58

The members of the Common Sense Patrol called Merry on the phone.

"We thought you'd be interested," Nora said. "We're going to get our mind off things by going out to lunch. Do you want to go with us?"

Merry paused.

"Well..." she said, "As long as we don't go to Saffron Path, I guess so."

When you see someone on the street and they ask what's wrong, she thought, you can't tell them you're stuck with the two halves of a paradox. An impossible goddamned paradox, over and over, back and forth.

That could be the weapon in and of itself, she thought. You zap someone with a ray gun. It doesn't kill her, it merely makes her think that black is white. Then she walks around as normal and of course black ain't white, she can see the signs everywhere, evidence to the contrary but while she know it isn't so, she also know it is, and she's driven and driven and driven to think it through, think it over, for the rest of her days, until one of two things happens. The thoughts destroy her - tear her down by cubes - or she's relieved to be a suicide.

That, Merry thought, would be a secret weapon any government would love to have.

"I'm trying," she had told her mom a couple of nights before. "I'm trying to look down on myself. See myself from without. You know what I mean?"

Mary nodded.

"It's not easy though."

"It's a tall order," Mary said. "Your brain is all you've got, and you're trying to think about yourself while you are yourself. That's an incredibly difficult thing to be expected to do."

Merry shook herself out of the black hole of cycling introspection, and left for the Common Sense meeting, without raising her hopes.

Something to do, she thought. She liked them --- Debbie, Nora, Alan.

Oh! In the time it took her to reach the burger joint, it hadn't crossed her mind that Nora's good friend Alan was probably dead.

"Is there, um, any word about Ned?" she asked as she sat down with Debbie and Nora.

"No, not yet," Nora said. "It's really kind of upsetting me, as a matter of fact. First my husband and now Alan. Alan and Ned were on the faculty together. They're both missing. Where did they go? We've got the police looking for them, but they haven't come up with anything so far. I'm starting to feel like the wives on Chuck Yeager's air force base.

"All those pilots would go out by the week almost, to try to break the sound barrier. I guess there was a purse for the first person to do it. They would go out, fly out, hit the limit, hit the sound barrier, burn up and die. This happened over and over, and their wives -- there weren't many women pilots yet -- would sit around the club, boozing and talking and going to funerals. How horrible!

"It's this feeling that something's going on, out of sight, and we're powerless to stop it. Ned gone, Alan gone! Who's next?"

"Err, I have to tell you something," Merry said. "I hate to tell it. I think Alan's been killed."

"Ohhhhhhhhhhh!"

"I ... it's outlandish, unbelievable. When I left you last time, I caught a bus to the train station down by the baseball stadium. There's a ticket machine there, and .. have you seen it, Nora?"

"Mm hmm."

"And that's Ned, isn't it? There's this ... stencilled image of Ned on the side of the vending machine."

"Mm hmm."

Nora's head was down. She sobbed quietly and Debbie held her.

"Well... " Merry kept talking, for herself as much as for them. "I followed an old man to the station. I'd seen him before. A shaggy old man. And, um, I think it's Ned."

"What?"

"That face on the ticket machine, that's your husband, right?" Merry repeated herself to be sure.

"Uh huh."

"Then there's no doubt about it. That's the old man I saw. My friends and I had run into him a few weeks earlier too. He made my friend Graham disappear."

"Really," said Debbie.

"I know it sounds strange. Before a few weeks ago, I wouldn't have believed it was possible. But I saw it with my own eyes. We were all eating lunch at the fishhouse on Moore and we got into a conversation with him and he made Graham vanish."

"Is your friend Graham famous?" Debbie asked. "Would I have heard his name?"

"No."

"Oh," said Debbie. "Okay, sorry. Go on. Um, wait, actually, what did you do when it happened?"

"We ran! We scattered! We were terrified."

Debbie tapped her finger on the table. "Mm, I would hazard a guess," she said. "That it's Ned who's behind all these Sam-Graham killings."

Nora inhaled heavily, looking as though her eyes were going to bug out of her head. When you get to be seventy or eighty, these things can just happen.

"I'm sorry," Debbie said feebly, cringing for Nora's benefit. "Um, Merry, you were saying?"

"Mmm," Merry said. "Well, I followed Ned down a secret passage underneath that ticket machine. There's a strange woman standing underground giving orders. I think it's Stacy Sun."

Debbie blinked.

"But she's going by a different name now. I have no idea why. I was hiding out of sight, and Ned comes in to give Stacy Sun a report. He's talking about all the famous Sams and Grahams he's captured, and I heard him say Alan had been killed because the box said so."

"What?" Debbie said.

"A box. Ned told Stacy Sun that he had killed Alan-"

"Ahhhhhhhhhhh!" Nora burst out in desperation.

The burger joint employees were periodically coming around to look at the women and scowl at them. Nora's outburst made them even more suspicious.

"Sorry," Debbie apologized to the proprietor. "Sorry!"

Nora could barely speak.

Heh, thought Merry, this is one way to cheer myself up, I guess, just hang around with people even sadder than me.

"You know, Stacy Sun, I think that's Alan's wife."

"Yes," Nora said. "She is."

"Well, she was pretty upset about it too. Obviously. And by this time, they saw me, but Stacy was too freaked out to deal with me. It was a little weird. She didn't seem to care that I was in the room. Eventually I just got bored and went back to the well. There's a ladder there so I just went up the ladder and went home.

Everyone just sat still for a while. They felt shivery. Merry remembered a sensation from childhood - coming in from swimming in ocean water on a chilly day with her parents and her siblings, they had stopped on the way home to get a hot drink.

It warms your mouth, Merry remembered, but it doesn't stop the shakes.

Eventually Debbie spoke. She had known Alan through Ned and Nora, and had met him at a party, but wasn't visibly distraught.

"I have an idea, but I don't know if you'll be ready for it."

"Go ahead," Nora said.

"I think we need to try to ... get some justice. Or something. I think we need to work on it, and get it in front of the DA, or at least try to get some stories in the Daily."

Nora nodded vacantly.

"So here's what I'm thinking. Get a cop, drag them to Saffron Path and show them that wheel. I'm sure it's connected, because weren't there Sams on that wheel?"

"Sammy Davis Jr."

"Right. Sammy Davis Jr. So it's one and the same. The missing Sams and Grahams, that's Ned. And we need Ned to get to Alan. It's possible he's still alive."

"I'm pretty sure he isn't," Merry said.

Debbie flared angrily, but didn't say so out loud.

It would be a little more compassionate to give Nora some hope, she thought, even a false hope.

"Well, anyway," Debbie continued, "find one and you've found them all. And I can't think of anything like that hamster wheel which is quite so freaky and quite so accessible, both at the same time.

"I think we need to either get that thing on film ..." she was thinking out loud.

"Or, what would be even better is to force our cop to look right at it. Because, you know, people are just so used to seeing weird stuff during the day. I was walking around downtown one day and I saw a guy levitating."

Nora and Merry just sat.

"Honest to god. It was some kind of a weird promotion for, I don't know, a new soap or a toothpaste. I know it must have been computers, or wires, or something. But as far as I could tell, he was just hanging there in mid-air. He was hollering, hawking this stuff. So what are you going to do? Call a cop? Or a physicist?"

"Throw up?" said Merry.

"Or have a heart attack?" said Nora.

"Exactly," said Debbie. "Those kinds of minor mysteries, living in the city, we're constantly being asked to just ignore them and keep moving."

"People saw that treadmill thing," offered Nora. "They saw it when you tore that poster. And why don't they say anything? They're just so inured to the smoke and mirrors."

"Right. So maybe it's going to take a cop to go further than we could get on our own. Do we know any lawyers?"

"No," said Merry. "Well .. yes. I know a lawyer from the Loyd Society, but I doubt he'd help me."

"You know," Debbie said, "I wonder if those Saffron Path people know something they aren't telling. They've always seemed a little shady to me, you know. Who is this Bob B. Soxx anyway?"

"Well," Merry said, " I went there one day with my mom. We had lunch there and there was this waitress who told us the whole story. I think Bob B. Soxx is okay. Anyway, his little cult is more or less just the same old, you know, turn the other cheek. And, um, passive resistance. Nonviolence. It isn't terribly original but I don't think they're espousing anything too weird."

"But they have little teeny Sammy Davis Juniors running in hamster wheels in their wall?"

"Uh, well, true," Merry conceded. "There's something I don't like about them, but their public face ... let me put it this way, if you go in to eat lunch, and you buy a little pamphlet while you're there called 'The Teachings of Bob B. Soxx,' I don't think there's anything in the pamphlet that would raise any eyebrows at the FBI."

"So they're keeping secrets," Debbie said. "They have a hidden agenda? That whole little restaurant is like the hamster wheel. They're very freaky, but they're very out in the open. They're like a sitting duck, as a matter of fact."

Merry sighed.

"Please, Merry? It might help get Ned back. It might help us find out what happened to Alan. Not to mention all the other Sams and Grahams who might be safe. They're not dead, right? They could need rescuing."

"Even after going down the well," Merry said, "there's no way I would have come to some of your conclusions."

Debbie nodded.

"But I'll help, for now."

It's something to do, she thought. It kills time, takes my mind off black and white.

Merry and Debbie looked at Nora.

Nora sighed. "I'm an old journalist," she said. "Alan and Ned would both want me afflicting the comfortable 'til I drop."