It was not a normal dream. It had the cohesiveness and inevitability not of nightmare, where fear makes its own reality for the duration of sleep, but rather of history. Kelly was an observer, and the frustration of watching rather than participating – even in a certain disaster – caused him to drench with sweat the bedspread on which he lay.
And the wall of Amida, thrown higher than reason to make the fortress impregnable, crashed of its own weight toward the Persian lines. The rubble of it lay in a broad entrance ramp, giving the besiegers a gentle slope up which they scrambled into the heart of the city, crying slaughter and the glory of their bloody monarch Shapur.
Kelly thought he would prefer anything to the rape and butchery his mind showed him in the same omniscient detail as it had the preliminaries. But what closed the dream at last was a nuclear fireball, expanding and devouring its way across not Amida but a thousand modern cities, each of them as clear in Kelly’s brain as the screams of the first woman he had shot at close range.
He awoke standing, legs splayed and the snubbie in his right hand searching for a target in the dim light. He thought it must be dawn, but the digital clock in his little radio said that it was seven PM.
There was no one else in the room.
Kelly felt foolish as he put the revolver down, but coming alert with a gun ready had been a survival reflex for a lot of years. Hell, it probably was again. And if nothing was waiting for him in the room at the moment, then that certainly didn’t mean that everything was normal.
He’d never had a dream like that in his life; and it seemed likely enough that whatever it was he’d just – imagined – it wasn’t a dream.
The phone rang. Kelly jumped, cursed, and started to pick up the handset. His right palm and fingers tingled oddly, and not from his grip on the snubbie, that was too familiar a stress for him to notice its effect. Flexing his right hand, Kelly picked up the phone with his left and said, “Shoot.”
“Thought I’d check in, Tom,” Elaine said through a buzz of static more reasonable for a call from Lagos than from the next room over. “Commander Posner expects to meet you in the lobby in twenty minutes.”
“No problem,” said Kelly. “I was just getting dressed.”
“Then I’ll leave you to it. Good luck,” the woman said and rang off.
She sounded cheerful enough, Kelly thought. Wonder if she’d be cheerful if she knew as much about the bug as the bug had told Kelly about her.
He should have been wrung out by the nightmare, but in fact he’d awakened feeling as good as he had in years. The length of time he’d slept didn’t make sense, either. He’d needed eighteen hours of rest, but there was no way his mind should have let him get it. It didn’t work that way when you were on edge. Catnaps maybe, but not uninterrupted sleep that genuinely refreshed you instead of just backing a notch or two off your tension.
The tingling in his right hand persisted for some minutes, finally wearing away at about the time he shrugged into the coat of his gray wool suit. It hadn’t been anything serious, nothing that kept him from tying his shoes or would have kept him from putting all five rounds from the snubbie into a shirt pocket at fifteen yards.
But the feeling had been in the portions of his hand which had brushed the surface of the alien corpse in Maryland, and it could be that that meant something very serious indeed.
“I don’t like this,” said Commander Posner for the third time, lighting a fresh cigarette from the butt of the one he had just smoked through. “Associating me with you and whatever you’re doing is a public provocation to the host country, and it’ll do a great deal of harm in the long run.”
Posner was in civilian clothes tonight, a fact that surprised Kelly as did nothing else about the assistant military attache. Military attachés – of all nations – have an advantage over other intelligence officers in that there is no dichotomy in what they are doing. They are, openly and by reciprocal treaty, spies in foreign countries. Not spies thinly masquerading as newsmen, AID officers, or vice-consuls, just spies. Their status makes it difficult for them to achieve results more remarkable than photographs of military parades, but it also permits them to believe that the world is as ordered a place as the bridge of an aircraft carrier in peacetime.