ENRY AND OWEN

1

Henry watched Underhill trudge toward him in the glare of the security lights. Underhill's head was bent against the snow and the intensifying wind. Henry opened his mouth to call out, but before he could, he was overwhelmed, nearly flattened, by a sense of Jonesy. And then a memory came, blotting out Underhill and this brightly lit, snowy world completely. All at once it was 1978 again, not October but November and there was blood, blood on cattails, broken glass in marshy water, and then the bang of the door.

2

Henry awakes from a terrible confused dream - blood, broken glass, the rich smells of gasoline and burning rubber - to the sound of a banging door and a blast of cold air. He sits up and sees Pete sitting up beside him, Pete's hairless chest covered with goosebumps. Henry and Pete are on the floor in their sleeping - bags because they lost the four - way toss. Beav and Jonesy got the bed Oater there will be a third bedroom at Hole in the Wall, but now there are only two and Lamar has one all to himself, by the divine right of adulthood), only now Jonesy is alone in the bed, also sitting up, also looking confused and frightened.

Scooby-ooby-Doo, where are you, Henry thinks for no appreci?able reason as he gropes for his glasses on the windowsill. In his nose he can still smell gas and burning tires. We got some work to do now -

'Crashed,' Jonesy says thickly, and throws back the covers. His chest is bare, but like Henry and Pete, he wore his socks and longjohn bottoms to bed.

'Yeah, went in the water,' Pete says, his face suggesting he doesn't have the slightest idea what he's talking about. 'Henry, you got his shoe - '

'Moccasin - 'Henry says, but he hasn't any idea what he's talking about either. Nor wants to.

'Beav,' Jonesy says, and gets out of bed in a clumsy lunge. One of his stocking-clad feet comes down on Pete's hand.

'Ow!' Pete cries. 'Ya stepped on me, ya fuckin gomer, watch where you're - '

'Shut up, shut up,' Henry says, grabbing Pete's shoulder and giving it a shake. 'Don't wake up Mr Clarendon!'

Which would be easy, because the door of the boys' bedroom is open. So is the door on the far side of the big central room, the one to the outside. No wonder they're cold, there's a hell of a draft. Now that Henry has his eyes back on (that is how he thinks of it), he can see the dreamcatcher out there dancing in the cold November breeze coming in through the open door.

'Where's Duddits?' Jonesy asks in a dazed, I'm-still-dreaming voice. 'Did he go out with Beaver?'

'He's back in Derry, foolish,' Henry says, getting up and pulling on his thermal undershirt. And he doesn't feel that Jonesy is foolish, not really; he also has a sense that Duddits was just here with them.

It was the dream, he thinks. Duddits was in the dream. He was sitting on the bank. He was crying. He was so. He didn't mean to. If anyone meant to, it was us.

And there is still crying. He can hear it, coming in through the front door, carried on the breeze. It's not Duddits, though; it's the Beav.

They leave the room in a line, pulling on scraps of clothes as they go, not bothering with their shoes, which would take too long.

One good thing - judging from the tin city of beer-cans on the kitchen table (plus a suburb of same on the coffee-table), it'll take more than a couple of open doors and some whispering kids to wake up Beaver's Dad.

The big granite doorstep is freezing under Henry's stocking feet, cold in the deep thoughtless way death must be cold, but he barely notices.

He sees the Beaver right away. He's at the foot of the maple tree with the deer-stand in it, on his knees as if praying. His legs and feet are bare, Henry sees. He's wearing his motorcycle jacket, and tied up and down its arms, fluttering like pirate's finery, are the orange bandannas his father made his son wear when Beaver insisted on wearing such a damned foolish unhunterly thing in the woods. The outfit looks pretty funny, but there's nothing funny about that agonized face tilted up toward the maple's nearly bare branches. The Beav's cheeks are streaming with tears.

Henry breaks into a run. Pete and Jonesy follow suit, their breath puffing white in the chill morning air. The needle-strewn ground under Henry's feet is almost as hard and cold as the granite doorstep.

He drops to his knees beside Beaver, scared and somehow awed by those tears. Because the Beav isn't just misting up, like the hero of a movie who may be allowed to shed a manly drop or two when his dog or his girlfriend dies; Beav is running like Niagara Falls. From his nose hang two ropes of clear glistening snot. You never saw stuff like that in the movies.

'Gross,' Pete says.

Henry looks at him impatiently, but then he sees Pete isn't looking at Beaver but past him, at a steaming puddle of vomit. In it are kernels of last night's corn (Lamar Clarendon believes passionately in the virtues of canned food when it comes to camp cooking) and strings of last night's fried chicken. Henry's stomach takes a big unhappy lurch. And just as it starts to settle, Jonesy yarks. The sound is like a big liquid belch. The puke is brown.

'Gross!' Pete almost screams it this time.

Beaver doesn't seem to even notice. 'Henry!' he says. His eyes, submerged beneath twin lenses of tears, are huge and spooky. They seem to peer past Henry's face and into the supposedly private rooms behind his forehead.

'Beav, it's okay. You had a bad dream.'

'Sure, a bad dream.' Jonesy's voice is thick, his throat still plated with puke. He tries to clear it with a thick ratching noise that is somehow worse than what just came out of him, then bends over and spits. His hands are planted on the legs of his longhandles, and his bare back is covered with bumps.

Beav takes no notice of Jonesy, nor of Pete as Pete kneels down on his other side and puts a clumsy, tentative arm around Beav's shoulders. Beav continues to look only at Henry.

'His head was off,' Beaver whispers.

Jonesy also drops to his knees, and now all three of them are surrounding the Beav, Henry and Pete to either side, Jonesy in front. There is vomit on Jonesy's chin. He reaches to wipe it away, but Beaver takes his hand before he can. The boys kneel beneath the maple, and suddenly they are all one. It is brief, this sense of union, but as vivid as their dream. It is the dream, but now they are all awake, the sensation is rational, and they cannot disbelieve.

Now it is Jonesy the Beav is looking at with his spooky swimming eyes. Clutching Jonesy's hand.

'It was laying in the ditch and his eyes were full of mud.'

'Yeah,' Jonesy whispers in an awed and shaky voice. 'Oh jeez, it was.'

'Said he'd see us again, remember?' Pete asks. 'One at a time or all together. He said that.'

Henry hears these things from a great distance, because he's back in the dream. Back at the scene of the accident. At the bottom of a trash - littered embankment where there is a soggy piece of marsh, created by a blocked drainage culvert. He knows the place, it's on Route 7, the old Derry-Newport Road. Lying overturned in the muck and the murk is a burning car. The air stinks of gas and burning tires. Duddits is crying. Duddits is sitting halfway down the trashy slope and holding his yellow Scooby-Doo lunchbox against his chest and crying his eyes out.

A hand protrudes from one of the windows of the overturned car. It's slim, the nails painted candy-apple red. The car's other two occupants have been thrown clear, one of them almost thirty damn feet. This one's facedown, but Henry still recognizes him by the masses of soaked blond hair. It's Duncan, the one who said you're not gonna tell anyone anything, because you'll be fuckin dead. Only Duncan's the one who wound up dead.

Something floats against Henry's shin. 'Don't pick that up!' Pete says urgently, but Henry does. It's a brown suede moccasin. He has just time to register this, and then Beaver and Jonesy shriek in terrible childish harmony. They are standing together, ankle-deep in the muck, both of them wearing their hunting clothes: Jonesy in his new bright orange parka, bought special from Sears for this trip (and Mrs Jones still tearfully, unpersuadably convinced that her son win be killed in the woods by a hunter's bullet, cut down in his prime), Beaver in his tattered motorcycle jacket (What a lot of zippers! Duddie's Mom had said admiringly, thus winning Beaver's love and admiration forever) with the orange bandannas tied up and down the arms. They aren't looking at the third body, the one lying just outside the driver's door, but Henry does, just for a moment (still holding the moccasin, like a small waterlogged canoe, in his hands), because something is terribly, fundamentally wrong with it, so wrong that for a moment he cannot tell what it might be. Then he realizes that there's nothing above the collar of the corpse's high-school jacket. Beaver and Jonesy are screaming because they have seen what should have been above it. They have seen Richie Grenadeau's head lying faceup, glaring at the sky from a blood-spattered stand of cattails. Henry knows it's Richie at once. Even though the swatch of tape no longer rides the bridge of his nose, there is no mistaking the guy who was trying to feed Duddits a piece of shit that day behind Tracker's.

Duds is up there on the bank, crying and crying, that crying that gets into your head like a sinus headache, and if it goes on it will drive Henry mad. He drops the moc and slogs around the back of the burning car to where Beaver and Jonesy stand with their arms around each other.

'Beaver! Beav!' Henry shouts, but until he reaches out and gives Beaver a hard shake, Beaver just continues to stare at the severed head, as if hypnotized.

Finally, though, Beaver looks at him. 'His head's off,' he says, as if this were not evident. 'Henry, his head's - '

'Never mind his head, take care of Duddits! Make him stop that goddam crying!'

'Yeah,' Pete says. He looks at Richie's head, that final dead glare, then looks away, mouth twitching. 'It's drivin me fuckin bugshit.'

'Like chalk on a chalkboard,' Jonesy mutters. Above his new orange parka, his skin is the color of old cheese. 'Make him stop, Beav.'

'H - H - H - '

'Don't be a dweeb, sing him the fuckin song!' Henry shouts. He can feel mucky water oozing up between his toes. 'The lullaby, the goddam lullaby!'

For a moment the Beav looks as though he still doesn't understand, but then his eyes clear a little and he says 'Oh!' He goes slogging toward the embankment where Duddits sits, clutching his bright yellow lunchbox and howling as he did on the day they met him. Henry sees something that he barely has time to notice: there is blood caked around Duddits's nostrils, and there's a bandage on his left shoulder. Something is poking out of it, something that looks like white plastic.

'Duddits,' the Beav says, climbing the embankment. 'Duddle, honey, don't. Don't cry no more, don't look at it no more, it's not for you to look at, it's so fuckin gross . . .'

At first Duddits takes no notice, just goes on howling. Henry thinks, He cried himself into a nosebleed and that's the blood part, but what's that white thing sticking out of his shoulder?

Jonesy has actually raised his hands to cover his ears. Pete has got one of his on top of his head, as if to keep it from blowing off. Then Beaver takes Duddits in his arms, just as he did a few weeks earlier, and be ins to sing in that high clear voice that you'd never think could come out of a scrub like the Beav.

'Baby's boat's a silver dream, sailing near and far . . .'

And oh miracle of blessed miracles, Duddits begins to quiet.

Speaking from the comer of his mouth, Pete says: 'Where are we, Henry? Where the fuck are we?'

'In a dream,' Henry says, and all at once the four of them are back under the maple tree at Hole in the Wall, kneeling together in their underwear and shivering in the cold.

'What?' Jonesy says. He pulls free to wipe at his mouth, and when the contact among them breaks, reality comes all the way back. 'What did you say, Henry?'

Henry feels the withdrawal of their minds, actually feels it, and he thinks, We weren't meant to be like this, none of us. Sometimes being alone is better.

Yes, alone. Alone with your thoughts.

'I had a bad dream,' Beaver says. He seems to be explaining this to himself rather than to the rest of them. Slowly, as if he were still dreaming, he unzips one of his jacket pockets, rummages around inside, and comes out with a Tootsie Pop. Instead of unwrapping it, Beaver puts the stick end in his mouth and be ins to roll it back and forth, nipping and gnawing lightly. 'I dreamed that - '

'Never mind,' Henry says, and pushes his glasses up on his nose. 'We all know what you dreamed.' We ought to, we were there trembles on his lips, but he keeps it inside. He's only fourteen, but wise enough to know that what is said cannot be unsaid. When it's laid, it's played they say when they're playing rummy or Crazy Eights and someone makes a goofy-ass discard. If he says it, they'll have to deal with it. If he doesn't, then maybe . . . just maybe it'll go away.

'I don't think it was your dream, anyhow,' Pete says. 'I think it was Duddits's dream and we all - '

'I don't give a shit what you think,' Jonesy says, his voice so harsh that it startles them all. 'It was a dream, and I'm going to forget it. We're all going to forget it, aren't we, Henry?'

Henry nods at once.

'Let's go back in,' Pete says. He looks vastly relieved. 'My feet're fre -

'One thing, though,' Henry says, and they all look at him nervously. Because when they need a leader, Henry is it. And if you don't like the way I do it, he thinks resentfully, someone else can do it. Because this is no tit job, believe me.

'What?' Beaver asks, meaning What now?

'When we go into Gosselin's later on, someone's got to call Duds. In case he's upset.'

No one replies to this, all of them awed to silence by the idea of calling their new retardo friend on the phone. It occurs to Henry that Duddits has likely never received a phone call in his life; this will be his first.

'You know, that's probably right,' Pete agrees and then slaps his hand over his mouth like someone who has said something incriminating.

Beaver, naked except for his dopey boxers and his even dopier jacket, is now shivering violently. The Tootsie Pop jitters at the end of its gnawed stick.

'Someday you'll choke on one of those things,' Henry tells him.

'Yeah, that's what my Mom says. Can we go in? I'm freezing.' They start back toward Hole in the Wall, where their friendship will end twenty-three years from this very day.

'Is Richie Grenadeau really dead, do you think?' Beaver asks.

'I don't know and I don't care,' Jonesy says. He looks at Henry. 'We'll call Duddits, okay - I've got a phone and we can bill the charges to my number.'

'Your own phone,' Pete says. 'You lucky duck. Your folks spoil you fuckin rotten, Gary.'

Calling him Gary usually gets under his skin, but not this morning - Jonesy is too preoccupied. 'It was for my birthday and I have to pay the long-distance out of my allowance, so let's keep it short. And after that, this never happened - never happened, you got that?'

And they all nod. Never happened. Never fucking hap -

3

A gust of wind pushed Henry forward, almost into the electrified compound fence. He came back to himself, shaking off the memory like a heavy coat. It couldn't have come at a more inconvenient time (of course, the time for some memories was never convenient). He had been waiting for Underhill, freezing his katookis off and waiting for his only chance to get out of here, and Underhill could have walked right by him while he stood daydreaming, leaving him up shit creek without a paddle.

Only Underhill hadn't gone past. He was standing on the other side of the fence, hands in his pockets, looking at Henry. Snowflakes landed on the transparent, buglike bulb of the mask he wore, were melted by the warmth of his breath, and ran down its surface like . . .

Like Beaver's tears that day, Henry thought.

'You ought to go in the barn with the rest of them,' Underhill said. 'You'll turn into a snowman out here.'

Henry's tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. His life quite literally depended on what he said to this man, and he could think of no way to get started. Couldn't even loosen his tongue.

And why bother? the voice inside inquired - the voice of darkness, his old friend. Really and truly, why bother? Why not just let them do what you were going to do to yourself, anyway?

Because it wasn't just him anymore. Yet he still couldn't speak.

Underhill stood where he was a moment longer, looking at him. Hands in pockets. Hood thrown back to expose his short dark-blond hair. Snow melting on the mask the soldiers wore and the detainees did not, because the detainees would not be needing them; for the detainees, as for the grayboys, there was a final solution.

Henry struggled to speak and could not, could not. Ah God, it should have been Jonesy here, not him; Jonesy had always been better with his mouth. Underhill was going to walk away, leaving him with a lot of could-have-beens and might-have-beens.

But Underhill stayed a moment longer.

'I'm not surprised you knew my name, Mr . . . Henreld? Is your name Henreid?'

'Devlin. It's my first name you're picking up. I'm Henry Devlin.' Moving very carefully, Henry thrust his hand through the gap between a strand of barbed wire and one of electrified smoothwire. After Underhill did nothing but look at it expression?lessly for five seconds or so, Henry pulled his hand back to his part of the newly drawn world, feeling foolish and telling himself not to be such an idiot, it wasn't as if he'd been snubbed at a cocktail party.

Once that was done, Underhill nodded pleasantly, as if they were at a cocktail party instead of out here in a shrieking storm, illuminated by the newly installed security lights.

'You knew my name because the alien presence in Jefferson Tract has caused a low-level telepathic effect.' Underhill smiled. 'Sounds silly when you say it right out, doesn't it? But it's true. The effect is transient, harmless, and too shallow to be good for much except party games, and we're a little too busy tonight for those.'

Henry's tongue came finally, blessedly, unstuck. 'You didn't come over here in a snowstorm because I knew your name,' Henry said. 'You came over because I knew your wife's name. And your daughter's.'

Underhill's smile didn't falter. 'Maybe I did,' he said. 'In any case, I think it's time we both got under cover and got some rest - it's been a long day.'

Underhill began walking, but his way took him alongside the fence, toward the other parked trailers and campers. Henry kept pace, although he had to work in order to do it; there was nearly a foot of snow on the ground now, it was drift?ing, and no one had tramped it down over here on the dead man's side.

'Mr Underhill. Owen. Stop a minute and listen to me. I've got something important to tell you.'

Underhill kept walking along the path on his side of the fence (which was also the dead man's side; did Underhill not know that?), head down against the wind, still wearing that faintly pleasant smile. And the awful thing, Henry knew, was that Underhill wanted to stop. It was just that Henry had not, so far, given him a reason to do so.

'Kurtz is crazy,' Henry said. He was still keeping pace but he was panting audibly now, his exhausted legs screaming. 'But he's crazy like a fox.'

Underhill kept walking, head down and little smile in place under the idiotic mask. If anything, he walked faster. Soon Henry would have to run in order to keep up on his side of the fence. If running was still possible for him.

'You'll turn the machine-guns on us,' Henry panted. 'Bodies go in the barn . . . barn gets doused with gasoline . . . probably from Old Man Gosselin's own pump, why waste government issue. . . and then ploof, up in smoke . . . two hundred . . . four hundred . . . it'll smell like a VFW pig-roast in hell . . .'

Underhill's smile was gone and he walked faster still. Henry somehow found the strength to trot, gasping for air and fighting his way through knee-high snowdunes. The wind was keen against his throbbing face. Like a blade.

'But Owen . . . that's you, right? . . . Owen? . . . you remember that old rhyme . . . the one that goes "Big fleas . . . got little fleas . . . to bite em . . . and so on and so on . . . and so on ad infinitum?" that's here and that's you . . . because Kurtz has got his own cadre the man under him, I think his name is Johnson . . .'

Underhill gave him a single sharp look, then walked faster than ever. Henry somehow managed to keep up, but he didn't think he would be able to much longer. He had a stitch in his side. It was hot and getting hotter. 'That was supposed . . . to be your job the second part of the clean-up . . . Imperial Valley, that's the code name . . . mean anything to you?'

Henry saw it didn't. Kurtz must never have told Underhill about the operation that would wipe out most of Blue Group. Imperial Valley meant exactly squat to Owen Underhill, and now, in addition to the stitch, Henry had what felt like an iron band around his chest, squeezing and squeezing.

'Stop . . . Jesus, Underhill . . . can't you . . . ?'

Underhill just kept striding along. Underhill wanted to keep his last few illusions. Who could blame him?

Johnson . . . a few others . . . at least one's a woman . . . could have been you too if you hadn't tucked up . . . you crossed the line, that's what he thinks . . . not the first time, either . . . you did it before, at some place like Bossa Nova . . .'

That earned Henry a sudden sharp look. Progress? Maybe.

'In the end I think even Johnson goes . . . only Kurtz leaves here alive . . . the rest nothing but a pile of ashes and bones . . . your fucking telepathy doesn't . . . tell you that, does it . . . your little parlor-trick mind-reading . . . won't even . . . fucking touch . . . that . . .'

The stitch in his side deepened and sank into his right armpit like a claw. At the same time his feet slipped and he went flailing headfirst into a snowdrift. His lungs tore furiously for air and instead got a great gasp of powdery snow.

Henry flailed to his knees, coughing and choking, and saw Underhill's back just disappearing into the wall of blowing snow. Not knowing what he was going to say, knowing only that it was his last chance, he screamed: 'You tried to piss on Mr Rapeloew's toothbrush and when you couldn't do that you broke their plate! Broke their plate and ran away! Just like you're running away now, you fucking coward!'

Ahead of him, barely visible in the snow, Owen Underhill stopped.

4

For a moment he only stood there, his back to Henry, who knelt panting like a dog in the snow with melting, icy water running down his burning face. Henry was aware in a way that was both distant and immediate that the scratch on his leg where the byrus was growing had begun to itch.

At last Underhill turned around and came back. 'How do you know about the Rapeloews? The telepathy is fading. You shouldn't be able to get that deep.'

'I know a lot,' Henry said. He got to his feet and then stood there, gasping and coughing. 'Because it runs deep in me. I'm different. My friends and I, we were all different. There were four of us. Two are dead. I'm in here. The fourth one . . . Mr Underhill, the fourth one is your problem. Not me, not the people you've got in the barn or the ones you're still bringing in, not your Blue Group or Kurtz's Imperial Valley cadre. Only him.' He struggled, not wanting to say the name - Jonesy was the one to whom he had been the closest, Beaver and Pete were great, but only Jonesy could run with him mind for mind, book for book, idea for idea; only Jonesy also had the knack of dreaming outside the lines as well as seeing the line. But Jonesy was gone, wasn't he? Henry was quite sure of that. He had been there, a tiny bit of him had been there when the redblack cloud passed Henry, but by now his old friend would have been eaten alive. His heart might still beat and his eyes might still see, but the essential Jonesy was as dead as Pete and the Beav.

'Jonesy's your problem, Mr Underhill. Gary Jones, of Brookline, Massachusetts.'

'Kurtz is a problem, too.' Underhill spoke too softly to be heard over the howling wind, but Henry heard him, anyway - heard him in his mind.

Underhill looked around. Henry followed the shift of his head and saw a few men running down the makeshift avenue between the campers and trailer boxes - no one close. Yet the entire area around the store and the barn was mercilessly bright, and even with the wind he could hear revving engines, the stuttery roar of generators, and men yelling. Someone was giving orders through a bullhorn. The overall effect was eerie, as if the two of them had been trapped by the storm in a place filled with ghosts. The running men even looked like ghosts as they faded into the dancing sheets of snow.

'We can't talk here,' Underhill said. 'Listen to me, and don't make me repeat a single word, buck.'

And in Henry's head, where there was now so much input that most of it was tangled into an incomprehensible stew, a thought from Owen Underhill's mind suddenly rose clear and plain: Buck. His word. I can't believe I used his word.

'I'm listening,' Henry said.

5

The shed was on the far side of the compound, as far from the barn as it was possible to get, and although the outside was as brilliantly lit as the rest of this hellish concentration camp, the inside was dark and smelled sweetly of old hay. And something else, something a little more acrid.

There were four men and a woman sitting with their backs against the shed's far wall. They were all dressed in orange hunting togs, and they were passing a joint. There were only two windows in the shed, one facing in toward the corral, the other facing out toward the perimeter fence and the woods beyond. The glass was dirty, and cut the merciless white glare of the sodium lights a little. In the dimness, the faces of the pot - smoking prisoners looked gray, dead already.

'You want a hit?' the one with the Joint asked. He spoke in a strained, miserly voice, holding the smoke in, but he held the joint out willingly enough. It was a bomber, Henry saw, big as a panatela.

'No. I want you all to get out of here.' They looked at him, uncomprehending. The woman was married to the man currently holding the joint. The guy on her left was her brother-in-law. The other two were just along for the ride.

'Go back to the barn,' Henry said.

'No way,' one of the other men said. 'Too crowded in there. We prefer to be more exclusive. And since we were here first, I suggest that if you don't want to be sociable, you should be the one to - '

'I've got it,' Henry said. He put a hand on the tee-shirt knotted around his leg. 'Byrus. What they call Ripley. Some of you may have it . . . I think you do, Charles - ' He pointed at the fifth man, burly in his parka and balding.

'No!' Charles cried, but the others were already scrambling away from him, the one with the Cambodian cigar (his name was Darren Chiles and he was from Newton, Massachusetts) being careful to hold onto his smoke.

'Yeah, you do,' Henry said. 'Major league. So do you, Mona. Mona? No, Marsha. It's Marsha.'

'I don't!' she said. She got up, pressing her back against the shed wall and looking at Henry with large, terrified eyes. Doe's eyes. Soon all the does up here would be dead, and Marsha would be dead, as well. Henry hoped she could not see that thought in his mind. 'I'm clean, mister, we're all clean in here except you!'

She looked at her husband, who was not big, but bigger than Henry. They all were, actually. Not taller, maybe, but bigger.

'Throw him out, Dare.'

'There are two types of Ripley,' Henry said, stating as fact what he only believed but the more he thought about it, the more sense it made. 'Call them Ripley Prime and Ripley Secondary. I'm pretty sure that if you didn't get a hot dose - in something you ate or inhaled or something that went live into an open wound - you can get better. You can beat it.'

Now they were all looking at him with those big doe eyes, and Henry felt a moment of surpassing despair. Why couldn't he just have had a nice quiet suicide?

'I've got Ripley Prime,' he said. He unknotted the tee-shirt. None of them would do more than glance at the rip in Henry's snow-powdered jeans, but Henry took a good big look for all of them. The wound made by the turnsignal stalk had now filled up with byrus. Some of the strands were three inches long, their tips wavering like kelp in a tidal current. He could feel the roots of the stuff working in steadily, deeper and deeper, itching and foaming and fizzing. Trying to think. That was the worst of it - it was trying to think.

Now they were moving toward the shed door, and Henry expected them to bolt as soon as they caught a clear whiff of the cold air. Instead they paused.

'Mister, can you help us?' Marsha asked in a trembling child's voice. Darren, her husband, put his arm around her.

'I don't know,' Henry said. 'Probably not . . . but maybe. Go on, now. I'll be out of here in half an hour, maybe less, but probably it's best if you stay in the barn with the others.'

'Why?' asked Darren Chiles from Newton.

And Henry, who had only a ghost of an idea - nothing resembling a plan - said, 'I don't know. I just think it is.' They went out, leaving Henry in possession of the shed.

6

Beneath the window facing the perimeter fence was an ancient bale of hay. Darren Chiles had been sitting on it when Henry came in (as the one with the dope, Chiles had rated the most comfortable seat), and now Henry took his place. He sat with his hands on his knees, feeling immediately sleepy in spite of the voices tumbling around in his head and the deep, spreading itch in his left leg (it was starting in his mouth, as well, where he had lost one of his teeth).

He heard Underhill coining before Underhill actually spoke from outside the window; heard the approach of his mind.

'I'm in the lee of the wind and mostly in the shadow of the building,' Underhill said. 'I'm having a smoke. If someone comes along, you're not in there.'

'Okay.'

'Lie to me, I'll walk away and you'll never in your short life speak to me again, out loud or . . . otherwise.'

'Okay.'

'How did you get rid of the people in there?'

'Why?' Henry would have said he was too tired to be angry, but that seemed not to be the case. 'Was it some kind of goddam test?'

'Don't be a jerk.'

'I told them I've got Ripley Prime, which is the truth. They scatted in a hurry.' Henry paused. 'You've got it too, don't you?'

'What makes you think so?' Henry could detect no strain in Underhill's voice, and as a psychiatrist, he was familiar with the signs. Whatever else Underhill might be, Henry had an idea that he was a man with a tremendously cool head, and that was a step in the right direction. Also, he thought, it can't hurt if he understands he really has nothing to lose.

'It's around your fingernails, isn't it? And a little in one ear.'

'You'd wow em in Vegas, buddy.' Henry saw Underhill's hand go up, with a cigarette between the gloved fingers. He guessed the wind would end up smoking most of that one.

You get Primary direct from the source. I'm pretty sure Secondary comes from touching something that's growing it - tree, moss, deer, dog, another person. You catch that kind like you catch poison ivy. This isn't anything your own medical technicians don't know. For all I can tell, I got the information from them. My head's like a goddam satellite dish with everything beaming in on Free Preview and nothing blocked out. I can't tell where half of' this stuff's coming from and it doesn't matter. Now here's some stuff your med-techs don't know. The grays call the red growth byrus, a word that means 'the stuff of life'. Under some circumstances, the Prime version of it can grow the implants.'

'The shit-weasels, you mean.'

'Shit-weasels, that's good. I like that. They spring from the byrus, then reproduce by laying eggs. They spread, lay more eggs, spread again. That's the way it's supposed to work, anyway. Here, most of the eggs go dead. I have no idea if it's the cold weather, the atmosphere, or something else. But in our environment, Underhill, it's all about the byrus. It's all they've got that works.'

'The stuff of life.'

'Uh-huh, but listen: the grays are having big problems here, which is probably why they hung around so long - half a century - before making their move. The weasels, for instance. They're supposed to be saprophytes . . . do you know what that means?'

'Henry . . . that's you, right? Henry? . . . Henry, does this have any bearing on our present - '

It has plenty of bearing on our present situation. And unless you want to own a large part of the responsibility for the end of all life on Spaceship Earth - except for a lot of interstellar kudzu, that is - I advise you to shut up and listen.'

A pause. Then: 'I'm listening.'

'Saprophytes are beneficial parasites. We have them living in our guts, and we deliberately swallow more in some dairy products. Sweet acidophilus milk, for instance, and yogurt. We give the bugs a place to live and they give us something in return. In the case of dairy bacteria, improved digestion. The weasels, under normal circumstances - normal on some other world, I guess, where the ecology differs in ways I can't even guess at - grow to a size maybe no bigger than the bowl of a teaspoon. I think that in females they may interfere with reproduction, but they don't kill. Not normally. They just live in the bowel. We give them food, they give us telepathy. That's supposed to be the trade. Only they also turn us into televisions. We are Grayboy TV.'

'And you know all this because you have one living inside you?' There was no revulsion in Underhill's voice, but Henry felt it clearly in the man's mind, pulsing like a tentacle. 'One of the quote-unquote normal weasels?'

'No.' At least, he thought, I don't think so.

'Then how do you know what you know? Or are you maybe just making it up as you go along? Trying to write yourself a pass out of here?'

'How I know is the least important thing of all, Owen - but you know I'm not lying. You can read me.'

'I know you think you're not lying. How much more of this mind-reading shit can I expect to get?'

'I don't know. More if the byrus spreads, probably, but not in my league.'

'Because you're different.' Skepticism, both in Underhill's voice and in Underhill's thoughts.

'Pal, I didn't know how different until today. But never mind that for a minute. For now, I just want you to understand that the grays are in a shitpull here. For maybe the first time in their history, they're in an actual battle for control. First, because when they get inside people, the weasels aren't saprophytic but violently parasitic.

They don't stop eating and they don't stop growing. They're cancer, Underhill.

'Second, the byrus. It grows well on other worlds but poorly on ours, at least so far. The scientists and the medical experts who are running this rodeo think the cold is slowing it down, but I don't think that's it, or not all of it. I can't be positive because they don't know, but - '

'Whoa, whoa.' There was a brief cupped flame as Underhill lit another cigarette for the wind to smoke. 'You're not talking about the medical guys, are you?'

'No.'

'You think you're in touch with the grayboys. Telepathically in touch.'

'I think . . . with one of them. Through a link.'

'This Jonesy you spoke of?'

'Owen, I don't know. Not for sure. The point is, they're losing. Me, you, the men who went out there to the Blue Boy with you today, we might not be around to celebrate Christmas. I won't kid you about that. We got high, concentrated doses. But - '

'I've got it, all right,' Underhill said. 'Edwards, too - it showed up on him like magic.'

'But even if it really takes hold on you, I don't think you can spread it very far. It's not just that catchable. There are people in that barn who'll never get it, no matter how many byrus-infected people they mingle with. And the people who do catch it like a cold come down with Byrus Secondary . . . or Ripley, if you like that better.'

'Let's stick to byrus.'

'Okay. They might be able to pass it on to a few people, who would have a very weak version we could call Byrus Three. It might even be communicable beyond that, but I think once you got to Byrus Four you'd need a microscope or a blood-test to pick it up. Then it's gone.

'Here's the instant replay, so pay attention.

'Point one. The grays - probably no more than delivery - systems for the byrus - are gone already. The ones the environment didn't kill, like the microbes finally killed the Martians in War of the Worlds, were wiped out by your gunships. All but one, that is, the one - yeah, must be - that I got my information from. And in a physical sense, he's gone, too.

'Point two. The weasels don't work. Like all cancers, they ultimately eat themselves to death. The weasels that escape from the lower intestine or the bowel quickly die in an environment they find hostile.

'Point three. The byrus doesn't work, either, not very well, but given a chance, given time to hide and grow, it could mutate. Learn to fit in. Maybe to rule.'

'We're going to wipe it out,' Underhill said. 'We're going to turn the entire Jefferson Tract into a burn-scar.'

Henry could have screamed with frustration, and some of that must have gotten through. There was a thud as Underhill jerked, striking the flimsy shed wall with his back.

'What you do up here doesn't matter,' Henry said. 'The people you've got interned can't spread it, the weasels can't spread it, and the byrus can't spread itself. If your guys folded their tents and just walked away right now, the environment would take care of itself and erase all this nonsense like a bad equation. I think the grays showed up the way they did because they just can't fucking believe it. I think it was a suicide mission with some gray version of your Mistuh Kurtz in charge. They simply cannot conceptualize failure. "We always win," they think.'

'How do you - '

'Then, at the last minute, Underhill - maybe at the last second ?one of them found a man who was remarkably different from all the others with whom the grays, the weasels, and the byrus had come in contact. He's your Typhoid Mary. And he's already out of the q-zone, rendering anything you do here meaningless.'

'Gary Jones.'

'Jonesy, right.'

'What makes him different?'

Little as he wanted to go into this part of it, Henry realized he had to give Underhill something.

'He and I and our two other friends - the ones who are dead - once knew someone who was very different. A natural telepath, no byrus needed. He did something to us. If we'd gotten to know him when we were a little older, I don't think that would have been possible, but we met him when we were particularly . . . vulnerable, I suppose you'd say . . . to what he had. And then, years later, something else happened to Jonesy, something that had nothing to do with . . . with this remarkable boy.'

But that wasn't the truth, Henry suspected; although Jonesy had been hit and almost killed in Cambridge find Duddits had never to Henry's knowledge been south of Derry in his life, Duds had somehow been a part of Jonesy's final, crucial change. A part of that, too. He knew it.

'And I'm supposed to what? Just believe all this? Swallow it like cough-syrup?'

In the sweet-smelling darkness of the shed, Henry's lips spread in a humorless grin. 'Owen,' he said, 'you do believe it. I'm a telepath, remember? The baddest one in the jungle. The question, though . . . the question is . . .'

Henry asked the question with his mind.

7

Standing outside the compound fence by the back wall of the old storage shed, freezing his balls off, filter-mask pulled down around his neck so he could smoke a series of cigarettes he did not want (he'd gotten a fresh pack in the PX), Owen would have said he never felt less like laughing in his life . . . but when the man in the shed responded to his eminently reasonable question with such impatient directness - you do believe it . . . I'm a telepath, remember? - ?a laugh was surprised out of him, nevertheless. Kurtz had said that if the telepathy became permanent and were to spread, society as they knew it would fall down. Owen had grasped the concept, but now he understood it on a gut level, too.

'The question, though . . . the question is . . .'

What are we going to do about it?

Tired as he was, Owen could see only one answer to that question. 'We have to go after Jones, I suppose. Will it do any good? Do we have time?'

'I think we might. Just.'

Owen tried to read what was behind Henry's response with his own lesser powers and could not. Yet he was positive that most of what the man had told him was true. Either that or he believes it's true, Owen thought. God knows I want to believe it's true. Any excuse to get out of here before the butchery starts.

'No,' Henry said, and for the first time Owen thought he sounded upset, not entirely sure of himself. 'No butchery. Kurtz isn't going to kill somewhere between two hundred and eight hundred people. People who ultimately can't influence this business one way or the other. They're just - Christ, they're just innocent bystanders!'

Owen wasn't entirely surprised to find himself rather enjoying his new friend's discomfort; God knew Henry had discomfited him. 'What do you suggest? Bearing in mind that you yourself said that only your pal Jonesy matters.'

'Yes, but . . .'

Floundering. Henry's mental voice was a little surer, but only a little. I didn't mean we'd walk away and let them die.

'We won't be walking anywhere,' Owen said. 'We'll be running like a couple of rats in a corncrib.' He dropped his third cigarette after a final token puff and watched the wind carry it away. Beyond the shed, curtains of snow rippled across the empty corral, building up huge drifts against the side of the barn. Trying to go anywhere in this would be madness. It'll have to be a Sno-Cat, at least to start with, Owen thought. By midnight, even a four-wheel drive might not be much good. Not in this.

'Kill Kurtz,' Henry said. 'That's the answer. It'll make it easier for us to get away with no one to give orders, and it'll put the . . . the biological cleansing on hold.'

Owen laughed dryly. 'You make it sound so easy,' he said. 'Double-oh-Underhill, license to kill.'

He lit a fourth cigarette, cupping his hands around the lighter and the end of the smoke. In spite of his gloves, his fingers were numb. We better come to some conclusions pretty quick, he thought. Before I freeze to death.

'What's the big deal about it?' Henry asked, but he knew what the big deal was, all right; Owen could sense (and half-hear) him trying not to see it, not wanting things to be worse than they already were. 'Just walk in there and pop him.'

'Wouldn't work.' Owen sent Henry a brief image: Freddy Johnson (and other members of the so-called Imperial Valley cadre) keeping an eye on Kurtz's Winnebago. 'Also, he's got the place wired for sound. If anything happens, the hard boys come running. Maybe I could get him. Probably not, because he covers himself as thoroughly as any Colombian cocaine jefe, especially when he's on active duty, but maybe. I like to think I'm not bad myself. But it would be a suicide mission. If he's recruited Freddy Johnson, then he's probably got Kate Gallagher and Marvell Richardson . . . Carl Friedman . . . Jocelyn McAvoy. Tough boys and tough girls, Henry. I kill Kurtz, they kill me, the brass running this show from under Cheyenne Mountain send out a new cleaner, some Kurtz clone that'll pick up where Kurtz left off. Or maybe they just elect Kate to the job. God knows she's crazy enough. The people in the barn might get twelve additional hours to stew in their own juice, but in the end they'll still burn. The only difference is that, instead of getting a chance to go charging gaily through the snowstorm with me, handsome, you'll burn with the rest of them. Your pal, meanwhile - this guy Jonesy - he'll be off to . . . to where?'

'That's something it might be prudent for me to keep to myself, for the time being.'

Owen nonetheless probed for it with such telepathy as he possessed. For a moment he caught a blurred and perplexing vision - a tall white building in the snow, cylindrical, like a barn silo ?and then it was gone, replaced by the image of a white horse that looked almost like a unicorn running past a sign. On the sign were red letters reading BANBURY CROSS under a pointing arrow.

He grunted in amusement and exasperation. 'You're jamming me.'

'You can think of it that way. Or you can think of it as teaching you a technique you better learn if you'd like to keep our conversation a secret.'

'Uh-huh.' Owen wasn't entirely displeased with what had just happened. For one thing, a jamming technique would be a very good thing to have. For another, Henry did know where his infected friend - call him Typhoid Jonesy - was going. Owen had seen a brief picture of it in Henry's head.

'Henry, I want you to listen to me now.'

'All right.'

'Here's the simplest, safest thing we can do, you and I. First, if time isn't an utterly crucial factor, we both need to get some sleep.'

'I can buy that. I'm next door to dead.'

'Then, around three o'clock, I can start to move and shake. This installation is going to be on high alert till the time when there isn't an installation here any longer, but if Big Brother's eyeball ever glazes over a little, it's apt to be between four and six A.M. I'll make a diversion, and I can short out the fence - that's the easiest part, actually. I can be here with a Sno-Cat five minutes after the shit hits the fan - '

Telepathy had certain shorthand advantages to verbal communi?cation, Owen was discovering. He sent Henry the image of a burning MH-6 Little Bird helicopter and soldiers running toward it even as he continued to speak.

' - and off we go.'

'Leaving Kurtz with a barnful of innocent civilians he plans to turn into crispy critters. Not to mention Blue Group. What's that, a couple-three hundred more?'

Owen, who had been full-time military since the age of nineteen and one of Kurtz's eraserheads for the last eight years, sent two hard words along the mental conduit the two of them had established: Acceptable losses.

Behind the dirty glass, the vague shape that was Henry Devlin stirred, then stood.

No, he sent back.

8

No? What do you mean, no?

No. That's what I mean.

Do you have a better idea?

And Owen realized, to his extreme horror, that Henry thought he did. Fragments of that idea - it would be far too generous to call it a plan - shot through Owen's mind like the brightly fragmented tail of a comet. It took his breath away. The cigarette dropped unnoticed from between his fingers and zipped away on the wind.

You're nuts.

No, I'm not. We need a diversion in order to get away, you already know that. This is a diversion.

They'll be killed anyway!

Some will. Maybe even most of them. But it's a chance. What chance will they have in a burning barn?

Out loud, Henry said: 'And there's Kurtz. If he's got a couple of hundred escapees to worry about - most of whom who'd be happy to tell the first reporters they came across that the panic - stricken U.S. government had sanctioned a My Lai massacre right here on American soil - he's going to be a lot less concerned about us.'

You don't know Abe Kurtz, Owen thought. You don't know about the Kurtz Line. Of course, neither had he. Not really. Not until today.

Yet Henry's proposal made a lunatic kind of sense. And it contained at least a measure of atonement. As this endless November fourteenth marched toward midnight and as odds of living until the end of the week grew longer, Owen was not surprised to find that the idea of atonement had its attractions.

'Henry.'

'Yes, Owen. I'm here.'

'I've always felt badly about what I did in the Rapeloews' house that day.'

'I know.'

'And yet I've done it again and again. How tucked up is that?' Henry, an excellent psychiatrist even after his thoughts had turned to suicide, said nothing. Fucked up was normal human behavior. Sad but true.

'All right,' Owen said at last. 'You can buy the house, but I'm going to furnish it. Deal?'

'Deal,' Henry replied at once.

'Can you really teach me that jamming technique? Because I think I may need it.'

'I'm pretty sure I can.'

'All right. Listen.' Owen talked for the next three minutes, sometimes out loud, sometimes mind to mind. The two men had reached a point where they no longer differentiated between the modes of communication; thoughts and words had become one.