He peered up past the bullet and into the scaffolding over the stage. Perched there were two men in black—government agents. They’d been onto him all along. No doubt they’d found him in the first place by tailing Audrey; they’d probably opened her mail. Conrad winced to imagine cops reading the silly drunken first letter he’d written her from Bulber’s.I do want to do some kind of trip on the straights’
heads here ...
Fourth Chinese Brother.
Conrad could feel that his body had gone back to its old shape—his hair was long again; his joints more flexible. It felt good. Getting out of the Mr. Bulber shape was like getting out of an uncomfortable Sunday suit. His shape-changing power was gone, but now he had a new power: the ability to step outside of time.
He crumpled up his confused, rambling speech about the secret of life and tossed it aside. It hung there in the air, just where he let it go. Time had stopped for everything except Conrad and what he touched.
Somehow his personal time-axis had turned perpendicular to the world’s time. He was still in our universe’s space, yet his time had twigged off into a new direction.
Conrad wondered if he should do something to dough-faced Potts, sitting back there with his finger raised in silent signal to the snipers. Give him the speech, maybe. Yeah. Conrad pried Potts’s mouth open and stuffed his wadded speech inside.Chew on that, man. Do you some good. Potts twitched momentarily into life at Conrad’s touch, just long enough to gag and glare, but then, as Conrad shied away from him, he returned to stony immobility.
Conrad hopped down from the stage and went over to Audrey, sitting there in the front row between Ace and Platter. A smile still broadened her full mouth, and her hands were held up in applause. He took her by the shoulders and kissed her.
“Huh?” Audrey jerked in surprise. For her it was as if Conrad had flown over instantaneously. “Conrad?
You changed back! But ... why’s it so quiet?”
Conrad made sure to keep his hand on her, towing her along in his altered timestream. “It’s my fourth power. I changed the direction of my time. It’s a little like I’m moving infinitely fast. As long as I touch you, you’ll move along with me. They were going to shoot me up there. I jumped out of time just before the first bullet hit me.”
Audrey got to her feet and looked around. It was an unsettling sight: row after row of faces caught in random flash-bulb expressions. The overall feeling was of being in front of a great, cresting wave about to break. “It’s creepy, Conrad. Let’s get out of here.”
Hand-in-hand they walked out of Clothier. Red-and-yellow maple leaves hung suspended in the air. A
starling that had just taken wing hovered three feet off the ground. Frozen in time like this, the bird’s body looked strange—like a three-dimensional Chinese ideogram. High overhead, a jet’s contrails marked the sky.
“They tried to shoot you?”
“Yeah. The bullet’s still hanging in the air back there.”
“What would have happened if the bullet had hit you?”
“My body would be dead, and maybe the rest of me, too. There’s that stick of light in me, but I’m not sure it can live on its own without that crystal I told you about. I was so scared the flamers would home in on me again that I left the crystal at Skelton’s. I shouldn’t have done that.” Staring at the starling’s ragged feathers, Conrad tried once again to understand death. Nothing. In the sudden contrast, Audrey’s face seemed unbearably sweet. They hugged and kissed.
“When I shift back into normal time, it’s probably going to be at the same instant I left. So this isn’t going to last any time at all. It’s an intermission between two reels of the movie. Maybe I’ll decide to be a martyr and go stand by that bullet and step back into real time. Do you think I should do that, Audrey?”
“Don’t be crazy. I can’t believe they’d want to kill you anyway. All you ever did wrong was break into that farmhouse. You’ve been here on Earth ten years and never hurt anyone.”
“It’s kind of weird, isn’t it? The government has gotten so paranoid recently. I guess they figured that with all my powers there was no way to capture me alive.”
“They were right about that,” said Audrey, smiling. “You still didn’t answer my question, though. How longfor you is the time-stop going to last?”
“All my other powers always lasted till I knew that everyone had found out about them. When I saw our picture in the paper in Paris, I couldn’t fly anymore ... remember? And then when Skelton’s film of me was on TV, I couldn’t shrink. Just now, with those guys shooting at me, I could tell they knew I’d changed my face, so I got my old Conrad-face back. But now, outside of time like this, it doesn’t seem like they’ll ever know at all. This could last for a long time, Audrey. And for all that time, nothing will move or change except the things that I touch.”
“Like me. Sleeping Beauty.”
“And the air we’re breathing.”
“I wonder if a car would run if you touched it.”
“What for?”
“We’ve got to dosomething , Conrad. We can’t just vegetate.” She tugged at him, and they started walking down the long campus lawn toward the street.
“Uh ...” Conrad was having trouble getting motivated. He’d tried to figure out the secret of life for the speech, and basically he’d failed. Life was life. The feds had almost killed him for trying to explain it. And now here he and Audrey were, together again for the first time in weeks, moving around in the center of an endless stillness. It was like they were the flickering thoughts of some vast, universal jellyfish. Without time, it wasn’t quite real, but how pretty the leaves and sky! Life could end any time, and he still didn’t know what it was all about. “Is there a rush? We’ve got all the time in the world.”
“Well, I don’t know, Conrad.”
“Why don’t we go to Bulber’s house and make love?”
Audrey twisted coyly away and briefly froze till Conrad put his hand back on her. She seemed not to notice the hiatus. “But the flame-people,” she protested. “Aren’t they going to come after you? If you can move out of human time, then they can, too.”
“Oh, Audrey, I don’t know. Maybe I’d be glad to see them. Maybe they could fix it all. I want all this science fiction to be over. I’m tired of trying to be cool, or a genius. I just want to live a regular life with you. Get married, go to grad school, learn stuff, have kids, get old. Is that so much to ask?”
Audrey put her arm around Conrad’s waist and squeezed. “Actually ... we could fuck right here on the lawn. No one can see us. Let’s do it right there, by the tree where we first kissed!”
And then they went down to the little street of shops at the edge of the campus and filled up a shopping bag with food. It was dreamy, dreamy in the food store and on the sidewalks—everyone still and silent.
“It’s nice like this, isn’t it, Conrad? Just you and me, and everyone else asleep.”
“Yes. It’s nice now, but I also know we’re going to get tired of living in a cardboard world.”
“So what should we do?”
“Let’s drive to Louisville and get the crystal from Skelton’s. I’ll hold it, and then the flame-people will find me again.”
“And then?”
“Oh, shit, let’s just enjoy this while we’re doing it.” The street was filled with cars, frozen cars with frozen drivers. “Do you like that Mustang, Audrey?”
“Neat! A convertible! I bet you can make it run.”
“Just wait here a second with our food.” Conrad stepped back from Audrey, and she stood motionless on the sidewalk. He went over to the Mustang and gave the car a tentative pat. At Conrad’s vivifying touch, the car gave a brief jerk forward. So Audrey was right—Conrad could pull machines as well as people into his timestream. Careful to touch the car as little as possible, Conrad reached in past the driver to yank on the emergency brake and turn off the ignition. Then he vaulted over the passenger side to sit next to the driver, a fellow student named Bud Otis. The fully wakened car skidded to a stop, with Conrad reaching over to steer it straight.