HE went home and kept his mouth shut and did a lot of worrying. He wondered whether, praying man or not, he shouldn't try a prayer or two. But when he did, the prayers sounded strange and out of place coming from his lips, so he figured he'd better leave well enough alone.
At times it still seemed impossible. At other times it seemed crystal clear that Cooper Jackson actually could will an event to happen—that by thinking so, he could make it so. But mostly, because he knew too much to think otherwise, Charley knew that the whole thing was true. Cooper Jackson had spent twenty years or so in thinking and imagining, his thoughts and imaginings shaped, not by the course of human events, but by the fantasy of many human minds. He would not think as a normal human being thought, and therein lay both an advantage and a danger.
If he did not think in entirely human channels, he also was not trammeled by the limitations of human thinking; he was free to let his mind wander out in strange directions and bend its energies to strange tasks. His obsession with the necessity of achieving lasting peace was an example of his unhuman attitude; for, while the entire Earth did earnest lip service to the cause of peace, the threat of war had hung over every one so long that its horror had been dulled. But to Cooper Jackson, it was unthinkable that men should slay one another by the millions.
Always Charley came back to those helpers, those three shadowy figures he pictured as standing at Cooper Jackson's shoulder. He assigned them three arbitrary faces, but the faces would not stay as he imagined them. At last he understood that, they were things to which you could assign no face.
But the thing that he still worried most about, although he tried not to think of it at all because of its enormity, was the Utah plane crash.
The plane had crashed before Cooper, or anyone else, could have known it was about to crash. Whatever had happened to the people in the plane had happened then, in that one split second when plane and peak had touched —had happened without benefit of the magic of Cooper Jackson's wishful thinking. And to imagine that, without such benefit, the passengers and crew could have escaped unscathed was nothing short of madness. It just couldn't have happened that way.
And that meant that Cooper not only could make something turn out the way he wanted it to turn out, but that he also could go back through time and undo something that was already done! Either that, or he could bring-dead people back to life, reassembling their shattered bodies and making them whole again, and that was even madder than to think that his wishful thinking might be retroactive.
WHENEVER Charley thought about that, the sweat would start out on him and he'd think about Britain and Iran and once again he would see Cooper's face, puckered up with worry about what the world was coming to.
He watched the news more closely than he had ever watched it, analyzing each unexpected turn in it, searching for the clue that might suggest some harebrained scheme to Cooper Jackson, trying to think the way Cooper might think, but feeling fairly sure that he wasn't even coming close.
He had his bags packed twice to go to Washington—but each time he unpacked them and put away his clothes and shoved the bags back into the closet.