“Where are you going?”
“Above, up and up and up into them clouds and thickness, sure, that’s where we go… up beyond into the cold and blackness and empty spaces. The long, hollow spaces, long, long…”
“Where are you going? Can you see where you are going?”
Lind’s breathing had slowed now to barely a rustle. His eyes were glazed and sleepy and lost. The air in the room no longer stank like bleach. It was cold, very cold suddenly. The temperature plummeting until a bone-deep chill settled into Hayes. Sharkey killed the fan and cranked the heat up, but it was barely keeping an edge on that glacial cold. Hayes could see his breath coming out in frosty plumes.
“There are winds,” Lind said in a squeaky whisper. “We drift on the winds that carry the hive and we dream together… we all dream together through the long, black night that goes on and on and on… nothingness… emptiness… only the long, empty blackness…”
Lind stopped talking. In fact, his eyes drifted shut and it seemed he had gone out cold. He was sleeping very peacefully. He stayed that way for ten or fifteen minutes while Hayes and Sharkey could do nothing but wait. About the time Hayes decided to pull his hand free, Lind gripped it and his eyes came open.
“The world… the blue world… the empty blue world… this is where we come, this is where the hive goes now. Oceans, great oceans… black, blasted lands… mountains and valleys and yellow mist.”
Hayes knew where they were now. They could be nowhere else. “Is there anything alive there, Lind? Is there any life?”
But Lind was shaking his head back and forth. “Dead… dead… nothing. But the hive, the hive can seed it… create organic molecules and proteins and the helix, we are the makers of the helix… we are the farmers, we seed and then we harvest. The primal white jelly… the architect of life… we are and have always been the farmers of the helix, the hive mind, the great white space, the thought and the being and the structure and… the helix… the perpetuation of the helix, the surety and plan and the conquest and the harvest… the makers and unmakers… the cosmic lord of the helix… the continuation of the code the helix the code vessels of flesh exist to perpetuate the helix only exist to perpetuate and renew the helix the spiral of being… the primal white jelly… the color out of space…”
Hayes tried to pull away now, because something was happening.
Lind’s eyes were now black and soulless and malevolent, filled with a dire alien malignancy. They were black and oily, yet shining brightly like tensor lamps. They found Hayes and held him. And those eyes, those bleeding alien cancers, they did not just look through him, they looked straight into the center of his being, his soul, coldly appraising what they found there and contemplating how it could be crushed and contained and converted into something else. Something not human, something barren and blank, something that was part of the hive.
Hayes screamed… feeling them, those ancient minds coming at him like a million yellowjacket wasps in a wind tunnel, punching through him and melting away his soul and individuality, making him part of the greater hole, the swarm, the swarm-mind. He tried vainly to pull his hand out of Lind’s grasp, but his muscles had gone to rubber and his bones were elastic. And Lind was like some incredible generator, arcing and crackling, electric flows of energy dancing over his skin in pale blue eddies and whirlpools.
And that energy was kinetic. It had motion and direction.
The glass face of a clock on the wall shattered like a hammer had struck it. Papers and pencils and folders were scattered from Sharkey’s desk and blown through the air in a wild, ripping cyclone. Shelves were emptied of bottles and instruments and the floor was vibrating, the walls pounding like the beat of some incredible heart. The infirmary and sickbay were a tempest of anti-gravity, things spinning and jumping and whirling in mid-air, but never falling. Sharkey was thrown against the wall and then to the floor where she was pushed by a wave of invisible force right against the door leading out into the corridor. That awful vibration was thrumming and thrumming, the air filled with weird squeals and echoes and pinging sounds. Hayes lost gravity… he was lifted up into the air, Lind still clutching his hand, tethering him to the world. Cracks fanned out in the wall, ceiling tiles broke loose and went madly spinning through the vortex and then –
And then Lind sat up.
The straps holding him down sheared open, wavering and snapping about like confetti in a tornado. His face was contorted and bulging, tears of blood running from his eyes and nose. He seized up, went rigid, and then collapsed back on the bed.
Everything stopped.
All those papers and pens and vials of pills and drugs and books and charts and paperclips… all of it suddenly crashed to the floor and Hayes with it. He sat there on his ass, stunned and shocked and not sure where he was for a moment or what he was doing. Sharkey was pulling herself up the wall, trying to speak and only making weird grunting sounds. The force of that wind, or whatever in the Christ it had been, had actually blown the tight pony tail ring from her hair and her locks hung over her face in wild plaits. She brushed them away.
Then she was helping Hayes up. “Are you okay, Jimmy?”
He nodded dumbly. “Yeah… I don’t even know what happened.”
Sharkey went to Lind. She pulled open one of his eyelids, checked his pulse. She picked her stethoscope up from where it was dangling from the top of the door. She listened for Lind’s heart, shook her head. “Dead,” she said. “He’s dead.”
Hayes was not surprised.
He looked down at Lind and knew that if the man’s heart had not given out or his brain exploded in his head, if whatever had not killed him, then both Sharkey and himself would probably be dead now. That energy had been lethal and wild and destructive.
“Elaine,” he said. “Should we…”
“Let’s just clean this mess up.”
So they did.
They had barely begun when people were coming down the corridor, demanding to know what all the racket had been and why the goddamn infirmary smelled like bleach or chemicals. But then they saw Lind and they didn’t ask any more questions. They politely tucked their tails between their legs and got out while the getting was good.
After they had put things back in order and swept up the rest, Hayes and Sharkey sat down and she got out a bottle of wine she’d been saving. It was expensive stuff and they drank it from plastic Dixie cups.
“How am I going to log this one?” Sharkey said. “That Lind was possessed? That he exhibited telepathy and telekinesis? That something had taken over his mind and it was something extraterrestrial? Or should I just say that he died from some unexplainable dementia?”
Hayes sighed. “He wasn’t possessed or insane. At least, not at first. He was in contact with them somehow, with those dreaming minds out in the hut or maybe the living ones down in the lake. Probably the former, I’m guessing.” Hayes lit a cigarette and his hand shook. “What he was telling us, Doc, was a memory. A memory of an alien world where those Old Ones had come from… it was a memory of colonization. Of them leaving that planet and drifting here through space, I think.”
“Drifting through space?” she said. “It must have taken ages, eons.”
“Time means nothing to them.”
Sharkey just shook her head. “Jimmy… that’s pretty wild.”
He knew it was, but he believed it. Completely. “You have a better explanation? I didn’t think so. You felt the heat, smelled that ammonia… it was probably one of the outer planets they came from. Maybe not originally, but that was their starting point when they came here. Jesus, they must have drifted for thousands of years, dormant and dreaming, waiting to come here, to this blue world.”