'Look around the place,' Bobbi repeated, and the last word drew out, deepening, and became a snore. She was asleep.
2
Gardener almost went to the phone again. It was close. He got up, but halfway across the living room he diverted, going to Bobbi's rocking chair instead. He would watch for a while first, he thought. Watch for a while and try to think what all this might mean.
He swallowed and winced at the pain in his throat. He was feverish, and he suspected the fever was no little one-degree job, either. He felt more than unwell; he felt unreal.
Fabulous ... what it is ... what it can do ...
He would sit here for a while and think some more. Then he would make a pot of strong coffee and dump about six aspirins into it. That would take care of the aches and fever, at least temporarily. Might help keep him awake, too.
... what it will do ...
Gard closed his eyes, dozing himself. That was all right. He might doze, but not for long; he'd never been able to sleep sitting up. And Peter was apt to appear at any time; he would see his old friend Gard, jump into his lap, and get his balls. Always. When it came to jumping into the chair with you and getting your balls, Peter never failed. Hell of an alarm clock, if you happened to be sleeping. Five minutes, that's all. Forty winks. No harm, no foul.
You should have found it. I think it was for you, Gard ...
He drifted, and his doze quickly deepened into sleep so deep it was close to coma.
3
shusshhhhh ...
He's looking down at his skis, plain brown wood strips racing over the snow, hypnotized by their liquid speed. He doesn't realize this state of near hypnosis
until a voice on his left says: 'One thing you bastards never remember to mention at your fucking Communist antipower rallies is just this: in thirty years of peaceful nuclear-power development, we've never been caught once.
Ted is wearing a reindeer sweater over faded jeans. He skis fast and well. Gardener, on the other hand, is completely out of control.
'You're going to crash,' a voice on his right says. He looks over and it is Arglebargle- Arglebargle has begun to rot. His fat face, which had been flushed with alcohol on the night of the party, is now the yellow-gray of old curtains hanging in dirty windows. His flesh has begun to slough downward, pulling and splitting. Arglebargle sees his shock and terror. His gray lips spread in a grin.
'That's right,' he says. 'I'm dead. It really was a heart attack. Not indigestion, not my gall-bladder. I collapsed five minutes after you were gone. They called an ambulance and the kid I hired to tend bar got my heart started again with CPR, but I died for good in the ambulance.'
The grin stretches; becomes as moony as the grin of a dead trout lying on the deserted beach of a poisoned lake.
'I died at a stoplight on Storrow Drive,' Arglebargle says.
'No,' Gardener whispers. This ... this is what he has always feared. The final, irrevocable, drunken act.
'Yes,' the dead man insists as they speed down the hill, drifting closer to the trees. 'I invited you into my house, gave you food and drink, and you repaid me by killing me in a drunken argument.'
'Please ... I. . .'
'You what? You what?' from his left again. The reindeer on Ted's sweater have disappeared. They have been replaced by yellow radiation warning symbols. 'You nothing, that's what! Where do you latter-day Luddites think all that power comes from?'
'You killed me,' Arberg drones from his right, 'but you'll pay. You're going to crash, Gardener.'
'Do you think we get it from the Wizard of Oz?' Ted screams. Weeping sores suddenly erupt on his face. His lips bubble, peel, crack, begin to suppurate. One of his eyes shimmers into the milkiness of cataract. Gardener realizes with mounting horror that he is looking into a face exhibiting symptoms of a man in the last advanced stages of radiation sickness.
The radiation symbols on Ted's shirt are turning black.
'You'll crash, you bet,' Arglebargle drones on. 'Crash.'
He is weeping with terror now, as he wept after shooting his wife, hearing the unbelievable report of the gun in his hand, watching as she staggered backward against the kitchen counter, one hand clapped to her cheek like a woman uttering a shocked 'My land! I NEVER!' And then the blood