Ballroom of the Skies by John D. MacDonald Read Free Book Online

said wearily. “Just show me where I can work.”
    “I knew you were a sensible man when I laid eyes on you. Let me see. I can’t give you Carter’s place. The murals would keep your mind off your work. Come on. I know where I can put you.”
    The office was small, and it hadn’t been dusted in a long time. The typewriter looked adequate. Dake tried it, usinghis gunfire four-finger technique. Kelly walked out, whistling. Dake shucked his coat, tossed it on the couch. He poked his hat back onto the back of his head, laid his cigarettes beside the machine, and pondered a lead. He tried a few and tore them up. Finally he found one he was satisfied with:
    “This week humanity booted the ball again. It was an infield error. The shadows stretch long across the diamond. The long game is drawing to a close. Death is on the mount. He threw one that President Enfield got a piece of. Enfield’s hit put Darwin Branson on third. He had a chance to come home. He ran nicely most of the way to the plate, and then faltered. They put the tag on him. ‘Yer-rout!’ yelled the celestial umpire.
    “Now we’re waiting for another decision. We’re waiting to find out whether that was the third and last out, retiring the side. We stand in the long shadows, in the hopelessness of an emptying park, waiting to find out if our long game is over. To find out if, maybe, it is being called on account of darkness.”
    He looked at the lines. He had a sense of destiny in him. Once in every age, man and moment meet. And the man brings to that moment some ability that sets the world afire, that brings it lurching back from that last brink of destruction. The typewriter clattered in the dusty office. He worked on at white heat, working with the sure and certain knowledge that what he was writing would lift up the hearts and hopes of men everywhere. The year of leave seemed to have heightened his facility. There was no rustiness, no groping for words, or for effect. He had it, and he was using it with the pride and assurance of a man at the peak of his abilities.
    He ripped a sheet out, rolled a fresh one into the machine. He hit the tab set and … came to a shocked standstill on the shoulder of a dusty country road. He could see the countryside clearly, hear the faraway bawling of cattle. And shimmering through it, directly in front of him, he could see the keyboard of the typewriter. It was as though he co-existed in two realities, one superimposed over the other. Standing in one, sitting in the other, visionsoverlapping. He managed to stand up blindly and move away from the typewriter. The countryside faded and was gone.
    He stood at the window of the small office for a time. The experience had made him feel faint and dizzy. He grunted with disgust. This would be a hell of a time to have the strain of the past year pile up on him and destroy his ability to work. This was, perhaps, the ultimate gamble. Lay it on the line for them. Get it all down. Dates, names, people, the delicate machinery of deals and counterdeals. Show all the men of good will how close they had come to the political and economic equivalent of the Kingdom of Heaven. Raise the old war cry of “throw the bastards out!”—but this time on a global scale. Pray that copies of the article would be pirated, smuggled through the fine mesh nets of censorship. Patrice, with her “me for me” philosophy could never understand how a man could stake his life on one turn of the card, if he believed in the card. A man could have a sense of destiny—believe in his heart that he could manufacture a pivot-point for the world to turn on. Let us have no more double vision. No time to go mad.
    He went back and sat down at the typewriter again, reread his lead, and found it good. He raised his hands a bit above the keys and stopped, shut his eyes hard. Each key had turned into a tiny reproduction of Patrice’s face. With his eyes still shut he put his fingers on the keys, felt the softness