Firestarter(81)

The Shop didn't get its power back until the Briska station come on line again... which is to say, at the same time the rest of eastern Virginia got its juice back-around midnight.

By then, the next links had already been forged. As a result of the storm and the blackout, something tremendous had happened to both Andy and Charlie McGee, although neither of them had the slightest idea of what had happened to the other. After five months of stasis, things had begun to roll onward again.

4

When the power went off, Andy McGee was watching The PTL Club on TV. The, PTL stood for "Praise the Lord." On one of the Virginia stations, The PTL Club seemed to run continuously, twentyfour hours a day. This was probably not the case, but Andy's perceptions of time had become so screwed up it was hard to tell.

He had put on weight. Sometimes-more often when he was straight-he would catch a glimpse of himself in the mirror and think of Elvis Presley and the way the man had softly ballooned near the end of his life. At other times, he would think of the way a tomcat that had been "fixed" would sometimes get fat and lazy.

He wasn't fat yet, but he was getting there. In Hastings Glen, he had weighed himself on the bathroom scale in the Slumberland Motel and had come in at one sixty-two. These days he was tipping the scales at about one-ninety. His cheeks were fuller, and he had the suggestion of a double chin and what his old high school gym teacher used to call (with utter contempt) "man-tits." And more than a suggestion of a gut. There was not much exercise or much urge to exercise while in the grip of a solid Thorazine high-and the food was very good.

He did not worry about his weight when he was high, and that was most of the time. When they were ready to make some more of their fruitless tests, they would iron him out over an eighteen hour period, a doctor would test his physical reactions, an EEG would be taken to make sure his brain waves were nice and sharp, and then he would be taken into a testing cubicle, which was a small white room with drilled-cork paneling.

They had began, back in April, with human volunteers. They told him what to do and told him that if he did anything over enthusiastic-like striking someone blind, for instance-that he would be made to suffer. An undertone to this threat was that he might not suffer alone. This threat struck Andy as an empty one; he didn't believe that they would really harm Charlie. She was their prize pupil. He was very much the B feature on the program.

The doctor in charge of testing him was a man named Herman Pynchot. He was in his late thirties and perfectly ordinary except for the fact that he grinned too much. Sometimes all that grinning made Andy nervous. Occasionally an older doctor named Hockstetter would drop by, but mostly it was Pynchot.

Pynchot told him as they approached the first test that there was a table in the small testing room. On this table was a bottle of grape Kool-Aid, labeled INK, a fountain pen in a stand, a pad of note paper, a pitcher of water, and two glasses. Pynchot told him that the volunteer would have no idea that there was anything other than ink in the ink bottle. Pynchot further told Andy that they would be grateful if he would "push" the volunteer into pouring himself a glass of water, then dumping a goodish quantity of the "ink" into it, and then quaffing the whole mess.

"Neat," Andy said. He himself had not been feeling so neat. He missed his Thorazine and the peace that it brought.

"Very neat," Pynchot said. "Will you do it?"

"Why should I?"

"You'll get something in return. Something nice."

"Be a good rat and you get the cheese," Andy said. "Right?"

Pynchot shrugged and grinned. His smock was screamingly neat; it looked as if it might have been tailored by Brooks Brothers.

"All right," Andy said. "I give up. What's my prize for making this poor sucker drink ink?"

"Well, you can go back to taking your pills, for one thing."

Suddenly it was a little hard to swallow, and he wondered if Thorazine was addicting, and if it was, if the addiction was psychological or physiological. "Tell me, Pynchot," he said. "How does it feel to be a pusher? Is that in the Hippocratic oath?"

Pynchot shrugged and grinned. "You also get to go outdoors for a while," he said. "I believe you've expressed an interest in that?"

Andy had. His quarters were nice-so nice you could sometimes almost forget they were nothing but a padded jail cell. There were three rooms plus a bath; there was a color TV equipped with Home Box Office, where a new choice of three recent films appeared each week. One of the munchkins possibly it had been Pynchot-must have pointed out that there was no use taking away his belt and giving him only Crayolas to write with and plastic spoons to eat with. If he wanted to commit suicide, there was just no way they could stop him. If he pushed hard enough and long enough, he would simply blow his brain like an old tire.

So the place had all the amenities, even extending to a microwave oven in the kitchenette. It was all done in decorator colors, there was a thick shag rug on the living-room floor, the pictures were all good prints. But for all of that, a dog turd covered with frosting is not a wedding cake; it is simply a frosted dog turd, and none of the doors leading out of this tasteful little apartment had doorknobs on the inside. There were small glass loopholes scattered here and there around the apartment-the sort of loopholes you see in the doors of hotel rooms. There was even one in the bathroom, and Andy had calculated that they provided sightlines to just about anyplace in the apartment. TV monitoring devices was Andy's guess, and probably equipped with infrared as well, so you couldn't even jerk off in relative privacy.