Seven hours after Buddy appeared on my Sony, Peggy Sue and I found ourselves 115 miles southwest of there, riding through a treeless prairie on U.S. 54, aiming for the city of El Dorado. (p.r.o.nounced El Doraydo, not El Dorahdo. This was still Kansas.) We had traveled farther than 115 miles, though, because whenever possible we had taken country roads and state highways to avoid the troopers cruising the U.S. highways and the Kansas Turnpike. The snow had stopped at dawn and hadn't acc.u.mulated, so the roads hadn't been bad, but the cold had been harder on me than I'd expected. My body was chilled almost to the point of numbness, and my feet were already there. The dull gray sky wasn't helping me think warm thoughts.

In addition, Peggy Sue was thoroughly grumpy. She'd started sputtering and stumbling a few miles south of Emporia, and switching the fuel valve to the reserve tank hadn't helped. I begged her to hold out just long enough for us to find a hiding place for the day. I didn't want to keep traveling while the sun was up because we might be spotted by a Kansas Highway Patrol airplane, and if we had to stop on the prairie, we were as good as caught.

The Ariel's engine died a half mile short of the El Dorado city limits sign, but we were able to coast into a self-service gas station. The hands of a cracked Pepsi-Cola clock attached to the FUEL-U-PUMP sign said that the time was twenty minutes past eight o'clock. Cowboy Carl's would open in forty minutes, and the boys would wonder why I was late for work again. I had not slept in twenty-six hours.

The red column of mercury in a Dr Pepper thermometer on the stucco building topped out at forty-one degrees. That was almost twenty degrees warmer than it had been at home when I'd left, but even inside the Moonsuit I felt as though I had spent the night packed in dry ice. Dismounting was an adventure in pain because my knees didn't want to bend back straight and because putting weight on my feet was like stabbing them with pickle forks. I was beginning to suspect that there was no way in h.e.l.l that Peggy Sue and I could make it to Lubbock.

I filled the bike's tank from the lone Regular pump, then staggered into the building and gave five dollars to the shriveled man behind the counter. That left me with a little over fifty-three bucks. A radio beside the cash register was playing mournful country music, heavy on the steel guitars and slow on the beat.

I had removed my gloves to accept the few cents of change due me, but my cold fingers fumbled the coins and dropped them. The counterman peered at me through inch-thick eyegla.s.ses and said, "You okay to keep riding that Harley?" My faceplate was fogging, so I flipped it up as I squatted, knees popping, to retrieve the coins. "It's not a Harley," I said.

He glanced out the smudged window. "Triumph?"

I lost my balance and fell onto my rump, realizing that I shouldn't have corrected the old man. I should have let him think Peggy Sue was anything but what she was. "Yeah," I lied. "A 1962 Triumph Thunderbird."

He frowned as I sc.r.a.ped up the coins and lurched to my feet. "I see you've got a Shawnee County sticker on your plate," he said. If his eyes were sharp enough to see that, they were sharp enough to see that there were no Triumph emblems on Peggy Sue's fuel tank. At least there were no Ariel emblems there either.

My right hand knotted around the coins, and their edges bit into my fingers. "Yeah," I said, heading toward the door.

"Bet you could use a cup of coffee," the old man said.

I shook my head and pushed open the door.

"Only fifty cents," he called after me. Just then the country music stopped and a news bulletin began: "For those of you who haven't turned on your TV sets yet today..."

I hurried outside, shoving my change into a Moonsuit pocket and pulling on my gloves. As I straddled my bike and snapped up the kickstand, I thought,Everyone is an enemy.

Peggy Sue didn't want to fire, and I jumped furiously on the starter. I was sweating now, and my eyes stung. My body's numbness had disappeared and been replaced by an itching heat. I glanced at the stucco building and saw the old man staring out at me.

I dismounted, grasped the Ariel's handgrips, and pushed. If I could find a hill, I might get up enough speed for a clutch-popping start-but at that moment I didn't care if I had to push forever as long as we got away from that gas station. I felt the old man's gaze drilling into my back as I shoved Peggy Sue's five hundred pounds out of the drive and began trudging down the shoulder of the highway. I was breathing hard, and for the first time I noticed that the air was tinged with a stink of burning crude oil.

I stopped beside the city limits sign and tried to kick-start the bike again, but all she did was sputter.

Inside the Moonsuit, my clothes were sticking to my skin, and inside my helmet, my hair was wet. Even my feet were hot. I resumed pushing.

A few hundred yards inside the city limits, we pa.s.sed a windbreak of evergreens that lay perpendicular to the highway on the north side. West of that windbreak was a two-story white building with seven gray doors visible on each floor. A flaking sign out front displayed the words FIFTY-FOUR MOTOR INN REASONABLE RATES outlined in dead neon tubes. The "Vacancy" appendage hummed and flickered, but it was a redundancy. The only vehicle in the parking lot was a battered Pinto in front of the door labeled "Office" at the west end. As I paused, an obese woman carrying a plastic trash bag emerged from around the building's southeast corner. An access road branched off from the parking lot there, running between the motel and the trees. That might mean that there was a second lot and more rooms on the north side, hidden from the highway. I began pushing Peggy Sue again, but I kept watching the woman. The bike and I were barely thirty yards away from her, but she didn't even glance at us. She was gazing down at the concrete walkway, mumbling words that I couldn't make out. When she reached the office, she took a keyring from her coat pocket, unlocked the door, and went inside. The curtains over the window beside the door stayed closed.

I looked behind me and saw that the highway had curved so that the FUEL-U-PUMP station had vanished behind the row of evergreens. Even if he was still watching, the old man wouldn't see me now, so I guided my motorcycle onto the spa.r.s.e gravel of the motel parking lot. To my helmet-encased ears, the noise made by her tires sounded like thunder.

I parked the bike beside the Pinto and approached the office cautiously to observe and evaluate my enemy. If the obese motel manager caught me, I would never make it to Lubbock. I would never discover whether Buddy had truly arisen, and I would never know why his image had singled me out for persecution or glory.

Understand: I didn'twant to break into a room and sleep there without paying. Despite what the FCC thought of me, I had never willingly broken any law except the occasional speed limit or controlled substances statute. I had never stolen from anyone. At least, not much. But fatigue and fear go a long way toward breaking down the superego.

There was just enough s.p.a.ce between the curtains to let me see into the office. The woman was lying on a couch below the window, watching the snow-speckled screen of a color TV atop the registration desk.

Buddy was on the screen, and the sound was turned up loud enough that I could hear him doing his version of "Bo Diddley." The Great Red Spot floated above his tousled hair like a halo.

The woman lay as still as a lump of dough; the volume of the television had kept her from hearing my bike's tires on the gravel. I returned to Peggy Sue, pushed her down the length of the building to the access road, and sure enough found an empty northern parking lot and fourteen more rooms.

At the lot's far edge, a chain-link fence threaded with dead vines marked the boundary of a salvage yard. The scabrous skulls of three GMC pickup trucks grinned at me through the links. Their windshields were intact. They had made it to the Spirit Land.

A blue dumpster with stenciled letters indicating that it was emptied on Tuesdays sat in the lot's northeastern corner. I hid Peggy Sue behind it.

"Talk to her if she gets lonely," I told the nearest truck skull.

Then I crossed to the motel and climbed metal stairs to the second-floor walkway. I was feeling an echo of the primitive urge for height, of our ancestors' need to see danger approaching at a distance... which made little sense in my situation, because once inside a room, I would keep the curtains drawn. Also, if my enemies blocked the stairs, my only escape would be to jump over the walkway railing. Ignoring these facts, I chose the corner room, number 15.

As I had hoped, the FIFTY-FOUR MOTOR INN REASONABLE RATES had lousy door locks, the kind that will open to a credit card slid between the jamb and the spring bolt. Unfortunately, I was so tired that my coordination was screwed, so after a few tries I gave up on that method and rammed the door with my shoulder. The wooden jamb was rotten, and the bolt ripped through it as if it were moist cardboard. The break-in made only a small noise, so I didn't think the woman at the other end of thebuilding could have heard it.

Once inside number 15, I fumbled in the gray light filtering through the curtains and chained the door.

Then I started laughing. The base plate of the chain was nailed into a jamb with the strength of frozen pudding, andI had chained the door.

I laughed so hard that I was barely able to unbuckle and pull off my helmet, and I collapsed face-first onto the bed to m.u.f.fle myself. The pebbled bedspread smelled like day-old dinner rolls. The bedsprings sagged and squeaked. I laughed until the only sound I could make was a strangled wheeze. My abdomen ached. Tears tickled my nose. I couldn't move. I slept.

I was awakened by pain in my crotch. I hadn't stopped to p.i.s.s during the ride down from Topeka, and Peggy Sue and the road had pounded my bladder and kidneys the whole way. I'd been so cold and tired that I hadn't even been aware of the problem until now.

I sludged out of bed, supported myself with a hand on the wall, and shuffled around a corner into the closet-size bathroom. When I flipped the light switch, a buzzing white fluorescence almost slammed me to the floor. The glare wouldn't be seen outside number 15, but from where I stood, it hurt almost as much as the urine pressure.

I threw my gloves into the main room, squirmed out of the Moonsuit and kicked it after the gloves, then shoved my jeans and shorts to my knees in a panic. I was grateful that the toilet didn't have a lid. The relief was momentary, however. My guts twisted, and I had to finish in a hurry in order to turn around.

Diarrhea. An ache began pulsing behind my left eye.

After flushing the toilet, which made ominous gurgling noises, I tried to throw up. All I could do was heave. The last thing I'd eaten had been a few handfuls of microwave popcorn just before leaving home.

When the heaving stopped, I struggled up from my knees, pulled up my underwear and jeans, and saw my face in the speckled mirror over the sink. My hair was rumpled, and I looked a lot like Buddy might look without gla.s.ses, except that the whites of my eyes were tracked with crimson veins. I glanced at my wrist.w.a.tch; the time was a little after 3:00 P.M. I had been wearing my gas-permeable contact lenses for thirty-two hours. With that realization, I experienced a sensation like having Comet shoved under my eyelids.

I removed the lenses and rinsed them in the ochre water that jitterbugged from the faucet. I had neither a storage case nor wetting solution. Sharon Sharpston wore the same type of gas-permeable lenses, so I had planned to borrow those things while I stayed at her apartment.

What might Sharon be doing at that moment? I wondered. I pictured her sitting on a straight-backed chair in a police station in Topeka, her chopped auburn hair standing at attention, her violet eyes looking down her impossibly straight nose at the Authority who was trying to question her.

"My professional ethics prevent me from discussing my client's psychological profile," she would be saying. "However, I can tell you that he is an intriguing person whom I find tremendously exciting s.e.xually. Now, if you badger me any further, my boyfriend Bruce will give you a sound thrashing with the Const.i.tution."

The pain behind my left eye increased. In the almost three years that I had known Sharon, I had neverbeen able to visualize her naked. Bruce always came into the picture before I was able to unfasten anything.

I went back into the main room and placed my contact lenses on the palm of one of my gloves, which had landed beside the TV on the desk. The set was an ancient black-and-white Zenith, and when I snapped it on, it filled the room with pale flashes. Only one channel displayed a viewable picture, but one channel was all that I or anyone else would need today.

"-Southwest 163rd Street, Topeka, Kansas," Buddy was saying. His fuzzy image scrolled up a few times, then came to an unsteady rest. "You know, folks," he continued, shaking his head, "it's no fun being stranded. I'd appreciate some help soon, please, either from this Oliver Vale or from whoever can think of anything."

He took a deep breath, then shook his head again and began playing "What to Do."

I sat on the foot of the bed, staring at the screen and feeling guilty. We hadn't even managed to hustle our lazy b.u.t.ts to Mars yet, so how could we ever hope to get to Ganymede to save a kid who couldn't do much for us anyhow except write songs and play the guitar?

At that thought, I became afraid that I knew what the pain behind my left eye was. It was apes.h.i.t insanity trying to bore up into my forehead and spread through my brain like a metastasizing carcinoma.

It couldn't be sane to think of the video-Ganymede as reality. It made much more sense to believe that the image on the Zenith, and the one at home on my Sony, were random outpourings of electrons following the same logic as the infinite number of monkeys with the infinite number of typewriters cranking outJulius Caesar andI, the Jury. In a universe chockful of chaotic energies, didn't the Uncertainty Principle and the Laws of Thermodynamics predict that a televised rock 'n' roll ghost was bound to pop up sooner or later?

I wished that I had toughed it out in my one attempt to take physics at K-State.

Not that an answer would have made any difference. Even after six hours of sleep, my soul's belief in Buddy was as strong as it had been beside the low-water bridge. I would have to learn to live with the pain behind my eye.

The guilt was another matter. Madness I can handle, but guilt sucks.

I had decided to go to Lubbock to discover the truth of what had happened, but if Buddy had truly arisen, I would have to do more. I would have to find a way to rescue him. If his ascension to Ganymede meant that he had become immortal in life as well as in music, I would have plenty of time.

The pain behind my eye increased, and I leaned forward to shut off the TV. The Zenith crackled and glared with a bright dot, but unlike my Sony, it didn't turn itself on again. I thanked it for that.

A few hours remained before it would be dark" enough for me and Peggy Sue to leave the FIFTY-FOUR MOTOR INN REASONABLE RATES. I wasn't sleepy anymore, though, so to kill the time I turned on the pink plastic radio that sat beside the lamp on the nightstand. I was careful to keep the volume low in case the woman in the office had turned off her television.

"-last seen driving south on a county road near Topeka. Registration records describe the vehicle as a black 1957 Ariel Cyclone motorcycle, a model that resembles Triumph motorcycles of the same era.Vale apparently fled spontaneously, so his destination, if any, is unknown. Police, county sheriff's deputies, state troopers, and highway patrol officers are scouring the eastern half of the state-"

"It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it," I muttered.

"-and their counterparts in Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Missouri have been alerted. Once again, any citizen who sees anyone fitting the description of Oliver Vale is urged to contact the nearest law-enforcement office at once. According to reports, the 'Buddy Holly' television intrusion is nationwide, and late reports are that normal broadcasts in foreign countries, including the Soviet Union, have also been displaced. State Department sources warn that we may find ourselves embroiled in a serious international incident if this situation is not resolved quickly. The White House has no comment."

The newscast ended, and the reporter was replaced by a disc jockey. "Well, friends and neighbors," the deejay said, "it looks to me like we're livin' in peculiar times, yes indeedy. One thing you can count on, though: KOWW ain't ever played that rock and roll noise, and we ain't ever going to. So this is the place to get away from what's on your TV."

A song turgid with steel guitars began playing. I twisted the tuning k.n.o.b, and it fell off.

I listened to the steel guitars. Curiously, the whiny music soothed me, and I relaxed more with every drunken note. Maybe it was because the songs and rhythms with which I had grown up had been mostly frantic and loud. Whatever the reason, though, I lay back and slept again. I even had a pleasant s.e.xual dream about Julie "Eat s.h.i.t and die, Oliver" Calloway in which she more than repented for earning her nickname.

When I awoke, the news announcer was back, saying the same things he'd said before. I turned off the radio and sat up, stretching. My watch said that it was six o'clock. Almost time to go. I stripped off my clothes and, with only a rotten doorjamb protecting me from the world, went naked into the bathroom.

The water emerged from the shower head at a fast dribble, alternating between chilled and scalding. I washed with a sliver of brown soap that smelled like turpentine and dried with a towel that was covered with old cigarette burns.

I had left the bathroom and was still toweling when a metallic booming noise echoed outside. It was the sound of something b.u.mping an empty dumpster.

Someone had found Peggy Sue.

A smart person would have paused to think. A smart person would have inserted his contact lenses and peeked out between the curtains to see what was going on. A smart person would have put on his pants.

"Oliver," Mother once told me, "you are sensitive, sweet, and loving, with good taste in music, but you will save yourself a lot of trouble if you remember that what you arenot is smart. No reflection on you.

It's genetic."

I was out in the forty-degree air and down the stairs before the dumpster had stopped vibrating. It was only as I stepped on an especially sharp bit of gravel halfway to the dumpster that I stopped and noticed my situation.

It was cold. I was nude. The sole of my right foot was stinging. An enormous out-of-focus man with wildred hair and a beard to match stood beside the dumpster. His features were blurry, but it was obvious that he was looking at me fiercely. He was wearing a Harley-Davidson cap and oil-stained overalls. As I squinted at him, he reached into a bib pocket and pulled out a crescent wrench much like the one I keep on my coffee table.

All I had with me was the cigarette-burned towel. "Get away from my bike," I said, twirling the towel into a rat tail, "or I'll snap you into a coma." I was hoping to make him think I was crazy. Even accomplished fighters hate to mix it up with lunatics.

The big man glanced behind the dumpster. "I wondered who belonged to this," he said in a voice corresponding to his size and hair. He looked back toward me. "Go put on some clothes, boy. I ain't gonna hurt your machine. I was screwin' around in the salvage yard, and I had to hop the fence when I saw the bike. A six-fifty Ariel is rarer than a disease-free f.u.c.k with a p.o.r.no queen."

I was nonplussed.

"Well, go on," he said, gesturing toward the motel with his wrench. "Don't just stand there with your d.i.c.k shrinking."

I took a few steps backward, then turned and began to wrap the towel around my waist as I walked.

The obese motel manager came around the corner of the building before I had covered my crotch. She was too far away for me to see her expression, but her scream told me all I needed to know. I began sprinting for the stairs, and she spun and ran, thinking I was after her. Indecent exposure and attempted s.e.xual a.s.sault were about to be added to the list of my crimes.

As I charged up the stairs to number 15, I heard the red-haired man's laugh. It was the sort of laugh elicited by The Three Stooges and Wile E. Coyote. It was the sort of laugh that said,Oh, sweet Jesus, am I glad that isn't me! I couldn't hold it against him.

I jabbed my contact lenses into my eyes and yanked my clothes on, not even pausing when I saw that my briefs were inside-out and backward. I was imagining the progress of the motel manager's phone call to the El Dorado police and estimating their response time. As I zipped up the Moonsuit, I decided that I had a slim chance of making it out of town if Peggy Sue started right away.

Peggy Sue never started right away.

I clattered down the stairs, pulling on my helmet as I went, and ran to the dumpster. The red-haired man's crescent wrench was back in his pocket, and he stuck out an open hand as I approached.

"Boog Burdon," he said.

"A pleasure," I said, touching his hand as I dashed around him to my bike. The Ariel was nosed into the narrow s.p.a.ce behind the dumpster, so I would have to roll her out before trying to start her.

"Couldn't help but notice the Shawnee County tag," Boog said. "You the dude Buddy Holly mentioned on theToday show this morning?"

"That wasn't theToday show," I said, wrestling Peggy Sue out backward and turning her to face the access road. "Well, he was in that f.u.c.kin' time slot," Boog said.

I mounted Peggy Sue, opened the fuel valve, and began jumping on the kick starter. "I'm not responsible," I said as I jumped. "I didn't bring him back to life or send him to Ganymede, I swear it."

Boog took out his crescent wrench again. I screamed a string of nonsense syllables.

"Shut up," Boog said. "I'm just gonna take off your G.o.dd.a.m.n license plate."

I stopped kicking. "Huh?"

Boog moved to the rear of the bike, squatted, and fitted his wrench to one of the bolts that held the plate to the rear fender. "Radio says various fuzz are after your a.s.s, and if this bike don't draw their attention, the tag sure as s.h.i.t will." He squinted up at me. "You're kind of stupid."

"It's genetic," I said, and jumped on the starter again.

"Sit the f.u.c.k still," Boog said. "Soon as I get this off, I'll start the b.i.t.c.h. I remember her." He scowled.

"Christ, what'd you do to the left exhaust? Let an alligator suck on it?"

I remembered now that Peggy Sue had been owned by "Boog's Hog Works of El Dorado" before being purchased by the old guy from whom I'd gotten her. "It was bitten off by a dog," I said.

"A f.u.c.kin' lesson for us all," Boog muttered, grunting as the license plate came free. He twirled the bolts back into the empty bracket and stood, flinging the plate over the truck skulls into the heart of the salvage yard. "Soon as you can, swipe an out-of-state tag," he said.

Then he nodded in the direction that he had thrown the plate. "Coupla old dead Indian cycles in there.

Can you f.u.c.kin' believe it? n.o.body knew they was there until they hauled out some DeSoto bodies yesterday and found 'em underneath." He shook his head. "Poor old b.a.s.t.a.r.ds ain't much but rust now."

A siren shrieked in the distance.

"You said you could start my bike?" I asked.