Ralph nodded. He could feel the caffeine hitting him now, jiving up his head, his fingers the tiniest bit. “I’m sure it was. Now think back to the hospital roof. Did you ever in your entire life hear two guys explain so much without explaining anything?”

“I don’t get what you mean,” Lois said, but her face suggested something else: that she didn’t want to get what he meant.

“What I mean goes back to one central idea: maybe they can’t lie.

Suppose they can’t. If you have certain information you don’t want to give out but you can’t tell a lie, what do you do?”

“Keep dancing away from the danger zone,” Lois said. “Or’ zones.

“

“Bingo. And isn’t that what they did?”

“Well,” she said, “I guess it was a dance, all right, but I thought you did a fair amount of leading, Ralph. In fact, I was impressed by all the questions you asked. I think I spent most of the time we were on that roof just trying to convince myself it was all really happening.”

“Sure, I asked questions, lots of them, but He stopped, not sure how to express the concept in his head, a concept which seemed simultaneously complex and baby-simple to him. He made another effort to go up a little, searching inside his head for that sensation of blink, knowing that if he could reach her mind, he could show her a picture that would be crystal clear. Nothing happened, and he drummed his fingers on the tablecloth in frustration.

“I was just as amazed as you were,” he said finally. “If my amazement came out as questions, it’s because men-those from my generation, anyway-are taught that it’s very bad form to ooh and aah.

That’s for women who are picking out the drapes.”

“Sexist.” She smiled as she said it, but it was a smile Ralph couldn’t return. He was remembering Barbie Richards. If Ralph had moved toward her, she would almost certainly have pushed the alarm button beneath her desk, but she had allowed Lois to approach because she had swallowed a little too much of the old sister-sister sister crap.

“Yes,” he said quietly, “I’m sexist, I’m old-fashioned, and sometimes it gets me in trouble.”

“Ralph, I didn’t mean-”

“I know what you meant, and it’s okay. What I’m trying to get across to you is that I was as amazed… as knocked out… as you were. So I asked questions, so what? Were they good questions-? Useful questions?”

“I guess not, huh?”

“Well, maybe I didn’t start out so badly. As I remember, the first thing I asked when we finally made it to the roof was who they were and what they wanted. They slipped those questions with a lot of philosophical blather, but I imagine they got a little sweaty on the backs of their necks for awhile, just the same.

Next we got all that background on the Purpose and the Random-fascinating, but nothing we exactly needed in order to drive out to High Ridge and persuade Gretchen Tillbury to cancel Susan Day’s speech. Hell, we would have done better-saved time-getting the road-directions from them that we ended up getting from Simone’s niece.”

Lois looked startled. “That’s true, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. And all the time we were talking, time was flying by the way it does when you go up a couple of levels. They were watching it fly, too, you can believe that. They were timing the whole scene so that when they finished telling us the things we did need to know, there would be no time left to ask the questions they didn’t want to answer. I think they wanted to leave us with the idea that this whole thing was a public service, that saving all those lives is what it’s all about, but they couldn’t come right out and say so, because-”

“Because that would be a lie, and maybe they can’t lie.”

“Right. Maybe they can’t lie.”

“So what do they want, Ralph?” He shook his head. “I don’t have a clue, Lois. Not even a hint.” She finished her own coffee, set the cup carefully back down in its saucer, studied her fingertips for a moment, then looked up at him. Again he was forcibly struck by her beauty-almost levelled by it. “They were good,” she said. “They are good. I felt that very strongly.

Didn’t you?”

“Yes,” he said, almost reluctantly. Of course he had felt it. They were everything Atropos was not.

“And you’re going to try to stop Ed regardless-you said you could no more not try than you could not try to duck a baseball someone chucked at your head. Isn’t that so?”

“Yes,” he said, more reluctantly still.

“Then you should let the rest of it go,” she said calmly, meeting his blue eyes with her dark ones. “It’s just taking up space inside your head, Ralph. Making clutter.”

He saw the truth of what she said, but still doubted if he could simply open his hand and let that part of it fly free. May I be you had to live to be seventy before you could fully appreciate how hard it was to escape your upbringing. He was a man whose education on how to be a man had begun before Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and he was still a prisoner of a generation that had listened to H. V.

Kaltenborn and the Andrews Sisters on the radio-a generation of men that believed in moonlight cocktails and walking a mile for a Camel. Such an upbringing almost negated such nice moral questions as who was working for the good and who was working for the bad; the important thing was not to let the bullies kick sand in your face. Not to be led by the nose.

Is that so? Carolyn asked, coolly amused. How fascinating. But let me be the first to let you in on a little secret, Ralph: that’s crap. it was crap back before Glenn Miller disappeared over the horizon an it’s crap now. The idea that a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do, now… there might be a little truth to that, even in this day and age, It’s a long walk back to Eden in any case, isn’t it, sweetheart?

Yes. A very long walk back to Eden.

“What are you smiling about, Ralph?”

He was saved the need to reply by the arrival of the waitress and a huge tray of food. He noticed for the first time that there was a button pinned to the frill of her apron. LIFE IS NOT A CHOICE, it read.

“Are you going to the rally at the Civic Center tonight?” Ralph asked her.

“I’ll be there,” she said, setting her tray down on the unoccupied table next to theirs in order to free her hands.

“Outside.

Carrying a sign. Walking roundy-round.”

“Are you a Friend of Life?” Lois asked as the waitress began to deal out omelets and side-dishes.

“Am I livin?” the waitress asked.

“Yes, you certainly appear to be,” Lois said politely.

“Well, I guess that makes me a Friend of Life, doesn’t it?

Killing something that could someday write a great poem or invent a drug that cures AIDS or cancer, in my book that’s just flat wrong.

So I’ll wave my sign around and make sure the Norma Kamali feminists and Volvo liberals can see that the word on it is MURDER.

They hate that word. They don’t use it at their cocktail parties and fundraisers.

You folks need ketchup?”

“No,” Ralph said. He could not take his eyes off her. A faint green glow had begun to spread around her-it almost seemed to come wisping up from her pores. The auras were coming back, cycling up to full brilliance.

“Did I grow a second head or something while I wasn’t looking?”

the waitress asked. She popped her gum and switched it to the other side of her mouth.

“I was staring, wasn’t I?” Ralph asked. He felt blood heating his cheeks. “Sorry.”

The waitress shrugged her beefy shoulders, setting the upper part of her aura into lazy, fascinating motion. “I try not to get carried away with this stuff, you know? Most days I just do my job and keep my mouth shut. But I ain’t no quitter, either. Do you know how long I’ve been marchin around in front of that brick slaughterin pen, on days hot enough to fry my butt and nights cold enough to freeze it off?”

Ralph and Lois shook their heads.