“I feel like we’re in a bathysphere, all glass, suspended far, far down
in the ocean,” Holly said. “And great schools of luminescent fish are
diving and soaring and swirling past us on all sides, through the deep
black water.”
He loved her for putting the experience into better words than he could
summon, words that would not let him forget the images they described,
even if he lived a hundred years.
Unquestionably, the ghostly luminosity lay within the stone, not merely
on the surface of it. He could see into that now-translucent substance,
as if it had been alchemized into a dark but well-clarified quartz. The
amber radiance brightened the room more than did the lantern, which he
had turned low. His trembling hands looked golden, as did Holly’s face.
But pockets of darkness remained, and the constantly moving light
enlivened the shadows as well.
“What now?” Holly asked softly.
Jim noticed that something had happened to the yellow tablet on the
floor between them. “Look.”
Words had appeared on the top third of the first page. They looked as
if they had been formed by a finger dipped in ink: I AM WITH YOU.
Holly had been distracted-to say the least!-by the lightshow, but she
did not think that Jim could have leaned to the tablet and printed the
words with the felt-tip pen or any other instrument without drawing her
attention. Yet she found it hard to believe that some disembodied
presence had conveyed the message.
“I think we’re being encouraged to ask questions,” Jim said.
“Then ask it what it is,” she said at once.
He wrote a question on the second tablet, which he was holding, and
showed it to her: Who are you?
As they watched, the answer appeared on the first tablet, which lay
between and slightly in front of them at such an angle that they could
both read it. The words were not burnt onto the paper and were not
formed by ink that dripped magically from the air. Instead, the
irregular, wavery letters appeared as dim gray shapes and grew darker as
they seemed to float up out of the paper, as though a page of the tablet
were not one-five hundredth of an inch thick but a pool of liquid many
feet deep. She recognized immediately that this was similar to the
effect she had seen earlier when the balls of light had risen to the
center of the pond before bursting and casting concentric rings of
illumination outward through the water this was, as well, how the light
had first welled up in the limestone walls before the blocks had become
thoroughly translucent.
THE FRIEND.
Who are you? The Friend.
It seemed to be an odd self description. Not “your friend” or “a
friend” but The Friend.
For an alien intelligence, if indeed that’s all it was, the name had
curious spiritual implications, connotations of divinity. Men had given
God many names-Jehovah, Allah, Brahma, Zeus, Aesir-but even more titles.
God was The Almighty, The Eternal Being, The Infinite, The Father, The
Savior, The Creator, The Light. The Friend seemed to fit right into
that list.
Jim quickly wrote another question and showed it to Holly: Where do you
come from?
ANOTHER WORLD.
Which could mean anything from heaven to Mars.
Do you mean another planet?
YES.
“My God,” Holly said, awed in spite of herself So much for the great
hereafter.
She looked up from the tablet and met Jim’s eyes. They seemed to shine
brighter than ever, although the chrome-yellow light had imparted to
them an exceptional green tint.
Restless with excitement, she rose onto her knees, then eased back
again, sitting on her calves. The top tablet page was filled with the
entity’s responses. Holly equivocated only briefly, then tore it off
and set it aside, so they could see the second page. She glanced back
and forth between Jim’s questions and the rapidly appearing answers.
From another solar sy.stern?
YES.
From another galaxy?
YES.
Is it your vessel we’ve seen in the pond?
YES.
How long have you been here?
,000 YEARS.
As she stared at that figure, it seemed to Holly that this moment was