“Do you think we get it from the Wizard of Oz?” Ted screams. Weeping sores suddenly erupt on his face. His lips bubble, peel, crack, begin to suppurate. One of his eyes shimmers into the milkiness of cataract. Gardener realizes with mounting horror that he is looking into a face exhibiting symptoms of a man in the last advanced stages of radiation sickness.

The radiation symbols on Ted's shirt are turning black.

“You'll crash, you bet,” Arglebargle drones on. “Crash.”

He is weeping with terror now, as he wept after shooting his wife, hearing the unbelievable report of the gun in his hand, watching as she staggered backward against the kitchen counter, one hand clapped to her cheek like a woman uttering a shocked “My land! I NEVER!” And then the blood squirting through her fingers and his mind in a last desperate effort to deny it all had thought Ketchup, relax, that's just ketchup. Then beginning to weep as he was now.

“As far as you guys are concerned, all your responsibility ends at the wall plate where you plug in.” Pus runs and dribbles down Ted's face. His hair has fallen out. The sores cover his skull. His mouth spreads in a grin as moony as Arberg's. Now in a last extremity of terror Gardener realizes he is skiing out of control down Straight Arrow flanked by dead men. “But you'll never stop us, you know. No one will. The pile is out of control, you see. Has been since… oh, around 1939, I'd reckon. We reached critical mass along about 1965. It's out of control. The explosion will come soon.”

“No… no…”

“You've been riding high, but those who ride highest fall hardest,” Arberg drones. “Murder of a host is the foulest murder of all. You're going to crash… crash… crash!”

How true it is! He tries to turn but his skis remain stubbornly on course. Now he can see the big, hoary old pine. Arglebargle and Ted the Power Man are gone and he thinks: Were they Tommyknockers, Bobbi?

He can see a red swatch of paint around the pine's gnarly trunk… and then it begins to flake and split. As he slides helplessly toward the tree he sees that it has come alive, that it has split open to swallow him. The yawning tree grows and swells, seems to rush toward him, grows tentacles and there is a horrible rotten blackness in its center, with red paint around it like the lipstick of some sinister whore, and he can hear dark winds howling in that black, squirming, mouth and

he doesn't wake up then, as much as it seems he has-everyone knows that even the most outlandish dreams feel real, that they may even have their own spurious logic, but this is not real, cannot be. He has simply exchanged one dream for another. Happens all the time.

In this dream he has been dreaming about his old skiing accident-for the second time that day, can you believe it? Only this time the tree he struck, the one which almost killed him, grows a rotted mouth like a squirming knothole. He snaps awake and finds himself sitting in Bobbi's rocking chair, too relieved by simple waking to care that he's stiff all over, and that his throat is now so sore that it feels like it's been lined with barbed wire.

He thinks: I'm going to get up and make myself a dose of coffee and aspirin. Wasn't I going to do that before? He starts to get up and that's when Bobbi opens her eyes. That's also when he knows he is dreaming, must be, because green rays of light shoot from Bobbi's eyes-Gardener is reminded of Superman's X-ray vision in the comic-books, the way the artist always drew it in lime-colored beams. But the light which comes from Bobbi's eyes is swamplike and somehow dreadful… there is something rotted about it, like the drifting glow of St Elmo's fire in a swamp on a hot night.

Bobbi sits up slowly and looks around… looks toward Gardener. He tries to tell her no… Please don't put that light on me.

No words come out and as that green light hits him he sees that Bobbi's eyes are blazing with it-at its source it is as green as emeralds, as bright as sun-fire. He cannot look at it, has to avert his eyes. He tries to bring an arm up to shield his face but he can't, his arm is too heavy. It'll burn, he thinks, it'll burn, and then in a few days the first sores will show up, you'll think they're pimples at first because that's what radiation sickness looks like when it starts, just a bunch of pimples, only these pimples never heal, they only get worse… and worse…

He hears Arberg's voice, a disembodied holdover from the previous dream, and now there seems to be triumph in his drone: “I knew you were going to crash, Gardener!”

The light touches him… washes over him. Even with his eyes squeezed tightly shut it lights the darkness as green as radium watch-dials. But there is no real pain in dreams, and there is none here. The bright green light is neither hot nor cold. It is nothing. Except…

His throat.

His throat is no longer sore.

And he hears this, clearly and unmistakably: “per cent off! This is the sort of price reduction that may never be repeated! EVERYONE gets credit! Recliners! Waterbeds! Living room s-”

The plate in his skull, talking again. Gone almost before it was fairly begun.

Like his sore throat.

And that green light was gone, too.

Gardener opens his eyes… cautiously.

Bobbi is lying on the couch, eyes shut, deeply asleep… just as she was. What's all this about rays shooting out of eyes? Good God!

He sits in the rocking chair again. Swallows. No pain. The fever has gone down a lot, too.

Coffee and aspirin, he thinks. You were going to get up for coffee and aspirin, remember?

Sure, he thinks, settling more comfortably into the rocking chair and closing his eyes. But no one gets coffee and aspirin in a dream. I'll do it just as soon as I wake up.

Gard, you are awake.

But that, of course, could not be. In the waking world, people don't shoot green beams from their eyes, beams that cure fevers and sore throats. Dreams si, reality no.

He crosses his arms over his chest and drifts away. He knows no more-either sleeping or waking -for the rest of that night.

When Gardener woke up, bright light was streaming into his face through the western window. His back hurt like a bastard, and when he stood up his neck gave a wretched, arthritic creak that made him wince. It was quarter of nine. He looked at Bobbi and felt a moment of suffocating fear-in that moment he was sure Bobbi was dead. Then he saw that she was just so deeply, movelessly asleep that she gave a good impression of being dead. It was a mistake anyone might have made. Bobbi's chest rose in slow, steady pulls with long but even pauses in between. Gardener timed her and saw she was breathing no more than six times a minute.

But she looked better this morning-not great, but a lot better than the haggard scarecrow who had reeled out to greet him last night.

Doubt if I looked much better, he thought, and went into Bobbi's bathroom to shave.

The face looking back from the mirror wasn't as bad as he had feared, but he noted with some dismay that his nose had bled again in the night-not a lot, but enough to have covered his philtrum and most of his upper lip. He got a facecloth out of the cupboard to the right of the sink and turned on the hot water to wet it down.

He put the facecloth under the water flowing from the hot tap with all the absentmindedness of long habit-with Bobbi's water heater, you just about had time for a cup of coffee and a smoke before you got a lukewarm stream-and that was on a good d

“Youch!”

He pulled his hand back from water so hot it was steaming. Okay, that was what he got for assuming Bobbi was just going to go clipclopping down the road of life without ever getting her damned water heater fixed.