She kissed him back . . .
And then she was lying in a limestone casket . . . Then warm and alive . . . then cold and rotting . . . A helicopter fluttered again . . . A helicopter blinked out of existence in a world where men had suddenly never learned to fly . . . Then it was back again, chasing after quarry that had gone long ago when the world had been different for a few moments . . .
Tombstones. . .
Blink!
A warm bed, warm bodies . . .
Blink!
Blink! Blink!
He woke up two miles closer to Kingsmir. And he knew! He pulled the Champion onto the berm and crawled between the bucket seats to where she lay. He ran his fingers over her face, trailed them under her chin, felt the blood pulsing in her neck. Laurie was changing reality! Somehow, comatose as she was, the psychic powers were siphoning themselves off instead of exploding violently. They were under control! And they were not merely powers of teleportation and mind reading; they were powers that could change the basic fiber of the universe. He had thought he imagined her answering him a while back; now he knew she had answered. There had been no need of lips.
“Laurie, can you hear me?”
There was the distant answer that he had to strain to hear.
“Laurie, you heard the helicopter, sensed the guards and the roadblock. And you changed reality for a while until the car—moving independent of both worlds—had passed the trouble spot. Isn’t that what you did, Laurie?”
A distant yes.
“Listen, Laurie. The graveyard is all wrong. Poetic as hell, but wrong. The other one. The one where we are in bed, Laurie.” He stroked her chin. He kissed her lips and urged her to concentrate. He heard the sirens on the road and talked faster . . .
He talked of a world where there had never been hallucino-children. He spoke of a world where all were normal . . .
He woke before she did and lay listening to the rasping of her breath: seafoam whispering over jagged rocks. It would get worse before she woke.
The view from the window was pleasant. It had been snowing since suppertime. Beyond the hoary willow tree lay the highway, a black slash in the calcimined wonderland. They were plowing the road, for the heating coils had broken down again. Somehow, he felt that he had seen it all before. Everything was like an echo being relived.
“Glittering dreams fluttering flaked
float softly downward
while snow priests prepare
for fairy cotillions . . .”
He was not sure whether that was senseless or not. And even the poem seemed naggling familiar. He repeated it softly.
“Frank?” she said.
“I know.”
“Soon.”
“I’ll pull the car out of the garage.”
“The snow—”
“They seem to have it under control,” he said, feeling as if he had said the same thing once before.
“I love you,” she said as he went through the doorway into the shadow-filled living room. That always sent shivers through him—that face, that voice, those words. The shiver continued, however, rippling over his spine, quaking across his forehead, spreading to nearly every nerve in his body. What was he frightened of? And what was this feeling of familiarity all about? He was more than normally afraid for Laurie. After all, she was only pregnant. Suddenly, he hoped to hell it would be a girl. And then the shivers were gone as he rushed for the car. He was warm, the world was wonderful, and there was no longer a sense of familiarity. Suddenly things were very much different and very new indeed.
DRAGON IN THE LAND
There has been a great deal of talk about McLuhanism, Marshall McLuhan’s philosophies on our electric world of superfast communications. McLuhan says we are all drawing the world tighter and tighter together into a Global Village, and that when mankind is that close, war will gradually disappear. “Dragon in the Land,” directly extrapolates from that thesis. Herein is the final war. And when enemies meet—one in defeat, the other in triumph—and find, perhaps grudgingly, that the Global Village concept and the war have made them brothers, they find that caring for someone not of your fatherland requires no more effort than loving your own father. I think there is a dragon in the land of our own time, of the here and now. It seems to be the dragon of peace, a good beast, and it is winning friends and influencing more people every day. This story brought me over thirty letters from fans so far, and it is good to know there are people willing to take the time to sit down and write and say, “Peace.” Another story of mine called “Muse” has garnered forty-five letters to date, and it concerns the same idea, namely that all men—indeed, all living creatures—are linked in the scheme of things and are, in a sense, brothers. And people are banning together to protest industrial plants being built in places where there was once natural beauty . . . And left-wingers and right-wingers are fighting pollution with a growing vehemence . . . And a former Commandant of the Marines goes on speaking tours against the Vietnamese war where we kill each other without knowing why . . . Sometimes I think it pays to be an optimist . . .