فصل 01 - بخش 09

NO END TO THE UNIVERSE

July 26th 1

What sleep Ralph got was thin and broken by bad dreams. In one of them, he held the dying Terry Maitland in his arms, and Terry said, ‘You robbed my children.’

Ralph woke at four thirty and knew there would be no more sleep. He felt as if he had entered some heretofore unsuspected plane of existence, and told himself everyone felt that way in the small hours. That was good enough to get him into the bathroom, where he brushed his teeth.

Jeannie was sleeping as she always did, with the coverlet pulled up so high that she was nothing but a hump with a fluff of hair showing over the top. There was gray in that hair now, as there was in his. Not much, but more would be coming right along. That was all right. Time’s passage was a mystery, but it was a normal mystery.

The breeze from the air conditioner had spilled some of the pages Jeannie had printed onto the floor. He put them back on the night table, picked up his jeans, decided they would do for another day (especially in dusty south Texas), and went to the window with them in his hand. The first gray light was creeping into the day. It would be a hot one here, and hotter still where they were going.

He observed – without much surprise, although he couldn’t have said why – that Holly Gibney was down there, dressed in her own pair of jeans and sitting in the lawn chair where Ralph himself had been sitting little more than a week ago, when Bill Samuels had come calling. The evening Bill had told him the story of the disappearing footprints and Ralph had matched him with the one about the infested cantaloupe.

He pulled on his pants and an Oklahoma Thunder tee-shirt, checked Jeannie again, and left the room with the old scuffed moccasins he wore as bedroom slippers dangling from two fingers of his left hand.