It all seemed to be some kind of a test, but he could not see any consistent pattern in it.

For the first time he examined the watch with great care. The ornate initials OLK on the back were worn thin. There was a catch near the stem so the back could be opened. He hesitated, put his thumbnail against the catch and snapped it open. There was a second case inside, of smooth gray metal, with absolutely no way to open it. On the interior concavity of the gold back was engraved something else, almost as ornate as the initials, unworn. He translated, with some difficulty, the Latin words. "Tune waits for one man." It had that ring of slightly sour humor so typical of Omar Krepps. He snapped the case shut and for the first time he began to wonder about the power source. It would seem plausible to a.s.sume that distortions of s.p.a.ce, time and energy could be achieved only through expenditures of vast power. The watch seemed to be permanently sealed. It had an old-fashioned bulkiness. Certainly the distortion of time could not be achieved through purely mechanical means. He held it to his ear and again thought he heard the faint musical note, in a minor key, like a faraway wind in high tension wires. And he wondered if its capacities could be used up, if it would work only for so long, or for so many times. That sort of information would probably be in the letter.

What if Wintermore had fiddled with the extra hand?

He felt exasperated at his uncle. It did not seem possible Omar would have left so many things to chance.

What next? The watch, properly and carefully used, with sufficient advance planning, would enable him to solve the problems of the various criminal actions and civil actions. But it would have to be done in a way which would quiet public interest rather than enhance it. A total notoriety, as Uncle Omar had realized, would make life impossible. One would be sought at the ends of the earth by nuts, monsters, shysters, maniacs, fanatics, reporters.

He knew he had started badly. Letting it get into the hands of Bonny Lee had been an inadvertent violation of the implied trust and responsibility. It should be treated with as much gravity, care and respect as a cobalt bomb. Four times he had tried to escape from Uncle Omar's control into a life of normality, of the small goals and pleasures of the average life. He knew that chance was gone, unless he denied the responsibility by smashing the watch, or dropping it into the sea. That was one possible decision, but he could not make it until he had used the watch to remove all pressures, regain anonymity.

Again there were five minutes left. He looked at Bonny Lee and felt a great galloping rush of desire for her. But electric as the urge was, there was a strange placidity about it, an a.s.sured and comforting smugness. In Rome last year he had desired the woman named Andy just as much, but there had been no flavor of happiness to it. And because it had made him wretched, it had distorted desire into too significant a thing. So now something new had been discovered. Frustration bloated the role of s.e.x, kept it in the center of the stage and gave it all the lines. It had stunted the other aspects of his life through its false importance. Release had suddenly put it in proper context. It was dwindled, and could now share the lines with the other actors, essential to the play but not obsessional, suitably dramatic but linked to reality, capable of comedy as well.

I was a legless man, he thought, and watched everyone in the world walking and running and climbing, and the attribute of leglessness colored every reaction to some degree. I pretended I had legs, so no one would notice. Now I have legs, and though walking is a joy, legs are now just a part of living, and the awareness of them comes and goes. I accept the fact of having legs.

He went over to Bonny Lee, bent and put his lips against the rigidity of her mouth and pressed the world back to life. The warmth and softness came in a twinkling and she gave a convulsive leap of fright, a small squeak of dismay. The brown eyes narrowed.

"That's right sneaky," she whispered. "Like to jump clean outa my skin, you ba.s.sar. It's not a kind of thing anybody is ever going to get used to, sugar."

She wiped her fingers on a tissue and went into the other room and closed the heavy plank door and bolted it. She moved casually into his arms, kissing him lightly on the chin and gave a huge, shuddering yawn. "I'm p.o.o.ped entire, Kirby." She trudged over and sat heavily on the bed and yawned again and knuckled her eyes. "Don't you go near the window so any of those biddies can see you."

"I've got a lot of problems to think about, Bonny Lee."

She kicked her sandals off and stretched out on the bed. "Can't think of a thing until I get some sleep. Aren't you bushed too?"

"Yes, I guess I am." He went over and sat on the edge of the bed and leaned over her and kissed her with considerable and lengthy emphasis.

She chuckled. "Man, you're not as sprung as I am."

"Bonny Lee?"

"No, sugar. It would be a waste of talent for sure. Please let me sleep, sugar, and then we'll see. You oughta sleep too. Whyn't you go on out on the couch where you can quieten down nice?"

"I shouldn't waste time sleeping, with all that, "

She silenced him with a sudden gesture, bit her lip and said, "Gimme the watch, sugar."

"I really don't think you ought to, "

"I wanta try something, stupid! I'm not going to get cute. I'm too gawdd.a.m.n tired to get cute. You gotta trust me, or we are going absolutely no place at no time. Hand it over."

He hesitated, gave it to her reluctantly. She grasped the stem of the watch. In something that seemed like a flicker of movement just a little too fast to be visible, she was in an entirely different position, the watch on the bed a few inches from her slack hand, her eyes closed, breathing slowly, deeply, audibly through her parted lips. He spoke to her and she did not answer. He shook her and she whined. When he shook her again she reached for the watch. An instant later she had flickered into a slightly different position, and she was completely bare. One instant she was wearing her clothes. The next instant they were in midair beside the bed, falling to the floor. He woke her again and she mumbled and growled and took the watch and flickered into a different position. He touched her shoulder and she came awake quite easily. Her eyes were slightly puffy with sleep. She yawned and stretched luxuriously. With the awakenings, the entire procedure had taken just a couple of minutes.

She smiled at him and said, her voice soft and husky, "Three whole hours. Mmmmm. Now you." She wriggled over to the wall. "Get comfortable first, sugar, cause the d.a.m.n bed and pillow get hard as a stone. Better strip on account of clothes feel sorta like cement."

He stretched out and turned the world red. He made the full twist, turning it back the maximum of one hour. She was sculptured of smooth dark red wood, propped on one elbow, smiling at him. He was in the rigid hollow in the bed his weight had made. He tried to go to sleep, but the clothing was oppressive. He got up and tried to take it off, but it was as stubborn as thick lead foil, so he clicked back into the world and stripped rapidly, his back to her, his face hot with the confusion of modesty, of a daylight intimacy he had never known before. In haste and an awkward confusion he stretched out again and flipped into redness and soon drifted into sleep. Suddenly he was awakened and her head was on the pillow, facing him, a few inches away.

"Take another hour, sugar," she whispered. 'Take two. I can wait."

He went back into redness and into sleep, and was awakened with her smiling at him as before. "Doesn't it work good?" she whispered.

He yawned, marveling at her quick instinct for the utility of the device. It was something he would never have thought of, or at least not for a long time.

"That was one strange thing about Uncle Omar. Sometimes he seemed to be able to get along on no sleep at all. We wondered about it sometimes."

"That old man had it made, Kirby. It's like only a couple of minutes since I woke up for the last time. You want a little more sleep?"

"N-Not at the moment."

"You know, I din think so, somehow," she whispered. "This must be my day for breaking all the rules there are." She moved closer. She hooked a warm firm silky leg over his. She was so close all he could see was the single huge brown eye, moist and bright, feel the heat and weight of her breath. "It's so nice to love you," she sighed. "Because you're sorta shaky and scared, kinda. And sweet. What you do, you make it important, Kirby. And that makes me go all funny, like marshmallows and warm soup, and my heart is way up here going chunk chunk chunk, and I almost wanta cry, and let's make this time all slow and sweet and dreamy and gentle and closer than anybody ever got to either one of us, and be talking to me. Be saying the nice things, and I shall say them back, ever' one."

Chapter Ten.

Kirby Winter and Bonny Lee Beaumont made love, took naps in the red world, showered together with a playfulness, with small mischiefs and burlesques, bawdy comedies over soap and shared towels, a playtime so alien to his own estimates of himself that he felt as if he had become another person. He had strode in lonesome severity past all the fiestas, thinking them flavored with evil and depravity to be righteously condemned. But suddenly he had been invited in, where all the warmth and the music was, and had found himself caught up, not in depravity, not in decadence, not in wickedness,but in a holiday flavor of a curious innocence, a wholesome and forthright and friendly pursuit of quite evident pleasures.

In any plausible use of aesthetic theorizings, she had contours, textures and colorings which made her, as an object at rest or in motion, highly pleasing to sight, touch, taste, and hearing. Through the .very process of appraising her as not only an individual, but also an object of aesthetic value, pleasing to him, he was able to achieve an inversion of that logic and a.s.sume that he, in kind, was also, to her, an individual as well as an object which pleased her. And this brought him to an objectivity which altered his prior att.i.tude toward his body, changing it from something ludicrous, something so grotesque as to merit concealment, to an object meriting that pride which was a reflection of her pleasure.

He was pleased to be tall, grateful for a muscularity in part inherited and in part developed, perhaps, as a byproduct of many sublimations, distressed at a roll of softness around his middle, particularly after Bonny Lee's soapy, derisive, painful pinch, and was resolved to become as taut as she, knowing it would please her. Though at first the physiological mechanisms of desire had a distressing obviousness, targeting him for saucy jokes, he achieved acceptance of the inevitable and then progressed to a degree of self-satisfaction bordering upon the fatuous.

Yet throughout the whispered soapy games, in spite of his years of inadvertent continence, he could guess she was a rare one, precisely suited to bring him back into the race of men with minimal delay. He sensed that had there been any trace or trick of self-consciousness about her, any contrived modesties or measured reservations, had she in fact struck any other att.i.tude other than that of a happy, exuberant, exhibitionistic, inventive, gamboling, young, coltish creature, he would have tumbled back into awkwardness, irrational shame, dismay and the puritan persuasion that anything so delicious must, of necessity, be evil.

There was a pattern in the love play, little times of promising to stop all this nonsense, and then an instinctive awareness of whose turn it was to become the aggressor, to be repulsed playfully, or with mock solemnity, or with wicked reprisals, and sometimes the sweet and momentary acceptance, abandoned quickly by one or the other before it went on beyond any chance of stopping it.

She sat on the edge of the blue tub and he scoured her hair dry with a big maroon towel and watched it spring back to damp tight ringlets. Suddenly the games were over, with no need to explain it to each other, with only the need to carry her to the bed and, with all the acc.u.mulated tensions, quickly, strongly, boisterously, strenuously, joyously take it so quickly over the edge that in her completion she made sounds like a slow, strange laughter while, with an astonishing strength, she held him absolutely motionless.

They listened to the two o'clock news with astonishment and incredulity. After the fifteen minutes ended, there was a special fifteen-minute bulletin on Kirby Winter, the adventures of.

When the final commercial came, she turned off the little transistor radio and placed it on the night stand beside the bed.

"Even crazier than the news, sugar, is it being the two o'clock news. My head is out of joint. All these naps. It should be tomorrow, almost. No more naps, Kirby, because you know what'll happen for sure. Get all rested and want each other again and take more naps and, h.e.l.l, we keep this up the only way you'll leave is on a stretcher, or float out the window."

"I can't understand how Betsy Alden, "

She sat up and frowned at him. "Say, did your Uncle Omar look a lot older than he was?"

"What?"

"A day is got to have twenny-four hours, sugar. Lemme see. You know I stuck maybe an extra eleven onto this one? Time and a half, like. I bet if I had the same kinda day every day for ten years, I'd all of a sudden be thirty-five insteada thirty. Was he old-lookin'?"

"I guess he was. I guess he looked older than his age."

She lifted a long brown leg and flexed it. "Hefting them people around on the beach and all, I wore myself down. So there's wear and tear, but now there's just a little sore, like the day after you do too much."

"Didn't you hear the broadcast?"

"What kind of a smart-a.s.s question is that? Surely I heard it. They've all gone nuttier than ever."