The space was marked with a HANDICAPPED ONLY sign. Sloat
glanced at it indifferently, then reached into his pocket, drew out a vial of cocaine, and used some of it. In a few moments the world seemed to gain color and vitality. It was wonderful stuff. He wondered if it would grow in the Territories, and if it would be more potent over there.
Gardener himself had awakened Sloat in his Beverly Hills
home at two in the morning to tell him what had happened—
it had been midnight in Springfield. Gardener’s voice had
been trembling. He was obviously terrified that Morgan
would fly into a rage, and furious that he had missed Jack
Sawyer by less than an hour.
“That boy . . . that bad, bad boy . . .”
Sloat had not flown into a rage. Indeed, he had felt extraordinary calm. He felt a sense of predestination which he suspected came from that other part of him—what he thought of
as “his Orris-ness” in a half-understood pun on royalty.
“Be calm,” Sloat had soothed. “I’ll be there as soon as I
can. Hang in there, baby.”
He had broken the connection before Gardener could say
any more, and lain back on the bed. He had crossed his hands on his stomach and closed his eyes. There was a moment of
weightlessness . . . just a moment . . . and then he felt a sensation of movement beneath him. He heard the creak of leather
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traces, the groan and thump of rough iron springs, the curses of his driver.
He had opened his eyes as Morgan of Orris.
As always, his first reaction was pure delight: this made
coke seem like baby aspirin. His chest was narrower, his
weight less. Morgan Sloat’s heartbeat ran anywhere from
eighty-five beats a minute to a hundred and twenty when he
was pissed off; Orris’s rarely went higher than sixty-five or so.
Morgan Sloat’s eyesight was tested at 20/20, but Morgan of
Orris nonetheless saw better. He could see and trace the
course of every minute crack in the sidewall of the diligence, could marvel over the fineness of the mesh curtains which
blew through the windows. Cocaine had clogged Sloat’s nose, dulling his sense of smell; Orris’s nose was totally clear and he could smell dust and earth and air with perfect fidelity—it was as if he could sense and appreciate every molecule.
Behind him he had left an empty double bed still marked
with the shape of his large body. Here he was sitting on a
bench seat plusher than the seat in any Rolls-Royce ever
made, riding west toward the end of the Outposts, toward a
place which was called Outpost Depot. Toward a man named
Anders. He knew these things, knew exactly where he was,
because Orris was still here, inside his head—speaking to
him the way the right side of the brain may speak to the rational left during daydreams, in a low but perfectly clear
voice. Sloat had spoken to Orris in this same low undervoice on the few occasions when Orris had Migrated to what Jack
had come to think of as the American Territories. When one
Migrated and entered the body of one’s Twinner, the result
was a kind of benign possession. Sloat had read of more violent cases of possession, and although the subject did not
greatly interest him, he guessed that the poor, unlucky slobs so afflicted had been taken over by mad hitchhikers from
other worlds—or perhaps it was the American world itself
which had driven them mad. That seemed more than possible;
it had certainly done a number on poor old Orris’s head the first two or three times he had popped over, although he had been wildly excited as well as terrified.
The diligence took a mighty bounce—in the Outposts, you
took the roads as you found them and thanked God they were
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there at all. Orris shifted in his seat and his clubfoot muttered dull pain.
“Hold on steady, God pound you,” the driver muttered up
above. His whip whistled and popped. “Roll, you sons of dead whores! Roll on!”
Sloat grinned with the pleasure of being here, even though
it would only be for moments. He already knew what he
needed to know; Orris’s voice had muttered it to him. The
diligence would arrive at Outpost Depot—Thayer School in
the other world—well before morning. It might be possible to take them there if they had lingered; if not, the Blasted Lands awaited them. It hurt and enraged him to think that Richard was now with the Sawyer brat, but if a sacrifice was demanded . . . well, Orris had lost his son and survived.
The only thing that had kept Jack alive this long was the
maddening fact of his single nature—when the whelp flipped
to a place, he was always in the analogue of the place he had left. Sloat, however, always ended up where Orris was, which might be miles away from where he needed to be . . . as was the case now. He had been lucky at the rest area, but Sawyer had been luckier.
“Your luck will run out soon enough, my little friend,” Or-
ris said. The diligence took another terrific bounce. He grimaced, then grinned. If nothing else, the situation was
simplifying itself even as the final confrontation took on
wider and deeper implications.
Enough.
He closed his eyes and crossed his arms. For just a mo-
ment he felt another dull thud of pain in the deformed foot . . .
and when he opened his eyes, Sloat was looking up at the
ceiling of his apartment. As always, there was a moment
when the extra pounds fell into him with sickening weight,
when his heart reacted with a surprised double-beat and then sped up.
He had gotten to his feet then and had called West Coast
Business Jet. Seventy minutes later he had been leaving LAX.
The Lear’s steep and abrupt takeoff stance made him feel as it always did—it was as if a blowtorch had been strapped to his ass. They had touched down in Springfield at five-fifty central time, just as Orris would be approaching Outpost Depot in the
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Territories. Sloat had rented a Hertz sedan and here he was.
American travel did have its advantages.
He got out of the car and, just as the morning bells began
to ring, he walked onto the Thayer campus his own son had so lately quitted.
Everything was the essence of an early Thayer weekday
morning. The chapel bells were playing a normal morning
tune, something classical but not quite recognizable which
sounded a bit like “Te Deum” but wasn’t. Students passed
Sloat on their way to the dining hall or to morning workouts.
They were perhaps a little more silent than usual, and they shared a look—pale and slightly dazed, as if they had all
shared a disquieting dream.
Which, of course, they had, Sloat thought. He stopped for
a moment in front of Nelson House, looking at it thoughtfully.
They simply didn’t know how fundamentally unreal they all
were, as all creatures who live near the thin places between worlds must be. He walked around to the side and watched a
maintenance man picking up broken glass that lay on the
ground like trumpery diamonds. Beyond his bent back Sloat
could see into the Nelson House lounge, where an unusually
quiet Albert the Blob was sitting and looking blankly at a
Bugs Bunny cartoon.
Sloat started across toward The Depot, his thoughts turn-
ing to the first time that Orris had flipped over into this world.
He found himself thinking of that time with a nostalgia that was, when one really stopped to think about it, damned near grotesque—after all, he had nearly died. Both of them had nearly died. But it had been in the middle fifties, and now he was in his middle fifties—it made all the difference in the world.
He had been coming back from the office and the sun had
been going down in a Los Angeles haze of smudged purples
and smokey yellows—this had been in the days before the
L.A. smog had really begun to thicken up. He had been on
Sunset Boulevard and looking at a billboard advertising a
new Peggy Lee record when he had felt a coldness in his
mind. It had been as if a wellspring had suddenly opened
somewhere in his subconscious, spilling out some alien
weirdness that was like . . . like . . .
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(like semen)
. . . well, he didn’t know exactly what it had been like. Except that it had quickly become warm, gained cognizance,
and he had just had time to realize it was he, Orris, and then everything had turned topsy-turvy like a secret door on its gimbal—a bookcase on one side, a Chippendale dresser on