The Omega Point

by Whitley Strieber

  The meeting concluded on what he could only see as a sour note. But why wouldn’t they be sour? There was nothing positive here, it was all supply problems, security problems, and, because of the subterfuge he’d had to engage in, a lack of faith in their new boss. But any opponent in this room would have to see him as being nothing more than what he appeared to be—an inexperienced and overbearing supervisor.

  Marian lingered at the door. Their eyes met and he nodded, and she returned.

  She said, “David, we need to talk about some additional matters.”

  “Don’t resign, Marian. Remember that I didn’t pick me, Mrs. Denman did.”

  She sat down before the dark fireplace.

  “If it’s all the same to you, David, I won’t dignify that with a response.”

  “I’m sorry, I—”

  “Don’t say you’re sorry. You say that too much. It makes you look weak.” She smiled a little. “Do you know that T-shirt? I think Mack wears it from time to time. “ ‘Graham Mining, Where the Weak are Killed and Eaten.’ Do you know that?”

  “I haven’t seen it.”

  “He’s in the art room now,” Katie said. “He’s got it on.”

  Marian waved her hand. “The point is, if you appear weak, Acton will devour you.”

  “Is that what happened to Dr. Ullman?”

  “As far as we know, the fire was set by townies.”

  “And yet one day later you put Mack under confinement and gave him an armed guard.”

  “I did that because he’s potentially violent.”

  “Not because he killed Dr. Ullman and you know it perfectly well?”

  “I do not know it. It could’ve been the police themselves, or even the firemen. We are hated here.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “Understand it. Live it. It is the central reality of all our lives. This is the palace, still splendid in the middle of a ruined and starving world.”

  What was her point? And speaking of Mack, he was due here for a session in a few minutes.

  She continued, “I want to agree with you to an extent, David. Oh, not about the conspiracy business. You saw lightning, or some sort of static effect. Who knows these days what nature might toss at us? And patients go downstairs at all hours.” She held up a hand. “I know it’s against the rules, but you don’t tell people like this to follow your rules. You ask them.”

  “But they—”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m not even interested in what they were doing. They do all sorts of odd things. Most of them are geniuses, which I’m sure you’ve noticed. Or have you?”

  “Don’t patronize me, Marian.”

  “Trust them, David! What they are doing here, even who they really are, most of them—well, we’re not sure, none of us. But we serve their needs. We feed them and protect them and give them shelter and psychiatric support. They’re far, far beyond most mortals, including you and me. Did you know that most of them can learn a new language in a couple of hours? And ask them to recite something for you sometime. Anything worth reciting. They’ll know it, almost certainly. Give them something to read, then ask them to repeat it a couple of days later. It’ll come back verbatim. Engage them on the most complex topics, you’ll be amazed.”

  “Like what—Aztec culture?”

  “Most of these people are as interested as anybody in ancient Mesoamerica. The difference is, they understand things like the Nahuatl language of the Aztecs, and their philosophy, and Mayan mathematics.”

  His mind went to Acton’s list sitting right now locked in one of the drawers of his desk. He did not want to feel as if he was drowning, but that was exactly how he felt. He knew that Marian was not an insider, Aubrey Denman had told him. So he would not open up to her, no matter how familiar with the situation she seemed.

  Mack Graham was on his way, and there wasn’t time to continue this. All he could do was to tell the truth of his feelings.

  “Marian, I’m moved, I have to admit, by your loyalty to the patients.”

  “David, in this place nothing is as it seems.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that you may never fully understand them or what they’re doing. But trust it, David. We all do, we just trust it.” She came to her feet. “I have patients, too,” she said. “Linda Fairbrother had a very difficult night. A painful interruption, as I understand it. She has a compulsive need to play every note in precise sequence.” Her voice rose a little. “But some insensitive fool touched her hand—touched it—and disturbed the flow of her music and that has injured her.”

  “I’m sorry,” David said.

  “Yes,” she responded, “you are.” And she left.

  David fought the pain that her sarcasm brought. He should not have interrupted the patient. It had been insensitive, even unprofessional. You empathized, you did not control . . . unless, of course, you were a kid who was just plain out of his depth.

  To regain his composure, what he needed was information. If he just understood the basic realities of this place better, he could be more useful. Or, frankly, begin to be useful at all. He looked to Katie, who remained as still as a wary bird.

  “Katie, you’ve been here for, um—”

  “Four years.”

  “As a psychiatric nurse who has been working with Dr. Hunt for that time, what do you make of this conversation?”

  “Are you putting me on the spot, here?”

  “I’m asking for your professional opinion.”

  “As a nurse, my opinion of her is that she’s a conscientious and effective doctor.”

  “And me? How am I doing?”

  “David, to be completely frank, you’re taking longer figuring things out than I would have thought.”

  “I can’t figure anything out!”

  “You can figure out what you need to figure out, which is how to support these patients. Just concentrate on their needs, David! Who knows what they’re doing? We can’t understand, we don’t have the minds for it. What we can do is provide a hug or a pill when needed, and a sounding board. Let them go where they want to go, be there to catch them when they trip. That’s all we can do.”

  His buzzer rang, and at the Acton Clinic, you did not keep patients waiting.

  9

  ORME

  Mack appeared in a silk jacket and trousers, moving with that curious precision of his. As he slid into the patient’s chair in the nook that David had reserved for these sessions, David thought that he looked not like a mental patient with a severely distorted grasp of reality, but like some sort of vaudeville performer.

  “We could become cannibals,” Mack said.

  That certainly sounded like symptomatic production. He settled in for a real session with a real psychiatric patient . . . for once.

  “What makes you say that?”

  “No eggs at breakfast, therefore Acton is having supply problems. We could send raiding parties into the town.”

  “Do you think cannibalism is a good idea?”

  “I’m crazy, so of course I do. I want to know about the new intake.”

  “You’ll meet her in the common areas.”

  “Social Register?”

  “I wouldn’t know, Mack.”

  “Let me tell you about her. She’s at least thirty. She’s a self-commit who’s been having very serious second thoughts. And last night, when she was screaming in that so very pleasant padded cell of yours, and you went to observe her, you got, shall we say, sidetracked.”

  What was this? Had this patient overheard something? Or had he been behind one of those welder’s masks, perhaps—another confinement patient being let out at night?

  “Expand on that.”

  “I think there are lots of surprises in the Acton Clinic. Right answer?”

  “Therapeutic interaction isn’t about right answers. It’s about opening doors.”

  “You see the sun this morning?”

  “Have you seen the sun?”

  “
My point is that it looks like it’s had a bite taken out of it. The sunspot is gigantic.”

  “What does that mean to you?”

  “To me? That I won’t be alive in six months. Like you. Like everybody.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Incidentally, the new intake—what’s her surname? Where’s she from?”

  “We’re back to the new patient?”

  “I just like to know who’s here. Who I might be dealing with. The world of the obscenely rich is not a large one. She and I might have played doctor as kids. If so, I’d like to renew the acquaintance.”

  “Being in the CIA makes you rich?”

  “Being the heir to Graham Mining makes you rich. I served my country for a dollar a year. And I was retired mental, okay? Is that what you want me to admit? That I was humiliated and ended up in this idiotic place, spilling my innermost secrets to a kid? Dr. Ford, I want just two things from you. First, I want to know the name of the new intake. I want to know who I’m living with. Second, I would like you to review my file and see if I really need to be on confinement.”

  “You don’t think you should be?”

  “Of course not! I don’t understand it at all.”

  “Dr. Hunt did it because you have anger issues. Your daytime rights aren’t affected.”

  “Except I have a goddamn armed guard when I go outside!”

  “Armed with a tranquilizer gun. After Dr. Ullman passed away, you were very, very angry.” He did not bring up the fact that Mack had been AWOL at the time of the fire.

  “Something was wrong that night, Doctor. And something was wrong last night, is wrong now, and has been wrong for weeks. And I don’t mean the sun or the economy or any of that crap. I mean that something is wrong here. Something is happening to this place, and yes, it scares me and when I am afraid, yes, I have an anger problem. Like those flashes last night? What was that? I had—” He stopped, shook his head.

  “You had?”

  “I don’t know. A dream. Not pretty.”

  “You think the flashes were a dream?”

  “Hell no, but they triggered something.”

  “Can you describe it, Mack?”

  “Um, sure. A demon. I saw a demon.”

  David strove to maintain the therapeutic context, but at the same time was acutely aware of his own reaction to the flashes, but what he’d seen had hardly been a demon.

  “You want to ask me something, Doctor. Go ahead.”

  Mack was certainly perceptive. “What do you know about the flashes?”

  “They’re making an ORME, and that’s pretty damn disturbing.”

  “An ORME?”

  “An orbitally rearranged monatomic element. Gold, would be my guess. The legendary philosopher’s stone.”

  Those two words, “philosopher’s stone,” would ordinarily have evoked in him the quiet contempt of the scientist dealing with an ignorant member of the public who was silly enough to believe such twaddle.

  That was not how he reacted now. “Go on.”

  “It’s being made in their arc furnace. The ‘kiln.’ Look inside sometime.”

  “I have. It looks like a kiln.”

  “Not at night, Doc. That’s when they install their tungsten filament, and you’re looking at three thousand degrees sustained.”

  “Isn’t that rather a high temperature?”

  “Not for them. And this new lady, she’s their leader, I think. I think things are going into overdrive. She, um—God, you know, I’ve forgotten her name.”

  “Caroline.”

  “Haven’t we done this? Maybe the flashes erased my memory. I mean her last name. Is it Acton?”

  David remained impassive.

  “Is it Light, then? Is she a member of the Light family?”

  Mack was fishing hard—too hard, David thought. He would not forget this. “Let’s get back to ORME,” he said. “It’s what?”

  “An orbitally rearranged monatomic element is an element that’s not entirely confined to three-dimensional space. It’s torsioned into hyperspace. You eat it, and you extend into hyperspace, too.”

  The philospher’s stone . . . they’d been taught about it in class. “It’s not just for philosophers and it’s not a stone, it’s a white powder.”

  “And extending into hyperspace gets you what?”

  “You’re outside of space and time. So you can see the past and the future. You can . . . maybe escape. Move around time or through it faster. Except, of course, for the problem.”

  “Which is?”

  “It’s total bullshit. All ingesting a heavy metal is gonna do is screw with your kidneys.”

  “That would be my best guess, too.”

  If a man’s stare could express the hunger of a tiger, Mack the Cat’s poisoned eyes expressed it now. At that moment, the session bell chimed softly and he leaped to attention and saluted. “Hup!”

  David recalled Katie’s comment that Mack alternated between incipient serial killer and charming boy.

  After he left, David slid aside the wall of book backs that concealed his electronics from patients. He keyed in Mack’s code, F-0188, and the system began following his transponder. David watched him go down the wide hallway past Katie’s office, then down two flights of stairs, the system automatically shifting from one camera to the next as it followed him.

  He went into the art room where a number of other patients were painting and one was sculpting.

  David closed the monitors. This was the very picture of a compliant patient.

  He had fifteen minutes before his next appointment, which was Linda Fairbrother.

  He pressed his intercom and said to Katie, “I’m going down to the art room to observe Mack. I’ll be back in time for Fairbrother.”

  As he was closing his monitoring system, he saw Caroline Light sitting at an easel in the art room. Again, he pressed the intercom. “I see that Caroline is in the population.”

  “Dr. Hunt said to release her.”

  He went into the outer office. “But she’s under constant supervision?”

  She gestured toward her bank of screens. “Absolutely. Sam’s on the job, watching her and Mack and keeping them apart.”

  “Oh?”

  “Mack has expressed interest in her.”

  He was tempted to issue Sam a real gun and live rounds. He would immediately reinforce to Sam that he thought that Mack was potentially quite dangerous to her.

  “Let Marian know that I’ll expect to discuss Caroline’s progress toward the end of the day. We’ll need to make a decision about where she sleeps tonight.”

  Frankly, he hoped that she would fake more evidence of disturbance and justify another night under confinement—not that it helped, given her hidden power to apparently come and go as she pleased. He’d assumed that she’d had help from the staff—probably Fleigler—but now who knew, maybe she’d just walked through the walls.

  This substance they were making—even the process of creating it affected the mind profoundly, and look what had happened to him when he drew close. He’d been somehow—was the right word “overcome”?—yes, overcome, and what had taken place next? He thought that they had probably carried him to his room.

  But the state he had been in was not sleep, it was darker and deeper than sleep. Had he been outside of time, somehow? Was such a thing truly possible?

  In any case, if just the manufacturing process was that disorienting, perhaps the substance was potent indeed. He could certainly understand why the group making it had been wearing welder’s masks.

  White powder gold . . . it had been discussed in class—discussed a lot. He could see Mr. Light sitting on the edge of his desk speaking about it. Could see but not hear.

  God, but the fog of amnesia was maddening. Maybe Katie knew more than she was saying. Maybe there would be some trigger to memory if he just talked about it all. “Katie, what’s your impression of what happened last night? Please be frank.”


  “You were overwrought. It could happen to anybody.”

  Not helpful. “Did I go out? Were you aware of that?”

  She was silent. Then she reached out, her hand tentative. For a moment, he still hesitated, but when she began to withdraw it, he took it. They remained like that for a moment, and he felt that her hand was warm and small and very soft.

  A moment later, it was over, and she turned away and busied herself with her files. He went down to watch Caroline and Mack, and try to feel his way a little further down the dark passage that was life at the Acton Clinic.

  10

  MAYHEM

  Mack sat near Caroline Light, watching her paint the most strikingly realistic painting he had ever seen. She was just beginning, but it was really very odd. It wasn’t photographic, it was beyond that. The light shimmering in the meadow, the glow of the tiny flowers and the green of the grass—it was just uncanny, and what a very mysterious thing for her to be doing. What would a painting have to do with anything, no matter how it appeared?

  He had calculated every word uttered in his session with young David, controlling not only his own answers, but also the doctor’s questions, until finally the truth had been revealed. At the instant that the young doctor’s untrained body language—crossing his legs, glancing away—had revealed the correctness of his guess that this was Caroline Light, a bolt of pure fire had shot through him, forcing him to will his face to impassivity and idly straighten his tie while he was actually brimming with triumph inside.

  It was Caroline Light, and my, but she had fooled them all, hadn’t she? Rich, neurotic playgirl. And all that screaming and crying last night—she was an excellent actress.

  No matter how good she was, though, in the end he was going to squeeze out every morsel of information she possessed, including how to make white powder gold that worked, and exactly what to do with it that would lead to escape from this hell.

  They might not be able to save all the people in all the redoubts, but they could certainly save the Blue Ridge, which would be enough to start mankind again on a far stronger footing. No more corrupt bloodlines, no more inferior people, not ever. A new world.