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THE MIND GAME |
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Chapter Seventeen After having dropped out of an airplane in a drugged stupor directly into a guided tour by the director of the Institute himself, Weller was abruptly left dangling in limbo for a night and day and a night again. Perhaps it was some kind of Transformational lesson or perhaps a bureaucratic screw-up or perhaps just sheer indifference. His room here was a far cry from his crummy hole at the Los Angeles Transformation Center. Pine paneling, thick green carpeting, a comfortable bed, even a color television set which not only brought in all the New York stations, but gave call-up access to a library of Transformationalist tapes. The closet and chest had even been filled with new clothing, and what was more, the stuff fitted him. If he were a prisoner, this was the Alcatraz Hilton. That night Weller ate Beef Wellington and Peach Melba in the Institute Central commissary, laid out much like the grim dining room at the center, but with white tablecloths, softer lighting, a gourmet menu, and a small choice of wines. This was definitely a more clannish crowd, the favored few at the Institute. Nobody tried to force themselves on Weller here. Far from it. There were tables of middle-aged people in white smocks, a blue-jean crowd, hard-noses who might be Monitors or security guards, and they didn't even seem to mix much with each other. Eating in isolation, Weller had the feeling that he was totally cut off from the internal lines of communication of the Institute and would be until some word came down from the Man. People weren't going to talk to strangers here unless they were officially introduced. And when he went back to his room, he realized that he was totally cut off from the world outside as well. There was no phone in the room. He hadn't noticed that before. In fact, when he thought about it, he realized that he hadn't seen a phone anywhere in Institute Central. Well, that figured. With barbed-wire fences, guard dogs, body searches, and security guards, the Institute could hardly be expected to have pay phones to the rest of the world for its inmates. The Alcatraz Hilton was exactly what it was. Enough was enough for one day, and he fell asleep almost before he hit the pillow. He would face tomorrow when it came. But the next morning, after a late breakfast in the nearly empty commissary, what he found he had to face was nothing and lots of it. There was something called the "Directive Desk" in what had been the lobby of the hotel and behind it was an earnest young girl in white, with bright young eyes and a slightly ravaged complexion. "Is this where someone might leave a message for me?" Weller asked her. "A message?" "Yeah. I just got here and I don't have the faintest idea of where I'm supposed to go or what I'm supposed to do or if I'm to report to someone. No one bothered to tell me." "Well, let's see if we have any updated directives for you, Mr....?" "Weller, Jack Weller." She checked a gridwork of cubbyholes with nameplates above them. "If there is one, it's here," she said. She came back with a single sheet of paper that she had taken from one of the cubbies. "Here it is, Mr. Weller!" she said brightly. She read from the paper. "Operant directive, Jack Weller, until further updating. Await next directive, provisional Q-level privileges. There you are!" "Where is that?" Weller said. "What does it mean?" "Oh, it's quite simple. You're free to do whatever you want until you get a new directive, which will probably come through here. Within Q-level restrictions, of course." "Q-level restrictions?" "Full commissary privileges," the girl recited. "No phone privileges. No admission to restricted areas without a specific directive to the contrary. No unauthorized communication with permanent personnel." She smiled at Weller. "It's like being on vacation," she said. "We have a pool and a tennis court and lots of woods to walk in. Relax and enjoy yourself." "Swell," Weller grumbled. Don't call us, we'll call you. I didn't exactly come here to go swimming and walk in the woods, he thought. Well, maybe it might be worthwhile to take a look around. Without a golf cart the Institute suddenly became a much bigger place, a small town spread out thin over many acres of woodland. Weller found that on foot it was very difficult to gather an overall image of its totality. Wandering up the main path that Bernstein had driven him down the day before, the buildings and facilities no longer seemed so crowded together, there was no sense of a "Main Street" or even a university quad. The hilly landscape had been left more or less intact, and the woods that covered it had only been sheared away where a building or a path needed the empty space. Everything was half concealed by the hills and hollows of the landscape and heavily shrouded by thick copses of trees. And for the population that this place must have, there were precious few people to be seen wandering the grounds. Most of the buildings that Weller passed had signs out front that said, "Admittance Under Directive Only." He got the feeling that that applied to just about every individual part of the whole. Computer people couldn't get into chemical laboratories. The biofeedback labs would be closed to biochemists. There was probably a whole volunteer army of Transformationalist slavies doing the necessary dirty work who couldn't get into anything but the facilities set aside specifically for them. "Q-level restrictions" seemed to mean that he was limited to Institute Central, the old resort facilities, and the open paths and woodlands. Look, but don't try to touch. Hardly in the mood for swimming or tennis, Weller decided that the most useful way to kill time would be to walk through as much of the Institute as he could. He might run into Annie. And if nothing else, it would tire him out, which might be an aid to turning his mind off, not a bad thing when all you can do at the moment is grind your mental gears. So he wandered off the main path into the woods, trying to keep more or less in a straight line so that he could eventually come to an edge of the property, the first logical step of any foot survey. He followed a path going in his direction past a lab and some bungalows, then reentered the woods when it veered away to the right. It took him about ten minutes of walking on the shaded brown earth of the woods to reach the fence. It instantly flashed him an image of a prison camp. The woods abruptly ended in a defoliated zone ten yards wide. A rectilinear spider web of thin wires formed a ten foot high fence between where Weller stood at the edge of the woods and the clear zone. A similar fence ran along the other side of the zone where the woods began again. This triple barrier of electrified fence and cleared zone seemed to go all around the property line. Weller walked alongside it, up and down hills, around bends, until by the changing position of the sun, he could tell he had circled the whole grounds. Twice he saw uniformed and conspicuously armed guards zipping along inside the fenced zone in golf carts. He instinctively melted back into the woods at their approach. Once he saw a pack of Dobermans patrolling in the fenced-off zone, sniffing and reconnoitering as if it were their territory. They dashed snarling and yowling up to the fence as they got a whiff of him, and Weller ran off deep into the woods until the pack sounds died away. Carson wasn't kidding about the security. Although the Institute was all woods and tennis courts, it was sealed off like a military outpost. The bucolic setting only cleverly masked the fact from inquiring outside eyes. Weller went back to Institute Central for lunch after completing an entire circuit of the barrier without finding a break. Even the airstrip was inside of it. After lunch he followed paths at random to see how much of the network he could cover on foot, since, presumably these paths went everywhere. He came upon several areas within the Institute grounds that were sealed off from the rest of the place by their own fenced perimeter, though here the barrier was a simple, high barbed-wire fence, and no prowling dogs were in evidence. These sealed compounds included a colony of small bungalows surrounding a low white building in a shaded hollow, a motor pool and security area, and a low house of gray stone capped with a huge, shimmering geodesic dome. Each of these compounds had a single gate and the guards looked like standard-model Monitors without visible armament. Within the Institute grounds, apparently, it was assumed that fences would be respected. Weller spent a long afternoon wandering about in this methodical fashion, but what struck him was how little he was actually able to see: the outsides of buildings, the fences around other buildings, occasional people in golf carts humming by like lords of the manor, and one or two peculiar looks as they passed. It was eerie. A velvet-lined prison camp through which he was allowed to wander at will as long as he didn't try to get into anything. He was totally cut off from contact with the outside world and any realistic hope of physical escape, and at least at the moment he was cut off from any real contact with what was going on within the world of the Institute too. They could keep him in this state forever if they wanted to -- cut off from the outside world, unable to find Annie, unable to see Steinhardt, eating three fine meals a day, and haunting the Institute grounds like a ghost. After a heavy solitary dinner of tournedos of beef and a full bottle of Burgundy, Weller took an after-dinner walk, feeling more like a ghost than ever in the clear dark night full of towering trees and intermittent bright starlight. Maybe this is Transformationalism's final solution to the Jack Weller problem, he thought. Maybe all I've succeeded into doing is talking my way into John Steinhardt's version of jail. That thought was just a little too scary out there in the lonely darkness, and it drove him indoors, into the light, into his room, where he further removed himself from any more paranoid contemplation of his real situation by gorking himself out in front of the tube until he felt tired enough to fall into what he earnestly hoped would be dreamless sleep. *** Weller was abruptly jolted into wakefulness by an insistent pounding at the door to his room. Blinking sleep from his eyes, he staggered out of bed and pulled on a pair of shorts, noticing blearily that the sun was just rising over the tree line outside his window, filling the world with a grim, gray early morning light. Furry-mouthed and evil-tempered, he opened the door and grunted, "Yeah?" A burly man in a black T-shirt and jeans stood there looking horribly awake and impatient. What the hell did he want at this ungodly hour? "John has invited you to have breakfast with him at his house," the man said with infuriating politeness. "Within the half hour," he added more authoritatively. "Get shaved and dressed. I'll wait for you out here." "Urrr ...," Weller grunted and closed the door. Christ, he thought, dragging himself into the bathroom, and I'm half asleep. No doubt the son of a bitch planned it that way! He took a quick shower, shaved, brushed his teeth, combed his hair, pissed, and put on white ducks and a blue short-sleeved shirt. By the time he had finished, his mind was more or less awake, though he found himself wishing for a belt of that magic brain stimulant Carson had given him. He felt alert enough to face an ordinary day's work with equanimity, but confronting John B. Steinhardt over breakfast seemed to call for an eptified state of mind of which he still didn't feel capable. The Monitor was still waiting in the hall. He took Weller to a waiting golf cart and drove over to the fenced-off compound that enclosed the gray stone house capped with the geodesic dome. The morning chill and the heatless rising sun began to shock Weller's brain into fuller wakefulness as a guard passed them through the gate and the golf cart pulled up beside the building's entrance. The Monitor led Weller into the house through a quite ordinary doorway and into a large vestibule faced with living rock. Beyond he could see a short hall that opened into a living room with an enormous Henry-Moore-looking sculpture as a centerpiece. On the wall of the vestibule, hanging slightly off-center, was a single, small Cubist oil painting; the signature was that of Pablo Picasso. A spiral staircase, all hand-rubbed brass, led upward into a blaze of sunlight. "John's waiting for you up there," the Monitor said, pointing to the spiral staircase. "I stay here." Nervously Weller ascended the staircase into a confusion of plants, sunlight, and chaos. From the inside the dome was entirely transparent; the sun was a great ball of pale orange fire illuminating the eastern half of the world, and the woods and buildings of the Institute encircled the chamber like a great living landscape painting. A forest canopy of potted plants hung across the top of the dome, casting long, confusing dappled shadows. More plants -- small palms, bonsai and palmettos --were scattered around the circular room, seemingly at random. And there were all sorts of clutter crowding the big room as if it were the playpen of some enormously wealthy adult child. A big reflector telescope set high on a steel platform equipped with its own ladder. A huge video recording and playback console. Free-standing bookcases seemingly set up at random. An antique globe of the world four feet in diameter. Dozens of clocks, ranging from antique grandfathers to a Spilhaus Space Clock. A rosewood bar. A tremendous globular tropical fish tank. Untidy heaps of nameless electronic equipment. A Van de Graaff generator. Cases, tables, and shelves overflowing with maps, small statues, chess sets, models of airplanes, ships, and spacecraft. A pinball machine. As many as twenty lamps, no two in a matching style. The furniture was equally weird. A huge macrame hammock on a steel frame in the middle of the room. A large oak desk with an immense old carved chair behind it. A watercouch covered in black velvet. Camel saddles. Nests of large paisley floor pillows. Leather director's chairs scattered all over the place. And in the eastern quadrant of the room a big, round butcherblock table with a director's chair in front of it, and a complicated-looking black leather recliner behind it. Leaning back in the recliner, wearing only a pair of white Bermuda shorts with rolls of fat hanging out over the waistband, was John B. Steinhardt. His thinning gray hair was longer than in his official pictures, his moustache was slightly bushier, his naked chest was grizzled with thick gray hair, his complexion was pink shading into red, his watery blue eyes were somewhat bloodshot, though far more lively than any photograph could portray, and he had a long cigar stuck in the corner of his wide, heavy-lipped mouth. Somehow it was not exactly Weller's fantasy image of the Great Guru in his throne room. "Ah, so we meet at last!" Steinhardt called in a gravelly barroom voice, as he brought his recliner to an upright position. "Sit yer ass down!" Shakily Weller planted himself in the director's chair opposite Steinhardt. There was a big pot of coffee on the table between them, two place settings with cups, a bottle of green fluid, and a half-empty fifth of Jack Daniels. Up close, Weller saw that Steinhardt's face was deeply lined and blotched here and there with spider webs of red capillaries. "Have a little pick-me-up," Steinhardt said, pouring two inches of the green fluid into each of two glasses. "You look like shit." He paused, hesitated, then poured an inch of bourbon into his own glass. "Shot of booze in your eptifier?" he asked genially. "Kills the taste. No matter how much tinkering they do with the formula, it still tastes like piss." "A little early for me," Weller said, picking up his glass. "Low level, Jack, low level," Steinhardt said. "If you take enough eptifier, you can drink like a fish from sunrise to sunset and still feel like Adonis. Why do you think I had my boys invent the stuff?" With that, he downed the contents of his glass in two quick gulps. Weller choked down his eptifier glumly. So far, the Great Man seemed like an old rummy. "Breakfast!" Steinhardt suddenly bellowed. "We're ready for breakfast!" A moment later a young blond girl wearing skintight white short-shorts and a tiny halter that barely contained her trim high-pointed breasts came up the spiral staircase bearing a silver tray with cream, sugar, and two covered dishes. She put the tray down on the table, served them coffee, and uncovered the dishes, revealing what appeared to be eggs Benedict. "My own recipe," Steinhardt said. "Westphalian ham, and bearnaise instead of hollandaise, with bialys instead of muffins. Eclecticism, my motto." He smiled a rubber smile, and put his arm around the girl's waist. Abruptly he pulled off her halter, revealing perfect pink-lipped breasts. "Now ain't that a pair of knockers?" he said, as the girl stood there with a sincere smile plastered across her face. Weller's mouth fell open. Steinhardt laughed uproariously. "Okay, Sally, you can go now," he said, slapping her on the behind. When she had gone, Steinhardt stared across the table at the shaken Weller, eyes twinkling with inner amusement. ''I'm a disgusting old fart, right?" he said. "You're appalled. You expected the Maharishi and you got King Farouk. You can't figure me out. You sure you don't want some booze?" He poured a dollop of Jack Daniels into his coffee and took a sip. Suddenly his face became deadly serious, his eyes like sapphire lasers. "Of course, it's all a con," he said slyly. "Just wanted to see how you'd react. Who knows, within the next thirty seconds, I may whip out a bowie knife and cut your prick off for balling my wife." Again Steinhardt broke himself up into rumbling laughter. Weller sat there transfixed, not knowing how to react. Everything about Steinhardt seemed so totally unexpected, so totally unpredictable. For want of anything else to do, he took a bite of his eggs Steinhardt. They were delicious. Steinhardt took another sip of his spiked coffee. "Now then, m'boy," he said in a W. C. Fields voice, "about this off-the-wall idea of yours about me making commercials.... " Shakily Weller eyed the bottle of eptifier. If the stuff really worked -- and it did seem to -- he could use all the eptifying he could get. "May I?" he said, picking up the bottle. "By all means," Steinhardt said. "The crazed magnificence of my total being must be scaring the shit out of you." Weller poured himself another shot of the green fluid. Immediately Steinhardt topped it off with a slug of bourbon. As Weller started to protest, he held up his palm. "My wish is your command," he said. "I kid you not." Resignedly Weller gulped down the whole mess. The whiskey sent fire to his stomach and heat to his brain. For a moment his eyes watered. When they cleared, he felt a surge of psychic energy; his synapses seemed faster, his mind was racing, and Steinhardt didn't seem quite so intimidating. "Look, I don't have to tell you what hot shit you are, obviously," he said. "But maybe I do have to tell you that the commercials we're turning out now stink." Steinhardt nodded. "Recruiting creative people and keeping them creative while keeping them recruited is one of our central, unresolved paradoxes," he said. "So far, old Heisenberg has been laughing up his sleeve at us." Not knowing what to make of that, Weller pressed doggedly on. "I'm the only real pro you've got," he said. "And you'd be the kind of video personality who could sell Communism to Barry Goldwater -- under my direction." "No doubt, no doubt," Steinhardt said around a mouthful of food. He paused, gulped down a slug of coffee. "But if you think I'm going to waste my time making used Transformationalism commercials, you have the consciousness of an earthworm." Poleaxed, Weller could only mutter. "Why?" "Why!" Steinhardt roared. "Did Jesus Christ make TV commercials? Did Buddha? Did Greta Garbo? What happens to my shadowy, enigmatic mystique if I start peddling Transformationalism myself like so much snake oil? Down the willy-hole it goes, and you can't run a movement like this without an authentic enigmatic mystique. To make commercials I'd have to assume an image, a frozen instantaneous persona. Aside from what it would do to this glorious movement, it would bore the piss out of me. So forget that cockamamie idea, Jack. It's shit for the birds." "Then ... why did you bring me here at all?" Weller stammered, his mind reeling. Steinhardt was proving impossible to figure out, too confusing to even think straight around, as if his brain projected an enormously powerful magnetic field which screwed up any mental compass within its sphere of influence. Steinhardt leaned back, poured himself half a glass of straight whiskey, and sat there toying with it, staring up at the canopy of hanging plants. "I once read a science-fiction story," he said. "Or maybe I wrote it, I cranked out so much crud in the old days it's hard to remember which. Anyway, there was this all-powerful ruler of an alien planet who wanted to perpetuate his rule 'beyond the grave,' as we used to say in the old pulp days. So be built himself a giant computer, and he programmed his own personality into it. Then he programmed the thing to pick succeeding programmers according to how closely they matched his own personality, and he programmed it to breed the whole race into an ever-closer mass approximation of this ideal personality, namely his own. A thousand years later they were him." Steinhardt lowered his gaze to stare at Weller, and suddenly there seemed to be something crazed and monstrously monomaniacal leering at him across the breakfast table. "How do you like that little wet dream?" Steinhardt said. "The entire human race graven in the image of yours truly!" Weller reacted from the gut. "It makes me want to puke," he said. Steinhardt broke up into rumbling laughter. He reached across the table and thumped Weller on the shoulder. "Ah, I think my instincts were right about you." he said. "My own fantastic processing techniques have put a head on your shoulders." "Huh?" "Huh?" Steinhardt mimicked. "You're right, of course. It's a stupid, disgusting, regressive idea, the exact opposite of what I'm determined to leave behind when I shuffle off to Buffalo." "I think you left me around the last bend," Weller muttered. "Don't worry," Steinhardt said, "you'll get used to it." He steepled his hands and seemed to become more serious. "The story I've just told you is the history of all previous religions, social movements, and attempts to create higher levels of human consciousness," he said. "A hotshot like me comes along, shatters generations of fixed consciousness, reignites ongoing change, and sets up a movement to perpetuate the situation. If he doesn't end up swallowing his own hype -- a long assumption in this racket, let me tell you -- it works as advertised as long as he's alive to keep throwing off changes. But once a Buddha, Jesus, or Steinhardt croaks, he becomes a graven image at the service of the surviving organization." Steinhardt paused, took a sip of whiskey, shook his head sadly. "You see, we shaved apes are entropy junkies. People get tired of free consciousness, they get a sick craving for a new, stable mind freeze. And what do they do? When the psychic liberator is no longer around to kick them in the ass, the organization he's left behind turns him into a new object of worship, iconized and Madison-avenuized for all time. In his name they turn his historical image into an instrument of the very kind of brain-freeze he's busted his balls to destroy. The legacy of Jesus is Billy Graham. In the name of revolutionaries like Marx and Lenin we have a bureaucratic state. The party of Lincoln ends up as the party of old Tricky Dick. You're dead right, m'boy. It is to puke!" Weller sat there transfixed while this monologue went on. This weird old drunk was apparently also an authentic visionary thinker. It didn't add up to a coherent whole. Weller couldn't reconcile these two Steinhardt personas no matter how much he tried. And he had no idea of what the man was getting at. "But what does all this have to do with why I'm here?" Steinhardt leaned forward and stared at Weller with cold, penetrating energy. "When I'm dead, I don't want my assorted disciples and ten-percenters to own my image," he said, "I don't want them turning the memory of John B. Steinhardt into a billboard behind which the usual religion-money-power-mind-control shell game does business as usual. I want my memory to keep generating changes despite the legacy of Transformationalism, to be a continued source of creative chaos. And that's why you're here, Jack, that's why I need a director." Suddenly Steinhardt went through another change, took a sip of coffee, and went back to eating his eggs. "And that's also why I don't want to make commercials," he said. ''They'll have me making too many commercials when I'm dead as it is. What I want to make while I'm still around sniffing the flowers is a kind of anti-commercial. A video-taped last testament to be released far and wide when I croak. A half hour? An hour? Six hours? I dunno. We'll have to figure that out." He waved his fork in the general direction of Weller's face. "But I'll tell you what I want it to be like," he said. "I want it to be full of internal self-contradictions. I want to contradict all the bullshit Transformationalism is inevitably going to say about me for the next thousand years, and then I want to contradict my own contradictions. I want to reveal myself as a drunken teenybopper-fucking pathological liar as well as a saintly liberator of human consciousness. I want to tell dirty jokes and frame timeless epigrams. I want to live on on tape completely independent of Transformationalism, and I want a testament that will make it absolutely impossible for anyone to ever write the bottom line on John B. Steinhardt." "I'm not sure I understand," Weller said uncertainly. "Old Mao Tze Tung almost got the idea with his notion of permanent revolution," Steinhardt said. "But he got too caught up in his own ego trip and ended up with a society forever consulting his little Red Book of epigrams. It's fun to be a god when you're alive, but when I'm dead, I want to revert to the public domain, as it were." Perhaps It was the double dose of eptifier, or perhaps the sheer force of Steinhardt's personality, but Weller felt his mind opening up to encompass this weird concept. A tape of Steinhardt supporting and debunking Transformationalism at the same time would indeed counterbalance the power of Transformationalism in the only way possible, with a dialectic between the ghost of Steinhardt and the inheritors of the movement he had founded. The Steinhardt testament would by definition always have to be the last word on the subject, but if it were properly made, no one would be able to be sure what it said. Even in death Steinhardt would remain the center of the movement, and the center would be void. The idea had style. "Well, what do you think?" Steinhardt asked. "Could you help me put together something like that?" "I gather you would write the script?" Weller said dryly. "Script?" Steinhardt bellowed. "Write? Are you nuts? I'll get gibbering drunk and babble at the camera for about thirty hours. Then you'll go shoot a lot of footage here and at the centers and put together something vaguely coherent out of the whole mess." "Uh ... I'd be willing to give it a try," Weller said. "When do you want to start?" His head felt as if it were flying off in all directions at once. He was overwhelmed by Steinhardt, appalled by the arduous task that was being proposed, challenged by the concept and by the prospect of working with this incomprehensible creature. And he suddenly realized that no thought of Annie had crossed his mind during the whole conversation. His reason for being here in the first place had been driven from his mind by the force of Steinhardt's personality. How in the world can I manipulate this conversation for two seconds? he wondered. How can I dare to bring up what I came here for in the first place? Somehow, at this moment, before Steinhardt, his own petty personal problems seemed goatlike, picayune, beneath cosmic notice. "Not so fast," Steinhardt said. "I didn't say you had the job yet. I was just asking whether you wanted to try out for it. I mean, how can I be completely sold on a character like you, who wormed his way in here by fucking my wife, who's played games with nerds like Garry Bailor, who's driven some of my best Monitors screaming up the walls, who's got poor old Doc Bernstein shitting in his pants?" But Steinhardt spoke in such a genial -- indeed almost affectionate -- tone that Weller could hardly work up even a healthy twinge of paranoia. Steinhardt took a final sip of coffee and stuck his cigar back in the corner of his mouth. "So I'm assigning you a guide who will also be a commissar," he said. "Someone who will stick close to you and give me a better bottom line on where your consciousness is really at. You'll spend some time getting the feel of the operation here and shooting the shit with me from time to time. You'll be trying to sell yourself to me just as you would any other producer -- while your guide reports back. Then we'll see what's what. It's your big break, Jack, make the most of it. If you don't blow it, you'll be a big man in the movement. Not only that, you'll share a little piece of my ineffable immortality. But there's plenty of time, I ain't about to kick off by next Tuesday." Steinhardt rose somewhat ponderously from his recliner. "Now then," he said impishly, "shall we go downstairs and meet your comrade commissar?" He led Weller down the spiral staircase, into the vestibule, along the hall, and into a huge living room whose major feature was a giant sunken conversation pit with the huge flowing abstract sculpture growing in its center like some science-fiction tree. Seated alone at the far side of the pit and partially hidden by the sculpture from the angle at which they had entered was a woman wearing a white blouse and tennis skirt. As they rounded the sculpture and she came into full view, Weller's heart skipped a beat and a big hollow balloon exploded in his stomach, sagging him at the knees, sending blood rushing in waves to his head. The woman in white was Annie. But a changed Annie. Her long blond hair had been cut short into a severe pageboy. Something was subtly different about her mouth. And her eyes.... They were preternaturally bright, but it was a cold vitality; younger, older, timeless as glacial ice. She rose to meet them, staring evenly at Weller with an absolutely unreadable expression. For his part, Weller could not find a word to say; his whole being vibrated with an immense silence, an echoing emptiness filled with half-formed memories, with anticipated expectations of this moment that had nothing to do with the reality itself. The whole world seemed to funnel down to a point centered between her eyes. It was Steinhardt who broke the silence with a great booming laugh, ''Jack, meet your guide and comrade commissar," he said. "And let this be a lesson to you, kiddo. You were promised you'd be reunited with your wife when you were sufficiently transformed. Well, how do you like your ultimate processor, Charlie?" He laughed again, took Annie's hand, placed it in Weller's, and drew them together by throwing his arms wide around both of their shoulders. "For the moment, at least, you have my blessings upon your union, chilluns," he said. He withdrew his arms, walked away, waved his hand, shook his head, and left the room rumbling with laughter. They stood there alone staring at each other like long-lost lovers, like blind dates, like strangers. "God," Weller finally said, "I just don't know what to say." Annie smiled, a thin ghost of smiles remembered. "Neither do I." Then abruptly they were in each other's arms, bodies pressed together, shapes fitting into well-remembered shapes, lips tasting well-remembered lips, and for a while it seemed to Weller that months of time had been annihilated, as if this were only one more in an endless series of embraces down through the years, as if the space between this time and the last had never existed. Yet as their tongues touched and their bodies moved on each other, he came to feel a subtle alienness, the feeling of the first touch of a new lover, not so much the thrill of fresh flesh, but rather an indefinable psychic distance, a subliminal newness. They parted and sank down onto the upholstered lip of the conversation pit. "It's over," Weller sighed. "It's really over." Annie laughed. ''That's funny," she said. "I was about to say it was just beginning." A nervous tremor went through Weller's body. This moment was nothing like anything he had anticipated. Words, even coherent feelings, were coming so hard. No time had passed since she left. A thousand years had gone by. He couldn't get it together. "Well, how the hell are you?" he asked inanely. "Great," she said. "Fulfilled. Whole. And you, Jack? They haven't told me much. Just enough to write those two letters, and then a lot of Monitor security silence ..." "I've gotten here," Weller said. "So you have." Annie broke out a great big old-time smile that began to warm the strange ice around Weller's heart. "So you have!" She hugged him fiercely. "I have missed you!" she said. "It's been fantastic, but it hasn't been easy. It's been a long lonely time...." She rubbed her cheek against his. "If I hadn't known it was the right thing for both of us, I don't know whether I would've been able to go through it just for myself. But all that's over now. You've come back to me transformed. And you're going to be working directly with John. If I didn't love you so much, I'd be green with envy." The cold, distant feeling that had begun to dissipate began to close in on Weller again. For even now, in what should have been a personal moment, a joyous moment of reunited love, the massive shadow of John B. Steinhardt still hung over them, a gigantic afterimage that would not fade, a presence that intruded upon their intimacy by the very force of the man's absence. Weller had the urge to grab Annie's hand and run -- out of the house, through the woods, over the fences, past the dogs, three thousand miles back in space and time to their house in long-lost, long-ago California. "Hey, can we get out of here?" he said. "Is there someplace we can be alone?" Annie kissed him lightly on the lips, "Sure," she said. "I've got my own cabin in the Colony. But it's going to be our place now. You're authorized to move in with me. It's a new beginning for us. Ah, it's so wonderful the way things fall into place when you have the courage to ride the changes!" She hugged him again, took his hand, and pulled him to his feet. "Come on'" she said. "Let me show you our new home." Weller forced a happy smile and a bouncy walk as she led him out of Steinhardt's house. Why, he wondered, do I feel like this? I should feel happy, I should feel I've come home, I should feel I've won. Why can't I let joy into my heart? What's wrong with me? Why do I feel this dread? Why do I feel I'm holding hands with a stranger?
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