He closed his eyes and crossed his arms. For just a moment he felt another dull thud of pain in the deformed foot . . . and when he opened his eyes, Sloat was looking up at the ceiling of his apartment. As always, there was a moment when the extra pounds fell into him with sickening weight, when his heart reacted with a surprised double-beat and then sped up.
He had gotten to his feet then and had called West Coast Business Jet. Seventy minutes later he had been leaving LAX. The Lear's steep and abrupt takeoff stance made him feel as it always did - it was as if a blowtorch had been strapped to his ass. They had touched down in Springfield at five-fifty central time, just as Orris would be approaching Outpost Depot in the Territories. Sloat had rented a Hertz sedan and here he was. American travel did have its advantages.
He got out of the car and, just as the morning bells began to ring, he walked onto the Thayer campus his own son had so lately quitted.
Everything was the essence of an early Thayer weekday morning. The chapel bells were playing a normal morning tune, something classical but not quite recognizable which sounded a bit like 'Te Deum' but wasn't. Students passed Sloat on their way to the dining hall or to morning workouts. They were perhaps a little more silent than usual, and they shared a look - pale and slightly dazed, as if they had all shared a disquieting dream.
Which, of course, they had, Sloat thought. He stopped for a moment in front of Nelson House, looking at it thoughtfully. They simply didn't know how fundamentally unreal they all were, as all creatures who live near the thin places between worlds must be. He walked around to the side and watched a maintenance man picking up broken glass that lay on the ground like trumpery diamonds. Beyond his bent back Sloat could see into the Nelson House lounge, where an unusually quiet Albert the Blob was sitting and looking blankly at a Bugs Bunny cartoon.
Sloat started across toward The Depot, his thoughts turning to the first time that Orris had flipped over into this world. He found himself thinking of that time with a nostalgia that was, when one really stopped to think about it, damned near grotesque - after all, he had nearly died. Both of them had nearly died. But it had been in the middle fifties, and now he was in his middle fifties - it made all the difference in the world.
He had been coming back from the office and the sun had been going down in a Los Angeles haze of smudged purples and smokey yellows - this had been in the days before the L.A. smog had really begun to thicken up. He had been on Sunset Boulevard and looking at a billboard advertising a new Peggy Lee record when he had felt a coldness in his mind. It had been as if a wellspring had suddenly opened somewhere in his subconscious, spilling out some alien weirdness that was like . . . like . . .
(like se**n)
. . . well, he didn't know exactly what it had been like. Except that it had quickly become warm, gained cognizance, and he had just had time to realize it was he, Orris, and then everything had turned topsy-turvy like a secret door on its gimbal - a bookcase on one side, a Chippendale dresser on the other, both fitting the ambience of the room perfectly - and it had been Orris sitting behind the wheel of a 1952 bullet-nosed Ford, Orris wearing the brown double-breasted suit and the John Penske tie, Orris who was reaching down toward his crotch, not in pain but in slightly disgusted curiosity - Orris who had, of course, never worn undershorts.
There had been a moment, he remembered, when the Ford had nearly driven up onto the sidewalk, and then Morgan Sloat - now very much the undermind - had taken over that part of the operation and Orris had been free to go along his way, goggling at everything, nearly half-mad with delight. And what remained of Morgan Sloat had also been delighted; he had been delighted the way a man is delighted when he shows a friend around his new home for the first time and finds that his friend likes it as much as he likes it himself.
Orris had cruised into a Fat Boy Drive-in, and after some fumbling with Morgan's unfamiliar paper money, he had ordered a hamburger and french fries and a chocolate thick-shake, the words coming easily out of his mouth - welling up from that undermind as water wells up from a spring. Orris's first bite of the hamburger had been tentative . . . and then he had gobbled the rest with the speed of Wolf gobbling his first Whopper. He had crammed the fries into his mouth with one hand while dialling the radio with the other, picking up an enticing babble of bop and Perry Como and some big band and early rhythm and blues. He had sucked down the shake and then had ordered more of everything.