“Explosives would seem the more likely bet if he really is planning to get everyone; a strong wind could create problems for him if it’s gas.” Ralph took a sip of his water and was interested to see that his hand was not quite steady. “On the other hand, we don’t know what goodies he might have been cooking up in his laboratory, do we?”
“No,” Lois said in a small voice.
Ralph put his water-glass down. “What he’s planning to use doesn’t interest me very much.”
“What does?”
The waitress came back with fresh coffee, and the smell alone seemed to light up Ralph’s nerves like neon. He and Lois grabbed their cups and began to sip as soon as she had started away. The coffee was strong and hot enough to burn Ralph’s lips, but it was heaven. When he set his cup back in its saucer again, it was halfempty and there was a very warm place in his midsection, as if he had swallowed a live ember.
Lois was looking at him somberly over the rim of her own cup.
“What interests me,” Ralph told her, “is us. You said Atropos has turned Ed into a guided missile. That’s right; that’s exactly what he’s done. World War II kamikaze pilots were. Hitler had his V-2s; Hirohito had his Divine Wind. The disturbing thing is that Clotho and Lachesis have done the same thing to us. We’ve been loaded up with a lot of special powers and programmed to fly out to High Ridge in my Oldsmobile and stop Susan Day. I’d just like to know why.”
“But we do know,” she protested. “If we don’t step in, Ed Deepneau is going to commit suicide tonight during that woman’s speech and take two thousand people with him.”
“Yeah,” Ralph said, “and we’re going to do whatever we can to stop him, Lois, don’t worry about that.”
He finished his coffee and set the cup down again. His stomach was fully awake now, and raving for food. “I could no more stand aside and let Ed kill those people than I could stand in one place and not duck if someone threw a baseball at my head. It’s just that we never got a chance to read the fine print at the bottom of the contract, and that scares me.” He hesitated a moment. “It also pisses me off.”
“What are you talking about?”
“About being played for a couple of patsies. We know why were going to try and stop Susan Day’s speech; we can’t stand the thought of a lunatic killing a couple of thousand innocent people.
But we don’t know why they want us to do it. That’s the part that scares me.”
“We have a chance to save two thousand lives,” she said. “Are you telling me that’s enough for us but not for them?”
“That’s what I’m telling you. I don’t think numbers impress these fellows very much; they clean us up not just by the tens or hundreds of thousands but by the millions. And they’re used to seeing the Random or the Purpose swat us in job lots.”
“Disasters like the fire at the Cocoanut Grove,” Lois said. “Or the flood here in Derry eight years ago.”
“Yes, but even things like that are pretty small beans compared to what can and does go on in the world every year. The Flood of ’85 here in Derry killed two hundred and twenty people, something like that, but last spring there was a flood in Pakistan that killed thirty-five hundred, and the last big earthquake in Turkey killed over four thousand. And how about that nuclear reactor accident in Russia? I read someplace that you can put the floor on that one at seventy thousand dead. That’s a lot of Panama hats and jumpropes and pairs of… of eyeglasses, Lois.” He was horrified at how close he had come to saying pairs of earrings.
“Don’t,” she said, and shuddered.
“I don’t like thinking about it any more than you do,” he said, “but we have to, if only because those two guys were so goddam anxious to keep us from doing just that. Do you see what I’m getting at yet?
You must. Big tragedies have always been a part of the Random; why is this so different?”
“I don’t know,” said Lois, but it was important enough for them to draft us, and I have an idea that was a pretty big step.”
Ralph nodded. He could feel the caffeine hitting him now, jiving up his head, his fingers the tiniest bit. “I’m sure it was. Now think back to the hospital roof. Did you ever in your entire life hear two guys explain so much without explaining anything?”
“I don’t get what you mean,” Lois said, but her face suggested something else: that she didn’t want to get what he meant.
“What I mean goes back to one central idea: maybe they can’t lie.
Suppose they can’t. If you have certain information you don’t want to give out but you can’t tell a lie, what do you do?”
“Keep dancing away from the danger zone,” Lois said. “Or’ zones.
“
“Bingo. And isn’t that what they did?”
“Well,” she said, “I guess it was a dance, all right, but I thought you did a fair amount of leading, Ralph. In fact, I was impressed by all the questions you asked. I think I spent most of the time we were on that roof just trying to convince myself it was all really happening.”
“Sure, I asked questions, lots of them, but He stopped, not sure how to express the concept in his head, a concept which seemed simultaneously complex and baby-simple to him. He made another effort to go up a little, searching inside his head for that sensation of blink, knowing that if he could reach her mind, he could show her a picture that would be crystal clear. Nothing happened, and he drummed his fingers on the tablecloth in frustration.
“I was just as amazed as you were,” he said finally. “If my amazement came out as questions, it’s because men-those from my generation, anyway-are taught that it’s very bad form to ooh and aah.
That’s for women who are picking out the drapes.”
“Sexist.” She smiled as she said it, but it was a smile Ralph couldn’t return. He was remembering Barbie Richards. If Ralph had moved toward her, she would almost certainly have pushed the alarm button beneath her desk, but she had allowed Lois to approach because she had swallowed a little too much of the old sister-sister sister crap.
“Yes,” he said quietly, “I’m sexist, I’m old-fashioned, and sometimes it gets me in trouble.”
“Ralph, I didn’t mean-”
“I know what you meant, and it’s okay. What I’m trying to get across to you is that I was as amazed… as knocked out… as you were. So I asked questions, so what? Were they good questions-? Useful questions?”
“I guess not, huh?”
“Well, maybe I didn’t start out so badly. As I remember, the first thing I asked when we finally made it to the roof was who they were and what they wanted. They slipped those questions with a lot of philosophical blather, but I imagine they got a little sweaty on the backs of their necks for awhile, just the same.
Next we got all that background on the Purpose and the Random-fascinating, but nothing we exactly needed in order to drive out to High Ridge and persuade Gretchen Tillbury to cancel Susan Day’s speech. Hell, we would have done better-saved time-getting the road-directions from them that we ended up getting from Simone’s niece.”
Lois looked startled. “That’s true, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. And all the time we were talking, time was flying by the way it does when you go up a couple of levels. They were watching it fly, too, you can believe that. They were timing the whole scene so that when they finished telling us the things we did need to know, there would be no time left to ask the questions they didn’t want to answer. I think they wanted to leave us with the idea that this whole thing was a public service, that saving all those lives is what it’s all about, but they couldn’t come right out and say so, because-”
“Because that would be a lie, and maybe they can’t lie.”
“Right. Maybe they can’t lie.”
“So what do they want, Ralph?” He shook his head. “I don’t have a clue, Lois. Not even a hint.” She finished her own coffee, set the cup carefully back down in its saucer, studied her fingertips for a moment, then looked up at him. Again he was forcibly struck by her beauty-almost levelled by it. “They were good,” she said. “They are good. I felt that very strongly.