himself. It was hard going-he thought he had never felt quite so frightened and confused in his entire life-but he gave it the old college try.
["Come on, dear. Let's go."] Ralph remembered thinking-this while they'd been making their way along the abandoned rail-line which had eventually taken them back to the airport-that walking was not exactly what they were doing; it had seemed more like gliding. They went from the picnic area at the end of Runway 3 back to Strawford Park in that same fashion, only the glide was faster and more pronounced now. It was like being carried along by an invisible conveyor belt.
As an experiment, he stopped walking. The houses and storefronts continued to flow mildly past. He looked down at his feet to make sure, and yes, they were completely still. It seemed the sidewalk was moving, not him.
Here came Mr. Dugan, head of the Derry Trust's Loan Department, decked out in his customary three-piece suit and rimless eyeglasses.
As always, he looked to Ralph like the only man in the history of the world to be born without an asshole. He had once rejected Ralph's application for a Bill-Payer loan, which, Ralph supposed, might account for a few of his negative feelings about the man. Now he saw that Dugan's aura was the dull, uniform gray of a corridor in a VA hospital, and Ralph decided that didn't surprise him much. He held his nose like a man forced to swim across a polluted canal and passed directly through the banker. Dugan did not so much as twitch.
That was sort of amusing, but when Ralph glanced at Lois, his amusement faded in a hurry. He saw the worry on her face, and the questions she wanted to ask. Questions to which he had no satisfactory answers.
Ahead was Strawford Park. As Ralph looked, the streetlights came on suddenly. The little playground where he and McGovern-Lois too, more often than not-had stood watching the children play was almost deserted. Two junior-high kids were sitting side by side on the swings, smoking cigarettes and talking, but the mothers and toddlers who came here during the daylight hours were all gone now.
Ralph thought of McGovern-of his ceaseless, morbid chatter and his self-pity, so hard to see when you first got to know him, so hard to miss once you'd been around him for awhile, both of them lightened and somehow turned into something better by his irreverent wit and his surprising, impulsive acts of kindness-and felt deep sadness steal over him. Short-Timers might be stardust, and they might be golden as well, but when they were gone they were as gone as the mothers and babies who made brief playtime visits here on sunny summer afternoons.
["Ralph, what are we doing here? The deathbag's over the Civic Center, not Strawford Park."'] Ralph guided her to the park bench where he had found her several centuries ago, crying over the argument she'd had with her son and daughter-in-law... and over her lost earrings.
Down the hill, the two Portosans glimmered in the deepening twilight.
Ralph closed his eyes. I am going mad, he thought, and I'm headed there on the express rather than the local. Which is it going to be?
The lady... or the tiger?
["Ralph, we have to do something. Those lives... those thousands of lives... "I In the darkness behind his closed lids, Ralph saw someone coming out of the Red Apple Store. A figure in dark corduroy pants and a Red Sox cap. Soon the terrible thing would start to happen again, and because Ralph didn't want to see it, he opened his eyes and looked at the woman beside him.
["Every life is important, Lois, wouldn't you agree? Every single one."] He didn't know what she saw in his aura, but it clearly terrified her.
["What happened down there after I left? What did he do or say to you? Tell me, Ralph." You tell me."'] So which was it going to be?
The one or the many? The lady or the tiger? If he didn't choose soon, the choice would be taken out of his hands by nothing more than the simple passage of time. So which one? Which?
"Neither... or both," he said hoarsely, unaware in his terrible agitation that he was speaking aloud, and on several different levels at once. "I won't choose one or the other. I won't. Do you hear me?"
He leaped up from the bench, looking around wildly.
"Do you hear me?" he shouted. "I reject this choice! I will