“Who’s there?” Helga’s voice came through the still closed door.
“It’s Ralph. Ralph Metric. I want to talk to you.”
A few seconds of silence. “What about?” Her voice slowed with a strange caution.
“Well—can I come in? It’s important.”
There was no answer. “It’s about Stimmitz,” he said.
The door opened a few inches, revealing a section of Helga’s wide face.
She looked Ralph over, then glanced past him into the hallway. Without speaking, she pulled the door open and stood back.
As Ralph stepped past her into the apartment he felt her watching him.
He turned and met her eyes with his own, then looked quickly away. Wow, he thought, she looks like she’s about to bite my head off. He stared out her window at the harsh desertscape.
“So?” said Helga. “What did you want to say?”
He looked around at her. She studied him with the same hostile bearing, her arms folded in front of her short, square torso. “Actually,” said Ralph, “I really wanted to ask you some things—”
“Like what?” she snapped.
“Well, about what you and Stimmitz saw when you sneaked into the Thronsen Home, and—”
“You didn’t make that part of your deal, then. Too bad.”
“Huh?” Ralph looked at her in puzzlement. “Deal?”
Her expression didn’t change. “If you’re so curious about what’s going on over there you should have asked for some information along with whatever they did pay you.”
“Pay me? What are you talking about?”
One corner of her mouth curled in disgust. “Come on. I told Stimmitz I didn’t think he should tell you anything. That you couldn’t be trusted. But he went ahead. His last mistake.”
“What?” Ralph spun around and faced her. “You think I finked on Stimmitz or something?”
“You were the only one he told about going into Thronsen. You were the only one who knew.”
“Hey, that doesn’t mean I said anything to anybody about it. Why would I want to get him in trouble?”
She said nothing, only continued her hard, level gaze at him.
Ralph felt a surge of anger, like a heat in his chest. “How much do you think they paid me?” he said bitterly.
“You’re so stupid you probably did it for nothing.”
“Forget it.” He walked to the door and put his hand on the knob. “I didn’t set Stimmitz up and nobody’s letting me in on anything.”
“Get out,” said Helga flatly.
He opened the door and stepped into the hallway. He turned to say something more but the door closed in his face. From inside he could hear the small metal noises of the lock clicking into place.
Ralph cradled the back of his head in his hands and gazed up at the featureless white ceiling over his bed.
I don’t know what’s going on around here.
Stimmitz was gone, of that much he was sure. There had been no blood on the jumpsuit, but that didn’t prove anything, one way or the other. So what else is there? he thought, staring at the ceiling. Helga was acting crazy—but then he had always felt she was kind of strange. Perhaps her own universe had finally snapped shut around her like a trap.
Give up, Ralph told himself disgustedly. Accept what Stiles told you. Go drink a beer with the others. He took his hands from behind his head and saw that they had clenched into fists, the nails digging into the flesh of his palms. Convulsively, he got up from the bed and stalked into the living room.
The morning sun came through the window in a shaft, bleaching out the color of everything in the apartment. Ralph looked from the couch to the walls, as though some message could have been written there, then across the door and back to the couch. Stupid-looking couch, he thought, feeling something going sour in his stomach as he turned and gazed out the window.
If only there was something solid, he thought, that I had brought back with me from the dreamfield. So that I’d know for sure. Something like—shoes! He swivelled around toward his bedroom door. The shoes he had been wearing that shift were under his bed—he hadn’t left them in the locker room with his jumpsuit.
Crouching on his knees beside the bed, he pulled out the shoes. He hurriedly examined them, turning each one around and studying it from all sides. After a couple of minutes he sat down heavily on the bed. Still nowhere, he thought. There had been no spots of blood anywhere on the shoes. His disappointment had a sense of finality.
Come on, he thought. Why can’t you accept it? Nothing happened. Stimmitz is probably in L.A., looking in the want ads for another job. He tilted one of the shoes and poured a small hill of sand into his palm. For several seconds he stared at the tiny bit of desert before the realization hit him.
That’s impossible, he thought. The base is all paved or landscaped. There’s no sand between here and the line shack. There’s no way I could have gotten any in my shoes—but it’s here somehow.
He reached for the other shoe and tilted it over his palm. There was even more sand in that one, making a gritty fistful in all. Carefully, he stood up and carried it into the other room.
Standing at the window, he looked from the sand to the desert beyond the base and back again. I don’t get it, he thought, baffled. The sand was something tangible, disturbing in its inexplicable way, but the connection between it and everything else that disturbed him seemed tenuous.
Maybe it’s a sign. He studied the multi-faceted grains. Go to the source, or something like that. He went over by the couch and tore a sheet of newspaper free from the stack beside it. In the center of the paper he placed the sand and then folded it into a makeshift envelope. While stuffing it in his back pocket, he headed for the door. Then again, he thought, it might be just sand.
When he reached the top of one of the low hills surrounding the base, Ralph turned and looked back at it, shading his eyes from the sun with his hand. From where he was, standing between two large clumps of the desert’s dry, prickly brush, he could see all of the base’s buildings, the paths linking them, and the fence circling the space.
Turning ninety degrees, his feet crunching against the hill’s pebbles and sand, he could see part of the high security fence that surrounded the Thronsen Home. The complex itself was out of sight beyond the chain-link mesh, which was topped with barbed wire and laced with cables for the electronic alarm devices. Somewhere inside there were the kids whose nightly dreams had been merged and formed into the field. If, thought Ralph, that’s really what’s in there. He headed down the side of the hill away from the base.
A flat gully, deep enough to be still shaded from the sun, lay at the foot of the hill. Ralph looked in either direction along its path, then started walking toward the east. He wondered if he would recognize what he was looking for when he came across it. From atop a small rock, a dust-colored lizard squirted its tongue at him, then vanished.
This is ridiculous, thought Ralph after walking for a few minutes along the gully. There’s nothing out here but dirt and rocks and— He froze.
From somewhere in the desert’s total silence he had heard a tiny, metallic click. After a few seconds of intent listening, he heard it again. The noise, so slight it would have been undetectable anywhere else but in a desert, came from somewhere above the gully.