A moment later everything was gone-the creature which had identified itself to Ed as the Crimson King, the kitchen in the old house on Richmond Street, his mother’s rocking chair. Ralph was kneeling on thin air about six feet to the right of the Cherokee’s nose, his hands upraised as an oft-beaten child might raise his hands before the approach of a cruel parent, and when he looked between his knees, he saw the Civic Center and the adjacent parking lot directly below him. At first he thought his eyes were being fooled by an optical illusion, because the arc-sodiums in the parking lot seemed to be spreading apart. They almost looked like a crowd of very tall, very skinny people which is starting to break up because the excitement, whatever it was, is over. And the lot itself seemed to be… well… expanding.
Not expanding but getting closer, Ralph thought coldly. He’s going down. He’s started his kamikaze run.
For a moment Ralph was frozen in place, enchanted by the simple wonder of his position. He had become a mythical in-between creature, clearly no god (no god could be as tired and terrified as he was right now) but clearly no such earthbound creature as a man, either.
This was what it was really like to fly; to see the earth from above, with no border around it. This [“RALPH!”] Her scream was like a shotgun fired beside his ear. Ralph flinched from it, and the moment his gaze left the hypnotic sight of the ground swelling up toward him, he was able to move. He rose to his feet and walked back to the plane.
He did this as easily and normally as a man walking down a hallway in his own home. No wind buffeted his face or blew his hair back from his brow, and when his left shoulder passed through the Cherokee’s propeller, the whirling blade harmed him no more than it would have harmed smoke.
For a moment he saw Ed’s pallid, handsome face-the face of the highwayman who’d come riding up to the old inn door in the poem which had always made Carolyn cry-and his previous feeling of mingled pity and regret was replaced by anger. It was difficult to become really infuriated with Ed-he was, after all, just another chess-piece being moved across the board-and yet the building he had aimed his airplane at was full of real people. Innocent people.
Ralph saw something balky, childish, and willful about the dopey expression of disassociation on Ed’s face, and as he passed through the thin skin of the cockpit wall, Ralph thought, I think that on some level, Ed, you knew the devil had come in. I think you might even have been able to put him out again… didn’t Mr. C. and Mr. L. say there’s always a choice? If there is, you have to own a piece of this goddam you.
For a moment Ralph’s head poked through the ceiling as it had done before, and he knelt again. Now the Civic Center filled the entire windshield of the plane and he understood that it was too late to stop Ed from doing something.
He had pulled the doorbell free of the tape. He was holding it in his hand.
Ralph reached into his pocket and gripped the remaining earring, once again holding it between his fingers with the prong sticking out.
He curled his other hand into a tube around the wires running between the cardboard carton and the doorbell. Then he closed his eyes and concentrated, creating that flexing sensation in the middle of his head again. There was a sudden hollow, fluttery sensation in his stomach, and he had time to think Whoa! This is the expr(,-V elevator.” Then he was down on the Short-Time level where there were no gods or devils, no bald doctors with magic scissors and scalpels, no auras. Down where passing through walls and walking away from plane-crashes was an impossibility. Down on the Short-Time level where he could be seen… and Ed, Ralph realized, was doing just that.
“Ralph?” It was the drugged voice of a man just waking from his life’s soundest sleep. “Ralph Roberts? What are you doing here?”
“Oh, I was in the neighborhood and I thought I’d drop in,” Ralph said. “Drag up a rock, so to speak.” And with that, he closed his curled hand into a fist and tore the wires out of the box.
“No!” Ed shrieked. “Oh no, don’t, you’ll spoil everything!”
Yes indeed, Ralph thought, then reached over Ed’s lap to grab the Cherokee’s control-wheel. The Civic Center was now no more than twelve hundred feet below them, perhaps less. Ralph still didn’t know for sure what was in the box strapped to the copilot’s chair, but he had an idea it was probably the plastique stuff the terrorists always used in the martial arts movies starring Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal. It was supposed to be fairly stable-not like the nitro in Clouzot’s Wages of Fear, certainly-but this was hardly the time to put his trust in the Gospel of Movieland. And even a stable explosive might go off without a detonator when dropped from a height of almost two miles.
He jammed the control-wheel as far over to the left as he could.
Below them, the Civic Center began to wheel sickeningly around, as if it had been mounted on the spindle of a gigantic top.
“No, you bastard.” Ed yelled, and something that felt like the head of a small hammer struck Ralph in the side, almost paralyzing him with pain and making it all but impossible to breathe. His hand slid off the control-wheel as Ed hammered him again, this time in the armpit. Ed seized the wheel and yanked it savagely back over. The Civic Center, which had begun to slip toward the side of the windshield, began to rotate back toward dead center.
Ralph clawed at the wheel. Ed placed the heel of his hand on his forehead and shoved him backward. “Why couldn’t you stay out of it?”
he snarled. “Why’d you have to meddle?” His teeth were bared, his lips pulled back in a Jealous snarl. Ralph’s appearance in the cockpit should have incapacitated him with shock but hadn’t.
Of course not, he’s nuts, Ralph thought, and suddenly raised his interior voice in a panicked yelclass="underline"
[“Clotho! Lachesiv For Christ’s sake, help me."’]
Nothing. It didn’t feel as if his shout were going anywhere. And why would it? He was back down on the Short-Time level, and that meant he was on his own.
The Civic Center was only eight or nine hundred feet below them now. Ralph could see every brick, every window, every person standing outside-he could almost even tell which ones were carrying signs. They were looking up, trying to figure out what this crazy plane was doing.
Ralph couldn’t see the fear on their faces, not yet, but in another three or four secondsHe launched himself at Ed again, ignoring the throb in his left side and driving his right fist forward, using his thumb to ride the prong of the earring out beyond his fingers as far as possible.
The old Earring Gag had worked on the Crimson King, but Ralph had been higher then, and he’d had the element of surprise more firmly in hand. He went for the eye this time, too, but Ed snapped his head away at the last moment. The prong drove into the side of his face just above the cheekbone. Ed swatted at it as if it were a gnat, holding on tightly to the control-wheel with his left hand as he did it.
Ralph went for the wheel again. Ed lashed out at him. His fist connected above Ralph’s left eye, driving him backward. A single loud tone, pure and silvery, filled Ralph’s ears. It was as if there were a large tuning fork somewhere in between them, and someone had struck it. The world went as gray and grainy as a newsprint photograph.