Marcie murmured wordlessly in her sleep. Suddenly and curiously shy about meeting Jack Twist's eyes, Jorja used her daughter's dreamy mutterings as an excuse to look away from him.

Jack said, "Whatever secret they're protecting is so important they had to let me carry on with whatever crimes I chose to commit."

Ginger Weiss shook her head. "Maybe not. Maybe they engineered this guilt. Maybe they planted the seed, so you'd change."

“No,” Jack said. "If they didn't have time to weave the story of the toxic spill into everyone's false memories, they sure wouldn't have had time to finesse me toward the straightandnarrow path. Besides . . . this is difficult to explain . . .

but, since coming here tonight, I feel in my heart that I've learned guilt and found my way back into society because something so important happened to us two summers ago that it put my own suffering in perspective and made me see that none of my bad experiences was so bad as to justify the warping of my entire life."

“Yes!” Sandy said. "I feel that, too. All the hell I went through as a child . . . none of it matters after what happened that July."

They were silent, trying to imagine what experience could have been so shattering as to make even the most painful of life's tricks seem of little consequence. But none of them could puzzle it out.

After he selected more songs on the jukebox, Jack asked a lot of questions of the others, filling the gaps in his knowledge of their various ordeals and putting together a complete picture of their discoveries to date. That done, he guided them through a discussion of strategy, formulating a set of tasks for tomorrow.

Jorja was again intrigued by Jack's leadership skills. By the time the group discussed what steps should be taken next and settled on an agenda, they had agreed to undertake precisely the tasks Jack thought ought to be accomplished, though there was never a sense that he had commanded or manipulated them. When he'd first appeared in the Blocks' apartment, he'd proved he could take control of a situation and, by sheer force of personality, make people obey him. But now he chose indirection, and the speed with which everyone came around to his purposes was proof this was the right tactic.

Jorja realized that he impressed her for many of the same reasons that Ginger Weiss had impressed her. She saw in him the kind of person she had been struggling to become since her divorceand the kind of man that Alan could never have been.

The final problem the group dealt with was the danger of an attack by Falkirk's men. Now that there was a real chance their memory blocks would substantially decayor crumble completelyin the near future, they posed a greater threat to their enemy than at any time since July, the summer before last. Tomorrow, they would be separated most of the day as they carried out their various tasks and researches, but tonight they were in danger if they all stayed at the motel, making one easy target. Therefore, they agreed that most of them would go to bed now, while two or three drove into Elko and spent part of the night circling through town, always on the move, alert. Assuming that the Tranquility was under observation, the enemy would at once realize they could no longer seize everyone in a clean sweep. At four o'clock in the morning, a second group of outriders could rendezvous with the first team in Elko and relieve them, so they could come back here and get some sleep.

“I'll volunteer for the first team,” Jack said. "I just have to fetch my Cherokee from the hills, where I left it. Who'll go with me?"

“I will,” Jorja said at once, then became aware of the weight of her daughter on her lap. "Uh, that is, if someone'll let Marcie sleep in their room tonight."

“No problem,” Faye said. "She can stay with Ernie and me .

Jack said they ought to divide their numbers further, and Brendan Cronin volunteered to join him and Jorja on the first team. The priest's response triggered a peculiar feeling in Jorja, a pang she would not identify as disappointment until much later.

Because everyone else had errands to run early tomorrow, the second team was composed of only Ned and Sandy. A rendezvous between the teams was set for four o'clock in the morning at the Arco MiniMart.

“If you get there first,” Jack said, "for God's sake don't buy a Hamwich. Okay, I guess that's it. We should get moving."

“Not quite yet,” Ginger said. The physician folded her hands and looked down at her interlaced fingers, collecting her thoughts. "Since this afternoon, when Brendan first arrived, when the rings appeared on his and Dom's hands, when the motel office was filled with that strange noise and the light ... I've been chewing over everything we've been able to learn, trying to make those bizarre phenomena fit in somehow. I've hit on an explanation for some of it; not all, but some of it."

Everyone expressed an eagerness to hear the theory, halfformed though it might be.

Ginger said, "As different as our dreams are, one element links all of them: the moon. Okay. Our other dreamsdecon suits, IV needles, beds with restraining strapsproved to be based on real experiences, real threats. In fact, they weren't dreams but memories surfacing in the form of dreams. So it seems reasonable to suppose the moon also featured prominently in whatever happened to us, that the moon, too, is a memory trying to surface in our dreams. Agreed?"

“Agreed,” Dom said, and everyone else nodded.

"We've seen how Marcie's lunar obsession changed to a fascination with a scarlet moon,“ Ginger continued. ”And Jack's told us that, a couple nights ago, the ordinary moonlight in his own nightmare turned into a bloody glow. None of the rest of us has dreamed of a red moon yet, but I submit that the appearance of this scarlet image in Marcie's and Jack's dreams is proof that it's also a memory. In other words, on the night of July 6, we saw something that made the moon turn red. And the apparitional light, which sometimes fills Brendan's bedroom, which some of us witnessed today in the motel office, is a strange sort of reenactment of what happened to the real moon on the night in July. The apparitional light is a message meant to nudge our memories."

“Message,” Jack said. "All right. But who the devil's sending the message? Where's the light come from? How is it generated?"

“I've got an idea about that,” Ginger said. "But let me take this one step at a time. First, let's consider what might've happened to make the moon turn red that night."

Jorja listened, as did the others, with interest at first and then with growing uneasiness, while Ginger got up from her chair and, pacing, outlined an unnerving explanation.

Ginger Weiss wholeheartedly embraced the scientific worldview. To her, the universe unfailingly operated by the rules of logic and reason, and no mystery could long endure once attacked in a logical fashion. But unlike some in the scientific communityand many in the medical'communityshe did not believe that a vivid imagination was necessarily a hindrance to logic and reason. Otherwise, she might not have devised the theory she now conveyed to the others in the Tranquility Grille.

It was a pretty strange theory, and she was nervous about how the others would receive it. So she paced to the jukebox, over to the service counter, back to the table, moving constantly as she talked:

"The men who dealt with us in the first day or two of imprisonment were wearing decontamination suits designed to handle biological risks. They must've been worried we were infected with something. So perhaps part of what we saw was a scarlet cloud of biological contaminant. When it passed overhead, it turned the moon red."

“And we were all infected with some strange disease,” Jorja said.

Ginger said, "That may be why, yesterday at the special place along the highway, I had the memoryflash of Dom shouting, 'It's inside me. It's inside me." That would have been a logical thing for him to shout if, that night, he had found himself caught up in a red cloud of some contaminant and realized he was breathing it in. And Brendan's told us that the same words-'It's inside me'-came spontaneously to his lips last night in Reno, when the red apparitional light filled his room."

“Bacteria? Disease? Then why didn't we get sick?” Brendan said.

“Because they treated us immediately,” Dom said. "We've already worked that one out, Brendanyesterday, before you got here. But, Ginger, the light that filled the office this afternoon was too bright to represent moonlight filtered through a red cloud."

“I know,” Ginger said, pacing. "Underdeveloped as it is, my idea doesn't explain everythinglike the rings on your hands. So maybe it's not the right idea. On the other hand, it does explain some things, and maybe if we think about it long enough, we'll see how it explains these other puzzles, as well. And as a theory, it has one big plus."

“What's that?” Ned asked.

"It could explain why Brendan was involved in two miracle cures in Chicago. It could explain the whirling paper moons in Zebediah Lomack's house. And the destruction here at the diner on Saturday night, when Dom was trying to recall what had happened the summer before last. It could explain the source of the apparitional light."

On the jukebox, the last of a series of songs had faded to its end as Ginger began to speak. But no one got up to choose more music, for they were riveted by her promise to explain the inexplicable.

“To this point,” Ginger said, "the theory's pretty mundane. A red cloud of contaminant. Nothing hard to accept in that. But now . . . you've got to take a big leap of imagination with me. We've been assuming that the miraculous healing and certainly the poltergeist phenomena have some mysterious external source. Father Wycazik, Brendan's rector, thinks that external source is God. The rest of us don't feel it's exactly divine. We don't know what the hell it is, but we all assume that it's an external power, something out there somewhere that's taunting us or trying to reach us with a message or threatening us. But what if these wonders have an internal source. Suppose Brendan and Dom really possess some power, and suppose that they possess it because of what happened during the night of the red moon. Suppose they have telekinesiswhich is the power to move objects without touching them, which would explain the whirling paper moons and the destruction in the diner."

Everyone looked at Dom and Brendan in amazement, but no one was more startled than those two men, who gaped at Ginger, shocked.

Dom said, “But that's ridiculous! I'm no psychic, no sorcerer.”

“Me neither,” Brendan said.

Ginger shook her head. "Not consciously, no. I'm saying maybe the power is in you, and you're just not aware of it. Bear with me. Think about it. The first time the rings appeared on Brendan's hands, the first time he exercised his healing power, was when he was combing the hair of the little girl in the hospital. He's said he was overwhelmed with pity for her and filled with frustration and anger that he couldn't help her. Maybe it was his intense frustration and anger that freed the power in him, even though he wasn't aware of it. He couldn't be aware of it because the acquisition of this power is part of what he's been made to forget. Okay, the second time, with the wounded policeman, Brendan found himself in an extreme crisis, which might trigger these powers." She began pacing and talking more rapidly to prevent debate until she'd finished. "Now think about Dom's experiences. The first one, in Reno, at Lomack's house. The way you told it to us, Dom ... as you wandered through the house, you became so frustrated by the everdeepening nature of the mystery that you wanted to rush through those rooms and tear those paper moons off the walls. Those were your very words. And, of course, that's what happened: You pulled those moons off the walls, not with your hands but with this power. And remember, the pictures only fell to the floor when you shouted, 'Stop it, stop it!" When it did stop, you thought something had heard you and obeyed or relented, but in fact you stopped it yourself."

Brendan, Dom, and a couple of the others still looked skeptical.

But Ginger had captured Sandy Server's imagination. "It makes sense! It makes even more sense if you think about what happened here on Saturday night, right in this very room. Dom was trying to remember back to that Friday in July, trying to remember what happened right up to the second where his memory block took effect. And while he was struggling to remember . . . all of a sudden this strange noise, this thunder, started to rumble through the diner, and everything started to shake. He could've been unconsciously using this power of his to recreate the effects of whatever happened back then."

“Good!” Ginger said encouragingly. "See? The more you think about it, the more it hangs together."

“But the strange light,” Dom said. "You're saying Brendan and I somehow manufactured that?"

“Yes, possibly,” Ginger said, returning to the table, leaning on her empty chair. "Pyrokinesis. The ability to spontaneously generate heat or fire with the power of the mind alone."

“This wasn't fire,” Dom said. “It was light.”

“So . . . call it 'photokinesis,' ” Ginger said. "But I think when you and Brendan met, you subconsciously recognized the power in each other. On a deep level, you were both reminded of what happened to you that July night, the thing you've been forced to forget. And both of you wanted to blast those memories into view. So unwittingly you generated that weird light, which was a recreation of the way the moon changed from white to red on the night of July 6. It was your subconscious trying to jolt the memory through the block."

Ginger could see that their minds were spinning with all these odd ideas, and she wanted to keep them unsettled a while longer, because when they were unsettled they were more likely to absorb what she was saying. Given time for quiet reflection, the heavy armor of skepticism would fall back into place, and her ideas would bounce off.

Ernie Block shook his head. "Wait a minute. You're losing me now. You started all this by suggesting that what turned the moon red was a scarlet cloud of some biological contaminant. Then you jumped way the hell to one side and started talking about how the thing that happened to us was responsible for Dom and Brendan developing these supposed powers. Where's the connection? What does biological contamination have to do with all this psychic stuff, anyway?"

Ginger took a deep breath because they had come to the core of her theory, the wildest part of it. "What if . . . what if we were contaminated by some virus or bacterium that, as a sideeffect, causes profound chemical or genetic or hormonal changes in its host, changes in the host's brain? And what if those changes leave the host with something very like psychic powers, even once the infection is gone?"