“Sir?” said one of the soldiers. He was young and lean and had a Southern accent. “Pardon, sir…but I think I’ve seen this man before. I mean…not here, but somewhere else.”
“How would that be, Private?”
“I don’t know, sir. He just looks real familiar. Like…somebody I remember from television. My mom used to watch him, back in Birmingham…or who he looks like.”
“I doubt this bastard was ever a television star,” Fleming answered, and then he returned to his business by pulling back the bolt of his .45 automatic and levelling the barrel at the man’s head. “I’ll kill you, friend. And if your Gorgon buddy moves, I’m leaving that up to Ethan. So let’s hear it.”
“Major,” said Jefferson Jericho, his eyes wide and set with an expression of puzzlement and pleading, “this is a big mistake. I hardly knew either of these men. I just met them on the road. Hey, I’m from the South too,” he told the young Southern soldier. “I used to live in—”
“Shut it,” Fleming interrupted. “Ethan knows the Gorgons are protecting you. Why do you need protection?”
“Protecting me?” Jefferson brought up a crooked smile. “If that’s so, they haven’t done a very good job, have they?”
Dave was watching Vope, who blinked…blinked…blinked.
“Major,” Dave said, “I think you ought to go ahead and put that sonofabitch there out of our misery. I’ll do it, if you like. Glad to.”
“No,” Ethan said. “Besides, you wouldn’t know how.”
“Would you?”
“Yes,” Ethan answered, sure in that knowledge, and looking into the silver eye made Dave go silent.
“I have let you restrain me,” Jack the Gorgon suddenly said. “I have allowed this indignity, but I could easily break loose from these bonds. The boy could destroy me, but not before you, called Major, are dead.”
“This guy’s crazy,” Jefferson spoke up. “Mental. But how does that mean he’s a Gorgon?”
“You want to tell him what you’ve told me?” Fleming asked the boy with the silver eye.
Ethan stared for a moment at Jeff Kushman. Looking into the man’s face, at the softness that seemed only lately to have been touched by this brutal war, he had the feeling that there was something wrong with the name…that it was an alias to an alias, that this man was a walking lie but he was good at lying, he was very skilled at it, and he may have been able to convince and persuade someone who could not see the hard blue sphere that shielded the images in his mind. Ethan said, “I can read the Gorgon’s mind. I can see things in there.” He decided to try his luck at persuasion. “I can read yours too, Mr. Kushman…but that’s not the name you really use, is it?”
Jefferson’s face flushed; he looked around for help and found only hard faces and accusing eyes. “Listen to me,” he said, speaking to everyone, “I’m human! I’m one of you! Look at this boy and tell me what he is! You’re not going to trust a…an alien over a human, are you?”
“I know who and what you are,” Ethan said. “Denying it just makes you smaller.”
“This isn’t a boy!” Jefferson had almost shouted it. His eyes were shiny with fear. “I don’t know what he is, but he’s not one of us! Listen, listen…okay?” He directed this to Major Fleming, and specifically to the hand that held the pistol. “I didn’t want to get involved in this, I was somewhere else! It’s not me that wants him!” He felt the ropes tighten as the Gorgon shifted in his chair. He looked to Dave and Olivia. “I swear to God, I don’t want to hurt him! I don’t care, I just want to get back to where I was! Back to my people! You know?” It was all pouring out of him, he felt that his dam had broken and he couldn’t hold back the floodwaters but he thought that he could be killed three ways now: by this weird boy, by the Gorgon he was roped to, or by the major’s pistol. “I was pushed into this!” he said. “I was forced to do it, I didn’t want to be here!”
“Forced to do what?” the major asked, and he looked as if he were so ready to use that gun.
“I was forced to—”
“I will speak,” said the Gorgon.
Everyone was silent. Jefferson Jericho looked at the floor, his heart pounding and his mind racing.
Vope couldn’t turn his head enough to look at anyone directly, so he stared impassively at the far wall. “The boy is a curiosity to us. How he kills without weapons. He is something that should not be, yet he is. We wish to know his internals and systems. You would do the same, Major, if you were fighting an enemy such as we are.”
“We are fighting your enemy,” Fleming answered. “And we’re fighting you, too.”
“You have lost both those wars long ago. The only chance your kind has for survival is to nest with us. Release us from these bonds, Major. We will take the boy and consider him an offering.”
“Like hell!” Dave growled. “Nobody’s taking Ethan!”
Vope was silent. Then his head cocked slightly to one side and he said, “Your refusal has been noted. You ask for an attack that will burn you all to the ground. In the end, we shall have what we want.”
“Then maybe I should blow your damn head off right now,” said Fleming, who stepped closer to press the pistol’s barrel against Vope’s temple.
“Good luck with that,” Jefferson said bitterly. He tensed himself for what he feared was to come, the sweat running down his sides under his shirt.
“Yes,” said the Gorgon, as if in agreement with that last statement. Jefferson Jericho couldn’t see what happened next, but the others could. The Gorgon’s body shimmered and began to lose its substance. There was a sound like a soft whistling, as if air was being displaced. Maybe it was a whirring sound, like a little machine in motion. As Vope faded out and the ropes that had bound him fell slack, the black-bearded and dark-eyed face angled to look up at Major Fleming, and it seemed to the major that something behind that face was struggling to get out, to cast off its disguise, because the face was as distorted as if made of melting wax, or like an empty rubber mask seen in a funhouse mirror. There came the harsh, otherworldly echo of the Gorgon’s final word to him: “Idiot.”
Then the body was gone, but perhaps there remained for a second or two the faintest impression of a dark aura where the body had been…and that too passed away, and the barrel of Fleming’s automatic was aimed at empty air.
“Jesus!” Jefferson Jericho shouted, as he realized the ropes had fallen from him and Vope had been teleported from the room. “Don’t leave me here!” Jefferson stood up from his chair, causing all the guns in the room to train on him. “Don’t leave me!” he called into the air, with a voice like that of a broken child. There was no reply to his plea, not even the merest pinch of pain from the device buried in the back of his neck.
“I can’t live out here! I can’t survive it!” he babbled to the major, as tears of terror burned his eyes. “This is all wrong! I’ve got to get back to where I was!” He turned his agonized appeal upon Ethan, Dave, Olivia and JayDee. “Please…you’ve got to help me get back!”
“I’ll help you into a fucking grave, if that suits you,” Dave said.
Ethan sent out the silver hand again—it was easy now, so easy, as if he’d been doing it all his life—to probe into the head of the man who called himself Jeff Kushman, but the incandescent blue sphere still protected the man’s memories. Whatever the Gorgons had done to him, they were still shielding him. It was a strong force. Ethan’s force couldn’t remain in there very long without feeling that it was sapping his strength; he had to pull out, and he brought the silver hand back to rest within himself. From beginning to end it had taken less than three seconds.