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CHAPTER NINETEEN:

They Go Off by Themselves Lately

When Vickery had driven out here two days ago he had been noting the bleak landscapes—the endless flat expanses of weed-studded desert, the occasional house set well back from the generally empty two-lane road, a lonely cluster of mailboxes on posts indicating houses so far back on dirt roads that their sun-faded roofs were indistinguishable among the sand and Joshua trees and tumbleweeds—but this morning he stared straight ahead, and when he passed the last paved street and bumped out onto the dirt road that stretched away to the north, he could already see the enormous boulder that lay three miles ahead.

In the back seat, Yoneda said, “When you picked me up out here on Sunday, I thought you were just being a Good Samaritan. But you already guessed I was ONI.”

“True,” said Tacitus.

“And you,” Yoneda went on, “you pepper-sprayed me!”

“Do you wish we hadn’t done what we did?” asked Castine, who was also staring ahead through the dusty windshield.

Vickery glanced at Yoneda in the rear-view mirror; she was frowning out at the endless sunlit desert to the east. “I’d still have a career,” she said. She held up a hand and added, “I know—till midnight. More things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our protocols.”

As if to punctuate her statement, the sound that was like thunder boomed in the empty sky.

There hadn’t been lines of ghosts alongside the freeways as they had driven out here, but twice on the long stretch of the 10, Castine had pointed out cars that shifted in color and shape and then winked out of existence. The figures inside them had been blurry, but might have been waving.

“I haven’t been out here in years,” said Plowman quietly, squinting out at the desert. “In the early ’60s I went to a couple of the flying saucer conventions they held around the rock every June. Barbecues, tents everywhere, costumes, hundreds of people. Even a year-round café and and airstrip, and they said Howard Hughes would land there for a sandwich any time he was flying over. I wonder if anything’s left.”

“You can see a foundation or two,” said Vickery.

“Huh.” Plowman leaned forward to peer ahead. “The guy who started it all back in the ’50s said an alien from Venus landed there, and talked to him. Gave him a tour of its spaceship. So I guess he always figured that was where they’d show up, if they ever came back again.”

Castine turned around, her head bobbing as the car rocked over the uneven dirt road. “Do you think he really did meet an alien?”

Plowman sat back. “Don’t be dumb, girl. You and I know what it’s like to meet one of them.”

Now the rock dominated the horizon ahead, crouched like a headless stone lion beside a smaller but still enormous boulder. As on Sunday, a number of cars and trailers were parked around the natural monuments, and after another minute of rocking progress Vickery was able to see individual people among the vehicles or out on the plain.

When the road widened out to the hundred-yard clear area, Vickery drove between the widely spaced vehicles and stopped where he had parked on Sunday, beside the cracked cement foundation of what might have been the long-gone café Plowman had mentioned. Vickery was surprised at the number of people who had made the trip out here on a Tuesday morning—looking back between the heads of Tacitus and Plowman, he could see the glint and dust-cloud of at least one more vehicle driving up the dirt road from the south.

The burned-out skeleton of the ONI van had been carted away, and Vickery couldn’t now even see a scorched mark on the sand where it had stood.

He paused before switching off the engine, and none of the others opened their doors. He looked past Castine at the ninety-foot wide base of the primordial stone—he couldn’t see the high shoulders of it, much less the top, from where he sat—and for the moment it seemed to be the center and summation of the barren desert that extended to the horizon in all directions except where the stone loomed massively in the way. The closed doors and roof of the car were a frail container of small, precise definitions, and he hesitated to rupture it.

“If they're still using our blood to track us,” he said, “we last showed up on Fairfax in L.A. about two hours ago. We can afford a half hour of exposure here, and then Ingrid and I should get back in the car for a while. Ideally we'll be able to sneak fresh blood samples onto a vehicle that’s about to leave.”

Castine took a deep breath and opened her door, and the dry desert wind, scented by miles of creosote bushes and baking stone, swept in past her. Vickery switched off the engine and stepped out into the harsh daylight.

When all five of them had got out of the car and stood shading their eyes in the glare of sun on stone and sand, Plowman squinted to the north and said, “I thought that boy had sense.”

Vickery turned in that direction and saw a little blue motorcycle bobbing toward them. Evidently it had circled the area first.

He shook his head and walked around the car to the trunk. “Let’s get this spread out,” he said, opening the trunk. “Give it some duration in one spot.”

At his studio at dawn he had rolled up the canvas and bent it double to fit in the trunk, and now Plowman got one end of it and helped to lift it out. The two of them shuffled to the edge of the old pavement and let the canvas roll drop, kicked it straight, then knelt and began unrolling it across the cracked cement surface.

When the canvas was completely unrolled and Yoneda and Castine were lining the flapping edges with rocks, Plowman stared at the irregular tangle of lines that Vickery had painted on it last night.

“I guess that looks right.”

“It is,” Vickery told him shortly. “Now we wait an hour or two and just make sure the wind doesn’t flip up any corners.”

Santiago came riding up on his puttering bike, and he pushed up sunglasses to peer at the lines painted on the canvas.

“It looks the same,” he said, and when Vickery asked him what it looked the same as, the boy nodded toward the eastern side of the plain, past a couple of trailers a hundred yards away. “People over there laying out sugar and honey. Others over there don’t like it.”

Vickery squinted in that direction, then shrugged. “As long as they keep it over there.”

Santiago switched off the bike’s engine and flipped down the kickstand. “I brought you this,” he said, digging in the left pocket of his hoodie. He held out an old corncob pipe. “You already got one thing like it, but maybe you could use ’em in stereo some way.”

Vickery guessed that it was one he’d seen before, at the house of a dead ghostmonger years ago.

Yoneda stepped over to where they stood, pushing damp hair back from her forehead. “It’s hot out here already,” she said, and then she peered at the corncob pipe and nodded. “Only thing we were missing. Thank God you came along, kid.”

“This pipe is like the knob on the metronome in the car,” said Vickery. “There’s a fossilized ghost subsumed in each of them.”

“That’s true,” said Castine; then her eyes widened and she added, “That’s true! Fossilized. It’s like the negated alien under the robot in L.A., isn’t it?”

“Kind of parallel cases,” agreed Vickery. To Santiago he said, “Thanks, we might find a use for it.” He slid it into his shirt pocket.

Santiago nodded and got off his bike, squinting around at all the strangers standing further off, widely separated out across the plain.

“Robot?” muttered Yoneda.

“Jack up the back end of the car,” suggested Plowman, “and duct tape the pipe onto the wheel and the metronome pendulum onto the fender, then get the motor running, so you got a moving one rotating by a stationary one. Get a negation induction current running.”

“Eye of newt and toe of frog!” Yoneda burst out angrily. “You guys know these things are big, right? I saw that one in the riverbed two nights ago, and we all saw the one that fell into the ocean last night. And I don’t mean big in a size way.” To Vickery she said, “They live in higher space-time dimensions, right?—and just interact with our lot the way we might step through a spider web?” She stamped her foot on the packed-sand ground. “And you’re gonna stop them with a corncob pipe duct-taped onto a car tire?”

Vickery frowned at her, then looked past her and saw Castine biting her lip and blinking.

Yoneda went on, “Thrift-store junk against . . . something like gods?”

“Well,” said Vickery as a nervous smile tugged at his own lips, “Ingrid and I once saved L.A. from blowing up by flying a home-made hang-glider through a hole in the sky of Hell.”

Santiago nodded solemnly.

Plowman laughed. “That’s the story. I heard it was a hot-air balloon, though.”

“And,” said Tacitus, “I drove a car into that Hell myself, three years ago. I was able to walk out, though.”

Plowman pulled a metal flask from his inside jacket pocket, unscrewed the cap and took a swig of what smelled like bourbon. “Hang-glider my ass,” he muttered.

Vickery thought Yoneda was near tears, and he recalled that she had probably sacrificed her career, and possibly her liberty, in order to join them in this. He was framing a way to remind her of the convincing bases of their fears and proposed action when Plowman began talking, loudly.

“It seems like a fool’s errand,” the old man said, nodding toward Yoneda, “hoping to negate ’em all over the world with just the stuff we got right here, but it reminds me of one time I had ants in my yard, and I took a bucket of gunpowder outside—I used to do my own reloading in those days—and I turned it upside-down on top of the biggest anthill, and two days later I took the bucket away, and nearly all the gunpowder was gone! So I struck a match and tossed it onto the anthill, and my whole yard blew up.”

Yoneda looked past Vickery at the other vehicles parked out across the wide cleared area around the stone. Perhaps she was looking for another ride. Almost too quietly for Vickery to hear, she said, “And is a robot going to show up?”

“That’s just a nickname,” Vickery said quickly, “sorry, for a building in L.A.” He waved at the six-by-eight canvas spread out on the old pavement. “The original of this symbol is partly under it, underground. Nobody thinks the building is a real robot, okay?”

Tacitus laid a hesitant hand on Yoneda’s shoulder. “These people,” he said, “we people—aren’t actually insane.”

Yoneda looked back at him. “Too late now anyway,” she said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Plowman’s expansive mood seemed to have collapsed. He looked around at the bleak landscape as if trying to fix it in his memory. “I don’t think I am either,” he said to Yoneda. He took a few steps away from the car and the weighted canvas, then walked back. He slid the flask back into his jacket, and after a moment’s hesitation pulled out a tattered envelope with a rubber band around it. He handed it to Castine.

“If you make it out of here,” he said, in a gruff voice that didn’t invite reply, “get this to my daughter.”

Vickery saw that the envelope was bulky. Castine just nodded as she tucked it into her own inside jacket pocket.

“Food and beer,” Vickery said quickly, stepping around to the trunk. He popped it open and lifted away the lid of a new styrofoam cooler, revealing a brace of submarine sandwiches in cellophane and two stacked six-packs of Budweiser. Several plastic bottles of water were tucked in among it all, and another six-pack, probably not very cold, sat beside the cooler. “You too,” he added to Santiago, who was hanging back.

Soon they were all sitting in a rough circle around the brightly sunlit canvas, using the edges of it between the stones as a tablecloth. Vickery and Castine had forgotten to get napkins, but Vickery reflected that napkins would have blown away in any case, and he set the example for the others by wiping his mouth on his sleeve. Plowman declined a sandwich, citing his missing tooth, and stuck to beer. The black lines of the negation symbol shone on the white canvas.

After finishing half of her own sandwich and washing down the last bite with a swig of beer, Castine looked up and asked, “About an hour, you think? It’s been about a half hour already.”

“An hour,” said Vickery, “or a bit more. Gotta make sure the canvas is already here, at the retro moment we wind up seeing. You and I should get back in the car”

“An hour,” echoed Plowman. He pulled out another envelope and passed it to Santiago. “Hold this for me, kid,” he said. Santiago nodded and tucked it into the left pocket of his hoodie.

For several seconds Vickery had been aware of shouting from the eastern side of the plain, past a couple of trailers, and now Santiago stood up, looking in that direction.

“They were arguing already when I rode by there,” he said. “Some are like that crazy lady at your chess club, and they don’t like it that others are laying out the lineas de muerta in sugar and honey.”

Vickery looked past Castine at the trailers. Already the sun was raising heat distortions, and the trailers seemed to ripple. “I wish they’d all just—” he began, but the pop of a gunshot interrupted him. It was followed by two more.

Vickery got to his feet, nervously touching the .45 semi-automatic in his jacket pocket. The others all stood up too, and Castine’s hands were in her pockets and Yoneda’s right hand was inside her khaki jacket.

The sound like thunder shook the air, and the wind from the east was stronger, raising swirls of dust, and the distant shouting became rhythmical—chanting.

“There’ll be cops,” Yoneda said, nodding toward the dirt road that led back south to Landers. Vickery glanced that way and saw several more vehicles approaching.

“We keep our heads down,” said Vickery, “and San Bernardino County Sheriffs have got no reason to look twice at us.” He turned to Santiago, who of course had one hand in the heavy pocket of his hoodie. “Over there,” Vickery said, waving toward the trailers, “do you think it’s just the sugar and honey that some people are objecting to? I mean—would they recognize the symbol in black paint on canvas?”

The chanting from the other side of the trailers was louder, carried on the wind.

“How close they looked at it,” said Santiago, “I don’t know. But,” and he waved at the canvas, “the lines on the sand looked like that. Tangled.”

“If anybody starts coming here from that direction,” Vickery said, “Let’s all stand blocking the view of the canvas. But casual!”

“All we needed,” said Plowman.

The wind caught a corner of the canvas and lifted it, tossing aside several rocks that had held it down.

“How about if we all just lie on it?” said Castine, brushing windblown hair out of her face and crouching to replace the rocks.

“For how long?” said Vickery. “As much as a minute? We don’t want to go into echo-vision and just see us all lying there!”

A roaring engine caught his attention, and when he looked to the east he saw a grotesque vehicle plunging diagonally across the uneven dirt.

Vickery squinted at it. It might have been some sort of Jeep with no windshield, but the grille was hidden by an aluminum-foil-covered mask of the popular-culture “alien” image, the inverted-teardrop shape with big slanted eyes and a bulging forehead. Long, bending poles with banners fluttering on them stuck out to the sides. Vickery could see a goggled driver over the big aluminum-foil head, and two men swaying in the back, and he could just hear their shouted chanting over the noise of their engine.

The vehicle swerved among the cars and trailers, raising dust that blew across the plain and veiled the wide base of Giant Rock.

Vickery heard a thump and clatter close behind him, and turned—a sharp gust of wind had lifted the far side of the canvas, scattering rocks, and in the moment before he dove at it with his arms spread, the stark black lines on the upright white canvas were the brightest spot in the tan desert landscape.

Vickery banged his knee and his chin in falling on top of the canvas, and he rolled over painfully on it and sat up as the others swept the canvas flat and crouched between it and the jeep.

But the jeep had swerved toward them. Vickery pulled the .45 out of his pocket, holding it low, and saw Santiago glance away toward his motorcycle. Yoneda had drawn her little .380 semi-automatic; her teeth were bared in a tense smile.

Santiago was still looking back, but his hand remained in his jacket pocket.

The oncoming aluminum-foil alien face dipped its pointed chin to the dirt as the jeep slammed to a sliding halt thirty feet away. One of the men vaulted out of the back of it, and when he straightened up he was holding a revolver. He pointed it at Vickery and his companions and waved the barrel to the side twice, clearly ordering them to move away from the old pavement and the canvas. Vickery was aware that a car engine was approaching from behind him, and that it was probably what had caught Santiago’s attention a moment earlier, but his eyes were fixed on the armed man standing beside the weird vehicle.

For several seconds nobody moved. Vickery knew he could get the .45 in line and shoot the gunman if the man were to swing the gun back toward them, and he was praying that the man would not do it.

But the man spread his arms and raised his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug; then, as if to emphasize his pantomimed order, pointed his revolver at the ground and fired.

And several deafeningly close simultaneous gunshots startled Vickery in the instant that his own gun jumped in his hand.

The man by the groteque jeep stepped back, startled—clearly he hadn’t fired again—and Vickery quickly looked at the others crouched on either side of the canvas. Castine was flexing her empty right hand, Yoneda too had dropped her gun, and there was a smoking hole in the front of Santiago’s hoodie. Plowman and Tacitus were sitting beside the canvas, looking around wide-eyed.

The man who had fired into the ground had climbed back into the jeep, and it was accelerating away in reverse, the aluminum-foil alien head nodding vigorously as the vehicle bounced over the uneven ground.

“Santiago!” shouted Vickery over the ringing in his and certainly everyone’s ears, “are you hit?” He tapped his own side and pointed at the boy’s abdomen.

Santiago shook his head and poked the muzzle of his pocketed gun against the hole in his hoodie.

Vickery looked closely at the others, but none of them had been hit.

He realized that he and Castine and Yoneda and Santiago had each fired a shot at the same moment—and it seemed clear that in each case it had been involuntary.

Vickery looked in the other direction. A black SUV was slowing to a stop a few yards away from the old pavement, and a white Chevy van behind it was doing the same; both vehicles halted and the doors swung open, and men with guns were jumping out onto the sand.

One man in a dark gray business suit and sunglasses stepped ahead of the others, his gun—a semi-automatic similar to Santiago’s—held pointing up for now. He looked to be about forty, with gray streaks in his brown hair at the temples. Vickery noticed a ragged slit in the side of the man’s well-tailored suit coat.

Four men had got out of the van; they all wore sunglasses and black nylon jackets, and, though one man was limping badly, each of them carried a handgun pointed toward Vickery’s group. Sensitive Assignment Specialists, Vickery guessed. And they’ve definitely got us covered.

“Let’s see everybody’s hands,” the man in the suit called; and when all five of Vickery’s party were holding up empty hands, the man went on, “Good, keep ’em up. I see Agents Yoneda and Castine, and Pierce Plowman, and one who must be Sebastian Vickery, and another who might be a GRU agent! Who are you, kid?” he asked Santiago.

“The caterer,” said Santiago.

“And you,” called Yoneda, “must be Agent Finehouse.”

The four Sensitive Assignment Specialists looked tense and uneasy, and Vickery belatedly noticed bloody footprints and a hole punched in the tan boot of one of them. And there was a bullet-sized hole punched outward in the side of the van. Vickery looked more closely at the rip in Finehouse’s coat.

“It happened to you guys too,” Vickery said wonderingly, “didn’t it? Your guns all fired spontaneously?”

Finehouse darted a quick, wrathful glance back at the SUV, then returned his attention to Vickery and his companions. “All of you on your feet,” he said, “hands well clear, not kidding. Good. Now step away from the canvas.” To the men beside him he said, “Pat, you and Mike frisk ’em and zip ’em, and Tommy, you roll up the canvas and stash it. Quick is good.”

The back gate of the SUV swung up, and another man climbed down to stand unsteadily on the dirt. Vickery raised his eyebrows—the man’s sandals and black turtleneck sweater were out of place among his companions, but the most jarring detail was his black goatee, which tapered to a theatrical point. He began lifting hatbox-sized cardboard boxes out of the back of the SUV and setting them on the sand.

Two of Finehouse’s men shuffled forward, one crouching to toss aside the rocks holding the canvas down.

Beyond the SUV and the van, off to the right, Vickery now saw another vehicle plunging this way aross the packed sand—a gleaming white ’70s-era Cadillac.

One of the two men by the van turned at the sound of its engine, and had just taken a step toward the back of the van when the driver of the Cadillac held a gun out the window and fired into the air and leaned on the horn.

And the area around the half-rolled-up canvas seemed to explode.

The agent whom Finehouse had called Mike had gathered the guns from Vickery’s party and had been stepping back when all four of the guns he was carrying fired simultaneously; three of the guns sprang out of his hands and he spun and sagged at the knees. In the same instant the guns of the two agents by the van had jumped, and Vickery felt a bright, hot sting over his right ribs. He glimpsed fabric fragments flying up from the canvas, but any twang of ricochet was lost in the ringing concussion of the guns and the sudden blaring of horns from the SUV and the van and Vickery’s Dodge.

Vickery was already diving forward, and he snatched Yoneda’s little gun out of mid-air in the moment before his somersault slammed him into the knees of the two men by the van. As he rolled to his feet he grabbed one man’s gun barrel and twisted it aside and struck the right wrist of the other with the butt of Yoneda’s gun; and a moment later he had stepped back and was aiming her gun between the men’s faces.

One of them had dropped his gun and was massaging his wrist, and the other slowly released the gun whose barrel Vickery’s hand was still gripping and twisting. Both men seemed dazed, and Vickery realized that they had unintentionally fired their guns in that tumultuous instant three seconds earlier.

“Hands behind your necks!” Vickery shouted over the jarring clamor of the car horns, and both men hesitated and then complied.

Yoneda was backing away from the SUV, holding Finehouse’s gun while Finehouse sat by the front wheel, apparently unwounded but visibly gasping for air. The man with the pointed beard was sitting on the sand in the midst of his cardboard boxes, weeping. The car horns stuttered to silence.

Vickery took a quick glance over his shoulder. One of the Sensitive Assignment Specialists was plodding back toward the van with his hands raised while Plowman kept Tacitus’s revolver trained on him. The agent called Mike was sitting on the sand beside the old cement pavement now, clenching a gleamingly bloody fist; Tacitus had taken off his own belt and looped it around Mike’s upper arm and was pulling it tight.

Castine had hurried to the SUV and pulled the bearded man to his feet. She carefully patted him down, and then pushed him to join his fellows. Santiago was unrolling the canvas and replacing the rocks around the edges, and the right pocket of his hoodie again sagged with its usual weight. Castine walked back and crouched to hold the canvas flat for him.

Vickery reached across to probe the rip in the side of his windbreaker. He could feel hot blood rolling down to his belt, and winced as he touched a gash over a rib. He wiped his bloody fingers on his jeans and made himself concentrate on his surroundings.

Twice, he thought, all the guns in this immediate area fired spontaneously! He raised the barrel of Yoneda’s gun so that it was pointed a few inches above the heads of his two captives.

“Everybody!” he called. “Aim a bit to the side of whoever you’re covering! Guns go off by themselves lately.”

On the far side of the van, the Cadillac had rolled to a stop and the driver’s-side door swung open. Anita Galvan stepped out, still holding the gun she had fired into the air while pulling up, and two men got out of the car after her. Vickery recognized Arturo and her nephew Carlos.

Galvan strode up to where Vickery stood and looked around with eyebrows raised. “Was that a grenade?” she asked. “Hey, that’s the guy who offered me fifteen thousand bucks for you. Yo, mister! Do you have the money?”

Finehouse looked from her lowered gun to the raised guns of Vickery and Yoneda and Plowman, and shook his head in impatient dismissal of her.

Vickery turned to look out across the windy plain toward Giant Rock. People were staring in this direction or hurrying toward parked cars. He was relieved to see no one who appeared to have been wounded by either of the bursts of spontaneous gunfire, but several had their hands to the sides of their heads, clearly talking on cell phones.

“We gotta do this quick,” he said. He turned back to the vehicles and walked carefully to the SUV and peered inside, then edged up to the open door of the van. He crouched and leaned in, scanning the interior over the barrel of the .380, but both vehicles were empty.

He straightened and stepped away from the van. He had noticed bundles of zip-ties at the belts of Finehouse’s men, and he said, “Yoneda, kick all the stray guns over here, and Ingrid, get those zip-ties and bind all the ONI guys, and then bind them together. Pierce and Yoneda both cover her while she does that, but don’t aim directly at anybody! Tacitus, finish up with that tourniquet and get over here. And everybody be aware of where guns are pointing!”

“I’m sorry!” wailed the oddly bearded man.

“Shut up, can’t you?” said Finehouse.

Mike got to his feet, gripping the belt that was now cinched tightly around his upper arm. Castine unclipped the bundle of zip-ties from his belt, and Plowman waved the revolver toward where the man’s companions leaned against the van.

Yoneda kicked a couple of government semi-automatics away from the vehicles as she held Finehouse’s aimed at his shoes. “Get up and stand with your pals,” she said.

When Finehouse had got up and joined the goateed eccentric and the four agents beside the van, Castine quickly looped a zip-tie around each man’s wrists and drew them all tight—extra tight around Mike’s wrists, slicked as one of them was with blood—then, standing to the side to give Yoneda and Plowman clear fields of fire if necessary, she ran a tie through all the loops, tugged it firm, and quickly stepped away.

Finehouse, crowded together now with the four battered Sensitive Assignment Specialists and the goateed man, looked up from his bound wrists.

“Sebastian Vickery,” he called, “surrender to us now and Agent Castine will suffer no consequences for her actions during these three days. I’m authorized to promise that.”

“He’s got stuff to do,” Castine told him as she stepped back beside Vickery.

“More important stuff, I’m afraid,” Vickery agreed.

Finehouse looked away from them. “Agent Yoneda, turn the gun the other way or spend twenty years in Miramar.”

“My money’s on Vickery,” she said, “God help me.”

“Mine too,” put in Galvan. “Literally.”

Tacitus had joined Vickery and Castine beside the canvas. He looked down at the canvas and then up, nervously, at Vickery. “Now?” he asked.

Castine shivered, gripping her elbows.

Vickery took a deep breath and let it out, and nodded. “Now.” He gingerly slid the .380 into his pocket and pointed across the plain. “Let’s all three stare at the rock till we’re seeing it in echo-vision,” he said, “and then—” He paused.

— Then look down at the canvas, he thought. Samson pulling down the temple? When they die they become mass, Plowman had said at breakfast. Unless we stop for lunch, this is probably our last meal. Vickery looked at the bag full of sandwich wrappings and empty beer cans. Well, breakfast had not in fact been their last meal. Maybe this forced-march picnic hadn’t been either.

He looked to his right at Castine, then past her at Tacitus.

Castine’s lips twitched in an attempted smile. “The one in the riverbed on Sunday night didn’t land on us.” She took Tacitus’s left hand, and Vickery clasped hers.

Finehouse took an awkward step away from the van, tugging the four men around with him, but slid to a halt when Yoneda stepped back and raised his own gun to point at his knees.

Finehouse flinched and retreated, but a moment later bared his teeth and shouted, “You know you’re messing with enormous things which you don’t remotely understand! Vickery, Castine, you used to be government agents—this is amateur, civilian!—acting in complete ignorance—”

“Go,” said Tacitus quietly.

“Cendravenir!” Finehouse called. “Dammit, where are your balls?”

Vickery assumed he was shouting at one of his Sensitive Assignment Specialists, goading him to action; but Yoneda and Plowman were alert. Vickery stared across the plain at the towering boulder.

On Sunday he had shifted to echo-vision while sitting in his truck, but he had been staring at the slope of rocks to the left of Giant Rock. And he found it difficult now to impose a flat two-dimensional view on the imposing stone sentinel; the thing was too emphatically three-dimensional, too big and solid.

He didn’t glance to the right, since he assumed that if either of his companions had achieved echo-vision it would have spilled him into it as well; and certainly Castine’s hand would have tensed in his!

“You can still stop this!” cried Finehouse. “Abort, abort!”

With his left hand Vickery felt along the side of his denim jacket until he found the bullet-hole, and then poked his finger through it and scraped his fingernail along the gash a bullet had torn in his skin.

It hurt much more than he had anticipated, and his view lost its immediacy and scope—and it was easy in that moment to see in front of him simply a mottled brown blob bordered by expanses of blue and tan.

And he made himself look past the façade.

Instantly the sky was a remote bronze dome, and the great monolith stood far away across the glowing plain, displacing vast volumes of air, shining in the color that was out past red in the spectrum.

He looked down; and he exhaled when he saw the canvas, relieved that the echo-view was not showing him a time before they had unrolled it here. The lines of the negation symbol shone in that color now, against the dimmer background of the canvas. Unable to hear most sounds occuring in real time, he concentrated his attention on the jagged, tangled lines.

For perhaps thirty seconds they glowed steady in his sight—and then he winced as the symbol abruptly became black on white in glaring sunlight and he could hear the desert wind again. The retro-vision had ended.

He sagged and caught his balance, glancing around quickly. Castine pulled both of her hands free and sat down, holding her head. Tacitus was alternately blinking at the figures around the three vehicles and up into the empty sky.

Castine lowered her hands and looked up at Vickery. “It didn’t work,” she said hoarsely.

Vickery exhaled, and realized that he had been holding his breath. He looked up into the vast blue vault of the sky, which was empty even of clouds. “Wait—there was a several-second delay on Sunday—”

“It didn’t work,” Castine repeated. “I sensed them again, just now—like last night on the boat, when I shared the mind of, of the ghost of one of them—I was open to it, the same sensation, like my little mind was shaking apart and falling out of everything as the three got closer, more real than me—but they—oh, English is no good for this!”

“Try,” called Yoneda, not sarcastically.

Castine sighed and nodded. “They were responding to our—what was your phrase, Tacitus?—our localized radiating discord, and . . . came close? Touched the surface of the pond? But we didn’t attract them close enough, didn’t bring them into focus. A sort of field around this thing,” she said with a wave at the canvas, “repelled them while they still had time to . . . step back, step out.” She rubbed her eyes, then pushed herself up and got to her feet. “What’s today? Tuesday? We gotta find a priest who’ll hear our confessions.”


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Framed