his words that my supposition had been wrong — that, though weakened, he wasn't disoriented at all — and this realization fell like a stone on my spirit. Among the many things of which Stephen Tressalian had robbed his son, this seemed to me the most valuable and shocking. It was unspeakably cruel that Malcolm should not have known the answer to his own question; yet the obviousness of why he did not was crueler still. Desperately searching for an answer that would not betray my own sense of sorrow, I finally said, 'Larissa is a far cry from 'any woman.' '

Malcolm pondered the statement. 'Do you know that?' he eventually asked. 'Empirically, I mean.'

'I think so,' I answered. 'At any rate, I believe it. That's what's important.'

'Yes,' he said, touching his mouth pensively with his fingers. 'That is the important thing, isn't it? Belief…' We sat there without saying another word for about a minute, as air wheezed noisily into and out of Malcolm's lungs. Then he repeated the word: 'Belief… I haven't studied it enough, Gideon. I've focused on deception — the deceptions of this age and my own attempts to reveal them through deception. But I should have paid more attention to belief — because it's what's put us in this predicament.' He seemed to be gaining strength, though I got the impression that it was more the chance to talk about what had been bothering him than any genuine physical improvement that was behind his surge in energy. 'What is it, Gideon? What makes a man like Dov Eshkol so committed to his beliefs that he's capable of committing any kind of crime?'

Given the palliative effect that the conversation was having on him, I kept up my end; and there, in the bizarre, threatening quiet of the slow-moving ship, surrounded and constantly scrutinized by the mechanized minions of our enemies below, we began to pick away at the mind of the man we were hunting.

'There are a lot of factors involved in that kind of belief, of course,' I said. 'But if I had to pick one as paramount, I'd say it was fear.'

'Fear?' Malcolm repeated. 'Fear of what? God?'

I shook my head. 'The kinds of fear I'm talking about strike long before we encounter any concept of God. From the day we're born, there are two basic terrors that consume all people, whatever their background. The first is terror prompted by a sense of our true aloneness, our isolation from one another. The second, of course, is the fear of death. No matter how in particular, these fears touch each of our lives and are at least partly responsible for all crimes— including the types that Eshkol has committed.'

I paused and studied Malcolm for a few seconds: he was nodding his head and seemed to be growing calmer by the moment, even though his blue eyes stayed locked on the drones outside. 'Go on,' he said after a half minute or so. 'We've got to know how his mind works.'

'All right,' I replied, 'but only if you can stay calm about it.' He waved a hand a bit impatiently, a good sign that he was, indeed, feeling better. 'Well,' I continued, 'most people try to submerge the first of these fears — the terror of isolation — in a sense of identification within a group. Religious, political, ethnic, it doesn't really matter — it's even behind most of the mass marketing that's done today and behind popular culture itself. Anything, as long as it seems to break down the wall of alienation and impart a sense of belonging.'

'Which creates,' Malcolm murmured, his eyes going self-consciously wide, 'enormous opportunities for manipulation.'

'And manipulators,' I agreed. 'Otherwise known as leaders. Most of them are simply people who are trying to assuage their own fears by creating a rubric of identity into which the greatest number of souls, differing in everything except their feeling of being disconnected and lost, can fit.'

'Are we talking about Eshkol's superiors here?'

'In part, but not primarily. His Israeli commanders do fall into the category we've been discussing so far, the fairly common variety of leaders that includes almost anyone involved in a political, religious, economic, or cultural movement. But Eshkol? There's nothing common about him, and if we want to understand how he works, we have