Echo Round His Bones by Thomas Disch Page A

so caught up by this scene that he was not at once

aware of the voices approaching the anteroom in the outer corridor.

Voices . . . it could only be . . .

Hansard dodged first behind the couple in fur coats, then surveyed the

room for a vantage point from which he could eavesdrop without being

seen. The guard who was addressing the man in the wheel chair had been

sitting at a desk, and by this desk stood a wastebasket. From the center

of the room the contents of the wastebasket would be invisible.

Hansard lowered himself into the floor, careful not to allow his body to

slip through the ceiling of the room immediately below, for it was only

so, immersed in the "material" of the Real World, that gravity seemed

to lose its hold on him. At last he was totally enveloped except for

his head, which was out of sight in the wastebasket. And none too soon,

for by the sudden clarity of the intruders' voices Hansard knew he was

no longer alone in the room.

"I told you this would be a waste of time," said a voice that seemed

tantalizingly familiar. Worsaw's? No, though it had something of the

same southern softness to it.

A second voice that could have belonged only to the Arkansan Lesh whined

a torpid stream of obscenities in reply to the first speaker, to the general

effect that he, being of a wholly inferior nature, should shut up.

A third speaker agreed with this estimate and expanded on it; he suggested

that the first speaker owed himself and Lesh an apology.

"I apologize, I apologize."

"You apologize, sir ."

"I apologize, sir," the first voice echoed miserably.

"You're goddamn right, and you'd just better remember it too. We don't

have to keep you alive, you know. Any time I like I can just saw your

fat head off, you son of a bitch, and if it wasn't for Worsaw I'd of

done it long ago. I should smash your face in right now, that's what I

should do."

"Ah, Lesh," said the third speaker, "don't you ever get tired of that crap?

What time is it, anyhow?"

The first voice, which Hansard could still not place, said, "The clock

over the desk says four-fifteen. And that means that Greenwich Mean

Time is ten-fifteen, and so all the embassies in Europe are shutting

down. There may still be a few people left, like that old cripple and

the piece, coming back here . But that isn't going to do us any good."

"You think you're pretty goddamn smart, don't you?" Lesh whined.

"There's probably something to what he says though," the third voice put

in. "There ain't any point sitting around here if nobody else is going

through. Leastwise, I got better things to do."

Lesh, after more obscenities, agreed. Their voices faded as they left

the room.

Hansard decided to follow them. He risked little in doing so, for in his

present state concealment took little effort and escape perhaps less.

He dropped through the floor into the room below, and the momentum took

him through the floor of that room in turn, and so on into the basement.

This method of descent allowed him time to be outside the building and

hidden from sight before the three men had exited from the front door.

The man whose voice had seemed familiar to Hansard walked behind the other

two (who carried rifles), and was bent under the weight of a field pack

so that it was not possible to see his face. The two armed men mounted a

Camp Jackson-bound bus, leaving their companion to continue the journey on

foot, for with the added weight of the pack and the consequent increase in

momentum he would probably not have been able to stay inside the vehicle.

When the bus was out of sight, however, this figure removed his back pack

and laid it in the middle of a shrub, then turned down a street in a

direction that carried him away from Camp Jackson.

A canteen swung from his cartridge belt. Hansard needed that canteen

for himself. He removed the field pack from the shrubbery and "buried"

it hastily in the sidewalk, then set off after the vanishing figure