And that was all the heartbreak he could stand to inflict, all the horror, all the fear. He picked her up, held her, walked her back and forth until-a very long time later-her sobs tapered off to irregular hitchings of her chest, and sniffles. When he looked at her, she was asleep with her cheek on his shoulder.

He put her on the couch and went to the phone in the kitchen and called Quincey.

Quincey didn’t want to talk. He was working for a large aircraft corporation in that year of 1975, and in the notes that accompanied each of his yearly Christmas cards to the McGees he described his job as Vice-President in Charge of Stroking. When the men who made the airplanes had problems, they were supposed to go see Quincey. Quincey would help them with their problems-feelings of alienation, identity crises, maybe just a feeling that their jobs were dehumanizing them-and they wouldn’t go back to the line and put the widget where the wadget was supposed to go and therefore the planes wouldn’t crash and the world would continue to be safe for democracy. For this Quincey made thirty-two thousand dollars a year, seventeen thousand more than Andy made. “And I don’t feel a bit guilty,” he had written. “I consider it a small salary to extract for keeping America afloat almost single-handed.”

That was Quincey, as sardonically funny as ever. Except he hadn’t been sardonic and he hadn’t been funny that day when Andy called from Ohio with his daughter sleeping on the couch and the smell of burned bear and singed carpeting in his nostrils:

“I’ve heard things,” Quincey said finally, when he saw that Andy wasn’t going to let him off without something. “But sometimes people listen in on phones, old buddy. It’s the era of Watergate.”

“I’m scared,” Andy said. “Vicky’s scared. And Charlie’s scared too. What have you heard, Quincey?” “Once upon a time there was an experiment in which twelve people participated,” Quincey said. “About six years ago. Do you remember that?” “I remember it,” Andy said grimly. “There aren’t many of those twelve people left. There were four, the last I heard. And two of them married each other.” “Yes,” Andy said, but inside he felt growing horror. Only four left? What was Quincey talking about?

“I understand one of them can bend keys and shut doors without even touching them.” Quincey’s voice, thin, coming across two thousand miles of telephone cable, coming through switching stations, through the open-relay points, through junction boxes in Nevada, Idaho, Colorado, Iowa. A million places to tap into Quincey’s voice.

“Yes?” he said, straining to keep his voice level. And he thought of Vicky, who could sometimes turn on the radio or turn off the TV without going anywhere near it-and Vicky was apparently not even aware she was doing those things.

“Oh yes, he’s for real,” Quincey was saying. “He’s-what would you say?-a documented case: It hurts his head if he does those things too often, but he can do them. They keep him in a little room with a door he can’t open and a lock he can’t bend. They do tests on him. He bends keys. He shuts doors. And I understand he’s nearly crazy.”

“Oh… my… God,” Andy said faintly.

“He’s part of the peace effort, so it’s all right if he goes crazy,” Quincey went on. “He’s going crazy so two hundred and twenty million Americans can stay safe and free. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Andy had whispered.

“What about the two people who got married? Nothing. So far as they know. They live quietly, in some quiet middle-American state like Ohio. There’s maybe a yearly check on them. Just to see if they’re doing anything like bending keys or closing doors without touching them or doing funny little mentalist routines at the local Backyard Carnival for Muscular Dystrophy. Good thing those people can’t do anything like that, isn’t it, Andy?”

Andy closed his eyes and smelled burned cloth. Sometimes Charlie would pull open the fridge door, look in, and then crawl off again. And if Vicky was ironing, she would glance at the fridge door and it would swing shut again-all without her being aware that she was doing anything strange. That was sometimes. At other times it didn’t seem to work, and she would leave her ironing and close the refrigerator door herself (or turn off the radio, or turn on the TV). Vicky couldn’t bend keys or read thoughts or fly or start fires or predict the future. She could sometimes shut a door from across the room and that was about the extent of it. Sometimes, after she had done several of these things, Andy had noticed that she would complain of a headache or an upset stomach, and whether that was a physical reaction or some sort of muttered warning from her subconscious, Andy didn’t know. Her ability to do these things got maybe a little stronger around the time of her period. Such small things, and so infrequently, that Andy had come to think of them as normal. As for himself… well he could push people. There was no real name for it; perhaps autohypnosis came closest. And he couldn’t do it often, because it gave him headaches. Most days he could forget completely that he wasn’t utterly normal and never really had been since that day in Room 70 of Jason Gearneigh.

He closed his eyes and on the dark field inside his eyelids he saw that comma-shaped bloodstain and the nonwords COR OSUM.

“Yes, it’s a good thing,” Quincey went on, as if Andy had agreed. “Or they might put them-in two little rooms where they could work full-time to keep two hundred and twenty million Americans safe and free.”

“A good thing,” Andy agreed.

“Those twelve people,” Quincey said, “maybe they gave those twelve people a drug they didn’t fully understand. It might have been that someone-a certain Mad Doctor-might have deliberately misled them. Or maybe he thought he was misleading them and they were deliberately leading him on. It doesn’t matter.”

“No.”

“So this drug was given to them and maybe it changed their chromosomes a little bit. Or a lot. Or who knows. And maybe two of them got married and decided to have a baby and maybe the baby got something more than her eyes and his mouth. Wouldn’t they be interested in that child?”

“I bet they would,” Andy said, now so frightened he was having trouble talking at all. He had already decided that he would not tell Vicky about calling Quincey.

“It’s like you got lemon, and that’s nice, and you got meringue, and that’s nice, too, but when you put them together, you’ve got… a whole new taste treat. I bet they’d want to see just what that child could do. They might just want to take it and put it in a little room and see if it could help make the world safe for democracy. And I think that’s all I want to say, old buddy, except… keep your head down.”

Voices in a haunted room.

Keep your head down.

He turned his head on the motel pillow and looked at Charlie, who was sleeping deeply. Charlie kid, what are we going to do? Where can we go and be left alone? How is this going to end?

No answer to any of these questions.

And at last he slept, while not so far away a green car cruised through the dark, still hoping to come upon a big man with broad shoulders in a corduroy jacket and a little girl with blond hair in red pants and a green blouse.