No, he guessed he wasn't. When he'd picked up the first one, he had felt a deep, momentary ache spread up his arm like rheumatism, but Lois had shown no signs of pain when she picked up the second one.
And the voices-I didn't hear them shout when she picked up the one she has.
Ralph leaned forward and grasped the third ring. There was no jolt of pain and no shout from the objects which formed the walls of the room-they just kept singing softly. Meanwhile, a fourth ring materialized where the other three had. been, materialized exactly like another hat on the head of hapless Bartholomew Cubbins, but Ralph barely glanced at it. He looked at the first ring, lying between the fork of his lifeline and loveline on the palm of his right hand.
One Ring to rule them all, he thought. One Ring to hind them.
And I think that's you, beautiful. I think the others are just clever counterfeits.
And maybe there was a way to check that. Ralph held the two rings to his ears. The one in his left hand was silent; the one in his right, the one that had been inside the deathbag when he cut it open, gave off a faint, chilling echo of the deathbag's final scream.
The one in his right hand was alive.
["Ralph?"
Her hand on his arm, cold and urgent. Ralph looked at her, then tossed the ring in his left hand away. He held the other up and gazed at Lois's strained, strangely young face through it, as if through a telescope.
["This is the one. The others are just place-holders, I think-like-e zeros in a big, complicated math problem."]
["You mean they don't matter?"]
He hesitated, unsure of how to reply... because they did matter, that was the thing. He just didn't know how to put his intuitive understanding of this into words. As long as the false rings kept appearing in this nasty little room, like hats on the head of Bartholomew Cubbins, the future represented by the deathbag around the Civic Center remained the one true future. But the first ring, the one which Atropos had actually stolen off Ed's finger (perhaps as he lay sleeping next to Helen in the little Cape Cod house which was now standing empty), could change all that.
The replicas were tokens which preserved the shape of ka just as spokes radiating out from a hub preserved the shape of a wheel. The original, however...
Ralph thought the original was the hub: One Ring to bind them.
He gripped the gold band tightly, feeling its hard curve bite into his palm and fingers. Then he slipped it into his watchpocket.
There was one thing about ka they didn't tell us, he thought.
It's slippery. Slippery as some nasty oldfish that won't come off the hook but just keeps flopping around in your hand.
And it was like climbing a sand dune, too-you slid one step back for every two you managed to lunge forward. They had gone out to High Ridge and accomplished something-just what, Ralph didn't know, but Dorrance had assured them it was true; according to him, they had fulfilled their task there. Now they had come here and taken Ed's token, but it still wasn't enough, and why? Because k,i was like a fish, ka was like a sand dune, ka was like a wheel that didn't want to stop but only to roll on and on, crushing whatever might happen to be in its path. A wheel of many spokes.
But most of all, perhaps, ka was like a ring.
Like a wedding ring.
He suddenly understood what all the talk on the hospital roof and all of Dorrance's efforts to explain hadn't been able to convey: Ed's undesignated status, coupled with Atropos's discovery of the poor, confused man, had conveyed a tremendous power upon him. A door had opened, and a demon called the Crimson King had strolled through, one that was stronger than Clotho, Lachesis, Atropos, any of them. And it didn't intend to be stopped by a Derry Old Crock like Ralph Roberts.
E "Ralph?" I
["One Ring to rule them all, Lois-one Ring to find them.
["What are 'you talking about? What do you mean?"] He patted his watchpocket, feeling the small yet momentous bulge that was Ed's ring.
Then he reached out and grasped her shoulders.
["The replacements-the false rings-are spokes, but this one is the hub. Take away the hub, and a wheel can't turn.
["Are you sure?"] He was sure, all right. He just didn't know how to do