same thing he was thinking.
The Friend was in its testy, I’ll show-you mode, and it was providing
details which it expected would lend credibility to its extravagant
claim to be altering human destiny. But it was impossible to know if
what it said was true-or merely fantasies that it had worked up to
support its story. The important thing, perhaps, was that it seemed to
care deeply that they believe it. Jim had no idea why his or Holly’s
opinion should matter at all to a being as intellectually superior to
them as they were to a field mouse, but the fact that it did evidently
matter seemed to be to their advantage.
” August twentieth. The Mojave Desert Nevada. Lisa and Susan Jawolski
. Lisa will provide her daughter with the love affection. and
counseling that will make it possible for the girl eventually to
overcome the severe psychological trauma of her father’s murder and grow
up to be the greatest woman statesman in the entire history of the
world, a force for enlightenment and compassionate government policies
August twenty-third. Boston, Massachusetts. Nicholas O’Conner saved
from an electrical-vault explosion.
He will grow up to become a priest who will dedicate his life to caring
for the poor in the slums of India-” The Friend’s attempt to answer
Holly’s criticism and present a six grandiose version of its work was
childishly transparent. The Burkette bo was not going to save the
world, just be a damned good paramedic, and Nicholas O’Conner was going
to be a humble man leading a self effacing existence among the needy-but
the rest of them were still great or brilliant or staggeringly talented
in one way or another. The entity now recognized the need for
credibility in its tale of grandeur, but it could not bring itself to
significantly water down its professed accomplishments.
And something else was bothering Jim: that voice. The longer he
listened to it, the more he became convinced that he had heard it
before, not in this room twenty-five years ago, not within its current
context at all.
The voice had to be appropriated, of course, because in its natural
condition the alien almost certainly did not possess anything similar to
human vocal cords; its biology would be inhuman. The voice it was
imitating, as if it were an impersonator performing in a cosmic cocktail
lounge, was that of a person Jim had once known. He could not quite
identify it.
” August twenty-sixth. Dubuque Iowa. Christine and Casey Dubrovek
Christine will give birth to another child who will grow up to be the
greatest geneticist of the next century. Casey will become an
exceptional school teacher who will tremendously influence the lives of
her students, and who will never fail one of them to the extent that a
suicide results” Jim felt as if he had been hit in the chest with a
hammer. That insulting accusation, directed at him and referring to
Larry Kakonis, shook his remaining faith in The Friend’s basic desire to
do good.
Holly said, “Shit, that was low.”
The entity’s pettiness sickened Jim, because he wanted so badly to
believe in its stated purpose and goodness.
The scintillant amber light swooped and swirled through the walls, as if
The Friend was delighted by the effect of the blow it had struck.
Despair welled so high in Jim that for a moment he even dared to
consider that the entity under the pond was not good at all but purely
evil.
Maybe the people he had saved since May fifteenth were not destined to
elevate the human condition but debase it. Maybe Nicholas O’Conner was
really going to grow up to be a serial killer. Maybe Billy Jenkins was
going to be a bomber pilot who went rogue and found a way to override
all the safeguards in the system in order to drop a few nuclear weapons
on a major metropolitan area; and maybe instead of being the greatest
woman statesman in the history of the world, Susie Jawolski was going to
be a radical activist who planted bombs in corporate boardrooms and
machinegunned those with whom she disagreed.
But as he swayed precariously on the rim of that black chasm, Jim saw in