Firestarter(12)

"Daddy? Are you still okay?"

"So far, so good," he said, but he was not so very okay. He wasn't fooling himself, and he doubted if he was fooling Charlie.

"How much further is it?"

"Are you getting tired?"

"Not yet... but Daddy..."

He stopped and looked solemnly down at her. "What is it, Charlie?"

"I feel like those bad men are around again," she whispered.

"All right," he said. "I think we better just take a shortcut, honey. Can you get down that hill without falling?"

She looked at the grade, which was covered with dead October grass.

"I guess so," she said doubtfully.

He stepped over the guardrail cables and then helped Charlie over. As it sometimes did in moments of extreme pain and stress, his mind attempted to flee into the past, to get away from the stress. There had been some good years, some good times, before the shadow began to steal gradually over their lives-first just over him and Vicky, then over all three, blotting out their happiness a little at a time, as inexorably as a lunar eclipse. It had been-

"Daddy!" Charlie called in sudden alarm. She had lost her footing. The dry grass was slippery, treacherous. Andy grabbed for her flailing arm, missed, and overbalanced himself. The thud as he hit the ground caused such pain in his head that he cried out loud. Then they were both rolling and sliding down the embankment toward the Northway where the cars rushed past, much too fast to stop if one of them-he or Charlie-should tumble out onto the pavement.

12

The GA looped a piece of rubber flex around Andy's arm just above the elbow and said, "Make a fist, please." Andy did. The vein popped up obligingly. He looked away, feeling a little ill. Two hundred dollars or not, he had no urge to watch the IV set in place.

Vicky Tomlinson was on the next cot, dressed in a sleeveless white blouse and dove-gray slacks. She offered him a strained smile. He thought again what beautiful auburn hair she had, how well it went with her direct blue eyes... then the prick of pain, followed by dull heat, in his arm.

"There," the grad assistant said comfortingly.

"There yourself," Andy said. He was not comforted.

They were in Room 70 of Jason Gearneigh Hall, upstairs. A dozen cots had been trucked in, courtesy of the college infirmary, and the twelve volunteers were lying propped up on hypoallergenic foam pillows, earning their money. Dr. Wanless started none of the IVs himself, but he was walking up and down between the cots with a word for everyone, and a little frosty smile. We'll start to shrink anytime now, Andy thought morbidly.

Wanless had made a brief speech when they were all assembled, and what he had said, when boiled down, amounted to: Do not fear. You are wrapped snugly in the arms of Modern Science. Andy had no great faith in Modern Science, which had given the world the H-bomb, napalm and the laser rifle, along with the Salk vaccine and Clearasil.

The grad assistant was doing something else now. Crimping the IV line.

The IV drip was five percent dextrose in water, Wanless had said... what he called a D5W solution. Below the crimp, a small tip poked out of the IV line. If Andy got Lot Six, it would be administered by syringe through the tip. If he was in the control group, it would be normal saline. Head or tails.

He glanced over at Vicky again. "How you doin, kid?"

"Okay."

Wanless had arrived. He stood between them, looking first at Vicky and then at Andy. "You feel some slight pain, yes?" He had no accent of any kind, least of all a regional-American one, but he constructed his sentences in a way Andy associated with English learned as a second language.

"Pressure," Vicky said. "Slight pressure."

"Yes? It will pass." He smiled benevolently down at Andy. In his white lab coat he seemed very tall. His glasses seemed very small. The small and the tall.

Andy said, "When do we start to shrink?"

Wanless continued to smile. "Do you feel you will shrink?"

"Shhhhrrrrrink," Andy said, and grinned foolishly. Something was happening to him. By God, he was getting high. He was getting off.

"Everything will be fine," Wanless said, and smiled more widely. He passed on. Horseman, pass by, Andy thought bemusedly. He looked over at Vicky again. How bright her hair was! For some crazy reason it reminded him of the copper wire on the armature of a new motor... generator... alternator... flibbertigibbet...

He laughed aloud.

Smiling slightly, as if sharing the joke, the grad assistant crimped the line and injected a little more of the hypo's contents into Andy's arm and strolled away again. Andy could look at the IV line now. It didn't bother him now. I'm a pine tree, he thought. See my beautiful needles. He laughed again.

Vicky was smiling at him. God, she was beautiful. He wanted to tell her how beautiful she was, how her hair was like copper set aflame. "Thank you," she said. "What a nice compliment." Had she said that? Or had he imagined it? Grasping the last shreds of his mind, he said, "I think I crapped out on the distilled water, Vicky."

She said placidly, "Me too."

"Nice, isn't it?"

"Nice," she agreed dreamily.

Somewhere someone was crying. Babbling hysterically. The sound rose and fell in interesting cycles. After what seemed like eons of contemplation, Andy turned his head to see what was going on. It was interesting. Everything had become interesting. Everything seemed to be in slow motion. Slomo, as the avant-garde campus film critic always put it in his columns. In this film, as in others, Antonioni achieves some of his most spectacular effects with his use of slomo footage. What an interesting, really clever word; it had the sound of a snake slipping out of a refrigerator: slomo.