"Not voluntarily anyway. But it looks like medicine is quitting me."
"You still have the Touch, don't you?"
He nodded. "It's still there."
She still hadn't one-hundred-percent accepted the existence of the Dat-tay-vao. She believed Alan, and she believed Ba, but she hadn't as yet seen it work, and the idea was so far beyond anything in her experience that the jury was still out for a small part of her mind.
"Maybe you should lay low with it for a while."
She felt him stiffen. "You sound like Ginny. She wanted me to deny it existed and never use it again."
"I didn't say that!" She resented being compared to his wife. "I just think maybe you should back off a bit. Look what's happened to you since you began using it."
"You're probably right. I probably should let things cool down. But, Sylvia…"
She loved to hear him say her name.
"… I don't know how to explain this, but I can feel them out there. All those sick and hurting people. It's as if each one of them is sending out a tiny distress signal, and somewhere in the center of my brain is a little receiver that's picking up every single one of them. They're out there. And they're waiting. I don't know if I could stop—even if I wanted to."
She hugged him tighter. She remembered the day in the diner after they had been to the cemetery when he had first told her about it. It had seemed like such a gift then. Now it seemed like a curse.
He suddenly turned to face her.
"Now that I'm here, don't you think it's about time I used the touch on Jeffy?"
"No, Alan, you can't!"
"Sure! Come on. I want to do this for you as well as him!" he began pulling her toward the stairs. "Let's go take a look at him."
"Alan," she said, her voice quavering with alarm, "he's not here. I told you before—he's at the McCready Foundation until Thursday."
"Oh, yeah," he said quickly. Perhaps too quickly. "Slipped my mind."
He gathered her into his arms.
"Can I stay the night? If I may be permitted to quote Clarence Frogman Henry"—his voice changed to a deep croak—" 'I Ain't Got No Home.' "
"You'd better!" she laughed. But the laugh sounded hollow to her. How could Alan have forgotten about Jeffy being away? She didn't know what it was, but something was wrong with him.
___33.___
Charles
Charles looked up and was shocked to see Sylvia wending her way toward him through the tables of the staff cafeteria. In the bright red and white print dress that hugged her waist and bared her shoulders, she was a breathtaking mirage floating across a wasteland of white lab coats. Her smile was bright, but it didn't seem to be for him alone—it was for the world at large.
"You're early," he said, rising as she reached his table. She hadn't been due for another two hours.
"I know." She pulled out the chair across from him and sat down. Her words came rapid-fire. "But it's been three days and I've missed Jeffy and couldn't wait any longer. Your secretary told me you were here, told me how to get here when I asked her not to page you. What's that you're drinking?"
"Tea. Want one?"
She nodded and made a face in the direction of his cup. "But not hot and milky like that. Iced, if you don't mind. And clear."
He went and got it for her, and a refill of hot for himself, conscious of all the eyes on them, wondering no doubt where Charles Axford had been hiding the lovely bird.
She sipped it appreciatively. "Good." She looked around, a mischievous smile playing about her lips. "Never thought of you as the type for the staff caf."
"Every once in a while," he said with his best deadpan expression, "when I feel the approach of a hint of self-doubt, I find it therapeutic to move among the lesser of my fellow creatures. It restores my faith in myself."
Sylvia favored him with a smile. "How's Jeffy?"
She had asked him that question every day since she'd left him here on Monday and he had managed to put her off. Now it was Thursday and he had to answer. He would lay it out straight for her.
"Not good. He's definitely withdrawing. The clinical evaluations confirm it across the board when compared to his last work-up. We did the works on him—CT, PET, and BEAM scans, MRI, waking and sleeping EEGs, and computer generated spectral analysis of those EEGs. All normal. There's nothing structurally or electrically wrong with his brain."
"Which means there's nothing you can do for him."
"Probably not."
Anyone else watching Sylvia's face would have thought it calm, impassive. Charles saw the fleeting twist to her lips, the single prolonged blink, and knew how deeply disappointed she was.
"There's a new medication we can try."
"None of the others worked, not even that last one, whatever it was."
"PPA—phenylpropanolamine. It works in some autistics. Not Jeffy, unfortunately."
"And this one?"
He shrugged. It was a structural analog of PPA—probably useless where Jeffy was concerned. But he wanted to give her hope. "It may help, it may not. At least it won't hurt him."
"How can I refuse?" Sylvia said with a sigh.
"You can't. I'll ring you up later on and come by. I'll drop some off then."
Sylvia glanced away. "Maybe you should know… I have a houseguest."
"Who?" He couldn't imagine what she was getting at.
"Alan."
"Bulmer?" Jesus bloody Christ! Everywhere he went— Bulmer, Bulmer, Bulmer! "What happened? Wife kick him out or something?"
"No. She left him."
Charles held his breath. "Because of you?"
Sylvia looked puzzled, then: "Oh, no. It was because of all this healing business."
"So he came knocking on your door with an empty sugar bowl in his hand, right?"
"Why, Charles!" she said with a humorless smile. "I believe you're jealous! What happened to all that talk of 'no strings' and 'no exclusives'? I thought you promised not to ever get possessive, and above all, never get involved."
"I did and I'm not!" he said, feeling flustered and hiding it well, he hoped. He was jealous. "But I know your weaknesses as well as anybody."
"Maybe so. But he didn't camp on my doorstep in any way, shape, or form." Her face clouded. "It was awful."
She told him about the mob outside Bulmer's house Monday evening, forcing its way in, how he had been bruised and battered and his clothes half torn from his body.
Charles shuddered at the thought of being in that position. All those people reaching, touching.
And then she told him about how they had received word that his house had burned down.
"We went there Tuesday," she said softly. "There was nothing left, Charles! It had rained like crazy the night before, yet the ashes were still smoldering. You should have seen him—stumbling around the foundation like a drunken man. I don't think he truly believed the place had burned until he got there and saw it. Before that it had only been a story from a voice on the phone the night before. But when he pulled up in front of his yard, oh, you should have seen his face."
A tear slid down Sylvia's cheek, and the sight of it, knowing it was for another man, was like a drop of nitric acid slipping down the outer wall of his heart.
"You should have seen his face!" she repeated, volume rising with her anger. "How could they do that to him?"
"Well," Charles said as cautiously as he could, "when you play with fire—"
"You're so damn sure he's a phony, aren't you?"
"I'm absolutely positive." Charles could not remember being more sure of anything else in his life. "Diseases don't disappear at the touch of someone's hand, even if that someone is the wonderful Dr. Bulmer. He's had a lot of free publicity, a lot of new patients, and now it's backfired on him."