"Mission" - читать интересную книгу автора (Tilley Patrick)

TheAges Past
lst Age - The Age of Light
2nd Age - The Age of Creation
3rd Age - The Age of Darkness

The Present Age
4th Age - The Age of Life
The Ages to come -
5th Age - The Age of Love
6th Age - The Age of Wisdom
7th Age - The Age of Glory


Once again he declined to go into details but! did manage to elicit one additional item of information. We are, apparently, nearing the end of the Fourth Age, and! gathered that the Fifth Age is when the good times are supposed to roll. 'Soon' was the word he used but what that means is anybody's guess. On the time scale the Empire is using that could be next Monday, or a million years from now.
I changed course yet again and tried to question him about the longships. 'Come on,' I said. 'I saw Star Wars five times. Humour me.'
He put the red flower to his nose and eyed me indulgently. 'What can I tell you? That it is twice as big as Manhattan Island and can
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carry half as many people? Or that It is-commanded by a Pro-Consul of the Empire? You mustn't let your fascination with the hardware mislead you. As I told you before, that's not really whatit's all about. The only thing you need to understandfially, with the totality- ofyour being, is who and what you are and your relationship tome. Once you acquire that knowledge, all your questions will be answered.'
'Okay,' I said. 'I'll try and bear that in mint'
Miriam came out on to the porch. She gave a sharp sigh as she saw me sitting there in my robe. 'I thought you were going round the garden.'
I looked at The Man then up at her. 'We decided to talk instead.'
'Breakfast is ready. Are you going to eat like that or are you planning to get dressed?'
'Give me a couple of minutes and I'll make you proud of me. I gave her a sunny smile but she didn't see it. She was looking past meat TheMan. And she didn't look sixteen any more. I turned and saw why.
The mat was empty. But he'd left us the red flower. Miriam picked it up before I could get out of the chair. I suddenly felt cheated, but inside there was also this almost inconsolable sense of loss. I could see that Miriam felt it too. Perhaps cnn more than I did. What we both needed to do more than anything else at that moment was to put our arms around each other:
But we didn't.
I just bared my teeth and said, 'You and your flicking breakfast.. Which shows, I guess, just how much I still had to learn.
Needless to say, that slip of the tongue meant that the rest of the weekend was shQt to hell. The silence that hung over the breakfast table would have earned us a free ticket to a Trappist monastery. It was Miriam who finally broke the ice but it didn't help to raise the temperature.
'You look as ifyou've got a lot to get through here. I think I'd better drive over to Scarsdale. After all, they were expecting me.'
Scarsdale was where her parents lived. 'Sure. Good idea.' it was the wrong thing to say but part of me enjoys being mean-spirited now and then, I shrugged. 'Listen - if that's what you want to do.'
Of course it was. She alre!dy had her coat on. Maybe! could have persuaded her to take it off but it was too much hassle. Besides, it was tiue. I really did need to make up for the time I'd lost on the Saturday having my mind bent by footnotes from the Two Hundred Million
Year War~1f that sounds flip, it is because I was doing my damnedest to play it down. What we had become involved in was absolutely incredible. What we had seen and heard was fantastic. Unforgettable. But the look I'd seen in Miriam's eyes when he'd produced the stigmata had scared the hell out of me. I might be long on questions and short on answers but I was sure of one thing: as twtof the smallest cogs in the Celestial machine; we ran the risk of being ground to pieces. The only way to stay sane, whole and healthy was by keeping a firm grip on reality. And that's what I planned to do on behalf of both of us. Even if it meanr playing the bad guy.
I opened the front door but didn't offer to carry her overnight bag. We walked down to where she had parked the Pontiac. We both chewed on our teeth until we got there. She tossed the bag into the back and got in.
I leaned against the inside of the door as she went to close it. The window was up and it was obvious that she wasn't going to roll it down. 'Listen,'! said. 'I'm sorry! went over the top when The Man disappeared. I don't know why any of this is happening, or what it is were getting into. Maybe we ought to take some time to work out where we go from here.'
'Take all the time you want.' She switched on the ignition.
'What do you want me to do with all the food?' I said.
She threw me a bleak glance. 'Ship it to the Vietnamese Boat People.'
If I could have stood the pain, I'd have left my arm in the door as she slammed it shut. Just to ruin her weekened. But as "ma devout coward, I lifted it prudently out of the way. I stepped back and watched her do a tight-lipped three-point turn, then waved her out of my life. It wasn't the first time she hadn't waved back and I knew it would not be the last. And what made us so different? People had been arguing over The Man for centuries. I went back inside and immersed myself in the heady world of patent infringements.
Now I don't know how closely you've been following this but some oryou may have detected a certain schizoid quality in my reactions to The Man and what he'd been laying on us. If you'd have been there when it was happening,! think you might have been a little confused too. I no longer doubted the validity of the experience. I was just doing my level best, as I've already said, not to go overboard. I had suspended both belief and disbelief. I was trying to cling to the middle ground, somewhere between awe and derision but the deep-
seated cynicism with which I regarded most of the things of this world and certainly all of the next, kept bringing me back to earth. I wanted to hear more; to discover all he knew. But I didn't want to be drafted into this Man's army and, despite the voice inside my head which kept egging me on, I was not about to volunteer.
And there was another problem. This game of chronological hide-and-seek we'd got mixed up in threatened to cut us off from the people around us. After aft, The Man could come back again. For days instead of hours. How long could we conceal this historical time-bomb that had been dropped in our taps just because some cosmic body-snatcher didn't know his quarks from his mesons?
Suppose someone started back-tracking from that empty drawer in the morgue towards us? Or if friend Fowler got visions of winning a Nobel Prize by going public with his analysis of that blood sample? And I could envisage the Monday morning small talk at the office. Hi, Leo. Have agoothveeken& Mmm, I was up at Sleepy Hollow and a couple of friends dropped in. Oh, yeah. Anybody special? No. Just Miriam and a guy called Jesus.
$z wasaterri1ying thought but as I sat there in front of those deposidots, I couldn't think of one person Miriam and I could tell who wouldn'(think we had flipped our lids.
I diluted my anxiety with a generous shot of bourbon, waded through thereat of my paperwork then drove back into town to avoid ihe inevitable Monday morning pile-up. It was around eleven as I let myseluinto my apartment. I checked with the answering service but there was no message from Miriam. I toyed with the idea of ringing
Х her in case she'd tried to reach me at Sleepy Hollow, then thought
Х better of it. If and when she wanted to get in touch, she would know where to find me. I went to bed with the Good Book and checked over a few key passages before I turned the light out. At least I knew where he'd gone. The Man had a date with the rest of the boys in Bethany. To break some bread and show Thomas his stigmata. And according to the Book, Thomas, who'd been out of town all week, was even more impressed than we were.