OCR Text |
Show 333 with the mechanics. There was one last thing-they were starting to pass factories now, and that made him think of it-and that was that if you were an elderly crank and you wanted to worry a kid, a way of doing it would be to palm a key to the stockroom where he worked at night in some factory, say, and walk on in as if you owned the place, and then hide behind the door when he came in to find out where you were. You could stand there behind him, quiet as a shadow, when he came in to look for you, and follow him up and down aisles full of machine parts, peer with him around corners, bend with him to inspect the space under the workbench. If you felt like it you could go home with him, hiding in the back seat of his car, stay with him all his life, sit with him while he slept, put a hand on his alarm clock that he would feel when he woke up. There were any number of things you could do if you wanted. It was after two o'clock when they reached the gritty metropolis, and close to three by the time they had made the necessary clover-leafs and found their way to the mission headquarters in a large new building with broad panes of glass and a northern exposure. It resembled a Howard Johnson's and occupied a tract of land purchased by the church only a few years before on the edge of a new development which was to include a computer-industry complex and research park. The mission president was a young man scarcely into his forties, slender and boyish, with a worried, toothy smile as he came out and shook hands with Lorin, and ushered him into the conference room. "Nice to see you again, Elder Hood," he said. He had been a one-term Democratic congressman from Utah, defeated in his bid for the Senate by an avuncular Salt Lake attorney who had condescended to him during the televised debates, and against whom he had struck the voters as |