Cold Fire

had tried on previous occasions when he'd not wanted her to get any closer. Hadn't worked then, wouldn't work now. Sometimes men could be so dense.
    She said, “I interviewed a psychiatrist once.”
    “Oh, terrific, that makes you a qualified therapist.”
    “Maybe it does. The psychiatrist I interviewed was crazy as a loon himself, so what does a university degree matter?”
    He took a deep breath and let it out with a shudder. “Okay, suppose you're right and somehow we do turn up undeniable proof that I'm crazy as a loon—”
    “You aren't crazy, you're—”
    “Yeah, yeah, I'm disturbed, troubled, in a psychological box. Call it whatever you want. If we find proof somehow—and I can't imagine how—then what happens to me? Maybe I just smile and say, 'Oh, yes, of course, I made it all up, I was living in a delusion, I'm ever so much better now, let's have lunch.' But I don't think so. I think what happens is … I blow apart, into a million pieces.”
    “I can't promise you that the truth, if we find it, will be any sort of salvation, because so far I think you've found your salvation in fantasy not in truth. But we can't go on like this because The Enemy resents me, and sooner or later it'll kill me. You warned me yourself.”
    He looked at the words on the windshield, and said nothing. He was running out of arguments, if not resistance.
    The words quickly faded, then vanished.
    Maybe that was a good sign, an indication of his subconscious accommodation to her theory. Or maybe The Enemy had decided that she could not be intimidated with threats—and was struggling to burst through and savage her.
    She said, “When it's killed me, you'll realize it is part of you. And if you love me, like you told me you did through The Friend last night, then what's that going to do to you? Isn't that going to destroy the Jim I love? Isn't that going to leave you with just one personality—the dark one, The Enemy? I think it's a damned good bet. So we're talking your survival here as well as mine. If you want to have a future, then let's dig to the bottom of this.”
    “Maybe we dig and dig—but there is no bottom. Then what?”
    “Then we dig a little deeper.”
     

----
     
    As they were entering town, making the abrupt transition from dead-brown land to tightly grouped pioneer settlement, Holly suddenly said aloud: “Robert Vaughn.”
    Jim twitched with surprise, not because she had said something mystifying but because that name made an immediate connection for him.
    “My God,” he said, “that was the voice.”
    “The voice of The Friend,” she said, glancing at him. “So you realized it was familiar, too.”
    Robert Vaughn, the wonderful actor, had been the hero of television's The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and exquisitely oily villain of countless films. He possessed one of those voices with such a rich timbre and range that it could be as threatening, or as fatherly and reassuring, as he chose to make it.
    “Robert Vaughn,” Holly said. “But why? Why not Orson Welles or Paul Newman or Sean Connery or Fred Flintstone? It's too quirky a choice not to be meaningful.”
    “I don't know,” Jim said thoughtfully, but he had the unnerving feeling he should know. The explanation was within his grasp.
    Holly said, “Do you still think it's an alien? Wouldn't an alien just manufacture a nondescript voice? Why would it imitate any one particular actor?”
    “I saw Robert Vaughn once,” Jim said, surprised by a dim memory stirring within him. “I mean, not on TV or in the movies, but for real, up close. A long time ago.”
    “Where, when?”
    “I can't … it won't … won't come to me.”
    Jim felt as if he were standing on a narrow spine of land between two precipices, with safety to neither side. On the one hand was the life he had been living, filled with torment and despair that he had tried to deny but that had overwhelmed him at times, as when he had taken his spiritual journey on the Harley into the Mojave Desert, looking for a way out even if the way was death. On the other hand lay an uncertain future that Holly was trying to paint in for him, a future that she insisted was one of hope but which looked to him like chaos and madness. And the narrow spine on which he stood was crumbling by the minute.
    He remembered an exchange they'd had as they lay side by side in his bed two nights ago, before they had made love for the first time. He'd said, People are always more … complex than you