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"to charm a candle flame and make it show pictures."
"Yes," he said.
Later on, just as the day dwindled to its dull close with the pasty face of
the clouds glowing bloodshot for a moment on the horizon, a voice called
unexpectedly from just below them, in the lower story of the house.
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"Red Rover!" it shouted. "It's me, on my way up. Don't shoot."
There were the sounds of boots on the stairs again, ascending this time; and
Red Rover walked in, to drop uninvited into theroom's single large chair.
"All right," he began. "I "
He broke off, looking at Eileen, who, was sitting up in bed. He bounced to
his feet to cross over to her, peered down into her eyes and looked at her
neck.
"Well, you were right," he said, glancing atChaz . He looked back at Eileen.
"You're immune."
"I always was," she said.
"Don't actso flip," Rover said, deep in his throat. "There're lots of poor
people who prayed to be spared once they were outside here, and weren't."
"Maybe they could have been, though,"Chaz said.
"What do you mean?" Rover turned on him.
"I'll show you. Pull your chair up to the table here."Chaz beckoned him into
the corner where the table sat. Rover obeyed. "I've fixed you these."
Rover looked at the pieces of pa-per with thex's ,o's , and squares drawn on
them.Chaz began to turn them over so that they were blank side up.
"What about them?" Rover asked.
"I want you to try to pick out all the ones with one kind of symbol from the
rest,"Chaz said.
"Oh, thatrhine -stuff," Rover said. "In my neighborhood there were a lot of
games like that around. I was never any good at them."
"You hadn't been exposed to the Rot then," saidChaz . "When you were,
something like this stopped being a game. Your life was at stake. Since then,
things have changed for you. Try it now."
Rover grunted, but bent over the slips of paper now all blank side up. He
fingered around among them; and after a minute had twelve slips pulled off to
one side.
"By the way," he said, looking up atChaz . "How many did you say there are of
each kind?"
"I didn't say,"Chaz answered. "Does it matter?"
Rover shook his head.
"Not if I'm right," he said. "Take a look. I ought to have all the circles.
Funny . . ."
Chazturned over the slips that Rover had pulled aside. They were all marked
with the o. He turned up the rest of the slips. There was not an o among the
symbols marked on them.
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"It's funny, all right," said Rover, frowning at the slips. "I was never any
good at those games never, at all."
"Because you didn't expect to be then,"Chaz said. "Just like the four men who
stayed in this house before us. They expected the Rot to kill them, and it
did; just like you expected to lose, and did."
"Why don't I lose now?"
"Because now your survival in-stinct has found out you can do something if
you want to,"Chaz said. "When you were first put out, you must have wanted
revenge onwhoever or whatever put you out so badly that you didn't spend any
time worrying about dying from the Rot."
Red Rover nodded slowly. For a moment his face shifted and became faintly
savage, then smoothed out, again.
"Yes," he said, "that was about it." He looked up atChaz . "But that still
doesn't explain the how of this . . ." He waved at the slips of paper.
"There was a way open your mind could use to keep you alive, if it wanted
to,"Chaz said. "As I was telling Eileen earlier, the survival in-stinct's a
pretty primitive mecha-nism. It doesn't much care about at-titudes, or ideas,
or really about anything at all, except not dying. When your mind saw a way to
keep alive, the survival instinct made it take that way."
"Which was what?"
"You had to believe that you had the paranormal power to defy the Rot,"
saidChaz . "That's what used to puzzle me. The Rot's not like a mi-crobe or a
virus. It's simply a mechani-cal thing. The spore finds human lungs a good
place to flourish; and it keeps growing until it strangles the personit's
inside. Of course, there couldn't be any kind of natural resis-tance to being
choked to death. The Rot had to mean one hundred percent deaths following
spore inhalation there couldn't be any immunes."
"But there are," said Red Rover.
Chaznodded. "Myself, the witches there'd probably be others around in the
sterile areas who'd show they were immune if they were ever exposed to the
Rot but they take care not to be, just like everyone else, because they don't
know yet that they're immune,"Chaz said. "The point is, though, both the
witches and myself know we've got paranormal powers. The four buried [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]