lesson too often repeated. It occurred to Alice that he'd eaten no dinner.
"Then," he went on, "the weight of the balls falling into the cups of the arms on this side carries the arms far enough up on this side so that they fold up, and the cup tips, and the ball rolls out"—he turned the wheel by hand to demonstrate—"and goes back into the rack, and rolls down and falls into the cup of the arm that just extended itself over on this side, and that carries that arm around, and so it goes on endlessly." The slack arm did deposit its ball; the ball did roll into the arm that extended itself, clack-clack-clack, out from the wheel. The arm was borne down to the bottom of the wheel's cycle. Then it stopped.
"Amazing," Alice said mildly.
Smoky, hands behind his back, looked glumly at the unmoving wheel. "It's the stupidest thing I've ever seen in my life," he said.
"Oh."
"This guy Cloud must have been just about the stupidest inventor or genius who ever . . ." He could think of no conclusion, and bowed his head. "It never worked, Alice; this thing couldn't turn anything. It's not going to work."
She moved carefully among the tools and oily disassembled works and took his arm. "Smoky," she said. "Everybody's downstairs. Ariel Hawksquill came."
He looked at her, and laughed, a frustrated laugh at a defeat absurdly complete; then he grimaced, and put his hand quickly to his chest.
"Oh," Alice said. "You should have eaten."
"It's better when I don't," Smoky said. "I think."
"Come on," Alice said. "You'll figure this out, I bet. Maybe you can ask Ariel." She kissed his brow, and went before him out the arched door and then down the steps, feeling released.
"Alice," Smoky said to her. "Is this it? Tonight, I mean. Is this it?"
"Is this what?"
"It is, isn't it?" he said.
She said nothing while they went along the hall and down the stairs toward the second floor. She held Smoky's arm, and thought of more than one thing to say; but at last (there wasn't any point any longer in riddling, she knew too much, and so did he) she only said. "I guess. Close."
Smoky's hand, pressed to his chest beneath his breastbone, began to tingle, and he said "Oh-oh," and stopped.
They were at the top of the stairs. Faintly, below, he could see the drawing-room lights, and hear voices. Then the voices went out in a hum of silence.
Close. If it were close, then he had lost; for he was far behind, he had work to do he could not even conceive of, much less begin. He had lost.
An enormous hollow seemed to open up in his chest, a hollow larger than himself. Pain gathered on its perimeter, and Smoky knew that after a moment, an endless moment, the pain would rush in and fill the hollow: but for that moment there was nothing, nothing but a terrible premonition, and an incipient revelation, both vacant, contesting in his empty heart. The premonition was black, and the incipient revelation would be white. He stopped stock still, trying not to panic because he couldn't breathe; there was no air within the hollow for him to breathe; he could only experience the battle between Premonition and Revelation and listen to the long loud hum in his ears that seemed to be a voice saying Now you see, you didn't ask to see and this is not the moment in which you would anyway have expected sight to come, here on this stair in this dark, but Now: and even then it was gone. His heart, with two slow awful thuds like blows, began to pound fiercely and steadily as though in rage, and pain, familiar and releasing, filled him up. The contest was over. He could breathe the pain. In a moment, he would breathe air.
"Oh," he heard Alice saying, "oh, oh, a bad one"; he saw her pressing her own bosom in sympathy, and felt her grip on his left arm.
"Yeah, wow," he said, finding voice. "Oh, boy."
"Gone?"
"Almost." Pain ran down the left arm she held, diminishing to a thread which continued down into his ring finger, on which there was no ring, but from which, it felt, a ring was being torn, pulled off, a ring worn so long that it couldn't be removed without severing nerve and tendon. "Quit it, quit it," he said, and it did quit, or diminish further anyway.
Okay, he said. Okay.
"Oh, Smoky," Alice said.