“There is no necessity for this suffering, Jonesy. See us for what we are-not invaders but saviors. Buddies.”
Mr Gray considered the various boxes. For a creature that couldn’t actually think much, Jonesy had an enormous amount of storage capacity. Question for another day: why would beings who thought so poorly have so much retrieval capability? Did it have to do with their overblown emotional makeup? And the emotions were disturbing. He found Jonesy’s emotions very disturbing. Always there. Always on call. And so much of them.
“War… famine… ethnic cleansing… killing for peace… massacring the heathen for Jesus… homosexual people beaten to death… bugs in bottles, the bottles sitting on top of missiles aimed at every city in the world… come on, Jonesy, compared to type-four anthrax, what’s a little byrus between friends? Jesus-Christ-bananas, you’ll all be dead in fifty years, anyway! This is good! Relax and enjoy it!”
“You made that guy stick a pen in his eye.”
Grumpy, but better than nothing. The wind gusted, the pickup skidded, and Mr Gray rode with it, using Jonesy’s skills. The visibility was almost nil; he had dropped to twenty miles an hour and might do well to pull over completely for awhile once he cleared Kurtz’s net. Meanwhile, he could chat with his host. Mr Gray doubted that he could talk Jonesy out of his room, but chatting at least passed the time.
“I had to, buddy. I needed the truck. I’m the last one.”
“And you never lose.”
“Right,” Mr Gray agreed.
“But you’ve never had a situation like this, have you? You’ve never had someone you can’t get at. “Was Jonesy taunting him? Mr Gray felt a ripple of anger. And then he said something Mr Gray had already thought of himself. “Maybe you should have killed me in the hospital. Or was that only a dream?”
Mr Gray, unsure what a dream was, didn’t bother responding. Having this barricaded mutineer in what by now should have been Mr Gray’s mind and his alone was increasingly annoying. For one thing, he didn’t like thinking of himself as “Mr Gray”-that was not his concept of himself or the species-mind of which he was a part; he did not even like to think of himself as “he”, for he was both sexes and neither. Yet now he was imprisoned by these concepts, and would be as long as the core being of Jonesy remained unabsorbed. A terrible thought occurred to Mr Gray: what if it was his concepts that had no meaning?
He hated being in this position.
“Who’s Duddits, Jonesy?”
No answer.
“Who is Richie? Why was he a shit? Why did you kill him?”
“We didn’t!”
A little tremble in the mental voice. Ah, that shot had gone home. And something interesting: Mr Gray had meant “you” in the singular, but Jonesy had taken it in the plural.
“You did, though. Or you think you did.”
“That’s a lie.”
“How silly of you to say so. I have the memories, right here in one of your boxes. There’s snow in the box. Snow and a moccasin. Brown suede. Come out and look.”
For one giddy second he thought Jonesy might do just that. If he did, Mr Gray would sweep him back to the hospital at once. Jonesy could see himself die on television. A happy ending to the movie they had been watching. And then, no more Mr Gray. just what Jonesy thought of as “the cloud”.
Mr Gray looked eagerly at the doorknob, willing it to turn. It didn’t.
“Come out.”
Nothing.
“You killed Richie, you coward! You and your friends. You… you dreamed him to death.” And although Mr Gray didn’t know what dreams were, he knew that was true. Or that Jonesy believed it was.
Nothing.
“Come out! Come out and… “He searched Jonesy’s memories. Many of them were in boxes called MOVIES, Jonesy seemed to love movies above all things, and Mr Gray plucked what he thought a particularly potent line from one of these: “… and fight like a man!”
Nothing.
You bastard, Mr Gray thought, once more dipping into the enticing pool of his host’s emotions. You son of a bitch. You stubborn asshole. Kiss my bender, you stubborn asshole.
Back in the days when Jonesy had been Jonesy, he had often expressed anger by slamming his fist down on something. Mr Gray did it now, bringing Jonesy’s fist down on the center of the truck’s wheel hard enough to honk the horn. “Tell me! Not about Richie, not about Duddits, about you! Something makes you different. I want to know what it is.”
No answer. “It’s in the crib-is that it?’still no answer, but Mr Gray heard Jonesy’s feet shuffle behind the door. And perhaps a low intake of breath. Mr Gray smiled with Jonesy’s mouth.
“Talk to me, Jonesy-we’ll play the game, we’ll pass the time. Who was Richie, besides Number 19? Why were you angry with him? Because he was a Tiger? A Derry Tiger? What were they? Who’s Duddits?”
Nothing.
The truck crept more slowly than ever through the storm, the headlights almost helpless against the swirling wall of white. Mr Gray’s voice was low, coaxing.
“You missed one of the Duddits-boxes, buddy, did you know that? There’s a box inside the box, as it happens-it’s yellow. There are Scooby-Doos on it. What are Scooby-Doos? They’re not real people, are they? Are they movies? Are they televisions? Do you want the box? Come out, Jonesy. Come out and I’ll give you the box.”
Mr Gray removed his foot from the gas pedal and let the truck coast slowly to the left, over into the thicker snow. Something was happening here, and he wanted to turn all his attention to it. Force had not dislodged Jonesy from his stronghold… but force wasn’t the only way to win a battle, or a war.
The truck stood idling by the guardrails in what was now a full-fledged blizzard. Mr Gray closed his eyes. Immediately he was in Jonesy’s brightly lit memory storehouse. Behind him were miles of stacked boxes, marching away under the fluorescent tubes. In front of him was the closed door, shabby and dirty and for some reason very, very strong. Mr Gray placed his three-fingered hands on it and began to speak in a low voice that was both intimate and urgent.
“Who is Duddits? Why did you call him after you killed Richie? Let me in, we need to talk. Why did you take some of the Derry boxes? What did you not want me to see? It doesn’t matter, I have what I need, let me in, Jonesy, better now than later.”
It was going to work. He sensed Jonesy’s blank eyes, could see Jonesy’s hand moving toward the knob and the lock.
“We always win,” Mr Gray said. He sat behind the wheel with Jonesy’s eyes closed, and in another universe the wind screamed and rocked the truck on its springs. “Open the door, Jonesy, open it now.”
Silence. And then, from less than three inches away and as surprising as a basinful of cold water dashed on warm skin: “Eat shit and die.” Mr Gray recoiled so violently that the back of Jonesy’s head connected with the truck’s rear window. The pain was sudden and shocking, a second unpleasant surprise.
He slammed a fist down again, then the other, then the first once more; he was hammering on the wheel, the horn beating out a Morse code of rage. A largely emotionless creature and part of a largely emotionless species, he had been hijacked by his host’s emotional juices-not just dipping in them this time but bathing. And again he sensed this was only happening because Jonesy was still there, an unquiet tumor in what should have been a serene and focused consciousness.
Mr Gray hammered on the wheel, hating this emotional ejaculation-what Jonesy’s mind identified as a tantrum-but loving it, too. Loving the sound of the horn when he hit it with Jonesy’s fists, loving the beat of Jonesy’s blood in Jonesy’s temples, loving the way Jonesy’s heart sped up and the sound of Jonesy’s hoarse voice crying “You fuckhead! You fuckhead!” over and over and over.
And even in the midst of this rage, a cold part of him realized what the true danger was. They always came, they always made the worlds they visited over in their image. It was the way things had always been, and the way they were meant to be.
But now…
Something’s happening to me, Mr Gray thought, aware even as the thought came that it was essentially a “Jonesy” thought. I’m starting to be human.
The fact that the idea was not without its attractions filled Mr Gray with horror.
8
Jonesy came out of a doze where the only sound was the soothing, lulling rhythm of Mr Gray’s voice, and saw that his hands were resting on the locks of the office door, ready to turn the lower and draw the bolt on the upper. The son of a bitch was trying to hypnotize him, and doing a pretty good job of it.