She finished her inspection, leaned forward, and kissed his cheek, [“I think that there’ll be plenty of time for getting up to dickens later, Ralph-tonight’sfor sleeping.”] He supposed she was right. Five minutes ago he had been more than willing-he had always loved the act of physical love, and it had been a long time. For now, however, the spark was gone. Ralph didn’t regret that in the least. He knew, after all, where it had gone.

[“Okay, Lois-tonight’s for sleeping.

She went into the bathroom and the shower went on. A few minutes later, Ralph heard her brushing her teeth. It was nice to know she still had them. During the ten minutes she was gone he managed to do a certain amount of undressing, although his throbbing ribs made it slow work. He finally succeeded in wriggling McGovern’s sweater off and pushing out of his shoes. His shirt came next, and he was fumbling ineffectually with the buckle of his belt when Lois came out with her hair tied back and her face shining.

Ralph was stunned by her beauty, and suddenly felt much too big and stupid (not to mention old) for his own good. She was wearing a long rose-colored silk nightgown and he could smell the lotion she had used on her hands. It was a good smell.

“Let me do that,” she said, and had his belt unbuckled before he could say much, one way or the other. There was nothing erotic about it; she moved with the efficiency of a woman who had often helped her husband dress and undress during the last year of his life.

“We’re down again,” he said. “This time I didn’t even feel it happening.”

“I did, while I was in the shower. I was glad, actually.

Trying to wash your hair through an aura is very distracting.”

The wind gusted outside, shaking the house and blowing a long, shivering note across the mouth of a downspout. They looked toward the window, and although he was back down on the SbortTime level, Ralph was suddenly sure that Lois was sharing his own thought: Atropos was out there somewhere right now, no doubt disappointed by the way things had gone but by no means crushed, bloody but unbowed, down but not out.

From now on they can call him Old One-Ear, Ralph thought, and shivered. He imagined Atropos swinging erratically through the scared, excited populace of the city like a rogue asteroid, peering and hiding, stealing souvenirs and slashing balloon-strings… taking solace in his work, in other words. ing Ralph found it almost impossible to believe that he had been sitt’ f that creature and slashing at him with his own scalpel not on top so very long ago. How did I ever find the courage?

he wondered, but he supposed he knew. The diamond earrings the little monster had been wearing had provided most of it. Did Atropos know those earrings had been his biggest mistake? Probably not. In his way, Doc #3 had proved even more ignorant of Short-Time motivations than Clotho and Lachesis.

He turned to Lois and ras ed her hands. “I lost your earrings again.

This time they’re gone for good, I think. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t apologize. They were already lost, remember? And I’m not worried about Harold and Jan anymore, because now I’ve got a friend to help me when people don’t treat me right, or when I just get scared. Don’t I?”

“Yes. You most certainly do.”

She kissed him, ugged him tightly, and kissed him again. Lois had apparently not forgotten a single thing she’d ever learned about kissing, and it seemed to Ralph that she’d learned quite a lot. “Go on and hop in the shower.” He started to say that he thought he’d fall asleep the moment he got his head under a stream of warm water, but then she added something which changed his mind in a hurry: “Don’t take offense, but there’s a funny smell on you, especially on your hands.

It’s the way my brother Vic used to smell after he’d spent the day cleaning fish.”

Ralph was in the shower two minutes later, and in soapsuds up to his elbows.

10 Only When he came out, Lois was buried beneath two puffy quilts her face showed, and that was visible only from the nose up. Ralph crossed the room quickly, wearing only his undershorts and painfully conscious of his spindly legs and potbelly.

He tossed back the covers and slid in quickly, gasping a little as the cool sheets slid along his warm skin.

Lois slipped over to his side of the bed at once and put her arms around him. He put his face in her hair and let himself relax against her. It was very good, being with Lois under the quilts while the wind shrieked and gusted outside, sometimes hard enough to rattle the storm windows in their frames. It was, in fact, heaven.

“Thank God there’s a man in my bed,” Lois said sleepily.

“Thank God it’s me,” Ralph replied, and she laughed.

“Are your ribs okay? Do you want me to find you an aspirin”

“Nope. I’m sure they’ll hurt again in the morning, but right now the hot water seems to have loosened everything up.” The subject of what might or might not happen in the morning raised a question in his mind-one that had probably been waiting there all along.

“Lois?”

“Mmmmm?”

In his mind’s eye Ralph could see himself snapping awake in the dark, deeply tired but not at all sleepy (it was surely one of the world’s cruelest paradoxes), as the numbers on the digital clock turned wearily over from 3:47 a.m. to 3:48. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s dark night of the soul, when every hour was long enough to build the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

“Do you think we’ll sleep through?” he asked her.

“Yes,” she said unhesitatingly. “I think we’ll sleep just fine.”

A moment later, Lois was doing just that.

Ralph stayed awake for perhaps five minutes longer, holding her in his arms, smelling the wonderful interwoven scents rising from her warm skin, luxuriating in the smooth, sensuous glide of the silk under his hands, marvelling at where he was even more than the events which had brought him here. He was filled with some deep and simple emotion, one he recognized but could not immediately name, perhaps because it had been gone from his life too long.

The wind gusted and moaned outside, producing that hollow hooting sound over the top of the drainpipe again-like the world’s biggest Nirvana Boy blowing over the mouth of the world’s biggest pop-bottle-and it occurred to Ralph that maybe nothing in life was better than lying deep in a soft bed with a sleeping woman in your arms while the fall wind screamed outside your safe haven.

Except there was something better-one thing, at least-and that was the feeling of falling asleep, of going gently into that good night, slipping out into the currents of unknowing the way a canoe slips away from a dock and slides into the current of a wide, slow river on a bright summer day.

Of all the things which make up our Short-Time lives, sleep is surely the best, Ralph thought.

The wind gusted again outside (the sound of it now seeming to come from a great distance) and as he felt the tug of that great river take him, he was finally able to identify the emotion he had been feeling ever since Lois had put her arms around him and fallen asleep as easily and as trustingly as a child. It went under many different names-peace, serenity, fulfillment-but now, as the wind blew and Lois made some dark sound of sleeping contentment far back in her throat, it seemed to Ralph that it was one of those rare things which are krown but essentially unnameable: a texture, an aura, perhaps a whole level of being in that column of existence. It was the smooth russet color of rest; it was the silence which follows the completion of some arduous but necessary task.

When the wind gusted again, bringing the sound of distant sirens with it, Ralph didn’t hear it. He was asleep. Once he dreamed that he got up to use the bathroom, and he supposed that might not have been a dream. At another time he dreamed that he and Lois made slow, sweet love, and that might not have been a dream, either. If there were other dreams or moments of waking, he did not remember them, and this time there was no snapping awake at three or four o’clock in the morning. They slept-sometimes apart but mostly together-until just past seven o’clock on Saturday evening; about twenty-two hours, all told.