‘He enjoys the drives — speed seems to do him good. And you too, I take it. Be careful of those fugues. If you want to, visit me at the clinic.’
‘Franklin…’ Controlling his irritation, Slade carefully relaxed his jaw and mouth, as if dismantling an offensive weapon. ‘I don’t have the fugues any longer. I found a way of… dealing with them.’
‘All this flying around? You frightened the old boy.’
‘I doubt it.’ He watched Trippett nodding to himself. ‘In fact, I’d like to take him with me — we’ll fly out into space again, one day. Just for him I’ll build a gentle space-craft, made of rice paper and bamboo..
‘That sounds your best idea yet.’
‘It is.’ Slade stared at Franklin with sudden concern and the almost boyish smile of a pupil before a favourite teacher. ‘There is a way out, doctor, a way out of time.’
‘Show me, Slade. I haven’t much time left.’
‘I know that, doctor. That’s what I wanted to tell you. Together, Marion and I are going to help you.’
‘Marion -?’ But before Franklin could speak, the aircraft’s engine racketed into life. Fanning the tailplane, Slade deftly turned the craft within its own length. He replaced the goggles over his eyes, and took off in a funnel of dust that blanched the paintwork of the Mercedes. Safely airborne, he made a final circuit, gave a curious underhand salute and soared away.
Franklin walked to the car and leaned against the roof, catching his breath. The old man was quiet again, his brief fit forgotten.
‘That was Slade. Do you know him, Ursula?’
‘Everyone does. Sometimes he works on our computer at Soleri, or just starts a fight. He’s a bit crazy, trying all the time not to fugue.’
Franklin nodded, watching the plane disappear towards Las Vegas, lost among the hotel towers. ‘He was a trainee astronaut once. My wife thinks he’s trying to kill me.’
‘Perhaps she’s right. I remember now — he said that except for you he would have gone to the moon.’
‘We all went to the moon. That was the trouble…’
Franklin reversed the Mercedes along the service road. As they set off along the highway he thought of Slade’s puzzling reference to Marion. It was time to be wary. Slade’s fugues should have been lengthening for months, yet somehow he kept them at bay. All that violent energy contained in his skull would one day push apart the sutures, burst out in some ugly act of revenge.
‘Dr Franklin! Listen!’
Franklin felt Ursula’s hands on his shoulder. In a panic he slowed down and began to search the sky for the returning microlight.
‘It’s Dad, doctor! Look!’
The old man had sat up, and was peering through the window in a surprisingly alert way. The slack musculature of his face had drilled itself into the brisk profile of a sometime naval officer. He seemed uninterested in his daughter or Franklin, but stared sharply at a threadbare palm tree beside a wayside motel, and at the tepid water in the partly drained pool.
As the car swayed across the camber Trippett nodded to himself, thoroughly approving of the whole arid landscape. He took his daughter’s hand, emphasizing some conversational point that had been interrupted by a pot-hole.
‘…it’s green here, more like Texas than Nevada. Peaceful, too. Plenty of cool trees and pasturage, all these fields and sweet lakes. I’d like to stop and sleep for a while. We’ll come out and swim, dear, perhaps tomorrow. Would you like that?’
He squeezed his daughter’s hand with sudden affection. But before he could speak again, a door closed within his face and he had gone.
They reached the clinic and returned Trippett to his darkened ward. Later, while Ursula cycled away down the silent runways, Franklin sat at his desk in the dismantled laboratory. His fingers sparred with each other as he thought of Trippett’s curious utterance. In some way Slade’s appearance in the sky had set it off. The old astronaut’s brief emergence into the world of time, those few lucid seconds, gave him hope. Was it possible that the fugues could be reversed? He was tempted to go back to the ward, and bundle Trippett into the car for another drive.
Then he remembered Slade’s aircraft speeding towards him across the solar mirrors, the small, vicious propeller that shredded the light and air, time and space. This failed astronaut had first come to the clinic seven months earlier. While Franklin was away at a conference, Slade arrived by air force ambulance, posing as a terminal patient. With his white hair and obsessive gaze, he had instantly charmed the clinic’s director, Dr Rachel Vaisey, into giving him the complete run of the place. Moving about the laboratories and corridors, Slade took over any disused cupboards and desk drawers, where he constructed a series of little tableaux, psychosexual shrines to the strange gods inside his head.
