Something hard and going fast hit the boulder’s edge, four feet or so from Decker. Chips of granite flew and a few of them struck his cheek and neck with stinging force. The report of the shot reverberated in the hills. The bullet, up-ended in its flight, went howling off in a ricochet, tumbling end for end.
Up there, Decker told himself, up there by the stone outcropping – a tiny spot that had momentarily glittered in the rays of the setting sun. Decker tried to make out what it was but was unable to. He slid the barrel of his rifle along the boulder until it was pointed approximately at the spot.
Nothing happened. Nothing stirred. There was no sound. The killer waited. Then Decker saw the beginning of a shape and traced it out – a shoulder, a hint of torso, the suggestion of a head.
He crouched close against the rifle, cuddling it hard against him, lining up the sights. The shoulder, and there was the head, half in shadow, not sharply outlined, but it had to be a head. He took it in his sights, froze them on it, drew in a breath and held it, began the trigger squeeze. . .
Thirty-eight
Tennyson woke just before dawn. Jill lay beside him, asleep, breathing softly, regularly. He propped his pillow against the headboard and slid his body up to lean against it. The dark was quiet. Faint predawn light filtered through the windows of the living room, the blinds were drawn and no light could seep into the bedroom. In the kitchen the refrigerator was humming to itself.
He glanced down at Jill to see if the cheek was still clear and unblemished, but she was turned so that it was against the pillow. Even had it not been, he told himself, in the faintness of the light reflected from the living room he probably would not have been able to be sure.
Thinking of it now, even hours after it had happened, he still felt the stir of disbelief. Yet there had been evidence, hours of evidence, that the angry red scar was no longer there. Surely, if for whatever reason, it had been only a temporary effect, it should have started to return within those hours.
He raised his right hand in front of him, close to his face, and stared at it. It was shadowed in the darkness; all he could see was the shape of it. The hand was in no way different. It did not glow in the dark; it was as it had always been.
And yet the touch of it. . .
He shivered in a sudden coldness, although the night was warm. He tried to remember back, digging back through the folds of otherwhere, to the equation world. The equations had spun around him in a dizzy swirl, they had gone knifing through him; some of them, he was sure, had lodged inside of him and stayed. There had been a time toward the end of what he could remember when it had seemed that he, himself, had shrunk to an equation – shrunk, he thought, or grown? He tried to remember what sort of equation he had been – if, in fact, he had ever known. Certainly not one of those fat, monstrous equations, frightening in their very complexity, that he had glimpsed while he lay buried in the quivering jelly sea. Perhaps he had been a very simple equation, a simple statement of himself. When the diagrams had built the house for him, he recalled, he had quickly scuttled under it and had crouched, not knowing what he was, but quite content with what he was. A simple thought, a simple reasoning that might have gone along with a very simple equation. Had the diagrams built the shelter, he wondered, to protect him against the ravening equations that flashed and whirled outside it, spinning all around it?
Then, suddenly, with no warning, he had been free of the equation world, to find himself standing in the living room with his back turned to the fire. Free – but not entirely free, for he had brought back something from the equation world, some quality, some ability that he had not had before. There had been one evidence of that new ability; would there now be more? What am I, he asked himself, what am I, the continuing question that he had asked when he had huddled in the house the diagrams had built.
Human, he wondered, am I human still? How many alien concepts can be grafted onto human stock and it still stay human?
Had the folk of the equation world, he asked himself, known or sensed that he was a physician, a healer? Had they confined their rebuilding of him – if it had been rebuilding – to the sole purpose of designing him into a better healer? Or had they tinkered with other facets of his life as well?
Thinking of it, he was frightened, and the more he thought about it, the more frightened he became. He had meddled into something that he had no right to meddle with and he had not come out unscathed. He had been changed and he desired no change: Change was uncomfortable under any circumstance; a change in one’s self was terrifying.
Yet why should he feel such terror? The change, what ever it might be, how limited or extensive, whatever it might come to in the future, had made it possible for him to give to Jill – unwittingly, and yet he’d given it – a gift that no other human could have given her.
And that was it. There was no point in being frightened or being terrified. In the end, so far as he was concerned, it all came down to Jill. If in all the future there was nothing else – if, in fact, in future time he should suffer for it- there would be no regret. Any future price that might be exacted from him would be worth what he had done. He had been paid in full in that moment he had laid his hand upon her cheek.
Thinking this, he felt a calmness in him. He stayed propped up in bed, not sliding back down again, staring into the gray edge of the early dawn. In his thoughts he went back again to the equation world, trying to puzzle how he had managed to go there in person, although he knew without question that it had not been he who had been able to go there but Whisperer who had been able to take him there. To understand how Whisperer had done it, he’d have to know a great deal more about Whisperer than he knew.
Turning his head slowly, he scanned the room, looking for some evidence of Whisperer – a glitter in a corner, a sparkle in the air. He saw no glitter or sparkle. He searched inside himself for Whisperer, for Whisperer might still be with him. But there was no hint of him, although that was not good evidence, for in the equation world, he’d not been aware of Whisperer.
He jerked himself more fully awake, for there was a tapping. It stopped for a moment and then started up again. It seemed to have no direction, it could come from almost anywhere. Listening closely, he identified it. There was someone at the door. He swung himself easily out of bed, sitting on the edge, his feet seeking blindly for the slippers that did not seem to be there.
Jill stirred in the bed, making an inquiring sound. ‘It’s all right,’ he told her. ‘You stay here. There’s someone at the door.’
He failed to find the slippers and stood up without them, making his way around the bed and into the living room. He closed the bedroom door behind him. The tapping on the door had stopped for a time, but now it began again, a discreet tapping, not insistent.
Without turning on lights, Tennyson made his way across the living room, skirting chairs and tables. When he opened the door, for a moment he did not recognize the man who stood outside it, then saw that it was Ecuyer.
‘Jason, I am sorry. This ungodly hour…’
‘It’s all right,’ said Tennyson. ‘I was just lying there and thinking. Ready to get up.’
‘Could you spare a drink? Some brandy if you have it.’
‘Certainly,’ said Tennyson. ‘Sit down in front of the fire. I’ll put on another log.’
He closed the door and had a closer look at Ecuyer. The man was dressed in slacks and jacket.
‘Up early?’ he asked. ‘Or didn’t you go to bed at all?’
‘Never went to bed,’ said Ecuyer, reaching the couch before the fire and collapsing onto it.
Tennyson found the brandy and brought Ecuyer a snifter with a generous helping.
‘You look all tired out,’ he told him.