Firestarter(14)

But it happened a long time ago. Like in the twelfth century.

Bloody hand. Striking the chart. The chart rattling up on its roller with a smacking sound.

Better to drift. Vicky was looking troubled again.

Suddenly music began to flood down from the speakers in the ceiling, and that was nice... much nicer than thinking about charley horses and leaking eyeballs. The music was soft and yet majestic. Much later, Andy decided (in consultation with Vicky) that it had been Rachmaninoff. And ever after when he heard Rachmaninoff, it brought back drifting, dreamy memories of that endless, timeless time in Room 70 of Jason Gearneigh Hall.

How much of it had been real, how much hallucination? Twelve years of off-and-on thought had not answered that question for Andy McGee. At one point, objects had seemed to fly through the room as if an invisible wind were blowing-paper cups, towels, a blood-pressure cuff, a deadly hail of pens and pencils. At another point, sometime later (or had it really been earlier? there was just no linear sequence), one of the test subjects had gone into a muscular seizure followed by cardiac arrest-or so it had seemed. There had been frantic efforts to restore him using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, followed by a shot of something directly into the chest cavity, and finally a machine that made a high whine and had two black cups attached to thick wires. Andy seemed to remember one of the "grad assistants" roaring, "Zap him! Zap him! Oh, give them to me, you f**khead!"

At another point he had slept, dozing in and out of a twilight consciousness. He spoke to Vicky and they told each other about themselves. Andy told her about the car accident that had taken his mother's life and how he had spent the next year with his aunt in a semi-nervous breakdown of grief. She told him that when she was seven, a teenage babysitter had assaulted her and now she was terribly afraid of sex, even more afraid that she might be frigid, it was that more than anything else that had forced her and her boyfriend to the breakup. He kept... pressing her.

They told each other things that a man and a woman don't tell each other until they've known each other for years... things a man and a woman often never tell, not even in the dark marriage bed after decades of being together.

But did they speak?

That Andy never knew.

Time had stopped, but somehow it passed anyway.

13

He came out of the doze a little at a time. The Rachmaninoff was gone... if it had ever been there at all. Vicky was sleeping peacefully on the cot beside him, her hands folded between her br**sts, the simple hands of a child who has fallen asleep while offering her bedtime prayers. Andy looked at her and was simply aware that at some point he had fallen in love with her. It was a deep and complete feeling, above (and below) question.

After a while he looked around. Several of the cots were empty. There were maybe five test subjects left in the room. Some were sleeping. One was sitting up on his cot and a grad assistant-a perfectly normal grad assistant of perhaps twenty-five-was questioning him and writing notes on a clipboard. The test subject apparently said something funny, because both of them laughed in the low, considerate way you do when others around you are sleeping.

Andy sat up and took inventory of himself. He felt fine. He tried a smile and found that it fit perfectly. His muscles lay peacefully against one another. He felt eager and fresh, every perception sharply honed and somehow innocent. He could remember feeling this way as a kid, waking up on Saturday morning, knowing his bike was heeled over on its kickstand in the garage, and feeling that the whole weekend stretched ahead of him like a carnival of dreams where every ride was free.

One of the grad assistants came over and said, "How you feeling, Andy?"

Andy looked at him. This was the same guy that had injected him-when? A year ago? He rubbed a palm over his cheek and heard the rasp of beard stubble. "I feel like Rip van Winkle," he said.

The GA smiled. "It's only been forty-eight hours, not twenty years. How do you feel, really?"

"Fine."

"Normal?"

"Whatever that word means, yes. Normal. Where's Ralph?"

"Ralph?" The GA raised his eyebrows.

"Yes, Ralph Baxter. About thirty-five. Big guy. Sandy hair."

The grad assistant smiled. "You dreamed him up," he said.

Andy looked at the GA uncertainly. "I did what?"

"Dreamed him up. Hallucinated him. The only Ralph I know who's involved in all the Lot Six tests in any way is a Dartan Pharmaceutical rep named Ralph Steinham. And he's fifty-five or so."

Andy looked at the GA for a long time without saying anything. Ralph an illusion? Well, maybe so. It had all the paranoid elements of a dope dream, certainly; Andy seemed to remember thinking Ralph was some sort of secret agent who had wasted all sorts of people. He smiled a little. The GA smiled back... a little too readily, Andy thought. Or was that paranoia, too? Surely it was.

The guy who had been sitting up and talking when Andy woke up was now being escorted from the room, drinking from a paper cup of orange juice.

Cautiously, Andy said: "No one got hurt, did they?"

"Hurt?"

"Well-no one had a convulsion, did they? Or-"

The grad assistant leaned forward, looking concerned. "Say, Andy, I hope you won't go spreading anything like that around campus. It would play bloody hell with Dr. Wanless's research program. We have Lots Seven and Eight coming up next semester, and-"