Firestarter

She looked at the grade, which was covered with dead October grass.

“I guess so,” she said doubtfully.

He stepped over the guardrail cables and then helped Charlie over. As it sometimes did in moments of extreme pain and stress, his mind attempted to flee into the past, to get away from the stress. There had been some good years, some good times, before the shadow began to steal gradually over their lives-first just over him and Vicky, then over all three, blotting out their happiness a little at a time, as inexorably as a lunar eclipse. It had been-

“Daddy!” Charlie called in sudden alarm. She had lost her footing. The dry grass was slippery, treacherous. Andy grabbed for her flailing arm, missed, and overbalanced himself. The thud as he hit the ground caused such pain in his head that he cried out loud. Then they were both rolling and sliding down the embankment toward the Northway where the cars rushed past, much too fast to stop if one of them-he or Charlie-should tumble out onto the pavement.

12

The GA looped a piece of rubber flex around Andy’s arm just above the elbow and said, “Make a fist, please.” Andy did. The vein popped up obligingly. He looked away, feeling a little ill. Two hundred dollars or not, he had no urge to watch the IV set in place.

Vicky Tomlinson was on the next cot, dressed in a sleeveless white blouse and dove-gray slacks. She offered him a strained smile. He thought again what beautiful auburn hair she had, how well it went with her direct blue eyes… then the prick of pain, followed by dull heat, in his arm.

“There,” the grad assistant said comfortingly.

“There yourself,” Andy said. He was not comforted.

They were in Room 70 of Jason Gearneigh Hall, upstairs. A dozen cots had been trucked in, courtesy of the college infirmary, and the twelve volunteers were lying propped up on hypoallergenic foam pillows, earning their money. Dr. Wanless started none of the IVs himself, but he was walking up and down between the cots with a word for everyone, and a little frosty smile. We’ll start to shrink anytime now, Andy thought morbidly.

Wanless had made a brief speech when they were all assembled, and what he had said, when boiled down, amounted to: Do not fear. You are wrapped snugly in the arms of Modern Science. Andy had no great faith in Modern Science, which had given the world the H-bomb, napalm and the laser rifle, along with the Salk vaccine and Clearasil.

The grad assistant was doing something else now. Crimping the IV line.

The IV drip was five percent dextrose in water, Wanless had said… what he called a D5W solution. Below the crimp, a small tip poked out of the IV line. If Andy got Lot Six, it would be administered by syringe through the tip. If he was in the control group, it would be normal saline. Head or tails.

He glanced over at Vicky again. “How you doin, kid?”

“Okay.”

Wanless had arrived. He stood between them, looking first at Vicky and then at Andy. “You feel some slight pain, yes?” He had no accent of any kind, least of all a regional-American one, but he constructed his sentences in a way Andy associated with English learned as a second language.

“Pressure,” Vicky said. “Slight pressure.”

“Yes? It will pass.” He smiled benevolently down at Andy. In his white lab coat he seemed very tall. His glasses seemed very small. The small and the tall.

Andy said, “When do we start to shrink?”

Wanless continued to smile. “Do you feel you will shrink?”

“Shhhhrrrrrink,” Andy said, and grinned foolishly. Something was happening to him. By God, he was getting high. He was getting off.

“Everything will be fine,” Wanless said, and smiled more widely. He passed on. Horseman, pass by, Andy thought bemusedly. He looked over at Vicky again. How bright her hair was! For some crazy reason it reminded him of the copper wire on the armature of a new motor… generator… alternator… flibbertigibbet…

He laughed aloud.

Smiling slightly, as if sharing the joke, the grad assistant crimped the line and injected a little more of the hypo’s contents into Andy’s arm and strolled away again. Andy could look at the IV line now. It didn’t bother him now. I’m a pine tree, he thought. See my beautiful needles. He laughed again.

Vicky was smiling at him. God, she was beautiful. He wanted to tell her how beautiful she was, how her hair was like copper set aflame. “Thank you,” she said. “What a nice compliment.” Had she said that? Or had he imagined it? Grasping the last shreds of his mind, he said, “I think I crapped out on the distilled water, Vicky.”

She said placidly, “Me too.”

“Nice, isn’t it?”

“Nice,” she agreed dreamily.

Somewhere someone was crying. Babbling hysterically. The sound rose and fell in interesting cycles. After what seemed like eons of contemplation, Andy turned his head to see what was going on. It was interesting. Everything had become interesting. Everything seemed to be in slow motion. Slomo, as the avant-garde campus film critic always put it in his columns. In this film, as in others, Antonioni achieves some of his most spectacular effects with his use of slomo footage. What an interesting, really clever word; it had the sound of a snake slipping out of a refrigerator: slomo.

Several of the grad assistants were running in slomo toward one of the cots that had been placed near Room 70’s blackboard. The young fellow on the cot appeared to be doing something to his eyes. Yes, he was definitely doing something to his eyes, because his fingers were hooked into them and he seemed to be clawing his eyeballs out of his head. His hands were hooked into claws, and blood was gushing from his eyes. It was gushing in slomo. The needle flapped from his arm in slomo. Wanless was running in slomo. The eyes of the kid on the cot now looked like deflated poached eggs, Andy noted clinically. Yes indeedy.

Then the white coats were all gathered around the cot, and you couldn’t see the kid anymore. Directly behind him, a chart hung down. It showed the quadrants of the human brain. Andy looked at this with great interest for a while. Verrry in-der-rresting, as Arte Johnson said on Laugh-In.

A bloody hand rose out of the huddle of white coats, like the hand of a drowning man. The fingers were streaked with gore and shreds of tissue hung from them. The hand smacked the chart, leaving a bloodstain in the shape of a large comma. The chart rattled up on its roller with a smacking sound.

Then the cot was lifted (it was still impossible to see the boy who had clawed his eyes out) and carried briskly from the room. A few minutes (hours? days? years?) later, one of the grad assistants came over to Andy’s cot, examined his drip, and then injected some more Lot Six into Andy’s mind.

“How you feeling, guy?” the GA asked, but of course he wasn’t a GA, he wasn’t a student; none of them were. For one thing, this guy looked about thirty-five, and that was a little long in the tooth for a graduate student. For another, this guy worked for the Shop. Andy suddenly knew it. It was absurd, but he knew it. And the man’s name was…

Andy groped for it, and he got it. The man’s name was Ralph Baxter.

He smiled. Ralph Baxter. Good deal.

“I feel okay,” he said. “How’s that other fella?”

“What other fella’s that, Andy?”

“The one who clawed his eyes out,” Andy said serenely.

Ralph Baxter smiled and patted Andy’s hand. “Pretty visual stuff', huh, guy?”

“No, really,” Vicky said. “I saw it, too.”

“You think you did,” the GA who was not a GA said. “You just shared the same illusion. There was a guy over there by the board who had a muscular reaction… something like a charley horse. No clawed eyes. No blood.”

He started away again.

Andy said, “My man, it is impossible to share the same illusion without some prior consultation.” He felt immensely clever. The logic was impeccable, inarguable. He had old Ralph Baxter by the shorts.

Ralph smiled back, undaunted. “With this drug, it’s very possible,” he said. “I’ll be back in a bit, okay?”

“Okay, Ralph,” Andy said.

Ralph paused and came back toward where Andy lay on his cot. He came back in slomo. He looked thoughtfully down at Andy. Andy grinned back, a wide, foolish, drugged-out grin. Got you there, Ralph old son. Got you right by the proverbial shorts. Suddenly a wealth of information about Ralph Baxter flooded in on him, tons of stuff: he was thirty-five, he had been with the Shop for six years, before that he’d been with the FBI for two years, he had-

He had killed four people during his career, three men and one woman. And he had raped the woman after she was dead. She had been an AP stringer and she had known about-

That part wasn’t clear. And it didn’t matter. Suddenly Andy didn’t want to know. The grin faded from his lips. Ralph Baxter was still looking down at him, and Andy was swept by a black paranoia that he remembered from his two previous LSD trips… but this was deeper and much more frightening. He had no idea how he could know such things about Ralph Baxter-or how he had known his name at all-but if he told Ralph that he knew, he was terribly afraid that he might disappear from Room 70 of Jason Gearneigh with the same swiftness as the boy who had clawed his eyes out: Or maybe all of that really had been a hallucination; it didn’t seem real at all now.

Ralph was still looking at him. Little by little he began to smile. “See?” he said softly. “With Lot Six, all kinds of funky things happen.”

He left. Andy let out a slow sigh of relief. He looked over at Vicky and she was looking back at him, her eyes were wide and frightened. She’s getting your emotions, he thought. Like a radio. Take it easy on her! Remember she’s tripping, whatever else this weird shit is!

He smiled at her, and after a moment, Vicky smiled uncertainly back. She asked him what was wrong. He told her he didn’t know, probably nothing.

(but we’re not talking-her mouth’s not moving)

(it’s not?)

(vicky? is that you)

(is it telepathy, andy? is it?)

He didn’t know. It was something. He let his eyes slip closed.

Are those really grad assistants? she asked him, troubled. They don’t look the same. Is it the drug, Andy? I don’t know, he said, eyes still closed. I don’t know who they are. What happened to that boy? The one they took away? He opened his eyes again and looked at her, but Vicky was shaking her head. She didn’t remember. Andy was surprised and dismayed to find that he hardly remembered himself. It seemed to have happened years ago. Got a charley horse, hadn’t he, that guy? A muscular twitch, that’s all. He-

Clawed his eyes out.