“As you would know if you had played the game, Erskine, Mellabenth is president of CEA, the Channeled Entities of America. All the entities channeled by serious, established channelers in the United States and Canada hold regular meetings to coordinate policy.”
Malcolm could not come up with a single smart-aleck comment in response to this, not even in the privacy of his thoughts. His brain, in fact, seemed to have stopped working.
“At our last meeting, we all agreed that you were becoming a problem. Some of the channelers talked about hiring a hit man and having you blown away.”
Hit man — the magic phrase. Malcolm’s brain started working again. “Wait a minute. First, I thought the proper patois was ‘to off,’ not ‘to blow away.’ Second, who was having this meeting, the channelers or the, er, entities?”
“Well, for Heaven’s sake, they have to do everything through their human mediums, of course, so we channelers get together and convey the entities’ debate to each other and then back to them. We’re sort of like United Nations interpreters, see.”
This makes as much sense as anything else I’ve heard, Malcolm thought. “So they don’t have a big meeting room somewhere on a higher plane of existence, with ectoplasmic coffee and doughnuts, and conference calls to other planes?”
Atlantica glared at him. “You’re not taking this seriously, are you?”
“It is hard.”
“Mongo.”
Malcolm began taking the conversation seriously.
“All right,” Atlantica said, satisfied with his suddenly sober expression. “Anyway, Mellabenth convinced the other entities that blowing you away — or offing you — wasn’t really the optimal solution. He pointed out that we needed to bring you into the fold so that you and, um, what’s his name?”
“Who? Whose name?”
Atlantica began to swell, her face reddening, pulsing veins standing out on her forehead, foam appearing on her lips.
Malcolm shrank back in his chair.
“Your entity, lout!” Her voice was huskier, deeper. “The being you channel!”
“Lukas! Lukas of Aldebaran!”
Atlantica detumesced. Malcolm breathed again. This woman’s pyrotechnics, he realized, were almost as frightening as Mongo’s quiet looming. Of course, he admitted to himself, I am unusually easy to frighten.
Atlantica continued. “Right. Lukas. Anyway, Mellabenth wants you and Lukas brought into the fold. You’ll join our organization, you’ll pay your proper percentage of profit into the kitty, just like everyone else, Lukas will announce that he was Mellabenth’s subordinate in ancient times when they were both mortal, and you’ll swear your personal allegiance to me as president of the channeler’s auxiliary of the CEA.”
“Well, golly, that sounds simple enough. I just give you all my money and accept you as my boss, and I’m free to go. Of course, if I refuse to go along with all of this, then I get to keep all of my money, and I remain my own boss.”
“Mongo.”
The ultimate counterargument. Malcolm sighed. “You know, if I do agree to your terms — offer, pardon me — I’ll be giving up quite a bit. Money, freedom, a great future.”
“You’d also be gaining a few things, and I’m not just talking about your life and health.” Atlantica rose from her chair and strode over to stand behind Malcolm’s chair. She placed one hand on each shoulder and squeezed hard enough to cause pain. “Ever been tied up by an expert?” she breathed in Malcolm’s ear.
So there are things Marlene doesn’t know! Malcolm thought. Why are beautiful women so fascinated with me?
“I’ve always loved tying up and controlling and humiliating men like you,” Atlantica said. “You know — weak, shallow, insignificant men. The kind who really deserve to be stepped on and squashed.”
The door burst open, splinters of wood flying from the broken frame around the lock.
“Nobody move!” a deep voice roared.
A river of conservatively suited, short-haired, clean-shaven men poured into the room. At their head was Zip Muchley. Jerry and Al were right behind him. All were brandishing immense cannons disguised to look like handguns.
“Are you all right, sir?” Al asked.
When he did not reply immediately, Jerry said anxiously, “Mr. Erskine, sir, are you all right?”
They crowded around his chair, peering down at him, concern writ large on all their faces.
Not as all right as I would have been if you hadn’t interrupted. “Yes, I’m fine. No one’s harmed me.” He stood up and turned toward Atlantica.
She was being held firmly by two large young men, looking dwarfed between them and no longer so dangerous. She glared at Malcolm, at the two who held her, and then at all of the others. “Who the hell are you, and what do you want? We were just having a business discussion!”
Zip Muchley shook his head and said in a stern tone, “We know better, ma’am. You had Mr. Erskine kidnapped and brought here so that you could try to put an end to his important work for world enlightenment and the advancement of the free enterprise system, ma’am. We had a call from an unnamed source giving us all the info, and then when we sneaked in here, we captured a couple of your followers, and when we tortured them, they spilled the beans.”
“Tortured?” Malcolm said, feeling queasy.
“Oh, don’t worry, Mr. Erskine,” Jerry reassured him. “That’s just Agency officialese for ‘questioned.’”
“Yeah,” Al said quickly. “Questioned them. That’s all.”
“Anyway, ma’am,” Zip continued, “you’re now under arrest for violation of the Freedom of Channeling Presidential Decree. Trial will be before an Agency administrative judge tomorrow morning, sentencing to follow immediately. You do not have the right to remain silent. Mr. Erskine, sir, we’ll be transporting you to California for safekeeping. Uh, you know where. You can stay there and plan strategy with, uh,” he looked around, “you know who.”
Oh, Christ, Malcolm thought. Out of the frying pan, into the fire. Lukas, how I wish you were real and could help me!
The lights went out.
The room was utterly black. There was much shouting and cursing and the sound of large bodies milling about and stepping on each other’s toes, accompanied by much more cursing.
A small, hard hand gripped Malcolm’s and yanked. A voice whispered in his ear, “Keep quiet and come along.”
Atlantica? Who else could it be? Some of her underlings were free, after all, and had staged a rescue attempt. Malcolm hesitated only for a moment. Of the frightening alternatives facing him, this seemed at the moment to be the least unpleasant. Not that he could have chosen a different alternative, anyway. The hand grasping his had a grip he doubted he could break, and when his invisible rescuer moved, he had no choice but to stumble after.
After a few minutes of zig-zag progress, rebounding from one cursing, shoving Secret Service man to another, Malcolm could tell he was in an open space. Outside the room and in the hallway, he guessed. Still there was no light. The entire house must be in darkness.
The hand pulled him along for some distance. “Step down a few steps,” the voice whispered. They went down a half-flight of stairs.
Light came on, temporarily blinding Malcolm.
“How interesting,” a voice said. “Step outside to do some astronomy, and everything goes to hell. Hey, Erskine, open your eyes.”
“I don’t want to, Mongo. It’s nice in here.” Nevertheless, he did open his eyes.
Mongo loomed before him, exuding even more menace than usual. He held a very large telescope and tripod easily in one hand and a flashlight in the other. He put the flashlight on the floor, balancing it on its end so that its light splashed on the ceiling. He placed the telescope carefully on the floor and then took off the heavy coat he had been wearing and let it drop over the telescope. Under the coat, he wore a white dress shirt that was stretched to bursting over his huge chest.
They were in a kitchen, a very large one, the sor
t of place where, in an earlier age, malnourished servants had labored to produce vast meals for their well fed masters. To Malcolm’s right, an immense wooden table was littered with dirty plates. In a platter in the center were the remnants of a large ham. Sturdy wooden chairs surrounded the table.
The hand holding his had let go. Malcolm turned to his left, expecting to see Atlantica. Instead, he saw a stunningly, exotically beautiful young woman with shoulder-length black hair and olive skin and almond-shaped eyes.
He grabbed one of the wooden chairs and fell into it. His knees had lost their ability to support him.
Mongo glanced at Malcolm. “You’ll keep for a while,” Mongo said. He turned to Malcolm’s dream girl. “I think I’ll kill you first.”
* * * * *
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
But it won’t be much fun,” Mongo added. He gestured toward Malcolm. “He’s such a wimp, I don’t know how long I can make him last. And you,” he turned back to Malcolm’s dream girl, “why, you’re so itty bitty and fragile, a real light shot to the heart’ll do it instantly.”
He moved so quickly that Malcolm couldn’t quite follow what had happened. All he was sure of was that Mongo had moved, first forward and then back into position again, and that his dream girl had staggered back. But now she was standing normally again, although she was rubbing her chest.
“Pretty good,” she said admiringly.
The slightest trace of a frown of puzzlement flickered on Mongo’s face. “Interesting,” he said. “You’re stronger than you look. You a freak with your heart on the right side, or something?”
The dream girl shook her head. “Better than that. I’m a freak with no heart at all. My turn.”
This time, Malcolm couldn’t follow the action at all. He sensed a flicker of motion, but his dream girl seemed to be where she had been all along. Mongo, however, bent suddenly at the knees and sat down heavily on the floor. The room shook when the giant landed.
Mongo raised his hand halfway to his chest, but then let it fall limply. A red stain spread over his shirt, centered just to the left of the center of his chest.
“Gasp,” Mongo said.
He wilted to the floor and lay limply on his back. A pink froth formed on his lips. Blood began to dribble from his slack mouth. He looked up at Malcolm’s dream girl with adoration in his glazing eyes. “I love you,” he bubbled, and died.
“Usual reaction,” said Malcolm’s dream girl, dismissing the dead cosmic outplacement director. “Come on, Erskine, the SS men will be here in a few minutes.” When Malcolm stared up at her with a look combining total devotion and paralyzing fear and did not move, she snapped, “On your feet! Now!”
Malcolm leaped to his feet and stood at attention.
“Good. Follow me. There’s a car waiting out by the highway. Hold my hand. We cut all the outside lights as well. You can call me Shirley.”
* * * * *
Another long drive to an unknown destination, the time spent in the back seat of a large car next to a frightening individual.
There were differences, though.
The person next to Malcolm this time was not Mongo, but rather the woman he had fantasized about for years, become flesh. She was perfect. Even in the dim light cast in the back seat by the dashboard and by the reflection through the windows from the headlights, he could see that much easily.
It had not, however, been part of his fantasy that his dream woman would be as much a killer as Mongo, or possibly even more a killer. For that matter, in his fantasies, she had paid attention to him, passionate attention, rather than staring out the window, lost in her own world. And, mysterious daughter of the wondrous East, she had not been named “Shirley.”
Malcolm racked his brain for an appropriate topic with which to start a conversation. He really wanted to know whether she was his savior or his abductor, and if the latter, just what the nature was of the frying pan into which he was being forced to jump.
Better to ease into the difficult stuff, he told himself. “So, Shirley,” he said heartily, “how do you like our country so far?”
He would not have thought that such dark eyes could emit such freezing cold rays. He shivered and drew back into his corner.
Shirley looked satisfied. “I was born in this country, you twit. And so were my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, at least. That’s as far back as the family records go. Now, tell me something. I suppose I’m the woman you’ve fantasized about all your life, and you can imagine nothing more heavenly than to be allowed to get into my bed and make worshipful love to me, right?”
Malcolm nodded eagerly. Could it possibly be... ?
“Usual reaction,” Shirley said. “From now on, don’t call me ‘Shirley,’ call me ‘Miss Weng.’”
“Uh, okay, Miss Weng.”
Shirley shook her head. “Changed my mind. Don’t call me anything. Don’t speak to me. Retreat into your fantasies. And don’t look at me.” She returned her attention to the passing night.
I’ve read about women like this, Malcolm thought. In fact, I’ve written about women like this.
In his fiction, though, he was always in control. His protagonists, who were always the same ideal, the man he wished he could be, were suave when they should be suave, gentle when they should be gentle, and always, always completely successful with the women he invented for their pleasure. Real women and real life were so much more difficult for Malcolm to deal with. In real life, events, circumstances, and women were always in control and Malcolm never was.
Perhaps it was time to change all of that, to assert himself, to emulate his own fictional creations.
He kept his head pointed forward and swiveled his eyes to the right to get a straining look at Shirley Weng’s profile.
Good Heavens, how utterly perfect! His dream girl had always been a bit fuzzy in the details, as dream girls tend to be. This woman was sharp and hard and clear.
What better circumstances to start his new self-assertion than these, and with what better companion to do so than the girl of his dreams incarnate? Then he remembered another very clear detail connected with Shirley Weng: the terrifying Mongo dying with blood bubbling from his mouth and his chest crushed. And he decided that this was not the time, not the place, and not the companion after all.
He turned his own attention to the window beside him. The darkness outside was broken only by occasional highway signs and the lights of towns and cities. The night air was clear, cleaned by the earlier rain. They were apparently on Interstate 95, heading south. Where that put them, and where it meant they were headed, Malcolm didn’t know. He knew only that they had started somewhere in Virginia.
In fact, he realized that he couldn’t even be sure of that. He knew that the house in which the Secret Service had been hiding him and Marlene was in Virginia. He also knew that Mongo had taken him from Dulles Airport on a relatively short drive, but he had only the fuzziest idea of the geography of the East Coast. Should have paid more attention in grade school, he told himself quite a few years too late.
For that matter, he should have worked harder at his meaningless job for the last few years and given up any idea of writing bestsellers. If he had done that, he’d now be bored but safe back home in Piketon. Just as divorced, of course, but would that have been bad?
Hours passed, and Malcolm kept awaking with a start to realize that he had drifted off to sleep. He glanced carefully to the right again. Shirley was as upright and wide awake as at the start of the ride. She seemed not to need sleep. Malcolm hoped the same was true of their driver.
He tried to keep his back straight, hoping that when he did doze, he’d stay upright himself. It scared him to imagine what Shirley might do to him if he fell over against her.
He dreamed strange dreams of space adventures involving Merskeenians and Marlengas. Shirley was there, too. She appeared not as the prototype of a race, but as an individual being, immensely powerful, huge, a living space battlecruiser, arriving un
heralded from the dark intergalactic depths, flying into Merskeenian space to blast to smithereens a strange, pervasive menace called a Mongo. The Merskeenians radioed their thanks to their enigmatic savior and began to plan a monument to her and a farewell ceremony. But she hung around, refusing to offer an explanation as to why she had not yet announced a departure date, becoming a looming menace herself. The Merskeenians began to feel very nervous.
Malcolm awoke feeling eager to get to his computer. This was not bad stuff! He could do something with it, add to the pulpy mythos he was building. Perhaps, after the Business Secrets from the Stars episode of his life had passed and he had retired to a mansion somewhere high in the mountains, far from Piketon, he could start churning out a ten- or twelve-volume action-adventure novel about the adventures of Lukas of Aldebaran and his fellow Merskeenians. Drop all the pretense and market it as fiction. There was a ready-made market, after all.
So what happens next? he asked himself. Well, Lukas, with his usual courage, volunteers to fly into space and try to board the Shirley creature and communicate with her man-to-whatever. No, not “board her.” Make that “enter her.”
Malcolm headed back to dreamland with a smile.
The car decelerated suddenly, jerking Malcolm awake. Fear clutched at him. The driver had fallen asleep! No, they were exiting from the Interstate at last.
The suddenness of it had driven from him the dream he had been having. He had managed to dream of being Lukas entering the amazing Shirley, but he had a vague memory that the results for Lukas had not been pleasurable.
The rising sun sat huge and red on the horizon off to the left. From the raised exit ramp, Malcolm could see a vista of lush growth spreading in all directions, glowing red in the sunlight. Malcolm could imagine he was still in the land of his dreams, that he was on some exotic planet circling Aldebaran, the red giant star. Strange, dense alien plant life covered the surface of this world. What beings moved beneath that cover? Enemies? Friends? What new, happier life awaited him on this world?
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