thought I was dying. My heart!' She clapped a hand dramatically over one breast. 'It was beating so fast! My head started to ache, and I got a nosebleed, and Vera got scared. She says, "Turn around, Eileen, right now, you got to get to the hospital right away!"
'Well, I turned around somehow - I don't hardly remember how, the world was spinning so - and by then my mouth was bleeding, and two of my teeth fell out. Right out of my head! Did you ever hear the beat of it?'
'No,' he lied, thinking of Alvin Rutledge. 'Where did it happen?'
'Why, I told you - we were going to see Mary Jacklin - '
'Yes, but were you actually in Haven when you got sick? And which way did you come in?'
'Oh, I see! No, we weren't. We were on the Old Derry Road. In Troy.'
'Close to Haven, then.'
'Oh, 'bout a mile from the town line. I'd been feeling sick for a little time -whoopsy, you know - but I didn't want to say so to Vera. I kept hoping that I would feel better.'
Vera Anderson hadn't gotten sick, and this troubled Leandro. It didn't fit. Vera hadn't gotten a bloody nose, nor lost any teeth.
'No, she didn't get sick at all,' Mrs Pulsifer said. 'Except with terror. I guess she was sick with that. For me ... and for herself too, I imagine.'
'How do you mean?'
'Well, that road's awful empty. She thought I was going to pass out. I almost did. It might have been fifteen, twenty minutes before someone came along.'
'She couldn't have driven you?'
'God bless you, John, Vera's had muscular dystrophy for years. She wears great big metal braces on her legs - cruel-looking things, they are, like something you'd expect to see on a torture chamber. It just about makes me cry sometimes to see her.'
5
At a quarter to ten on the morning of August 15th, Leandro crossed into the town of Troy. His stomach was tight with anticipation and - let's face it, folks - a tingle of fear. His skin felt cold.
I may get sick. I may get sick, and if I do, I'm going to leave about ninety feet of rubber reversing out of the area. Got that?
I got it, boss, he answered himself. I got it, I got it.
You may lose some teeth, too, he cautioned himself, but the loss of -a few teeth seemed a small price to pay for a story which might win him a Pulitzer Prize ... and, just as important, one which would surely turn David Bright green with envy.
He passed through Troy Village, where everything seemed fine ... if a little slower than usual. The first jag in the normal run of things came about a mile further south, and from a direction he wouldn't have expected. He had been listening to WZON out of Bangor. Now the normally strong AM signal began to waver and flutter. Leandro could hear one ... no, two . . * no ' three ... other stations mixed in with its signal. He frowned. That sometimes happened at night, when radiant cooling thinned the atmosphere and allowed radio signals to travel further, but he had never heard of it happening on an AM band in the morning, not even during those periods of optimum radio-transmission conditions which ham operators call 'the skip.'
He ran the tuner on the Dodge's radio, and was amazed as a flood of conflicting transmissions poured out of the speakers - rock-and-roll, countryand-western, and classical music stepped all over each other. Somewhere in the background he could hear Paul Harvey extolling Amway. He turned the dial further and caught a momentarily clear transmission so surprising he pulled over. He sat staring at the radio with big eyes.
It was speaking in Japanese.
He sat and waited for the inevitable clarification -'This lesson in Beginners' Japanese has been brought to you by your local Kyanize Paint dealer,' something like that. The announcer finished. Then came the Beach Boys 'Be True to Your School.' In Japanese.
Leandro continued to tune down the kHz band with a hand that shook. It was much the same all the way. As it did at night, the tangle of voices and music got worse as he tuned toward the higher frequencies. At last the tangle grew so severe it began to frighten him - it was the auditory equivalent of a squirming mass of snakes. He turned the radio off and sat behind the wheel, eyes