He looked around. The peacefulness at the beginning seemed so out of place here at the end.
Just like the space cylinder breaking up a few weeks ago
, he thought.
It shouldn't have happened
. But it did.
He walked around in the desolation, feeling the empty wind drifting down the fields. He couldn't locate the Malachi where it would have fallen beside the bushes next to the house. It had gone up with all the rest. His shoulder throbbed with pain.
Staring out over the wheat fields, he suddenly recalled the girl who fled. He walked over to where the fence had once reached, and walked beyond to the hill where the dreamling had disappeared. Gaining the top of the hillock, he could see for a great distance. There were no structures of any kind. No farms. No roads. No telephone lines. Just miles of prairie.
The girl was gone. The orange ships were gone. And so was Floyd Matkin, the Secretary of State.
Chapter Six
The Mysterious Mountain
Alan Hovhaness
Ken Collins shook Francis Lanier's left hand, since the right one was nestled in a sling tied just above his shoulder.
Collins gave him his most professional smile.
"I've been waiting to meet you for some time," he said cordially to Lanier as they entered the Oval Office. "We keep hearing about you people, but so many of you prefer to remain unknown to the public that we don't know anything at all about the nature of your work. Except that it gets results."
Lanier smiled. "We do the best we can, or at least try."
Christy followed them inside the office, toting a small briefcase of her own, and a day-bag that held their filter-masks, which they had removed as soon as they arrived at the White House. The smog over Washington was particularly oppressive today, and the filter-masks were quickly becoming a natural part of everyone's wardrobe during the summer months.
Lanier had thought it wise to personally deliver his report to the President, since Matkin's disappearance and subsequent death were of paramount concern to foreign policy decisions. Besides that, with his fractured collarbone, he was laid up for the next two to three weeks.
He could still meditate, and go under any time. But he would carry the pain of the fracture in every world he would enter. The pain would distract him from keeping in harmony with the internal vibrations of that plane, and therefore he had decided to take a short vacation. He would be of no practical use to anyone at all until his collarbone healed. And he wanted to take some time to assess the implications of his recent failures and what they ultimately meant. If anything.
This would give the moving company time to abandon the Malibu ranch for a better, more obscure perch outside of Missoula, Montana.
It seemed that someone had leaked Lanier's name, his profession, and the exact location of his Malibu retreat to the press and the scandal sheets. He became beleagured with pleas from hundreds of desperate individuals who needed his services, services which he simply didn't have the time to provide. Moreover, the Los Angeles pollution index had topped out in recent weeks, and the death rate in southern California had continued to climb because of it. There were more vehicular suicides, more lung cancers, isolated rioting, blackouts and brownouts. And more vanishings.
Los Angeles had rapidly become an unhealthy place in which to live. It didn't take him long to decide that it was time for a change of climate. It took about as long to decide as it took for the doctor to tape up his shoulder, which was about the time it took for the first of the desperate to arrive: Marianne Gleason of Sepulveda drove her propane station wagon onto Lanier's front lawn, barely ahead of a dozen other frantic individuals, demanding that Francis Lanier search for her missing relatives.
Christy had called the doctor's office warning him, and Lanier never returned home. He and Christy met on the way to Washington, D.C., a few days later, in the Denver airport. They left matters in Charlie Gilbert's capable hands regarding the movers and the announcements to the press that claimed Francis Lanier wasn't who they thought he was, and that he was out of town on business anyway. Which was true.
Katie Babcock flowed in from a side door to the office, followed by a cloud of cigarette smoke. She seemed almost military in the three-piece pin-stripe suit she wore. Very sharp and very efficient.
She strode over confidently and reached for Lanier's hand.
"Glad we could meet, Mr. Lanier." When Lanier feinted with his right hand to emphasize its place in the sling, Katie laughed and squeezed his left hand instead.
"Oh, sorry." She pointed. "I heard about your rough landing from Ken. Please have a seat. Does anyone want coffee?" Before anyone could respond, she signaled to the maid who hovered inconspicuously off to one side.
The President stared assuredly into Lanier's calm brown eyes. She noticed immediately the strange sense of centeredness about him, an aura of calmness, as if little in the world disturbed him. It wasn't quite confidence, she decided, it was something else. She found him an unusually attractive man, and perhaps his attractiveness was in some part due to his equilibrium. His self-assuredness, she realized, would be an asset in this world.
This is a very powerful man, she thought. Watch him closely. He probably has one hell of an organized personal life
.
He sat there, making himself comfortable, breathing easy, calmly while Christy sifted through her materials.
Katie wondered if he was married. She didn't recall reading any mention of it in his file. His eyes were gentle, portraying very little of what worked within his mind.
This man has many secrets
, she decided.
Katie Babcock sat at the wide couch next to the window where Christy sat next to her open briefcase. Lanier himself was seated in a chair at the President's left hand, in full glare of the sunlight. The morning sun, through the smog and residual aeroplankton, cast an amber glow about him.
She lifted his file that Ken had placed on the table in front of them.
"You're an interesting man, Mr. Lanier, with an interesting talent." She opened the file as if Floyd Matkin's death were the farthest thing on her mind. "Tell me, Mr. Lanier, I'm curious. Just how many of you are there? Does anyone know?" Meaning,
We haven't tracked all of you people down yet
.
Lanier read her well. "Please, call me Francis, or Fran." His smile won her immediately. He considered her with such a peaceful expression that his eyes radiated from an inner light that Katie knew she had never seen in any individual before.
Fascinating
, she thought to herself.
But he continued, "Well, no one knows just how many Stalkers there really are. We're all, though, from the same generation and the same part of the country. I've heard that there are about eighteen hundred of us, give or take a few."
Ken Collins closed the wide doors and strolled over to a chair beside Christy, who was busy taking notes.
"This Syndrome is absolutely insane," Katie said to them. "It's a wonder that anyone can get along." She crushed out her cigarette and prepared to light up another. Now she began thinking about Floyd Matkin.
Then she asked him, "But listen, does anyone really know just why you can control the disease and the rest of us can't? I've read the reports, but I don't understand it completely."
Very direct
, he thought.
But why not? She's entitled to it
. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair. "Well, I don't know how much you already know, but back in the late eighties, the government found a virus in sheep that was killing off most of the flocks in New Mexico, where I'm from. They developed what they thought was a cure for the disease and sprayed about a million square acres of grazing range. They didn't know if the virus came from something that was indigenous to the plants they ate, or what. but they shot first and asked questions later."
He looked at her evenly to see just how much of this she already knew. "The papers," he continued, "called it an 'outbreak' and wrote the whole business off."
"And what happened after that?"
"It turned out to be a virus that mutated on the chemical the government sprayed. It changed inside the sheep themselves, and when the sheep started surviving the effects of the original virus, the officials thought the crisis was over. My dad's got a whole casebook of clippings."
Katie appeared disappointed. "Is that all that happened?"
"Not quite." Lanier adjusted the sling. "When the virus contacted the chemical, called Lente-89, it apparently thrived and managed to develop the ability to alter a protein bond in the nerve circuits in the spine." Lanier felt funny telling them this. Some of this information the government already knew; and some of it the government didn't want to admit, or recognize.
He continued on. "What the virus did was to lower the level of pure energy that travels to the brain, but only slightly. It caused about two thousand people to become comatose. They were mostly people living on the ranches and the reservations. Their minds emptied, more or less."
"That's terrible," Katie said.
"Well," Lanier said, "it wasn't all that bad. It stopped the sheep from dying; and no human being died because of the changed virus."
"So how did this affect you? Where were you born?"
"In Santa Fe. Dad was a farmer and a mechanic. He got the virus, but Mother didn't. No one knows why. But the army finally said that he must've been out hunting when he contracted it."
Katie smiled at him. "I vaguely remember the incident. I was only a kid then."
"I was born about a year after the spraying, and so were most of the other Stalkers. I suffered some sort of minor genetic damage because of the molecular alteration performed by the original virus my dad carried. Birth defects are often caused by viruses, only mine took thirty years to show itself."
"And that's how you became a Stalker."
"Yes." He glanced around the room. Collins stood impassively, his hands in his pockets.
Until this time, very few people knew much of his personal history. The scandal sheets were digging as deep as possible, but he had burned a lot of bridges long ago. Now, here he was sitting with the President of the United States, having just revealed more about his life than he really intended to. None of the other Stalkers that he knew of—and he only knew about thirty-five of them well—had ever disclosed to the public so much as a fraction of their histories.
Everyone in the world knew that the Stalkers came from the same part of the United States, but no one knew why. Now, he thought,
if these people can only keep their mouths shut
.…
But in this business, secrets last as long as a plucked rose.
"And then," he gestured with his left hand, "when Liu Shan's Syndrome first appeared in Los Angeles, I was one of the first to go under, and come out. The Syndrome virus is probably very much like the virus that fed off the Lente-89 spray."
Katie was nodding as she leafed through his file, listening. And she was thinking,
If we can duplicate this condition, we might get Congress to rescind the genetic research laws
.…
"You went under, then?" she looked up, curious.
"Yes," Lanier said. "It was an emotional thing. I was meditating, and thought that nothing unusual was happening, and just snapped right out of it, willfully, which apparently no one was doing at the time."
"Ken tells me that you're the best. Why is that?"
Lanier suddenly blushed. "Well, I don't know if that's true or not, but I imagine it was because I was meditating for years before this thing struck. I can control my energies better, I guess. I don't know. It's hard to say. The other Stalkers seem to be getting good results as well."
"Well, Fran." She felt very uneasy saying his name. It didn't sound right for this man sitting before her. "I suppose it's caused you a lot of trouble, doing what you do."
He leaned back, careful of his shoulder. "Not yet it hasn't. Well, that's not entirely true. We're moving our operations to Montana, outside of Missoula, on some land I own up there. Someone let word out that I was a Stalker and it had to be someone pretty high up. Anyway, I got swamped with hundreds of people wanting me, and Christy says it got pretty scary for a while there when I didn't return to the ranch."
Christy said nothing, a stern look about her features.
"I can see where a person of your talents would be wanted day and night." She gestured to the small readout that was neatly laid on the corner of the coffee table. She went on.
"We get printouts daily from the Bureau of Statistics on various population profiles, and their rates of vanishings and returns, when they actually do return. Which is rarely. It seems to be getting worse."
Lanier nodded. "That's what I'm told. I don't know the stats myself, but Christy's research keeps me up to date with some of the profiles, at least among the politicians and the military personnel. They seem to require the services of any Stalker the most these days."
"A neurotic bunch," Collins interrupted cheerfully. "There's no telling what they'd do in the real world anyway."
"Don't mind him." She smiled up at Ken. "He doesn't like politics." They laughed.
Katie turned back to Lanier, who was lifting the teacup gingerly with his left hand, "So," she breathed a long sigh. "What can you tell us about Floyd's case that isn't in your report? I get the feeling that you left a few things out."
"The basic details are there," he told her. "There here were a few things I couldn't put my finger on, though."
"Go on." She was now very concerned.
He began. "What struck me most about Matkin's case was the contrast between the beginning of the scenario and its end. Did Floyd ever strike you as being unusually neurotic or unhappy? I have to be honest with you in telling you that I don't know much of what's going on, politically, in the country today. I just haven't had the leisure to keep up with things. Particularly private lives. But it seems to me that you would've chosen him for his abilities and strengths. Given the way things are in the world today, I don't think you'd have chosen a person prone to crack easily."