Part 22 (1/2)

”He's confused,” he heard one of them say. ”Disoriented. He doesn't know where he is.”

What was it she had said? You must not give in to the Marker. You must not allow it to begin Convergence. You must not give in to the Marker. You must not allow it to begin Convergence. He had to tell them. ”The Marker,” he whispered. Markoff leaned close. ”The Marker,” he repeated. He had to tell them. ”The Marker,” he whispered. Markoff leaned close. ”The Marker,” he repeated.

”The Marker?” said Markoff. ”What Marker? He's talking nonsense. Give him another shot.”

Altman shook his head. Or tried. Whether his head moved or not, he couldn't say. Either it didn't move or they ignored him. He watched one of them fill a syringe and prime the needle, without being able to do anything about it.

He tried to speak, made instead a gurgling, inarticulate cry.

”It'll be okay,” said Stevens, patting his arm. ”Don't worry, Altman, we're here for you.”

And then he felt the p.r.i.c.k as the needle punctured his flesh. His arm burned a moment, and then went numb. The men in white were there for a moment longer; then they slowly blurred and ran together and finally disappeared entirely.

When he came conscious again, the room was empty, except for three men: Stevens, Markoff, and another man from Markoff's inner circle whose name he didn't know. He was as large as Markoff but thicker, with a brutal, flat face. They stood to one side of the bed, speaking in whispers impossible for Altman to make out.

Stevens was the first to notice he was awake. He gestured at him and whispered something. The other two stopped talking. In unison, all three moved closer and stared down at him.

”Altman,” said Markoff. ”Still alive. You seem to lead a charmed life.”

Altman started to respond, but Markoff held a finger up to stop him. He reached down, removed Altman's oxygen mask.

”Are you feeling up to speaking?” asked Markoff.

”I think so,” Altman said. His voice sounded like it no longer belonged to him, or belonged to someone that was him but much older.

”You remember Stevens,” said Markoff. ”This is Officer Krax.”

Altman nodded.

”It's very simple,” said Markoff. ”I want you to tell me everything.”

He did, starting with the moment when Torquato had suddenly attacked and moving through to his hallucinations.

”Tell us more about these hallucinations,” said Krax.

”Does it matter?” asked Altman. ”They were just hallucinations.”

”It does matter,” said Stevens. ”Indeed, it matters a great deal.”

So, Altman, too tired to argue or make up a lie, told them. When he was done, the three men withdrew to the far side of the room, started whispering again. Altman closed his eyes.

He was on the verge of falling back asleep when they returned.

For a moment they just stared at him. Stevens started to say something, but Markoff touched his arm and stopped him.

”I want you to tell Stevens everything from here on out,” he said. ”Any dreams, hallucinations, anything at all out of the ordinary, you contact Stevens right away.”

”This is crazy,” said Altman.

”No,” said Markoff, ”it isn't.”

And then they were gone, leaving Altman behind to brood. He felt more confused and apprehensive than ever.

But a few minutes later the door opened, and a distraught Ada rushed in, and he had other things on his mind.

45 After nearly dying in the bathyscaphe, it was as if he was living a different life, as if the world he had known had become overlapped by another, ghostly one. He began to see more people whom he knew to be dead: his father, sister, a teacher he'd been close to who had committed suicide, an old friend killed by a car in high school. They would appear, looking nearly as real as anybody, and offer vague and sometimes puzzling messages. Some spoke against ”Convergence,” urging him to hurry and ”focus your attention correctly” (as one of them put it) before it was too late. Others spoke of unity, suggesting to him that it was somehow too late, that he had misused the resources given him and showed no signs of learning from his mistakes. All urged him to leave the Marker alone. He told Ada about seeing her mother. At first it made her angry, and then it made her cry. But then, a few hours later she asked him to tell her about the experience in detail.

”But why you?” she asked. ”Why not me?”

A day later he woke up in the middle of the night to find Ada staring at him. ”I saw her,” she said, her face radiant. ”Like a vision. She was as real as you or me. She was standing right over there, near the door.”

”What did she tell you?”

”That she loved me. And that we needed to leave the Marker alone, to forget we ever found it. It must be dangerous. Or powerful, anyway. What do you think the Marker is?”

He explained to her what he knew, described the way the Marker had looked underwater.

”It's all connected,” she said. ”The stories in town, these visions we're having, the artifact in the center of the crater. I'm sure of it.”

At first she was ecstatic about seeing her mother. It had been, Altman realized, an almost religious experience for her in a way that it hadn't been for him. For the rest of the night she was manic, elated. But by the next morning her mood had begun to turn. She was moody, depressed.

”Why can't she be here all the time?” she asked. ”Why can't she stay with me?”

”But it's not her,” said Altman. ”It seems like her, but it isn't. It's a hallucination.”

”It was was her,” said Ada, with a sense of conviction that worried him. ”And I need her. I need her back.” her,” said Ada, with a sense of conviction that worried him. ”And I need her. I need her back.”

And just when Ada was at her most depressed and listless, her mother came back. Altman was in the room at the time, beside her, and saw it as well. Only what he saw was not her dead mother but his own dead sister. They both agreed that something had happened, but had experienced it differently. They were each shown whomever they wanted to see. The words spoken were different as well, phrased to fit the way the person herself spoke when she was alive. But it all, with a little interpretation, fit into the idea of one crowning event, Convergence, though the dead were less clear about what exactly that was, or what could be done to stop it.

Altman was suspicious. ”It's not real,” he tried to tell Ada. ”We're being manipulated, used.”

”I know what I saw,” said Ada. ”It was as real as anything I've ever seen.” She wanted her mother back from the dead so much that she wouldn't listen. It was strange, Altman thought, that the hallucination-or vision, as she called it, was constant for her, always her mother, when his kept changing from one loved one to another. But perhaps it was simply because he was too skeptical to accept the hallucinations as anything but delusion and so it had to keep trying different strategies.

As he'd been ordered, Altman told Stevens about his hallucinations, mentioning Ada's as well. Stevens just recorded what he said and nodded. He seemed tired, overworked.

”What do you think it all means?” Altman asked.

Stevens shrugged. ”You and your girlfriend are not the only ones having them,” he said. ”Others are experiencing the same thing, and more and more frequently. Only dead people, loved ones-the sort of people that you'd want to take seriously. Some people, like you, believe they're hallucinations. Others, like Ada, believe they're something more.”

”Whatever it is, it wants us to do something,” Altman said. ”But it doesn't know how to communicate it properly.”

”Not only that,” said Stevens, in one of his rare moments of openness. ”Our hospital ward is full of people suffering from psychosis and the suicide rate is sky-high. Either it wants a lot of us mad and dead or what it's saying is literally destroying us.”

There was, he noticed, a s.h.i.+ft in the way people interacted with one another aboard the floating compound. There was a growing feeling that something was happening, something that they couldn't begin to understand. Some people began clumping together in groups, sharing their experiences with the dead, speculating that the boundaries between heaven and earth had been broken. Others dismissed them as a function of the signal emitted by the Marker, similar to a drug trip. Others seemed to be having a bad trip: they became withdrawn, confused, even violent.

He was in the laboratory, charting the moments when the signal pulse was strongest and trying to see if his hallucinations were occurring at those same times, when he noticed through the open door people rus.h.i.+ng down the hall.