Quicksilver

by Dean Koontz

“You mean . . . Sparky won’t make it?” “I don’t know. Maybe him or me or you. Maybe all of us won’t make it. All I know is . . . at least one of us won’t. If he knows, he’ll take even greater risks for my sake. I don’t want him doing that. What happens will happen.” She let go of me, stepped back. “That’s the only way it can be. Understand?”

BACK IN THE DAY

THE BOY, THE FATHER, THE BIRDS

How can a just world be shapen to allow such outrages? Why aren’t we designed to be unable to harm one another? Why aren’t our brains wired so that we can’t kill or rape or steal or lie or deceive? Why are we formed with the capacity to hate and envy? They say that this world and life in it are a gift, but how can it be a gift when it so often subjects us to fear or even terror, and to unbearable sadness?

PART 3

WHAT THE SEER SAW

19

“Who is this old friend?” “Hakeem Kaspar.” “Yes,” said Ching, “he is a lineman for the county.” “That’s him!” Ching said, “He rides the main road.” “Vernon will be so happy.” “Like most days, he’s been searchin’ in the sun for another overload,” Ching said. “Do you have an address for him?” “His place is on the old Apache Trail. It’s a dirt road with no signs. I’ll draw you a little map. You’ll be there in ten minutes at this time of day. At night, in May, with the spring insects at their peak, spattering your windshield, and the bats swarming, you’d need twenty minutes, maybe more. Go while it’s light.”

“We’ll scoot right out there. I hope he’s not on the job.” “Well, the lineman is still on the line. He starts before dawn,” Ching said, “but he finishes with that stretch down south about now. You’ll probably catch him just as he’s getting home.”

20

Considering that Hakeem Kaspar’s residence was the only one in sight and that, past his place, the dirt road seemed to lead into either a prehuman past or a posthuman future, it was no surprise that he heard us arrive and opened the door as we approached and carried a pistol in a holster on his right hip.

When I held out my driver’s license, his wide-eyed gaze widened further. The suspicion that had iced his every word now melted into astonishment. “Q-Q-Quinn Q-Quicksilver? Not the one and same?” “The one and same,” I assured him. “From the bassinet?” “I outgrew it.” “They sent you away.” “I came back.” “My life was never the same.” “The same as what?” I asked. “Never the same—after you.” “I’ve come to thank you for my life,” I said. “And to ask you about that morning. This is Bridget, who tells me she’s my fiancée, and this is her grandfather, Sparky. Do you want to see their ID?” “No. That’s all right. They passed the scan. I’ve got to trust the scanner. If I can’t trust the scanner, then what can I trust?”

21

“I had no interest in UFOs before that day,” said the lineman. “Zero, zip, nada. They were a joke to me. Not anymore. I usually hit the road an hour before dawn, but I set out late that morning. I was heading north out of Peptoe on the federal, as the land took shape in the first light. I’ve got my punch sheet of inspections to make, and I’m always studying the lines, so I don’t speed. I was poking along like usual when I noticed some white thing in the center of the three lanes. When I slowed almost to a stop, I saw a young girl, maybe in her late teens, out there on the flats, running away from the road toward one of those three-wheel all-terrain vehicles with big fat tires, like a tricycle for grown-ups. This young thing slips astride it and speeds away among the sage and mesquite, dust spewing up behind her. I suppose she was your mother.”

Hakeem erupted from his armchair and paced back into the dining area, into the galley, and then came toward us again. “I parked on the pavement with the truck’s emergency lights flashing and went to see what the girl had left in the basket. I didn’t realize it was a bassinet. When I saw a baby, I felt sick that someone would be so desperate to throw away such a precious thing.”

“Just then,” he continued, “I heard engines approaching fast from both the north and south. The first was Caesar Melchizadek on his way to work at the casino, and the other was Bailie Belshazzer in his Chevy pickup, headed for the wind farm. With my power-company truck blocking one lane, something bad could have happened. I should have grabbed the bassinet and taken you off the highway, but I was kind of—I don’t know—emotionally paralyzed by what I’d found. I wasn’t thinking straight. I waved down both Caesar and Bailie. They pulled off on the shoulder of the road and got out of their vehicles to see what the trouble was.”

“We gathered around the bassinet,” he said. “I was on my knees. Caesar was on one knee, and Bailie was crouched down. They were facing me, so they didn’t at first see what I saw behind them. Forty feet past them, right there on the highway . . . it was as if this large door opened, maybe fifteen feet wide and twice as high. An invisible door. A door in the day. It opened inward, and beyond it there wasn’t the highway or desert. Cobblestones, like an ancient road, dwindled away into darkness, not just into night, but . . . into a star-filled nothingness. As if the cobblestones were floating in space, with stars under and above and to all sides.”

“Weirder still, I get the feeling that someone or something is coming toward us along that cobblestone road, coming out of the stars. No, wait. That’s not right. It’s not just some feeling. I know for sure that something’s approaching along the cobblestones. Because, I can feel it coming, something powerful, the way you feel the air taking on weight when a thunderstorm is coming. And then I can almost see what it is. It’s invisible but I can see the space where it is, just inside the door in the day. It’s like how heat rising off a highway distorts the air, so the air ripples and quivers. The air is quivering in the shape of a man, a very tall man or something like a man, but I can’t see him, only this suggestion of him. I think I must be losing it, having a breakdown. But then somehow I know he’s real and that he’s there because of the baby, worried that the baby has been abandoned on a highway, and wants to be sure it’s safe. I don’t know what I said then, but I must have said something, because Caesar and Bailie turned to look. I expected maybe they wouldn’t see anything, but they did. They did.”

“So then we all shoot to our feet. We’re like, this can’t be happening. I mean, it’s a door in the day! Then a hissing sound and a gust of wind make us look up. Overhead there’s now a hole in the sky. A hole in the sky! Do I sound crazy to you? I’m not mental. Do you think I’m mental?”

Hakeem said, “So it’s like somebody just opened a big lid on the day. Through that opening, maybe twelve feet in diameter, we see a night sky, darkness and stars going on forever, just like beyond the magic door. I think we’re about to be sucked up into that night sky. Instead, these concentric circles of blue light come out of the hole, out of the stars, and wash over us. We feel them as well as see them, a tingling sensation in our bones—and something funny happens to time.”

“None of us has any memory of getting in our vehicles. The next thing we know, it seems like an instant later, we’re in Peptoe, me with the baby—that’s you—in the power-company truck, Bailie and Caesar following. We all had this terrible feeling that the baby was in great danger, that someone could come for him—for you—at any moment. Hell, not someone. Something. Something that would kill us to get at you. I swear, we were flat-out terrified. It makes no sense how crazy frightened we were. We’d been made terrified. I think that weird blue light, those concentric circles . . . somehow they programmed us to guard you and get you quickly away from that lonely stretch of highway, into the hands of the authorities, eventually to someone who would care about you as if you were their own child. I kept thinking that your vital thread had been broken, that the ends of your vital thread couldn’t be tied together again until you were in loving hands.” “What does that mean, ‘vital thread’?” I asked. “I don’t know what the hell it means. But I was in a panic about it.” He raised the bottle to his lips and seemed surprised that he had drained it. Bridget’s turn had come to say, “And?” “No, I’m done. I’m empty. I have no more for you. Bailie and Caesar didn’t see quite the same thing I did. You need to hear their side to get the whole picture.”

“Grays,” Hakeem said, “are the most common type of ETs reported by people who were abducted and taken up to the mother ship. Their skin is gray. You must’ve seen drawings of them. They’re kind of short, sexless, hairless, with big oval heads and huge dark eyes with no whites. The Grays are up to something, and it’s not good. They want something from us that we can’t begin to imagine. I hope to God I never find out what it is. I hope they don’t get what they want from me.”

I indicated the scanning device that he had left on the coffee table. “Is that a Gray detector?” “No, no. Grays aren’t shape changers. I got this from a techie flying-saucer guru in Arkansas. He builds and programs them himself. It’s based on a Chinese facial-recognition system, LLVision, but without the usual glasses. And it’s not about facial recognition, but about scanning for structural anomalies, anything that might indicate the human form is merely a costume. I’m not mental.” “Of course you’re not,” I said. “Have you ever scanned anyone who’s set off an alarm?” “Not yet. But with UFO activity increasing, it’s bound to happen one day. Thank God for Miles Bennell. He’s a genius.”

Bridget said, “Is UFO activity really increasing?” Springing up from his chair with the kinetic energy of a jack-in-the-box, Hakeem Kaspar said, “It always has been, ever since the 1940s. It’s always accelerating—the activity, number of sightings—toward some end. Who knows what end? Many nights, I sit out in the yard, in a lawn chair, and I watch the sky. Many nights. If you do that, you’ll be surprised at what you’ll see. You’ll see things that never took off from an earthly airport and will never land at one, immense craft without running lights, dark forms that blot out the stars as they pass. I’ve seen them. I watch, and I see them, and I’m not mental.” His feverish gaze slid from Bridget to me to Sparky. He took a deep breath. “Don’t tell anyone what I said. My job at the power company depends on this being secret. My interest in . . . in these things is something they wouldn’t understand.”

After we promised to keep his secret, we departed.

“I’m sorry.” I looked around at the hundreds of UFO photos papering nearly everything. “I didn’t leave myself in the middle of that highway, but I feel responsible for what you’ve been through, for what you’re going through.” His eyes at last narrowed. He squinted at me, as if scanning for structural anomalies. Then he startled me by throwing his arms around me and saying, “No, no, no. No, no, no.” He released me. His eyes were owlish again and now glimmering with unshed tears. “Before you, before baby you, before that door in the day and that hole in the sky, I was just marking time, just existing. There was no wonder in my life, no magic, nothing to believe in except a paycheck and a six-pack. That day, what happened on that stretch of highway—after that, I understood the world wasn’t just a movie screen, wasn’t just flat, there was depth to it, strangeness and meaning. I don’t know what meaning, but it’s something big, and I’m a part of it. If there are evil Grays—and there are!—then there must be other ETs, good Blues or some other color. Whatever’s out there, it’s anything you could imagine, everything you could imagine, because the universe is that big. I owe you, Quinn Quicksilver. I owe you for my happiness.”

“John Ching just called. You can’t go to Bailie’s place,” Hakeem warned. “Not now. Not ever. That helicopter was carrying ISA agents. Eight or nine of the bastards. They’re already at Bailie’s house. They’ve commandeered his SUV and two of the sheriff’s patrol cars. No doubt they’ll be here as soon as they can get anyone to tell them how to find my place, which won’t be right away because the people of Peptoe don’t traffic with their kind. You’ve got to go straight to Panthea. Bailie would have sent you to her after you’d visited with him. Panthea has been expecting you for weeks.”

“Yeah, okay, but I don’t know anyone named Panthea. Panthea who?” Hakeem regarded me with frustration and amazement, unable to comprehend how the miracle baby from the stars could be so clueless. “Panthea who? Panthea who? Panthea Ching, of course!”

22

Having heard the Explorer approaching, Panthea was waiting for us in the open door of the Quonset hut. She was five feet one and weighed maybe ninety-five pounds, prettier than any desert flower, of which there are many that dazzle. If her ears had been slightly pointed, I would have been convinced that she had elf DNA, for her blue eyes were quite large and so limpid that you could see the radiant pleats of the layered muscles in her irises.

Panthea looked each of us in the eyes, nodding as if confirming our identity by some sixth sense. “Quinn, Bridget, Silas who calls himself Sparky. I knew you would come. The squad is now complete.” “Squad?” I said. “One squad of many but no less important than the others. Each of us is an aluf shel halakha, with a great responsibility.” “We’re on a quest,” I said. “It’s nothing as simple as a quest,” Bridget said. “Isn’t it a quest?” I asked Panthea the seer. “Perhaps a quest, but not only a quest.” I was having none of that. “We find the equivalent of the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant, the elephants’ graveyard, and then it’s done.” Sparky said, “What does that mean—aluf whatever?” “When you know why you are,” Panthea Ching said, “you will know what those words mean.” “Why I am? My mom and dad wanted a baby. That’s why I am. Now, please, Ms. Ching, what does aluf shell halibut mean?” “It means nothing to you now. In time it will.”

“This isn’t about extraterrestrials from other galaxies, or from a farther arm of our own, or from a moon of Saturn. That stuff is for the movies. If only our adversaries were evil ETs, I’d rejoice. But the war into which we’ve been drafted is older than Earth itself and older than the stars, and we have no choice but to give ourselves to the current battle. The war predates the universe, as do our enemies.”

Bridget withheld from him her presentiment that not all of us would survive. I wondered if she had withheld anything from me.

23

Panthea said that we would be called to service soon, would be leaving Peptoe this evening, and needed to have dinner to fortify us for what we might endure between now and dawn. She spoke with quiet confidence and authority. Her pellucid blue eyes seemed like windows to a serene mind incapable of deceit. Bridget, Sparky, and I didn’t doubt she was a seer and our ally; if we were anxious about what came next, we were also relieved that we’d found the person able to lead us to a full understanding of the Screamers and our purpose.

“What you call Screamers,” Panthea said, “were once beautiful beings, not monsters in appearance, though in their minds and hearts they became monsters. I’ve dreamed of them for fifteen years. My dreams aren’t just dreams, but lessons in the reality of the cosmos. I’m being instructed in dreams. The Screamers are from the first universe, which preceded ours. The envious among them corrupted all of their kind, seeding suspicion and resentment that became hatred, which they called a virtue, bitter hatred so destructive that they brought Earth to ruin. That devastated world was the legacy they made for themselves. The physical appearance of those who survived the destruction then changed to reflect the condition of their souls. They became immortal monsters in the prison of that first universe. When they were beautiful and radiant, they were called Rishon. When they became monsters, they were called Nihilim.”

“We are the Rishon of the second universe,” Panthea continued, “though we’re a species with fewer gifts than those that the Rishon of the first universe possessed. Think of it like this—the genome of those original Rishon was edited to make us humbler and give us a better chance of avoiding the arrogance that would destroy our world as they destroyed theirs. The Nihilim, those you call the Screamers, can never by their own choice cross from their universe into ours. But the worst among us, the most morally deranged, are able to open a door to them, invite them, which is what happened long ago.”

There are rituals to open the door, but it’s not rituals that draw the Nihilim. They’re drawn by the passion of those who call them. Rituals aren’t essential. The Nihilim can also be welcomed into our world by someone who’s been consumed by such an intense desire for power that he or she will commit any crime, any atrocity, to gain dominance over others.

“Increasingly, everywhere in the world, people are not governed by those who wish to serve them, but ruled by those mad with power and determined to have total submission. They seem ever more fiercely inspired to greater ruthlessness. They call their hatred justice and see it as a virtue. How many Screamers, Nihilim, have they knowingly and unknowingly brought among us?”

Panthea said, “Could be legions. Or not. But when those who govern us achieve absolute power, it always and everywhere leads to insanity and mass murder. Regardless of the numbers arrayed against us, we must resist. If we fail, then the sane among us will die in holocaust after holocaust, along with the madmen and madwomen who hate us for not sharing their delusions.”

Sparky had been considering all Panthea told us. “‘Immortal,’ you say. But we killed two of them at a truck stop just yesterday evening.” “They’re immortal in the first universe. They’ve been condemned to immortality there. But they’re mortal when they come here where they don’t belong. And when they come here, they pass as Rishon.”

Sparky persisted. “Why would they surrender immortality to come here and risk dying?”

“Why risk death? Because in their world, they live in the ruins they made, and they have no capacity to create anything new. They exist to destroy. Destruction is their only joy. That’s the condition to which they willfully reduced themselves when they achieved the complete depravity of the Nihilim. Because in their world nothing remains to be torn down. There’s only rubble and dust. They live in frustration and rage that can never be assuaged. What would it avail them to reduce the remaining rubble to dust, the dust to even finer dust? There’s no pleasure in that. Being immortal, they lack the power to kill one another or themselves. And so they yearn for this second universe, where so much remains to be obliterated, where there are people on whom to impose great suffering, so many waiting to be corrupted and killed—and so many who are already on the path to becoming Nihilim themselves. Having once been favored godlings, the Nihilim know a new creation exists, and they yearn to rise from their universe to ours and be among us, even at the cost of losing their immortality.”

Bridget said, “How many of these creatures, these Nihilim, do squads like ours manage to exterminate?” “I don’t know. They’re not easy to kill. You were lucky at the truck stop. I believe more of us die at their hands than the other way around.” Panthea regarded me in solemn silence and then said, “If we don’t get you gunned up, you’ll be the first of us to die.” “Is that an opinion or something you’ve foreseen?” I asked, for it was of some concern to me. “Without a pistol, you will be held down by two of the Nihilim. A third monster will slice off your tongue, pry your eyes out, cut open your chest with a circular saw, and eat your heart.”

Returning to more immediate matters than ghost drones in the sky, Sparky said, “Quinn has never shot a gun. He’ll need training.” “In fact, he won’t,” Panthea said. “He was born for this. You have no doubt read of prodigies, as young as five, who hear perhaps a Mozart concerto and then sit at a piano for the first time in their lives and play it perfectly. Quinn will be that way with any weapon put in his hands.”

Rising from her chair, our elfin hostess said, “I’ve got a small armory. Let’s get a pistol for you. We need to hit the road soon. We’ve got somewhere we need to be by tomorrow.” As the rest of us rose to our feet, Winston woke and yawned, and Sparky asked, “Where? Where do we have to be?” “Beats me,” Panthea said. “I don’t see everything. My gift has limits. I can be surprised, make mistakes. Which is as it should be. Otherwise, I’d be a puppet in a play. I’m not a puppet. You aren’t puppets. But wherever we need to be, that place will find us.”

24

The seer said, “Could it be that Heather Ing-wen Han, Corrine Rainking, and the unknown young woman who left Quinn’s bassinet on that highway weren’t our mothers? Could it be that they were merely the vessels, surrogate mothers, by which we were brought into the world, and that we share no DNA with them? I suspect that we’re fatherless and motherless in a basic biological sense, that we were created—engineered—by some mysterious maker and that the sequences in our DNA that alarm authorities aren’t from an extraterrestrial race, but are from the Rishon of the first universe. If we have in us genetic material that provides us with a watered-down version of that race’s special gifts before they grew arrogant and destroyed their world, if we have no biological roots in this world, maybe we don’t exude the scent of prey, so to speak. We’re not recognized by the Nihilim as potential targets. Because they aren’t drawn to us either to kill us or make us suffer. They aren’t concerned with us at all—and so we may therefore stalk them.”

“Does this mean we’re not human?” “No,” Panthea said. “Even if what I’ve seen as a seer is correct, we’re human, of course. The difference is that we were engineered maybe in a laboratory or else someplace beyond our easy comprehension, then brought into the world by surrogate mothers who perhaps didn’t have full knowledge of their role.” “That doesn’t sound exactly human,” I said. “Surrogate mothers have been around for decades,” Panthea said. “They have helped many couples when the wife was physically unable to carry her own fetus. Some of our DNA, our special abilities, may be from the Rishon of the first universe, but they, too, were human.” “Until they degenerated into Nihilim,” Bridget said. “Which does not mean you and Quinn and I will likewise become moral and then physical degenerates. Many Rishon of this second universe are well along that path. We have been seeded into this world to prevent their further slide into an apocalyptic disaster, at least as they are being encouraged and assisted by the Nihilim.”

Maybe Sparky was impatient with all of us or maybe just with me, but he was snappish when he said, “No matter how you got here, you’re human, Quinn. And you’re human, Bridget. Your special talents come with an obligation, a serious one. Both of you have a duty to use them for the purpose you were given, a duty to your country, the world, humanity. Duty isn’t to be taken lightly. Get over yourselves and get your asses in gear.”