NO. BUT HUMANS HAVE ALWAYS KNOWN ABOUT US.
Us? There's more than one of you?
UNCOUNTABLE BILLIONS
Mary Malone's head rang. She'd been brought up as a Catholic. More than that — as Lyra had discovered, she had once been a nun. None of her faith was left to her now, but she knew about angels. St. Augustine had said, «Angel is the name of their office, not of their nature. If you seek the name of their nature, it is spirit; if you seek the name of their office, it is angel; from what they are, spirit, from what they do, angel.»
Dizzy, trembling, she typed again:
And Shadow matter is what we have called spirit?
FROM WHAT WE ARE, SPIRIT; FROM WHAT WE DO, MATTER. MATTER AND SPIRIT ARE ONE.
She shivered. They'd been listening to her thoughts.
And did you intervene in human evolution?
YES
Vengeance for — oh! Rebel angels! After the war in Heaven — Satan and the Garden of Eden — but it isn't true, is it? Is that what you …
FIND THE GIRL AND THE BOY. WASTE NO MORE TIME.
But why?
YOU MUST PLAY THE SERPENT.
She took her hands from the keyboard and rubbed her eyes. The words were still there when she looked again.
Where …
GO TO A ROAD CALLED SUNDERLAND AVENUE AND FIND A TENT. DECEIVE THE GUARDIAN AND GO THROUGH.
TAKE PROVISIONS FOR A LONG JOURNEY. YOU WILL BE PROTECTED. THE SPECTERS WILL NOT TOUCH YOU.
But I
BEFORE YOU GO, DESTROY THIS EQUIPMENT.
I don't understand. Why me? And what's this journey? And…
YOU HAVE BEEN PREPARING FOR THIS AS LONG AS YOU HAVE LIVED. YOUR WORK HERE IS FINISHED. THE LAST THING YOU MUST DO IN THIS WORLD IS PREVENT THE ENEMIES FROM TAKING CONTROL OF IT. DESTROY THE EQUIPMENT. DO IT NOW AND GO AT ONCE.
Mary Malone pushed back the chair and stood up, trembling. She pressed her fingers to her temples and discovered the electrodes still attached to her skin. She took them off absently. She might have doubted what she had done, and what she could still see on the screen, but she had passed in the last half-hour or so beyond doubt and belief altogether. Something had happened, and she was galvanized.
She switched off the detector and the amplifier. Then she bypassed all the safety codes and formatted the computer's hard disk, wiping it clean; and then she removed the interface between the detector and the amplifier, which was on a specially adapted card, and put the card on the bench and smashed it with the heel of her shoe, there being nothing else heavy at hand. Next she disconnected the wiring between the electromagnetic shield and the detector, and found the wiring plan in a drawer of the filing cabinet and set light to it. Was there anything else she could do? She couldn't do much about Oliver Payne's knowledge of the program, but the special hardware was effectively demolished.
She crammed some papers from a drawer into her briefcase, and finally took down the poster with the I Ching hexagrams and folded it away in her pocket. Then she switched off the light and left.
The security guard was standing at the foot of the stairs, speaking into his telephone. He put it away as she came down, and escorted her silently to the side entrance, watching through the glass door as she drove away.
An hour and a half later she parked her car in a road near Sunderland Avenue. She had had to find it on a map of Oxford; she didn't know this part of town. Up till this moment she had been moving on pent-up excitement, but as she got out of her car in the dark of the small hours and found the night cool and silent and still all around her, she felt a definite lurch of apprehension. Suppose she was dreaming? Suppose it was all some elaborate joke?
Well, it was too late to worry about that. She was committed. She lifted out the rucksack she'd often taken on camping journeys in Scotland and the Alps, and reflected that at least she knew how to survive out of doors; if worse came to worst, she could always run away, take to the hills….
Ridiculous.
But she swung the rucksack onto her back, left the car, turned into the Banbury Road, and walked the two or three hundred yards up to where Sunderland Avenue ran left from the rotary. She felt almost more foolish than she had ever felt in her life.
But as she turned the corner and saw those strange childlike trees that Will had seen, she knew that something at least was true about all this. Under the trees on the grass at the far side of the road there was a small square tent of red and white nylon, the sort that electricians put up to keep the rain off while they work, and parked close by was an unmarked white Transit van with darkened glass in the windows.
Better not hesitate. She walked straight across toward the tent. When she was nearly there, the back door of the van swung open and a policeman stepped out. Without his helmet he looked very young, and the streetlight under the dense green of the leaves above shone full on his face.
«Could I ask where you're going, madam?» he said. «Into that tent.»
«I'm afraid you can't, madam. I've got orders not to let anyone near it.»
«Good,» she said. «I'm glad they've got the place protected. But I'm from the Department of Physical Sciences — Sir Charles Latrom asked us to make a preliminary survey and then report back before they look at it properly. It's important that it's done now while there aren't many people around. I'm sure you understand the reasons for that.»
«Well, yes,» he said. «But have you got anything to show who you are?»
«Oh, sure,» she said, and swung the rucksack off her back to get at her purse. Among the items she had taken from the drawer in the laboratory was an expired library card of Oliver Payne's. Fifteen minutes' work at her kitchen table and the photograph from her own passport had produced something she hoped would pass for genuine. The policeman took the laminated card and looked at it closely.
«Dr. Olive Payne,'» he read. «Do you happen to know a Dr. Mary Malone?»
«Oh, yes. She's a colleague.» «Do you know where she is now?»
«At home in bed, if she's got any sense. Why?»
«Well, I understand her position in your organization's been terminated, and she wouldn't be allowed through here. In fact, we've got orders to detain her if she tries. And seeing a woman, I naturally thought you might be her, if you see what I mean. Excuse me, Dr. Payne.»
«Ah, I see,» said Mary Malone. The policeman looked at the card once more.
«Still, this seems all right,» he said, and handed it back. Nervous, wanting to talk, he went on. «Do you know what's in there under that tent?»
«Well, not firsthand,» she said. «That's why I'm here now.»
«I suppose it is. All right then, Dr. Payne.»
He stood back and let her unlace the flap of the tent. She hoped he wouldn't see the shaking of her hands. Clutching the rucksack to her breast, she stepped through. Deceive the guardian — well, she'd done that; but she had no idea what she would find inside the tent. She was prepared for some sort of archaeological dig; for a dead body; for a meteorite. But nothing in her life or her dreams had prepared her for that square yard or so in midair, or for the silent sleeping city by the sea that she found when she stepped through it.