[“What happened down there after I left? What did he do or say to you? Tell me, Ralph.” You tell me."’] So which was it going to be?
The one or the many? The lady or the tiger? If he didn’t choose soon, the choice would be taken out of his hands by nothing more than the simple passage of time. So which one? Which?
“Neither… or both,” he said hoarsely, unaware in his terrible agitation that he was speaking aloud, and on several different levels at once. “I won’t choose one or the other. I won’t. Do you hear me?”
He leaped up from the bench, looking around wildly.
“Do you hear me?” he shouted. “I reject this choice! I will have BOTH or I will have NEITHER!”
On one of the paths north of them, a wino who had been poking through a trash-barrel, searching for returnable cans and bottles, took one look at Ralph, then turned and ran. What he had seen was a man who appeared to be on fire.
Lois stood up and grasped his face between her hands.
[“Ralph, what is it? Who is it? Me? You? Because if it’s me, if you’re holding back because of me, I don’t want-”] He took a deep, steadying breath and then put his forehead against hers, looking into her eyes.
[“It’s not you, Lois, and not me. If it was either of us, I might be able to choose. But it’s not, and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to be a pawn anymore.”]
He shook her loose and took a step away from her. His aura flashed out so brilliantly that she had to raise her hand in front of her eyes; it was as if he were somehow exploding. And when his voice came, it reverberated in her head like thunder.
“CLOTHO. LACHESIS COME TO ME, DAMMIT, AND COME NOW”] He took two or three more steps and stood looking down the hill.
The two junior-high-school boys sitting on the swings were looking up at him with identical expressions of startled fear. They were up and gone the moment Ralph’s eyes lit on them, running flat-out toward the lights of Witcham Street like a couple of deer, leaving their cigarettes to smolder in the foot-ditches beneath the swings.
[“CLOTHO! LACHESIS!”
He was burning like an electric arc, and suddenly all the strength ran out of Lois’s legs like water. She took one step backward and collapsed onto the park bench. Her head was whirling, her heart full of terror, and below everything was that vast exhaustion. Ralph saw it as a sunken ship; Lois saw it as a pit around which she was forced to walk in a gradually tightening spiral, a pit into which she must eventually fall.
[“CLOTHO. LACHESIS LAST CHANCE I MEAN IT!”] For a moment nothing happened, and then the doors of the Portosans at the foot of the hill opened in perfect unison. Clotho stepped from the one marked MEN, Lachesis from the one marked WOMEN. Their auras, the brilliant green-gold of summer dragonflies, glimmered in the ashy light of day’s end. They moved together until their auras overlapped, then walked slowly toward the top of the hill that way, with their white-clad shoulders almost touching. They looked like a pair of frightened children.
Ralph turned to Lois. His aura still blazed and burned.
[“Stay here.”]
[“Yes, Ralph.”] She let him get partway down the hill, then gathered her courage and called after him.
[“But I’ll try to stop Ed if you won’t. I mean it.
Of course she did, and his heart responded to her bravery… but she didn’t know what he knew. Hadn’t seen what he had seen.
He looked back at her for a moment, then walked down to where the two little bald doctors looked at him with their luminous, frightened eyes.
Lachesis, nervously: [We didn’t lie to you-we didn’t.] Clotho, even more nervously (if that was possible): [Deepneau is on his way.
You have to stop him, Ralph-you have to at least try.] The fact is I don’t have to do anything, and your faces show it, he thought. Then he turned to Lachesis, and was gratified to see the small bald man flinch from his gaze and drop his dark, pupilless eyes.
[“Is that so? When we were on the hospital roof you told us to stay away from Ed, Mr. L. You were very emphatic about that.] Lachesis shifted uncomfortably and fidgeted with his hands.
El… that is to say we… we can be wrong. This time we were.] Except Ralph knew that wrong wasn’t the best word for what they had been; self-deceived would be better. He wanted to scold them for it-to tell the truth, he wanted to scold them for getting him into this shitting mess in the first place-and found he couldn’t.
Because, according to Old Dor, even their self-deception had served the Purpose; the side-trip to High Ridge had for some reason not been a side-trip at all. He didn’t understand why or how that was, but he intended to find out, if finding out was possible.
[“Let’s forget that part of it for the time being, gentlemen, and talk about why all this is happening. If you want help from me and Lois, I
think you better tell me.] They looked at each other with their big, frightened eyes, then back at Ralph.
Lachesis: [Ralph, do you doubt that all those people are really going to die? Because if you do-] [“No, but I’m tired of having them waved in my face. If an earthquake that served the Purpose happened to be scheduled for this area and the butcher’s bill came to ten thousand instead of just two thousand and change, you’d never even bat an eye, would you? So what’s so special about this situation? Tell me!”] Clotho: [Ralph, we don’t make the rules any more than you do. We thought you understood that.] Ralph sighed.
[“You’re weaseling again, and not wasting anybody’s time but your own.] Clotho, uneasily: [All right, perhaps the picture we gave you wasn’t completely clear, but time was short and we were frightened.
And you must see that, regardless of all else, those people will die if you can’t stop Ed Deepneau!] [“Never mind all of them for now,I only want to know about one of them-the one who belongs to the Purpose and can’t be handed overjust because some undesignated pisher comes along with a headful of loose screws and a planeful of explosive.
Who is it You feel you can’t give up to the Random? Who? It’s Day, isn’t it? Susan Day.] Lachesis: [No. Susan Day is part of the Random.
She is none of our concern, none of our worry.] [“Who, then?”
Clotho and Lachesis exchanged another glance. Clotho nodded slightly, and then they both turned back to Ralph.
Once again Lachesis flicked the first two fingers of his right hand upward, creating that peacock’s fan of light. It wasn’t McGovern Ralph saw this time, but a little boy with blond hair cut in bangs across his forehead and a hook-shaped scar across the bridge of his nose. Ralph placed him at once-the kid from the basement of High Ridge, the one with the bruised mother. The one who had called him and Lois angels.
And a little child shall lead them, he thought, utterly flabbergasted.
Oh my God. He looked disbelievingly at Clotho and Lachesis.
[“Am I understanding? All this has been about that one little boy?”] He expected more waffling, but the reply from Clotho was simple and direct: [Yes, Ralph.] Lachesis: [He’s at the Civic Center now. His mother, whose life you and Lois also saved this morning, got a call from her babysitter less than an hour ago, saying she’d cut herself badly on a piece of glass and wouldn’t be able to take care of the boy tonight after all. By then it was too late to find another sitter, of course, and this woman has been determined for weeks to see Susan Day… to shake her hand, even give her a hug, if possible. She idolizes the Day woman.] Ralph, who remembered the fading bruises on her face, supposed that was an idolatry he could understand. He understood something else even better: the babysitter’s cut hand had been no accident. Something was determined to place the little boy with the shaggy blond bangs and the smoke-reddened eyes at the Civic Center, and was willing to move heaven and earth to do it. His mother had taken him not because she was a bad parent, but because she was as subject to human nature as anyone else. She hadn’t wanted to miss her one chance at seeing Susan Day, that was all.