Part 40 (1/2)

Fraffin glanced at the disembodied face projected above the traffic control selector, returned his attention to Lutt. ”Yes, the female. You'll take her into custody and return her here. She's our property. We'll have an understanding with this Kelexel. No nonsense, you hear?

Bring her to me.”

”If I can, honored director.”

”You had better find a way,” Fraffin said.

18.

Thurlow awoke at the first click of the alarm clock, turned it off before it rang. He sat up in bed, fighting a deep reluctance to face this day. It'd be h.e.l.lish at the hospital, he knew. Whelye was putting on the pressure and would keep it up until . . . Thurlow took a deep sighing breath. When it got bad enough, he knew he'd quit

The community was helping him to this decision -- crank letters, vicious phone calls. He was a pariah.

The professionals were an odd contrast -- Paret and old Judge Victor Venning Grimm among them. What they did in court and what they did outside of court appeared to be held in separate, carefully insulated compartments.

”It'll blow over,” Grimm had said. ”Give it time.”

And Paret: ”Well, Andy, you win some, you lose some.”

Thurlow wondered if they had any but detached emotions about Murphey's death. Paret had been invited to the execution, and the courthouse grapevine had said he debated going. Good sense had prevailed, though. His advisors had warned against his appearing vindictive.

Why did I go? Thurlow asked himself. Did I want to extract the last measure of personal pain from this?

But he knew why he'd gone, meekly accepting the condemned man's wry invitation to ”Watch me die.” It'd been the lure of his own personal hallucination: Would the watchers be there, too, in their hovering craft?

They . . . or the illusion had been there.

Are they real? Are they real? his mind pleaded. Then: Ruth, where are you? He felt that if she could only return with a reasonable explanation for her disappearance, the hallucinations would go.

His thoughts veered back to the execution. It would take more than one long weekend to erase that memory. Recollection of the sounds bothered him -- the clang of metal against metal, the whisper-shuffling of feet as the guards came into the execution area with Murphey.

The memory of the condemned man's glazed eyes lay across Thurlow's vision. Murphey had lost some of his dumpiness. The prison suit hung slackly on him. He walked with a heavy, dragging limp. Ahead of him walked a black-robed priest chanting in a sonorous voice that concealed an underlying whine.

In his mind, Thurlow watched them pa.s.s, feeling all the spectators caught up abruptly in a spasm of silence. Every eye turned then to the executioner. He looked like a drygoods clerk, tall, bland-faced, efficient -- standing there beside the rubber-sealed door into the little green room with its eyeless portholes.

The executioner took one of Murphey's arms, helped him over the hatch sill. One guard and the priest followed. Thurlow was in a line to look directly through the hatchway and hear their conversation.

The guard pa.s.sed a strap over Murphey's left arm, told him to sit farther back in the chair. ”Put your hand here, Joe. A little farther this way.” The guard cinched the strap. ”Does that strap hurt?”

Murphey shook his head. His eyes remained glazed, a trapped animal look in them.

The executioner looked at the guard, said: ”Al, why don't you stay in here and hold his hand?”

In that instant, Murphey came out of the depths to shatter Thurlow, forcing him to turn away. ”You best stay with the mules and wagon,” Murphey said.

It was a phrase Thurlow had heard Ruth use . . . many times, one of those odd family expressions that meant something special to the inner circle of intimates. Hearing Murphey use it then had forged a link between father and daughter that nothing could break.

All else was anticlimax.