The Talisman

purity of air; air so pure that you could smell the radish a man pulled out of his garden half a mile away. Suddenly Jack felt as if he could simply push off and jump all the way across the quad . . . or fly, like those men with the wings strapped to their backs.
    Oh, there was light and clear air replacing that foul, garbagey stench and a sensation of crossing voids of darkness, and for a moment everything in him seemed clear and full of radiance; for a moment everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow.
    So Jack Sawyer flipped into the Territories again, this time while running headlong across the degenerating Thayer campus, with the sound of cracked bells and snarling dogs filling the air.
    And this time he dragged Morgan Sloat’s son Richard with him.

INTERLUDE
    SLOAT IN THIS WORLD/ORRIS IN THE TERRITORIES (III)
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    Shortly after seven a.m. on the morning following Jack and Richard’s flip out from Thayer, Morgan Sloat drew up to the curb just outside the main gates of Thayer School. He parked. The space was marked with a HANDICAPPED ONLY sign. Sloat glanced at it indifferently, then reached into his pocket, drew out a vial of cocaine, and used some of it. In a few moments the world seemed to gain color and vitality. It was wonderful stuff. He wondered if it would grow in the Territories, and if it would be more potent over there.
    Gardener himself had awakened Sloat in his Beverly Hills home at two in the morning to tell him what had happened – it had been midnight in Springfield. Gardener’s voice had been trembling. He was obviously terrified that Morgan would fly into a rage, and furious that he had missed Jack Sawyer by less than an hour.
    ‘That boy . . . that bad, bad boy . . .’
    Sloat had not flown into a rage. Indeed, he had felt extraordinary calm. He felt a sense of predestination which he suspected came from that other part of him – what he thought of as ‘his Orris-ness’ in a half-understood pun on royalty.
    ‘Be calm,’ Sloat had soothed. ‘I’ll be there as soon as I can. Hang in there, baby.’
    He had broken the connection before Gardener could say any more, and lain back on the bed. He had crossed his hands on his stomach and closed his eyes. There was a moment of weightlessness . . . just a moment . . . and then he felt a sensation of movement beneath him. He heard the creak of leather traces, the groan and thump of rough iron springs, the curses of his driver.
    He had opened his eyes as Morgan of Orris.
    As always, his first reaction was pure delight: this made coke seem like baby aspirin. His chest was narrower, his weight less. Morgan Sloat’s heartbeat ran anywhere from eighty-five beats a minute to a hundred and twenty when he was pissed off; Orris’s rarely went higher than sixty-five or so. Morgan Sloat’s eyesight was tested at 20/20, but Morgan of Orris nonetheless saw better. He could see and trace the course of every minute crack in the sidewall of the diligence, could marvel over the fineness of the mesh curtains which blew through the windows. Cocaine had clogged Sloat’s nose, dulling his sense of smell; Orris’s nose was totally clear and he could smell dust and earth and air with perfect fidelity – it was as if he could sense and appreciate every molecule.
    Behind him he had left an empty double bed still marked with the shape of his large body. Here he was sitting on a bench seat plusher than the seat in any Rolls-Royce ever made, riding west toward the end of the Outposts, toward a place which was called Outpost Depot. Toward a man named Anders. He knew these things, knew exactly where he was, because Orris was still here, inside his head – speaking to him the way the right side of the brain may speak to the rational left during daydreams, in a low but perfectly clear voice. Sloat had spoken to Orris in this same low undervoice on the few occasions when Orris had Migrated to what Jack had come to think of as the American Territories. When one Migrated and entered the body of one’s Twinner, the result was a kind of benign possession. Sloat had read of more violent cases of possession, and although the subject did not greatly interest him, he guessed that the poor, unlucky slobs so afflicted had been taken over by mad hitchhikers from other worlds – or perhaps it was the American world itself which had driven them mad. That seemed more than possible; it had certainly done a number on poor old Orris’s head the first two or three times he had