by Robert Maxxe
Moving to the front kitchen window, Carrie watched the two figures moving down the path. As they reached the sidewalk, Nick raised one hand and waved a greeting. Then Carrie noticed three more figures huddled not far away, waiting. Nick and Dana ran to join up with the other group, and they all walked away together. When they passed under a street lamp, Carrie saw that the other group was three more boys.
Four boys, and Dana—as there had been five and Dana before Alan Pomfrey was torped. It was the zal, Carrie realized, what was left of it.
Were they going as a unit to pay their last respects to one of their fallen?
After putting Emily to bed, Carrie went down to the den and picked up the New York Times for another of her never-ending attempts to keep up with the state of the world. Oddly, for once she was able to concentrate on the articles. The constant milling of the same irksome thoughts had finally ground them down to wisps that were blown away.
She was just sinking into a feature about successful career women who had happily left high-paying jobs to have babies, when the phone rang.
"It's Grace Mullen, Carrie," came the chirpy greeting from the other end of the line.
Carrie responded warmly, and they passed a few remarks about the Pomfrey tragedy, the automatic sympathy of neighbors in a small town. There was obviously another reason for the call.
At last Grace got down to it. Nick still hadn't adjusted himself to staying with the class; he was pressing ahead in his schoolwork all the time, moving way beyond the ordinary curriculum.
"Nobody wants to discourage a child's eagerness to learn. But balances are being seriously thrown off throughout the school. We can't leave things as they are. . . ."
Carrie was annoyed to hear Nick being held responsible for throwing the whole school out of whack. "I'll gladly discuss this with Nick," she replied. "But I don't think he should be singled out as—"
Grace broke in. "Oh, it isn't just Nick! I'm sorry if I gave that impression. More and more we're seeing it in other grades, certain kids zooming ahead of the rest." She gave a short, nervous laugh. "Some are even pulling ahead of their teachers. It's quite startling. . . ."
"About Nick," Carrie asked. "How far ahead is he?"
Grace paused. "Let me tell you what happened yesterday. Nick came up to me after math class and asked something about . . . oh goodness, I'm not sure that I have this right . . . about helping him straighten out some calculation involving non-inertial coordinates as related to the space-time continuum. Well, he put the question, Carrie, and then he just stood there waiting for an answer. I thought it had to be a prank—you know, bamboozle the teacher with some double-talk—so I laughed, trying to be a good sport. But then he just walked away. He seemed so genuinely disappointed. That wasn't the end of it, though. Later at a faculty meeting, another teacher mentioned having a similar exchange with a student. And Ray Darby, our physics man, he was knocked sideways. He recognized the language as pertinent to general relativity theory—that's advanced physics, Carrie!—and he seemed to think the children's interest might not be frivolous. Do you happen to know," Grace concluded, "where Nick could have picked up any knowledge of that . . .?"
"No," Carrie murmured. Though she did. She knew exactly where.
In view of the unusual situation, Grace continued, the school had thought of helping the eager beavers by separating them into a special section where they would get extra attention. The parents of all the students involved were being called to obtain their consent.
"I hope you agree, Carrie, that something must be done."
Yes. Something had to be done.
"The others in this class," Carrie demanded urgently, "who are they?"
"I haven't got the names in front of me at—"
"But are they all spacies?" Carrie insisted. "I've got to know."
Grace hesitated, plainly thrown by Carrie's strange concern. "I don't have any idea. But I did tell you that many of the children who enjoy that game are among our better students. I wouldn't think that's any reason to object to Nick's participation in the class."
Once more Carrie felt locked into her secret. There was no doubt anymore, some powerful force was at work. The machines were taking over the children, teaching them, filling their minds.
She couldn't hope to explain it to Grace, however.
"Let me think about it and get back to you," she said.
"Of course, Carrie. But do be quick. We're trying to deal with immediate needs." She said good night and hung up.
Carrie leaned back into the sofa, and closed her eyes. She had to concentrate, try to make sense out of what was happening. . . .
The spacies were going to have their own class, to be taught together at the same level.
But of course they were already learning together—from the machines. That explained Nick and Dana's studying together! Space-time continuum. Non-innertial coordinates. The words bounced around in her brain, colliding and fusing with others like atoms in a vacuum chamber. Lightshift. Timejump.
Nick was in direct contact with the electronic soul of that machine.
They need us. They're counting on us. Alan Pomfrey's fervent cry stabbed at her memory.
A pattern had begun to emerge. The game was definitely not collecting adherents at random. It was being selective, sorting them out. Children over adults, for a start. You can't understand, none of you. That's why they need us. Anyone could go into the arcade and play the game, but it would only capture for its real purpose those it wanted, needed. Then the process was refined further. Some children were weeded out as unsuitable, inferior—"torped"—while others went on to higher levels. The children who enjoy that game are among our better students. . . . Those who remained were educated by the game—the best of them. And what was the point of the education?
They were being prepared.
Carrie sat up, eyes open. They were being made ready for something.
But for what?
To get through.
The sound of the front door opening jarred Carrie out of her speculations. She listened to it slam shut, then the clump of Nick's footsteps mounting the stairs. Faintly she heard the door of his room close.
It wasn't only that he had been avoiding a confrontation with her, Carrie realized now; she had been avoiding him, too, unwilling to face a dark and threatening unknown. But she couldn't put it off any longer. For all she knew, it was already too late.
As she went to the stairs and laid her hand on the banister, she became aware of her own trembling. She was terrified by the battle into which she was headed, a battle for the love and loyalty of her son.
A battle of wills: hers . . . against the game's.
28
This time he had not escaped into sleep. He was in his pajamas, but the lamp on the night table was on, and he was sitting tensely on the edge of the bed, like a prospective jumper on the ledge of a high building. His eyes were aimed at the floor and he didn't raise them as she crossed the room to stand in front of him.
She didn't know how to begin. She wanted to be seen as his ally, not a fire-breathing inquisitor.
After a few moments she sat down beside him. He looked away. Then the words formed themselves.
"Nick, I need to hear about it. I'm scared, you see—scared for you, the other children, for all of us." She lifted her hand, stroked down the silky hair at the back of his neck. "I want to help you, Nick. Believe me, that's all I want. To save you. But I've got to know more or I can't begin. . . ."
For a few moments he remained motionless. All at once he whirled and threw his arms around her. "You don't have to be scared, Mom," he said. "I swear there's nothing to be afraid of, nothing I have to be saved from. I know that for sure."
Frustration tipped her over into anger. She thrust him away to search his face. Was this some shrewd maneuver, assuming the role of comforter even as she came to offer support? He looked so wounded now by the rejection of his embrace, but she could only see it as a tactic to escape the truth.
"Damn it, Nick, don't tell me there's nothing! You were there on the beach last night. You can start with that: what did you do to Alan?"
"He wasn't . . . how can you say I . . ." Nick's stammer turned to a scream. "We didn't touch him!"
She cursed herself for the naked accusation, "Oh God, Nick, I'm sorry. . . ." She reached out to him, but he jerked away, pressing himself up against the headboard. "Look, all I know is you haven't told me the truth about it, not everything. . . ."
Nick glanced away. After a short silence he said quietly, "Alan kept asking for another chance, kept asking and asking. He came into the arcade last night and asked again. It looked like he'd cut his leg, there was blood coming through his pants, and we wanted to help him. But he said if we really wanted to do something for him we should let him back in the zal. I told him I couldn't, so he ran out. We went after him, Dana and me, 'cause he was hurt, but he kept running ahead of us down to the beach. We caught up with him there, but he said he just wanted to be alone and think. He promised his leg was all right, and to get himself home. And it was late, so Dana and me, we had to go. . . ."
"What do you think happened after you left him?"
"Maybe he fell asleep. I don't know. We shouldn't have left him, I guess, but he swore—"
"Nick, why didn't you tell the truth last night? Alan might have been saved if I'd known where he was. Why did you give me that story about chasing Dana?"
He faced her, his mouth collapsed into a wince of shame and agony. "I knew the way you felt about the game . . . I knew if I told you about Alan you'd blame it on the game and stop me playing." The pitch of his despair intensified. "But I didn't know he was going to die!"
She believed him. But that only cleared one corner of the slate.
"You could have saved him, too, if you'd given him another chance."
"He was torped." Nick cried. "I couldn't give him another chance. Those are the rules."
The rules. What were these immutable commandments that compassion could not bend? From what mountaintop were they delivered?
"One more chance, Nick, that was all he wanted. Whatever the rules, when somebody's suffering—"
"But it wasn't up to me. Alan had seen how it worked when the others were torped. It was tougher for him, maybe, 'cause he'd gone farther, but he knew I couldn't help."
"Then what does it mean," she demanded, "to be the ult?"
Nick hesitated, then gave a self-conscious shrug. "That you're the best—like in 'ultimate,' see? You try each level first, see how it works, and help the others. Like being the coach of a team, sort of. . . ."
"You lead the zal?" Carrie said.
Nick shrugged again, then nodded.
"What makes you the one to lead?"
"I'm good at the game."
"The others pick you to lead them . . .?"
"Not exactly."
"How exactly?"
"It . . . it just works out that way."
"How?" She couldn't ease off. She knew the truth she was homing toward—and so did he.
He gave another awkward shrug. "I can't tell you."
"Can't—or won't?" Her restraint was slipping. "Goddamn it, Nick, you're going to tell me. Who made you the ult?"
"I don't know!" he bawled at her and edged away, pressing himself so hard against the headboard that Carrie heard the wooden joints of the bedstead cracking.
But she kept bearing down. "The game chooses, doesn't it?"
"I guess. . . ." His voice was barely audible.
It was the breakthrough, though. He had admitted its power. "What about Dana?" Carrie asked then. "The game makes decisions for her, too?"
Nick gazed at her solemnly.
"The game tells her to be with you—isn't that right?"
His shoulders moved again. Not merely a shrug. An element of squirming. "We like being together . . . we understand the same things. . . ."
"Like the time-space continuum. How do you know about that?"
"It's . . . just stuff that . . ." He shook his head.
"That what?"
"That's . . . there."
"Where?"
"In our minds." He cried it out, breaking down again.
"The game puts it there."
He didn't answer, but rubbed his hands nervously over his face.
"The game is teaching you," she persisted.
"Yes, I guess. . . ." He rolled his head to one side, avoiding her.
"What else is it teaching you?"
He didn't answer.
She grabbed him. "What is it preparing you for?"
"I don't know."
"But it communicates with you . . . you know what it wants. . . ." She started to shake him.
"I think, yes . . . I don't know . . ." His head started rolling from side to side as he howled out each conflicting answer in a rising crescendo of desperation. "Yes . . . I don't know . . . yes . . ."
Carrie eased back. Suddenly she saw the savagery of her prosecution mirrored in Nick's reaction, in his whole aspect. He looked so pale and pained, so breakable. She couldn't be sure now that he had made any meaningful confession. Perhaps he was only appeasing her, supplying the answers he thought she needed to hear, like those innocents who confessed after being brutally interrogated only so that they would be allowed to sleep.
No. She knew Nick: if he had a position to defend, he would keep fighting her. If he was distressed, it was not by her tough approach so much as his own inability to give reasonable answers. Now that explanations were necessary, he had discovered that they were elusive—impossible. He was like the pious believer who blindly answered the inner call to join some religious order; then, when asked to explain God, he was thrown into agony to provide reasons.
Carrie put her hand on his arm, trying to calm and comfort him, though without abandoning her pursuit. "Nick, you've got to realize that what's happening is unnatural. It can't go on. There's something wrong, and it's got to—"
He lurched up, and clutched her. "No! You mustn't stop us. There's a lot we don't understand, Mom, but one thing we all know is that it's good, and important."
"Important? Good?" she repeated. "And it kills . . .?"
"Alan was an accident. We can't let that make a difference, though. He'd understand that we had to keep going. Why do you think he wanted to play so much? He knew how great it would be to . . . to . . ."
He faltered again. She guessed what he must be holding back.
"To get through," she supplied quietly. "Can you tell me what that means?"
"To go to the end," he replied after a second. "To get to the last level."
"What will happen when you get there?"
"I don't—nobody knows. Not till it happens."
"When will that be?"
"We can't say. We're not sure how far out it is."
Far out. The irony teased a thin smile out of her. In the kids' slang it could mean strange and wild. How far out it all was.
But Nick had been using it as a literal spatial reference. Wherever Spacescape was taking the children, it was . . . far out.
Could the machine be capable of transporting the children into space, the landscape of the infinite? Was it conceivable that Peale had contrived some kind of—what?—time machine, a cosmic bus to zoom them all away as soon as they reached a certain level?
In the darkened bedroom, with the boy cowering in the small arena of lamplight, she felt reality fleeing away from her into the corners, all darkness losing its boundaries and blending away into the unending empty blackness of space.
She took a couple of deep breaths, and tried once more.
"How far have you gone already, Nick? What level have you reached?"
He seemed relieved, too, not to be left in limbo. "We're on the fifth level," he said quickly, "at the edge of the kor."
She had heard the word before. From Alan. "Core?" she asked. "As in apple?"
He shook his head. "This is k-o-r. Though it is like the center of something." H
e smiled with nervous embarrassment as he assumed the role of teacher. "There's this energy field, see, right in the middle of a star cluster that's on the edge of the proximate galaxy—and that's the kor. When you get into it, if you know how to harness particle forces, then you can ride them into the next level."
She tried to conceive of what place in his brain the knowledge occupied—how much of it his own fantasy, how much of the information implanted by a machine? It was beyond her. The effort left only a black hole in her imagination.
"All that is just there," she said. "In your mind . . ."
He nodded warily.
"But you have no idea why . . ."
"To help get us through," he said.
"But beyond that. Why is it so important to get through?"
He shook his head, but not frantically. There was a certain self-possessed tranquillity that he had won by passing through the storm of his own confusion.
"We only know that it's good," he said quietly.
"How do you know?" she asked, sharply this time, her rage against the unfathomable controlling force leaking through again. "How can you possibly know it's good if all the rest is a blank?"
"I do, that's all. It's like . . . like a light that's shining behind everything else in my mind. We all know it: this has to be done, and we're the ones who have to do it because you can't—because we're ready and you aren't. . . ."
He was looking at her, but at the same time through her, lost in his private vision. She grabbed him, shook him slightly as if to wake him.
"Ready for what? Why are you the ones? Who's doing this to you, Nick? Why?" She hammered out the questions, trying to batter down the wall that stood between herself and the secret. "What has to be done, Nick? What's going to happen, for God's sakes . . . !"
He looked straight at her as he answered serenely.
"Whatever."
His passivity only heightened her terror. He was possessed. Totally.
But merely by the mind of a machine? There had to be someone, something camouflaged by the circuitry. Not Peale alone. A representative he had called himself.