The Stone That Never Came Down by John Brunner Page B

…? Never mind. It’s years too late to go back and put that right.”
    “What?” Ruth said.
    “I’d rather not tell you,” was Malcolm’s prompt answer. He was relaxing now, moment by moment, as though within his head some process of review was taking place that was bringing him to terms with himself in the manner a psychiatrist might dream of achieving for his patients.
    “Well, whatever it was,” Ruth said tartly, “I don’t believe it can have been half as foolish as taking this VC pill. Nor can it have caused half as much trouble. Don’t you realise I’ve had to spend Christmas sleeping on that heap of cushions when I should have been at my brother’s–that I had to beg off with lies about not being well enough to travel–that my nephews cried when I told them on the phone they weren’t going to see me after all?” She glared at him. “Not to mention the agonies I went through when you slept on, and on, and on! ”
    “She’s right,” Billy said soberly. “We’d just about decided we’d been wrong, and you weren’t going to wake up naturally after all, so we’d have to face the consequences of calling a doctor and explain why we didn’t do it before. And given my reputation, and yours, and–”
    “And what shreds are left of mine!” Ruth cut in.
    “Yes. Yes, I see what you mean,” Malcolm confessed. “I think you’ve been wonderful. I’m terribly grateful to you both. And even if it was a fearful gamble it has turned out for the best in the end.”
    Setting his empty mug on the bedside table, he walked over to pick up the paper with Post’s photograph displayed, and shook it around to the front page as he returned to where he had been sitting.
    Billy said, “I’m not so sure of that.”
    “What?” Malcolm countered absently.
    “About it turning out for the best, of course! I mean, you’ve been left with what sound like lasting side-effects, right? You’re pretty cheerful right now, but how long is that going to go on?”
    “Not very long,” Malcolm said, eyes racing down the major news-stories in the paper, then turning it over to follow them on to the back page. “Dalessandro! Yes, Morris mentioned that guy–I mean Maurice Post. I didn’t remember hearing about him at the time, but I recall him now. A super-patriot with a fanatical right-wing following, the kind of guy who lays flowers at shrines in memory of Mussolini.”
    “What do you mean, not very long?” Ruth insisted.
    “What I’ve got …” Malcolm licked his lips. “It isn’t just being able to remember. It’s being able to include what I remember in my calculations. See trends and tendencies I never noticed before. Do you realise I’ve almost certainly missed the last Christmas?”
    “What?”–from both of them, uncomprehendingly.
    “When Post told me the conclusions he’d drawn from the news, I didn’t really believe him. I just pretended to agree because I was in the right kind of mood not to care if the world did come to an end.
    “But now I can fit together in my mind all the hints, all the clues he was referring to, directly or by implication. I can make a pattern of them, the same way he must have done. And do you know what the pattern shows?”
    He glanced from one to the other of them, as though challenging them to contradict.
    “What the pattern shows is World War Three.”

BOOK TWO
    Crescent

    “I was a Zen Buddhist in the 9th grade, a Hindu in the 10th, I just smoked dope in the 11th grade, then I became a vegetarian, but now I’ve found the Lord.”

    –An eighteen-year-old Jesus freak, quoted in The Last Supplement to the Whole Earth Catalog

IX

    “Look at them! Look!” Half out of his seat although the safety-belt lights were still on, Don Gebhart pointed through the window of the airliner as it taxied towards the terminal at London Airport. He was a rangy man with a prominent Adam’s apple, who always dressed in black; skeletal, he did not look in the least like a person