The Drawing of the Three

You may feel something, a voice from her own not-so-distant past spoke suddenly. Some little tickle. You may see something just a little bit wrong.

Colored contact lenses.

Jane Dorning personally knew over two dozen people who wore contacts. Most of them worked for the airline. No one ever said anything about it, but she thought maybe one reason was they all sensed the passengers didn't like to see flight personnel wearing glasses?it made them nervous.

Of all those people, she knew maybe four who had color-contacts. Ordinary contact lenses were expensive; colored ones cost the earth. All of the people of Jane's acquaintance who cared to lay out that sort of money were women, all of them extremely vain.

So what? Guys can be vain, too. Why not? He's good-looking.

No. He wasn't. Cute, maybe, but that was as far as it went, and with the pallid complexion he only made it to cute by the skin of his teeth. So why the color-contacts?

Airline passengers are often afraid of flying.

In a world where hijacking and drug-smuggling had become facts of life, airline personnel are often afraid of passengers.

The voice that had initiated these thoughts had been that of an instructor at flight school, a tough old battle-axe who looked as if she could have flown the mail with Wiley Post, saying: Don't ignore your suspicions. If you forget every thing else you've learned about coping with potential or actual terrorists, remember this: don't ignore your suspicions. In some cases you'll get a crew who'll say during the debriefing that they didn't have any idea until the guy pulled out a grenade and said hang a left forCubaor everyone on the aircraft is going to join the jet- stream. But in most cases you get two or three different people?mostly flight attendants, which you women will be in less than a month?who say they felt something. Some little tickle. A sense that the guy in 91C or the young woman in 5A was a little wrong. They felt something, but they did nothing. Did they get fired for that? Christ, no! You can't put a guy in restraints because you don't like the way he scratches his pimples. The real problem is they felt something …and then forgot.

The old battle-axe had raised one blunt finger. Jane Dorning, along with her fellow classmates, had listened raptly as she said, If you feel that little tickle, don't do anything … but that includes not forgetting. Because there's always that one little chance that you just might be able to stop something before it gets started …something like an unscheduled twelve-day layover on the tarmac of some shitpot Arab country.

Just colored contacts, but …

Thankee, sai.

Sleep-talk? Or a muddled lapse into some other language?

She would watch, Jane decided.

And she would not forget.

10

Now, the gunslinger thought. Now we'll see, won't we?

He had been able to come from his world into this body through the door on the beach. What he needed to find out was whether or not he could carry things back. Oh, not himself, he was confident that he could return through the door and reenter his own poisoned, sickening body at any time he should desire. But other things? Physical things? Here, for instance, in front of him, was food: something the woman in the uniform had called a tooter-fish sandwich. The gunslinger had no idea what tooter-fish was, but he knew a popkin when he saw it, although this one looked curiously uncooked.

His body needed to eat, and his body would need to drink, but more than either, his body needed some sort of medicine. It would die from the lobstrosity's bite without it. There might be such medicine in this world; in a world where carriages rode through the air far above where even the strongest eagle could fly, anything seemed possible. But it would not matter how much powerful medicine there was here if he could carry nothing physical through the door.

You could live in this body, gunslinger, the voice of the man in black whispered deep inside his head. Leave that piece of breathing meat over there for the lobster-things. It's only a husk, anyway.

He would not do that. For one thing it would be the most murderous sort of thievery, because he would not be content to be just a passenger for long, looking out of this man's eyes like a traveller looking out of a coach window at the passing scenery.

For another, he was Roland. If dying was required, he intended to die as Roland. He would die crawling toward the Tower, if that was what was required.

Then the odd harsh practicality that lived beside the romantic in his nature like a tiger with a roe reasserted itself. There was no need to think of dying with the experiment not yet made.

He picked up the popkin. It had been cut in two halves. He held one in each hand. He opened the prisoner's eyes and looked out of them. No one was looking at him (although, in the galley, Jane Dorning was thinking about him, and very hard).

Roland turned toward the door and went through, holding the popkin-halves in his hands.

11

First he heard the grinding roar of an incoming wave; next he heard the argument of many sea-birds arising from the closest rocks as he struggled to a sitting position (cowardly buggers were creeping up, he thought, and they would have been taking pecks out of me soon enough, still breathing or no?they're nothing but vultures with a coat of paint); then he became aware that one popkin half?the one in his right hand?had tumbled onto the hard gray sand because he had been holding it with a whole hand when he came through the door and now was?or had been?holding it in a hand which had suffered a forty per cent reduction.

He picked it up clumsily, pinching it between his thumb and ring finger, brushed as much of the sand from it as he could, and took a tentative bite. A moment later he was wolfing it, not noticing the few bits of sand which ground between his teeth. Seconds later he turned his attention to the other half. It was gone in three bites.

The gunslinger had no idea what tooter-fish was?only that it was delicious. That seemed enough.

12

In the plane, no one saw the tuna sandwich disappear. No one saw Eddie Dean's hands grasp the two halves of it tightly enough to make deep thumb-indentations in the white bread.

No one saw the sandwich fade to transparency, then disappear, leaving only a few crumbs.

About twenty seconds after this had happened, Jane Dorning snuffed her cigarette and crossed the head