As it turned out, Elszabet wasn’t able to talk about much of anything at the meeting. The thing that she most dreaded plagued her all during it: the Green World, seeking once more to rise up through her conscious mind and carry her away. She fought it as long as she could. But when eventually it overcame her she had had to leave the room. After that she wasn’t sure what had happened for a time; they had given her a sedative and had her lie down, and when she returned to consciousness there was a new mess to deal with. Dan Robinson brought her the news: Ed Ferguson and the synthetic woman Alleluia had run away. Homing-vector tracers were in use, though, and the fugitives had been located east of the Center in the redwood forest. An hour or so from now, when they emerged into some open place, Dan would send out the helicopter to pick them up.
“Who’s going to go?” Elszabet wanted to know.
“Teddy Lansford, Dante Corelli, and one of the security men. And I suppose I will also.”
“Count me in too.”
Robinson shook his head. “The copter only holds six, Elszabet. We need to leave room for Ferguson and Alleluia.”
“Let Dante stay behind, then. I ought to supervise the pickup operation.”
“Dante’s a strong and resourceful woman. They could be dangerous, especially Alleluia. I’d like Dante to go.”
“Then Lansford—”
“No, Elszabet.”
“You don’t want me to go.”
Robinson nodded. As though speaking to a child, he said, “Right. At last you see it. I don’t want you to go. You practically became delirious at the staff meeting, you’ve been under sedation for the past two hours, you’re wobbly as hell. It makes no sense for you to go chasing off in a helicopter after a couple of unruly runaways who happen to be the two least predictable and most amoral individuals we have here. Okay? Do you agree that you’re going to skip the pickup mission?”
She couldn’t argue with that. But the rest of the afternoon was a fidgety time for her. Runaways were serious business: she was responsible not only for the mental condition of the patients but for their physical well-being as well. It was very much against the rules for any of them to leave the Center grounds without permission, and permission was granted only with stringent precautions. There were legal aspects: Ferguson was here in lieu of a jail term, after all. And the synthetic woman, though she was not actually regarded as a criminal, was uncontrollably violent at times, extremely dangerous to others because of her superhuman strength. In her pre-Center days she’d done more than a little damage to people during wild moments of blackout. Elszabet didn’t want either one of them wandering around loose. They would need extensive double-picking when they got back, and maybe some preventive reconditioning as well—and what if they somehow gave the pickup squad the slip, or harmed a staff member while they were being apprehended?
So there was that to worry about. And the aftermath of her dream still to wrestle with. And she supposed she also had to give some thought to that horde of tumbondé people heading this way, although that was far from being an urgent problem right now if they were still somewhere south of San Francisco. Sufficient unto the moment were the headaches thereof.
It was a long couple of hours.
The helicopter returned toward sunset. Elszabet, feeling tired but much more calm than she had been during the day, went out to greet it. Alleluia was out cold: they had had to hit her with an anesthetic dart, Dante said. Ferguson, looking rumpled and sullen and abashed, came limping out: he had hurt his ankle pretty badly romping around in the forest, though otherwise he was okay. “Put him under pax and let him sleep it off,” Elszabet said. “We’ll double-pick him in the morning after we find out where he thought he was going. Ask Bill Waldstein to look at that ankle, too. Set up an immediate pick for Alleluia when she wakes up, and make sure she’s secured against any kind of violent outbreak. We’ll pick her again tomorrow, too.” Elszabet paused. Someone unexpected was coming from the copter: a tall, thin, shabby-looking man with intense, burning eyes. She glanced toward Dan Robinson. “Who’s that?”
“His name’s Tom,” Robinson said. “If he’s got any other name we don’t know it. He was with a band of scratchers when we found Ferguson and Alleluia. The scratchers ran for it, but Tom stuck around and asked us to take him in. Pretty far gone, you ask me: paranoid schizophrenic’s the quick two-dollar diagnosis. But very gentle, harmless, hungry.”
“I suppose we can give him a bath and a few meals,” Elszabet said. “The poor scruffy bastard. Look at those eyes, will you! They’ve seen the glory, all right!” She started to walk toward the newcomer, who was prowling around in a vague, perplexed way. Then she paused and looked back at Robinson. “Hey, I thought you told me the copter only held six!”
He grinned at her. “So sue me. I lied.”
“Tom’s hungry,” the scratcher said. “Tom’s cold. Will you take care of me here?”
“We’ll take care of you, yes,” Elszabet said. She went over to him. How strange he is, she thought. The strangeness seemed to radiate from him like an aura. Schizophrenic, maybe: it was, as Dan Robinson said, a pretty good two-buck diagnosis. Certainly he was a little off center. Those eyes, those fiery biblical eyes—the eyes of a madman, sure, or the eyes of a prophet, or both. “You’re Tom?” she asked. “Tom what?”
“Tom o’ Bedlam,” he said. “Poor Tom. Crazy Tom.”
He smiled. Even his smile had a fierce strange intensity. She put out her hand to him. “Come on, then, Tom o’ Bedlam. Let’s go inside and get you cleaned up, okay?”
“Tom’s dirty. Tom’s cold.”
“Not for long,” she said. She took him by the wrist. As she touched him she felt a curious sensation, as though something were twisting and churning in the depths of her mind; and for an instant she thought the Green World hallucination was going to repossess her right then and there. But that faded as quickly as it had come. Again Tom smiled. His eyes met hers, and something—she had no idea what—passed between them in that moment, some silent transfer of force, of power. I think we may have something special here, Elszabet told herself. But what? What?
4
In the morning Tom woke a little before sunrise, as he usually did. But for a moment he was bewildered at not being able to see the dawn sky, black shading into blue overhead and the last stars still glowing faintly. Above him all he could make out now was darkness, and beneath him he felt the unaccustomed softness of a bed, and he wondered where he was and what had happened to him.
Then he remembered. This place called the Center. The woman named Elszabet, taking him to the little wooden cabin at the edge of the woods last night and saying, “This will be where you stay, Tom.” Showing him how to work the sink and the shower and the other attachments. He remembered her telling him, “You get yourself cleaned up and I’ll be back in half an hour or so to take you down to the mess hall, okay?” Giving him fresh clothing, even. Pair of jeans, soft flannel shirt, pretty good fit. And coming back for him and taking him over to the big building where they were serving food. Dinner served on dishes, not something cooked on a stake over a fire by the side of the road. He remembered all that now.
So he hadn’t dreamed it. He was really here. This beautiful quiet place. He got up and walked out on the cabin porch and stared at the thick mists coiling like lazy snakes through the trees.
It had felt great sleeping in a bed again, an actual honest bed with pillows and clean sheets and a sleep-wire to hold in your hand if you didn’t feel sleepy, and all the rest. Tom couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in a bed, not really. When he was with the scratchers he had slept on one of the blow-up mattresses that they kept in the back of the van. Before that, coming down from Idaho, he had slept outdoors, mostly. Here and there, under trees or in little caves or right out in open fields, and sometimes, but not often, in some old burned-out house in one of the dead towns. And before that? He wasn’t sure. But it didn’t matter. He was here now.