“They’ll be back,” said Ethan, who coughed blood into a hand that was his gunsight. He staggered, and the President caught him. “I need time to program it,” he said, the voice raspy and weak. “We’re not safe here. Get into that room.” He nodded in the direction of the steel door that led to the surgery.
“Let’s go,” Beale said. Then, to Jefferson, “Hold onto that thing.”
They left the shattered artifact room and moved through the pall of rock dust, with Beale in the lead and Dave guarding the rear. Ethan was helped along by Olivia. He was aware of entities pressing in, of things not fully formed lurking in the haze, but whether they were Cypher or Gorgon, he didn’t know. Whichever it was, a terrible danger was very close.
They were about fifteen feet from the door when Dave heard what might have been a soft whistling like the displacement of air; or maybe it was a whirring sound, like a little machine in motion.
It was coming from his left.
He turned in that direction, his rifle barrel coming up because he knew already.
Vope had materialized only a few feet away. Vope was perfect again, as perfect as the Gorgons could create the masquerade of a human being.
Dave fired into the thing’s face and blew its right cheek off. Before he could take a second shot he saw the mouth hitch into what might have been a smile of triumph, just as the mottled spike drove itself into the right side of his chest. It wrenched free, and Dave fell to his knees.
There was no time for shock. With a cry of outrage and pain, Olivia emptied her last three bullets into the creature’s head. Vope staggered back, counterfeit human blood flowing down the face. The spiked arm and the arm with the ebony snake-head writhed in the air, the snake’s metal fangs darting out to seize and crush Olivia’s skull.
Ethan did not let that happen.
His rage emerged as a massive silver whip of energy that tore Vope to shreds in the blink of an eye. The face, now devoid of emotion, disintegrated. What little remained of the body was thrown backwards into the haze, and that small part ignited into white flame and exploded into nothingness.
“Help him…help him,” Ethan pleaded. Derryman and Winslett reached down and dragged Dave through the steel door. Beale slammed it shut and threw two locks.
Olivia had burst into tears, her knuckles white on the empty pistol. Ethan knelt down beside Dave, who reached out for him and grasped the front of his t-shirt.
“Damn,” Dave whispered, more in frustration than in pain. He was a ruin. He was his own Visible Man, open to the world. His hand trembled, and his face had gone deathly pale. He had lost his rifle and the baseball cap. His sweat-damp hair was sticking up in wild cowlicks.
Ethan searched his eyes and saw the dying of the light.
“Rest,” the peacekeeper said.
“I…I…” Dave couldn’t speak, he couldn’t get anything out. Yet he had so much to say. A coldness was creeping up. So much to say, to both Ethan and Olivia. To Jefferson, as well. He wanted to put his arms around Olivia one last time and tell her how much he loved and respected her, but he knew it was not to be. He hoped she knew; he thought she did. She knelt beside him too and took his other hand, and she held it tightly. It was getting hard for him to think, hard to realize exactly where he was and what had happened. It had been so fast. He thought as as he started to drift away…one thing he had learned…life was not fair and there were hard blows you had to take on the chin, like it or not. A test, he thought. Was that really what it was all about? If so…he hoped he’d scored at least a passing grade. His sunken eyes found the glowing cube in Jefferson’s hand. He pulled Ethan close, his mouth against the ear of a human boy.
“I believe in you,” he whispered.
And he left the world with the small sigh of a man who had worked hard all his life, seen much trial and tribulation, but had known joy and love too, in what used to be. He left the world holding tight to a being from another planet or another dimension or another reality, and as the life departed and the hand fell away, the peacekeeper stood up with Beale’s help. Ethan was himself dazed and unsteady but not defeated, and he touched his silver eyes where they were wet. Then he knew fully what it was to be a human, and he was in awe of them.
Olivia got to her feet. She stared down at Dave for a moment, and when she looked into Ethan’s eyes again she was stone-faced and resolute. “Do what you need to do,” she told him. “Do what you can.”
They stood in an area where surgeons prepared themselves to explore the bodies of beings from other worlds. There was a long green ceramic sink where the surgeons scrubbed their hands before they put on the rubber gloves and took up their scalpels. A pair of doors led into the operating room, and a large plate-glass window afforded a view to the two stainless steel operating tables, the concave mirror lights and the other necessary equipment. Ethan noted two cameras set up to capture all the details.
“Hold it out,” Ethan said to Jefferson.
There came the muffled noise of another explosion, a massive one, from somewhere else on the level. The floor shook beneath their feet. The Gorgons and Cyphers were still at their forever war, and they would fight each other into eternity on balls of rock, ice, and fire that sat astride the border.
“Hurry,” the President urged.
But it could not be hurried, because even though the peacekeeper knew the symbols, the task still had to be done with care. The creature who had brought this gift had intended to absorb the earthly languages, which would be child’s play for that advanced civilization. Then detailed instruction would be given to whoever was chosen to receive it, and hopefully that person was wise enough to grasp the power in this timepiece.
But that hadn’t happened, and Ethan figured the bearer of this had wound up being dissected on one of those operating room tables.
Ethan recognized that the upper symbols on the two squares stood for the representation of Furthermost Distance, which would be the year. The lower symbols stood for one and zero, again the binary code. Ethan entered the year by pressing the squares a total of eleven times. They turned from glowing white to red. That designation of the Year—the furthermost distance in time away from the present moment—was accepted.
The squares became white again. The upper symbols changed to the representation of Middle Distance, which would be the day. April 3rd was the 93rd day of the Earth year, thus Ethan entered the binary code of 1011101. The squares turned red, accepting the day.
Once more the squares turned white. The upper symbols altered themselves to the representation of Nearest Distance, which would be the time in hours and minutes.
Ethan recalled JayDee saying I remember the time exactly. It was eighteen minutes after ten.
That was when John Douglas had been alerted by a nurse to watch the explosions in the sky on the television newcasts and the Gorgon ships were beginning their ominous arrival around the planet. Ethan decided to input the time as ten o’clock, 1111101000 in binary code. The timepiece was aligned to the S-4 installation’s twenty-four-hour clock and would correctly read that number as morning and not night.
“When I enter this,” he told them, “the process will start. I don’t know what it will feel like to you. I do know I’ll have no more need for this body, and I’ll release it. Are you ready?”
“Ready,” said the President. His facial tic had stopped, but a muscle worked in his jaw.