“Onward, ever onward,” McVries said. “Christian soldiers, marching as to war. Ever hear that one, Ray?”

“What time is it?”

McVries glanced at his watch. “2:20, Look, Ray, if you’re going to-”

“God, is that all? I thought-” He felt panic rising in his throat, greasy and thick. He wasn’t going to be able to do it. The margin was just too tight.

“Look, if you keep thinking about the time, you’re gonna go nuts and try to run into the crowd and they’ll shoot you dog-dead. They’ll shoot you with your tongue hanging out and spit running down your chin. Try to forget about it.”

“I can’t.” Everything was bottling up inside him, making him feel jerky and hot and sick. “Olson… Scramm… they died. Davidson died. I can die too, Pete. I believe it now. It’s breathing down my fucking back!”

“Think about your girl. Jan, what’s-her-face. Or your mother. Or your goddam kitty-cat. Or don’t think about anything. Just pick ’em up and put ’em down. Just keep on walking down the road. Concentrate on that.”

Garraty fought for control of himself. Maybe he even got a little. But he was unraveling just the same. His legs didn’t want to respond smoothly to his mind’s commands anymore, they seemed as old and as flickery as ancient lightbulbs.

“He won’t last much longer,” a woman in the front row said quite audibly.

“Your tits won’t last much longer!” Garraty snapped at her, and the crowd cheered him.

“They’re screwed up,” Garray muttered. “They’re really screwed up. Perverted. What time is it, McVries?”

“What was the first thing you did when you got your letter of confirmation?” McVries asked softly. “What did you do when you knew you were really in?”

Garraty frowned, wiped his forearm quickly across his forehead, and then let his mind free of the sweaty, terrifying present to that sudden, flashing moment.

“I was by myself. My mother works. It was a Friday afternoon. The letter was in the mailbox and it had a Wilmington, Delaware, postmark, so I knew that had to be it. But I was sure it said I’d flunked the physical or the mental or both. I had to read it twice. I didn’t go into any fits of joy, but I was pleased. Real pleased. And confident. My feet didn’t hurt then and my back didn’t feel like somebody had shoved a rake with a busted handle into it. I was one in a million. I wasn’t bright enough to realize the circus fat lady is, too.”

He broke off for a moment, thinking, smelling early April.

“I couldn’t back down. There were too many people watching. I think it must work the same with just about everyone. It’s one of the ways they tip the game, you know. I let the April 15th backout date go by and the day after that they had a big testimonial dinner for me at the town hall-all my friends were there and after dessert everyone started yelling Speech! Speech! And I got out and mumbled something down at my hands about how I was gonna do the best I could if I got in, and everyone applauded like mad. It was like I’d laid the fucking Gettysburg Address on their heads. You know what I mean?”

“Yes, I know,” McVries said, and laughed-but his eyes were dark.

Behind them the guns thunder-clapped suddenly. Garraty jumped convulsively and nearly froze in his tracks. Somehow he kept walking. Blind instinct this time, he thought. What about next time?

“Son of a bitch,” McVries said softly. “It was Joe.”

“What time is it?” Garraty asked, and before McVries could answer he remembered that he was wearing a watch of his own. It was 2:38. Christ. His two-second margin was like an iron dumbbell on his back.

“No one tried to talk you out of it?” McVries asked. They were far out beyond the rest now, better than a hundred yards beyond Harold Quince. A soldier had been dispatched to keep tabs on them. Garraty was very glad it wasn’t the blond guy. “No one tried to talk you into using the April 31st backout?”

“Not at first. My mother and Jan and Dr. Patterson-he’s my mother’s special friend, you know, they’ve been keeping company for the last five years or so they just kind of soft-pedaled it at first. They were pleased and proud because most of the kids in the country over twelve take the tests but only one in fifty passes. And that still leaves thousands of kids and they can use two hundred-one hundred Walkers and a hundred backups. And there’s no skill in getting picked, you know that.”

“Sure, they draw the names out of that cocksucking drum. Big TV spectacular.” McVries’s voice cracked a little.

“Yeah. The Major draws the two hundred names, but the names’re all they announce. You don’t know if you’re a Walker or just a backup.”

“And no notification of which you are until the final backout date itself,” McVries agreed, speaking of it as if the final backout date had been years ago instead of only four days. “Yeah, they like to stack the deck their way.”

Somebody in the crowd had just released a flotilla of balloons. They floated up to the sky in a dissolving are of reds, blues, greens, yellows. The steady south wind carried them away with taunting, easy speed.

“I guess so,” Garraty said. “We were watching the TV when the Major drew the names. I was number seventy-three out of the drum. I fell right out of my chair. I just couldn’t believe it.”

“No, it can’t be you,” McVries agreed. “Things like that always happen to the other guy.”

“Yeah, that’s the feeling. That’s when everybody started in on me. It wasn’t like the first backout date when it was all speeches and pie in the sky by-and-by. Jan…”

He broke off. Why not? He’d told everything else. It didn’t matter. Either he or McVries was going to be dead before it was over. Probably both of them. “Jan said she’d go all the way with me, any time, any way, as often as I wanted if I’d take the April 31st backout. I told her that would make me feel like an opportunist and a heel, and she got mad at me and said it was better than feeling dead, and then she cried a lot. And begged me.” Garraty looked up at McVries. “I don’t know. Anything else she could have asked me, I would have tried to do it. But this one thing… I couldn’t. It was like there was a stone caught in my throat. After a while she knew I couldn’t say Yes, okay, I’ll call the 800 number. I think she started to understand. Maybe as well as I did myself, which God knows wasn’t-isn’t-very well.”

“Then Dr. Patterson started in. He’s a diagnostician, and he’s got a wicked logical mind. He said, 'Look here, Ray. Figuring in the Prime group and the backups, your chance of survival is fifty-to-one. Don’t do this to your mother, Ray.' I was polite with him for as long as I could, but finally I told him to just kiss off. I said I figured the odds on him ever marrying my mother were pretty long, but I never noticed him backing off because of that.”

Garraty ran both hands through the straw-thatch of his hair. He had forgotten about the two-second margin.

“God, didn’t he get mad. He ranted and raved and told me if I wanted to break my mother’s heart to just go ahead. He said I was as insensitive as a… a wood tick, I think that’s what he said, insensitive as a wood tick, maybe it’s a family saying of his or something, I don’t know. He asked me how it felt to be doing the number on my mom and on a nice girl like Janice. So I countered with my own unarguable logic.”

“Did you,” McVries said, smiling. “What was that?”

“I told him if he didn’t get out I was going to hit him.”

“What about your mother?”

“She didn’t say much at all. I don’t think she could believe it. And the thought of what I’d get if I won. The Prize-everything you want for the rest of your lifethat sort of blinded her, I think. I had a brother, Jeff. He died of pneumonia when he was six, and-it’s cruel-but I don’t know how we'd’ve gotten along if he'd’ve lived. And… I guess she just kept thinking I’d be able to back out of it if I did turn out to be Prime. The Major is a nice man. That’s what she said. I’m sure he’d let you out of it if he understood the circumstances. But they Squad them just as fast for trying to back out of a Long Walk as they do for talking against it. And then I got the call and I knew I was a Walker. I was Prime.”