elp me," he said then, and Charlie stood in the bathroom doorway, trying to decide. Part of her fear had already dissolved into sympathy, but part of it remained questioning, hard and bright.

"Help me, oh somebody help me," he said in a low voice, so low it was as if he expected no one to hear or heed. And that decided her. Slowly she began to feel her way across the room toward him, her hands held out in front of her.

8

Rainbird heard her coming and could not forbear a grin in the dark-a hard, humorless grin that he covered with the palm of his hand, in case the power should come back on at that precise instant.

"John?"

He made a voice of strained agony through his grin. "I'm sorry, kid. I just... it's the dark. I can't stand the dark. It's like the place where they put me after I was captured."

"Who put you?"

"The Cong."

She was closer now. The grin left his face and he began to put himself into the part. Scared. You're scared because the Cong put you in a hole in the ground after one of their mines blew most of your face off... and they kept you there... and now you need a friend.

In a way, the part was a natural. All he had to do was make her believe that his extreme excitement at this unexpected chance was extreme fear. And of course he was afraid-afraid of blowing it. This made the shot from the tree with the ampul of Orasin look like child's play. Her intuitions were deadly sharp. Nervous perspiration was flowing off him in rivers.

"Who are the Cong?" she asked, very close now. Her hand brushed lightly past his face and he clutched it. She gasped nervously.

"Hey, don't be scared," he said. "It's just that-"

"You... that hurts. You're hurting me."

It was exactly the right tone. She was scared too, scared of the dark and scared of him... but worried about him, too. He wanted her to feel she had been clutched by a drowning man.

"I'm sorry, kid." He loosened his grip but didn't let go. "Just... can you sit beside me?" "Sure." She sat down, and he jumped at the mild thud of her body coming down on the floor. Outside, far away, someone hollered something to someone else. "Let us out!" Rainbird screamed immediately. "Let us out! Hey, let us out! People in here!" "Stop it," Charlie said, alarmed. "We're okay... I mean, aren't we?"

His mind, that overtuned machine, was clicking along at high speed, writing the script, always three or four lines ahead, enough to be safe, not enough to destroy hot spontaneity. Most of all he wondered just how long he had, how long before the lights went back on. He cautioned himself not to expect or hope for too much. He had got his chisel under the edge of the box. Anything else would be gravy.

"Yeah, I guess we are," he said. "It's just the dark, that's all. I don't even have a fucking match or-Aw, hey, kid, I'm sorry. That just slipped out."

"That's okay," Charlie said. "Sometimes my dad says that word. Once when he was fixing my wagon out in the garage he hit his hand with the hammer and said it five or six times. Other ones, too." This was by far the longest speech she had ever made in Rainbird's presence. "Will they come and let us out pretty soon?"

"They can't until they get the power back on," he said, miserable on the outside, gleeful on the inside. "These doors, kid, they've all got electric locks. They're built to lock solid if the power goes off: They've got you in a fuh-they've got you in a cell, kid. It looks like a nice little apartment, but you might as well be in jail."

"I know," she said quietly. He was still holding her hand tightly but she didn't seem to mind as much now. "You shouldn't say it, though. I think they listen."

They! Rainbird thought, and a hot triumphant joy flashed through him. He was faintly aware that he had not felt such intensity of emotion in ten years.

They! She's talking about they!

He felt his chisel slip farther under the corner of the box that was Charlie McGee, and he involuntarily squeezed her hand again.

"Ow!"

"Sorry, kid," he said, letting off. "I know damn well they listen. But they ain't listening now, with the power off: Oh kid, I don't like this, I gotta get out of here!" He began to tremble.

"Who are the Cong?"

"You don't know?... No, you're too young, I guess. It was the war, kid. The war in Vietnam. The Cong were the bad guys. They wore black pajamas. In the jungle. You know about the Vietnam war, don't you?"

She knew about it... vaguely.

"We were on patrol and we walked into an ambush," he said. That much was the truth, but this was where John Rainbird and the truth parted company. There was no need to confuse her by pointing out that they had all been stoned, most of the grunts smoked up well on Cambodian red, and their West Point lieutenant, who was only one step away from the checkpoint between the lands of sanity and madness, on the peyote buttons that he chewed whenever they were on patrol. Rainbird had once seen this looey shoot a pregnant woman with a semiautomatic rifle, had seen the woman's six-month fetus ripped from her body in disintegrating pieces; that, the looey told them later, was known as a West Point Abortion. So there they were, on their way back to base, and they had indeed walked into an ambush, only it had been laid by their own guys, even more stoned than they were, and four guys had been blown away. Rainbird saw no need to tell Charlie all of this, or that the Claymore that had pulverized half his face had been made in a Maryland munitions plant.

"There were only six of us that got out. We ran. We ran through the jungle and I guess I went the wrong way. Wrong way? Right way? In that crazy war you didn't know which way was the right way because there weren't any real lines. I got separated from the rest of my guys. I was still trying to find something familiar when I walked over a land mine. That's what happened to my face."

"I'm very sorry," Charlie said. "When I woke up, they had me," Rainbird said, now off into the never-never land of total fiction. He had actually come to in a Saigon army hospital with an IV drip in his arm. "They wouldn't give me any medical treatment, nothing like that, unless I answered their questions."

Now carefully. If he did it carefully it would come right; he could feel it.

His voice rose, bewildered and bitter. "Questions, all the time questions. They wanted to know about troop movements... supplies... light-infantry deployment... everything. They never let up. They were always at me."

"Yes," Charlie said fervently, and his heart gladdened.

"I kept telling them I didn't know anything, couldn't tell them anything, that I was nothing but a lousy grunt, just a number with a pack on its back. They didn't believe me. My face... the pain... I got down on my knees and begged for morphine... they said after... after I told them I could have the morphine. I could be treated in a good hospital... after I told them."

Now Charlie's grip was the one that was tightening. She thought about Hockstetter's cool gray eyes, of Hockstetter pointing at the steel tray filled with curly woodshavings. I think you know the answer... if you light that, I'll take you to see your father right away. You can be with him in two minutes. Her heart went out to this man with the badly wounded face, this grown man who was afraid of the dark. She thought she could understand what he had been through. She knew his pain. And in the dark she began to cry silently for him, and in a way the tears were also for herself... all the unshed tears of the last five months. They were tears of pain and rage for John Rainbird, her father, her mother, herself. They burned and scourged.

The tears were not silent enough to go unheard by Rainbird's radar ears. He had to struggle to suppress another smile. Oh yes, the chisel was well planted. Tough cracks and easy cracks, but no impossible cracks.

"They just never believed me. Finally they threw me into a hole in the ground, and it was always dark. There was a little... a room, I guess you'd say, with roots sticking out of the earth walls... and sometimes I could see a little sunlight about nine feet up. They'd come-their commandant, I guess he was-and he'd ask me if I was ready to talk yet. He said I was turning white down there, like a fish. That my face was getting infected, that I'd get gangrene in my face and then it would get into my brain and rot it and make me crazy and then I'd die. He'd ask me if I'd like to get out of the dark and see the sun again. And I'd plead with him... I'd beg... I'd swear on my mother's name that I didn't know anything. And then they'd laugh and put the boards back and cover them up with dirt. It was like being buried alive. The dark... like this..."

He made a choked sound in his throat and Charlie squeezed his hand tighter to show him that she was there.

"There was the room and there was a little tunnel about seven feet long. I had to go down to the end of the tunnel to... you know. And the air was bad and I kept thinking I'm going to smother down here in the dark, I'm going to choke on the smell of my own sh-"He groaned. "I'm sorry. This is nothing to tell a kid."

"That's all right. If it makes you feel better, it's all right."

He debated, and then decided to go just a little further.

"I was down there for five months before they exchanged me."

"What did you eat?"

"They threw down rotted rice. And sometimes spiders. Live spiders. Great big ones-tree spiders, I guess. I'd chase after them in the dark, you know, and kill them and eat them."

"Oh, gross!"

"They turned me into an animal," he said, and was quiet for a moment, breathing loudly. "You got it better than me, kid, but it comes down to pretty much the same thing. A rat in a trap. You think they'll get the lights on pretty soon?"

She didn't say anything for a long time, and he was coldly afraid that he had gone too far. Then Charlie said, "It doesn't matter. We're together."

"All right," he said, and then in a rush: "You won't tell, will you? They'd fire me for the." way I been talking. I need this job. When you look the way I do, you need a good job."

"No, I won't tell."

He felt the chisel slip smoothly in another notch. They had a secret between them now.

He was holding her in his hands.

In the dark, he thought how it would be to slip his hands around her neck. That was the final object in view, of course-not their stupid tests, their playground games. Her... and then perhaps himself. He liked her, he really did. He might even be falling in love with her. The time would come when he would send her over, looking carefully into her eyes all the time. And then, if her eyes gave him the signal he had looked for for so long, perhaps he would follow her. Yes. Perhaps they would go into the real darkness together.

Outside, beyond the locked door, eddies of confusion passed back and forth, sometimes near, sometimes far away.

Rainbird mentally spat on his hands and then went back to work on her.

9

Andy had no idea that they hadn't come to get him out because the power failure had automatically locked the doors. He sat in a half-swoon of panic for some unknown time, sure the place was burning down, imagining the smell of smoke. Outside, the storm had cleared and late afternoon sunshine was slanting down toward dusk.

Quite suddenly Charlie's face came into his mind, as clearly as if she had been standing there in front of him.

(she's in danger charlie's in danger)

It was one of his hunches, the first he'd had since that last day in Tashmore. He thought he had lost that along with the push, but apparently that was not so, because he had never had a hunch clearer than this one-not even on the day Vicky was killed.

Did that mean the push was still there, too? Not gone at all, but only hiding?

(charlie's in danger!)

What sort of danger?

He didn't know. But the thought, the fear, had brought her face clearly in front of him, outlined on this darkness in every detail. And the image of her face, her wide set blue eyes and fine-spun blond hair, brought guilt like a twin... except that guilt was too mild a word for what he. felt; it was something like horror that he felt. He had been in a craze of panic ever since the lights went out, and the panic had been completely for himself. It had never even occurred to him that Charlie must be in the dark, too.

No, they'll come and get her out, they probably came and got her out long ago. Charlie's the one they want. Charlie's their meal ticket.

That made sense, but he still felt that suffocating surety that she was in some terrible danger.

His fear for her had the effect of sweeping the panic for himself away, or at least of making it more manageable. His awareness turned outward again and became more objective. The first thing he became aware of was that he was sitting in a puddle of ginger ale. His pants were wet and tacky with it, and he made a small sound of disgust.

Movement. Movement was the cure for fear.

Re got on his knees, felt for the overturned Canada Dry can, and batted it away. It went clinkrolling across the tiled floor. He got another can out of the fridge; his mouth was still dry. He pulled the tab and dropped it down into the can and then drank. The ringtab tried to escape into his mouth and he spat it back absently, not pausing to reflect that only a little while ago, that alone would have been excuse enough for another fifteen minutes of fear and trembling.

He began to feel his way out of the kitchen, trailing his free hand along the wall. This level was entirely quiet now, and although he heard an occasional faraway call, there seemed to be nothing upset or panicky about the sound. The smell of smoke had been a hallucination. The air was a bit stale because all the convectors had stopped when the power went off, but that was all.

Instead of crossing the living room, Andy turned left and crawled into his bedroom. He felt his way carefully to the bed, set his can of ginger ale on the bedtable, and then undressed. Ten minutes later he was dressed in fresh clothes and feeling much better. It occurred to him that he had done all of this with no particular trouble, whereas after the lights went out, crossing the living room had been like crossing a live minefield.

(charlie-what's wrong with charlie?)

But it wasn't really a feeling that something was wrong with her, just a feeling that she was in danger of something happening. If he could see her, he could ask her what He laughed bitterly in the dark. Yes, right. And pigs will whistle, beggars will ride. Might as well wish for the moon in a mason jar. Might as well For a moment his thoughts stopped entirely, and then moved on-but more slowly, and with no bitterness.

Might as well wish to think businessmen into having more self-confidence.

Might as well wish to think fat ladies thin.

Might as well wish to blind one of the goons who had kidnapped Charlie.

Might as well wish for the push to come back.

His hands were busy on the bedspread, pulling it, kneading it, feeling it-the mind's need, nearly unconscious, for some sort of constant sensory input. There was no sense in hoping for the push to come back. The push was gone. He could no more push his way to Charlie than he could pitch for the Reds. It was gone.

(is it!)

Quite suddenly he wasn't sure. Part of him some very deep part-had maybe just decided it didn't buy his conscious decision to follow the path of least resistance and give them whatever they wanted. Perhaps some deep part of him had decided not to give up.

He sat feeling the bedspread, running his hands over and over it.

Was that true, or only wishful thinking brought on by one sudden and unprovable hunch? The hunch itself might have been as false as the smoke he'd thought he smelled, brought on by simple anxiety. There was no way to check the hunch, and there was certainly no one here to push.

He drank his ginger ale.

Suppose the push had come back. That was no universal cure-all; he of all people knew that. He could give a lot of little pushes or three or four wallopers before he tipped himself over. He might get to Charlie, but he didn't have a snowflake's chance in hell of getting them out of here. All he would succeed in doing was pushing himself into the grave via a brain hemorrhage (and as he thought of this, his fingers went automatically to his face, where the numb spots had been).

Then there was the matter of the Thorazine they had been feeding him. The lack of it-the lateness of the dose due when the lights had gone out-had played a large part in his panic, he knew. Even now, feeling more in control of himself, he wanted that Thorazine and the tranquil, coasting feeling it brought. At the beginning, they had kept him off the Thorazine for as long as two days before testing him. The result had been constant nervousness and a low depression like thick clouds that never seemed to "let up... and back then he hadn't built up a heavy thing, as he had now.

"Face it, you're a junky," he whispered.

He didn't know if that was true or not. He knew that there were physical addictions like the one to nicotine, and to heroin, which caused physical changes in the central nervous system. And then there were psychological addictions. He had taught with a fellow named Bill Wallace who got very, very nervous without his three or four Cokes a day, and his old college buddy Quincey had been a potato-chip freak-but he had to have an obscure New England brand, Humpty Dumpty; he claimed no other kind satisfied. Andy supposed those qualified as psychological addictions. He didn't know if his craving for his pill was physical or psychological; he only knew that he needed it, he really needed it. Just sitting here and thinking about the blue pill in the white dish had him cotton mouthed all over again. They no longer kept him without the drug for forty-eight hours before testing him, although whether that was because they felt he couldn't go that long without getting the screaming meemies or because they were just going through the motions of testing, he didn't know.

The result was a cruelly neat, insoluble problem; he couldn't push if he was full of Thorazine, and yet he simply didn't have the will to refuse it (and, of course, if they caught him refusing it, that would open a whole new can of worms for them, wouldn't it?-real night-crawlers). When they brought him the blue pill in the white dish after this was over, he would take it. And little by little, he would work his way back to the calmly apathetic steady state he had been in when the power went off: All of this was just a spooky little side-trip. He would be back to watching PTL Club and Clint Eastwood on Home Box Office soon enough, and snacking too much out of the always-well-stocked fridge. Back to putting on weight.

(charlie, charlie's in danger, charlie's in all sorts of trouble, she's in a world of hurt)

If so, there was nothing he could do about it.

And even if there was, even if he could somehow conquer the monkey on his back and get them out of here-pigs will whistle and beggars will ride, why the hell not? any ultimate solution concerning Charlie's future would be as far away as ever.

He lay back on his bed, spread-eagled. The small department of his mind that now dealt exclusively with Thorazine continued to clamor restlessly. There were no solutions in the present, and so he drifted into the past. He saw himself and Charlie fleeing up Third Avenue in a kind of slow-motion nightmare, a big man in a scuffed cord jacket and a little girl in red and green. He saw Charlie, her face strained and pale, tears running down her cheeks after she had got all the change from the pay phones at the airport... she got the change and set some serviceman's shoes on fire.

His mind drifted back even further to the storefront in Port City, Pennsylvania, and Mrs. Gurney. Sad, fat Mrs. Gurney, who had come into the Weight-Off office in a green pantsuit, clutching at the carefully lettered slogan that had actually been Charlie's idea. You Will Lose Weight or We Will Buy Your Groceries for the Next Six Months.

Mrs. Gurney, who had borne her truck-dispatcher husband four children between 1950 and 1957, and now the children were grown and they were disgusted with her, and her husband was disgusted with her, and he was seeing another woman, and she could understand that because Stan Gurney was still a good-looking, vital, virile man at fiftyfive, and she had slowly gained one hundred and sixty pounds over the years since the second-to-last child had left for college, going from the one-forty she had weighed at marriage to an even three hundred pounds. She had come in, smooth and monstrous and desperate in her green pantsuit, and her ass was nearly as wide as a bank president's desk. When she looked down into her purse to find her checkbook, her three chins became six.

He had put her in a class with three other fat women. There were exercises and a mild diet, both of which Andy had researched at the Public Library; there were mild pep talks, which he billed as "counseling"-and every now and then there was a medium-hard push.

Mrs. Gurney had gone from three hundred to two-eighty to two-seventy, confessing with mixed fear and delight that she didn't seem to want second helpings anymore. The second helping just didn't seem to taste good. Before, she had always kept bowls and bowls of snacks in the refrigerator (and doughnuts in the breadbox, and two or three Sara Lee cheesecakes in the freezer) for watching TV at night, but now she somehow... well, it sounded almost crazy, but... she kept forgetting they were there. And she had always heard that when you were dieting, snacks were all you could think of. It certainly hadn't been this way, she said, when she tried Weight Watchers.

The other three women in the group had responded eagerly in kind. Andy merely stood back and watched them, feeling absurdly paternal. All four of them were astounded and delighted by the commonality of their experience. The toning-up exercises, which had always seemed so boring and painful before, now seemed almost pleasant. And then there was this weird compulsion to walk. They all agreed that if they hadn't walked a good bit by the end of the day, they felt somehow ill at ease and restless. Mrs. Gurney confessed that she had got into the habit of walking downtown and back every day, even though the round trip was more than two miles. Before, she had always taken the bus, which was surely the sensible thing to do, since the stop was right in front of her house.

But one day she had taken it-because her thigh muscles did ache that much-she had got to feeling so uneasy and restless that she had got off" at the second stop. The others agreed. And they all blessed Andy McGee for it, sore muscles and all.

Mrs. Gurney had dropped to two-fifty at her third weigh-in, and when her six-week course ended, she was down to two hundred and twentyfive pounds. She said her husband was stunned at what had happened, especially after her failure with countless dieting programs and fads. He wanted her to go see a doctor; he was afraid she might have cancer. He didn't believe it was possible to lose seventy-five pounds in six weeks by natural means. She showed him her fingers, which were red and callused from taking in her clothes with needle and thread. And then she threw her arms around him (nearly breaking his back) and wept against his neck.

His alumni usually came back, just as his more successful college students usually came back at least once, some to say thanks, some merely to parade their success before him-to say, in effect, Look here, the student has outraced the teacher... something that was hardly as uncommon as they seemed to think, Andy sometimes thought.

But Mrs. Gurney had been one of the former. She had come back to say hello and thanks a lot only ten days or so before Andy had begun to feel nervous and watched in Port City. And before the end of that month, they had gone on to New York City.

Mrs. Gurney was still a big woman; you noticed the startling difference only if you had seen her before-like one of those before-and-after ads in the magazines. When she dropped in that last time, she was down to a hundred and ninety-five pounds. But it wasn't her exact weight that mattered, of course. What mattered was that she was losing weight at the same measured rate of six pounds a week, plus or minus two pounds, and she would go on losing at a decreasing rate until she was down to one hundred and thirty pounds, plus or minus ten pounds. There would be no explosive decompression, and no lingering hangover of food horror, the sort of thing that sometimes led to anorexia nervosa. Andy wanted to make some money, but he didn't want to kill anyone doing it.

"You ought to be declared a national resource for what you're doing," Mrs. Gurney had declared, after telling Andy that she had effected a rapprochement with her children and that her relations with her husband were improving. Andy had smiled and thanked her, but now, lying on his bed in the darkness, growing drowsy, he reflected that that was pretty close to what had happened to him and Charlie: they had been declared national resources.

Still, the talent was not all bad. Not when it could help a Mrs. Gurney.

He smiled a little.

And smiling, slept.

10

He could never remember the details of the dream afterward. He had been looking for something. He had been in some labyrinthine maze of corridors, lit only by dull red trouble lights. He opened doors on empty rooms and then closed them again. Some of the rooms were littered with balls of crumpled paper and in one there was an overturned table lamp and a fallen picture done in the style of Wyeth. He felt that he was in some sort of installation that had been shut down and cleared out in one hell of a tearing hurry.

And yet he had at last found what he was looking for. It was... what? A box? A chest? It was terribly heavy, whatever it was, and it had been marked with a white-stenciled skull and crossbones, like a jar of rat poison kept on a high cellar shelf. Somehow, in spite of its weight (it had to weigh at least as much as Mrs. Gurney), he managed to pick it up. He could feel all his muscles and, tendons pulling taut and hard, yet there was no pain.

Of course there isn't, he told himself. There's no pain because it's a dream. You'll pay for it later. You'll have the pain later.

He carried the box out of the room where he had found it. There was a place he had to take it, but he didn't know what or where it was-

You'll know it when you see it, his mind whispered.

So he carried the box or chest up and down endless corridors, its weight tugging painlessly at his muscles, stiffening the back of his neck; and although his muscles didn't hurt, he was getting the beginnings of a headache.

The brain is a muscle, his mind lectured, and the lecture became a chant like a child's song, a little girl's skipping rhyme: The brain is a, muscle that can move the world. The brain is a muscle that can move-

Now all the doors were like subway doors, bulging outward in a slight curve, fitted with large windows; all these windows had rounded corners. Through these doors (if they were doors) he saw a confusion of sights. In one room Dr. Wanless was playing a huge accordion. He looked like some crazed Lawrence Welk with a tin cup full of pencils in front of him and a sign around his neck that read

THERE ARE NONE SO BLIND AS THOSE WHO WILL NOT SEE. Through another window he could see a girl in a white caftan flying through the air, screaming, careering off the walls, and Andy hurried past that one quickly.

Through another he saw Charlie and he became convinced again that this was some sort of pirate dream-buried treasure, yo-ho-ho and all of that because Charlie appeared to be talking with Long John Silver. This man had a parrot on his shoulder and an eyepatch over one eye. He was grinning at Charlie with a kind of smarmy false friendship that made Andy nervous. As if in confirmation of this, the one-eyed pirate slipped an arm around Charlie's shoulders and cried hoarsely, "We'll do "em yet, kid!"

Andy wanted to stop there and knock on the window until he attracted Charlie's attention-she was staring at the pirate as if hypnotized. He wanted to make sure she saw through this strange man, to make sure she understood that he wasn't what he seemed.

But he couldn't stop. He had this damned

(box? chest?)

to

(???)

to what? Just what the hell was he supposed to do with it? But he would know when it was time. He went past dozens of other rooms-he could't remember all of the things he saw-and then he was in a long blank corridor that ended in a blank wall. But not entirely blank; there was something in the exact center of it, a big steel rectangle like a mail slot.

Then he saw the word that had been stamped on it in raised letters, and understood.

DISPOSAL, it read.

And suddenly Mrs. Gurney was beside him, a slim and pretty Mrs. Gurney with a shapely body and trim legs that looked made for dancing all night long, dancing on a terrace until the stars went pale in the sky and dawn rose in the east like sweet music. You'd never guess, he thought, bemused, that her clothes were once made by Omar the Tentmaker.

He tried to lift the box, but couldn't. Suddenly it was just too heavy. His headache was worse... It was like the black horse, the riderless horse with the red eyes, and with dawning horror he realized it was loose, it was somewhere in this abandoned installation, and it was coming for him, thudding, thudding

"I'll help you," Mrs. Gurney said. "You helped me; now I'll help you. After all, you are the national resource, not me."

"You look so pretty," he said. His voice seemed to come from far away, through the thickening headache.

"I feel like I've been let out of prison," Mrs. Gurney responded. "Let me help you."

"It's just that my head aches-"

"Of course it does. After all, the brain is a muscle."

Did she help him, or did he do it himself? He couldn't remember. But he could remember thinking that he understood the dream now, it was the push he was getting rid of, once and for all, the push. He remembered tipping the box against the slot marked DISPOSAL, tipping it up, wondering what it would look like when it came out, this thing that had sat inside his brain since his college days. But it wasn't the push that came out; he felt both surprise and fear as the top opened. What spilled into the chute was a flood of blue pills his pills, and he was scared, all right; he was, in the words of Granther McGee, suddenly scared enough to shit nickels.

"No!" he shouted.

"Yes," Mrs. Gurney answered firmly. "The brain is a muscle that can move the world."

Then he saw it her way.

It seemed that the more he poured the more his head ached, and the more his head ached the darker it got, until there was no light, the dark was total, it was a living dark, someone had blown all the fuses somewhere and there was no light, no box, no dream, only his headache and the riderless horse with the red eyes coming on and coming on.

Thud thud, thud...

11

He must have been awake a long time before he actually realized he was awake. The total lack of light made the exact dividing line hard to find. A few years before, he had read of an experiment in which a number of monkeys had been put into environments designed to muffle all their senses. The monkeys had all gone crazy. He could understand why. He had no idea how long he had been sleeping, no concrete input except

"Oww, Jesus!"

Sitting up drove two monstrous bolts of chromium pain into his head. He clapped his hands to his skull and rocked it back and forth, and little by little the pain subsided to a more manageable level.

No concrete sensory input except this. rotten headache. I must have slept on my neck or something, he thought. I must have

No. Oh, no. He knew this headache, knew it well. It was the sort of headache he got from a medium-to-hard push... harder than the ones he had given the fat ladies and shy businessmen, not quite as hard as the ones he had given the fellows at the turnpike rest stop that time.

Andy's hands flew to his face and felt it all over, from brow to chin. There were no spots where the feeling trailed away to numbness. When he smiled, both corners of his mouth went up just as they always had. He wished to God for a light so he could look into his own eyes in the bathroom mirror to see if either of them showed that tell-tale blood sheen...

Push? Pushing?

That was ridiculous. Who was there to push?

Who, except

His breath slowed to a stop in his throat and then resumed slowly.

He had thought of it before but had never tried it. He thought it would be like overloading a circuit by cycling a charge through it endlessly. He had been scared to try it.

My pill, he thought. My pill is overdue and I want it, I really want it, I really need it. My pill will make everything all right.

It was just a thought. It brought on no craving at all. The idea of taking a Thorazine had all the emotional gradient of please pass the butter. The fact was, except for the rotten headache, he felt pretty much all right. And the fact also was he had had headaches a lot worse than this-the one at the Albany airport, for instance. This one was a baby compared to that.

I've pushed myself, he thought, amazed.

For the first time he could really understand how Charlie felt, because for the first time he was a little frightened by his own psi talent. For the first time he really understood how little he understood about what it was and what it could do. Why had it gone? He didn't know. Why had it come back? He didn't know that either. Did it have something to do with his intense fear in the dark? His sudden feeling that Charlie was being threatened (he had a ghostly memory of the piratical one-eyed man and then it floated away, gone) and his own dismal self-loathing at the way he had forgotten her? Possibly even the rap on the head he had taken when he fell down?

He didn't know; he knew only that he had pushed himself.

The brain is a muscle that can move the world.

It suddenly occurred to him that while he was giving little nudges to businessmen and fat ladies, he could have become a one-man drug-rehabilitation center, and he was seized in a shivery ecstasy of dawning supposition. He had gone to sleep thinking that a talent that could help poor fat Mrs. Gurney couldn't be all bad. What about a talent that could knock the monkey off the back of every poor junkie in New York City? What about that, sports fans?

"Jesus," he whispered. "Am I really clean?"

There was no craving. Thorazine, the image of the blue pill on the white plate-that thought had become unmistakably neutral.

"I am clean," he answered himself.

Next question: could he stay clean?

But he had no more than asked himself that one when other questions flooded in. Could he find out exactly what was happening to Charlie? He had used the push on himself in his sleep, like a kind of autohypnosis. Could he use it on others while awake? The endlessly, repulsively grinning

Pynchot, for instance? Pynchot would know what was happening to Charlie. Could he be made to tell? Could he maybe even get her out of here after all? Was there a way to do that? And if they did get out, what then? No more running, for one thing. That was no solution. There had to be a place to go.

For the first time in months he felt excited, hopeful. He began to try scraps of plan, accepting, rejecting, questioning. For the first time in months he felt at home in his own head, alive and vital, capable of action. And above all else, there was this: if he could fool them into believing two things that he was still drugged and that he was still incapable of using his mental-domination talent, he might-he just might have a chance of doing-doing something.

He was still turning it all over restlessly in his mind when the lights came back on. In the other room, the TV began spouting that same old Jesuswill-take-care-of-your-soul-and-we'll-take-care-of-your-bank-book jive.

The eyes, the electric eyes! They're watching you again, or soon will be... Don't forget that!

For one moment, everything came home to him the days and weeks of subterfuge that would surely lie ahead if he was to have any chance at all, and the near certainty that he would be caught at some point. Depression waved in... but it brought no craving for the pill with it, and that helped him to catch hold of himself.

He thought of Charlie, and that helped more. He got up slowly from the bed and walked into the living room. "What happened?" he cried loudly. "I was scared! Where's my medication? Somebody bring me my medication!"

He sat down in front of the TV, his face slack and dull and heavy. And behind that vapid face, his brain-that muscle that could move the world ticked away faster and faster.

12

Like the dream her father had had at the same time, Charlie McGee could never remember the details of her long conversation with John Rainbird, only the high spots. She was never quite sure how she came to pour out the story of how she came to be here, or to speak of her intense loneliness for her father and her terror that they would find some way to trick her into using her pyrokinetic ability again.

Part of it was the blackout, of course, and the knowledge that they weren't listening. Part of it was John himself, he had been through so much, and he was so pathetically afraid of the dark and the memories it brought of the terrible hole those "Congs" had put him in. He had asked her, almost apathetically, why they had locked her up, and she had begun talking just to distract his mind. But it had quickly become more than that. It began to come out faster and faster, everything she had kept bottled up, until the words were tumbling out all over one another, helter-skelter. Once or twice she had cried, and he held her clumsily. He was a sweet man... in many ways he reminded her of her father.

"Now if they find out you know all of that," she said, "they'll probably lock you up, too. I shouldn't have told."

"They'd lock me up, all right," John said cheerfully. "I got a D clearance, kid. That gives me clearance to open bottles of Johnson's Wax and that's about all." He laughed. "We'll be all right if you don't let on that you told me, I guess."

"I won't," Charlie said eagerly. She had been a little uneasy herself, thinking if John told, they might use him on her like a lever. "I'm awful thirsty. There's icewater in the refrigerator. You want some?"

"Don't leave me," he said immediately.

"Well, let's go together. We'll hold hands."

He appeared to think about this. "All right," he said.

They shuffled across to the kitchen together, hands gripped tightly.

"You'd better not let on, kid. Especially about this. Heap-big Indian afraid of the dark. The guys'd laugh me right out of this place." "They wouldn't laugh if they knew-""Maybe not. Maybe so." He chuckled a little. "But I'd just as soon they never found out. I just thank God you was here, kid."

She was so touched that her eyes filled again and she had to struggle for control of herself. They reached the fridge, and she located the jug of icewater by feel. It wasn't icy cold anymore, but it soothed her throat. She wondered with fresh unease just how long she had talked, and didn't know. But she had told... everything. Even the parts she had meant to hold back, like what had happened at the Manders farm. Of course, the people like Hockstetter knew, but she didn't care about them. She did care about John... and his opinion of her.

But she had told. He would ask a question that somehow pierced right to the heart of the matter, and... she had told, often with tears. And instead of more questions and cross-examination and mistrust, there had been only acceptance and calm sympathy. He seemed to understand the hell she had been through, maybe because he had been through hell himself.

"Here's the water," she said.

"Thanks." She heard him drink, and then it was placed back in her hands. "Thanks a lot."

She put it away.

"Let's go back in the other room," he said. "I wonder if they'll ever get the lights back on." He was, impatient for them to come on now. They had been off more than seven hours, he guessed. He wanted to get out of here and think about all of this. Not what she had told him-he knew all of that-but how to use it.

"I'm sure they'll be on soon," Charlie said.

They shuffled their way back to the sofa and sat down.

"They haven't told you anything about your old man?"

"Just that he's all right," she said.

"I'll bet I could get in to see him," Rainbird said, as if this idea had just occurred to him.

"You could? You really think you could?"

"I could change with Herbie someday. See him. Tell him you're okay. Well, not tell him but pass him a note or something" "Oh, wouldn't that be dangerous?" "It would be dangerous to make a business of it, kid. But I owe you one. I'll see how he is."

She threw her arms around him in the dark and kissed him. Rainbird gave her an affectionate hug. In his own way, he loved her, now more than ever. She was his now, and he supposed he was hers. For a while.

They sat together, not talking much, and Charlie dozed. Then he said something that woke her up as suddenly as completely as a dash of cold water in the face.

"Shit, you ought to light their damn fires, if you can do it."

Charlie sucked her breath in, shocked, as if he had suddenly hit her.

"I told you," she said. "It's like letting a... a wild animal out of a cage. I promised myself I'd never do it again. That soldier at the airport... and those men at that farm... I killed them... burned them up!" Her face was hot, burning, and she was on the verge of tears again.

"The way you told it, it sounded like selfdefense."

"Yes, but that's no excuse to-"