“Sir?” the woman in the glass booth asked impatiently. “Can I help you?”
Ralph came back to the present with a thud he could almost feel.
“Yes, ma’am. My wife and I would like to visit jimmy Vandermeer on the third floor, if-”
“That’s I.C.U,!” she snapped. “Can’t go up to I.C.U. without a special pass.” Orange hooks began to poke their way out of the glow around her head, and her aura began to look like barbed wire strung across some ghostly no-man’s-land.
“I know,” Ralph said, more humbly than ever, “but my frienj, Lafayette Chapin, he said-”
“Gosh!” the woman in the booth interrupted. “It’s wonderful, the way everyone’s got a friend. Really wonderful.” She rolled a satiric eye toward the ceiling.
“Faye said jimmy could have visitors, though. You see, he has cancer and he’s not expected to live much l-”
“Well, I’ll check the files, the woman in the booth said with the grudging air of one who knows she is being sent upon a fool’s errand, “but the computer is very slow tonight, so it’s going to take awhile. Give me your name, then you and your wife go sit over there.
I’ll page you as soon as-” Ralph decided that he had eaten enough humble pie in front of this bureaucratic guard dog. It wasn’t as if he wanted an exit-visa from Albania, after all; just a goddam I.C.U. pass would do.
There was a slot in the base of the glass booth. Ralph reached through it and grasped the woman’s wrist before she could pull it away.
There was a sensation, painless but very clear, of those orange hooks passing directly through his flesh without finding anything to catch on. Ralph squeezed gently and felt a small burst of force-something that would have been no bigger than a pellet if it had been seen-pass from him to the woman. Suddenly the officious orange aura around her left arm and side turned the faded turquoise of Ralph’s aura. She gasped and jerked forward on her chair, as if someone had just dumped a paper cup filled with ice-cubes down the back of her uniform.
[“Never mind the computer. just give me a couple of passes, please.
Right away.”
“Yes, sir,” she said at once, and Ralph let go of her wrist so she could reach beneath her desk. The turquoise glow around her arm was turning orange again, the change in color creeping down from her shoulder toward her wrist.
But I could have turned her all blue, Ralph thought. Take her offer.
Run her around the room like a wind-up toy.
He suddenly remembered Ed quoting Matthew’s Gospel-to Herod, When he said that he was mocked, was exceeding through a mixture of fright and shame filled him. Thoughts of vampirism recurred as well, and a snatch from a famous old Pogo comic strip: We have met the enemy and he is us.
Yes, he could probably do almost anything he wanted with this orange-haloed grump; his batteries were fully charged.
The only problem was that the juice in those batteries-and in Lois’s, as well-was stolen goods.
When the information-lady’s hand emerged from beneath the desk, it was holding two laminated pink badges marked INTENSIVE CARE/VISITOR.
“Here you are, sir,” she said in a courteous voice utterly unlike the tone in which she had first addressed him. “Enljoy your visit and thank you for waiting.”
“Thank you,” Ralph said. He took the badges and grasped Lois’s hand.
“Come on, dear. We ought to [“Ralph, what did yoU DO to her?”] [“Nothing, I guess-I think she’s all right.”] get upstairs and make our visit before it gets too late.”
Lois glanced back at the woman in the information booth. She was dealing with her next customer, but slowly, as if she’d just been granted some moderately amazing revelation and had to think it over.
The blue glow was now visible only at the very tips of her fingers, and as Lois watched, that disappeared as well.
Lois looked up at Ralph again and smiled.
I “Yes… she is all right. So stop beating up on yourself [“Was that what I was doing?” [“I think so, yes… we’re talking that way again, Ralph.”] I “I know,”] [“Ralph?”] [“Yes?”] I “This is all pretty wonderful, isn’t it?”] [“Yes.” Ralph tried to hide the rest of what he was thinking from her: that when the price for something which felt this wonderful came due, they were apt to discover it was very high.
[“Stop staring at that baby, Ralph. You’re making its mother nervous.”]
Ralph glanced at the woman in whose arms the baby slept and saw that Lois was right… but it was hard not to look. The baby, no more than three months old, lay within a capsule of violently shifting yellow-gray aura. This powerful but disquieting thunder light circled the tiny body with the idiot speed of the atmosphere surrounding a gas giant-Jupiter, say, or Saturn.
[“Jesus, Lois, that’s brain-damage, isn’t it?”] [“Yes. The woman says there was a car accident.”] [“Says? Have you been talking to her?”] [“No. It’s -.” [“I don’t understand.”] [“Join the club.”] The oversized hospital elevator labored slowly upward. Those inside-the lame, the halt, the guilty few in good health-didn’t speak but either turned their eyes up to the floor-indicator over the doors or down to inspect their own shoes. The only exception to this was the woman with the thunderstruck baby. She was watching Ralph with distrust and alarm, as if she expected him to leap forward at any moment and try to rip her infant from her arms.
It’s not just that I was looking, Ralph thought. At least I don’t think so. She felt me thinking about her hah-. Felt me… sensed me… heard me… some damned thing, anyway.
The elevator stopped on the second floor and the doors wheezed open. The woman with the baby turned to Ralph.
The blanket shifted slightly as she did and Ralph got a look at the crown of its head.
There was a deep crease in the tiny skull. A red scar ran the length of it. To Ralph it looked like a rill of tainted water standing at the bottom of a ditch. The ugly and confused yellow-gray aura which surrounded the baby was emerging from this scar like steam from a crack in the earth. The baby’s balloon-string was the same color as its aura, and it was unlike any other balloon-string Ralph had seen so far-not unhealthy in appearance but short, ugly, and no more than a stub.
“Didn’t your mother ever teach you any manners?” the baby’s mother asked Ralph, and what cut him wasn’t so much the admonotion as the way she made it. He had scared her badly, “Madam, I assure you-”
“Yeah, go on and assure my fanny,” she said, and stepped out of the car. The elevator doors started to slide closed. Ralph glanced at Lois and the two of them exchanged a moment of brief but total understanding. Lois shook her finger at the doors as if scolding them, and a gray, meshlike substance fanned out from its tip. The doors struck this and then slid back into their slots, as they were programmed to do upon encountering any barrier to their progress.
[“Madam!ill The woman stopped and turned around, clearly confused. She shot suspicious glances about her, trying to identify who had spoken.
Her aura was a dark, buttery yellow with faint tints of orange spoking out from its inner edges. Ralph fixed her eyes with his.
[“I’m sorry if I offended you. This is all very new to my friend and me. We’re like children at a formal dinner. I apologize.
He didn’t know just what she was trying to communicate-it was like watching someone talk inside a soundproof booth-but he sensed relief and deep unease… the sort Of unease people feel when they think they may have been observed doing something they shouldn’t. Her doubtful eyes remained on his face a moment or two longer, then she turned and began to walk rapidly down the corridor in the direction of a sign reading NEUROLOGICAL SURVEY.