["Lois, come back! Don't go near him."'] ["Bill." Bill! B-"I Lois reached McGovern just before Ralph was able to reach her.
She put out her hand to grab his shoulder. Ralph saw her fingers plunge into the murk which surrounded him... and then slide into him.
Her aura changed at once, from a gray-blue shot with those pinkish sparks to a red as bright as the side of a fire engine. jagged flocks of black shot through it like clouds of tiny swarming insects. Lois screamed and pulled her hand back. The expression on her face was a mixture of terror and loathing. She held her hand up in front of her eyes and screamed again, although Ralph could see nothing on it.
Narrow black stripes were now whirring giddily around the outer edges of her aura; to Ralph they looked like planetary orbits marked on a map of the solar system. She turned to flee. Ralph grabbed her by the upper arms and she beat at him blindly.
McGovern and his friend, meanwhile, continued their placid amble up the hall to the drinking fountain, completely unaware of the shrieking, struggling woman not ten feet behind them. "When I asked Bob why he wouldn't publish the book," McGovern was continuing, "he said that I of all people should understand his reasons.
I told him..."
Lois drowned him out, shrieking like a firebell.
["Quit it, Lois." Quit it right now!!
Whatever happened to you is over now." It's over and you're all right." But Lois continued to struggle, dinning those inarticulate screams into his head, trying to tell him how awful it had been, how he'd been rotting, that there were things inside him, eating him alive, and that was bad enough, but it wasn't the worst. Those things were around, she said, they were bad, and they had known she was there.
["Lois, you're with me You're with me and it's all right." One of her flying fists clipped the side of his jaw and Ralph saw stars. He understood that they had passed to a plane of reality where physical contact with others was impossible-hadn't he seen Lois's hand pass directly into McGovern, like the hand of a ghost?-but they were obviously still real enough to each other; he had the bruised jaw to prove it.
He slipped his arms around her and hugged her against him, imprisoning her fists between her breasts and his chest. Her cries however, continued to rant and blast in his head, He locked his hands together between her shoulderblades and squeezed.
He felt the power leap out of him again, as it had that morning, only this time it felt entirely different. Blue light spilled through Lois's turbulent red-black aura, soothing it. Her struggles slowed and then ceased. they felt her draw a shuddering breath. Above and around her, the blue glow was expanding and fading. The black bands disappeared from her aura, one after the other, from the bottom to top, and then that alarming shade of infected red also began to fade. She put her head against his arm. sorry, Ralph-I went nuclear again, didn't I?"] That's The trouble."
"I suppose so, but ever mind. You're okay now, that's the important thing."] ["If ' you knew how horrible that was-... touching the thing "You put it across very well, Lois.
She glanced down the corridor, where McGovern's friend was now getting a drink. McGovern lounged against the wall next to him, talking about how the Exalted amp; Revered Bob Polhurst had always done the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in ink.
"He used to tell me that wasn't pride but optimism," McGovern said, and the deathbag swirled sluggishly around him as he spoke, flowing in and out of his mouth and between the fingers of his gesturing, eloquent hand.
["We can't help him, can we, Ralph? There's not a thing in the world we can do."] Ralph gave her a brief, strong hug. Her aura, he saw, had entirely returned to normal.
McGovern and his friend were walking back down the corridor toward them. Acting on impulse, Ralph disengaged himself from Lois and stepped directly in front of Mr. Plum, who was listening to McGovern hold forth on the tragedy of old age and nodding in the right places.
["Ralph, don't do that."] ["It's okay, don't worry."
But all at once he wasn't so sure it was okay. He might have stepped back, given another second. Before he could, however, Mr. Plum glanced unseeingly into his face and walked right through him.