TV the Braves were getting shellacked by the Mets, courtesy of WTBS and the big satellite
dish on the Aquinas Hotel’s roof. Eddie felt a faint sensation of calm which seemed to come
from the back of his mind . . . except where it was really coming from, he knew from what
he had read in the medical journals, was from the bunch of living wires at the base of his
spine, that place where heroin addiction takes place by causing an unnatural thickening of
the nerve stern.
Want to take a quick cure?he had asked Henry once. Break your spine, Henry. Your legs
stop working, and so does your cock, but you stop needing the needle right away.
Henry hadn’t thought it was funny.
In truth, Eddie hadn’t thought it was that funny either. When the only fast way you could
get rid of the monkey on your back was to snap your spinal cord above that bunch of nerves,
you were dealing with one heavy monkey. That was no capuchin, no cute little organ
grinder’s mascot; that was a big mean old baboon.
Eddie began to sniffle.
“Okay,” he said at last. “It’ll do. You can vacate the premises, scuzz.”
The sallow thing got up. “I have friends,” he said. •They could come in here and do things
to you. You’d beg to tell me where that key is.”
“Not me, champ,” Eddie said. “Not this kid.” And smiled. He didn’t know how the smile looked, but it must not have looked all that cheery because the sallow thing vacated the
premises, vacated them fast, vacated them without looking back.
When Eddie Dean was sure he was gone, he cooked.
Fixed.
Slept.
8
As he was sleeping now.
The gunslinger, somehow inside this man’s mind (a man whose name he still did not know;
the lowling the prisoner thought of as “the sallow thing” had not known it, and so had never spoken it), watched this as he had once watched plays as a child, before the world had
moved on. . . or so he thought he watched, because plays were all he had ever seen. If he
had ever seen a moving picture, he would have thought of that first. The things he did not
actually see he had been able to pluck from the prisoner’s mind because the associations
were close. It was odd about the name, though. He knew the name of the prisoner’s brother,
but not the name of the man himself. But of course names were secret things, full of power.
And neither of the things that mattered was the man’s name. One was the weakness of the
addiction. The other was the steel buried inside that weakness, like a good gun sinking in
quicksand.
This man reminded the gunslinger achingly of Cuthbert.
Someone was coming. The prisoner, sleeping, did not hear. The gunslinger, not sleeping,
did, and came forward again.
9
Great,Jane thought. He tells me how hungry he is and I fix something up for him because
he’s a little bit cute, and then he falls asleep on me.
Then the passenger—a guy of about twenty, tall, wearing clean, slightly faded bluejeans
and a paisley shirt—opened his eyes a little and smiled at her.
“Thankee sai,”he said—or so it sounded. Almost archaic … or foreign. Sleep-talk, that’s all,
Jane thought.
“You’re welcome.” She smiled her best stewardess smile, sure he would fall asleep again and the sandwich would still be there, uneaten, when it was time for the actual meal
service.
Well, that was what they taught you to expect, wasn’t it?
She went back to the galley to catch a smoke.
She struck the match, lifted it halfway to her cigarette, and there it stopped, unnoticed,
because that wasn’t all they taught you to expect.
I thought he was a little bit cute. Mostly because of his eyes. His hazel eyes.
But when the man in 3A had opened his eyes a moment ago, they hadn’t been hazel; they
had been blue. Not sweet-sexy blue like Paul Newman’s eyes, either, but the color of
icebergs. They—
“Ow!”
The match had reached her fingers. She shook it out.
“Jane?” Paula asked. “You all right?”
“Fine. Daydreaming.”
She lit another match and this time did the job right. She had only taken a single drag when
the perfectly reasonable explanation occurred to her. He wore contacts. Of course. The
kind that changed the color of your eyes. He had gone into the bathroom. He had been in
there long enough for her to worry about him being airsick—he had that pallid complexion,
the look of a man who is not quite well. But he had only been taking out his contact lenses
so he could nap more comforta- bly. Perfectly reasonable.
You may feel something,a voice from her own not-so-distant past spoke suddenly. Some
little tickle. You may see something just a little bit wrong.
Coloredcontact lenses.
Jane Doming personally knew over two dozen people who wore contacts. Most of them
worked for the airline. No one ever said anything about it, but she thought maybe one
reason was they all sensed the passengers didn’t like to see flight personnel wearing
glasses—it made them nervous.
Of all those people, she knew maybe four who had color-contacts. Ordinary contact lenses
were expensive; colored ones cost the earth. All of the people of Jane’s acquaintance who
cared to lay out that sort of money were women, all of them extremely vain.
So what? Guys can be vain, too. Why not? He’s good-looking.
No. He wasn’t. Cute, maybe, but that was as far as it went, and with the pallid complexion
he only made it to cute by the skin of his teeth. So why the color-contacts?
Airline passengers are often afraid of flying.
In a world where hijacking and drug-smuggling had become facts of life, airline personnel
are often afraid of passengers.
The voice that had initiated these thoughts had been that of an instructor at flight school, a
tough old battle-axe who looked as if she could have flown the mail with Wiley
Post,saying: Don’t ignore your suspicions. If you forget every thing else you’ve learned
about coping with potential or actual terrorists, remember this: don’t ignore your
suspicions. In some cases you’ll get a crew who’ll say during the debriefing that they didn’t have any idea until the guy pulled out a grenade and said hang a left for Cuba or everyone
on the aircraft is going to join the jet-stream. But in most cases you get two or three
different people—mostly flight attendants, which you women will be in less than a
month—who say they felt something. Some little tickle. A sense that the guy in 91C or the
young woman in 5A was a little wrong. They felt something, but they did nothing. Did they
get fired for that? Christ, no! You can’t put a guy in restraints because you don’t like the
way he scratches his pimples. The real problem is they felt something . . . and then forgot.
The old battle-axe had raised one blunt finger. Jane Doming, along with her fellow
classmates, had listened raptly as she said, If you feel that little tickle, don’t do anything. . .
but that includes not forgetting. Because there’s always that one little chance that you just might be able to stop something before it gets started . . . something like an unscheduled
twelve-day layover on the tarmac of some shitpot Arab country.
Just colored contacts, but…
Thankee, sai.
Sleep-talk? Or a muddled lapse into some other language?
She would watch, Jane decided.
And she would not forget.
10
Now,the gunslinger thought. Now we’ll see, won’t we?
He had been able to come from his world into this body through the door on the beach.
What he needed to find out was whether or not he could carry things back. Oh, not himself,
he was confident that he could return through the door and reenter his own poisoned,
sickening body at any time he should desire. But other things? Physical things? Here, for instance, in front of him, was food: something the woman in the uniform had called a
tooter-fish sandwich. The gunslinger had no idea what tooter-fish was, but he knew a
popkin when he saw it, although this one looked curiously uncooked.
His body needed to eat, and his body would need to drink, but more than either, his body
needed some sort of medicine. It would die from the lobstrosity’s bite without it. There
might be such medicine in this world; in a world where carriages rode through the air far
above where even the strongest eagle could fly, anything seemed possible. But it would not
matter how much powerful medicine there was here if he could carry nothing physical
through the door.
You could live in this body, gunslinger,the voice of the man in black whispered deep
inside his head. Leave that piece of breathing meat over there for the lobster-things. It’s