His eyes are drawn again and again to the digital readout at the front of the cabin. It shows how fast this British bullet is going. Now, as the Concorde reaches its cruising speed, it tops out at just over mach 2. Bill takes his pen from his shin pocket and uses its tip to tap buttons on the computer watch Audra gave him last Christmas. If the machometer is right — and Bill has absolutely no reason to think it is not — then they are busting along at a speed of eighteen miles per minute. He is not sure this is anything he really wanted to know.

Outside his window, which is as small and thick as the window in one of the old Mercury space capsules, he can see a sky which is not blue but the twilight purple of dusk, although it is the middle of the day. At the point where the sea and the sky meet, he can see that the horizon-line is slightly bowed. I am sitting here, Bill thinks, a Bloody Mary in my hand and a dirty fat man's elbow poking into my bicep, observing the curvature of the earth.

He smiles a little, thinking that a man who can face something like that shouldn't be afraid of anything. But he is afraid, and not just of flying at eighteen miles a minute in this narrow fragile shell. He can almost feel Derry rushing at him. And that is exactly the right expression for it. Eighteen miles a minute or not, the sensation is of being perfectly still while Derry rushes at him like some big carnivore which has lain in wait for a long time and has finally broken from cover. Derry, ah, Derry! Shall we write an ode to Derry? The stink of its mills and its rivers? The dignified quiet of its tree-lined streets? The library? The Standpipe? Bassey Park? Derry Elementary School?

The Barrens?

Lights are going on in his head; big kliegs. It's like he's been sitting in a darkened theater for twenty-seven years, waiting for something to happen, and now it's finally begun. The set being revealed spot by spot and klieg by klieg is not, however, some harmless comedy like Arsenic and Old Lace; to Bill Denbrough it looks more like The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

All those stories I wrote, he thinks with a stupid kind of amusement. All those novels. Derry is where they all came from; Derry was the wellspring. They came from what happened that summer, and from what happened to George the autumn before. All the interviewers that ever asked me THAT QUESTION . . . I gave them the wrong answer.

The fat man's elbow digs into him again, and he spills some of his drink. Bill almost says something, then thinks better of it.

THAT QUESTION, of course, was 'Where do you get your ideas?' It was a question Bill supposed all writers of fiction had to answer — or pretend to answer — at least twice a week, but a fellow like him, who made a living by writing of things which never were and never could be, had to answer it — or pretend to — much more often than that.

'All writers have a pipeline which goes down into the subconscious,' he told them, neglecting to mention that he doubted more as each year passed if there even was such a thing as a subconscious. 'But the man or woman who writes honor stories has a pipeline that goes further, maybe . . . into the sub-subconscious, if you like.'

Elegant answer, that, but one he had never really believed. Subconscious? Well, there was something down there all right, but Bill thought people had made much too big a deal out of a function which was probably the mental equivalent of your eyes watering when dust got in them or breaking wind an hour or so after a big dinner. The second metaphor was probably the better of the two, but you couldn't very well tell interviewers that as far as you were concerned, such things as dreams and vague longings and sensations like déjà-vu really came down to nothing more than a bunch of mental farts. But they seemed to need something, all those reporters with their notebooks and their little Japanese tape-recorders, and Bill wanted to help them as much as he could. He knew that writing was a hard job, a damned hard job. There was no need to make theirs harder by telling them, 'My friend, you might as well ask me "Who cut the cheese?" and have done with it.'

He thought now: You always knew they were asking the wrong question, even before Mike called; now you also know what the right question was. Not where do you get your ideas but why do you get your id eas. There was a pipeline, all right, but it wasn't either the Freudian or Jungian version of the subconscious that it came out of; no interior drain-system of the mind, no subterranean cavern full of Morlocks waiting to happen. There was nothing at the other end of that pipe but Derry. Just Derry. And —

— and who's that, trip-trapping upon my bridge?

He sits bolt upright suddenly, and this time it's his elbow that goes wandering; it sinks deeply into his fat seatmate's side for a moment.

'Watch yourself buddy,' the fat man says. 'Close quarters, you know.'

'You stop whopping me with yours and I'll try to stop wuh-whapping you with m-mine.' The fat man gives him a sour, incredulous what-the-hell-you-talking-about look. Bill simply gazes at him until the fat man looks away, muttering.

Who's there?

Who's trip-trapping over my bridge?

He looks out the window again and thinks: We're beating the devil.

His arms and the nape of his neck prickle. He knocks back the rest of his drink in one swallow. Another of those big lights has gone on.

Silver. His bike. That was what he had called it, after the Lone Ranger's horse. A big Schwinn, twenty-eight inches tall. 'You'll kill yourself on that, Billy,' his father had said, but with no real concern in his tone. He had shown little concern for anything since George's death. Before, he had been tough. Fair, but tough. Since, you could get around him. He would make fatherly gestures, go through fatherly motions, but motions and gestures were all they were. It was like he was always listening for George to come back into the house.

Bill had seen it in the window of the Bike and Cycle Shoppe down on Center Street. It leaned gloomily on its kickstand, bigger than the biggest of the others on display, dull where they were shiny, straight in places where the others were curved, bent in places where the others were straight. Propped on its front tire had been a sign:

USED Make an Offer

What actually happened was that Bill went in and the owner made him an offer, which Bill took — he wouldn't have known how to dicker with the Cycle Shoppe owner if his life depended on it, and the price — twenty-four dollars — the man quoted seemed very fair to Bill; generous, even. He paid for Silver with money he had saved up over the last seven or eight months — birthday money, Christmas money, lawn-mowing money. He had been noticing the bike in the window ever since Thanksgiving. He paid for it and wheeled it home as soon as the snow began to melt for good. It was funny, because he'd never thought much about owning a bike before last year. The idea seemed to come into his mind all at once, perhaps on one of those endless days after George died. Was murdered.

In the beginning, Bill almost did kill himself. The first ride on his new bike ended with Bill dumping it on purpose to keep from running smack into the board fence at the end of Kossuth Lane (he had not been so afraid of running into the fence as he had been of bashing right through it and falling sixty feet into the Barrens). He came away from that one with a five-inch gash running between the wrist and elbow of his left arm. Not even a week later he had found himself unable to brake soon enough and had shot through the intersection of Witcham and Jackson at perhaps thirty-five miles an hour, a little kid on a dusty gray mastodon of a bike (Silver was silver only by the most energetic reach of a willing imagination), playing cards machine-gunning the spokes of the front and back wheels in a steady roar, and if a car had been coming he would have been dead meat. Just like Georgie.