Mason grabbed Suleiman’s hand, and Mason’s rock-hard grip frightened him, and for the first time, he saw what everyone else did; hundreds of the white-uniformed humanoids were spilling out of the embassy now.
“What is this?” Suleiman said, in a halting English. “Is the embassy . . . is it angry?”
“I don’t know,” Astrid said to him. “But it’s not good.”
Thousands of London’s citizens were pouring into Grosvenor Square, all pushed and prodded by the beings in white.
The cellular artistry of Eero Saarinen’s chancery was revealing itself as something, indeed, not of this Earth—it was serving, literally, as hell’s, not heaven’s “Gate” for the animals.
A great plasmatic quarkbeam suddenly exploded from the roof of the embassy. It curved high above central London. It flowed parallel to the ground for a mile or two, and bent down again, somewhere north, toward the zoo, a plunging finger of doom. It formed a colossal arc of nervous subatomic particles, a sort of white suitcase handle with which Atlas might have picked up the borough of Westminster and hurled it into the stratosphere.
All the rectangular panels of Saarinen’s soulless facade immediately were illuminated and began to glow a lurid red. In each of the cells, Astrid could see mammalian silhouettes slowly appear and dissolve. Kudus, tree shrews, frogs, corgi dogs, porpoises—they flickered and were gone. The mammoth, satanic soul-eating machine had started to suck in all the souls of living animals of earth. It was just as the sand cat had warned St. Cuthbert. Here was the device “from outside the desert,” a product of some distant intergalactic malfeasance, switched on like the demon Baphomet’s vacuum cleaner.
Some of the white-suited Neuters, meanwhile, had opened long silver staves that smoothly glided up from their soft pale wrists to deliver powerful quantum contra-fluxal shocks. Then the cultists began to work the staves, like stock prods, blue sparks flying out, jabbing the applicants and CIA agents and analysts and police officers, even some of the autoreporters who had shown up, herding them toward the table with the alcohol. There the shepherded were made to imbibe from blackberry-colored orbs of Flōt. It was dosed, Astrid suspected, with barbiturate. This was how the Heaven’s Gate cult killed you. Did they, she wondered, as they murdered you, slip their famous enigmatic $5 bill into your pocket right then, the currency meant perhaps to pay the toll of some intergalactic Charon, thus ensuring a steady stream of souls to their comet world?
The red-haired man was still resisting until he was thrust down and held in place with at least three of the alien stock prods. One of the cult members began to beat and shock him aggressively until he stopped moving, stopped making noise, and when that happened, Astrid felt sure that she was next.
Amid the chaos, the leader of the cult, Marshall Applewhite III, appeared in the door of the lift that the security team had used. He wore the same silvery tunic Astrid had seen him wearing when she watched the telly with Sykes at the Seamen’s Rest. It was a ridiculously campy garment one might see on some Venusian high priest from an old science fiction B movie. His tall frame and shaved head would have made him seem menacing, but his large blue fawn eyes, his good posture, his expression of barely repressed merriment, offered a sugared charisma. Astrid could almost see why so many followed him to their deaths. Almost.
“You’re freakstyle,” she said. “I must be close to the end now. You are the Flōt withdrawal talking. You’re a figment, you are.”
“I’m sorry,” Applewhite said, moving somehow closer to Astrid. “I’m as real as the comet,” he added, pointing toward the sky. “I’m sorry—do not be afraid. You’ll see. Everything is fan-ta-stic!”
Astrid wanted to shove the creep away from her, but he preempted this by moving himself along.
MOST OF THE PEOPLE being driven like cattle were only zapped a few times before taking their potion willingly. Applewhite himself was touring the operation like a kind of foreman inspecting the factory floor. He nodded and smiled and patted people on the back in a starchy, awkward way, and even tried to comfort prospective victims, giving quick hugs and laughing. “Exiting isn’t death,” he said. “In Level Above Human, you’ll all get new, eternal bodies built—and they’re so beautiful!—for space travel.” But if those herded and prodded ones did not become pliable, the Neuter soldiers squirted poisoned Flōt or champagne down their throats, sometimes stuffing in a handful of crackers and pills and a fig for good measure. At these ugly scenes Applewhite merely gave an exaggerated pout of sympathy and walked on.
“Let’s all be nice,” he said at one point.