“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.
The gray mesh Lois had cast at the door was thinning, and when the doors tried to close again, they cut neatly through it. The car continued its slow upward journey.
[“Ralph… Ralph, I think I know what happened to that baby.”] She reached toward his face with her right hand and slipped it between his nose and mouth with her palm down. She pressed the pad of her thumb lightly against one of his cheekbones and the pad of her index finger lightly against the other. It was done so quickly and confidently that no one else in the elevator noticed. If one of the three other riders had noticed, he or she would have seen something that looked like a neatness-minded wife smoothing away a blot of skin-lotion or a dollop of leftover shaving cream.
Ralph felt as if someone had pulled a high-voltage switch inside his brain, one that turned on whole banks of blazing stadium lights.
In their raw, momentary glow, he saw a terrible image: hands clad in a violent brownish-purple aura reaching into a crib and snatching up the baby they had just seen. He was shaken back and forth, head snapping and rolling on the thin stalk of neck like the head of a Raggedy Andy doll -and thrown The lights in his head went black then, and Ralph let out a harsh, shuddery sigh of relief. He thought of the pro-life protestors he’d seen on the evening news just last night, men and women waving signs with Susan Day’s picture and WANTED FOR MURDER on them, men and women in Grim Reaper robes, men and women carrying a banner which read LIFE, WHAT A BEAUTIFUL CHOICE.
He wondered if the thunderstruck baby might have a differing opinion on that last one. He met Lois’s amazed, agonized eyes with his own, and groped out to take her hands.
[“Father did it, right? Threw the kid against the [”)’es. The hah. Couldn’t stop coming.” [“And she knows. She knows, but she hasn’t told anyone.
[“No… but she might, Ralph. She’s the knowing about it.”] [“She might also wait until he does it again. An next time he might finish the job.” A terrible thought occurred to Ralph then; it shot across his mind like a meteor scratching momentary fire across a midnight summer sky: it might be better if he did finish the job. The thunderstruck baby’s balloon-string had only been a stump, but it had been a healthy stump. The child might live for years, not knowing who he was or where he was, let alone why he was, watching people come and go like trees in the mist…
Lois was standing with her shoulders slumped, looking at the floor of the elevator car and radiating a sadness that squeezed Ralph’s heart. He reached out, put a finger under her chin, and watched a delicate blue rose spin itself out of the place where his aura touched hers. He tilted her head up and was not surprised to see tears in her eyes.
“Do you still think it’s all pretty wonderful, Lois?” he asked softly, and to this he received no answer, either with his ears or in his mind.
They were the only two to get out on the third floor, where the silence was as thick as the dust under library shelves. A pair of nurses stood halfway up the hall, clipboards held to white-clad bosoms, talking in low whispers. Anyone else standing by the elevators might have looked at them and surmised a conversation dealing with life, death, and heroic measures; Ralph and Lois, however, took one look at their overlapping auras and knew that the subject currently under discussion was where to go for a drink when their shift ended.