"I remember you," Bailey said. His voice sounded blurred in his ears; the room, the girl, the man sitting rigid behind the desk had taken on a dream-like quality. "You're the girl who helped me. I never learned your name."
"Throw the gun away, William," she said urgently.
Bailey trembled, sick with the hunger of his need to shoot, restrained by the impossibility of killing the girl. "I can't," he groaned. "I have to kill him!"
"Why?" the girl demanded.
"The voice," he said, remembering. "In the Euthanasia Center, it told me how to control my circulation to keep the drug from paralyzing my heart, how to make my legs work enough to carry me out through the service door. It told me to come here, shoot Micael Drans! I have to kill him! Stand aside! I'll kill you if I have to!"
"William," the girl's voice was low, urgent. "Micael Drans is more important than you can dream—than even he dreams." She spoke over her shoulder to the waiting and watching man. "Micael—something very important has happened within the last few hours." It was a statement, not a question. Drans nodded slowly. "Yes." He seemed calm, merely puzzled.
"A message," the girl said. "A message from very far away."
A look of incredulity came over Drans' face. "How could you know of that, Aliea?"
"The message is genuine," the girl said in an intense voice. "Believe it, Micael!" Bailey listened, feeling the sweat trickling down the side of his face. His heart thudded dully.
"I think I understand part of it, William," the girl went on. "You received a part—but I received the rest! You knew what—and I knew why. I made my way here—just as you did. I didn't understand, then—but now I do! And you must, too!"
"I have to kill him—"
"I can shoot first, William," she said steadily. "You're confused, under terrible stress. I'm not. You must try to understand. Perhaps . . ." She broke off. "William, close your eyes. Concentrate. Let me try to reach you . . . !"
Like an automaton, he followed instructions. Blackness. Swirling light. Out of the darkness, a shape that hovered, a complex structure of light that was not light, a structure incomplete, needing him to complete it. He moved toward it, sensing how the ragged surfaces of his own being reached out to meet and merge with its opposite—
Light blossomed like a sudden dawn. All barriers fell. Her mind lay open to him.
Now come, William, her voice spoke in his brain. I'll lead you . . . He followed along a dark path that plunged down, down, through terrible emptiness . . .
And emerged into—somewhere. He was aware of the compound ego-matrix that was himself, Bailey/Aliea; saw all the foreshortened perspective of his narrow life, her pinched, love-starved existence. And saw the presence that had reached out, touched him/her. And abruptly, he/she was that other presence.