“Oh, yes.”
Pami got out of the car to stretch her legs. Also, she was curious about the other person in that car. If he was a man, why didn’t he change the tire himself? Why didn’t he even get out of the car? She strolled forward.
Kwan had been napping. Now he sat up, sharply aware again of the nasty sting and burn in his throat. It had been so hard to get the apple juice down. He was very hungry, but how was he going to eat? These people he’d fallen among wouldn’t be able to feed him intravenously. Should he just give up, return to his fate? Or try again to kill himself? He watched Frank open the trunk of the car and take out a wheelchair. Kwan closed his eyes. I don’t think I can go on, he thought.
Frank put the wheelchair to one side and went back into the trunk for the spare, as Pami strolled by. Grigor, seated in the front passenger seat with the window open, watched the thin black girl in the outside mirror as she approached. He readied a small smile, not showing the interior of his ruined mouth, and looked up as she came parallel to him and glanced in. “Hello,” he said.
“Yes, hello,” Pami said, looking him over, understanding why he hadn’t leaped out to change the tire. Merely curious, she said, “You got slim?”
“What?”
“No, that’s not it,” Pami corrected herself. “Here it’s AIDS.”
Grigor smiled again, remembering to keep his lips closed. “No, not me,” he said. Then he looked at her more closely, the bone structure visible in her face, the darkness beneath her eyes, the boniness of her shoulders. “But that’s what’s got you, is it?”
“Oh, yeah,” Pami said, with a shrug. “Anybody can see it now. No more work for me.”
Grigor peered in the outside mirror again at Frank, just hunkering down by the rear wheel, pushing the jack in underneath. “Is that your doctor?”
Pami laughed. “You bet. Cure us all.”
“Not me,” Grigor said.
“Why? What you got?”
“Chernobyl.”
“What’s that?”
While Grigor explained to Pami what had happened to him, Maria Elena said to Frank, “I was feeling very lost before you came.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“The tire breaking the way it did, it was as though everything I touched had to fail.”
The lug nuts were giving Frank a hard time. He said, “I know the feeling.”
“My husband has left me,” she told him. “My friend in the car is dying. Everything I do has failed. I wanted to make things better, but I didn’t.”
Frank stopped his work to look up at her. A lid seemed to come off some boiling pot in his brain. He said, “I’m an ex-con, habitual loser, I jumped parole, did a million little burglaries. I never hurt anybody, but then I went in with another guy, and an old man died. That’s the money I’m spending. I still dream about that old guy.”
Maria Elena looked toward Kwan, barely visible in the backseat of the Toyota. She glanced back at Pami, talking with Grigor. She said to Frank, “Where are you all going?”
“To hell in a handbasket,” Frank said, and pulled the ruined tire off its rim.
“That work will make your hands very dirty,” Maria Elena said.
“Yeah, I know that.”
“When you are finished,” she said, “come to my house.”
Ananayel
Now! my five triggers are together at last, and now all they have to do is find the path I have cleared for them, and the game is over.
I will miss them, I’m afraid, miss all of it, miss the Earth and the humans and even contesting my will against that fiend. The long doze of my life will be as comfortable in the future as it has always been, I know that, and the joy of doing His service will remain untarnished. But still, when I look back, from eons away, at this augenblick in my existence, this speck of time, this brief instant of vivid color and vivid emotion, I will remember it with fondness.
Susan Carrigan.
Well, yes. I have made a study of this problem, while my players have been ricocheting toward one another, and I have proved to my own satisfaction that Susan Carrigan is nothing special. There are millions of such young women scattered over the globe, unmarried as yet, doing small things with clean neat fingers, whether in banks like Susan, or in clothing mills, or in lawyer’s offices, or in computer assembly plants, and they are all the same.
That’s the point. Such minor differences as occur in the appearance of these young women is as momentous as, to a human, the differences between two collies. Such shadings and gradations of personality as they provide within their basic nature as wholehearted servants are of even less moment. There is nothing to distinguish one from the other.
The human males, of course, devote much of their lives to discovering the minutiae of whatever differences do exist in these young women, and make their lifetime choices on the basis of such highly emotional and transitory distinctions as they profess to find. But I am not a human male, though I have enjoyed playing at the part.
Susan Carrigan was the first of them I met, that’s all. Nothing more.
I may drop in to see her again, once or twice, while the plotters work out the planet’s destruction in the house in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, but that will mostly be because I enjoy being Andy. Oh, well, I’ll miss it all, and her, too. I’ve said as much.
Regardless, it won’t be long now.
Synthesis
X
Pami!
I found it, didn’t I? The center of the scheme, the very cockroach nest of that servile fog, the cluster of god’s dunces all in one place. And what a crew!
We have kept him under observation, that blanched tool, that truckling toady. My winged allies, my fellow spirits of the air, they have viewed him unseen as he has to’d-and-fro’d on his lickspittle rounds. And why has he now caused a minor traffic incident to occur to an automobile on a side road in New York State? A blown-out tire, not very artfully arranged; but he is not an artist, is he, that bumble-fingered marplot? No, no, but no; truth doesn’t need artistry, does it? (Thus the immemorial motto of the ham-handed.)
I had kept not far from Susan Carrigan, which is to say, I had been keeping not far from murderous boredom. But when the word came that heaven’s stooge had made this upstate incursion into the quotidian, I fled from her — gratefully — and observed the two in the disabled car. They could give me aesthetic pleasure on their own, of course — what fortitude, in the face of what sorrow! hah! — but what did he want with them? Then the second car arrived, and there was Pami!
Oh, HA HA HA! I’ve got them now! I can destroy them at any instant, any instant at all. And once I discover Susan Carrigan’s role in Armageddon, I shall destroy them. Not as lingeringly as they deserve, I’m afraid, but I’ll do my best. I’ll give them as much attention as I can spare.
But not yet. Susan Carrigan is somehow central, but is not present with this gallery of the agonized. Why not? What is her role? Until I understand her function, I will not understand that vaporous firefly’s plot. I have to learn what he’s scheming before I can be sure the scheme has been as permanently doused and trampled as a cookfire in dry timber country.