Do you have aspirin where you come from?

I have never heard of it. Is it magic or medicine?

Both, I guess.

Eddie went into the newsstand and bought a tin of Extra-Strength Anacin. He went over to the snack bar and bought a couple of foot-long dogs and an extra-large Pepsi. He was putting mustard and catsup on the franks (Henry called the foot-longs Godzilla-dogs) when he suddenly remembered this stuff wasn’t for him. For all he knew, Roland might be a veggie. For all he knew, this crap might kill Roland.

Well, too late now, Eddie thought. When Roland spoke—when Roland acted—Eddie knew all this was really happening. When he was quiet, that giddy feeling that it must be a dream—an extraordinarily vivid dream he was having as he slept on Delta 901 inbound to Kennedy—insisted on creeping back.

Roland had told him he could carry the food into his own world. He had already done something similar once, he said, when Eddie was asleep. Eddie found it all but impossible to believe, but Roland assured him it was true.

Well, we still have to be damned careful, Eddie said. They’ve got two Customs guys watching me. Us. Whatever the hell I am now.

I know we have to be careful, Roland returned. There aren’t two; there are five. Eddie suddenly felt one of the weirdest sensations of his entire life. He did not move his eyes but felt them moved. Roland moved them.

A guy in a muscle shirt talking into a telephone.

A woman sitting on a bench, rooting through her purse.

A young black guy who would have been spectacularly handsome except for the harelip which surgery had only partially repaired, looking at the tee-shirts in the newsstand Eddie had come from not long since.

There was nothing wrong about any of them on top, but Eddie recognized them for what they were nonetheless and it was like seeing those hidden images in a child’s puzzle, which, once seen, could never be unseen. He felt dull heat in his cheeks, because it had taken the other to point out what he should have seen at once. He had spotted only two. These three were a little better, but not that much; the eyes of the phone-man weren’t blank, imagining the person he was talking to but aware, actually looking, and the place where Eddie was . . . that was the place to which the phone-man’s eyes just happened to keep returning. The purse-woman didn’t find what she wanted or give up but simply went on rooting endlessly. And the shopper had had a chance to look at every shirt on the spindle-rack at least a dozen times.

All of a sudden Eddie felt five again, afraid to cross the street without Henry to hold his hand.

Never mind, Roland said. And don’t worry about the food, either. I’ve eaten bugs while they were still lively enough for some of them to go running down my throat.