Cold Fire

Willpower did matter. But for God's sake, why? Why should an all-powerful alien force from another galaxy be intimidated by her unwavering resolution? Jim reported the response: "It says. For drama?'" "For drama?" she repeated.

"Yeah. F-O-R, then D-R-A-M-A, then a question mark." To the thing in the wall, she said, "Are you telling me the bells are just a bit of theater to dramatize your apparitions?" After a few seconds, Jim said, "No answer.”

"And why the question mark?" she asked The Friend. "Don't you know what the bells mean yourself, where the sound comes from, what makes it, why? Are you only guessing when you say for drama'? How can you not know what it is if it always accompanies you?" "Nothing," Jim told her.

She stared into the wall. The churning, schooling cells of light were increasingly disorienting her, but she did not close her eyes.

"A new message," Jim said." I am going.'" "Chicken," Holly said softly into the amorphous face of the thing in the wall. But she was sheathed in cold sweat now.

The amber light began to darken, turn orange.

Stepping away from the wall at last, Holly swayed and almost fell.

She moved back to her bedroll and dropped to her knees.

New words appeared on the tablet: I WILL BE BACK.

"When?" Jim asked.

WHEN THE TIDE IS MINE.

"What tide?" THERE IS A TIDE IN THE VESSEL, AN EBB AND FLOW, DARKNESS AND LIGHT. I RISE WITH THE LIGHT TIDE, BUT HE RISES WITH THE DARK.

"He?" Holly asked.

THE ENEMY.

The light in the walls was red-orange now, dimmer, but still ceaselessly changing patterns around them.

Jim said, "Two of you share the starship?" YES. TWO FORCES. TWO ENTITIES.

It's lying, Holly thought. This, like all the rest of its story, is just like the bells: good theater.

WAIT FOR MY RETURN.

"We'll wait," Jim said.

DO NOT SLEEP.

"Why can't we sleep?" Holly asked, playing along.

YOU MIGHT DREAM.

The page was full. Jim ripped it off and stacked it with the others.

The light in the walls was blood-red now, steadily fading.

DREAMS ARE DOORWAYS.

"What are you telling us?" The same three words again: DREAMS ARE DOORWAYS.

"It's a warning," Jim said.

DREAMS ARE DOORWAYS.

No, Holly thought, it's a threat.

The windmill was just a windmill again. Stones and timbers.

Mortar and nails. Dust sifting, wood rotting, iron rusting, spiders spinning in secret lairs.

Holly sat directly in front of Jim, in powwow position, their knees touching. She held both his hands, partly because she drew strength from his touch, and partly because she wanted to reassure him and take the sting out of what she was about to say.

"Listen, babe, you're the most interesting man I've ever known, the sexiest, for sure, and I think, at heart, the kindest. But you do a lousy interview. For the most part, your questions aren't well thought-out, you don't get at the meat of an issue, you follow up on irrelevancies but generally fail to follow up on the really important answers. And you're a naive enough reporter to think that the subject is always being straight with you, when they're almost never straight with an interviewer, so you don't probe the way you should.”

He did not seem offended. He smiled and said, "I didn't think of myself s a reporter doing an interview.”

"Well, kiddo, that's exactly what the situation was. The Friend, as he calls himself, has information, and we need information to know where we stand, to do our job.”

"I thought of it more as. I don't know. as an epiphany.

When God came to Moses with the Ten Commandments, I figure He just told Moses what they were, and if Moses had other questions he didn't feel he had to grill the Big Guy.”

"This wasn't God in the walls.”

"I know that. I'm past that idea now. But it was an alien intelligence so superior to us that it almost might as well be God.”

"We don't know that," she said patiently.

"Sure we do. When you consider the high degree of intelligence and the millennia needed to build a civilization capable of traveling across galaxies — good heavens, we're only monkeys by comparison!" "There, you see, that's what I'm talking about. How do you know it's from another galaxy? Because you believe what it told you. How do you know there's a spaceship under the pond? Because you believe what it told you.”

Jim was getting impatient now. "Why would it lie to us, what would it have to gain from lies?" "I don't know. But we can't be sure that it isn't manipulating us.

And when it comes back, like it promised, I want to be ready for it. I want to spend the next hour or two or three-however long we've got-making a list of questions, so we can put it through a carefully planned inquisition.

We've got to have a strategy for squeezing real information from it, facts not fantasies, and our questions have to support that strategy.”

When he frowned, she hastened on before he could interrupt.