McGovern’s aura, however, was totally black. The stump of what had once been a balloon-string jutted stiffly up from it. The thunderstruck baby’s balloon-string had been short but healthy; what they were looking at now was the decaying remnant of a crude amputation. Ralph had a momentary image, so strong it was almost a hallucination, of McGovern’s eyes first bulging and then popping out of their sockets, knocked loose by a flood of black bugs. He had to close his own eyes for a moment to keep from screaming, and when he opened them again, Lois was no longer at his side.
2
McGovern and his friend were walking in the direction of the nurses’ station, probably bound for the water-fountain. Lois was in hot pursuit, trotting up the corridor, bosom heaving. Her aura flashed with twizzling pinkish sparks that looked like neon-flavored asterisks. Ralph bolted after her. He didn’t know what would happen if she caught McGovern’s attention, and didn’t really want to find out. He thought he was probably going to, however.
[
‘Lois! Lois, don’t do that!’
]
She ignored him.
[
‘Bill, stop! You have to listen to me! Something’s wrong with you!’
]
McGovern paid no attention to her; he was talking about Bob Polhurst’s manuscript,
Later That Summer
. ‘Best damned book on the Civil War I ever read,’ he told the man inside the plum-colored aura, ‘but when I suggested that he publish, he told me that was out of the question. Can you believe it? A possible Pulitzer Prize winner, but—’
[
‘Lois, come back! Don’t go near him!’
]
[
‘Bill! Bill! B—’
]
Lois reached McGovern just before Ralph was able to reach her. She put out her hand to grab his shoulder. Ralph saw her fingers plunge into the murk which surrounded him . . . and then slide
into
him.
Her aura changed at once, from a gray-blue shot with those pinkish sparks to a red as bright as the side of a fire engine. Jagged flocks of black shot through it like clouds of tiny swarming insects. Lois screamed and pulled her hand back. The expression on her face was a mixture of terror and loathing. She held her hand up in front of her eyes and screamed again, although Ralph could see nothing on it. Narrow black stripes were now whirring giddily around the outer edges of her aura; to Ralph they looked like planetary orbits marked on a map of the solar system. She turned to flee. Ralph grabbed her by the upper arms and she beat at him blindly.
McGovern and his friend, meanwhile, continued their placid amble up the hall to the drinking fountain, completely unaware of the shrieking, struggling woman not ten feet behind them. ‘When I asked Bob why he wouldn’t publish the book,’ McGovern was continuing, ‘he said that I of all people should understand his reasons. I told him . . .’
Lois drowned him out, shrieking like a firebell.
[
‘!!! - - - - - - !!! - - - - - - - - - - !!!
’]
[
‘Quit it, Lois! Quit it right now! Whatever happened to you is over now! It’s over and you’re all right!’
]
But Lois continued to struggle, dinning those inarticulate screams into his head, trying to tell him how awful it had been, how he’d been
rotting,
that there were things inside him,
eating him alive,
and that was bad enough, but it wasn’t the worst. Those things were
aware,
she said, they were
bad,
and
they had known she was there
.
[
‘Lois, you’re with me! You’re with me and it’s all r—’
]
One of her flying fists clipped the side of his jaw and Ralph saw stars. He understood that they had passed to a plane of reality where physical contact with others was impossible – hadn’t he seen Lois’s hand pass directly into McGovern, like the hand of a ghost? – but they were obviously still real enough to each other; he had the bruised jaw to prove it.
He slipped his arms around her and hugged her against him, imprisoning her fists between her breasts and his chest. Her cries
[
‘!!! - - - - - - - - - !!! - - - - - - - - !!!’
]
continued to rant and blast in his head, however. He locked his hands together between her shoulderblades and squeezed. He felt the power leap out of him again, as it had that morning, only this time it felt entirely different. Blue light spilled through Lois’s turbulent red-black aura, soothing it. Her struggles slowed and then ceased. He felt her draw a shuddering breath. Above and around her, the blue glow was expanding and fading. The black bands disappeared from her aura, one after the other, from the bottom up, and then that alarming shade of infected red also began to fade. She put her head against his arm.
[
‘I’m sorry, Ralph – I went nuclear again, didn’t I?’
]
[
‘I suppose so, but never mind. You’re okay now. That’s the important thing.’
]
[
‘If you knew how horrible that was . . . touching him that way . . .’
]
[
‘You put it across very well, Lois.’
]
She glanced down the corridor, where McGovern’s friend was now getting a drink. McGovern lounged against the wall next to him, talking about how the Exalted & Revered Bob Polhurst had always done the
Sunday New York Times
crossword puzzle in ink. ‘He used to tell me that wasn’t pride but optimism,’ McGovern said, and the deathbag swirled sluggishly around him as he spoke, flowing in and out of his mouth and between the fingers of his gesturing, eloquent hand.
[
‘We can’t help him, can we, Ralph? There’s not a thing in the world we can do.’
]
Ralph gave her a brief, strong hug. Her aura, he saw, had entirely returned to normal.
McGovern and his friend were walking back down the corridor toward them. Acting on impulse, Ralph disengaged himself from Lois and stepped directly in front of Mr Plum, who was listening to McGovern hold forth on the tragedy of old age and nodding in the right places.
[
‘Ralph, don’t do that!’
]
[
‘It’s okay, don’t worry.’
]
But all at once he wasn’t so sure it
was
okay. He might have stepped back, given another second. Before he could, however, Mr Plum glanced unseeingly into his face and walked right through him. The sensation that swept through Ralph’s body at his passage was perfectly familiar; it was the pins-and-needles feeling one gets when a sleeping limb starts to wake up. For one moment his aura and Mr Plum’s mingled, and Ralph knew everything about the man that there was to know, including the dreams he’d had in his mother’s womb.
Mr Plum stopped short.
‘Something wrong?’ McGovern asked.
‘I guess not, but . . . did you hear a bang someplace? Like a firecracker, or a car backfire?’
‘Can’t say I did, but my hearing isn’t what it used to be.’ McGovern chuckled. ‘If something
did
blow up, I certainly hope it wasn’t in one of the radiation labs.’
‘I don’t hear anything now. Probably just my imagination.’ They turned into Bob Polhurst’s room.
Ralph thought,
Mrs Perrine said it sounded like a gunshot. Lois’s friend thought there was a bug on her, maybe biting her. Just a difference in touch, maybe, the way different piano-players have different touches. Either way, they feel it when we mess with them. They may not know what it is, but they sure do feel it.
Lois took his hand and led him to the door of Room 313. They stood in the hall, looking in as McGovern seated himself in a plastic contour chair at the foot of the bed. There were at least eight people crammed into the room and Ralph couldn’t see Bob Polhurst clearly, but he could see one thing: although he was deep within his own deathbag, Polhurst’s balloon-string was still intact. It was as filthy as a rusty exhaust pipe, peeling in some places and cracked in others . . . but it was still intact. He turned to Lois.
[
‘These people may have longer to wait than they think.’
]
Lois nodded, then pointed down at the greeny-gold footprints – the white-man tracks. They bypassed 313, Ralph saw, but turned in at the next doorway – 315, Jimmy V’s room.
He and Lois walked up together and stood looking in. Jimmy V had three visitors, and the one sitting beside the bed thought he was all alone. That one was Faye Chapin, idly looking through the double stack of get-well cards on Jimmy’s bedside table. The other two were the little bald doctors Ralph had seen for the first time on May Locher’s stoop. They stood at the foot of Jimmy V’s bed, solemn in their clean white tunics, and now that he stood close to them, Ralph could see that there were worlds of character in those unlined, almost identical faces; it just wasn’t the sort of thing one could see through a pair of binoculars – or maybe not until you slid up the ladder of perception a little way. Most of it was in the eyes, which were dark, pupil-less, and flecked with deep golden glints. Those eyes shone with intelligence and lively awareness. Their auras gleamed and flashed around them like the robes of emperors . . .
. . . or perhaps of Centurions on a visit of state.
They looked over at Ralph and Lois, who stood holding hands in the doorway like children who have lost their way in a fairy-tale wood, and smiled at them.
[
Hello, woman.
]
That was Doc #1. He was holding the scissors in his right hand. The blades were very long, and the points looked very sharp. Doc #2 took a step toward them and made a funny little half-bow.
[
Hello, man. We’ve been waiting for you.
]
3
Ralph felt Lois’s hand tighten on his own, then loosen as she decided they were in no immediate danger. She took a small step forward, looking from Doc #1 to Doc #2 and then back to #1 again.
[
‘Who are you?’
]
Doc #1 crossed his arms over his small chest. The long blades of his scissors lay the entire length of his white-clad left forearm.
[
We don’t have names, not the way Short-Timers do – but you may call us after the fates in the story this man has already told you. That these names originally belonged to women means little to us, since we are creatures with no sexual dimension. I will be Clotho, although I spin no thread, and my colleague and old friend will be Lachesis, although he shakes no rods and has never thrown the coins. Come in, both of you – please!
]
They came in and stood warily between the visitor’s chair and the bed. Ralph didn’t think the docs meant them any harm – for now, at least – but he still didn’t want to get too close. Their auras, so bright and fabulous compared to those of ordinary people, intimidated him, and he could see from Lois’s wide eyes and half-open mouth that she felt the same. She sensed him looking at her, turned toward him, and tried to smile.
My Lois,
Ralph thought. He put an arm around her shoulders and hugged her briefly.
Lachesis: [
We’ve given you our names – names you may use, at any rate; won’t you give us yours?
]
Lois: [
‘You mean you don’t already know? Pardon me, but I find that hard to believe.’
]
Lachesis: [
We
could
know, but choose not to. We like to observe the rules of common Short-Time politeness wherever we can. We find them lovely, for they are passed on by your kind from large hand to small and create the illusion of long lives.
]
[
‘I don’t understand.’
]
Ralph didn’t, either, and wasn’t sure he wanted to. He found something faintly patronizing in the tone of the one who called himself Lachesis, something that reminded him of McGovern when he was in a mood to lecture or pontificate.
Lachesis: [
It doesn’t matter. We felt sure you would come. We know that you were watching us on Monday morning, man, at the home of
]
At this point there was a queer overlapping in Lachesis’s speech. He seemed to say two things at exactly the same time, the terms rolling together like a snake with its own tail in its mouth:
[
May Locher.
] [
the finished woman
.]
Lois took a hesitant step forward.
[
‘My name is Lois Chasse. My friend is Ralph Roberts. And now that we’ve all been properly introduced, maybe you two fellows will tell us what’s going on around here.’
]
Lachesis: [
There is another to be named
.]
Clotho: [
Ralph Roberts has already named him
.]
Lois looked at Ralph, who was nodding his head.
[
‘They’re talking about Doc #3. Right, guys?’
]
Clotho and Lachesis nodded. They were wearing identical approving smiles. Ralph supposed he should have been flattered, but he wasn’t. Instead he was afraid, and very angry – they had been neatly manipulated, every step down the line. This was no chance meeting; it had been a setup from the word go. Clotho and Lachesis, just a couple of little bald doctors with time on their hands, standing around in Jimmy V’s room waiting for the Short-Timers to arrive, ho-hum.
Ralph glanced over at Faye and saw he had taken a book called
50 Classic Chess Problems
out of his back pocket. He was reading and picking his nose in ruminative fashion as he did so. After a few preliminary explorations, Faye dove deep and hooked a big one. He examined it, then parked it on the underside of the bedside table. Ralph looked away, embarrassed, and a saying of his grandmother’s popped into his mind:
Peek not through a keyhole, lest ye be vexed
. He had lived to be seventy without fully understanding that; at last he thought he did. Meanwhile, another question had occurred to him.
[
‘Why doesn’t Faye see us? Why didn’t Bill and his friend see us, for that matter? And how could that man walk right through me? Or did I just imagine that?’
]