“Do you think Helen knew about his hobby?” Lois asked, “She probably didn’t, did she?”

“I’m sure she didn’t. I’ll bet he switched over to Coastal Air right after he ran into the guy from West Side Gardeners, too. That little episode could have convinced him he was losing control, and he might do well to move his lessons a little farther away from home.”

“Or maybe it was Atropos who convinced him,” Lois said bleakly.

“Atropos or someone from even higher up.”

Ralph didn’t care for the idea, but it felt right, just the same, Entities, he thought, and shivered. The Crimson King.

“They’re dancing him around like a puppet on a string, aren’t they?” Lois asked.

“Atropos, you mean?”

“No. Atropos is a nasty little bugger, but otherwise I think he’s not much different from Mr. C. and Mr. L.-low-level help, maybe only a step above unskilled labor in the grand scheme of things.”

“Janitors.”

“Well, yes, maybe,” Lois agreed. “Janitors and gofers. Atropos is probably the one who’s done most of the actual work on Ed, and I’d bet a cookie it’s work he loves, but I’d bet my house that his orders come from higher up. Does that sound more or less on the beam to you?”

“Yes. We’ll probably never know exactly how nuts he was before this started, or exactly when Atropos cut his balloon-string, but the thing I’m most curious about at this moment is pretty mundane. I’d like to know how in the hell he went Charlie Pickering’s ball and how he paid for his damned flying lessons.”

Before Lois could reply, a waitress approached them, digging an order-pad and a ballpoint pen out of the pocket of her apron. “Hell-) you guys”

“I’d like a cheese and mushroom omelet,” Ralph said.

“Uh-huh.” She switched her cud from one side of her jaw to the other. “Two-egg or three-egg, lion?”

“Four, if that’s okay.”

She raised her eyebrows slightly and jotted on the pad. “Okay by me if it’s okay by you. Anything with that?”

“Yes, please. A glass of o.j large, an order of bacon, an order of sausage, and an order of home fries. Better make that a double order of home fries.” He paused, thinking, then grinned. “Oh, and do you have any Danish left?”

“I think I might have one cheese and one apple.” She glanced up at him. “You a little hungry, lion?”

“Feel like I haven’t eaten for a week,” Ralph said. “I’ll have the cheese Danish. And coffee to start. Lots of black coffee, Did you get all that?”

“Oh, I got it, lion. I just want to see what you look like when you leave.” She looked at Lois. “How ’bout you, ma’am?”

Lois smiled sweetly. “I’ll have what he’s having. Bon,” Ralph looked past the retreating waitress to the clock on the wall.

It was only ten past seven, and that was good. They could be out at Barrett’s Orchards in less than half an hour, and with their mental lasers trained on Gretchen Tillbury, it was possible that the Susan Day speech could be called off-aborted, if you liked-as early as 9:00 a.m.

Yet instead of relief he felt relentless, gnawing anxiety. It was like having an itch in a place your fingers cannot quite reach.

“All right,” he said. “Let’s put it together. I think we can assume that Ed’s been concerned about abortion for a long time, that he’s probably been a pro-life supporter for years. Then he starts to lose sleep… hear voices

… see little bald men

“Well, one in particular Ralph agreed. “Atropos becomes his guru, filling him in on the Crimson King, the Centurions, the whole nine yards. When Ed talked to me about King Herod-”

“-he was thinking about Susan Day,” Lois finished. “Atropos has been… what do they say on TV?… psyching him up. Turning him into a guided missile.

Where did Ed get that scarf, do you think?”

“Atropos,” Ralph said. “Atropos has got a lot of stuff like that, I’ll bet.”

“And what do you suppose he’s got in the plane he’ll be flying tonight?” Lois’s voice was trembling. “Explosives or poison gas?”

“Explosives would seem the more likely bet if he really is planning to get everyone; a strong wind could create problems for him if it’s gas.” Ralph took a sip of his water and was interested to see that his hand was not quite steady. “On the other hand, we don’t know what goodies he might have been cooking up in his laboratory, do we?”

“No,” Lois said in a small voice.

Ralph put his water-glass down. “What he’s planning to use doesn’t interest me very much.”

“What does?”

The waitress came back with fresh coffee, and the smell alone seemed to light up Ralph’s nerves like neon. He and Lois grabbed their cups and began to sip as soon as she had started away. The coffee was strong and hot enough to burn Ralph’s lips, but it was heaven. When he set his cup back in its saucer again, it was halfempty and there was a very warm place in his midsection, as if he had swallowed a live ember.

Lois was looking at him somberly over the rim of her own cup.

“What interests me,” Ralph told her, “is us. You said Atropos has turned Ed into a guided missile. That’s right; that’s exactly what he’s done. World War II kamikaze pilots were. Hitler had his V-2s; Hirohito had his Divine Wind. The disturbing thing is that Clotho and Lachesis have done the same thing to us. We’ve been loaded up with a lot of special powers and programmed to fly out to High Ridge in my Oldsmobile and stop Susan Day. I’d just like to know why.”

“But we do know,” she protested. “If we don’t step in, Ed Deepneau is going to commit suicide tonight during that woman’s speech and take two thousand people with him.”

“Yeah,” Ralph said, “and we’re going to do whatever we can to stop him, Lois, don’t worry about that.”

He finished his coffee and set the cup down again. His stomach was fully awake now, and raving for food. “I could no more stand aside and let Ed kill those people than I could stand in one place and not duck if someone threw a baseball at my head. It’s just that we never got a chance to read the fine print at the bottom of the contract, and that scares me.” He hesitated a moment. “It also pisses me off.”

“What are you talking about?”

“About being played for a couple of patsies. We know why were going to try and stop Susan Day’s speech; we can’t stand the thought of a lunatic killing a couple of thousand innocent people.

But we don’t know why they want us to do it. That’s the part that scares me.”

“We have a chance to save two thousand lives,” she said. “Are you telling me that’s enough for us but not for them?”

“That’s what I’m telling you. I don’t think numbers impress these fellows very much; they clean us up not just by the tens or hundreds of thousands but by the millions. And they’re used to seeing the Random or the Purpose swat us in job lots.”

“Disasters like the fire at the Cocoanut Grove,” Lois said. “Or the flood here in Derry eight years ago.”

“Yes, but even things like that are pretty small beans compared to what can and does go on in the world every year. The Flood of ’85 here in Derry killed two hundred and twenty people, something like that, but last spring there was a flood in Pakistan that killed thirty-five hundred, and the last big earthquake in Turkey killed over four thousand. And how about that nuclear reactor accident in Russia? I read someplace that you can put the floor on that one at seventy thousand dead. That’s a lot of Panama hats and jumpropes and pairs of… of eyeglasses, Lois.” He was horrified at how close he had come to saying pairs of earrings.

“Don’t,” she said, and shuddered.

“I don’t like thinking about it any more than you do,” he said, “but we have to, if only because those two guys were so goddam anxious to keep us from doing just that. Do you see what I’m getting at yet?

You must. Big tragedies have always been a part of the Random; why is this so different?”

“I don’t know,” said Lois, but it was important enough for them to draft us, and I have an idea that was a pretty big step.”