McGovern and his friend were walking in the direction of the nurses’ station, probably bound for the water-fountain. Lois was in hot pusuit, trotting up the corridor, bosom heaving, Her aura flashed with twizzling pinkish sparks that looked like neon-flavored asterisks.

Ralph bolted after her. He didn’t know what would happen if she caught McGovern’s attention, and didn’t really want to find out. He thought he was probably going to, however.

[“Lois.” Lois, don’t do that.” She ignored him.

[“Bill, stop! You have to listen to me.” Something’s wrong with you./’,] McGovern paid no attention to her; he was talking about Bob Polhurst’s manuscript, Later That Summer. “Best damned book on the Civil War I ever read,” he told the man inside the plum-colored aura, “but when I suggested that he publish, he told me that was out of the question. Can you believe it? A possible Pulitzer Prize winner, but-” [“Lois, come back! Don’t go near him."’] [“Bill.” Bill! B-“I Lois reached McGovern just before Ralph was able to reach her.

She put out her hand to grab his shoulder. Ralph saw her fingers plunge into the murk which surrounded him… and then slide into him.

Her aura changed at once, from a gray-blue shot with those pinkish sparks to a red as bright as the side of a fire engine. jagged flocks of black shot through it like clouds of tiny swarming insects. Lois screamed and pulled her hand back. The expression on her face was a mixture of terror and loathing. She held her hand up in front of her eyes and screamed again, although Ralph could see nothing on it.

Narrow black stripes were now whirring giddily around the outer edges of her aura; to Ralph they looked like planetary orbits marked on a map of the solar system. She turned to flee. Ralph grabbed her by the upper arms and she beat at him blindly.

McGovern and his friend, meanwhile, continued their placid amble up the hall to the drinking fountain, completely unaware of the shrieking, struggling woman not ten feet behind them. “When I asked Bob why he wouldn’t publish the book,” McGovern was continuing, “he said that I of all people should understand his reasons.

I told him…”

Lois drowned him out, shrieking like a firebell.

[“Quit it, Lois.” Quit it right now!!

Whatever happened to you is over now.” It’s over and you’re all right.” But Lois continued to struggle, dinning those inarticulate screams into his head, trying to tell him how awful it had been, how he’d been rotting, that there were things inside him, eating him alive, and that was bad enough, but it wasn’t the worst. Those things were around, she said, they were bad, and they had known she was there.

[“Lois, you’re with me You’re with me and it’s all right.” One of her flying fists clipped the side of his jaw and Ralph saw stars. He understood that they had passed to a plane of reality where physical contact with others was impossible-hadn’t he seen Lois’s hand pass directly into McGovern, like the hand of a ghost?-but they were obviously still real enough to each other; he had the bruised jaw to prove it.

He slipped his arms around her and hugged her against him, imprisoning her fists between her breasts and his chest. Her cries however, continued to rant and blast in his head, He locked his hands together between her shoulderblades and squeezed.

He felt the power leap out of him again, as it had that morning, only this time it felt entirely different. Blue light spilled through Lois’s turbulent red-black aura, soothing it. Her struggles slowed and then ceased. they felt her draw a shuddering breath. Above and around her, the blue glow was expanding and fading. The black bands disappeared from her aura, one after the other, from the bottom to top, and then that alarming shade of infected red also began to fade. She put her head against his arm. sorry, Ralph-I went nuclear again, didn’t I?”] That’s The trouble.”

“I suppose so, but ever mind. You’re okay now, that’s the important thing.”] [“If ’ you knew how horrible that was-… touching the thing “You put it across very well, Lois.

She glanced down the corridor, where McGovern’s friend was now getting a drink. McGovern lounged against the wall next to him, talking about how the Exalted amp; Revered Bob Polhurst had always done the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle in ink.

“He used to tell me that wasn’t pride but optimism,” McGovern said, and the deathbag swirled sluggishly around him as he spoke, flowing in and out of his mouth and between the fingers of his gesturing, eloquent hand.

[“We can’t help him, can we, Ralph? There’s not a thing in the world we can do.”] Ralph gave her a brief, strong hug. Her aura, he saw, had entirely returned to normal.

McGovern and his friend were walking back down the corridor toward them. Acting on impulse, Ralph disengaged himself from Lois and stepped directly in front of Mr. Plum, who was listening to McGovern hold forth on the tragedy of old age and nodding in the right places.

[“Ralph, don’t do that.”] [“It’s okay, don’t worry.”

But all at once he wasn’t so sure it was okay. He might have stepped back, given another second. Before he could, however, Mr. Plum glanced unseeingly into his face and walked right through him.

The sensation that swept through Ralph’s body at his passage was Perfectly familiar; it was the pins-and-needles feeling one gets when a sleeping limb starts to wake up. For one moment his aura and Mr. Plum’s mingled, and Ralph knew everything about the man that there was to know, including the dreams he’d had in his mother’s womb.

Mr. Plum stopped short.

“Something wrong?” McGovern asked.

“I guess not, but… did you hear a bang someplace? Like a firecracker, or a car backfire?”

“Can’t say I did, but my hearing isn’t what it used to be.”

McGovern chuckled. “If something did blow up, I certainly hope it wasn’t in one of the radiation labs.”

“I don’t hear anything now. Probably just my imagination.” They turned into Bob Polhurst’s room.

Ralph thought, Mrs. Perrine said it sounded like a gunshot.

Lois’s friend thought there was a bug on her, maybe biting her. just a difference in touch, maybe, the way different piano-players have different touches. Either way, they feel it when we mess with them.

They may not know what it is, but they sure do feel it.

Lois took his hand and led him to the door of Room 313. They stood in the hall, looking in as McGovern seated himself in a plastic contour chair at the foot of the bed. There were at least eight people crammed into the room and Ralph couldn’t see Bob Polhurst clearly, but he could see one thing: although he was deep within his own deathbag, Polhurst’s balloon-string was still intact. It was as filthy as a rusty exhaust pipe, peeling in some places and cracked in others… but it was still intact. He turned to Lois.

[“These people may have longer to wait than they think.

Lois nodded, then pointed down at the greeny-gold footprintsthe white-man tracks. They bypassed 313, Ralph saw, but turned in at the next doorway-315, jimmy V."s room.

He and Lois walked up together and stood looking in. jimmy V. had three visitors, and the one sitting beside the bed thought he was all alone. That one was Faye Chapin, idly looking through the dOLiblc stack of get-well cards on jimmy’s bedside table.

The other two were the little bald doctors Ralph had seen for the first time on May Locher’s stoop. They stood at the foot of Jimmy V."s bed, solemn in their clean white tunics, and now that he stood close to them, Ralph could see that there were worlds of character in those unlined, almost identical faces; it just wasn’t the sort of thing one could see through a pair of binoculars-or maybe not until you slid up the ladder of perception a little way. Most of it was in the eyes, which were dark, pupilless, and flecked with deep golden glints. Those eyes shone with intelligence and lively awareness. Their auras gleamed and flashed around them like the robes of emperors…