deserved their scars.”
“That doesn’t sound right, either. Not for this guy.”
“If he’s not either phobic or suffering from survivor’s guilt,” said Mondello, coming around the desk and walking Roy to the door, “then you can bet it’s guilt over
As the surgeon talked, Roy studied his face, fascinated by the finely honed bone structure. He wondered how much of the effect had been achieved with real bone and how much with plastic implants, but he knew that it would be gauche to ask.
At the door, he said, “Doctor, do you believe in perfection?”
Pausing with his hand on the doorknob, Mondello appeared mildly puzzled. “Perfection?”
“Personal and societal perfection. A better world.”
“Well…I believe in always striving for it.”
“Good.” Roy smiled. “I knew you did.”
“But I don’t believe it can be achieved.”
Roy’s smile froze. “Oh, but I’ve seen perfection now and then. Not perfection in the whole of anything, perhaps, but in part.”
Mondello smiled indulgently and shook his head. “One man’s idea of perfect order is another man’s chaos. One man’s vision of perfect beauty is another man’s notion of deformity.”
Roy did not appreciate such talk. The implication was that any Utopia was also Hell. Eager to convince Mondello of an alternate view, he said, “Perfect beauty exists in nature.”
“There’s always a flaw. Nature abhors symmetry, smoothness, straight lines, order — all the things we associate with beauty.”
“I recently saw a woman with perfect hands. Flawless hands, without a blemish, exquisitely shaped.”
“A cosmetic surgeon looks at the human form with a more critical eye than other people do. I’d have seen a lot of flaws, I’m sure.”
The doctor’s smugness irritated Roy, and he said, “I wish I’d brought those hands to you — the one, anyway. If I’d brought it, if you’d seen it, you would have agreed.”
Suddenly Roy realized that he had come close to revealing things that would have necessitated the surgeon’s immediate execution.
Concerned that his agitated state of mind would lead him to make another and more egregious error, Roy dawdled no longer. He thanked Mondello for his cooperation, and he got out of the white room.
In the medical building parking lot, the February sunshine was more white than golden, with a harsh edge, and a border of palm trees cast eastward-leaning shadows. The afternoon was turning cool.
As he twisted the key in the ignition and started the car, his pager beeped. He checked the small display window, saw a number with the prefix of the regional offices in downtown Los Angeles, and made the call on his cellular phone.
They had big news for him. Spencer Grant had almost been chased down in Las Vegas; he was now on the run, overland, across the Mojave Desert. A Learjet was standing by at LAX to take Roy to Nevada.
Driving up the barely perceptible slope between two rushing rivers, on a steadily narrowing peninsula of sodden sand, searching for an intruding formation of rock on which to batten down and wait out the storm, Spencer was hampered by decreasing visibility. The clouds were so thick, so black, that daylight on the desert was as murky as that a few fathoms under any sea. Rain fell in Biblical quantities, overwhelming the windshield wipers, and although the headlights were on, clear glimpses of the ground ahead were brief.
Great fiery lashes tortured the sky. The blinding pyrotechnics escalated into nearly continuous chain lightning, and brilliant links rattled down the heavens as though an evil angel, imprisoned in the storm, were angrily testing his bonds. Even then, the inconstant light illuminated nothing while swarms of stroboscopic shadows flickered across the landscape, adding to the gloom and confusion.
Suddenly, ahead and a quarter mile to the west, at ground level, a blue light appeared as if from out of another dimension. At once, it moved off to the south at high speed.
Spencer squinted through rain and shadow, trying to discern the nature and size of the light source. The details remained obscure.
The blue traveler turned east, proceeded a few hundred yards, then swung north toward the Explorer. Spherical. Incandescent.
“What the hell?” Spencer slowed the Explorer to a crawl to watch the eerie luminosity.
When it was still a hundred yards from him, the thing swerved west, toward the place where it had first appeared, then dwindled past that point, rose, flared, and vanished.
Even before the first light winked out, Spencer saw a second from the corner of his eye. He stopped and looked west-northwest.
The new object — blue, throbbing — moved incredibly fast, on an erratic serpentine course that brought it closer before it angled east. Abruptly it spun like pinwheel fireworks and disappeared.
Both objects had been silent, gliding like apparitions across the storm-washed desert.
The skin prickled on his arms and along the nape of his neck.
For the past few days, although he was usually skeptical of all things mystical, he had felt that he was venturing into the unknown, the uncanny. In his country, in his time, real life had become a dark fantasy, as full of sorcery as any novel about lands where wizards ruled, dragons roamed, and trolls ate children. Wednesday night, he had stepped through an invisible doorway that separated his lifelong reality from another place. In this new reality, Valerie was his destiny. Once found, she would be a magic lens that would forever alter his vision. All that was mysterious would become clear, but things long known and understood would become mysterious once more.
He felt all that in his bones, as an arthritic man might feel the approach of a storm before the first cloud crossed the horizon. He felt more than understood it, and the visitations of the two blue spheres seemed to confirm that he was on the right trail to find Valerie, traveling to a strange place that would transform him.
He glanced at his four-legged companion, hoping that Rocky was staring toward where the second light had vanished. He needed confirmation that he had not imagined the thing, even if his only reassurance came from a dog. But Rocky was huddled and shivering in terror. His head remained bowed, and his eyes were downcast.
To the right of the Explorer, lightning was reflected in raging water. The river was much closer than he expected. The right-hand arroyo had widened dramatically in the past minute.
Hunched over the wheel, he angled to the new midpoint of the ever narrower strip of high ground and drove forward, seeking stable rock, wondering if the mysterious Mojave had more surprises for him.
The third blue enigma plunged out of the sky, as fast and plumb as an express elevator, two hundred yards ahead and to the left. It halted smoothly and hovered just above the ground, revolving rapidly.
Spencer’s heart thudded painfully against his ribs. He eased off the accelerator. He was balanced between wonder and dread.
The glowing object shot straight at him: as large as the truck, still without detail, silent, otherworldly, on a collision course. He tramped the accelerator. The light swerved to counter his move, swelled brighter, filled the Explorer with blue-blue light. To make a smaller target of himself, he turned right, braked hard, putting the back end of the truck to the oncoming object. It struck without force but with sprays of sapphire sparks, and scores of electrical arcs blazed from one prominent point of the truck to another.
Spencer was encapsulated in a dazzling blue sphere of hissing, crackling light. And knew what it was. One of the rarest of all weather phenomena. Ball lightning. It wasn’t a conscious entity, not the extraterrestrial force he had half imagined, neither stalking nor seducing him. It was simply one more element of the storm, as impersonal as ordinary lightning, thunder, rain.
Perched on four tires, the Explorer was safe. As soon as the ball burst upon them, its energy began to dissipate. Sizzling and snapping, it swiftly faded to a fainter blue: dimmer, dimmer.
His heart had been pounding with a strange jubilation, as though he desperately wanted to encounter something paranormal, even if it proved hostile, rather than return to a life without wonder. Though rare, ball lightning was too mundane to satisfy his expectations, and disappointment brought his heart rate almost back to
