ammaden had said once that safes were like women: given the tools and the time, any box could be opened. There were, he said, tough cracks and easy cracks, but no impossible cracks.

This girl was tough.

At first they had had to feed Charlie intravenously just to keep her from starving herself to death. After a while she began to understand that not eating was gaining her nothing but a lot of bruises on the insides of her elbows, and she began to eat, not with any enthusiasm but simply because using her mouth was less painful.

She read some of the books that were given her-leafed through them, at any rate-and would sometimes turn on the color TV in her room only to turn it off" again a few minutes later. She had watched a local movie presentation of Black Beauty all the way through in June, and she had sat through The Wonderful World of Disney once or twice. That was all. On her weekly reports the phrase "sporadic aphasia" had begun to crop up more and more often.

Rainbird had looked the term up in a medical dictionary and understood it at once-because of his own experiences as Indian and warrior, he understood it perhaps better than the doctors themselves. Sometimes the girl ran out of words. She would simply stand there, not a bit upset, her mouth working soundlessly. And sometimes she would use a totally out-of-context word, apparently without realizing it at all. "I don't like this dress, I'd rather have the hay one.'. Sometimes she would correct herself absently-I mean the green one"-but more often it would simply pass unnoticed.

According to the dictionary, aphasia was forgetfulness caused by some cerebral disorder. The doctors had immediately begun monkeying with her medication. Orasin was changed to Valium with no appreciable change for the better. Valium and Orasin were tried together, but an unforseen interaction between the two had caused her to cry steadily and monotonously until the dose wore off: A brand-new drug, a combination of tranquilizer and light hallucinogenic, was tried and seemed to help for a while. Then she had begun to stutter and broke out in a light rash. Currently she was back on Orasin, but she was being monitored closely in case the aphasia got worse.

Reams had been written about the girl's delicate psychological condition and about what the shrinks called her "basic fire conflict," a fancy way of saying that her father had told her not to and the Shop people were telling her to go ahead... all of it complicated by her guilt over the incident at the Manders farm.

Rainbird bought none of it. It wasn't the drugs, it wasn't being locked up and watched constantly, it wasn't being separated from her father.

She was just tough, that was all.

She had made up her mind somewhere along the line that she wasn't going to cooperate, no matter what. The end. Toot finnee. The psychiatrists could run around showing her inkblots until the moon was blue, the doctors could play with her medication and mutter in their beards about the difficulty of successfully drugging an eight-year-old girl. The papers could pile up and Cap could rave on.

And Charlie McGee would simply go on toughing it out.

Rainbird sensed it as surely as he sensed the coming of rain this afternoon. And he admired her for it. She had the whole bunch of them chasing their tails, and if it was left up to them they would still be chasing their tails when Thanksgiving and then Christmas rolled around. But they wouldn't chase their tails forever, and this more than anything worried John Rainbird.

Rammaden, the safecracker, had told an amusing story about two thieves who had broken into a supermarket one Friday night when they knew a snowstorm had kept the Wells Fargo truck from arriving and taking the heavy end-of-the-week receipts to the bank. The safe was a barrel box. They tried to drill out the combination dial with no success. They had tried to peel it but had been totally unable to bend back a corner and get a start. Finally they had blown it. That was a total success. They blew that barrel wide open, so wide open in fact that all the money inside had been totally destroyed. What was left had looked like the shredded money you sometimes see in those novelty pens...

"The point is," Rammaden had said in his dry and wheezing voice, "those two thieves didn't beat the safe. The whole game is beating the safe. You don't beat the safe unless you can take away what was in it in usable condition, you get my point? They overloaded it with soup. They killed the money. They were assholes and the safe beat them."

Rainbird had got the point.

There were better than sixty college degrees in on this, but it still came down to safecracking. They had tried to drill the girl's combination with their drugs; they had enough shrinks to field a softball team, and these shrinks were all doing their best to resolve the "basic fire conflict'; and all that particular pile of horseapples boiled down to was that they were trying to peel her from the back.

Rainbird entered the small Quonset hut, took his time card from the rack, and punched in. T. B. Norton, the shift supervisor, looked up from the paperback he was reading.

"No overtime for punching in early, Injun."

"Yeah?" Rainbird said.

"Yeah." Norton stared at him challengingly, full of the grim, almost holy assurance that so often goes with petty authority.

Rainbird dropped his eyes and went over to look at the bulletin board. The orderlies" bowling team had won last night. Someone wanted to sell "2 good used washing machines." An official notice proclaimed that ALL W-I THROUGH W-6 WORKERS MUST WASH HANDS BEFORE LEAVING THIS OFFICE.

"Looks like rain," he said over his shoulder to Norton.

"Never happen, Injun," Norton said. "Why don't you blow? You're stinking the place up."

"Sure, boss," Rainbird said. "Just clockin in."

"Well next time clock in when you're spozed to."

"Sure, boss," Rainbird said again, going out, sparing one glance at the side of Norton's pink neck, the soft spot just below the jawbone. Would you have time to scream, boss? Would you have time to scream if I stuck my forefinger through your throat at that spot? Just like a skewer through a piece of steak... boss.

He went back out into the muggy heat. The thunderheads were closer now, moving slowly, bowed down with their weight of rain. It was going to be a hard storm. Thunder muttered, still distant.

The house was close now. Rainbird would go around to the side entrance, what had once been the pantry, and take C elevator down four levels. Today he was supposed to wash and wax all the floors in the girl's quarters; it would give him a good shot. And it wasn't that she was unwilling to talk with him; it wasn't that. It was just that she was always so damned distant. He was trying to peel the box in his own way, and if he could get her to laugh, just once get her to laugh, to share a joke with him at the Shop's expense, it would be like prying up that one vital corner. It would give him a place to set his chisel. Just that one laugh. It would make them insiders together, it would make them a committee in secret session. Two against the house.

But so far he hadn't been able to get that one laugh, and Rainbird admired her for that more than he could have said.

2

Rainbird put his ID card in the proper slot and then went down to the orderlies" station to grab a cup of coffee before going on. He didn't want coffee, but it was still early. He couldn't afford to let his eagerness show; it was bad enough that Norton had noticed and commented on it.

He poured himself a slug of mud from the hotplate and sat down with it. At least none of the other nerds had arrived yet. He sat down on the cracked and sprung gray sofa and drank his coffee. His blasted face (and Charlie had shown nothing but the most passing interest in that) was calm and impassive. His thoughts ran on, analyzing the situation as it now stood.

The staff on this were like Rammaden's green safecrackers in the supermarket office. They were handling the girl with kid gloves now, but they weren't doing it out of any love for the girl. Sooner or later they would decide that the kid gloves were getting them nowhere, and when they ran out of "soft" options, they would decide to blow the safe. When they did, Rainbird was almost sure that they would "kill the money," in Rammaden's pungent phrase.

Already he had seen the phrase "light shock treatments" in two of the doctors" reports-and one of the doctors had been Pynchot, who had Hockstetter's ear. He had seen a contingency report that had been couched in such stultifying jargon that it was nearly another language. Translated, what it boiled down to was a lot of strongarm stuff: if the kid sees her dad in enough pain, she'll break. What Rainbird thought the kid might do if she saw her dad hooked up to a Delco battery and doing a fast polka with his hair on end was to go calmly back to her room, break a waterglass, and eat the pieces.

But you couldn't tell them that. The Shop, like the FBI and CIA, had a long history of killing the money. If you can't get what you want with foreign aid, go in there with some Thompsons and gelignite and assassinate the bastard. Put some cyanide gas in Castro's cigars. It was crazy, but you couldn't tell them that. All they could see where RESULTS, glittering and blinking like some mythical Vegas jackpot. So they killed the money and stood there with a bunch of useless green scraps sifting through their fingers and wondered what the hell had happened.

Now other orderlies began to drift in, joking, smacking each other on the fat part of the arm, talking about the strikes they made and the spares they converted the night before, talking about women, talking about cars, talking about getting shitfaced. The same old stuff that went on even unto the end of the world, hallelujah, amen. They steered clear of Rainbird. None of them liked Rainbird. He didn't bowl and he didn't want to talk about his car and he looked like a refugee from a Frankenstein movie. He made them nervous. If one of them had smacked him on the heavy part of the arm, Rainbird would have put him in traction.

He took out a sack of Red Man, a Zig-Zag paper, and made a quick cigarette. He sat and smoked and waited for it to be time to do down to the girl's quarters.

All things taken together, he felt better, more alive, than he had in years. He realised this and was grateful to the girl. In a way she would never know of, she had given him back his life for a while-the life of a man who feels things keenly and hopes for things mightily; which is to say, a man with vital concerns. It was good that she was tough. He would get to her eventually (tough cracks and easy cracks, but no impossible cracks); he would make her do her dance for them, for whatever that was worth; when the dance was done he would kill her and look into her eyes, hoping to catch that spark of understanding, that message, as she crossed over into whatever there was.

In the meantime, he would live.

He crushed his cigarette out and got up, ready to go to work.

3

The thunderheads built up and up. By three o'clock, the skies over the Longmont complex were low and black. Thunder rolled more and more heavily, gaining assurance, making believers out of the people below. The grounds-keepers put away their mowers. The tables on the patios of the two homes were taken in. In the stables, two hostlers tried to soothe nervous horses that shifted uneasily at each ominous thud from the skies.

The storm came around three-thirty; it came as suddenly as a gunslinger's draw and with all-out fury. It started as rain, then quickly turned to hail. The wind blew from west to east and then suddenly shifted around to exactly the opposite direction. Lightning flashed in great blue-white strokes that left the air smelling like weak gasoline. The winds began to swirl counterclockwise, and on the evening weathercasts there was film of a small tornado that had just skirted Longmont Center and had torn the roof off a shopping-center Fotomat in passing.

The Shop weathered most of the storm well. Two windows were driven in by hail, and the windstorm picked up a low picket fence surrounding a quaint little gazebo on the far side of the duckpond and threw it sixty yards, but that was the extent of the damage (except for flying branches and some ruined flowerbeds-more work for the groundskeeping force). The guard dogs ran between the inner and outer fences crazily at the height of the storm, but they calmed down quickly as it began to slack off:

The damage was done by the electrical storm that came after the hail, rain, and wind. Parts of eastern Virginia were without power until midnight as a result of lightning strikes on the Rowantree and Briska power stations. The area served by the Briska station included Shop headquarters.

In his office, Cap Hollister looked up in annoyance as the lights went off and the solid, unobtrusive hum of the air conditioner wound down to nothing. There were perhaps five seconds of shadowy semi-darkness caused by the power outage and the heavy stormclouds-long enough for Cap to whisper "Goddam!" under his breath and wonder what the hell had happened to their backup electrical system.

He glanced out the window and saw lightning flickering almost continuously. That evening one of the guardhouse sentries would tell his wife that he had seen an electrical fireball that looked as big as two serving platters bouncing from the weakly charged outer fence to the more heavily charged inner fence and back again.

Cap reached for the phone to find out about the power-and then the lights came on again. The air conditioner took up its hum, and instead of reaching for the phone, Cap reached for his pencil.

Then the lights went out again.

"Shit!" Cap said. He threw the pencil down and picked up the phone after all, daring the lights to come on again before he had the chance to chew someone's ass. The lights declined the dare.

The two graceful homes facing each other across the rolling lawns-and all of the Shop complex underneath-were served by the Eastern Virginia Power Authority, but there were two backup systems powered by diesel generators. One system served the "vital functions"-the electrical fence, the computer terminals (a power failure can cost unbelievable amounts of money in terms of computer time), and the small infirmary. A second system served the lesser functions of the complex-lights, air conditioning, elevators, and all of that. The secondary system was built to "cross"-that is, to come in if the primary system showed signs of overloading-but the primary system would not cross if the secondary system began to overload. On August 19, both systems overloaded. The secondary system crossed when the primary system began to overload, just as the power-system architects had planned (although in truth, they had never planned for the primary system to overload in the first place), and as a result, the primary system operated for a full seventy seconds longer than the secondary system. Then the generators for both systems blew, one after the other, like a series of firecrackers. Only these firecrackers had cost about eighty thousand dollars each.

Later, a routine inquiry had brought back the smiling and benign verdict of "mechanical failure," although a more accurate conclusion would have been "greed and venality." When the backup generators had been installed in 1971, a senator privy to the acceptable-low-bid figures on that little operation (as well as sixteen million dollars" worth of other Shop construction) had tipped his brother-in-law, who was an electrical-engineering consultant. The consultant had decided he could quite handily come in under the lowest bid by cutting a corner here and there.

It was only one favor in an area that lives on favors and under-the-table information, and it was notable only because it was the first link in the chain that led to the final destruction and loss of life. The backup system had been used only piecemeal in all the years since it had been constructed. In its first major test, during the storm that knocked out the Briska power station, it failed completely. By then, of course, the electrical-engineering consultant had gone onward and upward; he was helping to build a multimillion-dollar beach resort at Coki Beach, on St. Thomas.

The Shop didn't get its power back until the Briska station come on line again... which is to say, at the same time the rest of eastern Virginia got its juice back-around midnight.

By then, the next links had already been forged. As a result of the storm and the blackout, something tremendous had happened to both Andy and Charlie McGee, although neither of them had the slightest idea of what had happened to the other. After five months of stasis, things had begun to roll onward again.

4

When the power went off, Andy McGee was watching The PTL Club on TV. The, PTL stood for "Praise the Lord." On one of the Virginia stations, The PTL Club seemed to run continuously, twentyfour hours a day. This was probably not the case, but Andy's perceptions of time had become so screwed up it was hard to tell.

He had put on weight. Sometimes-more often when he was straight-he would catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror and think of Elvis Presley and the way the man had softly ballooned near the end of his life. At other times, he would think of the way a tomcat that had been "fixed" would sometimes get fat and lazy.

He wasn't fat yet, but he was getting there. In Hastings Glen, he had weighed himself on the bathroom scale in the Slumberland Motel and had come in at one sixty-two. These days he was tipping the scales at about one-ninety. His cheeks were fuller, and he had the suggestion of a double chin and what his old high school gym teacher used to call (with utter contempt) "man-tits." And more than a suggestion of a gut. There was not much exercise or much urge to exercise while in the grip of a solid Thorazine high-and the food was very good.

He did not worry about his weight when he was high, and that was most of the time. When they were ready to make some more of their fruitless tests, they would iron him out over an eighteen hour period, a doctor would test his physical reactions, an EEG would be taken to make sure his brain waves were nice and sharp, and then he would be taken into a testing cubicle, which was a small white room with drilled-cork paneling.

They had began, back in April, with human volunteers. They told him what to do and told him that if he did anything over enthusiastic-like striking someone blind, for instance-that he would be made to suffer. An undertone to this threat was that he might not suffer alone. This threat struck Andy as an empty one; he didn't believe that they would really harm Charlie. She was their prize pupil. He was very much the B feature on the program.

The doctor in charge of testing him was a man named Herman Pynchot. He was in his late thirties and perfectly ordinary except for the fact that he grinned too much. Sometimes all that grinning made Andy nervous. Occasionally an older doctor named Hockstetter would drop by, but mostly it was Pynchot.

Pynchot told him as they approached the first test that there was a table in the small testing room. On this table was a bottle of grape Kool-Aid, labeled INK, a fountain pen in a stand, a pad of note paper, a pitcher of water, and two glasses. Pynchot told him that the volunteer would have no idea that there was anything other than ink in the ink bottle. Pynchot further told Andy that they would be grateful if he would "push" the volunteer into pouring himself a glass of water, then dumping a goodish quantity of the "ink" into it, and then quaffing the whole mess.

"Neat," Andy said. He himself had not been feeling so neat. He missed his Thorazine and the peace that it brought.

"Very neat," Pynchot said. "Will you do it?"

"Why should I?"

"You'll get something in return. Something nice."

"Be a good rat and you get the cheese," Andy said. "Right?"

Pynchot shrugged and grinned. His smock was screamingly neat; it looked as if it might have been tailored by Brooks Brothers.

"All right," Andy said. "I give up. What's my prize for making this poor sucker drink ink?"

"Well, you can go back to taking your pills, for one thing."

Suddenly it was a little hard to swallow, and he wondered if Thorazine was addicting, and if it was, if the addiction was psychological or physiological. "Tell me, Pynchot," he said. "How does it feel to be a pusher? Is that in the Hippocratic oath?"

Pynchot shrugged and grinned. "You also get to go outdoors for a while," he said. "I believe you've expressed an interest in that?"

Andy had. His quarters were nice-so nice you could sometimes almost forget they were nothing but a padded jail cell. There were three rooms plus a bath; there was a color TV equipped with Home Box Office, where a new choice of three recent films appeared each week. One of the munchkins possibly it had been Pynchot-must have pointed out that there was no use taking away his belt and giving him only Crayolas to write with and plastic spoons to eat with. If he wanted to commit suicide, there was just no way they could stop him. If he pushed hard enough and long enough, he would simply blow his brain like an old tire.

So the place had all the amenities, even extending to a microwave oven in the kitchenette. It was all done in decorator colors, there was a thick shag rug on the living-room floor, the pictures were all good prints. But for all of that, a dog turd covered with frosting is not a wedding cake; it is simply a frosted dog turd, and none of the doors leading out of this tasteful little apartment had doorknobs on the inside. There were small glass loopholes scattered here and there around the apartment-the sort of loopholes you see in the doors of hotel rooms. There was even one in the bathroom, and Andy had calculated that they provided sightlines to just about anyplace in the apartment. TV monitoring devices was Andy's guess, and probably equipped with infrared as well, so you couldn't even jerk off in relative privacy.

He wasn't claustrophobic, but he didn't like being closed up for long periods of time. It made him nervous, even with the drugs. It was a low nervousness, usually evidenced by long sighs and periods of apathy. He had indeed asked to go out. He wanted to see the sun again, and green grass.

"Yes," he said softly to Pynchot. "I have expressed an interest in going out."

But he didn't get to go out...

The volunteer was nervous at first, undoubtedly expecting Andy to make him stand on his head and cluck like a chicken or something equally ridiculous. He was a football fan. Andy got the man, whose name was Dick Albright, to bring him up to date on the previous season-who had made it to the playoffs and how they went, who had won the Super Bowl.

Albright kindled. He spent the next twenty minutes reliving the entire season, gradually losing his nervousness. He was up to the lousy reffing that had allowed the Pats to triumph over the Dolphins in the AFC championship game when Andy said, "Have a glass of water, if you want. You must be thirsty."

Albright glanced up at him. "Yeah, I am kinda thirsty. Say... am I talkin too much? Is it screwin up their tests, do you think?" "No, I don't think so," Andy said. He watched Dick Albright pour himself a glass of water from the pitcher.

"You want some?" Albright asked. "No, I'll pass," Andy said, and suddenly gave a hard push. "Have some ink in it, why don't you?" Albright looked up at him, then reached for the bottle of "ink." He picked it up, looked at it, and put it back down again. "Put ink in it? You must be crazy."

Pynchot grinned as much after the test as before it, but he was not pleased. Not pleased at all. Andy was not pleased either. When he had pushed out at Albright there had been none of that sideslipping sensation... that curious feeling of doubling that usually accompanied the push. And no headache. He had concentrated all of his will toward suggesting to Albright that putting ink in his water would be a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and Albright had made a perfectly reasonable reply: that Andy was nuts. In spite of all the pain it had caused him, he had felt a touch of panic at the thought the talent night have deserted him.

"Why do you want to keep it under wraps?" Pynchot asked him. He lit a Chesterfield and grinned. "I don't understand you, Andy. What good does it do you?"

"For the tenth time," Andy had replied, "I wasn't holding back. I wasn't faking. I pushed him as hard as I could. Nothing happened, that's all." He wanted his pill. He felt depressed and nervous. All the colors seemed too bright, the light too strong, voices too loud. It was better with the pills. With the pills, his useless outrage over what had happened and his loneliness for Charlie and his worry over what might be happening to her-these things faded back and became manageable. "I'm afraid I don't believe that," Pynchot said, and grinned. "Think it over, Andy. We're not asking you to make someone walk off" a cliff" or shoot himself in the head. I guess you didn't want that walk as badly as you thought you did."

He stood up as if to go. "Listen," Andy said, unable to keep the desperation entirely out of his voice, "I'd like one of those pills."

"Would you?" Pynchot said. "Well, it might interest you to know that I'm lightening your dosage... just in case it's the Thorazine that's interfering with your ability." His grin bloomed anew. "Of course, if your ability suddenly came back..."

"There are a couple of things you should know," Andy told him. "First, the guy was nervous, expecting something. Second, he wasn't all that bright. It's a lot harder to push old people and people with low or low-normal IQs. Bright people go easier."

"Is that so?" Pynchot said.

"Yes."

"Then why don't you push me into giving you a pill right now? My tested IQ is one-fifty-five."

Andy had tried-with no results at all.

Eventually he had got his walk outside, and eventually they had increased the dosage of his medication again as well-after they became convinced that he really wasn't faking, that he was, in fact, trying desperately hard to use the push, with no success at all. Quite independently of each other, both Andy and Dr. Pynchot began to wonder if he hadn't tipped himself over permanently in the run that had taken him and Charlie from New York to Albany County Airport to Hastings Glen, if he hadn't simply used the talent up. And both of them wondered if it wasn't some kind of psychological block. Andy himself came to believe that either the talent was really gone or it was simply a defense mechanism: his mind refusing to use the talent because it knew it might kill him to do so. He hadn't forgotten the numb places on his cheek and neck, and the bloodshot eye.

Either way, it amounted to the same thing-a big goose-egg. Pynchot, his dreams of covering himself with glory as the first man to get provable, empirical data on psychic mental domination now flying away, came around less and less often.

The tests had continued through May and June first more volunteers and then totally unsuspecting test subjects. Using the latter was not precisely ethical, as Pynchot was the first to admit, but some of the first tests with LSD hadn't been precisely ethical, either. Andy marveled that by equating these two wrongs in his mind, Pynchot seemed to come out the other side feeling that everything was okay. It didn't matter, because Andy had no success pushing any of them.

A month ago, just after the Fourth of July, they had begun testing him with animals. Andy protested that pushing an animal was even more impossible than trying to push a stupid person, but his protests cut zero ice with Pynchot and his team, who were really only going through the motions of a scientific investigation at this point. And so once a week Andy found himself sitting in a room with a dog or a cat or a monkey, feeling like a character from an absurdist novel. He remembered the cab driver who had looked at a dollar bill and had seen a five hundred. He remembered the timid executives he had managed to tip gently in the direction of more confidence and assertiveness. Before them, in Port City, Pennsylvania, there had been the Weight-Off program, the classes attended mostly by lonely fat housewifes with an addiction to Snackin" Cakes, Pepsi-Cola, and anything between two slices of bread. These were things that filled up the emptiness of their lives a little. That had simply been a matter of pushing a little bit, because most of them had really wanted to lose weight. He had helped them do that. He thought also of what had happened to the two Shop ramrods who had taken Charlie.

He had been able to do it, but no more. It was hard even to remember exactly what it had felt like. So "he sat in the room with dogs that lapped his hand and cats that purred and monkeys that moodily scratched their asses and sometimes showed their teeth in apocalyptic, fang-filled grins that were obscenely like Pynchot's grins, and of course none of the animals did anything unusual at all. And later on he would be taken back to his apartment with no doorknobs on the doors and there would be a blue pill in a white dish on the counter in the kitchenette and in a little while he would stop feeling nervous and depressed. He would start feeling pretty much okay again. And he would watch one of the Home Box Office movies-something with Clint Eastwood, if he could get it-or perhaps The PTL Club. It didn't bother him so much that he had lost his talent and become a superfluous person.

5

On the afternoon of the big storm, he sat watching The PTL Club. A woman with a beehive hairdo was telling the host how the power of God had cured her of Bright's disease. Andy was quite fascinated with her. Her hair gleamed under the studio lighting like a varnished table-leg. She looked like a time traveler from the year 1963. That was one of the fascinations The PTL Club held for him, along with the shameless carny pitches for money in the name of God. Andy would listen to these pitches delivered by hard-faced young men in expensive suits and think, bemused, of how Christ had driven the money-changers from the temple. And all the people on PTL looked like time travelers from 1963.

The woman finished her story of how God had saved her from shaking herself to pieces. Earlier in the program an actor who had been famous in the early 1950s had told how God had saved him from the bottle. Now the woman with the beehive hairdo began to cry and the once-famous actor embraced her. The camera dollied in for a close-up. In the background, the PTL Singers began to hum. Andy shifted in his seat a little. It was almost time for his pill.

In a dim sort of way he realized that the medication was only partially responsible for the peculiar changes that had come over him in the last five months, changes of which his soft weight gain was only an outward sign. When the Shop had taken Charlie away from him, they had knocked the one solid remaining prop out from under his life. With Charlie gone-oh, she was undoubtedly somewhere near, but she might as well have been on the moon-there seemed to be no reason for holding himself together.

On top of that, all the running had induced a nervous kind of shellshock. He had lived on the tightrope for so long that when he had finally fallen off, total lethargy had been the result. In fact, he believed he had suffered a very quiet sort of nervous breakdown. If he did see Charlie, he wasn't even sure she would recognize him as the same person, and that made him sad.

He had never made any effort to deceive Pynchot or cheat on the tests. He did not really think that doing so would rebound on Charlie, but he would not have taken even the most remote chance of that happening. And it was easier to do what they wanted. He had become passive. He had screamed the last of his rage on Granther's porch, as he cradled his daughter with the dart sticking out of her neck. There was no more rage left in him. He had shot his wad.

That was Andy McGee's mental state as he sat watching TV that August 19 while the storm walked the hills outside. The PTL host made a donations pitch and then introduced a gospel trio. The trio began to sing, and suddenly the lights went out.

The TV also went, the picture dwindling down to a bright speck. Andy sat in his chair, unmoving, not sure just what had happened. His mind had just enough time to register the scary totality of the dark, and then the lights went on again. The gospel trio reappeard, singing "I Got a Telephone Call from Heaven and Jesus Was on the Line." Andy heaved a sigh of relief, and then the lights went out again.

He sat there, gripping the arms of the chair as if he would fly away if he let go. He kept his eyes desperately fixed on the bright speck of light from the TV even after he knew it was gone and he was only seeing a lingering after-image... or wishful thinking.

It'll be back on in a second or two, he told himself. Secondary generators somewhere. You don't trust to house current to run a place like this.

Still, he was scared. He suddenly found himself recalling the boys"-adventure stories of his childhood. In more than one of them, there had been an incident in some cave with the lights or candles blown out. And it seemed that the author would always go to great lengths to describe the dark as "palpable" or "utter" or "total." There was even that tried-and-true old standby "the living dark," as in "The living dark engulfed Tom and his friends." If all of this had been meant to impress the nine year-old Andy McGee, it hadn't done. As far as he was concerned, if he wanted to be "engulfed by the living dark," all he had to do was go into his closet and put a blanket along the crack at the bottom of the door. Dark was, after all, dark.

Now he realized that he had been wrong about that; it wasn't the only thing he'd been wrong about as a kid, but it was maybe the last one to be discovered. He would just as soon have forgone the discovery, because dark wasn't dark. He had never been in a dark like this one in his life. Except for the sensation of the chair beneath his butt and under his hands, he could have been floating in some lightless Lovecraftian gulf between the stars. He raised one hand and floated it in front of his eyes. Arid although he could feel the palm lightly touching his nose, he couldn't see it.

He took the hand away from his face and gripped the arm of the chair with it again. His heart had taken on a rapid and thready beat in his chest. Outside, someone called out hoarsely, "Richie! Where the fuck are ya?" and Andy cringed back in his chair as if he had been threatened. He licked his lips.

It'll be back on in just a second or two now, he thought, but a scared part of his mind that refused to be comforted by mere rationalities asked: How long is a second or two, or a minute or two, in total darkness? How do you measure time in total darkness?

Outside, beyond his "apartment," something fell over and someone screamed in pain and surprise. Andy cringed back again and moaned shakily. He didn't like this. This was no good.

Well, if it takes them longer than a few minutes to fix it-to reset the breakers or whatever-they'll come and let me out. They'll have to.

Even the scared part of his mind-the part that was only a short distance away from gibbering-recognized the logic of this, and he relaxed a little. After all, it was just the dark; that's all it was-just the absence of light. It wasn't as if there were monsters in the dark, or anything like that.

He was very thirsty. He wondered if he dared get up and go get a bottle of ginger ale out of the fridge. He decided he could do it if he was careful. He got up, took two shuffling steps forward, and promptly barked his shin on the edge of the coffee table. He bent and rubbed it, eyes watering with pain.

This was like childhood, too. They had played a game called "blind man'; he supposed all kids did. You had to try to get from one end of the house to the other with a bandanna or something over your eyes. And everyone else thought it was simply the height of humor when you fell over a hassock or tripped over the riser between the dining room and the kitchen. The game could teach you a painful lesson about how little you actually remembered about the layout of your supposedly familiar house and how much more you relied upon your eyes than your memory. And the game could make you wonder how the hell you'd live if you went blind.

But I'll be all right, Andy thought. I'll be all right if I just take it slow and easy.

He moved around the coffee table and then began to shuffle his way slowly across the open space of the living room with his hands out in front of him. It was funny how threatening open space could feel in the dark. Probably the lights'll come on right now and I can have a good laugh at myself. Just have a good l-

"Ow!"

His outstretched fingers struck the wall and bent back painfully. Something fellthe picture of the barn and hayfield after the style of Wyeth that hung near the kitchen door, he guessed. It swished by him, sounding ominously like a whickering sword blade in the dark, and clattered to the floor. The sound was shockingly loud.

He stood still, holding his aching fingers, feeling the throb of his barked shin. He was cottonmouthed with fear.

"Hey!" he shouted. "Hey, don't forget about me, you guys!"

He waited and listened. There was no answer.

There were still sounds and voices, but they were farther away now. If they got much farther away, he would be in total silence. Forgotten all about me, he thought, and his fright deepened.

His heart was racing. He could feel cold sweat on his arms and brow, and he found himself remembering the time at Tashmore Pond when he had gone out too deep, got tired and begun to thrash and scream, sure he was going to die... but when he put his feet down the bottom was there, the water only nipple high. Where was the bottom now? He licked at his dry lips, but his tongue was dry, too.

"HEY." he shouted at the top of his lungs, and the sound of terror in his voice terrified him even more. He had to get hold of himself. He was within arm's length of total panic now, just bulling around mindlessly in here and screaming at the top of his lungs. All because someone had blown a fuse.

Oh goddammit all anyway, why'd it have to happen when it was time for my pill? If I had my pill I'd be all right. I'd be okay then. Christ it feels like my head's full of broken glass-

He stood there, breathing heavily. He had aimed for the kitchen door, had gone off course and run into the wall. Now he felt totally disoriented and couldn't even remember if that stupid barn picture had been hung to the right or left of the doorway. He wished miserably that he had stayed in his chair.

"Get hold," he muttered aloud. "Get hold." It was not just panic, he recognized that. It was the pill that was now overdue, the pill on which he had come to depend. It just wasn't fair that this had happened when his pill was due.

"Get hold," he muttered again.

Ginger ale. He had got up to get ginger ale and he was going to by-God get it. He had to fix on something. That's all it came down to, and ginger ale would do as well as anything else.

He began to move again, toward the left, and promptly fell over the picture that had come off the wall. Andy screamed and went down, pinwheeling his arms wildly and fruitlessly for balance. He struck his head hard and screamed again. Now he was very frightened. Help me, he thought. Somebody help me, bring me a candle, for Christ's sake, something, I'm scared-He began to cry. His fumbling fingers felt thick wetness on the side of his head-blood-and he wondered with numb terror how bad it was.

"Where are you people?" he screamed. There was no answer. He heard-or thought he heard-a single faraway shout, and then there was silence. His fingers found the picture he had tripped over and he threw it across the room, furious at it for hurting him. It struck the end table beside the couch, and the now-useless lamp that stood there fell over. The lightbulb exploded with a hollow sound, and Andy cried out again. He felt the side of his head. More blood there now. It was crawling over his cheek in little rivulets.

Panting, he began to crawl, one hand out to feel the wall. When its solidity abruptly ended in blankness, he drew in both his breath and his hand, as if he expected something nasty to snake out of the blackness and grab him. A little whhh! sound sucked in past his lips. For just one second the totality of childhood came back and he could hear the whisper of trolls as they crowded eagerly toward him.

"Just the kitchen door, for fuck's sake," he muttered raggedly. "That's all."

He crawled through it. The fridge was to the right and he began to bear that way, crawling slowly and breathing fast, his hands cold on the tile.

Somewhere overhead, on the next level, something fell over with a tremendous clang. Andy jerked up on his knees. His nerve broke and he lost himself. He began to scream. "Help! Help! Help!" over and over until he was hoarse. He had no idea how long he might have screamed there, on his hands and knees in the black kitchen.

At last he stopped and tried to get hold of himself. His hands and arms were shaking helplessly. His head ached from the thump he had given it, but the flow of blood seemed to have stopped. That was a little reassuring. His throat felt hot and flayed from all his screaming, and that made him think of the ginger ale again.

He began to crawl once more, and he found the refrigerator with no further incident. He opened it (ridiculously expecting the interior light to come on with its familiar frosty-white glow) and fumbled around in the cool dark box until he found a can with a ringtab on top. Andy shut the fridge door and leaned against it. He opened the can and swilled half the ginger ale at a draft. His throat blessed him for it.

Then a thought came and his throat froze.

The place is on fire, his mind told him with spurious calmness. That's why no one's come to get you out. They're evacuating. You, now... you're expendable.

This thought brought on an extremity of claustrophobic terror that was beyond panic. He simply cringed back against the refrigerator, his lips pulled back from his teeth in a grimace. The strength went out of his legs. For a moment, he even imagined he could smell smoke, and heat seemed to rush over him. The soda can slipped from his fingers and gurgled its contents out onto the floor, wetting his pants.

Andy sat in the wetness, moaning.

6

John Rainbird thought later that things could not have worked better if they had planned it... and if those fancy psychologists had been worth a tin whistle in a high wind, they would have planned it. But as it happened, it was only the lucky happen stance of the blackout's occurring when it did that allowed him to finally get his chisel under one corner of the psychological steel that armored Charlie McGee. Luck and his own inspired intuition.

He let himself into Charlie's quarters at three thirty, just as the storm was beginning to break outside. He pushed a cart before him that was no different from the ones most hotel and motel maids push as they go from room to room. It contained clean sheets and pillow slips, furniture polish, a rug-shampoo preparation for spot stains. There was a floor bucket and a mop. A vacuum cleaner was clipped to one end of the cart.

Charlie was sitting on the floor in front of the couch, wearing a bright blue Danskin leotard and nothing else. Her long legs were crossed in a lotuslike position. She sat that way a great deal. An outsider might have thought she was stoned, but Rainbird knew better. She was still being lightly medicated, but now the dosage was little more than a placebo. All of the psychologists were in disappointed agreement that she meant what she said about never lighting fires again. The drugs had originally been meant to keep her from burning her way out, but now it seemed sure that she wasn't going to do that... or anything else.

"Hi, kid," Rainbird said. He unclipped the vacuum cleaner. She glanced over at him but didn't respond. He plugged the vacuum in, and when he started it, she got up gracefully and went into the bathroom. She shut the door.

Rainbird went on vacuuming the rug. He had no plan in mind. It was a case of looking for small signs and signals, picking up on them, and following them. His admiration for the girl was unalloyed. Her father was turning into a fat, apathetic pudding, the psychologists had their own terms for it "dependency shock," and "loss of identity," and "mental fugue," and "mild reality dysfunction" but what it all came down to was he had given up and could now be canceled out of the equation. The girl hadn't done that. She had simply hidden herself. And Rainbird never felt so much like an Indian as he did when he was with Charlie McGee.

He vacuumed and waited for her to come out maybe. He thought she was coming out of the bathroom a little more frequently now. At first she had always hidden there until he was gone. Now sometimes she came out and watched him. Perhaps she would today. Perhaps not. He would wait. And watch for signs.

7

Charlie sat in the bathroom with the door shut. She would have locked it if she could. Before the orderly came to clean the place, she had been doing some simple exercises she had found in a book. The orderly came to keep it orderly. Now the toilet seat felt cold under her. The white light from the fluorescents that ringed the bathroom mirror made everything seem cold, and too bright.

At first there had been a live-in "companion," a woman of about forty-five. She was supposed to be "motherly," but the "motherly companion" had hard green eyes with small flecks in them. The flecks were like ice. These were the people who had killed her real mother; now they wanted her to live here with the "motherly companion." Charlie told them she didn't want the "motherly companion." They smiled. Then Charlie stopped talking, and she didn't say another word until the "motherly companion" left, taking her green ice-chip eyes with her. She had made a deal with that man Hockstetter: she would, answer his questions, and his alone, if he would get that "motherly companion" out. The only companion she wanted was her father, and if she couldn't have him, she would be alone.

In many ways she felt that the last five months (they told her it was five months; it didn't feel like anything) had been a dream. There was no way to mark time, faces came and went with no memories attached to them, disembodied as balloons, and food had no particular taste. She felt like a balloon herself sometimes. She felt as if she were floating. But in a way, her mind told her with perfect certitude, it was fair. She was a murderer.

She had broken the worst of the Ten Commandments and was surely damned to hell.

She thought about this at night, with the lights turned down low so that the apartment itself seemed like a dream. She saw it all. The men on the porch wearing their crowns of flame. The cars exploding. The chickens catching fire. The smell of burning that was always the smell of smoldering stuffing, the smell of her teddy bear.

(and she had liked it)

That was it; that was the trouble. The more she had done it the more she had liked it; the more she had done it the more she had been able to feel the power, a living thing, getting stronger and stronger. It was like a pyramid standing upside down, standing on its tip, and the more you did it the harder it got to stop it. It hurt to stop it.

(and it was fun)

and so she was never going to do it again. She would die in here before she did it again. Maybe she even wanted to die in here. The idea of dying in a dream wasn't scary at all.

The only two faces that weren't totally dissociated were Hockstetter's and that of the orderly who came to clean her apartment every day. Charlie had asked him once why he had to come every day, since she wasn't messy.

John-that was his name-had taken a scrungy old pad from his back pocket and a cheap ballpoint pen from his breast pocket. He said "That's just my job, kid." And on the paper he wrote Because they're full of shit, why else?

She had almost giggled but had stopped herself in time by thinking of men with crowns of fire, men who smelled like smoldering teddy bears. Giggling would have been dangerous. So she simply pretended that she hadn't seen the note or didn't understand it. The orderly's face was a mess. He wore an eyepatch. She felt sorry for him and once she had almost asked him what happened-if he had been in a car accident or something-but that would have been even more dangerous than giggling at his note. She didn't know why, but she felt that in every fiber.

His face was very horrible to look at, but he seemed pleasant enough, and his face was no worse than the face of little Chuckie Eberhardt back in Harrison. Chuckie's mother had been frying potatoes when Chuckie was three and Chuckie had pulled the pan of hot fat off the stove all over himself and had almost died. Afterward the other kids sometimes called him Chuckie Hamburger and Chuckie Frankenstein, and Chuckie would cry. It was mean. The other kids didn't seem to understand that a thing like that could happen to any kid. When you were three you didn't have much in the smarts department.

John's face was all ripped up, but that didn't scare her. It was Hockstetter's face that scared her, and his face-except for the eyes-was as ordinary as anyone else's. His eyes were even worse than the eyes of the "motherly companion." He was always using them to pry at you. Hockstetter wanted her to make fires. He asked her again and again. He took her to a room, and sometimes there would be crumpled-up pieces of newspaper and sometimes there would be little glass dishes filled with oil and sometimes there would be other things. But for all the questions, and all the fake sympathy, it always came down to the same thing: Charlie, set this on fire.

Hockstetter scared her. She sensed that he had all sorts of... of

(things)

that he could use on her to make her light fires. But she wouldn't. Except she was scared that she would. Hockstetter would use anything. He didn't play fair, and one night she had had a dream, and in this dream she had set Hockstetter on fire and she had awakened with her hands stuffed into her mouth to keep back a scream.

One day, in order to postpone the inevitable request, she had asked when she could see her father. It had been much on her mind, but she hadn't asked, because she knew what the answer would be. But on this day she was feeling specially tired and low-spirited, and it had just slipped out.

"Charlie, I think you know the answer to that," Hockstetter had said. He pointed to the table in the little room. There was a steel tray on the table and it was filled with heaps of curly woodshavings. "If you'll light that, I'll take you to your father right away. You can be with him in two minutes." Beneath his cold, watching eyes, Hockstetter's mouth spread wide in a just-pals sort of grin. "Now, what say?"

"Give me a match," Charlie had answered, feeling the tears threaten. "I'll light it."

"You can light it just by thinking about it. You know that."

"No. I can't. And even if I could, I wouldn't. It's wrong."

Hockstetter looked at her sadly, the just-pals smile fading. "Charlie, why do you hurt yourself like this? Don't you want to see your dad? He wants to see you. He told me to tell you it was all right."

And then she did cry, she cried hard and long, because she did want to see him, not a minute of any day went by without her thoughts turning to him, without missing him, without wanting to feel his solid arms around her. Hockstetter watched her cry and there was no sympathy in his face, no sorrow or kindness. There was, however, careful calculation. Oh, she hated him.

That had been three weeks ago. Since then she had stubbornly not mentioned her father, although Hockstetter had dangled him before her constantly, telling her that her father was sad, that her father said it was okay to make fires, and worst of all, that her father had told Hockstetter that he guessed Charlie didn't love him anymore.

She looked at her pale face in the bathroom mirror and listened to the steady whine of John's vacuum cleaner. When he finished that, he would change her bed. Then he would dust. Then he would be gone. Suddenly she didn't want him to be gone, she wanted to listen to him talk.

At first she had always gone into the bathroom and stayed in there until he was gone, and once he had turned off the vacuum cleaner and knocked on the bathroom door, calling worriedly: "Kid? You all right? You ain't sick, are you?"

His voice was so kind-and kindness, simple kindness, was so hard to come by in here-that she had had to struggle to keep her voice calm and cool because the tears were threatening again. "Yes... I'm okay."

She waited, wondering if he would try to take it further, try to get inside her like the others did, but he had simply gone away and started his vacuum up again. In a way she had been disappointed.

Another time he had been washing the floor and when she came out of the bathroom, he had said, without looking up, "Watch out for that wet floor, kid, you don't want to break your arm." That was all, but again she had been nearly surprised into tears-it was concern, so simple and direct it was unconscious.

Just lately she had been coming out of the bathroom to watch him more and more. To watch him... and to listen to him. He would ask her questions sometimes, but they were never threatening ones. Still, most times she wouldn't answer, just on general principles.

It didn't stop John. He would talk to her anyway. He would talk about his bowling scores, about his dog, about how his TV got broken and it would be a couple of weeks before he could get it fixed because they wanted so much for those little tiny tubes. She supposed he was lonely. With a face like his, he probably didn't have a wife or anything. She liked to listen to him because it was like a secret tunnel to the outside. His voice was low, musical, sometimes wandering. It was never sharp and interrogative, like Hockstetter's. He required no reply, seemingly.

She got off the toilet seat and went to the door, and that was when the lights went out. She stood there, puzzled, one hand on the doorknob, her head cocked to one side. It immediately came to her that this was some sort of trick. She could hear the dying whine of John's vacuum cleaner and then he said, "Well, what the Christ?"

Then the lights came back on. Still Charlie didn't come out. The vacuum cleaner cycled back up again. Footsteps approached the door and John said, "Did the lights go out in there for a second?"

"Yes."

"It's the storm, I guess."

"What storm?"

"Looked like it was going to storm when I came to work. Big thunderheads."

Looked like it was going to storm. Outside. She wished she could go outside and see the big thunderheads. Smell that funny way the air got before a summer storm. It got a rainy, wet smell. Everything looked gr-

The lights went out again.

The vacuum died. The darkness was total. Her only connection with the world was her hand on the brushed-chrome doorknob. She began to tap her tongue thoughtfully against her upper lip.

"Kid?"

She didn't answer. A trick? A storm, he had said. And she believed that. She believed John. It was surprising and scary to find that she believed what someone had told her, after all this time.

"Kid?" It was him again. And this time he sounded... frightened. Her own fear of the dark, which had only begun to creep up on her, was sublimated in his. "John, what's the matter?" She opened the door and groped in front of her. She didn't go out, not yet. She was afraid of tripping over the vacuum cleaner. "What happened?" Now there was a beat of panic in his voice. It scared her. "Where's the lights?" "They went out," she said. "You said... the storm..."

"I can't stand the dark," he said. There was terror in his voice and a kind of grotesque apology. "You don't understand. I can't... I got to get out..." She heard him make a sudden blundering rush across the living room, and then there was a loud and frightening crash as he fell over something-the coffee table, most likely. He cried out miserably and that frightened her even more.

"John? John! Are you all right?"

"I got to get out!" he screamed. "Make them let me out, kid!"

"What's wrong?"

There was no answer, not for a long time. Then she heard a low, choked sound and understood that he was crying.