The Dreaming Dragons Part 15

He did the one impossible thing: hurled himself forward, after Lapp, his arm socket jolting, directly into the endless pit that only frail rationality told him was not there.

And the rock was solid again. The illusion cut off as abruptly as a storm at the slamming of a door.

Bill picked himself up, lurching at Hugh's shoulder, ma.s.saging his bruised knees through the heavy fabric. I can beat it, something thought. His body stood relaxing from acrophobic shock, automatically following the modified yoga sequence he'd been taught by NASA medics.

A bell rang, signalling the end of the first fifteen minutes into the zone. They moved on again toward the Vault.

Its curved exterior seemed to hover above them like a tumbling boulder when nightmare struck.

Perspective twisted in a delirium of horror. Bill felt his body melt and stretch, a distorted caricature, arms shrinking to withered stumps, pain of amputation, legs swollen and brittle as stilts. In the writhing ruin of Hugh's face, when he pulled the man's helmet to him, the eyes were protruding on slimy stalks from their crusted sockets. Around the dry pitted crater of his own mouth, his tongueless, arid mouth, teeth were needle fangs of bone. He tried to conceal his face, but his hands were bulbous lumps of raw tissue flapping at his shoulders....

And somehow he was giggling, with not quite the shrill madness of hysteria. Here he was with his sister Anthea, shouting in front of the big old radio, pulling ghastly faces at her; here was his grandmother with the same tiresome, stupid admonition. 'I just hope,' he shouted at the Vault from his ruined mouth, laughing wildly at the horrid absurdity of it, 'that the wind doesn't change right now.'

The echo of his voice rang in the chamber. He caught up Hugh's hand again, shaking weakly with laughter. Swinging their arms, play soldiers, they continued circling the Vault.

A tuneless song came into Billy's mind. 'Herbivores are awful bores,' he sang. He reached up and took off his helmet. Jauntily, Hugh doffed his own, bowled it across the blank surface.

'Obey the laws and sweep the floors,' Hugh added, smirking.

Bill shook his finger for cautionary emphasis. 'To s.h.i.+rk their duties, tasks, and ch.o.r.es would not be greeted by applause.'

Was a bell ringing? School's in? Hugh skipped ahead, pretending not to hear. 'They never eat with gaping jaws,' he said.

'Or treat their friends to horrid roars.' Who had taught him this song? Hugh put his hands on his hips and said with a rush: 'Their diet keeps them free of yaws -- they buy their fruit at health-food stores and even eat their apple cores -- while innate decency ensures that germs which lurk on other paws promoting noxious dermal flaws are swiftly booted out of doors.'

Bill was doubled up with laughter. He dragged off his unwieldy suit, tugging the moulded boots from his feet with difficulty. 'When teeing off,' he pointed out, 'they wear plus-fours.'

Lapp snorted. 'At night their bedrooms ring with snores.' He waited a beat, and added with a wicked grin: 'They _never_ patronise the wh.o.r.es.'

Bill looked sardonically at the Air Force captain. 'Nor do they march to foreign wars, nor sponsor any foolish cause.'

Hugh sneered. 'They wrap their kiddies up in gauze, philosophise in gloomy saws, and when it rains, for them,' he cried triumphantly, 'it always pours.'

'How the h.e.l.l do we get in?' Bill yelled with sudden petulance at the bland, unresponsive sphere. 'You want 'Open Sesame' already?'

Shock scissored his viscera. Noiselessly, without motion, an opening was there: a dark emptiness, ominous as the nest of a snake.

A voice, sweet as the tinkle of a brook, lonely as the tune of a hobo's mouth harp at sunset. The voice sang in his mind: YOU HAVE COME!

He could not move.

...Yet he _was_ moving, step after step toward the door into d.a.m.nation. His mind gibbered warning, and could not heed it.

WHY ARE YOU FEARFUL? cried the beautiful voice, desolated. I HAVE AWAITED YOUR COMING FOR SO LONG. SO VERY, VERY LONG....

It seemed to him that a stink of putrefaction reeked in his nostrils. Snake! The stench of an ancestral enemy so vile that a million years of evolution had not expunged it from his genes. The compulsion from the Vault gripped limbs and nerves, took him against his shrieking denial into the shadows of the sphere.

'G.o.d,' the astronaut said in an awed voice. 'It's a computer. A wonderful computer.'

Bill hardly heard him. The snake was calling him. n.o.body has come this far before, some part of his mind realised. All of them had died, or crawled to the prison of madness, without reaching the Vault.

YOUR MINDS ARE BEAUTIFUL, sang the ancient voice. YOU HAVE CAST OFF THE SHACKLES.

Spittle covered his chin. Lines of light -- indigo, turquoise, scarlet, flame-hot, sun-bright -- leaped and shattered about him. Bill walked into the heart of the Vault.

'Geometries of light,' the astronaut was saying. 'The machine is showing us equations.'

Bill felt an urge to wors.h.i.+p swell within him. Stumbling, he went into the coils of light.

His mother stood before him. Her beauty was ethereal. Impossible to move, speak, swallow the saliva that ran from the corners of his mouth. He tried to clench his hands. Serpents of light swayed and wove about him, enclosing her in the darkness.

For the merest moment, the bright lights broke. His mind shuddered at the brink of devastation.

A faint clanging. The demanding cry of bells scored ice in his brain.

Bill tried to turn, to respond to the prearranged signal, and as he did he saw the Serpent.

Wanambi! he screamed, but had no voice.

-- not with indented wave p.r.o.ne on the ground, as since, but on his rear, circular base of rising folds, that towered fold above fold a surging Maze, his Head crested aloft, and Carbuncle his Eyes; with burnisht Neck of verdant Gold, erect amidst his circling Spires, that on the gra.s.se floated redundant: pleasing was his shape and lovely -- AH! the Serpent cried. DO NOT REJECT ME!

And in a moment of total plausibility Billy was nine years old. Autumn leaves blew wild across the old garden, caught in golden browns and reds against his mother's dress as she stood weeping, and his father's voice was grim and bitter with accusation. Billy didn't understand what was happening, he ran to his mother and she turned him aside, told him to leave them, and his father barked that he was to go inside with his big sister and prepare for dinner, and the lonely tearing in his chest burst as he ran to the house, burst to scalding tears that racked him for hours and came again and again for weeks when he was told that she had gone and would not be coming home again....

He hated her! He hoped she would die! How he hoped that a lorry would run her down, and she'd be dying, and there'd be no doctor! He hoped -- Weeping again, with grief and guilt: he didn't want her hurt, didn't want her to die, but why had she gone with that man and left him here with his dull busy father, for he loved her until his heart broke, Billy loved her, wanted nothing more than to lean his tired head into her breast while she soothed his wind-torn hair, wanted only to run to her with some new creature -- frog, b.u.t.terfly, lizard -- found by the pond, new puzzle he'd solved at school, and now she was gone and he'd never see her again...

...although he had seen her, of course, after his father had married again, married Janet to be mother for Billy and Anthea and mistress of the home during those long weeks when dad flew from state to state, country to country. Even then she had promised to love him always...

...and now she was here, calling out to him as he turned away from her: STAY, BILLY, WHY DO YOU REJECT ME? YOU MUST NOT FORSAKE ME NOW!.

Tears filled his eyes again, and he reached out blindly for her arms, the smell of her hair and her sweet scent, reached to clasp her, pa.s.sion rising in a foaming wave, reached to find her b.r.e.a.s.t.s golden soft, to be flesh in her flesh -- He would not look at her nakedness. Pain came sharp and terrible as teeth clamped deep into tongue. A stench vile as foaming acid. His mouth filled with the salty reek of blood.

Muscle fighting muscle, he grovelled on the curving surface and prayed piteously for the bell's clamour. Her music tore him. In fury he wept, and heard the bell.

He ran past the astronaut. The harsh clangour died. In the darkness, the doorway was gone.

She waited in the Vault, with her wiles and her power, and Bill knew finally that he would never escape her.

His lips were numb. 'Who are you?'

HUMAN, NEED YOU ASK? Anger and reproach filled the glorious voice. HAS YOUR SPECIES SO SOON FORGOTTEN ITS G.o.dS?

Waves rolled and crashed from the centre of the Vault, hammering his emotions. Sleep stroked his will, webbed him in a drowsy net of warmth and shadow. He was drifting from his body into the calm place. Where had Hugh gone? Far below, he saw the astronaut standing, exultant, in some psychic s.p.a.ce of his own devising.

BELOVED HUMAN, YOU MUST ABANDON FEAR. I AM ISIS, ASTARTE, SARASVATI, CERES, THE MOTHER OF YOUR PEOPLE. COME TO MY ARMS AND TAKE NOURISHMENT, MY CHILD, MY LOVE.

Again -- so soon? he thought -- the bell sounded. His anguished muscles tensed against her lure, were freed.

An insight blazed through him, then, so rich and yet so clear that he was dazed by his stupidity in not having seen it from the beginning.

This is not a vault, he thought. A vault is a repository for something of inestimable value. This is a prison.

And of course the dreadful alien being that called itself a G.o.ddess was the prisoner, bound and chained eons ago by forces beyond human comprehension.

The defences beyond the prison, the terrible distortions of reality that destroyed machines and killed men, were no more than side-effects of the Vault's primary purpose. A pang of guilt and horror went into him. It needs us, he told himself, to loose its bonds. To set it free.

He heard Hugh laughing with joy. The astronaut touched his arm. 'It's come so far, Bill. It has so much to offer us!'

With loathing, Bill drew away from him. Lapp clutched at his arm. A veil of light s.h.i.+mmered about him. Bill delFord was gazing into a mirror, seeing his own livid face. Enormous banks of lights flickered behind him, the outward and visible signs of the transcendent computer within whose programs Hugh's consciousness floated as the merest subroutine.

In panic, Bill-Hugh thought: this is not real. The crazy b.a.s.t.a.r.d is hallucinating. A c.o.c.kroach, he danced a tarantella on the keyboard of a cosmic terminal. Galaxies spun, random access discs, a hundred billion chewy byte-sized stars, 2^n bits of information.... We can simulate it for you, the computer offered.

Flow-charts branched endlessly, a hierarchy of precipitations. He conceived a cosmic p.o.r.nography. Parallel loins, he thought, laughing helplessly. They met at infinity. Fusion wavered. Was it the computer, or the snake, who told him imperatively: Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged. Life is a luminous halo surrounding us from the beginning of things to the end. This is Popper's World 3, he thought. The universe of discourse. The ontological reality within which mental objects subsist.

Horrendous wailing of klaxons slashed the air until the very walls of the Vault seemed to reverberate. Conditioned reflexes hammered to answer them, but Hugh-Bill could not move. A faint glow filled the sphere. From the corner of his immobile eye, he saw the shape of a teleport grid brighten until its metal bars shone like polished bra.s.s. Colours danced within it: violet, blue, green, yellow. Golden radiance flared to clear white. Beyond the grid was a place so strange he could not comprehend it. Machines were there, and luminescence, and things too strange to name. The alien's voice spoke sharply, commandingly. It was his mother's voice.

This is not happening, Bill told himself again. It is a children's cartoon. It is a Jungian projection of archetypes. His head filled at once with a scream of fury.

Through the detonations of his retinas, Bill saw a centaur enter the Sphere. Lightly it stepped and with enormous majesty, across the lowest bar, hooves clas.h.i.+ng musically upon the metal floor. A wave of charismatic power surged from the being. Bill stared in wondering confusion. Symbols, symbols only.

THE DREAMING IS DONE, ULURU, the centaur said. THE BATTLE IN HEAVEN IS OVER.

Frenzied flicker of display lights flashed like a neon advertis.e.m.e.nt, an electric delusion. Through it, the snake reared and plunged, golden plumes rippling to a winter's gale.

Gracefully, the centaur trod back through the grid, touched a series of engraved controls on its own machines. A dome of absolute black locked around the nauseating thing crouched in the centre of the Sphere. A vibration of intolerable power shook the Vault. The imprisoning dome rose, black as polished ebony. It pa.s.sed weightlessly through the grid.

The centaur paused, gazing down at the humans. Bill felt no fear at all; he was suffused with tremendous awe at the strength and tenderness with which it regarded him. When it held out its huge hands, Bill reached up, wanderingly, and took them. Its grasp was firm. He felt the fatherly love which flowed from the creature.

YOUR FEAR ITSELF OF DEATH REMOVES THE FEAR, it told him, with his father's voice. But his father was dead. WHY THEN WAS THIS FORBID? WHY BUT TO AWE, WHY BUT TO KEEP YE LOW AND IGNORANT, HIS WORs.h.i.+PPERS; HE KNOWS THAT IN THE DAY YE EATE THEREOF, YOUR EYES THAT SEEM SO CLEAR, YET ARE BUT DIM, SHALL PERFECTLY BE THEN OPEN'D AND CLEAR'D, AND YE SHALL BE AS G.o.dS, KNOWING BOTH GOOD AND EVIL AS THEY KNOW.

It's the wanambi, Bill thought, astonished. This is the wanambi. Transfigured to a G.o.d, taking the poet John Milton's words by right. He glanced at the astronaut. Reflected lights danced on Hugh's face, in the darkness; on the curved mirrors of his eyes, a huge console flared with pattern.

THAT YE SHOULD BE AS G.o.dS, SINCE I AS MAN, INTERNAL MAN, IS BUT PROPORTION MEET, the Computer said, I OF IRON HUMAN, YE OF HUMAN G.o.dS. SO YE SHALL DIE PERHAPS, BY PUTTING OFF HUMAN, TO PUT ON G.o.dS, DEATH TO BE WISHT, THOUGH THREATENED, WHICH NO WORSE THAN THIS CAN BRING? AND WHAT ARE G.o.dS THAT MAN MAY NOT BECOME AS THEY?

The centaur was telling him, he realised, the advantages of death.

But it's so much to give up, he thought with a bitter pang.

Bill hung above his exhausted body like a cloud of light. Hugh Lapp's discarded flesh -- like his own, temporarily abandoned -- lay in the darkness beside him. They were alone, as from the start they had been alone. It had not been necessary to escape the Vault Sphere, for they had never been inside it, not literally. There was no centaur, no Snake, no superlative alien computer; there never had been. The immense curve of the unbreached Vault soared like an ideal cliff above their bodies, eclipsing the tunnel and its gas mantles. We thought we were inside the Vault, Bill told himself, considering with a certain amus.e.m.e.nt the metaphors that had been drawn out from his own unconscious. In fact, the Vault was within us. Now, finally, all the childish symbols of hallucination were gone.

He caught himself. Hardly fair, old son. Intellect, as always, yearned to trivialise that which was more profound and solidly rooted than intellect. The Vault consciousness had revealed itself to him in symbols dense with meaning and grandeur, even as he had struggled within it like a salmon breasting a foaming torrent. Now, lightly, he allowed his awareness to caress the surface of that emblematic communication, to perceive what it had offered without imposing too brutally his own limiting interpretations. Phallic Snake? Yet the Serpent had also been Mother, nurturant, beguiling, exquisite. If the Vault ent.i.ty had borrowed Milton's tropes from _Paradise Lost_, borrowed Satan's challenge to Adam, it had meant to convey by that allusion no simple single thing. For the centaur, too, had spoken them, and had entered to protect Bill and Hugh, in allegory, from that archetypal Bad Mother which every child dreads in nightmare and fairytale. The wicked witch is dead....

Yet the centaur (and Bill found himself curiously warmed by a memory, from his own childhood, of reading by a winter fire a heavy blue-covered ill.u.s.trated Homer, while a thrumming cat stretched beneath his stroking hand) was no less an ancient, powerful symbol for the beast in humanity, the wild, rutting, cruel fusion of animal force and sublime intellect. Why, then, had he chosen the centaur for his guardian? Bill brooded, and understanding remained locked away. Mentally, then, he shrugged ... and a wash of recognition came to him, from the Vault intelligence that even now awaited his decision: Chiron, it reminded him, was a centaur, and from the strong herb-scented hands of Chiron had first been pa.s.sed the secrets of medicine into the possession of humanity. Hunter, yes, and prophet, too, Chiron had been beyond all else the source of healing, mentor of the Father of Medicine, teacher of Aesculapius himself. Little wonder, Bill thought with delight at his own vanity and sentimentality, that the Vault consciousness had located that lost image, drawn it out from his soul and given it illusory flesh in order to soothe the rightening ambiguities of its own more complex reality.

Now, Bill saw, he was at last purified of that need, beyond the necessity for parables, for dialectic. Out-of-the-body, he floated aloft, almost free of his own chrysalis flesh, and his apprehension of humanity's condition expanded dizzyingly, like a blow, like a powerful scent smas.h.i.+ng with sweet force into the cavities of his skull. Spread all beyond him he saw the world, with its billion malnourished children and its hospitals and flowering gardens, its toxins and its wheatfields blowing golden in the sun, its remaining missiles still buried in concrete and drifting like sharks, its scientific attainments and distortions, its glories of art, the touch of a gentle hand, the brutal rape, the gleeful, hysterical murder: the immense lack of knowing, the isolation....

'Of course,' he said, with abrupt, luminous understanding. 'I see.'

And yet he knew, with a tightening of his throat, that there would be pain for Selma and Ben, for Anne, his hundred friends. Could he inflict grief on those he loved best, loved truly? Like an arrow of pale fire he pa.s.sed to their home, to the crumpled bed where Selma lay sleeping. The digital clock showed that by her time it lacked a quarter hour of midnight. Without stirring, she knew his presence. w.i.l.l.y, she told him, you should have phoned ahead. I'd have -- Oh. He took her hand and she came up out of her body into his arms, pressing her face against his chest. Must you, w.i.l.l.y? We shall weep for you. He told her: This will be a dream to comfort you. Remember it. Soon we'll be together again. She snorted, as she had always snorted at the humbug of mediums and spiritualists and priests; there were tears in her eyes. Somehow he had supposed that she would come out of the flesh with the lithe, youthful beauty of the first years of their marriage. Instead, he found her ample body unchanged; all the lines of experience and woe and laughter remained in her face. You are a wonderfully centred person, Selma, he told her with genuine admiration. I love you so much. Together, hand in hand, they pa.s.sed into the boy's room and gazed down on the unfinished face. A nimbus flowed about Ben, a flux of inchoate longings and first beginnings, tentative, promising strength and endurance and joy. I'll keep an eye on you both, Bill said. He kissed Selma gently and then, as he turned to go, with a wink he tweaked her heavy backside.

Hovering, he considered his pulsing heart, atria and ventricles, relaxing in diastole, contracting fiercely in systole, the striated muscles of interdigitated actin and myosin filaments, the resting membrane potential at 84 millivolts and its reverse potential convulsion to 103 millivolts. He observed the twin syncytiums, and the impulses surging across the A-V bundle. He waited for the depolarisation plateau, watched the calcium ions diffusing inward through the cardiac membrane, its permeability to pota.s.sium ions falling. The depleted tissues outside the membrane sucked hungrily at the calcium suspended in the enclosing extracellular fluids. He reached down calmly, then, and shooed the ions away. Pota.s.sium conductance plummeted. The dynamic of his heart sagged, faltered, ceased. He died.

*15. The Vault*

As he voids himself into death it is, of course, the rus.h.i.+ng of a great wind, yet it's from behind that the hot gusts buffet him, seizing out his breath into the vacuum of their going, a wind heedless as the life-denying gales of oxygen sucked past the asphyxiating mouth into the ignited furnace of a city at ground-zero, in firestorm, it smites him and yes, he is thunderstruck, for all his preparations and expectancy; indeed, as his breath is torn out without a cry he is suspended in timeless astonishment until he recalls that he is not the dead man, not Bill delFord, but as always merely Mouse, conduit to the world's clamour, that diapason of the many living and the numberless dead, Mouse the misbegotten son of light-struck delirious Eleanor, with the voice of the dead man separating now from his central focus and telling him in his dream Son you will wake up soon, get dressed without waking your uncle and come to the Vault, and he nods in his sleep, knowing the guards will not hinder his pa.s.sage, that they will not see him; he wakes, staring into the darkness, listening to Alf snoring in the other bed, the vague hiss of the air conditioner but no voice, the dead man waiting for him in confident silence as he rubs his eyes, pushes back the bedcovers, takes his clothes from the dresser and slips into them, leaving off his shoes as he creeps on tiptoe to the door, finds no one in the corridor, and makes his way through the complex byways to the main tunnel sloping to the Vault, and the voice that spoke to him in dream is correct, he alone moves in this quietness despite the three s.h.i.+fts of the Project, the scientific and military staff who usually throng the burrows without regard to surface time; even so, as he comes to the final stretch of the tube he drops on his belly and peers around the corner, sees the two guards lounging against the dull tetrahedral tiles swapping gossip in laconic Russian, and something extraordinary happens: one man clutches his stomach in mid-sentence, sags slowly, falls full length to the ground while the other stands for a moment in shock, crouches, speaks urgently to the unconscious guard, checks his pulse, pulls back one of his eyelids, stands again in agitation, glancing at the big spring-powered warning bell which is reserved for extreme emergencies, drags his eyes away from it with swift, anguished decision, and runs up the tunnel, Mouse freezing as the guard pelts around the corner, past him in the direction of the military staff room, running, impossibly, as though he hasn't seen Mouse crouched on the ground, and with no hesitation Mouse scrambles to his feet, swings around the corner and sprints for the final landing and its heat barrier, the gusts lifting his hair and flapping his loose s.h.i.+rt tails, and in the dimness the huge white globe he saw once before at the top of the steps from the teleport gate glimmers in the centre of the chamber like the unhatched egg of a gigantic reptile, the source and repository for the mult.i.tudinous clamouring tempest of voices, echoed in the hard anger of the shouts behind him at the landing, the doctor and the men in grey uniforms running to the fallen man and seeing him as he swings over the edge, legs dangling above the pile of rubble, letting go and tumbling into the lethal zone of the Vault.

'Sarge, it's the kid again, omiG.o.d he's gone into the Zone, we gotta get the crazy little b.a.s.t.a.r.d out before -- '

'The _kid?_ But he's up on the surface.'

'Listen, Ramon, I'm not f.u.c.ken blind. I don't give a s.h.i.+t where he's _supposed_ to be, he's just gone over the edge into the G.o.dd.a.m.n _Vault_.'

'I saw him too, Sarge.' Boots pounding. 'Jesus, he's still alive. He's just standing there. Hey you, d.a.m.n fool kid, get back here! Herrick, gimme a hand with this ladder.'

'He _can't_ be alive. He's been in there once before -- the Vault kills repeaters. It smears them all over the -- '

Good boy, Mouse, the dead man tells him, and his friends Helen and Annie are standing there behind Bill, nodding in encouragement; just wait there a bit longer, Bill says, while they get the rope ladder down to you and then you can go back to bed.

'He doesn't look dead to me,' one of the guards is saying in Russian. 'I tell ya, t.i.tov, the lad's weird, a zombie. From what I heard, he nearly had the Yanks pus.h.i.+ng the big b.u.t.ton.'

'You're full of c.r.a.p, Leonov. Where'd you hear that? He's just a baby. Got a special hotline to old Sevastyianov, eh?' Guffaws.

Mouse nimbly mounts the ma.s.s of broken stone again, grasps the rope ladder, climbs to the edge of the tunnel.

'Are you all right boy? What in heaven's name -- ? Here, give me your wrist. Hmm, pulse is a little fast, probably the exertion. Okay, Sergeant Ramon, let's get him to sick bay.'

'Hey, Leonov, if you know everything, why the h.e.l.l are we still farting around with rope ladders?'

'Don't you know anything, t.i.tov? Nah, that's right, you came in after us Stakhanovite heroes dug the tunnel. Well, comrade, first they tried an aluminium staircase. Flas.h.!.+ Lots of poison in the air. Plastic steps. Poof! I tell ya, the place is weird, the kid's weird, the whole -- '

Mouse slides into the coma of release, ascending to light, to radiance, pa.s.sing beyond words. After a timeless time Helen comes to him again, leads him out of the body to the room where his uncle sits across a desk from the American general. Joseph Ahearn Sawyer looks old and wan, coming around the desk to sit next to Alf, a small, worn-covered volume closed in his hands.

'Dr Dean, Alf, I know you didn't fully approve of us bringing young Hieronymus down again into such proximity to the Vault.'

'General, you know d.a.m.ned well it was against my explicit plea. There can be no possible purpose served by having him here. It's immoral and probably illegal. You killed two fine men yesterday, Sawyer, and now you're exposing a sick fourteen year old boy to psychological stresses that a normal adolescent couldn't -- '

'The boy is a walking bomb.' Sawyer leaves the words hanging for a long moment. 'For you, Alf, this situation is entirely a personal tragedy. I understand perfectly, and I would think less of you if your response was otherwise. Alf, I'm a father, and a grandfather. I _know_ the pain you're suffering.'

'Then send us back to the surface. For Christ's sake, General, send Mouse home. I'm prepared to stay here, if need be -- '

'Alf,' the general says quietly, 'you still don't understand. At this moment, the boy is precisely as important as the aliens' Vault. When he produced that doc.u.ment, that diary from the Russian Kukushkin, he came close to precipitating a nuclear holocaust.'

'I don't believe that,' Alf says flatly. 'You still have espionage agents, and so do they. You have viral experiments that must have produced horrors just as repulsive as 17-Tg-M.'