Whitley Strieber - The Omega Point

These bastards had known this, he suspected, right to the minute. That was why they had prepared their little escape hatch when they had. They would also realize that it was the most valuable thing in the world, or that had ever been in the world.

Well, they would do it all again, but not here. They would do it for him. He just very badly needed those people from the town to come up and create his diversion. Then he would take Light and Ford where he wanted to take them, and do with them what he needed to do.

As David watched the rising of the new star, the red star, he thought of the Book of Revelation. What was the past, that it was so wise that it could write such books? As he looked back from the world as it was now, history seemed to him to be a long process of going blind.

He thought, I am at stage two of the process of dying, I’m beginning to accept the reality of what’s happening, and that’s changing my perspective.

It meant accepting that he could not keep the Acton Clinic functioning and he could not save the patients. Perhaps there had been a mission. Of course there had. But he did not think that even Herbert Action had been able to imagine the sheer scale of the catastrophe.

He tried to shake off the simmering anguish of failure, but that was not going to be possible.

“David.”

A shock went through him and he whirled around—and found himself confronting a large group of people who had entered his office so quietly that he had not heard them.

“David,” Caroline said again. He did not like that tone. He did not like this crowd. On top of everything else, now he had a rebellion on his hands.

Glen was there, Bev Cross and Sam Taylor, and a dozen or more patients, among them Susan Denman and a mysteriously recovered Aaron Stein, who had been among the most profoundly psychotic. Katie was nowhere to be seen.

Caroline said, “We’re a delegation.”

“May I know your complaint? I presume it is a complaint.”

Bev brought out a disposable syringe. “David, we’re going to do this.”

It was the substance—the gold.

“David,” Glen said, “you need to let us.”

Caroline’s lips were a stern line, but her eyes were pale clouds, heavy with tears.

“We’ve all taken it, David,” Sam said. “We all remember.”

“I’ve taken it.”

“How much have you taken?” Aaron asked.

“How much have you taken, Aaron? Any of you? I know the answer and so do you. Very damn little, just like me. So what does that tell you? It doesn’t work for me .”

Glen asked, “Will you let Bev inject you?”

There was a stirring in the room.

“Look, I understand everything.” He gestured toward the lamp. “I even understand how Herbert Acton saw into time. But I don’t understand how this is going to help. Why would my brain require a megadose?”

“David,” Caroline said, “once you wake up, you’ll thank us.”

“For injecting me with a heavy metal? I don’t think so.”

Glen said, “It isn’t a heavy metal anymore.”

“It’s gold, for God’s sake. If you think that’s not a heavy metal, you missed high school science.” He was thinking about the Beretta he’d been issued. If he could get to his desk, he could regain control of this situation.

Bev attempted to get behind him, but he turned as she did. “You can’t put gold in somebody’s veins.”

“You can.”

“What you made in that furnace is amateur chemistry. You can’t inject somebody with amateur chemistry.”

“It isn’t amateur,” Caroline said, “and it isn’t chemistry.” She gestured toward the glyphs above the door. “It induces the union of those two principles and results in an extension of consciousness beyond space and time.”

“Look, I’m a doctor and I can only say that ingesting a heavy metal is bad, but taking one in an injection is going to be catastrophic.”

“You’re in amnesia—”

“I’ve remembered everything, Caroline! The class, all of it. So I don’t need this—this attack. I do not need it.” Again he looked toward the desk. The gun was in there.

“David, your amnesia is emotional. What the gold will do is open a door in you that’s locked tight right now. The door to the heart.”

“The heart has no place in this.”

“David, the heart is everything! Without love to sustain us, we cannot make the journey.”

“Look, folks, you need to face something, all of you. We aren’t going to be making any journeys through time. Herbert Acton was incredibly accomplished, but he was also deluded. You can see into time. But actual, physical movement? Forget it.”

He saw Glen’s eyes flicker toward Sam, who came forward and was suddenly behind him with Beverly. Once again, David started to turn toward them, but this expert restrained him by immobilizing his arms just above the elbows.

Sam said, “Sorry, boss.”

Glen said, “Either this happens with a struggle or without a struggle, it’s your choice.”

Part of him considered the provable skills of Herbert Acton and part of him the arrogance of these people—but then Bev removed the sheath from the needle and all of him felt anger.

“How dare you,” he shouted, and he kicked at them.

“Hold him,” Caroline said. “We need the neck!”

“Jesus God, NO!” But they swarmed him and immobilized him with their bodies. “Don’t do this, this is insane!”

They forced him to the floor, they held his head so that he could not move it. He felt Bev swabbing the left side of his neck just above the carotid.

“Okay,” she said, “you’ll feel this one, hon.”

The needle was fire and he bellowed; he twisted and writhed and tried to move his head enough to dislodge it but he could not dislodge it, and he felt the substance running like lava through the vein.

Then it hit his brain in an explosion of darting sparks, each of which seemed filled with information, and in the next instant he saw beyond words, beyond thought, beyond language itself, into the pure, wordless mathematics of hyperspace.

Which he understood—and with it, also understood more of himself than ever before, that they were, in one sense, right about him, that he contained an enormous past stretching across eons among the living and eons among the dead. He saw, also, that a living man and a dead man are simply two aspects of one creature. The living form moves through life in an active state; a dead man is the same creature in its contemplative form, looking at what has been done, and in so doing seeing the truth of the self.

There came next a burst of pure physicality—bodily sensation in its purest form, the agony of pleasure and the agony of pain mixed together.

“Oh, God, God, I’m… I think I’m having a stroke. You’re giving me a stroke!”

“No,” Caroline said. Her hand on his forehead was cool and firm, and the tears in her eyes gleamed.

Then something happened that he had not expected and could not expect. The rich, vivid sensation of his body seemed to concentrate until it was a single, burning point—and then his head, for want of a better word to explain total annihilation, exploded.

He had no eyes to see with, no ears to hear with, no sensation of the world around him.

He thought, They killed me. They’re all crazy and they killed me. This was a blood sacrifice.

But the black that had enveloped him was not like the abyss he had glimpsed earlier. This darkness was vividly alive, and also changing, and it changed by degrees through all the colors that were on the Tiffany lamp, until it was a radiance, and suddenly he was no longer in a void, but back in his office.

He saw also within him another being who was not him but who occupied a place in hyperspace that was at once everywhere and was deeply, profoundly specific. He saw that this being, who had been called Osiris, who had been called Christ, who had been called Quetzalcoatl and Viracocha, who had been called so many different names, was right here, right now, and he understood why the preflood ritual that was now known as communion, the sharing of the flesh, had been preserved, because to accept Him into your body was to accept Him into your soul.