Lachesis: [It doesn’t matter. We felt sure you would come. We know that -you were watching us on Monday morning, man, at the borne of I 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 I’s 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?”] Clotho smiled.
[You didn’t imagine it. Try to think of life as a kind of building Ralph-what you would call a skyscraper.] Except that wasn’t quite what Clotho was thinking of, Ralph discovered. For one flickering moment he seemed to catch an ’ image from the mind of the other one he found both exciting and disturbing: an enormous tower constructed of dark and sooty stone, standing in a field of red roses.
Slit windows twisted up its sides in a brooding spiral.
Then it was gone.
[You and Lois and all the other Short-Time creatures live on the first two floors of this structure. Of course there are elevators-no, Ralph thought. Not in the tower I saw in your mind, my little friend.
In that building-if such a building actually exists-there are no elevators, only a narrow staircase festooned with cobwebs and doorways leading to God knows what.
Lachesis was looking at him with a strange, almost suspicious curiosity, and Ralph decided he didn’t much care for that look. He turned back to Clotho and motioned for him to go on.
Clotho: [As I was saying, there are elevators, but Short-Timers are not allowed to use them under ordinary circumstances. You are not
[ready] [prepared] --I The last explanation was clearly the best, but it danced away from Ralph just before he could grasp it. He looked at Lois, who shook her head, and then back at Clotho and Lachesis again. He was beginning to feel angrier than ever. All the long, endless nights sitting in the wing-chair and waiting for dawn; all the days he’d spent feeling like a ghost inside his own skin; the inability to remember a sentence unless he read it three times; the phone numbers, once carried in his head, which he now had to look up A memory came then, one which simultaneously summed up and justified the anger he felt as he looked at these bald creatures with Iding, their darkly golden eyes and almost blinding auras. He saw himself peering into the cupboard over his kitchen counter, looking for the powdered soup his tired, overstrained mind insisted must be in there someplace -He saw himself poking, pausing, then poking some more.
He saw the expression on his face-a look of distant perplexity that could easily have been mistaken for mild mental retardation but which was really simple exhaustion. Then he saw himself drop his hands and simply stand there, as if he expected the packet to jump out on its own.
Not until now, at this moment and at this memory, did he realize how totally horrible the last few months had been. Looking back at them was like looking into a wasteland painted in desolate maroons and grays.
[“So you took us onto the elevator… or maybe that wasn’t good enough for the likes of us and you just trotted us up the fire stairs.
Got us acclimated a little at a time so we wouldn’t strip our gears completely, I imagine. And it was easy. All you had to do was rob us of our sleep until we were half-crazy. Lois’s son and daughter-in-law want to put her in a theme-park for geriatrics, did you know that?
And my friend Bill McGovern thinks I’m ready for juniper Hill.
Meanwhile, you little angels-”] Clotho offered just a trace of his former wide smile.
[We’re no angels, Ralph.] [“Ralph, please don’t shout at them.”] Yes, he had been shouting, and at least some of it seemed to have gotten through to Faye; he had closed his chess book, stopped picking his nose, and was now sitting bolt-upright in his chair, looking uneasily about the room.
Ralph looked from Clotho (who took a step backward, losing what was left of his smile) to Lachesis.
“Your friend says you’re not angels. So here are they -?
Playing poker six or eight floors farther up? And I suppose God’s in the penthouse and the devil’s stoking coal in the boiler-room. “I No reply. Clotho and Lachesis glanced doubtfully at each other.
Lois plucked at Ralph’s sleeve, but he ignored her.
[“So what are we supposed to do, guys? Track down your little bald version of Hannibal Lecter and take his scalpel away? Well, fuck you.”
] Ralph would have turned on his heel and walked out then (he had seen a lot of movies, and he knew a good exit-line when he heard one), but Lois burst into shocked, frightened tears, and that held him where he was. The look of bewildered reproach in her eyes made him regret his outburst at least a little. He slipped his arm back around Lois’s shoulders, and looked at the two bald men defiantly.
They exchanged another glance and something-some communication just above his and Lois’s ability to hear or understandpassed between them. When Lachesis turned to them again, he was smiling… but his eyes were grave.
[I hear your anger, Ralph, but it is not justified. You do not believe that now, but perhaps you may. For the time being, we must set your questions and our answers-such answers as we may give-aside.] [“Why?” I [Because the time of severing has come for this man, Watch closely, that you may learn and know.] Clotho stepped to the left side of the bed. Lachesis approached from the right, walking through Faye Chapin as he went. Faye bent over, afflicted with a sudden coughing-fit, and then opened his book of chess problems again as it eased.
[“Ralph, I can’t watch this I can’t watch them do it.f"I But Ralph thought she would. He thought they both would. He held her tighter as Clotho and Lachesis bent over Jimmy V.
Their faces were lit with love and caring and gentleness; they made Ralph think of the faces he had once seen in a Rembrandt painting-the Night Watch, he thought it had been called. Their auras mingled and overlapped above jimmy’s chest, and suddenly the man in the bed opened his eyes. He looked through the two little bald doctors at the ceiling for a moment, his expression vague and puzzled, and then his gaze shifted toward the door and he smiled.