Shall I just kill her, and see what happens? Slowly, with boils and pus and scum from every pore? Or immediately, with a lightning stroke?
Come to me, my spies of the middle air, my northern apples of the twilight ether, extenders of my brain, my strength, my knowledge. What do they want? What do we know? What is his advantage, that bland mortician, that poisoned milk, that sterile tool?
Stable matter? Stable matter! Stab at Mater, what a vicious idea! So is that what the experiment in that plant is all about, the search for what the instable humans call strange matter (as though they weren’t sufficiently strange themselves).
By Unholy Lucifer, he means to stabilize the Earth!
No, no, no. I have to get in there. I have to stop this, and at once.
And that’s a pearl, that was my planet? No.
Ananayel
So he knows.
Well, he would, wouldn’t he? And my little lesson in Connecticut didn’t take, did it? But of course, I should have realized that; intimidation is a cumbersome tool, as likely to stiffen resolve as to break spirit. Oddly enough, violence never is the answer. Things done in violence have to be done over again.
But what else is there, with as fallen and shameless a creature as this nameless slave of the Unholy? Reason? Persuasion? Argument? Emotional appeal? Bribery? He’s an extension of his miserable master, nothing else, with no more free will than a moon.
All right, we’ll stop him. Again.
In order to accomplish anything, this fetid fiend will have to take a corporeal form, which in his case, of course, means possessing a human’s body rather than, as in mine, creating a pleasing person out of air. And his first idea — they’re so predictable, so obvious, these tools of Satan — will be to take over one of the hostages in the plant, one of the staff members kept inside to run the machinery. But that’s easily dealt with. I have my own assistants when necessary, my cherubim, swifter than thought, darting through space and time with arrowed precision. (How unthinking of human artists to portray them as fat!)
I have called upon them, these lean servants of the Lord. They hover now over the hostages, protecting, observing, prepared to alert me at the slightest hint of incursion. Until the end, each hostage shall have one of these, these, oh, let’s call them guardian angels.
So he can’t suddenly, all at once, be there, inside the plant. He’ll have to start from the other side of the fence, take over some poor human somewhere out in the world, and try to scheme some way to move it through the maze of officialdom ringing the site. Impossible? I’m not sure; that diseased cur does seem to have a low cunning.
Outside, of course, his choice of host is wide. I can’t give everyone a guardian angel. We’ll simply have to keep a diligent watch.
38
These were the times that tried Joshua Hardwick’s soul. To be public information director for a nuclear power plant less than a hundred miles from a major population center like New York City was no bed of roses even when things were going well. When the plant was under occupation by terrorists — nobody even knew for sure which terrorists, just to put the icing on the cake — the PID’s life became, in a word, hell.
There were even times these days when he found himself thinking nostalgically of the advertising racket, that’s how bad it was. (At least in the ad game, you could drink at lunch. And CNN wasn’t training its cameras on you every time you blew your nose. And... Nah. There’s no parenthesis big enough.)
Lately, Joshua hated to get out of bed in the morning, hated that first pre-breakfast phone call to the command post outside the Green Meadow gate — “Still there. No change.” — hated sitting in his Honda for the twenty-minute bucolic (and so what?) drive from his once-happy home in Connecticut to his once-cushy job. He hated the job, the reporters, the cops, the questions, the answers, and the fact that there actually weren’t any answers, not really.
Possibly most of all — apart from the terrorists who were ultimately responsible for this mess — Joshua hated his bosses, and God knows there were enough of them for the hate to spread around. Green Meadow was a quasi-governmental, quasi-private corporation, run by three federal and two New York State agencies, plus a consortium of private companies led by Unitronic Laboratories, itself a subsidiary of Anglo Dutch Oil. Every one of those entities had its representatives here for the crisis, and the task of each and every one of those representatives, it had early become clear, was to see to it that some other entity got the blame when things ended badly.
That was kind of depressing already, knowing they all expected it to end badly. And that, rather than any of them trying to do something to change that gloomy prediction, they were all spending their time trying to scramble out of the way of falling debris. Expected falling debris.
Which meant they all wanted the ear — and the voice, and the heart, and the mind, and the soul — of the public information director. They all wanted to believe he was on their side, would present their waffling and cowardice in the best light while screwing everybody else. (The idea that everybody else should be screwed was as important to these businessmen and government officials as the idea that they themselves should be spared.)
As usual this morning Joshua had to show his two separate IDs — one wasn’t enough for these people, because they were very serious — at the police barrier half a mile down the road from the plant entrance, and as usual it was a state trooper he never remembered seeing before, and who felt the same about him. Sitting at the wheel of his Honda with controlled impatience during the trooper’s long slow inspection of his face, Joshua felt a sudden startling clench in his stomach, a sudden urgent need to throw up. “Oh, my God,” he said. “I can’t— You’ll have to—”
Startled, the trooper backed away, hand whipping to his sidearm as Joshua came boiling out of the car, right hand clamped over mouth. Joshua managed two steps toward the far verge, all his muscles and joints lashing him with sudden excruciating pain, before he dropped to his knees and burst breakfast all over the westbound lane and slightly on his own trousers.
“Jesus Christ, fella!” the trooper cried, no longer suspicious — nobody can fake that much vomit — “What’s the matter with you?”
“I dun... I dunno.” Kneeling there, head sagging, Joshua gasped, lungs searing with pain at every breath. He dropped back to sit on his heels, arms hanging at his sides, and felt the pain strike at him everywhere, as though a whole bag of cats at once were trying to claw their way out of his body.
“I’ll call somebody,” the trooper decided.
“Wai—” Joshua said, vaguely lifting an arm. “Wait.”
Because the pain, as quickly as it had come over him, was now lessening, fading away. He was able to take deeper and deeper breaths, he could feel his strength steadily return, and he lifted a shaking hand to wipe his sweat-beaded and cold-feeling brow “What a hell of a thing,” he said, his voice trembling. And now that the first attack was over, what he mostly felt was scared. What was this? Cancer? Leukemia? An early sign?
Oh, Christ, don’t tell me I got something at the goddamn plant.
“Wait there,” the trooper said, which Joshua was more than willing to do, sitting back on his heels in front of his breakfast like an extremely oddball worshipper, and the trooper went away to his impressive official Plymouth Fury II on the other side of the road, returning a minute later with a roll of paper towels and a Diet Pepsi. “Here you go,” he said. “Try it, anyway”