The night of that first day erupted into screams.
“Why?” demanded Bell. “What was happening?”
That night several members of the staff reported extremely strange and unusually vivid dreams. It took the base psychologists nearly a week to put together a cohesive story and even longer to cross-check it. The upshot was that during the time the energy from the God Machine was active in low idle, several staff members claimed to have been inside the dreams of their friends and coworkers, and two of them swore that they had been home. One in Saratoga Springs and the other in Cheyenne. During those dreams they were able to see things at those locations with incredible clarity, and one of them remembered what was on TV. When this was checked out, the substance of those observations matched reality with eerie precision.
So far they determined that one in eleven people tended to have dreams while the machine was idling. However, two in fifteen had the kinds of vivid dreams where they appeared to have “traveled” to other locations and witnessed events there.
At first Sails couldn’t believe it. No one could. Until they had no choice. The machine was left idling for a week, and during that time several members of the team, including Erskine, went “dreamwalking,” as it came to be called. Occasionally their dreaming selves roamed far away from Gateway, but more often inside the dreaming minds — or even the wide-awake minds — of other people at the base. Everyone was rattled. Sails could understand that. Everyone down there had secrets. Everyone who worked in that program had made compromises and decisions that perhaps they did not care to have scrutinized.
One industrial spy was outed and was shipped off to a black site for fun and games. One of the soldiers was discovered to have committed two rapes of women during his time in Afghanistan. One of the women was a local, the other was a female soldier. The rapist was scheduled to return home for court-martial but was found outside in the snow with his ankles and wrists tied. It was seventy below.
Paranoia ran high at Gateway. People began taking sleeping pills, which seemed to work pretty well as a block against invasion. Unfortunately the quality of work product dropped. The pills were banned; everyone’s locker was searched.
The suicides didn’t start for nearly a month.
Bell kept his face bland. He’d heard of this sort of thing before. At Ballard after Prospero’s machine blew up, and elsewhere. Howard Shelton of Majestic Three had said that they were working on something like this for the DIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency. That line of experimentation was labeled Project Stargate and had ultimately failed. It was subsequently handed off to the CIA for evaluation and then terminated.
Bell thought about his son, and about Prospero’s complex genetics and parentage, if that word could even apply. Prospero was born in one of the M3 labs. The connection couldn’t be coincidental. That offended logic.
“This dream stuff is real?” asked Bell, careful to keep his excitement out of his voice.
“Yes,” she said. She sipped more of the bourbon and set the glass down. “They’ve been doing exhaustive tests.”
“Have you done this? Dreamwalking, I mean.”
Her eyes slid away. She said, “They sent someone down to interview everyone at Gateway.”
“Who?”
“Someone from the CIA,” she said.
“Christ. Have they reopened Stargate?”
Sails’s head whipped around and her eyes flared with suspicion and shock. “What? How do you even know about that?”
“I don’t know much,” he lied. “Howard Shelton’s people were working on it before the project was terminated.”
“Oscar… has anything like this ever happened with Prospero?”
“Of course not,” he lied. “I would have told you about that.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t lie to me.”
“I’m not.”
It took a while for the doubt to drain away from her eyes. Then she sagged back against the cushions. “I’m afraid to sleep,” she said.
“Because you’re afraid of dreamwalking?”
She shook her head slowly. “Because there are so many places you never want to go.”
“What do you mean?”
Without turning, Corrine Sails said, “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn.”
Which is when Oscar Bell woke up.
He was in his bed. Alone. In a silent house.
He stretched out a hand to the other side of the bed, but the sheets were smooth and cool, the pillow undented.
Bell got up and went through every bedroom on that floor, opening doors, looking for her. Calling her name. Then yelling it. He called the guard at the front gate and asked when Corrine Sails left.
“Left, sir?” asked the guard. “I don’t understand. I can check my logbook, but I’m pretty sure Major Sails hasn’t been here for three or four weeks. Do you want me to—?”
Bell hung up. He pulled on a robe and ran downstairs to his office. The fire had burned down to a few orange coals. The couch was empty. However, the bottle of Pappy Van Winkle stood on the edge of his desk. There were two glasses on the tables on either side of the couch. His, drained down to a last sip.
Hers. Filled nearly to the brim with four fingers.
Untouched.
Oscar Bell stood there for a long, long time.
In the morning he called Commander Stark at Ballard and told him that he was upping the budget for Prospero’s lab.
“Sir,” said Stark, “your son seems to have found a comfortable niche, even made a friend. He isn’t spending as much time as he used to in the lab.”
“Listen to me, you stupid motherfucker,” said Bell in a nearly inhuman tone, “I’m not paying you to make my son comfortable. I don’t want him fucking comfortable. I want him in that goddamn lab. I don’t care what it takes, I don’t care what you have to do, but you get him in there. You do it today. And if his productivity ever drops again, if I don’t hear about a jump in his productivity, then I will come down there and rip your fucking lungs out. Do you hear me, Stark? Am I making myself crystal clear?”
“Y-yes…”
“Yes… what?”
“Yes, sir.”
Bell slammed down the phone. The glass of bourbon was still where he’d found it. Bell went over to the couch, sat down, picked up the glass, and stared into its depths.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Harry Bolt caught up to Violin half a block from the library and dogged her heels as she ran down a side street, zigged and zagged through alleys and courtyards, followed her into hotels and out through different exits. When there were people around the woman slowed to a very casual and convincing stroll. She took Harry’s arm as if they were old friends or lovers and she laughed as if he’d said something clever. Once, when a police car was passing, Violin took his face in both hands and kissed him with such fierce intensity that when they were clear and began walking again he had a large and very inconvenient erection.
After fifteen minutes of random changes of direction, Violin stopped by a parked two-year-old Ford Modeo, produced a key, unlocked the car, and when they were both belted in she drove away at a sedate speed.