'Never mind,' Don said. 'I'm thinkin.'
'Think till hell freezes over, Slick, and it's still gonna be mate in six moves.'
Don poured some wine into a paper cup and rolled his eyes. 'Oh boogersnot!' he cried. 'I didn't realize I was playin chess with Boris Spassky! I thought it was just plain old Faye Chapin! I apologize all to hell and gone!'
'That's a riot, Don. An act like that, you could take it on the road and make a million dollars. You won't have to wait long to do it, either - you can start just six moves from now.'
'Ain't you smart,' Don said. 'You just don't know when to--'
'Hush!' Georgina Eberly said in a sharp tone. 'What was that? It sounded like something blew up!'
'That' was Lois, sucking a flood of vibrant rainforest green from Georgina's aura.
Ralph raised his right hand, curled it into a tube around his lips, and began to inhale a similar stream of bright blue light from Stan Eberly's aura. He felt fresh energy fill him at once; it was as if fluorescent lights were going on in his brain. But that vast sunken ship, which was really no more or less than four months' worth of mostly sleepless nights, was still there, and still trying to suck him down to the place where it was.
The decision was still right there, too - not yet made one way or the other, but only deferred.
Stan was also looking around. No matter how much of his aura Ralph took (and he had drawn off a great deal, it seemed to him), the source remained as densely bright as ever. Apparently what they had been told about the all-but-endless reservoirs of energy surrounding each human being had been the exact, literal truth.
'Well,' Stan said, 'I did hear somethin--'
'I didn't,' Faye said.
'Coss not, you're deaf as dirt,' Stan replied. 'Stop interruptin for just one minute, can'tcha? I started to say it wasn't a fuel-tank, because there ain't no fire or smoke. Can't be that Don farted, either, cause there ain't no squirrels droppin dead out of the trees with their fur burnt off. I guess it musta been one of those big Air National Guard trucks backfirin. Don't worry, darlin, I'll pertect ya.'
'Pertect this,' Georgina said, slapping one hand into the crook of her elbow and curling her fist at him. She was smiling, however.
'Oh boy,' Faye said. 'Take a peek at Old Dor.'
They all looked at Dorrance, who was smiling and waving in the direction of the Harris Avenue Extension.
'Who do you see there, old fella?' Don Veazie asked with a grin.
'Ralph and Lois,' Dorrance said, smiling radiantly. 'I see Ralph and Lois. They just came out from under the old tree!'
'Yep,' Stan said. He shaded his eyes, then pointed directly at them. This delivered a wallop to Ralph's nervous system which only abated when he realized Stan was just pointing where Dorrance was waving. 'And look! There's Glenn Miller coming out right behind em! Goddam!'
Georgina threw an elbow and Stan stepped away nimbly, grinning.
['Hello, Ralph! Hello, Lois!']
['Dorrance! We're going to Strawford Park! Is that right?']
Dorrance, grinning happily: ['I don't know, it's all Long-Time business now, and I'm through with it. I'm going back home soon and read Walt Whitman. It's going to be a windy night, and Whitman's always best when the wind blows.']
Lois, sounding nearly frantic: ['Dorrance, help us!']
Dor's grin faltered, and he looked at her solemnly.
['I can't. It's passed out of my hands. Whatever's done will have to be done by you and Ralph now.']
'Ugh,' Georgina said. 'I hate it when he stares that way. You could almost believe he really does see someone.' She picked up her long-handled barbecue fork and began to toast her hotdog again. 'Has anybody seen Ralph and Lois, by the way?'
'No,' Don said.
'They're shacked up in one of those X-rated motels down the coast with a case of beer and a bottle of Johnson's Baby Oil,' Stan said. 'The giant-economy-size bottle. I toldja that yesterday.'
'Filthy old man,' Georgina said, this time throwing the elbow with a little more force and a lot more accuracy.
Ralph: ['Dorrance, can't you give us any help at all? At least tell us if we're on the right track?']
For a moment he was sure Dor was going to reply. Then there was a buzzing, approaching drone from overhead and the old man looked up. His daffy, beautiful smile resurfaced. 'Look!' he cried. 'An old Grumman Yellow Bird! And a beauty!' He jogged to the chainlink fence to watch the small yellow plane land, turning his back to them.
Ralph took Lois's arm and tried to smile himself. It was hard going - he thought he had never felt quite so frightened and confused in his entire life - but he gave it the old college try.
['Come on, dear. Let's go.']
2
Ralph remembered thinking - this while they'd been making their way along the abandoned rail-line which had eventually taken them back to the airport - that walking was not exactly what they were doing; it had seemed more like gliding. They went from the picnic area at the end of Runway 3 back to Strawford Park in that same fashion, only the glide was faster and more pronounced now. It was like being carried along by an invisible conveyor belt.
As an experiment, he stopped walking. The houses and storefronts continued to flow mildly past. He looked down at his feet to make sure, and yes, they were completely still. It seemed the sidewalk was moving, not him.
Here came Mr Dugan, head of the Derry Trust's Loan Department, decked out in his customary three-piece suit and rimless eyeglasses. As always, he looked to Ralph like the only man in the history of the world to be born without an asshole. He had once rejected Ralph's application for a Bill-Payer loan, which, Ralph supposed, might account for a few of his negative feelings about the man. Now he saw that Dugan's aura was the dull, uniform gray of a corridor in a Veterans Administration hospital, and Ralph decided that didn't surprise him much. He held his nose like a man forced to swim across a polluted canal and passed directly through the banker. Dugan did not so much as twitch.
That was sort of amusing, but when Ralph glanced at Lois, his amusement faded in a hurry. He saw the worry on her face, and the questions she wanted to ask. Questions to which he had no satisfactory answers.
Ahead was Strawford Park. As Ralph looked, the streetlights came on suddenly. The little playground where he and McGovern - Lois too, more often than not - had stood watching the children play was almost deserted. Two junior-high kids were sitting side by side on the swings, smoking cigarettes and talking, but the mothers and toddlers who came here during the daylight hours were all gone now.
Ralph thought of McGovern - of his ceaseless, morbid chatter and his self-pity, so hard to see when you first got to know him, so hard to miss once you'd been around him for awhile, both of them lightened and somehow turned into something better by his irreverent wit and his surprising, impulsive acts of kindness - and felt deep sadness steal over him. Short-Timers might be stardust, and they might be golden as well, but when they were gone they were as gone as the mothers and babies who made brief playtime visits here on sunny summer afternoons.
['Ralph, what are we doing here? The deathbag's over the Civic Center, not Strawford Park!']
Ralph guided her to the park bench where he had found her several centuries ago, crying over the argument she'd had with her son and daughter-in-law . . . and over her lost earrings. Down the hill, the two Portosans glimmered in the deepening twilight.
Ralph closed his eyes. I am going mad, he thought, and I'm headed there on the express rather than the local. Which is it going to be? The lady . . . or the tiger?
['Ralph, we have to do something. Those lives . . . those thousands of lives . . .']
In the darkness behind his closed lids, Ralph saw someone coming out of the Red Apple Store. A figure in dark corduroy pants and a Red Sox cap. Soon the terrible thing would start to happen again, and because Ralph didn't want to see it, he opened his eyes and looked at the woman beside him.
['Every life is important, Lois, wouldn't you agree? E
very single one.']
He didn't know what she saw in his aura, but it clearly terrified her.
['What happened down there after I left? What did he do or say to you? Tell me, Ralph! You tell me!']
So which was it going to be? The one or the many? The lady or the tiger? If he didn't choose soon, the choice would be taken out of his hands by nothing more than the simple passage of time. So which one? Which?
'Neither . . . or both,' he said hoarsely, unaware in his terrible agitation that he was speaking aloud, and on several different levels at once. 'I won't choose one or the other. I won't. Do you hear me?'
He leaped up from the bench, looking around wildly.
'Do you hear me?' he shouted. 'I reject this choice! I will have BOTH or I will have NEITHER!'
On one of the paths north of them, a wino who had been poking through a trash-barrel, searching for returnable cans and bottles, took one look at Ralph, then turned and ran. What he had seen was a man who appeared to be on fire.
Lois stood up and grasped his face between her hands.
['Ralph, what is it? Who is it? Me? You? Because if it's me, if you're holding back because of me, I don't want--']
He took a deep, steadying breath and then put his forehead against hers, looking into her eyes.
['It's not you, Lois, and not me. If it was either of us, I might be able to choose. But it's not, and I'll be goddamned if I'm going to be a pawn anymore.']
He shook her loose and took a step away from her. His aura flashed out so brilliantly that she had to raise her hand in front of her eyes; it was as if he were somehow exploding. And when his voice came, it reverberated in her head like thunder.
['CLOTHO! LACHESIS! COME TO ME, DAMMIT, AND COME NOW!']
3
He took two or three more steps and stood looking down the hill. The two junior-high-school boys sitting on the swings were looking up at him with identical expressions of startled fear. They were up and gone the moment Ralph's eyes lit on them, running flat-out toward the lights of Witcham Street like a couple of deer, leaving their cigarettes to smolder in the foot-ditches beneath the swings.
['CLOTHO! LACHESIS!']
He was burning like an electric arc, and suddenly all the strength ran out of Lois's legs like water. She took one step backward and collapsed onto the park bench. Her head was whirling, her heart full of terror, and below everything was that vast exhaustion. Ralph saw it as a sunken ship; Lois saw it as a pit around which she was forced to walk in a gradually tightening spiral, a pit into which she must eventually fall.
['CLOTHO! LACHESIS! LAST CHANCE! I MEAN IT!']
For a moment nothing happened, and then the doors of the Portosans at the foot of the hill opened in perfect unison. Clotho stepped from the one marked MEN, Lachesis from the one marked WOMEN. Their auras, the brilliant green-gold of summer dragonflies, glimmered in the ashy light of day's end. They moved together until their auras overlapped, then walked slowly toward the top of the hill that way, with their white-clad shoulders almost touching. They looked like a pair of frightened children.
Ralph turned to Lois. His aura still blazed and burned.
['Stay here.']
['Yes, Ralph.']
She let him get partway down the hill, then gathered her courage and called after him.
['But I'll try to stop Ed if you won't. I mean it.']
Of course she did, and his heart responded to her bravery . . . but she didn't know what he knew. Hadn't seen what he had seen.
He looked back at her for a moment, then walked down to where the two little bald doctors looked at him with their luminous, frightened eyes.
4
Lachesis, nervously: [We didn't lie to you - we didn't.]
Clotho, even more nervously (if that were possible): [Deepneau is on his way. You have to stop him, Ralph - you have to at least try.]
The fact is I don't have to anything, and your faces show it, he thought. Then he turned to Lachesis, and was gratified to see the small bald man flinch from his gaze and drop his dark, pupil-less eyes.
['Is that so? When we were on the hospital roof you told us to stay away from Ed, Mr L. You were very emphatic about that.']
Lachesis shifted uncomfortably and fidgeted with his hands.
[I . . . that is to say we . . . we can be wrong. This time we were.]
Except Ralph knew that wrong wasn't the best word for what they had been; self-deceived would be better. He wanted to scold them for it - oh, tell the truth, he wanted to scold them for getting him into this shitting mess in the first place - and found he couldn't. Because, according to old Dor, even their self-deception had served the Purpose; the side-trip to High Ridge had for some reason not been a side-trip at all. He didn't understand why or how that was, but he intended to find out, if finding out was possible.
['Let's forget that part of it for the time being, gentlemen, and talk about why all this is happening. If you want help from me and Lois, I think you better tell me.']
They looked at each other with their big, frightened eyes, then back at Ralph.
Lachesis: [Ralph, do you doubt that all those people are really going to die? Because if you do--]
['No, but I'm tired of having them waved in my face. If an earthquake that served the Purpose happened to be scheduled for this area and the butcher's bill came to ten thousand instead of just two thousand and change, you'd never even bat an eye, would you? So what's so special about this situation? Tell me!']
Clotho: [Ralph, we don't make the rules any more than you do. We thought you understood that.]
Ralph sighed.
['You're weaseling again, and not wasting anybody's time but your own.']
Clotho, uneasily: [All right, perhaps the picture we gave you wasn't completely clear, but time was short and we were frightened. And you must see that, regardless of all else, those people will die if you can't stop Ed Deepneau!]
['Never mind all of them for now; I only want to know about one of them - the one who belongs to the Purpose and can't be handed over just because some undesignated pisher comes along with a headful of loose screws and a planeful of explosive. Who is it you feel you can't give up to the Random? Who? It's Day, isn't it? Susan Day.']
Lachesis: [No. Susan Day is part of the Random. She is none of our concern, none of our worry.]
['Who, then?']
Clotho and Lachesis exchanged another glance. Clotho nodded slightly, and then they both turned back to Ralph. Once again Lachesis flicked the first two fingers of his right hand upward, creating that peacock's fan of light. It wasn't McGovern Ralph saw this time, but a little boy with blond hair cut in bangs across his forehead and a hook-shaped scar across the bridge of his nose. Ralph placed him at once - the kid from the basement of High Ridge, the one with the bruised mother. The one who had called him and Lois angels.
And a little child shall lead them, he thought, utterly flabbergasted. Oh my God. He looked disbelievingly at Clotho and Lachesis.
['Am I understanding? All this has been about that one little boy?']
He expected more waffling, but the reply from Clotho was simple and direct: [Yes, Ralph.]
Lachesis: [He's at the Civic Center now. His mother, whose life you and Lois also saved this morning, got a call from her babysitter less than an hour ago, saying she'd cut herself badly on a piece of glass and wouldn't be able to take care of the boy tonight after all. By then it was too late to find another sitter, of course, and this woman has been determined for weeks to see Susan Day . . . to shake her hand, even give her a hug, if possible. She idolizes the Day woman.]
Ralph, who remembered the fading bruises on her face, supposed that was an idolatry he could understand. He understood something else even better: the babysitter's cut hand had been no accident. Something was determined to place the little boy with the shaggy blond bangs and the smoke-reddened eyes at the Civic Center, and was willing to move heaven and earth to do it. His mother had taken him not because she was a bad parent, but be
cause she was as subject to human nature as anyone else. She hadn't wanted to miss her one chance at seeing Susan Day, that was all.
No, it's not all, Ralph thought. She also took him because she thought it would be safe, with Pickering and his Daily Bread crazies all dead. It must have seemed to her that the worst she'd have to protect her son from tonight would be a bunch of sign-waving pro-lifers, that lightning couldn't possibly strike her and her son twice on the same day.
Ralph had been gazing off toward Witcham Street. Now he turned back to Clotho and Lachesis.
['You're sure he's there? Positive?']
Clotho: [Yes. Sitting in the upper north balcony next to his mother with a McDonald's poster to color and some storybooks. Would it surprise you to know that one of the stories is The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins?]
Ralph shook his head. At this point, nothing would surprise him.
Lachesis: [It's the north side of the Civic Center that Deepneau's plane will strike. This little boy will be killed instantly if steps are not taken to prevent it . . . and that can't be allowed to happen. This boy must not die before his scheduled time.]
5
Lachesis was looking earnestly at Ralph. The fan of blue-green light between his fingers had disappeared.
[We can't go on talking like this, Ralph - he's already in the air, less than a hundred miles from here. Soon it will be too late to stop him.]
That made Ralph feel frantic, but he held his place just the same. Frantic, after all, was how they wanted him to feel. How they wanted both of them to feel.
['I'm telling you that none of that matters until I understand what the stakes are. I won't let it matter.']
Clotho: [Listen, then. Every now and again a man or woman comes along whose life will affect not just those about him or her, or even all those who live in the Short-Time world, but those on many levels above and below the Short-Time world. These people are the Great Ones, and their lives always serve the Purpose. If they are taken too soon, everything changes. The scales cease to balance. Can you imagine, for instance, how different the world might be today if Hitler had drowned in the bathtub as a child? You may believe the world would be better for that, but I can tell you that the world would not exist at all if it had happened. Suppose Winston Churchill had died of food-poisoning before he ever became Prime Minister? Suppose Augustus Caesar had been born dead, strangled on his own umbilicus? Yet the person we want you to save is of far greater importance than any of these.]