A familiar noise sounded from the sky. The clacking engine of a light aircraft crossed the nearby roof-tops. Franklin stood up, shielding his eyes from the vivid air on the balcony. He watched the aircraft circle the surrounding streets and then speed towards him. A molten light dripped from the propeller, spraying the motel with liquid platinum, a retinal tincture that briefly turned the street dust to silver.
The plane flew past, heading north from Las Vegas, and he saw that Slade had recruited a passenger. A blonde woman in a ragged fur sat behind the naked pilot, hands clasped around his waist. Like a startled dreamer, she stared down at Franklin.
As the microlight soared away, Franklin went into the bathroom. Rallying himself, he gazed at the sallow, bearded figure in the mirror, a ghost of himself. Already sections of his mind were migrating towards the peaceful geometry of the bathroom walls. But at least Marion was still alive. Had she tried to intercede as Slade attacked him? There was a faint image on the air of a wounded woman Las Vegas was deserted. Here and there, as he set off in the car, he saw a grey face at a window, or a blanket draped across two pairs of knees on a balcony. All the clocks had stopped, and without his watch he could no longer tell how long the fugues had lasted, or when the next was about to begin.
Driving at a cautious ten miles an hour, Franklin slowed to a halt every five miles, then waited until he found himself sitting in the car with a cold engine. The temperature dial became his clock. It was almost noon when he reached the air base. The clinic was silent, its car park empty. Weeds grew through the fading marker lines, an empty report sheet left behind by those unhappy psychiatrists and their now vanished patients.
Franklin let himself into the building and walked through the deserted wards and laboratories. His colleagues’ equipment had been shipped away, but when he unlocked the doors to his own laboratory he found the packing cases where he had left them.
In front of the perimeter camera a rubber mattress lay on the turntable. Next to it an ashtray overflowed with cigarette ends that had burned the wooden planks.
So Slade had turned his talents to a special kind of photography a pornography in the round. Pinned to the walls behind the camera was a gallery of huge prints. These strange landscapes resembled aerial photographs of a desert convulsed by a series of titanic earthquakes, as if one geological era were giving birth to another. Elongated clefts and gulleys stretched across the prints, their contours so like those that had lingered in the apartment after Marion’s showers.
But a second geometry overlayed the first, a scarred and aggressive musculature he had seen borne on the wind. The aircraft was parked outside the window, its cockpit and passenger seat empty in the sunlight. A naked man sat behind the desk in Franklin’s office, goggles around his forehead. Looking at him, Franklin realized why Slade had always appeared naked.
‘Come in, doctor. God knows it’s taken you long enough to get here.’ He weighed Franklin’s wristwatch in his hand, clearly disappointed by the shabby figure in front of him. He had removed the centre drawer from the desk, and was playing with Franklin’s shrine. To the original objects Slade had added a small chromium pistol. Deciding against the wristwatch, he tossed it into the waste basket.
‘I don’t think that’s really part of you any longer. You’re a man without time. I’ve moved into your office, Franklin. Think of it as my mission control centre.’
‘Slade…’ Franklin felt a sudden queasiness, a warning of the onset of the next fugue. The air seemed to warp itself around him. Holding the door-frame, he restrained himself from rushing to the waste basket. ‘Marion’s here with you. I need to see her.’
‘See her, then…’ Slade pointed to the perimeter photographs. ‘I’m sure you recognize her, Franklin. You’ve been using her for the last ten years. That’s why you joined NASA. You’ve been pilfering from your wife and the agency in the same way, stealing the parts for your space machine. I’ve even helped you myself.’
‘Helped…? Marion told me that—’
‘Franklin!’ Slade stood up angrily, knocking the chromium pistol on to the floor. His hands worked clumsily at his scarred ribs, as if he were forcing himself to breathe. Watching him, Franklin could almost believe that Slade had held back the fugues by a sheer effort of will, by a sustained anger against the very dimensions of time and space.
‘This time, doctor, you can’t ground me. But for you I would have walked on the moon!’
Franklin was watching the pistol at his feet, uncertain how to pacify this manic figure. ‘Slade, but for me you’d be with the others. If you’d flown with the space-crews you’d be like Trippett.’
