Golze had hung up the telephone in the slot in its carrying case and was reading the notes he had made on the legal pad. "Her next of kin are the Moira Bradley who called the hospital, and one Frank Marrity, spelled with two rs. Pasadena and San Bernardino area codes. We could visit Marrity in San Bernardino tonight. He's east, and the thing moved east."
"We won't call on him," said Rascasse, "especially not at night. Don't want to scare anybody, we don't. We will call Marrity tomorrow, offer to buy it, if he's got it. Fifty thousand dollars should be… effective. And in case there's a hitch, it should be Charlotte that does the visiting."
In the darkness at the back of the bus, Charlotte nodded. Visiting I can do, she thought; and I'm good at looking. I don't mind if you ask me to do those things.
Back in the early '60s, someone in Army Intelligence at Fort Meade had been worried that Soviet psychics might identify American missile silos, and so he had designed this secret cluster of silos to confuse any such remote viewers. The tar-and-gravel runway was concealed behind a row of gaudy carnival tents and booths and rides, and the gray walls of the underground Launch Control Centers were all hung with pictures of Bozo the Clown and Engineer Bill and Gumby, and the Launch Control consoles were painted in such garish stripes and circles that the functional lights and buttons could hardly be distinguished; and the commander's launch key had a little clown's head epoxyed to the top of it. Charlotte and the other children had been required to play with Tinkertoys and Lincoln Logs in the LCCs, and to accompany maintenance men into the tunnels and silos, which had been decorated with enormous Dr. Seuss murals. Any Soviet psychic who managed to view the missile launch site would, it was hoped, assume that he was seeing some sort of amusement park or progressive elementary school instead, and would write off the session as a miss.
Charlotte had been the queen of the Silo Rascals, since she had been able to sense the intrusion when a distant psychic was using her eyes to look out through; and it had happened two or three times every year. At those moments she was trained to begin singing "Bye Bye Blackbird" as loudly as she could, at which signal all the air force personnel would drop their official work and begin dancing or putting on hand puppets or blowing through cheap tin trumpets. There had been times — when a favorite officer was being yelled at, or when she had been assigned to accompany the Corrosion Control crew below Level 7 at dawn in the middle of winter, or even when she had simply been bored — when she had begun singing the song without having sensed any outside monitoring. Even at the time she had been sure that the crew commanders sometimes suspected her of raising a false alarm, but they had apparently been under strict orders not to question her alerts.
Eventually she had become able to fix on a remote viewer who was looking through her eyes, and follow the link back, and get a glimpse of his surroundings — generally just some featureless dark room, though on a couple of occasions she had found herself staring at the dashboard of a moving car.
She had never mentioned this emergent homing ability to her control officers at Fort Meade, though, because even as a child she had known that they would immediately reassign her to a site that was reliably watched by foreign psychics, just so that she could spy on the psychics. She didn't want to leave the secret underground kingdom of the Silo Rascals.
The Launch Control Centers were her home, along with the stairs and corridors between the entrapment doors, and the two-hundred-foot cableway with its infinity of hiding places between the support girders, and the vast silo itself, ten stories deep with the shiny bulk of the Minuteman missile filling the infinite volume.
An exploding battery in the charger bay had blinded her in 1978, when she was nineteen.
In the nightmare months that followed — after the hospitals and the therapy, and after her extensive debriefing and eventual honorable discharge — she had discovered two things that had made her blindness and exile bearable. She learned that she could see through the eyes of anyone who was within about a hundred feet of her — the distance varied a bit, depending on the seasons — and she discovered alcohol.
Golze got up from his table now and descended the tight stairs to the tiny restroom just behind the front door of the bus; idly Charlotte monitored him, and she smiled at the way he was careful to do his business at the urinal by touch alone, staring up at the close plastic ceiling. He wasn't what anyone would call a gentleman, so it must be shyness. Men who knew about her ability always, when they went into a restroom, made a point of either modestly looking up or arrogantly looking down. Rascasse always looked down, but with Rascasse somehow it always seemed to be in surprise.
She shifted her attention to Rascasse, and she saw that he was staring at one of the crossword-puzzle clues: a four-letter word that meant "underground fence."
"Haha," she called toward the front of the rocking bus.
"What's funny back there?" he called.
"An underground fence is called a haha," she told him.
In the newspaper margin he wrote, Y dont U finish the bottle and sleep. Bzy day morrow.
"Haha," she said, and then set about taking his advice.
Six
When Frank Marrity walked down the gravel driveway at eight the next morning to pick up the Los Angeles Times, the green Rambler was parked just outside the chain-link gate.
He had awakened before Daphne, and slid out from under the covers without disturbing her, and in his pajamas and slippers he padded out to the kitchen to call the college and then make breakfast.
After he'd explained to the English Department secretary that he would not be coming in today, he boiled milk on the stove and poured it into two bowls of Quaker instant oatmeal, then stirred into each bowl a tablespoon of Cool Whip and a teaspoon of Southern Comfort liqueur. Daphne appeared just as he was carrying the bowls to the kitchen table.
"I looked in my room just now," she said as she pulled out a chair.
"We'll fix it up today," Marrity told her.
"Crazy day, yesterday," was all she said before digging into the oatmeal.
"The craziest," he agreed.
He was glad that she didn't comment on being served what was usually her "sick girl" breakfast instead of the routine cereal or bacon and eggs; but after the choking she'd experienced last night at dinner, he wanted to put off giving her anything that required chewing.
The telephone rang, and he decided to stay where he was and let the answering machine get it.
'You're reached the Marritys," said his voice from the machine, "and we're not able to come to the phone right now, but leave a message and your number and we'll get back to you." The beep followed, and two seconds of silence, and then the dial tone, which soon shut off.
He glanced at Daphne. She was frowning, but for a moment it seemed to him that it was his voice coming from the other side of the room, and not the hang-up, that had disturbed her.
A black-and-white cat jumped up onto the table, sliding on yesterday's newspaper, and Daphne nudged him off and then absently stared at the headlines. "Yesterday was the tenth anniversary of Elvis's death," she said. "I wonder if ghosts come back on their anniversaries."