by Robert Maxxe
Patrick listened with rapt concentration, his legs set so rigidly on the floor that the rocking chair never wavered.
At last her narrative reached the point where she had sat shaking in the car, overwhelmed by the fear of some monstrous mind invasion she had felt since last night's confrontation with Nick.
"I had nowhere to go for help but to you. Patrick, tell me honestly: do you think I'm . . . cracking up?"
At last he allowed the chair to rock slowly back and forth. "Oh shit, Carrie, how the hell should I know? I'm a complete idiot when it comes to computers, and I don't think anyone can set themselves up to judge what is, or isn't, normal behavior. Everybody's a little loony in one way or another. All I am sure about is that you're miserable at the moment, and I want to see you happy again. Whatever it takes to help you get through this, count on me to be right there with you."
The relief was so great she was almost gleeful. "Oh God, Patrick, that was all I needed—just to know that I'm not alone."
But then abruptly she nose-dived into bitterness. Why couldn't Lon give her such instant, unselfish support? She sighed, a blue sound.
"Okay, what next?" Patrick said quickly, to perk her up. "What's our plan to conquer the evil games?"
His tone was exaggerated, hokey, but she took no offense. It was only his way of playing down the things that terrified her, injecting the harmless excitement of children launching an escapade.
"I've got to get my hands on one of those machines, have one all to myself for a night."
"You wicked girl. Going to get yourself locked in the arcade again?"
She shook her head. "If I tamper with those machines, they'd know."
"They—you mean, the spacies?"
"The machines. They're programmed with certain security gadgets, made to protect themselves. I'll have to get one that isn't wired up to a circuit—from the factory."
"Cat-burglar stuff," Patrick said melodramatically. "The Great Spacescape Caper."
She gave him a sidelong glance. Did he understand? Or was he just humoring her? "Patrick, when I told you about breaking into Peale's place . . . did I mention that he had a gun?"
He smiled, a nervous flicker. "You mentioned it."
"So this won't be just fun and—"
"Games," he put in drily. "I know. But why harp on the gloomy-doomy stuff?"
She got down to details. They had to act soon, but the risk would be greatly reduced by waiting a few days. Peale's factory was situated near a couple of businesses that kept long hours—the ceramics plant, for example, where kilns had to be tended around the clock. Over the long Thanksgiving weekend, the neighborhood would be more deserted than usual; in any case, every place would probably be closed Thanksgiving night. Then a vehicle large enough to transport the machine could be driven into the area without attracting unwanted attention.
"What about Peale?" Patrick asked. "The way he turned up last time, Johnny-on-the-spot, it sounds like he stays close to the shop."
Carrie wondered: could Peale have a family, people with whom he'd sit down to a turkey dinner, laugh and tell stories, let down his guard? It seemed impossible.
"We'd better be ready for anything," she said. "But either way, there won't be a better time than Thursday night."
She described the rest of her plan. She'd need a place to hide the machine, for a few days, if possible. No telling how long it would take to break it down and analyze it. Her own house or the store couldn't be used. As soon as Peale found a game missing, he'd come after her.
"You could bring it here," Patrick offered. "Mrs. D. goes away for the holiday to her sister's in Connecticut. She always invites me with her, but I went once and it was the most god-awful meal I've ever had. Stuffing made with cocktail peanuts and pretzels, for chrissakes. But she'll be there through Monday, maybe longer. There'll be nobody around to see us put the thing in my room, or hear us hammering it to bits."
"Patrick, it's stolen property. Keeping it here could involve you more than I—"
"Please. Let me. It's the least I can do." He put his hand on hers. "You saved my life, you know."
"Oh Patrick, don't be—"
"No, really. That day I asked you for a job? It was . . . a little like rolling the dice." His eyes drifted over to the picture of the man in the silver frame. "I was going to kill myself after that ended. My whole life up to then I'd just been, you know, kept . . . and when it was over, there didn't seem anything else I could do. I think I was on my way to the drugstore, in fact, to buy something . . . anything that would do it painlessly. Then I walked past Treats, and I saw you in there behind the counter, and you were . . . so pretty, and the store looked so nice. . . ." He looked down at the floor, but she could feel the intensity of his emotion in the tightening grip on her hand. "I know this sounds silly . . . but I thought . . . if you gave me a job it would mean I was meant to live. And if you didn't . . ." He glanced up at her. "So let me pay you back, luv. Let me give whatever you need."
She nodded, and she hugged him.
So it was settled. They were a team of burglars.
He offered her tea then, and she accepted because there were hours before she had to pick up Emily and she was still afraid of being alone. After fetching water from a bathroom across the hall, and putting the kettle on a hot plate, he said:
"You realize there's no sense taking one of those games unless Lon's willing to look at how it works . . . ?"
Her spirit deflated again. "Sure I do, damn it. But he'll never agree up front, so I decided to take him by surprise. Pull the game apart, then walk him right into the middle of all the pieces and let professional curiosity take over."
Patrick watched the kettle a minute. "I think you'd feel better about it if you didn't back him into a corner. You don't want it to look like you're playing me off against him, either—rubbing it in that you weren't able to lean on him."
"But I've tried." It was almost a whimper.
"Try once more, Carrie. Tell him the same way you told me. Let him see you're at the end of your rope. If he loves you, he won't refuse help. I couldn't."
She didn't say what she would do with the advice, and Patrick dropped the subject. They drank tea, and the conversation sailed off in different directions. Patrick talked about his past, Carrie about the future, how her life might change if she married again—forgetting, for the moment, all the obstacles.
By the time she had to leave, she felt confident, independent, able to cope. Her old self. She felt very close to Patrick, too, like a sister.
"I see why they flock to Saint Prosciutto's," she said, and kissed him good-bye.
The irony wasn't lost on her. Though the game had alienated her from Nick and Lon, it had also provided the link to move her and Patrick from mere camaraderie to intimate affection.
Nothing was all bad.
That night Lon called to chat. He'd spent the day at the factory, he said, and expected to be tied up tomorrow, Sunday, as well. Demand for his company's small computers was going through the roof, and he'd been ordered from the top to oversee a lightning expansion of the assembly lines. Then he inquired about her day.
She still couldn't tell him. She said she'd spent a quiet afternoon at home and when Lon asked if Nick and Dana had been together, she mentioned seeing them at the funeral.
But didn't say they'd been there with the zal.
The pauses in the conversation got longer.
"Are you okay?" Lon asked then.
"Sure."
If only he would dig a little, she thought, press her to reveal the source of the strain. But probably he knew, and was avoiding the topic no less than she was.
He suggested that they might take in a movie tomorrow night, but she hedged, explaining she might have to stay home and do some baking for the store. That was too bad, he replied, since he was going up to the city early Monday to meet one of the company bigwigs who was coming in from California, and it might be necessary to stay over through Tuesday.
; "I won't be able to see you until Wednesday," he concluded.
Would she be ready to trust him then? "We'll be together all day Thursday," she said.
There was another strained silence before he said, "I love you," and hung up without waiting for her answer, as if anticipating she would have none.
30
As the week started she tried to stick to her usual schedule, tend to the store. But her mind wasn't on business. She called suppliers to replenish stock and ordered the wrong amounts; she wrote down telephone orders, and as soon as the deliveries were made complaints came back that items had been omitted, unwanted substitutions made. When she touched up a couple of the cold salads that a local cook regularly delivered on Monday morning, she oversalted one, put too much paprika in another, and ended up throwing both away.
She could think of nothing but the arcade. On Sunday she had tried to ignore Nick's independent comings and goings by taking Em to a matinee of the Ice Capades at the Nassau Coliseum and then staying out with her for supper. But the price of one day's pretense of indifference was a heightened anxiety in the aftermath. What had Nick done on Sunday? How much closer to their unknown goal had the ult moved his zal?
Patrick saw that Carrie was preoccupied and offered to take over everything at the store, but she couldn't let him. With the holiday approaching, the store was constantly humming.
At a few minutes past three in the afternoon, however, Carrie put on her coat and walked down the street to Osgood's. Standing just inside the front window where the magazine racks were located and pretending to flip through a copy of People, she watched the entrance to the arcade.
A number of young kids showed up after school, but not Nick nor anyone from his zal. The traffic seemed light. After ten minutes Carrie went across the street.
No groups of five were clustered at the machines. One here, two or three there. She made a tour and saw nothing on the screens but spaceships being steered through craters and spired cities.
She went back to the shop, but during the afternoon she made a few more forays to the arcade. Nick was never there. It struck her suddenly that the spacies might have fled town, commanded by their inner voices to continue their "flights" elsewhere, beyond interference.
But when she raced home, he was there.
At supper Nick announced across the table that he was going out later. Nighttime, Carrie realized then, must be reserved for their special flights. She put up no resistance, though. Emily was also at the table, and Carrie worried that bringing the struggle with Nick into the open would upset the younger child too much—or, worse, stimulate her curiosity about the game. Nick was not unaware of this concern, Carrie guessed. In the way he had declared his intentions, Carrie detected a subtle element of holding Em hostage against a denial.
Carrie was sitting alone at the kitchen table when Nick came to say he was leaving. The dishes were clean, everything put away. She had simply been waiting, half wondering whether she would make any attempt to stop him.
She said nothing. Couldn't even look at him. She felt oddly like a prisoner in a cell being given orders by her jailer.
She listened to the front door slam, his footsteps going down the path. Then she rose and went to the window.
Tonight they weren't waiting for him farther along the street. They were gathered in front of the house. When Nick joined them, there were none of the sounds that usually came from a bunch of kids meeting for a night out, no boisterous greetings or teasing jokes. They walked away silently, like a squad of soldiers on patrol in hostile territory.
Carrie went to the kitchen phone. Earlier she had checked with Kim Larrimore to engage her for an hour or two of baby-sitting, though the time had been left open.
"I'm ready," Carrie said when she had the girl on the phone. "Hurry over."
Driving along back roads, she was able to get there before the spacies had walked the distance, She parked in a side alley next to Osgood's. In a couple of minutes, they started to arrive. Carrie counted as the clusters of children went through the door in multiples of five.
After her count reached forty-five, the children stopped coming. No stragglers, no extra kids with an appetite to play a game or two. The arcade didn't want them—not when the spacies were there.
Carrie got out of the car and headed across the street. It was a clear night, surprisingly mild for late November, but as she passed into the path of light thrown off by the two arcade signs, she was suddenly very cold. The air, tinted by the blue neon, was like ice, and the deeper she went into the aura of the signs, the more Carrie felt encapsulated within its cold solidity, like some prehistoric animal trapped in a glacier. She fought against the resisting air, clenched her fists and kept going, step by step, until she reached the door. Then she felt the restraining atmosphere fall away.
She took a breath, refreshing herself from her effort, then pulled the door open slowly and slipped inside.
With her first glimpse, she could see that the environment was different, unlike anything she had observed before. From every screen came rainbows of rhythmically pulsing light, shooting delicately shaded beams onto the ceiling and all the surrounding walls. But the rays of color didn't merely project from the video screens to the solid surfaces, they left lines like laser traces in the darkness. Never in the past had Carrie seen any two screens showing the same display; but now all nine games were in absolute synchrony, putting out exactly the same light show. Every spectral line of color emanating from any one game intersected with matching lines from all the others, converging in the air to form phantom webs of the most astonishing beauty, constantly changing geometric grids etched in a diaphanous luminosity.
Wonderful effects could be achieved with light, she knew that. But this was more than mere clever technology, far more than the clever gaudy sensations of a drop-dead disco. Gazing at the spectacular faceted glow, Carrie felt she was at the core of a huge jewel being held up to the sun, at that precise point where the elementary energy of the universe was focused down to a pinpoint and then cleaved into a radiant spectrum.
For a long moment she was overwhelmed by it, hypnotized. Then she became aware of the sound, a faint whistling at a frequency so highly pitched as to be at the very edge of audibility, a sound like wind rushing past at tremendous velocity. And then the voices—the spacies, murmuring occasional words between silences:
". . . lots of P-dust redging up ahead . . ."
". . . could be an ionic storm . . ."
". . . trim locators . . ."
". . . stream with it . . ."
She couldn't repress a smile: it sounded like a parody of every broadcast she'd ever heard of astronauts-to-mission control during a space shot.
Then one voice rose slightly louder, more urgent: "Nick, are we in the ring yet?"
"Just passing the peritor."
Him. From one of the games on the left, toward the rear.
Then it struck Carrie that the question he'd answered had come from someone at the opposite bank of machines. The voices were coming from all corners, but speaking to a communal purpose! They were all functioning together—the spacies, the games—as though the arcade itself had become the control deck of some vessel hurtling to the outer reaches of the universe, a fantastic intergalactic ark.
". . . go to sub-vac as soon as we're over the axis . . ."
Still standing just inside the threshold, Carrie hadn't yet been able to determine exactly what was being shown on the screens in front of the spacies. From her vantage point all she could see was the glowing skein of light projected into the air.
She took a step forward, magnetized toward the web of colored beams—
And they vanished, just as if she had blundered into a spider's flimsy work and torn it apart. The arcade became in an instant the same place of neutral shadows she recalled from her first visit. The whistling noise stopped, the video screens went dark.
Simultaneously every one of the children swiveled around to face front and stare
directly at her. Carrie stopped in her tracks.
Nick emerged from the mass of shadowy figures. In a tone of gentle sympathy, as though she were the child being told she couldn't stay up past her bedtime to participate in some grown-up treat, he said, "You can't stay, Mom. Nothing will happen if you stay. You've got to leave."
There was a pause. She tried to will some protest into her throat, an assertion of authority, a proclamation of the natural order of things. . . .
"Please," Nick said, firm but patient—the patience of the infinite. "Go home. Let us continue."
The arcade was dead silent.
The spacies kept staring at her, waiting.
The games waited, too.
And something else she could only sense. Something indefinable, unseeable and untouchable.
Something in the air.
Against it, she was powerless.
She backed away slowly, felt the door behind her, and pushed through it, her eyes locked with Nick's until the door swung shut again, closing off the inside.
On Tuesday Lon called from the city to confirm that he would be staying over. He was very happy about the way his meetings were going. Plans were afoot to construct more factory buildings at Meadowdale to manufacture the next generation of Intellitronics computers. Lon's responsibility was being expanded, and he was being given a large raise. There was talk around the California headquarters that he was being groomed to take over the company someday.
"What gives it all a special kick is having someone to share it with," he said to Carrie. "I've never really had that before. Of course, I'd never move back to California again—not if you didn't want to. . . ."
There was a pause. Earlier today, when Carrie had reported last night's stand-off with Nick to Patrick, he had urged her again to take Lon into her confidence. But his eagerness to share the good things squelched her hunger to bring him into her nightmare.
She murmured passive assent while he made his suggestions for Thanksgiving Day: the meal would be at his house, Carrie could do some of the preparations at her home the night before, then come over about midmorning with Nick and Em and use his kitchen to put on the finishing touches.