“You’re too independent,” Danty said with assurance. “Like Magda, or me, come to that. You can quote the Gita, for example, as though you took it seriously. My guess would be you have it by heart:”
“When you wormed that out of me, I almost had a heart-attack,” Sheklov said. Was it only last night? It feels like a year agol But that was a good illusion to be under. It lent the comforting impression of distance in time to his borderline panic. He didn’t want to be reminded right now that he was capable of panic. He had to keep his mind at its finest pitch, to reason out and plan this ridiculous journey they were committed to.
“Yes, I’m sorry about that.” Danty muttered. “But . . . well, this talent of minel I’ll try to explain how it works, as far as I understand it myself-which isn’t very well.” He hunched forward and rested his unhurt arm on the back of Sheklov’s seat; staring past him at the cars on the superway.
“Since I was-oh-sixteen, seventeen, I guess, now and then I’ve felt a funny pressure at the back of my head, a sensation that belongs in the same group with hunger and thirst, because it means I have to do something to satisfy it. It makes me grope around like a blind man, or sometimes just wander from one place to another until I feel
the pressure fading a little and I realise I’m on the right track. Now and then I can tell quite clearly that I have to be at some special place at some special time. Like the morning of your arrival. I knew a direction I had to go in, I knew I’d recognize the spot when I reached it.”
“And you knew how to shut down the site,” Sheklov said, marvelling.
“That was the same process,” Danty said. “I got through the fences around the site by-by picturing an action in my mind and waiting to find out whether the pressure in my head got better or worse. Then I did the same thing with the lock on the control bunker, and then with the switches. I was asking this talent of mine, ‘Is it safe to close this one? Is it safe to close that one?’ And all the time I knew I had to get this right, because otherwise there was going to be a great crashing disaster. Like I told you, I figured out later that the sub that put you ashore would have triggered the detectors.”
“Thank you,” Sheklov said soberly. “1 wouldn’t have cared to be a mile from the explosion of one of those missiles.”
“Nor would I,” Danty said, with his regular crooked smile. “And then there’s one other thing about my talent. I can sense, in the same general way, how to-to inveigle people into doing things they didn’t intend to. I can sort of time words that prompt them to react.”
“Like making me quote the Gita.”
“Right. I can’t pull the trick all the time, only when something has built up the pressure in my head to a particular pitch. When I’m sensing something terribly important.” Danty passed his hand across his eyes. “And I never felt anything a fraction as important as-as you.4′
“How do you feel about me, then?” Sheklov countered.
“It’s hard to describe. Say huge. Say vast. Say colossal. You still aren’t within miles of hitting the idea. It’s like looking up into the sky and thinking yourself into a state where you can actually understand a million light-years. Feeling in your guts a gulf that takes light all that time to crawl across. Something that makes the whole of history; the whole story of life on Earth, the age of the Earth it. self, tiny!”
A shiver trembled down Sheklov’s spine. He began to dare to think that he might, just might, have succeeded in
his mission. He still didn’t see how, but the possibility was now credible.
Magda, unexpectedly, spoke up. She said, “Danty, what point of the border should we make for?”
“I’m still not quite clear on that,” Danty said. “Keep heading north, that’s all. I should be able to tell you in a little while what the safest zone will be.”