Free The Astral Mirror by Ben Bova Page A

just drop everything! This world doesn’t work that way. I can’t just... walk away from all this!”
    “That’s the deal,” the angel said. “Give it up. All of it. Or spend eternity in hell.”
    “But you can’t expect me to...” He gaped. The angel was no longer in the room with him. For several minutes he stared into the empty air. Then, knees shaking, he arose and walked to the closet. It too was empty of strange personages.
    He looked down at his hands. They trembled.
    “I must be going crazy,” he muttered to himself. “Too much strain. Too much tension.” But even as he said it, he made his way to the telephone on the bedside table. He hesitated a moment, then grabbed up the phone and punched a number he had memorized months earlier.
    “Hello, Chuck? Yes, this is me. Yes, yes, everything went fine tonight. Up to a point.”
    He listened to his underling babbling flattery into the phone, wondering how many times he had given his power of attorney to this weakling and to equally venal deputies.
    “Listen, Chuck,” he said at last. “I have a job for you. And it’s got to be done right, understand? Okay, here’s the deal—” he winced inwardly at the word. But, taking a deep manly breath, he plunged ahead. “You know the Democrats are setting up their campaign quarters in that new apartment building—what’s it called, Watergate? Yeah. Okay. Now I think it would serve our purposes very well if we bugged the place before the campaign really starts to warm up...”
    There were tears in his eyes as he spoke. But from far, far away, he could hear a heavenly chorus singing.

The Secret Life of Henry K.
     
    This late at night, even the busiest corridors of the Pentagon were deserted. Dr. Young’s footsteps echoed hollowly as he followed the mountainous, tight-lipped, grim-faced man. Another equally large and steely-eyed man followed behind him, in lockstep with the first.
    They were agents, Dr. Young knew that without being told. Their clothing bulged with muscles trained in murderous Oriental arts, other bulges in unlikely places along their anatomy were various pieces of equipment: guns, two-way radios, stilettos, Bowie knives... Young decided his imagination wasn’t rich enough to picture all the equipment these men might be carrying.
    After what seemed like an hour’s walk down a constantly curving corridor, the agent in front stopped abruptly before an inconspicuous, unmarked door.
    “In here,” he said, barely moving his lips.
    The door opened by itself, and Dr. Young stepped into what seemed to be an ordinary receptionist’s office. It was no bigger than a cubicle, and even in the dim lighting— from a single desk lamp, the overhead lights were off— Young could see that the walls were the same sallow depressing color as most Pentagon offices.
    “The phone will ring,” the agent said, glancing at a watch that looked absolutely dainty on his massive hairy wrist, “in exactly one minute and fifteen seconds. Sit at the desk. Answer when it rings.”
    With that, he shut the door firmly, leaving Dr. Young alone and bewildered in the tiny anteroom.
    There was only one desk, cleared of papers. It was a standard government-issue battered metal desk. IN and OUT boxes stood empty atop it. Nothing else on it but a single black telephone. There were two creaky-looking straight-backed metal chairs in front of the desk, and a typist’s swivel chair behind it. The only other things in the room were a pair of file cabinets, side by side, with huge padlocks and red SECURE signs on them, and a bulletin board that had been miraculously cleared of everything except the little faded fire-emergency instruction card.
    Dr. Young found that his hands were trembling. He wished that he hadn’t given up cigarettes: after all, oral eroticism isn’t all that bad. He glanced at the closed hallway door and knew that both the burly agents were standing outside, probably with their arms folded across their chest in