Impossible.
  She was sitting on the platform, her back to the half-wall. And she seemed to be 
regarding him with dread.
  What the hell?
  There should have been two of them. The nine-foot-square belfry wasn't large enough for 
a game of hide-and-seek. 'What he Saw must be true. But there should have been two of 
them.
  The night was rocked with thunder, and razor-tined forks of
  white lightning stabbed the earth. Wind boomed through the open tower.
  He stood over the child.
  Looking up at him, her voice wavering, she said, "Please... please.. . don't.. . shoot 
me."
  "Where is the other one?" Klinger asked. "Where did she go?"
  A voice behind him said, "Hey, mister."
  They had heard him coming up the stairs. They were ready and waiting for him.
  But how had they done it?
  Sick, trembling, aware that it was too late for him to save himself, he nevertheless 
turned to meet the danger.
  There was no one behind him. The storm conveniently provided another short burst of 
incandescent light, confirming that he saw what he thought he saw: he and the child were 
alone on the platform.
  "Hey, mister."
  He looked up.
  A black form, like a monstrous bat, was suspended above him. The woman. Jenny Edison. 
He could not see her face, but he had no doubt about who she was. She had heard him 
coming up the stairs when he thought he was being so clever. She had climbed atop the 
bell and had braced herself in the steel bell supports, against the ceiling, at the 
highest point of the arch, six feet overhead, like a goddamned bat.
  It's twenty-seven years since I was in Korea, he thought. I'm too old for commando 
raids. Too old .
  He couldn't see the gun she held, but he knew he was looking into the barrel of it.
  Behind him the Annendale girl scrambled out of the line of fire.
  It happened so fast, too fast.
  "Good riddance, you bastard," the Edison woman said.
  He never heard the shot.
  Dawson landed on his back in the middle of the inclined ramp. Trapped in the other 
man's clumsy but effective embrace,
  Paul fell on top of him, driving the breath from both of them. After a long shudder, 
the conveyor belt adjusted to their
  weight. It swiftly carried them headfirst toward the open mouth of the scrap furnace.
  Gasping, limp, Paul managed to raise his head from Dawson's heaving chest. He saw a 
circle of yellow and orange and red flames flickering satanically thirty yards ahead.
  Twenty-five yards
  Winded, with a bullet wound in one shoulder, having cracked his head against the ramp 
when he fell, Dawson was not immediately in a fighting mood. He sucked air, choked on the 
fiercely heavy rain, and blew water from his nostrils.
  The belt clattered and thumped upward.
  Twenty yards...
  Paul tried to roll off that highway of death.
  With his good hand Dawson held Paul by the shirt.
  Fifteen yards .
  "Let go . . . you . . . bastard." Paul twisted, squirmed, hadn't the strength to free 
himself.
  Dawson's fingers were like claws.
  Ten yards .
  Tapping his last reserves of energy, the dregs from the barrel, Paul pulled back his 
fist and punched Dawson in the face.
  Dawson let go of him.
  Five yards .
  Whimpering, already feeling the furnace heat, he threw himself to the right, off the 
ramp.
  How far to the ground?
  He fell with surprisingly little pain into a bed of weeds and mud beside the mill pond.
  When he looked up he saw Dawson-delirious, unaware of the danger until it was too late 
for him-dropping headfirst into that crackling, spitting, roiling, hellish pit of fire.
  If the man screamed, his voice was blotted out by a cymballike crash of thunder.
   
   
   
   
  THE ENDING
   
   
  Saturday, August 27, 1977
   
  5:00 A.M.
   
  THE MESS HALL at the logging camp was a rectangle, eighty feet by forty feet. Sam and 
Rya sat behind a dining
  table at one end of the long room. A single-file line of weary lumbermen stretched from 
their table across the hail and out the door at the far end.
  As each man stepped up to the table, Sam used the power of the key-lock program to 
restructure his memory. When the new recollections were firmly implanted, he excused the 
man-and Rya struck a name from the Big Union Supply Company's employee list.
  Between the thirtieth and the thirty-first subject, Rya said to Sam, "How do you feel?"
  "How do you feel?"
  "I'm not the one who was shot."
  "You've been hurt too," he said.
  "All I feel is-grown up."
  "More than that."
  "And sad," she said.
  "And sad."
  "Because it'll never be the same. Not ever." Her lips trembled She cleared her throat. 
"Now, how's your leg?"
  "About a yard long," he said.
  He pulled on her chin.
  She pulled on his beard.
  He managed to get a smile from her, and that was better medicine than Doc Troutman's 
antibiotics.