Couldn't be dead, could he, not in that position? Like that old lady a couple of weeks ago who'd been cold as a side of beef by the time they got to Williamsport? Sweet Jesus, please not another one. He couldn't go through that routine all over again. Cops with questions. Forms to fill in. The depot manager handing him the hard line about how it was "uncool for the company image." Fuck the company's image. He was a bus driver, not a fucking heart surgeon. What was he supposed to do?
He sighed and looked at his watch. Another forty-five minutes and that was it, thank Christ. Passengers traveling east into New Jersey and New York State had to transfer to sealed transportation at Williams-port. Here the air was breathable, more or less, whereas on the other side of Allentown you choked your goddamn lungs up.
Come to think of it, hadn't the kid boarded the bus carrying an oxygen cylinder? That's right. He'd been cradling it like a baby, as if it were as delicate and as precious too.
The driver sniffed experimentally. The bus was equipped with a filtration plant, but it wasn't oxygenated. Anyway, smelled okay to him. What was that disease that guy on TV had said was on the increase? Anorexia? Naw, that was teen-age tarts starving themselves to death.
It occurred to him to wonder that if there
On the back seat Mara sat with folded arms, oblivious to the jolting motion of the bus, oblivious to everything. The small gray metal cylinder was wedged beside him so that it couldn't roll off the seat.
He was submerged fathoms deep, his heartbeat like a slow muffled drumbeat, his circulatory and respiratory systems slowed right down to the minimum for life support. Time had no reality. At the very center of his consciousness there was a fierce, white-hot, molten core of purpose. Nothing else mattered or had meaning or existence.
He didn't have to think.
The instruction had been implanted during trance.
It told him precisely what had to be done.
And how it was to be achieved.
His life and being were dedicated to the single act he was about to perform. In the language of the Faith he was approaching the moment of Optimum Orbital Trajectory. In that moment everything he had learned would become meaningful and fulfill its purpose in the one supreme act.
And I, Mara thought exultantly, I am the chosen instrument of sweet searing death.
They had seen all the sights and visited the tourist attractions. The Statue of Liberty inside its transparent protective dome, like an ornate green cake under a glass cover; the Empire State Building, where they had hired masks and strolled blindly around the now purposeless observation deck on the one hundred and second floor; Central Park with its hellish landscape of stunted trees, gray grass, searchlight towers, and graffiti scrawled in blood on Wollman Rink; the eternal guitar-shaped holographic flame of the John Lennon Memorial on the upper west side; Checkpoint X, which marked the entrance into the electrified perimeter fence surrounding Harlem; the one remaining steel-and-glass rectangle of the World Trade Center alongside its shattered sister tower, which had burned down in the three-week-long hostage caper in 2005.
Dan was eager to see everything. Rather than to enjoy the experience itself, Chase suspected, this was more so that he could boast afterward of having been to New York, which was considered daring and dangerous, like penetrating a forbidden zone, a dark continent.
They dined with Ruth at a small restaurant on Third Avenue. All that day Dan had been chirpy and in high spirits, and so the change in him was apparent straightaway. He hardly touched his ragout de boeuf bourguignon. He looked pale and said he felt sick. Chase wanted to get him to the hospital, but Ruth advised against it; hospitals in New York were no places for sick people. Her apartment was three blocks away and they managed to get him there in a sealed cab. In the bathroom he heaved up some stringy black bile and complained of dizziness and buzzing in the ears. Ruth examined him and said he had a touch of "Manhattan Lung," prescribed aspirin and rest, and insisted on putting him in her own bed.
Chase felt guilty at this imposition, though Ruth told him she had two days off-duty owed her and could catch up on her sleep later.
