The sensation that swept through Ralph’s body at his passage was Perfectly familiar; it was the pins-and-needles feeling one gets when a sleeping limb starts to wake up. For one moment his aura and Mr. Plum’s mingled, and Ralph knew everything about the man that there was to know, including the dreams he’d had in his mother’s womb.
Mr. Plum stopped short.
“Something wrong?” McGovern asked.
“I guess not, but… did you hear a bang someplace? Like a firecracker, or a car backfire?”
“Can’t say I did, but my hearing isn’t what it used to be.”
McGovern chuckled. “If something did blow up, I certainly hope it wasn’t in one of the radiation labs.”
“I don’t hear anything now. Probably just my imagination.” They turned into Bob Polhurst’s room.
Ralph thought, Mrs. Perrine said it sounded like a gunshot.
Lois’s friend thought there was a bug on her, maybe biting her. just a difference in touch, maybe, the way different piano-players have different touches. Either way, they feel it when we mess with them.
They may not know what it is, but they sure do feel it.
Lois took his hand and led him to the door of Room 313. They stood in the hall, looking in as McGovern seated himself in a plastic contour chair at the foot of the bed. There were at least eight people crammed into the room and Ralph couldn’t see Bob Polhurst clearly, but he could see one thing: although he was deep within his own deathbag, Polhurst’s balloon-string was still intact. It was as filthy as a rusty exhaust pipe, peeling in some places and cracked in others… but it was still intact. He turned to Lois.
[“These people may have longer to wait than they think.
Lois nodded, then pointed down at the greeny-gold footprintsthe white-man tracks. They bypassed 313, Ralph saw, but turned in at the next doorway-315, jimmy V."s room.
He and Lois walked up together and stood looking in. jimmy V. had three visitors, and the one sitting beside the bed thought he was all alone. That one was Faye Chapin, idly looking through the dOLiblc stack of get-well cards on jimmy’s bedside table.
The other two were the little bald doctors Ralph had seen for the first time on May Locher’s stoop. They stood at the foot of Jimmy V."s bed, solemn in their clean white tunics, and now that he stood close to them, Ralph could see that there were worlds of character in those unlined, almost identical faces; it just wasn’t the sort of thing one could see through a pair of binoculars-or maybe not until you slid up the ladder of perception a little way. Most of it was in the eyes, which were dark, pupilless, and flecked with deep golden glints. Those eyes shone with intelligence and lively awareness. Their auras gleamed and flashed around them like the robes of emperors…
… or perhaps of Centurions on a visit of state.
They looked over at Ralph and Lois, who stood holding hands in the doorway like children who have lost their way in a fairy-tale wood, and smiled at them.
[Hello, woman.] That was Doc #1. He was holding the scissors in his right hand.
The blades were very long, and the points looked very sharp.
Doc #2 took a step toward them and made a funny little half-bow.
[Hello, man. We’ve bee waiting for you.] Ralph felt Lois’s hand tighten on his own, then loosen as she decided they were in no immediate danger. She took a small step forward, looking from Doc #1 to Doc #2 and then back to #1 again, [“Who are you?”] Doc #1 crossed his arms over his small chest. The long blades of’ his scissors lay the entire length of his white-clad left forearm.
[We don’t have names, not the same as Short-Timers do-but you call us after the fates in the story this man has already told you. That these names originally belonged to women means little to us, since we are creatures with no sexual dimension. I will be Clotho, although I spin no thread, and my colleague and old friend will be Lachesis, although he shakes no rods and has never thrown the coins.
Come in, both of you-please!] They came in and stood warily between the visitor’s chair and the bed. Ralph didn’t think the docs meant them any harm-for now, at least-but he still didn’t want to get too close. Their auras, so bright and fabulous compared to those of ordinary people, intimidated him, and he could see from Lois’s wide eyes and half-open mouth that she felt the same. She sensed him looking at her, turned toward him, and tried to smile. My Lois, Ralph thought. He put an arm around her shoulders and hugged her briefly.
Lachesis: [We’ve given you our names-names you may use, at any rate,-won’t you give us yours?] Lois: [“You mean you don’t already know? Pardon me, but I find that hard to believe.”] Lachesis: [We could know, but choose not to. We like to observe the rules of common Short-Time politeness wherever we can. We find them lovely, for they are passed on by your kind from large hand to small and create the illusion of long lives.] [“I don’t understand.”] Ralph didn’t, either, and wasn’t sure he wanted to. He found something faintly patronizing in the tone of the one who called himself Lachesis, something that reminded him of McGovern when he was in a mood to lecture or pontificate.
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.