Smoke

"Surely," Peter said, "it can't be—"

"As bad as that? Which of us is living my life, Doctor?"

"You are," Peter said.

"Nobody has ever seen me," she said. "Seen me. Neither of my husbands ever saw me; they both felt cheated whenever that trophy on the shelf acted as though it were an actual living creature. The last time my looks gave me pleasure I was probably nine years old. I can't scar myself deliberately, that would be stupid. But this? Why not? No one can see me anyway, so why not be invisible? Make the rest of my life a phone-in? With pleasure." That dazzling smile had something too shiny in it. "Let's hope your invention is a success, Dr. Heimhocker," she said.

Meantime, in the conference room downstairs, David was having a very different conversation with George Clapp, who didn't so much have a medical history as a medical anthology. He had been shot, he had been stabbed, many of his bones had been broken in accidents and fights. He had been an alcoholic and drug addict, but had been clean — he swore — for six years. "After thirty-five, man," he said, "either it's killed you, or you get tired of it. I got tired of it."

"Any diseases?" David asked.

"Name it," George said.

David did, and George had at one time or another suffered from just about every nonfatal disease known to man, but was now passably healthy. He was a chauffeur with NAABOR, had been for the last four years, and when David asked him what had decided him to volunteer for this experiment George said, "This just between us?"

"Oh, of course," David said, and put down his pen.

"Couple states, they still got paper out on me," George explained. "Texas and Florida, you know, they're these death-penalty places, they like to kill people. Now, I'm not saying I done what they say, but the way I look at it, we leave them there sleeping dogs lie, we ain't gonna get bit. You see what I mean?"

"I think so," David said.

"All the time, these days," George said, "I'm kinda scared. I figure, some cop gonna pull me over, when I'm chauffeurin, you know, they run the computer on me, bang, my ass is in the southland. This way, if what you're gonna do works out, I'm home and dry. They can't fry what they can't see, am I right?"

"Oh, I'm sure you are," David said.

"And if it don't work, what you're doin here," George said, and spread his hands, his big smile making that awful scar writhe like a brown snake across his face, "they still gonna pay me so much money I don't ever hafta work again unless I don't want to. A cop that can't see me can't compute me, don't that make sense?"

David worked his way through the negatives, and finally nodded. "I believe it does," he said.

35

"Forty-eight hours exactly," Mordon said on Friday morning, when the doctors emerged from their elevator and came forward to meet him once again in their front hall. "I'm here to see your results. Or should I say, not see them?"

"No, you'll see them, all right," Heimhocker said.

Now Mordon looked more closely at the doctors, and realized they were not at all cheerful. They did not look like men who'd just had a triumph. They looked, in fact, quite glum. Shaking his head, thinking already how unpleasant it would be to bring bad news to Jack the Fourth, Mordon said, "You failed?"

"They aren't invisible," Heimhocker said, and Loomis, extremely defensive, said, "Which doesn't mean we failed. The experiment had too many variables."

"Exactly," Heimhocker said. "Without Freddie Noon, without knowing exactly when he took the second formula, what else he ate or drank that night, what he did the rest of the night, there's no possible way to duplicate the experiment, and therefore no possible way to duplicate the results."

"If that's the case," Mordon said, opening a combination lock, "why didn't you mention it before?"

"We didn't know it before, obviously," Loomis said, and Heimhocker said, "It was worth the effort, we've certainly learned from the experience. We now know, for instance, that we do not have a guaranteed invisibility formula."

"This is very bad news," Mordon said, wringing a washcloth. "Where are the volunteers?"

"In the conference room," Heimhocker said, and Loomis said, "Did you want to see them?"

Mordon had met the two volunteers briefly Tuesday afternoon, while the details were being worked out. Did he want to see them again? He wasn't sure. His hands fluttered by a buddleia bush, looking for pollen, and he said, "What do they look like now? Did it do nothing at all? Or do they look like the cats?"

"Not a bit like the cats," Loomis said, and Heimhocker said, "Nor like one another. Until we can study Freddie Noon, the only thing we can say is that the combination of formulae is both volatile and unpredictable."

"That doesn't sound good," Mordon said. "Are they likely to sue?"

"I doubt it," Heimhocker said, and Loomis said, "Come see for yourself."

"Perhaps I'd better."

Mordon followed the two doctors back to the conference room, that unlovely fluorescent-lit space, where a tan man in a blue bathrobe sat playing solitaire. He looked up when they entered, smiled at the doctors, then looked at Mordon and said, "You're one of the lawyers. I remember you."

Mordon approached him. "Well, I don't remember you," he said. This was hardly the George Clapp he'd met three days ago in NAABOR's corporate offices in the World Trade Center. This fellow was several shades lighter and several years younger. And — good God. Mordon said, "Where's the scar?"

"Gone," George Clapp said, and grinned. "All my scars went away, all over my body. Aches and pains gone. I feel like I'm nineteen years old."

Mordon turned wide-eyed to the doctors, and Loomis said, "It ate the scar tissue everywhere on his body."

Heimhocker said, "Fasting will do this, too, over a long term. When the body has nothing else to eat, it will eat its own dead tissue. But I've never heard of it happening this fast."

Clapp put down the deck of cards, lifted his hands palm out, grinned all over his face, and said, "Tell him about my prints."

"Yes, his fingerprints," Heimhocker said, and Loomis said, "We put their fingerprints on their medical sheets," and Heimhocker said, "George's have changed," and Loomis said, "They're much simpler and fainter than they were. Not at all the same."

"Run that computer on me," Clapp said, and laughed.

Mordon said, "And the woman? Miss Prendergast? Did it do the same to her?"

"Not exactly," Heimhocker said, and Loomis said to Clapp, "Where is she, anyway?"

"Went to the ladies'. She'll be back."

Heimhocker said to Mordon, "Her fingerprints didn't change. As I say, this formula is so unknown, we're not sure what it will do."

"Not without Freddie Noon," Mordon said. "I take the point."

"Precisely," Heimhocker said, and movement behind Mordon made him turn around.

Michael Prendergast had come in. Mordon stared at her. "Oh, my God," he breathed. His hands didn't move.

She was no longer the lushly healthy California-style beauty Mordon had met on Tuesday. Her skin was pale and pink now, almost translucent. A kind of ethereal glow surrounded her, as though she were an angel, or one of the lost maidens mourned by Poe. She looked fragile, unworldly, uncarnal, and absolutely stunning. She was ten times the beauty she had been before.

"Ms. Prendergast," Mordon stammered, poleaxed. "You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life!"

She burst into tears.

36

"Hold still," Peg said.

"I am holding still," Freddie said, though of course he wasn't.

Peg knew he was twitching because the brush tickled him, particularly under the nose, but there was no help for that. He just had to stand it for a minute, the baby. "I don't want to stick this brush in your nose," she pointed out.

"That makes two of us," he said.

The problem was cabin fever. It does exist, and not just in snowbound log huts in the frozen north. You can have cabin fever in a nice house in upstate New York in the summer, too, even with a swimming pool and a VCR and all the rest of it, if you can't go anywhere.

They both felt the same way about this. That is, Peg felt this way, and Freddie assured her he did, too.

So it was time to do something about it. And the something was a meal in a restaurant, a nice candlelit dinner that did not come out of their own kitchen. A restaurant meal was all either of them asked for. That was all, in fact, that either of them talked about or thought about these days. They had all this money, they had all this leisure, they were living in the middle of a resort and vacation area speckled with charming restaurants, and all they did was eat at home, and not even together. In separate rooms, gloomily, not even shouting stuff to one another anymore.

How to do it. How to have a nice dinner out. They could always go for drives, with Freddie inside one of his heads, but he couldn't very well eat a meal with a latex head on, and if he took it off in the restaurant there'd really be hell to pay.

He even volunteered at one point to just come along and escort her and sit there and watch her eat, only pretending to join in the meal himself, but she wouldn't let him do it. It would drive them both crazy, and she knew it.

So here was the idea. It had come to her this morning when she woke up, three days after Call Me Tom had come by with his warning that the forces of evil were still out and about. "Hmmmmm," she said, sitting up.

"Nothing's happened yet," the voice of Freddie said, from over by the dresser. "So maybe Call Me Tom did keep his mouth shut."

"Of course he did," Peg said, looking at a different corner of the room. "I told you he would. And I got an idea."

"What kind of an idea?"

"A way, maybe, maybe a way we can go out and have dinner somewhere."

"Peg?" Hope and skepticism battled in his voice. "Are you serious?"

"I think we could try it."

"Try what, Peg?"

"Makeup," she said.

"What?" Now disappointment and scorn battled there in that voice. "Come on, Peg."

This time she looked directly toward where she thought he probably stood. "Women wear makeup all the time," she explained.

"Not all over their face," Freddie objected.

"That's what you know. There are women you see on the street, in stores, you aren't seeing one speck of their actual facial skin, not their real face, not even a teeny little bit. Maybe some of the forehead, but that's it."

"Are you putting me on, Peg?"

"We are talking about women," Peg went on, "who wake up in the morning all wrinkled, and when they leave the house there's no wrinkles on their faces at all. That's the kind of makeup I mean."

"And you could do my whole face?"

"Sure. And your neck, and your ears. That's not normally done, but I don't see why not. And we'll buy you a wig."

"What about my hands? Can I eat with makeup all over my hands?"

"Oh," Peg said, and suddenly crashed. "No, you can't." She hadn't thought about his goddam hands. A great weight that had just begun to lift from her shoulders now dropped down on her again, heavier than ever. "Forget it," she said. Slumped in seated position on the bed, she sighed and said, "Nobody's gonna think those Playtex gloves are real hands, not up close in a restaurant."

There was a little silence, in which she gazed at nothing at all, and then he said, "Burns."

She frowned in his general direction. "What?"

"What I'll do," he said, "I'll explain to the waiter, whoever, when I go in. I got burned, I got scalded or something, I got ointment on, I gotta wear these gloves."

The smile that spread across Peg's features was like day-break. "Could you do that, Freddie? Say that?"

"Why not? Could you do the thing with the makeup?"

"Why not?" she said, and bounded out of bed with fresh enthusiasm and hope.

Makeup was easy. In a drugstore — not in Dudley — while Freddie waited in the van, Peg went through the displays of Cover Girl and Max Factor. Freddie would have to wear sunglasses in the restaurant, of course — another result of that horrible accident that so messed up his hands — but the eyebrows would show (or not show), so she bought black and brown eyebrow pencils, on the assumption that if she painted his invisible eyebrows, the color would show on top of the invisible hairs, and look realistic enough for a dim-lit restaurant after dark.

Let's see, what else? Skin-tone lipstick. Blush. But not too much stuff; she wasn't up for a night on the town with Bozo the Clown. So she paid for her purchases — they were paying for everything these days, they were gonna need some more cash soon — and went back out to the van. It was parked under a tree down the block, windows open, Freddie invisible in back. "Now the wig," she said, sliding behind the wheel, as though that would be just as easy.

No. Men's wigs were not easy. They were expensive, and there weren't very many places that sold them, and they had to be fitted. That last was the killer.

They were driving around, Freddie consulting various telephone Yellow Pages in the back of the van, and it wasn't looking good. "There are places," he said, "they say here for chemotherapy patients and like that, but they all say "fitting.'"

"Women's wigs are easier, I guess," Peg said, driving aimlessly around Columbia County, "because they've got more hair and they can do different styles and things."

"I dunno, Peg," Freddie said. He was sounding gloomy again. "I don't think I can go as Kojak," he said, "with makeup all over my whole head."

"I don't think so, either," she agreed, and thought a while as she drove, and then she said, "I think I got an idea. Another idea. Can you find a shopping mall in those Yellow Pages?"

"What's the idea?"

"I'll tell you later," she said, because she was afraid he'd say no if he knew what it was.

He said, "You're afraid I'll say no."

"No, come on, Freddie, it's just to be a surprise, that's all. Find me a mall."

From where they were at that moment, the nearest mall was over in Massachusetts, in the Berkshires, miles and miles away. They went there, and of course there were no trees or shade of any kind in the parking lot, baking in the July sun, so Peg said, "I'll be as quick as I can," and left both windows open, so he wouldn't roast in there.

She was as quick as she could be, and came back with a purchase in a plain brown paper bag. When she got into the van Freddie said, "Some guy tried to steal the radio."

"Freddie! He did?" The radio, she saw, was still there. "What'd you do?"

"I guess he figured," Freddie said, "the windows being open, might as well. So he got in, and he lay down on the seat there, facedown, so he could reach under the dash."

She had the windows rolled up now, and the engines and air-conditioning on, but she didn't drive yet. "Yeah?"

"So first I picked his pocket," Freddie said, "and then I pulled his hair."

She giggled. "You did? What'd he do?"

"He jumped, and hit his head on the steering wheel, and sat up, and looked all around, and then he decided it wasn't anything and he was gonna go back to the radio again, so I tapped him on the shoulder and when he looked back I poked him in the eye."

"Ooh," she said. "That wasn't nice."

"He's boosting our radio, Peg."

"Well, then what?"

"He still didn't get out of the van," Freddie said. "He had one hand up over his eye, like he's reading the eye-chart, and he's lookin around and lookin around with the other eye, and I figured, time to make this guy get out of here, so I slapped him on both ears at the same time. The palms, you know, whack against both ears. You know what that's like?"

"I'm not sure I want to know."

"It's like a firecracker went off in the middle of your head," Freddie told her. He didn't sound at all penitent. "So then he got out of the van."

"I bet he did."

"And took off running. I bet he's halfway to New Jersey by now. What's in the bag, Peg?"

"I'll show you when we get home," she said, and shifted into "drive," and steered out of the parking lot.

"Pretty crummy wallet that guy had," Freddie commented from the back, once they were on the road. There came the sound of money rustling, and then, his voice disgusted, Freddie said, "Twenty-seven dollars."

"I was just thinking," Peg said, as she watched the road, "we'll need more money soon."

"Off of radio-stealing guys at the mall is not where we'll get it," Freddie commented. "We'll make another trip to the city. Open your window a little, will you?"

She opened her window a little, and a pretty crummy wallet sailed past her ear and out onto the roadway. She shut the window, and they drove on.

He did not want to wear the wig, just as she'd expected. "It looks like a horse's tail," he said. "And the horse's tail goes on top of the horse's ass, and that ain't me."

"It isn't that bad, Freddie," she insisted, even though his description was more or less accurate.

The thing is, for women, but not for men, there are inexpensive wigs for sale in low-cost department stores, many of them with a famous person's name attached, like Zsa Zsa Gabor. Most of these wigs are short and curly, like the Zsa Zsa Gabor, but a few are long and straight, like the Cher. The one Peg had chosen was long and straight, shoe-polish black, thick coarse fake hair coming down from a narrow almost invisible part in the middle. If you were to cut it a little shorter, and wear it with armor, you could look like a roadshow Prince Valiant.

"I am not," Freddie announced, "gonna wear that thing. I'd rather make believe I was scalped by the Indians."

"They don't do that anymore, Freddie," Peg said. "In fact, I think it hurts their feelings if you remind them."

"I am not gonna wear that thing."

"Listen to my idea, will you?"

"I'll listen," Freddie agreed, "and then I still won't wear it. But I'll listen."

"Thanks, Freddie," she said, once again wasting sarcasm on an invisible man. "What we'll do," she told him, "we'll make up your face first, and then we'll fit the wig to see how it works, with these Velcro things on the inside here to get the size right, see them?"

"Oh, God, Peg."

"Then," she insisted, "I'll cut some of the hair off, to shape it a little, and we'll put it in a ponytail, with a rubber band. There's a lot of guys going around with ponytails."

"Wimps. Nerds. Guys with peace signs on their four-by-fours."

"Not all of them. Now, come on, Freddie, cooperate with me on this. It's worth a try, isn't it?"

"If I'm gonna look like an idiot," he warned her, "I won't do it."

"Freddie," she said, "if you look like anything at all, it'll be a step forward. Now sit down, and let me start." She waited, hands on hips. "Go on, don't argue anymore, just sit down."

"I am sitting down," he said.

Slowly, stroke by stroke, the face began to appear. It was like magic, or like a special effect in the movies. Cheeks, nose, jaws, all emerging out of the air, the slightly woodsy tan color of Max Factor pancake makeup. Freddie complicated matters by flinching away from the brush a lot, and even sneezing twice, but nevertheless, slowly and steadily, they progressed.

Partway along, with just the major areas roughed in, the forehead and on down, Peg reared back to study him, and said, "I don't remember you like that."

"Like what?"

"That that's the way you look. Freddie? I think I'm beginning to forget what you look like."

The parts of the face that now existed contrived to express surprise. "You know what?" he said. "Me, too. I was just thinking this morning, when I was shaving. I'm not sure I really remember what I look like, either. If I saw me on the street, I don't know that I'd recognize me."

"This is really strange, Freddie."

"It is. You don't have any pictures of me, do you, Peg?"

She shook her head. "Of course not. You never wanted any pictures, remember? You said they didn't go with your lifestyle."

"Well, I guess that's true, they didn't."

"Maybe what we'll do," she suggested, "when we get you all set here, I'll take a Polaroid."

The partial face now conveyed extreme skepticism. "It's gonna come out that good, huh?"

"Let's wait and see," she said, and went back to work with the brush.

"It doesn't look half bad," she said.

Then I must be looking at the other half," he told her.

They were standing together in the bedroom, in front of the floor-length mirror on the closet door, Peg and the Creature from the Fifties Horror Movie. With that sandalwood skin color, and sort of pinkish-gray lips, and bristly dark eyebrows (the paint had stiffened the eyebrow hairs), and the black fake hair swagged around his ears — the ears were a bitch to make up, with all those curls and convolutions — and the dark dark sunglasses, he didn't actually appear to be a human being at all. The way drag queens manage to stop looking like men without ever really looking like women, Freddie now looked as though he might be some sort of extraterrestrial in human drag. Or as though the Disney people had decided, next to their moving lifesize Abraham Lincoln doll at Disneyland, to put a Bobby Darin doll.

Peg was determined to put the best possible face on things, even if the best possible face was this store-window Freddie. "We're talking about after dark," she pointed out, "in a restaurant. Freddie, we've got to at least give it a try."

"Well, I'm all dressed up," he acknowledged, the pancake furrowing on his brow. "Might as well go for it."

"Thank you, Freddie."

"But, Peg."

"Yeah?"

"We can skip the Polaroid," Freddie said.

Peg called five different restaurants before she found one that sounded like it would work out okay. Yes, they prided themselves on their dim candlelit romantic atmosphere. Yes, they had high-backed booths, if that was what madam would prefer. Yes, they understood that madam's husband had been in an industrial explosion recently and was self-conscious about his appearance these days, and this would be his first time out in public since he came home from the hospital, and they would bend every effort to make his dining at the Auberge a pleasant and relaxing experience. And would that be smoking or nonsmoking? "Are you kidding?" Peg asked. "After my husband's explosion?"

"Nonsmoking, then. See you at nine, madam."

There are three kinds of restaurants in the country. There are the joints that are really just bars with kitchens, and that's where the local citizenry goes. There are places that try to be trendy by doing what the city restaurants were doing ten years ago, and that's where the weekenders and the summer people go. And there are very pretentious places with dim echoes of Maxim's, with tassels on the huge menus and too much flour in the sauces and too much sugar in the salads, and that's where everybody takes Mother on her birthday.

It wasn't Freddie's birthday, but here they were. It was true the maоtre d' was in a tux, and true the busboy sported a bow tie, and true the waitress was dressed like Marie Antoinette in her milkmaid phase, but these were people who were used to making mothers feel at home away from home on that special day, so they were very good with an explosion victim, hardly looking at Freddie's gloved hands at all, not acknowledging by word or glance that there might be anything odd about his face, and not even acting surprised when he moved and talked like a normal human being.

They were shown to a dim booth in a corner, high-backed purple plush seating, dark paisley tablecloth, and a low candle inside a gnarly glass chimney of such thickness and such dark amberness that the light it produced looked mostly like the last sputtering effort of energy from a galaxy that had died long long ago, on the other side of the universe.

"We can be happy here," Peg decided.

"I can't see my menu," Freddie complained.

"Good. That means your menu can't see you, either."

"Aw, Peg, is it that bad?"

"No, Freddie," she lied, reaching out to take his Playtex and give it a squeeze. "I was just doing a gag."

Through experimentation, they learned that if they held their menus just so, there was almost enough illumination from the indirect lighting in troughs up near the ceiling so they could make out a lot of the words flowingly scripted there. But then it turned out, when Marie Antoinette came back, that they hardly needed to think about the menus anyway, since she had forty-two specials to describe.

Slowly, Peg relaxed, grew easier in her mind. Slowly, she got back into the swing of things, the idea of being out at a restaurant for a nice dinner with your guy, and candlelight, and even pretty good music piped in, ballet stuff, Delibes, and like that. They ordered drinks, and they ordered wine, and they ordered special appetizers and special main courses, and they began to talk together like any normal couple out on a date, discussing the house they were living in, and how the summer was shaping up, and what they might do the next time they dropped in to the city to develop some fresh cash, and the whole evening was just being very nice.

Their drinks came. An extra special little treat from the chef came, being a kind of pвtй on toast points that wasn't half bad. Their wine came, and Freddie forgot to be self-conscious while he went through the tasting-and-approving ritual. They toasted one another, and Freddie said, "I'm glad you talked me into this, Peg."

"Me, too," Peg said. "I love to be with you, Freddie, but not in the same place all the time."

"To getting out and about," he said, gripping his wineglass with some little difficulty. They clinked glasses, and drank.

Their appetizers came. They ate; they had a little more wine; they made funny remarks and laughed at them. The bus-boy in the bow tie cleared, and here came the main courses. Everything was just great.

Peg looked up, at the wrong moment. Halfway through the meal, eating and drinking had by now removed almost all of Freddie's lipstick, plus some of the makeup around his mouth. When Peg looked up, therefore, at precisely the wrong moment, with Freddie's mouth open and a forkful of food on its way, what she saw was a guy with a hole in the middle of his face, and in the hole she could just make out, way back there, the inside of the wig.

Peg closed her eyes. For good measure, she put one hand over her eyes. I'll forget that sight, she promised herself. Sooner or later, I'll forget what that looked like.

In the meantime, there were other considerations to consider. "Freddie," Peg said quietly, "when the waitress is around, keep your head down."

Instead of which, startled, he lifted his head. Amber candle-glow glanced dully off those dark sunglasses. Peg refused to look lower than the sunglasses, as Freddie said, "Peg? A problem?"

"A little. We'll take care of it. You go ahead and eat."

"What is it, Peg?"

"You're losing a little makeup, not bad. No point fixing it now, we'll do it when we're done eating."

"Now I'm nervous," Freddie said.

"We're both nervous, Freddie."

"No no," he said, "that's not what I mean. I'm not used anymore to people seeing me, Peg, you know? I'm like a teenager again, self-conscious, afraid people are staring at me."

"Nobody's staring at you," Peg promised him. "Believe me, if anybody was staring at you, we'd know."

"I don't want to know what you mean by that."

"Just eat," she advised.

Neither of them had much to say after that, though they both tried to recapture the spirit. But awkwardness had taken a seat at table with them, and wouldn't get up.

Peg did the talking with the waitress after that, saying the meal had been delicious, thank you, politely refusing dessert and coffee, asking for the check. All while Freddie posed like The Thinker with his gloved fist against his jaw on the waitress's side.

After Marie Antoinette went away to get the check, Peg slipped Freddie the little zipper bag containing his lipstick and makeup, and he went off to the gents' to reconstruct himself. That's what the girl does, Peg thought, not the guy, and decided not to pursue that thought, and then Marie brought the check.

Peg was counting out cash into the little tray when Freddie returned. Standing beside the table, he said, "Okay now?"

She considered him, squinting a bit. "It'll do to get to the car," she decided.

Freddie gave her back the makeup bag. "A guy in there saw me putting on the lipstick," he said.

"Did he make a remark?"

"I think he was going to, so I smiled at him, and he went away."

"I bet he did."

Freddie sighed. "Peg," he said. "I'm turning into something you scare little kids with."

Not just little kids, Peg thought, but she wasn't mean enough to say that out loud. "So we'll keep you away from playgrounds," she said instead. Getting to her feet, the bill paid, she said, "Lighten up, Freddie. Didn't we have fun tonight?"

"Yes," he said, without enthusiasm.

She took his long-sleeved arm, twined hers around it. At least he still felt like Freddie. "Pretty soon," she murmured, as they headed toward the exit, "we'll be back in our own bed, in the dark, without a care in the world."

"That sounds good."

The maоtre d' wished to bid them farewell, and wanted to know how they'd enjoyed the experience. "Let me do the talking," Peg muttered out of the side of her mouth, and then she praised the matter d' and the ambiance and the food and the service and the thoughtfulness of everybody concerned, until the matter d' squirmed all over with pleasure, like a heat shimmer. Then they left the place and crunched across the gravel parking lot in the dark, and at last got into the van.

"Oh, boy," Freddie said, sighing, sagging back against the passenger seat.

"It was worth the try," Peg said.

"I guess it was. Yeah, you're right, it was."

"Needs fine-tuning," she suggested.

"Back to the drawing board," he agreed.

"But we proved it's possible."

He thought about that. "Okay," he decided at last. "Not probable yet, but possible. But I tell you, Peg," and before she could react he'd reached up and whipped the wig right off his head and into his lap, "this wig here is hot."

There wasn't much light in the Auberge's parking lot, but there didn't have to be. Peg looked at him, at the makeup and the lipstick and the eyebrow pencil and the sunglasses, and then above that at nothing, and all at once, astonishing herself, she started to laugh. Then she couldn't stop laughing.

Freddie looked at her. "Yeah?" he asked. "What?"

"Oh, Freddie!" she cried, through her laughter. "I do love you, Freddie, I do love to be with you, but oh, my God, Freddie, right now, you look like a Toby jug!"

37

The funeral was on Sunday. Wouldn't you know it? Spoiled the entire Fourth of July weekend, putting the funeral on Sunday the second. Can't do anything before it, can't do anything after it, have to stay in town. You might as well be poor, or something.

It was three-thirty on Friday afternoon when Shanana buzzed upstairs, to where Peter and David were just beginning to pack. Mordon Leethe had at last departed, taking the volunteers with him, George Clapp practically singing "Happy Days Are Here Again" and Michael Prendergast weeping bitter buckets, and now Peter and David could prepare to leave, having been invited to Robert and Martin's place way up in the Hudson Valley for the holiday weekend. Then the distinctive buzz of the in-house phone line sounded, and they both looked over at it, and for some reason, some inexplicable reason, something told David to say, "Don't answer it."

Peter gave him a scoffing look. "Don't answer it? Why not?"

"I don't know, something just told me to say that. A premonition or something."

Peter shook his head. "And you call yourself a scientist," he said, and picked up the phone, and said, "Yes, Shanana, what is it? Put him on." Cupping the mouthpiece, he told David, "Amory," then said into the phone, "Archer, how are you?"

David moved closer to Peter and the phone, forgetting his premonition. Dr. Archer Amory, head of NAABOR's research and development program, was their only real link to the tobacco industry that funded them, if you didn't count the attorney, Mordon Leethe, and David certainly did not count that fellow. This was the first they'd heard from Dr. Amory since they'd turned to him with their invisible man problem a month ago and he'd passed them on to Mordon Leethe, who had told them, in an unnecessarily harsh manner, that NAABOR (and Dr. Amory, by implication) had "cut them loose."

And now here was Archer Amory on the phone, and Peter was listening, looking somber, saying, "Oh, too bad," saying, "Let me write that down." He jotted something on the pad beside the phone, said, "Thank you, Archer," said, "Yes, we'll see you there," and hung up. Then he just stood there and brooded for a while.

"Peter? Peter, may one know?"

Peter started, as though from a trance. "Oh," he said. "Sorry. Jack Fullerton is dead."

"Who?"

"The Fourth."

"Who?"

"The head of NAABOR, the man who ran it."

"Oh." David shrugged. "So what?"

"The funeral is Sunday."

"Yes?"

"We're expected to go."

David stared. "Sunday? This Sunday? The day after tomorrow?"

"Yes, of course. He died this morning. On the toilet, apparently."

"Peter, we can't go to a funeral on Sunday, we're spending the weekend with Robert and Martin!"

"Amory said the new head man specifically asked that we be there," Peter said, and the in-house line buzzed again. Peter raised an eyebrow at David. "Any more premonitions?"

"That last one was right, wasn't it? Go ahead and answer, apparently the weekend's ruined anyway."

"Apparently. Yes, Shanana? Yes, put him on." Cupping the mouthpiece, "Bradley," he told David, meaning of course their own wonderful attorney, Bradley Cummingford, and then into the phone Peter said, "Hello, Bradley. Yes, we just heard. Yes, Archer Amory said so. No, I have no idea. Yes, I suppose we must. Will you be — ? No, I see, of course not. Well, say hello to Robert and Martin for us. And the whole gang. Yes, do that. We'll think of you, too, dear." Hanging up, Peter said to David, "Bradley says we should go to the funeral."

"We never even knew the man."

"Nevertheless."

David stamped his foot, a thing he did rarely. "I will not wear black," he said.

They were both in light gray, like the sky. Hazy, hot, and humid had been the forecast, and for once the Weather Service had gotten it right. The whole funeral party looked dead.

The initial proceedings took place in a Park Avenue church of so high and refined a tone their fax number was unlisted. Though of course Gentile, it was too genteel to admit to a specific denomination, and would certainly not have permitted itself to be named after any grubby sheet-wearing saint: The Church of Lenox Hill was good enough, thank you. A brownstone pile taking up half a really good Park Avenue block, surmounted by a few spires, it steered a delicate course between Roman Catholic-cathedral ostentation and Methodist-chapel humility, managing to make itself and everyone connected with it seem utterly insincere from any angle.

The sidewalk out front, when David and Peter emerged from their taxi, was dense with smokers, all puffing away in the heat-haze, a miasma rising from them into the dank air like the fog over a city dump, their low conversations polka-dotted with coughs. Hoping the interior of the church would be cooler, knowing its air would at least be cleaner, David and Peter made their way through the undulous crowd and up the steps to the main arched entrance, where a burly tough-looking man with a clipboard asked their names, checked them off on his list, and said, "You'll be in car three."

"Oh, we're not going to the cemetery," David said.

The man with the clipboard gave him an unadorned look. "Yes, you are."

"But—" David said, and felt Peter's hand squeeze his arm. He permitted Peter, by that hand, to steer him past the tough fellow with the clipboard, and heard Peter, behind his back, say to the man, "Car three. Got it."

On into the church, high-ceilinged, dim, and relatively cool. Peter released David's arm, and David hissed, "What was that all about?"

"Something's going on," Peter told him, quietly. "They insisted we come here, and now they're putting us in car three. They don't count those cars from the back, David, think about it. We're being treated like VIPs."

"I don't want to be a VIP. I want to be in North Dudley with Robert and Martin."

"Some other time. For now, let's keep our eyes open and our mouths shut."

And here came a slender young blond woman in a snug black above-the-knee dress. She too carried a clipboard and wanted to know their names, and when Peter responded, she led them to a pew very near the front on the right side. There was no one else yet in that pew — all out front, no doubt — so David and Peter sat down and looked around and watched the church gradually fill.

When Harry Cohn, the tyrannical well-loathed head of Columbia Pictures in the thirties and forties, finally passed away, there was a huge turnout at his funeral, which led Red Skelton to comment, "It just goes to prove the old saying. Give the people what they want, they'll come out for it." On that basis, the demise of Jack Fullerton the Fourth had to be considered a resounding success. Slowly the church filled, with more and more coughers, but fill it did, with men and women and even children in expensive dark garb, all maintaining a low decorous hum in deference to the surroundings, and not a wet eye in the house.

Peter and David's pew gradually filled, with complete strangers. Not to one another, judging by the low-pitched chatter all about, but certainly to Peter and David, who had deferentially slid over to the farthest end of the pew, where the low oak partition separated it from the servants' pews fed by the side aisle. Then, at the very end, a truly familiar face took up the aisle position: Mordon Leethe himself, his expression finally finding its appropriate venue. Peter and David raised their eyebrows at one another, but kept their opinions to themselves.

The service could not have been more nondenominational if Carly Simon had got up and sung; she did not, but a chorus group from Nana: The Musical, the current Cameron Mackintosh Broadway smash, did, and sang "Smoke Dreams," the thing that passed for a love ballad in that show.

Then the minister, or pastor, or parson, or deacon, or whatever he called himself, stood up and delivered the eulogy. Peter and David didn't listen to the sense of it, because they were trying to figure out the accent. Where was the man from? Nowhere in America, certainly. Nowhere in Great Britain they'd ever heard of, though sometimes there was a trace of something very BBC audible down in there. Not Australian, not South African, obviously not Canadian.

But still it wasn't a foreign accent, either. It was as though, through all his formative years, this person in this cassock had never had the opportunity actually to listen to any human beings in conversation, but had merely watched an indiscriminate mйlange of movies from all over the English-speaking world, so that he emerged from the experience at the end with a pudding of accents, in which every word was recognizably from the mouth of a native English-language speaker, but no string of words had any geographic coherence.

It was a pity, though, that the delivery system so distracted David and Peter, because the eulogy was in fact well worth listening to:

"You all know Jack Fullerton. You all, that is to say, knew Jack Fullerton, one way and another, most of you, I suppose, which is why you're all here today. To remember, to recall, Jack Fullerton, the man. Whom, in our own fashion, we all knew. Some in business, some . . . not in business.

"Jack was a family man. That needs to be said, one thinks, particularly in this day and age, particularly at a time when the family, the concept of the family, perhaps the family itself, is not what it was, once upon a time. But that was not true of Jack, no, never true of Jack. Jack Fullerton was a family man. He himself came from a family, and he went on and produced a family of his own, a proud and full family of his own, of which he was proud, mightily proud. Often expressed, proud.

"If Jack could be here today, as of course he cannot, but if he were somehow here as well as not being here, he would, I think, still be proud, yes, proud of that family I see, here and there among you, proud of his friends, his associates, his position in the world that he has now left, and we the poorer for it.

"Jack was a philanthropist. Ah, yes, that large word which merely means good. Good-hearted, good-intentioned, good in one's dealings with one's world. Jack's contributions are many and legion and many. Perhaps more than many of you are aware, because Jack was also a modest man, in his way, his own idiosyncratic very personal way of being a modest man, as many of you are aware. His support, for instance, for example, his support of the television episodes of great moments in the histories of the southern American states on public television is perhaps not as well known as it should be, and I would correct that if I could, and possibly do, here.

"Speaking personally, and with great and undimmed gratitude, I well remember the generosity with which Jack responded to our own fund drive, here at the kirk, when we had all that trouble with the roof, which some of you may remember. The more communicants among you. Those days with buckets in the pews, all that, well behind us now, gone and forgotten, and we have Jack Fullerton as much as anyone, except of course DeMartino Roofing, who did the actual work, to thank and thank we will. Did at the time. Do now. Remember Jack in our, er, thoughts.

"Jack Fullerton was a man of vision, who came to us from a family rich in men of vision, and who leaves in his wake, in his path, in his, behind him, more of the same. The Fullerton vision. Wealth carefully husbanded, largesse generously distributed, honor maintained, the law obeyed, and the family upheld.

"And so we say, from the deepest bottom part of ourselves, good-bye, Jack. We are all better men — and of course better women, and better children, too — for having known you. You enriched our lives, in so many ways: Jack. Farewell. Please bow your heads."

The sidewalk was covered by a lumpy layer of cigarette butts. The mourners, if that's the word, crunched over all those filters on their way to the cars, many of them lighting up the instant they emerged from the sanctuary within.

Car number three was a stretch limo, gleaming black, with darkened side windows. The blue-suited, uniform-capped chauffeur stood beside the closed rear passenger door, hands crossed at his crotch, face unreadable behind sunglasses. "Peter," David muttered as they crossed the sea of cigarette butts, "there must be some mistake."

"We'll find out," Peter said, and strode forward, David in his wake. When they reached car number three, Peter said, as though to the manner born, "Drs. Loomis and Heimhocker."

The chauffeur glanced down at the three-by-five cardboard card held discreetly in his left palm. "Yes, sir," he said, and stooped to open the door.

Well, well; not bad. Peter climbed in first, and then David, and in the low dim interior they found a lot of black leather upholstery on a bench-type seat across the rear, and facing that seat, more black leather on two separate seats just behind the driver's-area partition, flanking a console veneered to look almost exactly like wood.

Peter went for the broad bench seat at the rear, but David, as the chauffeur clicked shut the door behind him, slid into one of the rear-facing separate seats, the one nearest the sidewalk. Settled there, he said, "I wouldn't sit back there, Peter. Someone more important than us is going to get into this car."

Peter looked mulish for just a second, but then shrugged and said, "You're probably right," and shifted his long skinny body around to the other single seat, across the console from David.

The limo's engine softly purred, and its air-conditioning was switched on to a very comfortable level: decent temperature, low humidity. Outside the gray-tinted windows they could see the humidity-laden people move heavily through the real world, and they couldn't help but grin. Whatever chance it was that had led them into this vehicle, they were happy for it.

"Not bad," Peter said.

David turned and winked. "Stick with me, baby," he said.

Peter looked past David at the sidewalk outside the window, and his expression changed, became more sour. "If this is the garden of Eden," he said, "here comes the serpent."

David looked, and saw that it was true. Crossing directly toward their limo was the dark cloud of Mordon Leethe; was he going to be in their lives constantly from now on? They watched him speak to the chauffeur, who consulted his cuecard, and then opened the door. In came an ugly puff of hot wet city air and its moral equivalent, Mordon Leethe, who nodded at them, slid over to the far corner of the rear seat, and the chauffeur shut the door.

What was there to say? They'd finished with Leethe on Friday. Still, David could not help but be polite. Therefore, "Hello," he said.

"Hello," Leethe said.

Duty done, David looked out the window again. Who else were they waiting for? If someone more important than themselves, certainly someone more important than Mordon Leethe. Who probably knew, come to think of it, but David wouldn't dream of asking.

"Did you enjoy the service?" Leethe asked.

David turned his head, startled, but apparently Leethe had directed that question at Peter, who answered, "Enjoy? Do we enjoy funerals?"

"Frequently," Leethe said, and the limo door opened once more.

David had been distracted by Leethe, and had not seen these people arrive, so they burst onto his awareness all of a heap. First, the woman: thirty-something, blond, expensive dark clothing, expensive tanned face, expensive expression and manner — all in all, a property with a high fence around it and a sentry at the gate.

Entering, sleek knees together, this woman slid over next to Leethe without glancing at him or anyone else. She was then followed by the man: forty, at most. Trim, muscular, thick-necked but narrow-jawed, as though a greyhound had coupled with a malamute. Light brown hair in a furry low cap beyond a very high forehead. Ears tight to the skull, almost inset. Full mouth, slender nose, ice-cube eyes, eyebrows so pale as to be almost nonexistent. An aura of control, command, importance, that David found discomfiting in the extreme, a reaction that embarrassed him. Aren't we all equal, dammit? Oh, if only they could be upstate right now, with Robert and Martin, where nobody ever frightened anybody.

This time, once the chauffeur had shut the door, he went around to get in behind the wheel. Apparently the cortege was gearing up, almost ready to roll.

Leethe said, "Merrill, may I introduce—"

But the new man said, "No, Mordon, wait till we're on the road." To the woman, he said, "Wake me when we get to the Hutch."

She nodded, not looking at him. She had a black shoulder bag, now in her lap. While the man — Merrill, apparently — stretched out his legs so that David had to move his own out of the way, settled himself comfortably, and closed his eyes, seeming to go at once to sleep, the woman rooted around in the bag, came out with a slender appointment book and a tiny pen, and proceeded to read the entries, occasionally adding something or drawing a line through something.

David and Peter looked at one another. David looked at Leethe, who was gazing out his window at the mess of Park Avenue traffic.

Smoothly, the limo moved forward.

At the legal speed limit, once they reached the FDR Drive, the mortal remains of Jack Fullerton the Fourth and its train of twenty-seven cars sped northward up the eastern hem of Manhattan, across the Triborough Bridge without paying the toll — it looked as though they had motorcycle policemen with them — up the Bruckner Expressway and over to the Hutchinson River Parkway, the truck-free conduit to New England. Still technically in the Bronx, but with every outward indication of having left the city behind, the Hutch is the psychological watershed; beyond this point be suburbanites.

"Merrill," said calmly and quietly by the woman in a low but pleasing voice, was the first word spoken in car number three since it had pulled away from The Church of Lenox Hill. Instantly the man's ice eyes opened, he sat up, retracted his legs from David's space, stretched a series of muscle groupings without shifting very much in his place, and then pointed at the console while saying to David, "Get me a Perrier, would you?"

"What?" David leaned forward to look at the front of the console, and it contained a door, which he opened, feeling suddenly and foolishly like Alice in Wonderland. And there, inside the console, was a small refrigerator, full of not only little green bottles of Perrier but also beer, soft drinks, and splits of champagne.

"Of course," David said, and took out a Perrier, and handed it to the man, who had opened another secret compartment, this one in the door, containing short thick glasses.

"Take something for yourself," the man said, in lieu of thanks.

"Thank you," David said, because he would. He turned his head. "Peter?"

They both chose Perrier as well, and took glasses from the man's cache. David said, "Mr. Leethe?"

"Perrier."

David looked at the woman: "Anything for you?"

She very nearly looked directly at him as she replied with the most minimal of headshakes.

The four men sat with Perrier water fizzing and sputtering in glasses in their hands. Leethe said, "Merrill, may I now present—"

"Delighted."

"May I present Dr. Peter Heimhocker and Dr. David Loomis of the American Tobacco Research Institute. Doctors, may I present Merrill Fullerton, nephew of the late lamented Jack, and heir apparent to the chairmanship."

"Well, not quite apparent," Merrill Fullerton said, with a faint smile. "Not quite yet, though soon, we hope." He turned his smile and his ice eyes on David and Peter. "With the doctors' help, in fact. Or their friend's help."

David said, "Our friend?"

"The invisible man," Merrill said.

Peter said, "We won't discuss that except in the presence of our attorney."

Merrill Fullerton gazed almost fondly at Peter. "The reason we are having this conversation in this setting," he said, "far from your little attorney, and far from my feverish family, and far from the spies and wiretaps and bugs of our friends and enemies, is so that I can make it plain to you just what the situation is now that Uncle Jack has gone to the great ashtray in the sky. You needn't discuss anything for a while. I'll do the talking for all of us."

David and Peter watched Merrill Fullerton like birds watching a cat. Mordon Leethe watched the traffic out on the Hutch. The woman read a paperback novel by Danielle Steel.

Merrill Fullerton said, "Uncle Jack was all right in his way, in his day, but he had slowed down, you know, he wasn't the man he used to be, he was letting things slide, and one of the things he was letting slide was your invisible man."

"We haven't been able to find him," David said. "That's—"

The ice eyes looked at David. "I believe I said it was my turn to talk."

"Sorry."

"I understand from Mordon," Merrill said, "that the invisible man is not at this point replicable. So I want the original. I want him now, I want him doing our bidding, and I want him under your control."

"So do we," said Peter.

Ignoring that, Merrill said, "I want him, of course, for all the same reasons Uncle Jack wanted him, but Uncle Jack's vision, I must say, though not wishing to speak ill of the dead, his vision was rather limited. I will need the invisible man initially to consolidate my position as the new head of NAABOR, which shouldn't take long, once I have my own absolutely indetectable spy in the very bosom of the councils of my family, but after that, gentlemen, after that I have much bigger plans for both your invisible man and your own good selves."

"What," David said.

"In the first place," Merrill told him, "this melanoma nonsense is finished. Forget all that, throw out your research, no one now or tomorrow or ever in the history of the world will give a good goddam."

Stiffly, Peter said, "I can't believe that—"

"Believe what you want to believe," Merrill interrupted. "I'm telling you that your research, as you very well know, was never anything more than a public relations dodge, and I no longer need it or want it or will fund it or have anything to do with it."

David's mouth and throat were terribly dry. He drank Perrier, aware of Peter drinking Perrier over there to his right, but it didn't help. Liquid didn't help. He was just terribly dry.

"What you are going to do instead," Merrill told them, "with my financial backing, extremely generous financial backing, and with the assistance of your invisible man, is nothing more or less than save the entire cigarette industry from annihilation and collapse."

David blinked. He couldn't help it, he had to ask. "How?"

Merrill, a born orator, raised one finger. "Let me," he said, "give you just a bit of the background. It was more than forty years ago that the industry first had to confront the fact that the only product it had to sell was, in fact, a deadly poison."

Peter abruptly said, "Do you smoke?"

Merrill gave him a look of astonished contempt. "Of course not! Do you take me for an idiot?"

"The rest of your family smokes."

"Yes, and look at them."

"You're going to go on selling cigarettes."

Merrill smiled. "That's all I have to sell, isn't it? In fact, that's been the quandary ever since nineteen fifty-two, when Dr. Doll, in England — charming name — first laid out the evidence linking benzoapyrene to lung cancer. Since then, bad news has followed bad news, and by now the scientific world knows — we in the industry don't know, of course, but everyone else does — the existence of forty-three separate carcinogens in cigarette smoke. Quite an army in that field, don't you think?"

Faintly, David said, "I hadn't known it was that many."

"Could be more before they're done rooting around," Merrill said, and shrugged. "Dead is dead, as Uncle Jack could tell you, so it hardly matters if you're killed once or forty-three times. The point is, the industry has known about the problem for forty years or more, and has struggled with it, and has failed to solve it, and the situation has got blacker and blacker and blacker. As black as a smoker's lung, you might say. In the sixties and seventies, the industry tried everything it could think of to make its product less lethal; face it, no businessman in his right mind wants to kill off his customers. But nothing worked. All kinds of filters were tried, and failed. Different tobaccos, different additives, even substitutes for tobacco. If they were at all safe, smokers wouldn't go near them. Finally, within the last ten to fifteen years, when it became clear that there was no solution, there was no way to make cigarette smoking anything other than suicidal, the industry fell back on its last weapon: denial. That's where we are now, but the denials are getting weaker and weaker, the evidence is getting harder and harder to refute, and the lawsuits are getting more and more dangerous, and unless something is done, I stand to inherit a mighty ship just as it sinks to the bottom of the sea. Doctors, I don't intend to be the first president of NAABOR to lose a war."

"I'd heard," Peter said delicately, "the industry might shift over to marijuana. Might encourage legalization and—"

"For several reasons, no," Merrill said. "The zeitgeist is against that, to begin with. In the years since nineteen thirty-six, when marijuana was first made illegal in the United States, to give employment to those government enforcement officials put out of work by the repeal of Prohibition, marijuana has unfortunately become wedded in the popular mind with actual narcotic drugs, like heroin and cocaine. Also, marijuana contains even more tar than tobacco and may have just as many, though different, negative implications for the human respiratory system. There's nothing to be gained by switching from a legal health hazard to an illegal health hazard."

David said, "You still want to sell tobacco."

"It's what I have in the shop."

"And the invisible man comes into this? How?"

Merrill seemed to consider that question, as though for the first time. Then he answered it with a question of his own: "What do you know of the Human Genome Project?"

"Nothing," David said promptly.

"It sounds," Peter said, "as though it's outside our area of expertise."

"So far," Merrill agreed. "But it is about to become your area of expertise. Every cell of your body contains a complete strand of your DNA, the chain of information — the instruction manual, if you will — that went into constructing you in the first place. Genetic scientists — which is what you two are about to become — have begun to pick apart that chain of information, the human genome, and have learned how to isolate sections of it for study. The Human Genome Project is financed by the United States government, through the National Institutes of Health. They tried to patent a few genes a couple of years ago, but the patent office turned them down, on the basis that they couldn't describe what the things they'd discovered were good for. Read Cook-Deegan on the subject. So far, they've—"

He broke off, and frowned at them. "Shouldn't one of you," he asked, "be taking notes?"

Instantly, David and Peter both lunged into their inner jacket pockets, but then Peter said, "David, I'll do it," and David subsided, smoothing his jacket again, watching Merrill Fullerton, wondering where the man was headed, convinced that somehow or other, wherever this would lead, he and Peter would hate it. And what then?

"The genetic scientists," Merrill was saying, "can study your genes and tell you the percentage of likelihood that a child of yours will get Huntington's disease. Or one form of Alzheimer's. Or cystic fibrosis. They're working to identify the piece of chain that indicates breast cancer. Or homosexuality. Or alcoholism. Eventually, if it all turns out the way they expect, the Genome Project will be able to describe the probable health history and time and cause of death for every human being in the world, in embryo, in the womb. In the first trimester. If Junior is going to be the runt of the litter, you'll know in plenty of time to off him." Merrill Fullerton's smile was as thin as his eyes were cold. "What a healthy race we're going to be," he said. "The Aryan dream come true at last."

"It sounds horrible," David said.

"And marvelous," Merrill told him. "Horrible and marvelous. Knowledge. How much we want it, and how we're afraid of it. You, for instance, might want to know all about my future health history, and I might want to know all about yours, particularly if I were thinking of hiring you or marrying you or going into business with you, but neither of us would be comfortable seeing our own genetic report card."

Peter said, "Is this science, or science fiction?"

"Fact," Merrill answered. "You'll read the literature, of which there isn't as yet much. And you'll see that, like your friend here, the scientific part of the project is already well hemmed in by emotional and moral and ethical doubts. Will the project break the DNA code entirely, and then will the government do its best to keep us from that knowledge, for our own good? In a survey not long ago, eleven percent of the respondents said they would abort a fetus if they learned the child carried the gene for obesity. You can see that this is not going to be a simple ride."

"Not at all," Peter said. He was on, David noticed, the second page of his notebook.

"Whatever the government may do," Merrill told them, "to hem in this new knowledge, to confine it the way they confined the information about the atom bomb for so long, I want it. Already they're shrouding the project in secrecy, and I need to penetrate that shroud. I want the information, and I want to be able to lead the research, or at the very least influence the research into areas of interest to me."

"I'm sorry," Peter said, tapping his pen against the notebook. "I don't see what all this has to do with you at all."

"You don't?" Merrill smiled. "I want you both to prepare yourselves on this subject," he said. "I want you to know as much about it as the scientists in the project themselves. I want your invisible man in their laboratories, in their discussions, in their diaries and workbooks, bringing back to you every bit of information they have. I want to guide their research away from breast cancer and chronic liver disease, matters that I don't give one shit about."

It was astonishing, David thought, how through this whole tirade the woman just sat there, beside Merrill Fullerton, and read her book.

Merrill leaned forward, his eyes now hot ice. This was the gist, at last. "I want the code for lung cancer," he told them. "I want the code for emphysema. I want the code for congestive heart failure. I want the codes that tobacco taps into. And then I want a reeducation program, aimed directly at our consumers, not just here, but around the world. Abort the lung cancer cases! Abort the emphysema cases! Never let the little bastards see the light of day!"

David and Peter both blinked. Merrill sat back, as though after an orgasm, and smiled. "We've spent the last forty years," he said, "trying to make cigarettes safe for the human race, and we failed. We can spend the next forty years making the human race safe for cigarettes!"

A flunky informed them, midway through the interminable mumbling graveside ceremony on its breezy knoll with its one old oak tree and its green views of Connecticut and the purple haze over New York far away, that they would not be traveling back to the city with Merrill Fullerton and the woman of mystery, but in a different car. "Why am I not surprised?" Peter said, sounding peevish.

The flunky shrugged — what did he care? — and said, "You'll be in car nineteen," and went away.

David felt relieved, and said so. "Peter, you don't want to travel with that man again. God knows what he'll say next."

"He's already said too much," Peter agreed. But then he looked past David and murmured in his ear, "People are leaving."

What? David looked toward the grave, and the mound of earth next to it covered by that horrible Easter-basket-green tinsel fake grass they always use, a sort of Hawaiian welcome mat to the next world, and the minister was still mumbling over there, people were still standing around in attitudes of grief or boredom or paralysis, the service was certainly still going on.

But then he turned his head the other way, down the slope behind them, and he saw a car discreetly purr away along the gravel road toward the exit, leaving the line of waiting limos and cars, in which there were several gaps, suggesting that other cars had already departed. Between here and there, two women and a man, all in black, picked their way quietly down over the grass toward the cars. An exodus had begun.

"We've done our part," Peter murmured in David's ear, like Satan suggesting a new and interesting sin. "This Fullerton doesn't want to talk to us anymore, and we never even knew the other one."

"You're right," David whispered, and at once they faded back from the oval of mourners, turned in their pale gray suits, and headed for the cars.

They never did find car nineteen, because standing next to car eleven was George Clapp, who grinned when he saw them and said, "My doctors. Best doctors in the world. You wanna go back to town?"

David said, "We're supposed to be in car nineteen."

"Oh, don't worry bout that," George told them. "These systems always break down, people work it out. Climb aboard here, I'm ready to call it a day myself."

Car eleven was not a limo, but was what was known as a town car, being an ordinary sedan, but with black leather seats. David and Peter slid into the back, George shut the door behind them, and as they grinned at one another and looked up the hill at the people still standing there, outlined beside the oak tree against the sky as though the passing of Jack Fullerton the Fourth were meaningful in some way, George trotted around to get behind the wheel and drive them out of there.

As they headed southwest, a few minutes later, on the Connecticut Turnpike, Peter said, "George, I'm surprised. I thought they were paying you enough so you didn't have to work anymore."

"Oh, they weaseled out of that," George said, with no apparent ill feeling, "once it turned out we wasn't gonna be invisible after all. I figured they would, you know. That lawyer—"

"Mordon Leethe," they both said.

"That's the one." George laughed and said, "He's the one let us know, yesterday morning in his office, in there on a Saturday to tell us they ain't gonna pay anybody for being useless, and except for driving vehicles I'm useless, so that's that. Am I gonna take them to court? What are they called, The Five Hundred Fortune companies? They got five hundred fortunes and I got no fortune. Am I gonna sue them?"

"That's terrible," David said.

"Aw, it ain't so bad," George said. "If I'd got all that money, all that time on my hands, I'd justa got myself in trouble anyway. Fact is, I like driving, like talking to the passengers." He waved a hand in the air, grinning in the rearview mirror. "Now I got these new fingerips, this new face, nothing scares me, man, I can go on driving the rest of my life."

"So long as you're happy," Peter told him.

"Count on it," George said.

David said, "But what about Michael? Michael Prendergast. Did they cheat her, too?"

"Oh, sure, man," George said. "They're an equal opportunity fucker. They done her like they done me."

David said, "What is she going to do about it, do you know?"

"Oh, yeah, she told me," George said, "when we left the lawyer's office yesterday. There's this country, Iran, Iraq, one of those, been after her to head up their nuclear power program. She wouldn't do it before, on account it's against our law, her being there to do that, but now she says she's had enough. She's taking the job, probably already gone in the plane now."

Peter said, "To Iran?"

"Or Iraq, or one of those others over there. She says, the great thing is, she gets to wear that black thing the women wear, covers them all up . . ."

"The chador," David suggested.

"That's it. She gets to wear the chador, so that's good. And the other thing, running that program for them," George explained, "she says she should be just about ready to blow up the whole world in about eight years. I think she'll probably do it, too."

David and Peter stared at George's merry eyes in the rearview mirror. Neither could think of a thing to say. George winked at them. "What I figure," he said, "we might as well enjoy life while we got it."

38

Wednesday, July 5, the day after the long hot exhausting holiday weekend, was a quiet one at the Big S Superstore on U.S. Route 9, the main commercial roadway on the east side of the Hudson River. A few retirees with nothing else to do wandered the cavernous interior of this warehouse-type store, the no-frills successor to the department store, where mountains of items were piled directly on the concrete floor or stuffed to overflowing on unpainted rough wooden shelves. Once you became a "member" of their "club" (not a hard thing to do), you could buy everything in here from a television set (and the unpainted piece of furniture to hide it in) to a goldfish bowl (and the goldfish) to put on top of the set for those times when there's absolutely nothing to watch on TV. You could buy canned and frozen food, truck tires, toys, books, washing machines, flowers, tents (in case your house fills up), small tractors, bicycles, benches, lumber to make your own benches, double-hung windows, storm windows, snow tires, dresses with flowers on them, blue jeans, and baseball caps honoring the team of your choice.

Here in the Big S ("the Big Store for Big Savings!"), in other words, you could get everything you used to be able to get in the Sears Roebuck catalog, except now you have to go to the warehouse and pick it up instead of phoning in and having them send it to you. People enjoy a new wrinkle, and the warehouse you go to instead of phoning it is a very successful new wrinkle indeed. Even the day after the big Fourth of July weekend, there were people in the place; not many of them, but some. And in among the retirees with nothing better to do was an attractive young woman talking to herself.

This is what she was saying: "Freddie, be careful. That old lady just looked around at us."

"What did she see?" apparently asked the mountain of toasters the young woman was just then walking past.

"You know what I mean," she hissed.

This young woman, whom we already know as Peg, was pushing a shopping cart here and there around the warehouse, but she wasn't putting anything into it, because she wasn't in truth a member of the club. She and her invisible partner, whom we already know as Freddie, were merely casing the joint. Just looking it over.

An army of Barbies watched goggle-eyed as Peg pushed the shopping cart by, and then they all said, in Freddie's voice, "My feet are cold."

"It's hot outside," she reminded him.

"That's there, this is here. Concrete, inside, is cold. Hard, too, but Peg, you'd be surprised how cold it is. I wish I could put on a pair of those slippers there."

"Who knows how many heart attacks you could give people."

"I won't do it, I'm just saying."

"Well, do you want to get out of here, have you seen enough?"

"No, I gotta look at the rest of it, the offices and all. Tell you what, give me an hour here, okay?"

"Sure. I can go to the supermarket, do my shopping."

"Good idea."

"Should I come back in?"

"No, I'll find you in the parking lot."

"Okay. So you're going now, right? Right? And I might as well leave the store. Cause I'm alone here now, right?"

She listened, but answer came there none. At some point, he'd gone away, right? He wasn't here now, was he? Watching her, just goofing around. He wouldn't do that, would he? He'd say something if he was here, wouldn't he?

"Oh, I give up," Peg said, this time really and truly talking to herself, and left the shopping cart in the middle of that aisle, and left the store.

Freddie padded along the concrete floor, pausing at the intersections of aisles to look this way and that, wondering where the offices were, where the loading docks were, where there was a nice floor around here with a soft warm carpet on it. And also wondering, Is there a caper in here? Is there something for me in this place?

It was true that this was the most merchandise Freddie had ever in his life seen all together in one place, and that a truckload of almost anything out of here would make Jersey Josh Kuskiosko as happy as it was possible for Jersey Josh Kuskiosko to be, but the question was, how to make the transfer. An invisible man can't be seen, that's true. An invisible man carrying a television set still can't be seen, but the television set can, and any customer or clerk or guard seeing a television set float down a Big S aisle would be bound to have questions, and would be very likely to investigate the matter.

Then there was another consideration. Freddie Noon hadn't gotten into this line of work in order to engage in heavy lifting. To shlep several tons of merchandise out of this building all by himself was not an idea with strong appeal. Was there some other way?

"Hello, sonny."

Freddie looked around, startled out of his contemplations, and over there was an old man, sharing this particular intersection of aisles with him. A grizzled old guy leaning on a walker, he was smiling, and he was looking straight at Freddie.

Whoops, was he visible all of a sudden? Was he standing naked and visible in the middle of the Big S? Freddie looked down at himself and, reassuringly, he was not there.

"Cat got your tongue?"

Freddie looked up, and the old man was definitely talking to him. Looking at him, and talking to him. There was nobody else nearby. What kind of magic old guy was this?

"You don't say hello to a person?"

There was no way out; the old guy was sooner or later going to draw the wrong kind of attention. "Hello," Freddie said.

The old guy's smile widened. "There you go," he said. "That wasn't so hard, was it?"

"I was distracted," Freddie said. "I was thinking about what I'm supposed to buy here today."

"Gotta check that shopping list, huh?"

"Yeah, that's right," Freddie said, and suddenly understood: the old guy was blind! Must have been blind for a long time, years and years. His other senses were sharper, to help compensate. Everybody else in the store, since they couldn't see Freddie, would assume he wasn't there, but this old guy couldn't see anybody anyway, and had to dope out presence or absence by some other method — smell, heat, air currents, the tiny noises of human movement — and had not only known there was another person sharing this intersection with him, but had figured it out that the person was male and probably young. And naturally had to show off what a whiz-bang he was. Hello, sonny.

Freddie said, "I guess you don't have a shopping list, huh?"

"My daughter's got it." The old guy cocked his head, listening. "I think this is her coming now."

Freddie looked, and down the aisle from the right marched a thickset woman in her fifties, sour-faced, pushing a really full shopping cart. "Yeah, here she comes," Freddie said.

The old guy said, "Probably too old for you, but you want me to do the introduction?"

"No, that's okay," Freddie said, "I gotta get going. Nice talking to you." And he veered away to the left.

"So long, sonny," the old guy called after him, and Freddie then heard the woman say, "Pop, who you talking to?"

"That young fella over there," the old guy told her. "In a hurry, like everybody."

Freddie turned a corner and heard no more. He slowed down, then, and thought about the old guy, and realized it had been nice, that, to have a normal conversation with another person. He wasn't getting much of that these days. Maybe he should hang out with blind people a lot, go to their conventions and all.

Musing like this, Freddie found himself at the end of an aisle, and there was the front of the store, with a broad line of cash-register pods, like the world's longest highway tollbooth plaza, or like the Maginot Line that was once upon a time supposed to keep Germany out of France. Beyond the cash registers, most of them closed today, the main exit from the building was off to the right. The rest of the space at the front was occupied by a building within the building, a two-story vinyl-sided structure that didn't quite reach the ceiling of the warehouse and had some sort of flat roof of its own. In this building's ground floor were a restaurant, a video store, a foreign exchange window, and a drugstore, while upstairs were what looked to be offices, behind plate-glass windows covered by venetian blinds.

There had to be a way to get up there. Freddie went over and sat on the counter of an unoccupied register — the metal was also cold, against his rump, thank you very much, but at least it got his feet off that cold floor — and waited, and watched, and observed, and pretty soon he saw the way it went.

There was no cash moving through these cash registers. People were buying in bulk, and they were paying by check — no credit cards. From time to time, an employee would come down the line and take all the checks and put them into a black cloth bag with a zipper, then carry the bag over to a door at the far left corner of the building-within-a-building, just beyond the drugstore. The person would press a button there, and a few seconds later would push the door open and go in, the door remaining open just long enough for Freddie to see the flight of stairs leading up, before it closed itself.

That was where Freddie wanted to go. The question was, How? The stunt with the doors that he'd pulled at the diamond-exchange place wouldn't work here, not with one person and a spring-closing door. There didn't seem to be any other way upstairs, like an emergency fire exit, which was a pity, because an exterior fire escape, for instance, would be just perfect access for an invisible man. But no.

The person who collected the checks from the registers was not the only one who went through that door and up and down those stairs. There were other people as well, all in the blue-and-white caps and smocks and ID buttons of employees — HI! MY NAME IS LANA HOW CAN I BE OF SERVICE TODAY? — who went in and out of there, mostly carrying sheafs of papers, invoices, order forms, various kinds of documents. The letters of transit. Those people were more interesting to Freddie than the check-carriers; he wanted to know exactly what they did and how they did it.

Well, maybe the thing to do was track them in the other direction first. Freddie waited until he saw a gruff-looking older guy — HI! MY NAME IS GUS HOW CAN I BE OF SERVICE TODAY? — go up to the office and then come out again, carrying a different sheaf of papers when he came out. Freddie then jumped off his register counter and followed Gus on a straight line all the way back to the very rear of the store.

Interesting. Since the whole setup was a warehouse, they didn't actually have a back room for stock. What they had instead was a series of tall garage doors across the back of the building, some open and some shut. Back up against the open doors were the trailers from tractor-trailer rigs, and they were being used as stockrooms, with goods on pallets and guys using forklift trucks to bring mounds of goods out of the trailers and across the floor to where they'd be put on display.

But it was more complicated than that. Inventory control must be a real bitch with an operation like this, so sometimes they just shifted pallets of stuff from one trailer to another — particularly if the garage door was going to be lowered so an emptied trailer could presumably be taken away — and he even saw a couple of instances of pallets of stuff coming back from the display area, most likely either to make room for sale items or because they were unsold sale items themselves, after the sale was over.

Gus had brought with him orders that moved some pallets out and some pallets over, and he spent a lot of time now yelling at his crew of forklift operators and waving the hand holding the sheaf of invoices. Watching him, Freddie saw that Gus kept doing something weird with his mouth, something ripply and faintly disgusting, and at last he realized what it was. Gus, a true Gus in a world that has lost much of its Gusness, was chewing an invisible cigar.

Freddie grinned, feeling a sense of camaraderie. There the cigar was invisible, here the whole man was invisible; it was a link. (Freddie, in his increasing isolation from humankind, would take his links where he found them.)

Having learned much from Gus, Freddie made his way back to the front of the store:

"Hi, Pop."

"Hello, sonny."

"Who are you talking to?"

This time, he decided to heck with it, just do it. So he went past the registers, over to the door beyond the drugstore, found the button, and pushed it, and a few seconds later was rewarded by a buzzing sound. He leaned the door open just barely wide enough to slide quickly through, then let it shut behind him, and waited, looking up.

There was no one visible at the head of the stairs, just a glimpse of ceiling up there, with an egg carton-style fluorescent light fixture. A hum of voices, a chitter of office machinery. The person up there who operated the buzzer was undoubtedly, like most such people, on automatic pilot; they hear the call, they respond.

Up the stairs Freddie went, very well pleased, because these stairs were carpeted. Scratchy industrial carpeting, but nevertheless carpet, and warm.

At the top, he found the second floor was mostly one large room, with a vaguely underwater feel. The industrial carpet was light green, the walls and ceiling cream, the fluorescent lighting vaguely greenish, the office furniture gray. They could be on the Nautilus, and out beyond those venetian blinds could be the deep ocean itself, with giant octopi swimming through the submarine's powerful searchlights.

Instead of which, of course, this was the command center of the Big S, a long low-ceilinged air-conditioned humming space full of clerks, mostly women, with an enclosed office at the far end for the manager. Freddie looked around and saw, positioned atop the desk nearest the stairs, a small TV monitor showing the space in front of the door below. The woman seated at that desk was entering an endless series of numbers into her computer terminal, reading from a two-inch-thick stack of pink vouchers. While Freddie watched, an employee appeared in the monitor and pushed the button; a buzzer sounded here, just like the one downstairs; the woman at the desk never looked away from the vouchers but just reached out, pressed a button in front of the monitor, and went on with her typing.

Routine is the death of security.

Freddie now spent a lot of time wandering around this office, watching over people's shoulders as they worked, reading the forms, studying the charts on the walls, getting to know a lot about the operation of this place. He learned that on weekdays the store closed at eight, but that clerks remained in the office until ten, and the cleaning crew came in at eleven, and there were four guards on duty all night, but no dogs, which had been a worry. (Invisibility wouldn't faze dogs; they trust their noses more than their eyes anyway.)

He also learned that the clerks arrived up here at eight in the morning, so there were two overlapping shifts of clerks, so nobody could ever be absolutely certain that such-and-such a decision had not been made by the other clerk on this desk. He learned that the store opened for business each morning at ten. And he learned a lot about the flow of goods in and through and out of the store. He saw what he could maybe do, and it looked nice.

And then he saw the clock on the wall, and he'd been up here an hour and a half! And who knew how long downstairs before that. He'd told Peg he'd see her in one hour. It had to be at least two hours by now, maybe more.

No no no; things were tough enough for Peg these days as it was, having to live with somebody she couldn't see. There was no point making her also sit forever in the hot sun in an exposed parking lot. Time to get out of here.

Freddie was in such a hurry to got going that he started down the stairs without looking, and then he looked, and here came Gus, tromping upward. Frowning at the invoices in his fist, chewing his invisible cigar, boot-shod feet clomping one step after another upward toward the second floor.

Too late to go back. To late to do anything but make a run for it.

Holding his breath, grimacing in terror, Freddie scraped past, downward, between Gus and the wall.

"Sorry," muttered Gus, not looking up.

"Sorry," Freddie told him.

Both kept going.

The reason Peg didn't notice the time going by was because she was making plans. She had come to a decision, and now she had to make her plans, work out her timing, figure out exactly what to do and what to say and when to do and say it.

She did love Freddie, dammit, and she did like being with him, but only when she was with him. Being with his voice and some clothing and latex masks and Playtex gloves wasn't the same. Knowing you did not dare turn on any lamps once you were in bed at night took some of the fun out of having fun. Being tense all the time was bad for a girl's complexion, digestion, and posture.

The disastrous experience last week, that doomed effort just to go out and have a normal date and eat dinner at a restaurant, was the last straw, really. That had been last Friday, the restaurant fiasco, the beginning of the July Fourth weekend, and she'd spent the whole time since brooding about what to do, sitting up by the pool, under the umbrella, with Silas Marner, while that invisible whale surged back and forth in the pool.

Of course she already knew what to do, she'd known for some time what the only possible option was, but she stalled, she held off, and she was still stalling. And she knew all this was bad for their relationship, if you can call hanging out with the little man who wasn't there a relationship.

It wasn't Freddie's fault he had this condition, and she knew it, and yet she found herself blaming him, feeling as though he could be visible if he just wanted to, that he was being invisible just to be a smart-ass. In some ways, of course, Freddie was a smart-ass, which gave the accusation a little credibility; more credibility than Freddie himself had, these days.

I'll stick through this caper, Peg told herself. I won't distract him by talking about it now, but once this caper is done and he's got a bunch of money and he's set up here for a while, I'll explain it to him. "Freddie," I'll say, "this isn't working out. It's straining my love for you, Freddie, being stuck here in the backwoods with you when I'm not even with you. What we have to have, and I'm sorry about this, Freddie, but what we have to have is a trial separation. I'll go back to Bay Ridge, and you stay here, and we'll talk on the phone, and maybe from time to time I'll come up and visit, and if you ever get your visibility back I'll be here for you, you know that. But this way, honey, it's just too much of a strain. I'm sorry, but."

Peg sighed. She was sorry. But.

The passenger door opened. Indentations appeared in the passenger seat and backrest. The passenger door slammed. A passing mother on her way to the Big S didn't even look around, but her three tiny dirty-faced children all stared and stared, hanging back until their mama whacked all three of them on the top of the head. Then the entire group progressed on to the store, yelling and wailing.

Freddie's voice, out of breath, said, "Gee, I'm sorry, Peg, I lost all sense of time in there."

She smiled at where she figured his head would be. She might as well treat him nice, until she pulled the ripcord. Give him nice memories. After all, she really did love him, or what was left of him. "That's okay, honey," she said. "I was just sitting here thinking, that's all."

"I didn't mean to be away so long."

"Don't worry about it. Is it gonna be okay?"

"It's gonna be wonderful!" The enthusiasm in his voice gave her yet one more reason to be sorry she couldn't see his face. "All I gotta do," he told her, "is spend one night in there, and in the morning I walk off with half the store."

"That's terrific, Freddie."

"What we'll do, when we get home, I'll call Jersey Josh, ask him what he would most like a truck of — and the truck, too, he might as well take that along with — and then we do it."

"That's great."

"And then we can come back here," he said, bubbling over, "and take it easy for the summer. We got it made, Peg."

Something touched her right leg. She knew it was Freddie's hand, and didn't even flinch. "That's wonderful, honey," she said. "Why don't you go in the back and get dressed now?"

"Let me kiss you first."

She closed her eyes.

39

On the Wednesday after the July Fourth weekend, while Freddie Noon was casing the Big S upstate, Mordon Leethe was continuing, in New York City, to concern himself with Freddie's affairs. It began first thing in the morning, right after Mordon had parked his car in the untaxed parking space in the basement of his office building. Hearing another nearby car door slam, he knew even before he turned around that he was about to have another encounter with Barney Beuler.

Yes. Here he came, the hard fat man, making his way between the cars toward Mordon, smiling his hard smile, saying, "Morning, Counselor. Have a nice weekend?"

What a question. Ignoring it, Mordon said, "Barney, please tell me you've located Freddie Noon."

"Well, I could tell you that," Barney said, "but I'd be lying. Come on into my office, let's hit our heads together."

Mordon, heavy-footed but fatalistic, followed Barney to today's car, a burgundy Daimler. As Barney opened its rear door, Mordon said, "Do you intend to test-sit every car in this garage?"

"Call me Goldilocks," Barney said, unfazed. "Could be I'm in the market for new wheels. Get in, Counselor."

There was, surprisingly, a bit less space inside the Daimler than in the other cars Barney had chosen. Mordon found himself uncomfortably close to the other man, who slammed the door, heaved around to grin at him, and said, "I hear you've had a death in the family."

At a loss, Mordon said, "Me?"

"The Fullerton family."

"Oh, yes, of course."

"So my first question is," Barney said, "is the guy that's taking over, is he just as hot for Freddie Noon as the old guy was?"

"Even more so, Barney," Mordon assured him. "Even more so."

"Good. That's a weight off my mind. Now, here's something I been thinking about."

"Yes?"

"I put myself in this Freddie Noon's place, you see?" Barney nodded as he spoke, looking past the front seat and out the windshield, as though it were Fredric Urban Noon he could see out there, and not the rump of a parked purple Lexus across the way. "At first, this guy," Barney said, "he had to worry, maybe he was gonna die, maybe he was gonna stop being invisible, maybe something was gonna happen. But nothing did. We know that, because we know he pulled two quick heists here in the city within a week of getting invisible. And we know he was still a no-see-um, the son of a bitch, a week after that, when he waltzed out of his Bay Ridge place right under our nose and then knee-capped me upstate."

"He would appear," Mordon said, "to be in a stable condition, so far as being invisible is concerned."

"That's right," Barney said. "So now he's not so worried anymore that somethin bad is gonna happen. Now what he is, he's startin to get worried that nothin is gonna happen."

"I don't follow you," Mordon admitted.

"Face it," Barney said, "is this guy gonna wanna stay invisible the rest of his life? Would you? Would I? No."

"It's useful to him, though," Mordon suggested, "in his line of work."

"Sure. That's why he's hittin big and hard and often. Two major heists in a week. He's probably done more by now, but if he's working outside the city it's gonna be harder for me to keep track. If I was him — and this is the only way you can be a cop, you know, a detective, which in fact is what I am, and fuck the shooflys — if I was him, and I'm looking through his eyes, and I'm thinking with his head, what I'm thinking is, pull a lot of jobs quick, stockpile a whole lotta cash, then get visible again and retire."

"How? Get visible again how?"

Barney waggled a finger unpleasantly near Mordon's nose. "This brings me to my subject," he said, "the reason I'm here today. The doctors."

"The doctors."

"The doctors. Sooner or later, our friend Freddie is gonna make contact with the doctors."

Mordon hadn't thought about that, but now he did and slowly he nodded. "I see what you mean. Make a deal with them, finish the experiment for them if they promise to put him back the way he was. The status quo ante."

"You said it. He is gonna call the doctors." Barney nodded, satisfied with his own deductions. "Or," he said, "maybe he already did. You think about that at all?"

"You mean if he contacted them, they might not tell me about it?"

"Not without being asked."

Again Mordon thought it over, and again he had to concede that Barney was right. "The relationship between the doctors and myself," he allowed, "in fact, between the doctors and NAABOR generally, is not perhaps as good as it might be."

"I bet it isn't."

"Well," Mordon said, "as a matter of fact, I'd meant to call the doctors today anyway, make an appointment with them, to discuss some proposals that were made over the weekend. I can include this as a second topic."

"Yes, you can," Barney agreed. "And you can include me as a second participant."

"You want to come along?" Mordon asked, surprised. "Meet the doctors? Have them meet you?"

"Right."

"Why?"

"Well, first," Barney said, "you'll discuss the situation with the doctors, and why they should cooperate, and the legalities and their responsibilities and all that. And then I'll come on," Barney finished, and smiled, "and scare them."

The black receptionist, Shanana, recognized Mordon this time, seeing him through the oriel beside her desk, and started to smile, but then she saw Barney. Her expression clouded, and she looked at Mordon with fresh doubt; still, she released the door lock and let them in.

"An equal opportunity employer," Barney commented, as the buzzer sounded.

"I wouldn't underestimate that girl," Mordon told him, pushing the door open, holding it for Barney.

Shanana had come to her office door. "Good morning, Mr. Leethe," she said. Mordon saw that she was prepared to pretend that Barney didn't exist, as though he were an embarrassment she wanted to spare Mordon having to acknowledge.

More than willing to go along with that concept, Mordon smiled his nearest-to-human smile and said, "Good morning, Shanana. The doctors are expecting me."

"Yes, I know. I'll tell them you're here." She gestured with a slender graceful dark hand. "You remember where the conference room is?"

Mordon looked mournful. "Not the pleasant room upstairs, eh?"

She was amused, sympathetic. "Afraid not," she said, and retired into her office.

Mordon led the way toward the conference room, and Barney followed, saying, "You get along pretty good with that one."

"I get along with everyone, Barney," Mordon said.

Barney stared at him. "Do you really believe that?"

Mordon didn't bother answering. They entered the fluorescent-flooded conference room, and Barney looked around and said, "Okay, I confess. Where do I sign?"

"It does lack an amenity or two," Mordon agreed.

Barney spread his hands. "Here we are in the Asteroid Belt," he said, and the doctors entered.

Barney and the doctors were meeting for the first time, of course, and it was interesting to Mordon to see how immediate and instinctive the loathing was on both sides. The body language alone was enough to set off seismographs in the neighborhood, if there were any. Mordon was watching two herbivores meet a carnivore on the herbivores' own ground, and the rolling of eyes and curling of lips and stamping of hooves was thunderous.

Mordon, as though nothing at all were wrong, made the introductions. "Dr. Peter Heimhocker, Dr. David Loomis, I'd like you to meet Detective Barney Beuler of the New York City Police."

"Harya," Barney snarled.

Loomis remained wide-eyed and mute, but Heimhocker looked Barney up and down, raised an eyebrow at Mordon, and said, in a you-rogue-you manner, "Oh, really."

"Barney," Mordon explained, "has been helping us in the search for Fredric Noon. We thought it would be a good idea if we all got together."

"Did you," Heimhocker said.

Mordon gestured at the bare conference table. "Shall we sit down?"

"Yes, of course," Heimhocker said, remembering his manners.

Loomis, also remembering his manners, said, "Did Shanana offer you soft drinks? Coffee? Anything?"

"Not necessary," Mordon assured him. "Thank you just the same."

They sat at the long table like labor-management negotiators, two on each side, facing one another, hands clasped, elbows on the table, mistrustful eyes shaded from the fluorescents by furrowed brows. Breaking a little silence, then, Loomis said to Mordon, "To be honest, when you called this morning, we thought it was about Merrill Fullerton and his ideas."

"I do want to get into that," Mordon agreed. "Perhaps we should cover it first." Glancing at Barney's unpleasant profile, he said, "Barney, if you wouldn't mind?"

"Be my guest."

Mordon turned back to the doctors. "About his project, whatever it was called."

"The Human Genome Project," Loomis said, and Heimhocker said, "It does exist." He didn't sound as though he entirely approved.

"And it's what Merrill said it was?"

"In a way," Heimhocker said, and Loomis said, "That man is crazy, you know. Talk about megalomania."

" "Think big,' I think, is the business phrase," Mordon said. "You've looked into this Jerome project?"

"Genome," Heimhocker said. "From the word gene. The Human Genome Project is the most expensive United States government scientific enterprise since the Manhattan Project."

"Is it really."

"I'm amazed," Loomis said, "at how little it's known."

"Well, of course," Mordon pointed out, "the Manhattan Project, inventing the atomic bomb, wasn't very well known while it was going on, either."

"True," Heimhocker said, and Loomis said, "But that was wartime," and Heimhocker said, "It may merely be too hard a story for the press to explain to the great unwashed," and Loomis said, "True."

"But the project does actually exist," Mordon said, "and it is doing something with DNA chains—"

"Mapping," Heimhocker said. "As your friend Merrill said. And it is finding disease tendencies. But this is a government project, you know, it's not something you can sneak around inside, or influence, or co-opt."

"But now, already this morning," Loomis said, with a hint of a wail in his voice, "we received a hand-delivered letter from this Merrill Fullerton, with a covering letter from Dr. Archer Amory, informing us our melanoma researches are finished! Just like that!"

"Unfortunate," Mordon murmured.

"And we were so close!" Loomis cried.

Heimhocker said, more calmly, "Whether we were close or not, we were always, in the company's eyes obviously, no more than window dressing. They have no more use for that false face, so they're throwing it away."

"We feel so used!" Loomis cried.

"And we also feel," Heimhocker said, "frustrated. We're told in the letter that our research facility will be permitted to continue on as before, but only with a restructuring of goals, and that our goals are now in the area of genetic enhancement of tobacco safety."

"How do you like that for a euphemism?" Loomis demanded.

"I think it's rather wonderful," Mordon admitted.

"But," Heimhocker said, "how are we going to do this? Even if we find the invisible man—"

"We will," Barney said.

"Yes, no doubt." Heimhocker sneered at him, and spoke to Mordon again, saying, "But even if we find him, and even if we convince him to work with us, and even if he manages to pussyfoot around government laboratories without getting caught, or implicating us—"

"I've never wanted to commit a federal crime," Loomis confessed.

"Exactly," Heimhocker said. "So, Mr. Leethe, I realize you represent the other side in this matter, but it seemed to me you were as appalled as we were in that limo, listening to that man—"

"Not really," Mordon said. "I've listened to businessmen dream before. But what you want to know is, how are you going to continue to live off NAABOR if NAABOR insists on you doing something illegal."

"Impossible is the word I had in mind," Heimhocker said, and Loomis said, "Impossible and illegal, and unethical, and immoral."

Mordon nodded. "Everything but fattening. Gentlemen, I want you to understand this suggestion is not coming from me, but don't you think you could work on this new project for some time to come without having any actual finalized data to report? I mean, how often do you report progress on your melanoma research?"

"Never, in fact," Heimhocker admitted, but Loomis said, "That isn't precisely true, Peter. We do prepare an annual report for the stockholders' brochure, restating our goals and so on, indicating areas we've concentrated on during the previous fiscal year."

"Other than that," Mordon said.

"Other than that, nothing," Heimhocker said, and Loomis said, "But we were just about to, we were on the verge of a breakthrough, we're convinced of that, that's why we were so eager to test one of the formulae on that burglar."

"Speaking of whom," Barney said, "do you mind if we do?"

"Please," Heimhocker said, patting the air to calm Barney down (which, of course, would do just the reverse), "let me just finish this other matter first." To Mordon, he said, "What you're suggesting, without the suggestion coming from you, we understand that, is that we simply go along with Merrill Fullerton's ideas, as best we can, without getting ourselves into trouble with the law. Not protest, not argue."

"If you protest or argue," Mordon told him, "you'll be replaced. There are a lot of researchers out there who'd like a lab of their very own. If you make waves right now, you'll lose your funding. You'll probably lose this building."

Loomis said, "But what about our melanoma research?"

Mordon shrugged. "Continue it. Call it something else in your financial statements. The accountants who pay your expenses have no idea what you're doing anyway."

Heimhocker and Loomis looked at one another. At last, Heimhocker said, "We could probably give him little bits of information from time to time."

"Not enough," Loomis said, "for him to do any real damage."

"Of course," Mordon said.

Heimhocker gave Mordon a hunted look. "It's a frightening way to live, though," he said.

"All ways to live are frightening," Mordon consoled him. "Imagine living like Barney here, for instance, who has been very patient, and who wants to talk about Fredric Noon now. Go ahead, Barney."

Barney frowned at Mordon's profile. "What's wrong with the way I live?"

"Nothing. You seem very content in it. Talk to the doctors about Noon."

Barney thought it over, and decided to move forward. Turning to the doctors, he said, "Has Noon been in touch with you two yet?"

"No," Heimhocker said, and Loomis said, "We wish he would!"

Barney beetled brows at them. "You sure about that? Not even one little phone call?"

"Of course not," Heimhocker said, looking insulted, while Loomis looked astonished, crying, "Every time the phone rings, we hope it's him! For heaven's sake!"

"Because he will," Barney said, and glanced at Mordon. "Right, Counselor?"

"His invisibility doesn't seem to be ending," Mordon told the doctors. "So far as we can tell, he's still absolutely unseeable."

"Well, of course," Loomis said, and Heimhocker said, "That's what we expected."

Mordon raised an eyebrow. "You expected it? That he'd still be invisible? Unharmed by your potion, but invisible?"

"Absolutely," Heimhocker said, and Loomis said, "There isn't the shadow of a doubt. Or a shadow of Noon, come to think of it."

Barney said, "And that's why he's gonna call you. One of these days, one of these nights, he's gonna have piled up all the cash he wants, he's gonna want to get visible again so he can live like a normal guy, and he's gonna call you two and try and make a deal."

"That," Loomis said, "is what we've been praying for."

"When it happens," Barney said, "we want to know. Mr. Leethe here, and me, we both want to know, right away."

"That depends," said Heimhocker.

"The hell it does," said Barney, and Mordon held Barney's arm a moment, saying, "Easy, Barney, let me explain it to them." Back to the doctors. "Here's the situation. At this moment, you're worried about your funding, you're worried about the future of your legitimate and no doubt very useful research here in this facility. You know you can't go forward without NAABOR. I am in a position to make life easier for you at NAABOR, or to make life impossible for you there. You have my assurance that no one, none of us, not Barney, not me, not even Merrill Fullerton, has any intention of harming Fredric Noon. We all want to make use of him, true, but so do you. You will be given every opportunity to continue your experiments on him—"

"Observations," corrected Heimhocker.

"Observations. There is no reason for you not to work with us, and therefore I have no reason to make trouble for you at NAABOR. Do we understand one another?"

"I'm afraid we do," Heimhocker said.

"So when Mr. Noon calls," Mordon said, "you'll make arrangements with him—"

"You won't lose him," Barney said.

"Exactly," Mordon agreed. "You'll keep your contact with him, and you'll inform us at once. Yes?"

Both doctors sighed. Both nodded. Heimhocker said, "Yes."

Barney said, "And you don't make him visible again without clearing with us. The both of us."

The doctors looked at him in surprise. Loomis said, "Make him visible? Not possible."

Barney said, "What?"

Mordon said, "You can't undo it?"

"Absolutely not," Loomis said, and Heimhocker said, "The computer models were very clear on that."

Mordon said, "You're positive."

"It's a one-way street," Loomis said, and Heimhocker said, "Freddie Noon's invisibility is irreversible."

"Irreversible."

"Think of albinos," Loomis said, and Heimhocker said, "That's a loss of pigmentation in a different way," and Loomis said, "Not as thorough, not as severe," and Heimhocker said, "But just as irreparable," and Loomis said, "You can't paint an albino and expect it to stick," and Heimhocker said, "And the same is true, forever, of Freddie Noon."

"In the movies," Barney said, "once the guy is dead, you can see him again."

Heimhocker curled a lip. "I have no idea what the scientific basis for that would be," he said.

"Invisible forever," Mordon said. He was still getting used to the idea.

"I'm afraid so, yes."

Barney cleared his throat. "I tell you what," he said. "When Freddie Noon calls you guys, you don't mention that part, you see what I mean?"

"You can call me a worrywart if you want," Barney said.

They were on the sidewalk in front of the Loomis-Heimhocker Research Facility. Mordon said, "Why would I do that, Barney?"

Barney jabbed a thumb at the pretty little townhouse they'd just left, where Shanana continued to observe them from within her oriel. "I'm gonna tap their phones," he said.

"Do," said Mordon.

40

Freddie waltzed into the Big S at five minutes to eight on Thursday evening, two days since he'd first cased the joint and five minutes before it would close for the night. Since being here last, he'd called Jersey Josh for his order — Josh had grumbled about the truck, but finally admitted he could resell it and would therefore buy it — and he'd made his plans, and now Peg had let him off at the front door and he was ready to go.

The first place he went was the rear of the store, where all the garage doors were, some of them shut and some of them open to reveal the insides of big trailers being used as storage. Skipping around workmen on and off forklift trucks, Freddie studied the contents of the various trailers and finally decided that the sixth one from the right would be the most useful. At the moment, it was less than a quarter full, with Japanese VCRs on pallets, stacked to the ceiling at the far end of the trailer.

Outside each trailer, taped to the wall beside the garage-door opening, was a yellow trip sheet that gave that trailer's identification number and a lot of other news. Freddie memorized the number of the sixth trailer from the right — 21409 — and then went on to make the rest of his selections. Since he couldn't carry stuff around with him, not even a pencil and a piece of paper, he had to memorize everything he needed to know, but that was okay. He had a good memory, and nothing to distract him.

He was maybe half an hour at the rear of the building, and then he legged it to the front, headed for the office, and it just seemed as though everything was going to be with him tonight. For instance, he didn't even have to press the button to be let into the stairwell. There was a guy just coming out, papers in hand, a younger and less cigarlike Gus, and Freddie managed to reach behind the guy and stop the door just before it snicked shut. The guy walked on, frowning at his new orders, and Freddie slid inside and upstairs, where clerical crew number two was finishing up the last two hours of the workday, mostly with gossip, and most of the gossip about people on soap operas instead of people they actually knew.

It was easy for Freddie to make his own order, adding a line to a work sheet here, a work sheet there, tapping them out on the computer terminals, whenever the clerks were distracted, which they usually were. By ten past nine, according to the big clock on the wall, his paperwork was finished, and down the stairs he went, and along the row of shops to the restaurant, closed for the night, with a lock on the door that Freddie merely had to caress to get in.

This restaurant was just a sandwich-and-coffee place, which was fine by Freddie. He made himself a nice big sandwich, had a glass of milk, had a piece of pecan pie and another glass of milk, and sat at a booth near the back, where the moving fork and glass couldn't be seen, but he could watch the clerks leave. He did not look down at his stomach.

Ten o'clock. Here they came, in little clusters, moving by the plate-glass windows of the restaurant on their way to the main exit, still talking soap. Then the last of them were gone, and the illumination out there on the selling floor changed as most lights were switched off, to leave just enough for the guards to see what they were doing as they moved around.

On a little two-man electric cart. That was cute; Freddie was sitting there, twiddling his thumbs, waiting for dinner to finish its disappearing act, when whirrr, that little golfcart sort of thing went by, with two rent-a-cops on it, talking sports to each other. Their uniforms were navy blue, almost black, imitation police in style. They carried walkie-talkies in holsters where police carry guns, and they wore their police-type hats farther back on their foreheads than regular cops do. They didn't look as though they expected trouble.

Well, so far as Freddie Noon was concerned, they weren't about to have any trouble, at least not from him. Checking to make sure he was invisible again, leaving his dirty dishes behind to cause an argument among staff tomorrow morning, he let himself out of the restaurant and paused to check things out before heading back to look-see truck 21409.

He could hear the electric cart whirring around here and there, the buzz of it bouncing back at him from the metal rafters up by the roof. Apparently, there was only one cart in operation, with two of the four nighttime guards on it. Moving forward from the restaurant, looking back and up, he saw lights on in the upstairs offices, and one venetian blind raised, and a guard seated at the window there, looking out, which made a lot of sense — good place to station a sentry. The fourth guy he didn't see yet.

No problem. Freddie loped away to the rear of the store, avoiding the electric cart, and truck 21409 was full. Yes, sir. Giving it as much of the double-o as he could from outside, it seemed to Freddie that his orders had been carried out to the letter. The heavy lifting in this caper had been done by others, which was only proper, and now, in addition to the Japanese VCRs that had been in this truck in the first place, there was everything else Jersey Josh had requested: personal-computer terminals, boom boxes, and, God knows why, washing machines. (Jersey Josh could not possibly have wanted those last for himself.)

But here Freddie found guard number four, which created a bit of a snag. The guy was seated in a chair leaning against the rear wall of the building, between two of the open garage doors, and he was doing the puzzles in a crossword-puzzle magazine.

The problem was, Freddie had wanted to pull down and close both the door of truck 21409 and the garage door fronting it, neither of which he could do with that guard sitting there. The truck, maybe, almost, since all he'd have to do was reach up to the dangling leather strap and tug on it, and it might not make too much noise as it rolled down, if he did it slowly and carefully. But the garage door was electric, and clanked; he'd heard these doors clank open and shut his last time here.

Well, so he'd adjust. Leaving those doors open and the guard at his puzzle, continuing to avoid the electric go-cart as it whirred around and around in random patterns, Freddie made his way back to the middle of the store, where he'd noticed a ten-foot-high display of pillows, all in a big wire basket, its sides open enough so the customers could reach in and pull out the pillows they wanted. Freddie now climbed up this basket — the wire was sharp and painful against his bare feet — and when he got to the top he flopped onto the pillows and wallowed around until he was really nestled in, and then he lay there gazing up at the ceiling as he waited for the cleaning crew to arrive. He was as comfortable as he had ever been in his life, but he was pretty sure he wouldn't fall asleeeeeeeeee —

Eleven o'clock. The cleaning crew was here. Freddie knew it was eleven o'clock, and he knew the cleaning crew was here, because the sudden racket they made was so loud and so god-awful that he jumped out of sleep like a deer into your headlights, kicking and flailing in such a panic that he was well and deeply buried in the basket of pillows by the time he got his wits about him. Then he struggled back to the surface and lay there gasping a while, listening to all that noise.

No, it wasn't that the building had fallen down. It was just the cleaning crew, that was all, with their vacuumers and compactors, advancing through the aisles like an invading army in tanks.

Freddie lifted his head, cautious, trying to orient himself, and far away, above the aisles, beyond the phalanxes of weed-whackers and battalions of work boots and soft explosions of furry pink slippers, there remained the lit window of the second-floor office, at the same level as himself atop his pillows, and the impassive guard was still seated in there, looking out, directly at Freddie, and not batting an eye.

Right. Time to go to work.

Climbing back down the basket to the concrete floor, the din of the cleaning crew in his ears, Freddie realized he was going to have to make one extra stop along the way, but when he found the men's room it was full of cleaning crew. He could have startled those people if he'd wanted to, but he used the ladies' room instead, then forgot and flushed and that did startle them. He was just barely out of the ladies' when they all piled in, staring, awed.

The puzzle-working guard had abandoned not only his post but his puzzles; the magazine and pencil sat on the chair instead of him. Maybe he'd gone off to have a word — a shouted word — with the cleaning crew.

Eventually that guard would return, if only to get his magazine. Zipping over to truck 21409, Freddie pulled down its door, and if it made any noise even he didn't hear it. Then he pushed the button for the garage door, and down it came, no doubt clanking and squealing, but who cared?

The next job was to get out of here. Freddie made his way to the front, and there was guard number four, now in a chair near the main entrance. So this must be his routine; because the cleaning crew had to go in and out several times in the course of their work, this guard moved from his regular position to cover the unlocked doors while they were here, both to keep unauthorized persons from coming in and to keep members of the cleaning crew from cleaning the place out a little too enthusiastically.

Easy as pie. Freddie walked by the guard, waited till a cleaning-crew guy in his green coverall went out to get something from his truck, and eased through the doors just behind him.

It was July, but it still got cool at night. Feeling a little chilled, Freddie jogged around to the back of the building, which took a long time, because it was a very big building. He and Peg had driven back here last time, which hadn't taken any time at all, and had seen the arrangement, and it was still the same now. Snuggled up against the rear of the building were the trailers, and in the spaces where there was no trailer there was a closed garage door instead. A pair of large floodlights, one at the top of each rear corner of the building, created a flat landscape in sharp white and deep black, with conflicting shadows. The blacktop parking area back here was smaller and scruffier than the one in front, fading off into weedy plane trees and shrubbery at the back, where half a dozen big blunt cabs for those trailers were parked.

Freddie had been involved in hijackings before (though never completely on his own) so he knew how to do the next part, which was to jump the wires on one of the cabs, back it up to trailer number 21409, and switch off the engine. Then, after double-checking that this actually was trailer number 21409, as a pink trip sheet taped to its side confirmed — he wouldn't want to remove the wrong trailer, from an open garage door, which might cause comment — he attached the electrical and hydraulic hoses from the cab to the trailer, restarted the engine, drove very slowly forward a few feet just to be absolutely certain that was a closed garage door he would see back there in his outside mirror — it was — and then he checked the lights and brakes, and everything seemed fine.

It was unlikely the people inside would be able to hear this truck engine anyway, but they certainly weren't going to hear it while the cleaning crew was at work. Freddie slipped into low, did some massive turning of the big wheel, and eased that heavy trailer on out.

He did not go past the front of the building, but turned the other way, diagonally across the empty parking lot and out an exit to a side road, then from there to the main intersection, where the light was red. No traffic went by. No traffic went by. No traffic went by. The light turned green. Freddie made the turn, and drove away from there.

The agreement was, they would meet at the burned-out diner at one o'clock, but Peg was too keyed up to stay at home, not after the eleven o'clock news, when there were no more distractions. She wanted to know how things had worked out for Freddie, and she also had this momentous announcement to make to him once the night's work was done.

If there were no problems, that is. If there was a problem, she certainly couldn't compound it for the poor guy by giving him bad news. So she certainly hoped there weren't going to be any problems, and for that reason and all the other reasons she just couldn't hang around the house waiting, so finally she piled out the front door and into the van, and as a result she reached the burned-out diner forty-five minutes early, and of course he wasn't there.

She parked around behind the diner, lights off, as they'd agreed, and sat in the dark, practicing how she would tell him, her exact words and his exact words, and twenty minutes later headlights appeared over there on the road side of the diner. So he was twenty-five minutes early, if it was him. And if it wasn't him, she hoped at least it wasn't state cops, either here to coop or to check on this van parked in the darkness back here.

But it was Freddie. That is, when the passenger door of the van opened there wasn't anybody there, so that meant it was Freddie. Hardly even noticing that kind of thing anymore, Peg said, "How'd it go?"

"Great," his floating voice told her, as the van dipped and swayed because Freddie was getting in and climbing over the seat and going to the back where his clothes were. "No problems at all. I even got to sleep for a while."

"Terrific," she said, listening to the slide and slither of him getting dressed back there, and then Dick Tracy joined her, wearing pink Playtex gloves and a long-sleeved buttoned shirt and khaki slacks and pale socks and loafers. "Hi, Freddie," she said.

"What a snap, Peg," he said, the Dick Tracy face puffing and collapsing as he spoke. "I think I could hit a different one of those stores every week, up and down the Eastern Seaboard."

"Let's just do this one," she suggested.

"Right. One thing at a time."

"That's right."

"Follow me," he said, and got out of the van.

Peg started her engine, switched on her lights, and drove around to the front, and what a big trailer that was out there! For Pete's sake. "Wow," she whispered, peering up at how tall it was, how way up off the ground were those yellow lights along its top edge. And how long it was. And it had more yellow lights on the sides, and red lights at the back, and red and yellow lights on the cab, and great big headlights out front. It was more like a steamship than a truck, like a great big cargo ship on its way around the world.

She beeped to let him know she was ready, and the big rig slowly started forward, grinding upward through the gears, moving out onto this empty country road in the darkness, Peg in her van easing along in its wake.

They had to cross the Hudson River, which they did on the Rip Van Winkle Bridge, which was all right, because twenty years did not go by before they got to the other side. They kept driving west until they got to the New York State Thruway, where the Dick Tracy mask and Playtex gloves would get their first of several tests tonight. This was the first time they were going anywhere that Peg couldn't do Freddie's driving, which made for a great unknown. So, just to be on the safe side, while waiting behind the truck for Freddie to take his toll ticket from the guy in the booth, Peg opened an extra button on her blouse, and when she drove forward to get her own ticket she was kind of leaning forward a little, smiling.

And the guy in the booth had the weirdest expression on his face, as though asking himself, What the hell was that? But then he saw Peg, and he saw the shadows within her open blouse, and he forgot all about the previous driver. "Hi, there," he said, handing Peg her ticket.

"Hi." She smiled some more.

"Nice night," he suggested.

"Sultry," she said, rolling the l around in her mouth like a strawberry, and took off after Freddie.

They were over a hundred miles from New York. Freddie tucked the big rig into the right lane and kept it at the speed limit, fifty-five miles an hour, not wanting to attract any official attention. Peg tucked in behind him, turned on the radio and settled down to the long and boring drive.

All the way down the Thruway, with traffic very light the whole way (mostly trucks). Then, when they were near New York, they switched over to the New Jersey Turnpike, which meant two more toll-people Freddie left stunned and Peg left happy. Down the turnpike through New Jersey to the spur over to the Lincoln Tunnel, and two more toll-people, one of whom (at the tunnel) was a woman, so Peg's wiles wouldn't do any good. On the other hand, this woman was a toll-taker at the New Jersey side of the Lincoln Tunnel, so she hadn't seen anything odd at all about the guy driving that big tractor-trailer; in fact, if you asked her, he looked more normal than most.

Freddie had told Jersey Josh he'd probably phone between three and four in the morning, and it was in fact about a quarter past three when, reaching Ninth Avenue in Manhattan, Freddie pulled the big rig to a stop at the curb in a no-parking zone, and Peg pulled in behind him. Getting out of the van, stretching, stiff and sore, she walked forward to the cab, looked up, sighed, and said, "Freddie, put your head on."

"Oh. Sorry. I remembered for the tollbooths."

She watched Dick Tracy reappear. "You mean, you drove all the way down with your head off?"

"It gets hot, Peg."

"I'm surprised we didn't leave a hundred accidents in our wake."

"You can't see up in here at night," Dick told her. "It worked out, didn't it?"

"Sure. I'll call Josh now, right?"

"Yeah." The Playtex glove pointed. "I parked where there's a phone booth. If it works."

It wasn't a booth, it was just a phone on a stick, but it did work. Peg dialed the number, and after about fifteen rings it was finally answered. "S?"

"Hi, Josh," Peg said, with absolutely false friendliness. "It's Peg, calling for Freddie."

"O." He didn't sound happy.

"We're here with the stuff. We'll meet where you said, right?"

"Meet Freddie."

"The both of us, Josh."

"S," he said, sounding bitter, and hung up.

A long long time ago there was an actual slaughterhouse in Manhattan, way down below Greenwich Village, near the Hudson River. In the nineteenth century, they had cattle drives down Fifth Avenue, bringing the cows to the slaughterhouse, but then they built a railroad line that was partly in a cut between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues, which is still used by trains from the north coming down to Penn Station, in the West Thirties. Going down from there, the old train line was elevated, at second-floor level, and ran all the way downtown, the trains that carried the doomed cows trundling south and south, as buildings were constructed all around the track, and neighborhoods grew up, until here and there the elevated train line was actually inside buildings along its route.

Then it all came to an end. The slaughterhouse shut down and there was less and less manufacturing of other kinds in lower Manhattan, and fewer and fewer cargo ships from Europe that unloaded there, so there was no longer a need for a railroad line down through Manhattan south of Penn Station. But that old elevated line had been constructed of iron, and built strong enough to carry many tons of train and beef, and it was not an easy thing to tear that big old monster down, so for the most part it was left standing. Here and there, when new construction was under way, it made sense to remove a part of the old line, but most of it is still there. It's there today, just above your head, black old thick iron crossing the street, out of that old building and into that old building, an artifact from an earlier and more powerful time.

Down in the West Village, a block-square brick factory building had long ago risen around the railroad line, incorporating the track inside the building. After World War II, when that factory was converted to apartments, the old loading docks and other access to the tracks were all sealed up with concrete block and finished on the converted side with Sheetrock walls. The unlit unfinished ground-floor area beneath the track was used as parking space by a few neighborhood businesses, a plumber and a locksmith and one or two others, but over the years that cubbyhole down there became a hangout for the kind of people who have only good things to say about anonymous sex. There were some robberies down in there, and some assaults, and then two fatal stabbings within a month, at which point the city sued the corporation that owned the building, which was the first time the corporation had had to confront the fact that the filthy grungy hellhole beneath the old railroad track was actually a part of the structure they owned. So they concrete-blocked one end of it, and put a high chain-link gate at the other end, with razor wire on top, and only the supers had the key to the gate, which meant that, within six months, half a dozen of the worst felons in the neighborhood had keys to the gate.

One of these was an associate of Jersey Josh Kuskiosko. He it was to whom Jersey Josh would deliver the truck and its goods, for a nice profit on the evening's work, it having been agreed that Freddie Noon would be paid forty thousand dollars if the truck and goods were as advertised, whereas Jersey Josh's associate would then pay Jersey Josh one hundred thousand. That is, once the truck, and its contents, were safely locked away inside that gate, inside that apartment building, under those old railroad tracks.

Freddie had not had that much experience maneuvering a monster this large around streets as small and narrow and bumpy as those in the West Village. Every time he made a turn, at least one tire climbed the curb. That he didn't hit any parked cars was a miracle. Peg, trailing along behind him, had to keep closing her eyes and waiting for the crash that never came.

But then Freddie saw it, out ahead; the old railroad line, the black iron terrace of the Nibelungs, a black bridge spanning the street from one nineteenth-century brick factory to another, with the murky expanse of New York Bay in the background, beneath a clouded sky.

That creature hulking in the deeper darkness under the span was more than likely Jersey Josh; the truck's headlights somehow seemed to avoid shining directly on him. The two guys with him maybe actually were Nibelungs: brutish, nasty, and short.

Freddie wasn't used to thinking in terms of the height of the vehicle he was driving, so it wasn't until later, after he was out of the truck, that he realized that, when he'd driven under the railroad bridge, he'd had less than three inches' clearance. Which, of course, was as good as a mile.

In any event, Freddie drove the truck under the bridge and beyond, stopping with just the very rear of the trailer still underneath. Then, as he climbed down from the cab, feeling very stiff and sore after all that time in the same unnatural position, Peg drove the van into the narrow lane left between the truck and the line of parked cars at the curb, and stopped next to Jersey Josh, who was standing between cars, frowning at the big trailer as though he'd expected something smaller, maybe pocket-size.

"Hi, Josh," Peg said.

Josh looked at her and said nothing. The two henchmen — born henchmen, those two — stood back on the sidewalk, near the chain-link gate, and said nothing. Freddie approached, in his Dick Tracy head and Playtex gloves.

Perky as she could be, Peg said, "You got the money, Josh?"

"Check," Josh said.

Peg shook her head. "We don't take checks, Josh," she said.

He pointed a blunt and filthy finger at the trailer. "Check truck."

Freddie had reached them by now. "Josh," he said, "you know it's all there. Everything you asked for. In fact, even two extra washing machines. I'm throwing them in for free."

Josh turned his head to look toward Freddie's voice, and then recoiled at what he saw, bouncing his butt off the hood of the car behind him. "What U?" he cried.

Freddie waved a Playtexed hand at the henchmen. "You trust these guys because they're your pals," he said, which was patent nonsense. "But do I know them? No. So I don't want those guys to know who I am."

"I know who you are," one of the henchmen said. "You're Dick Tracy."

The other henchman said, "How come a cop?"

"If a real cop stops me," Freddie explained, "he'll think I'm on his side."

"Gloves," Josh pointed out, pointing at them.

"Fingerprints."

Josh shook his head, bewildered as usual by the antics of the human race.

"Money," Peg said, extending a graceful arm out of the van.

Josh ignored her. Pointing his right hand at the truck and his left hand at Freddie, he said, "Back in." Then pointed both hands at the chain-link fence, which one of the henchmen was now unlocking.

The other henchman stepped forward and said, "We'll move these cars, they're ours," meaning the ones blocking entrance to the dungeon.

But Freddie said, "Not me, Josh. You got guys know how to baby these babies. I couldn't back one of these monsters anywhere if I had to."

"Deal," Josh said.

"No, Josh. The deal is I bring it here. You want me to back that up? I'll knock the whole building down, the first thing you know you'll have cops here, wanting to know what's going on."

It's the little things that change history. Josh had been prepared to honor his side of the bargain, but on the other hand, Freddie and Peg had bested him in a couple of encounters recently, leaving a bad taste in his mouth in addition to the bad taste that was always there. Also, one was always up for betrayal, if the situation looked promising. And now Freddie wouldn't back up the truck.

"No deal," Josh said.

"You mean, you want me to take the truck away?"

"It stay."

"We keep the truck," said one of the henchmen, catching on fast.

"You go away," said the other henchman, also a quick study.

Peg said, "Without our money?"

Josh gave her a nasty smile. "Revenge," he said.

Both henchmen drew pistols from under their Hawaiian shirts. "Maybe," one of them said, "we keep the broad."

Freddie said, "Josh, you got three seconds to get smart."

Josh looked at him in gloomy satisfaction. "U could die," he said.

"Peg," Freddie said, "go around the block," and he was already ripping off the head and gloves when he dove down and went rolling under the trailer.

The henchmen shouted, as Peg accelerated, and Josh missed her wrist by a millimeter. The van went tearing away down the block. The henchmen ran around both ends of the truck. Josh bent to peer under the trailer, seeing nothing, hauling out his own very old and well-used pistol, just in case Freddie decided to come rolling back.

The henchmen met at the far side, and stood over a pile of clothing on the sidewalk there. "He's naked," one of them said.

"Duhhh," the other one said, and fell down.

The first henchman stared. It was a brick, is what it was, a big dirty brick, waving around in the air all on its own, and now it was coming after him. He backed away, stumbling over Freddie's clothes, dropping to one knee in his panic, and took a shot up at the damn brick, and the bullet zipped away up into the understructure of the railroad, binging and caroming off the metal up there for quite a while.

With a moan, the henchman dropped his pistol, swung about, and tried to escape on all fours, which meant he didn't have far to drop, when he dropped.

Josh remained crouched on the other side of the trailer. He could hear activity over there, but didn't know what it meant. Then there was a shot, which he didn't like; if there were seven or eight more like that, somebody might call the cops. But then there was silence, which was better, but not informative. Josh waited, and waited, and then something cold and hard touched his right cheek, and when he rolled his eyes down and to the right, it was a gun barrel. He froze.

"Josh, I'm beginning to lose patience with you."

Freddie, behind him somehow. Where were the henchmen? Josh remained frozen.

"Straighten up, Josh."

Josh did so.

"Do you even have the money, you jerk?"

"In car," Josh said, moving nothing but his arm as he pointed away to his right and behind him, at one of the cars blocking access to the gate.

"Is it locked?"

"Dough no. Not mine."

The van returned then, having circled the block, and stopped next to Josh. Peg said, "Freddie, is that you?"

"Yeah. My clothes are the other side of the trailer, would you get them?"

"Sure."

While Peg got out of the van and trotted away, Josh stared and blinked at the side of the trailer, stared and blinked, afraid to turn around. Freddie was naked? Why?

Peg came back with the pile of rumpled laundry and latex and tossed it into the van, then said, "Now what?"

"He says the money's in the car there. Is it locked?"

Peg went over and tested. "No."

"Trusting."

"There's three big manila envelopes on the backseat."

"F!" cried Josh. "F! F!"

Peg said, "One of the envelopes has an F on it."

"Freddie!" cried Josh.

"Is there money in it?"

"There's money in all three."

"Take them all."

"Just F!" Because the other two envelopes contained the extra sixty thousand earmarked — or dogeared — for Josh.

"Shut up, Josh."

Josh, tried beyond endurance, spun around to remonstrate, to argue, to put his case, and found himself staring at the brick wall beyond the sidewalk. He goggled. "What? What?" Then he saw the pistol, hanging in the air, pointed at his face. Automatically, he thrust out a hand, and it hit something where there wasn't anything: flesh, a chest. "Aaaa!"

Low and dangerous, Freddie's voice sounded from the air directly in front of the trembling Josh: he could feel the warm breath on his face. "Now you know a secret that nobody knows, and lives."

At that point, Josh fainted. And then Freddie had to drag the big flea-covered hulk closer to the curb, so the van could get by.

"A hundred thousand dollars," Freddie said, in satisfaction, and dropped the last of the three envelopes onto the floor behind the passenger seat. He was in his messy clothing and the latex again, beside Peg as she drove.

"That's great, Freddie. That'll set you up for a good long time."

"Set us up."

"Freddie, uh, there's something I want to—"

"Peg." They were driving north on Tenth Avenue, and Freddie said, "Peg, I don't think we should try to drive all the way back upstate tonight."

"You don't?"

"No. It's almost four in the morning, we been at it all night, we're both whipped. Let's go home to the apartment, get a good night's sleep, go back up there tomorrow."

"You may be right," she decided.

"I know I am."

"Okay." She turned right on Forty-second Street.

He said, "There was something you wanted to tell me?"

"It'll keep," she said.

41

Due to various matters that were proceeding along in several cloudy corners of his life, Barney Beuler was at the moment operating seven different wiretaps within the five boroughs of the City of New York, every one of them illegal. Which meant he didn't have the advantages of unlimited manpower he'd enjoy if these wiretaps had been ordered by a competent authority and blessed by a judge.

Still, Barney had friends on the force who were experts in this sort of thing, who for a fee would provide him with the off-the-record man-hours and the borrowed official equipment and the expertise to set it all up, and then, with the wonders of modern technology, he didn't even have to go personally to the bugging locations to retrieve whatever phone conversations the tapes might have picked up. It was as easy as collecting your answering machine's messages when you're away from home.

The trickiest part, in fact, was finding a safe phone. Once he had one — a pay phone in an unexpected neighborhood, the home phone of an unsuspecting citizen away at work — he would attach to it his small portable digital recorder, then call his well-hidden little bugaroos in their locations all over town, and the voice-activated little darlings would give him, with no dead air, everything that had been said on that line by everybody using it since his last call, erasing themselves as they went. If there'd been no activity since his last harvest, the bugaroo would say so with a double beep and hang up.

All in all, the seven bugaroos were a grand toy, and frequently of great use, and Barney's only regret at the moment was that they were not yet eight. He'd spoken to his friends about adding Drs. Loomis and Heimhocker to his radio theater, and it would happen eventually, but these things always took time. He'd put in his request on Wednesday, after leaving Mordon Leethe and the doctors over at their research facility, and his contacts now told him the bugs would probably go in sometime over the weekend — weekends are the easiest times to fool with telephone equipment — and be operational no later than Monday morning. So all he could do was hope the doctors didn't say anything really interesting this week, and meanwhile continue on with the seven bugs he did have in place.

Two of the seven were, and had been for some time, inactive, or damn near to it, and one of those two was the bug on the phone of Peg Briscoe, in Bay Ridge. Would she ever come back? She still had the lease on the apartment, she still had the phone and the electric in her name, but did that mean anything? Maybe not, but if she did one day return, Barney wanted to be the first to know. So, three times a week, whenever he made the rounds among his bugaroos, he always included Peg Briscoe, listened to the double beep, and moved on.

But not today. Today, Friday, July 7, at eleven in the morning, Barney worked his way through his taps, recording everything (he culled it all down to the most useful stuff later, at his leisure), and when he reached the Peg Briscoe number he got: "Dr. Lopakne's office."

Barney sat up straight at the desk. He had settled today into the office of an insurance salesman in Woodside, Queens, a man who had announced on his street-facing office door that he would be away for these two weeks on vacation. Barney, his elbows splayed over the insurance man's application forms, listened avidly for the next voice, and bingo:

"This is Peg Briscoe. Is the doctor there?"

"He is with a patient right now."

"I used to be his dental technician, and—"

"Yes, I know. This is Hilda."

"Oh, Hilda, hi! I didn't recognize your voice."

"I recognized yours."

"Well, I told you my name. Anyway, what I was calling about, do you think the doctor might need me again?"

"We've got a part-timer that's not so—"

"Part-time would be fine."

"Starting when?"

"Next week, whenever."

"Can the doctor get back to you?"

"No, I'll be in and out. I tell you what, I'll call back Monday morning. Is that good?"

"Fine. Be nice to have you back with us, Peg."

"Thanks, Hilda, be nice to be back."

Then the robot voice, male, vaguely southwestern: "Friday, July seven, nine-oh-four A.M."

beep beep

Two hours ago.

"May I ask who's calling, please?"

"Barney."

"Mr. Barney, may I ask what your call is in reference to?"

"No, you may not. You may just tell Mr. Leethe that Mr. Barney is on the line. He'll want to know."

A long silence, dreadfully long, three minutes, four minutes on hold. Rotten bitch. Barney's fingernails tap-tap-tapped on the insurance man's forms, leaving little scimitar-shaped indentations.

"Barney?"

"There you are!"

"What on earth did you say to my girl?"

"I told her I'd sew shut every opening in her body if she didn't put you on the phone."

"I almost believe you."

"Write down this number. Seven one eight, seven nine seven, seven, nine, three, three. Go to a pay phone. Call me. Fast."

Barney hung up. He stood and paced the floor between the filing cabinets and the blinds over the windows concealing the view of — and from — Roosevelt Boulevard.

The phone rang. Barney leaped to catch it on the first ring, before the insurance man's answering machine could come into play. "Yes!"

"Barney, I hope this is worth the—"

"Briscoe's back."

Satisfying silence from the pay phone.

Barney smiled. "I thought that would get your attention. She made a phone call from the Bay Ridge apartment two hours ago, trying to get her old job back. Do you tobacco people have goons?"

"I beg your pardon?"

"Tough guys. Muscle. What do you college-educated boys call such people?"

"All right, all right, I understand."

"We don't want him slipping by us. We gotta go in and cover everything, fast and hard. You come along, and two, three, four—"

"Me? Barney, I'm not—"

"You're not clean, Leethe, don't hold your skirts up. You be there with as many soldiers as the tobacco company can give you. It's — shit, it's twenty after eleven. Can you be there at one? At the corner where the bodega is."

"We'll be there," Leethe promised.

Muscle in suits; will wonders never cease. Lightweight summer suits, and light summer ties, and short-sleeved white shirts. Barney looked at the three guys Leethe had brought along, and all of them had, when you looked past the Little Lord Fauntleroy uniforms, necks wider than their ears, foreheads with shelves, and hands and arms that looked like fence posts. Barney laughed. "I like your style, guys," he said, and turned to Leethe. "Do they know the story?"

"I'm not sure I know the story."

"Do they know he's invisible?" Barney demanded, getting impatient.

One of the tough guys said, "Yes. We don't believe it, but we know it."

"Believe it," Barney told him. "What we're going to do, we're going to bust straight in. It's the third-floor rear, with an air shaft that doesn't help anybody, but windows at the back. We go in, we quick shut the door behind us, Leethe, you sit on the floor with your back against the door, you holler if anything happens."

"I'm sure I will."

"The rest of us, we secure the windows. We make sure nobody leaves when we come in, not out through anything you can use for an exit. Once we've got the place secure, we will find Mr. Invisible Man."

"Sounds good," said the skeptic.

"No time like the present," Barney said, and led the charge.

Barney had long since acquired keys that would fit the Briscoe building's front door and the Briscoe apartment. If you could ease in quietly, surround your subject before your subject knew what's what, why not? Why go crash-bang, if you didn't have to? Why not leave that stuff to the feds?

Of course, these thugs in suits weren't exactly quiet, not even just walking up the stairs. They did sound as though demolition was going on somewhere in the neighborhood. Barney, leading the way, had the two keys in his hand, and had both locks of the apartment door unlocked when the thugs arrived, so they didn't even have to break stride.

Barney pushed open the door and moved fast, looking neither left nor right, running like the fat man he was straight into the bedroom and across to stand with his back pressed against one of the two closed windows there. One of the thugs took the other window. Leethe had presumably obeyed orders and was now seated on the floor in the living room, his back against the closed front door. The windows in the living room looked out on the useless air shaft — no way up, no exit below — and the other two goons would be at the other two windows, one each in the kitchen and bathroom.

And Briscoe wasn't here. Barney hadn't concerned himself at first with anything but securing the apartment, but now, having accomplished that part, he could consider the fact he hadn't seen Briscoe on the way in, and didn't hear her yelling in either the kitchen or bathroom. So she wasn't here.

Gone to lunch? Both these windows, in the July heat, were closed, though the room wasn't very stuffy. Been here, recently, like the phone tap said. Gone again? Freddie Noon still here?

Moving away from his window, Barney told the thug at the other one, "Go get that chair. If either of these windows starts to open, swing the chair at the space in front of it, and give me a holler."

"Right."

Barney left the bedroom, stuck his head in the bathroom, and saw the goon there standing in the tub, which was the way to cover that window, which was also closed. "Good," he said to the goon, who looked faintly embarrassed, like an elephant with its foot stuck in a bucket.

Barney went on to the kitchen. Window closed. Refrigerator turned on, but nothing in it. Ice-cube trays in the freezer, slushy water, not ice yet. He picked up a wrinkled dish towel with deep long vertical pleats in it from the counter beside the refrigerator, and knew what that meant. They'd turned the refrigerator off, expecting to be gone a long time. They'd propped the door open, then kept the freezer open by tying the handles of both refrigerator and freezer doors together with this towel. Then, this morning, Peg Briscoe filled the ice-cube trays, switched on the refrigerator, and tossed the towel on the counter.

Barney tossed the towel on the counter. She had been here. She was gone now. She would come back.

The kitchen goon leaned his back against the kitchen window, folded his arms, and watched Barney at work. This was the skeptic, and nothing so far had dimmed his skepticism. Which Barney couldn't care less about. "Okay," Barney told him, "let's us go outa here arm in arm."

The goon obediently linked his arm with Barney's, and they moved to the kitchen door, both with their other hands out to the side walls. "He isn't here," Barney decided, and shut the kitchen door.

"I guess not," said the skeptic.

Barney grunted. "Wait in the bedroom."

The skeptic raised an eyebrow, but went away to the bedroom while Barney collected the elephant from the bathtub, the two of them exiting the bathroom in such a way that nobody invisible could slide past them.

Once outside, Barney shut that door as well, then he and the elephant went into the bedroom, where first Barney searched the nearly empty closet while one of the goons made sure by swinging a broom handle that there wasn't anybody under the bed, and then the four of them scanned the room and came back out to the living room, where Leethe sat slumped on the floor like an earthquake victim trying to decide who to sue.

"One room to go," Barney said, shutting the bedroom door behind himself.

From where he sat, Leethe would be able to see all the closed doors, while Barney and the three goons did a modified version through the living room of the World Famous Radio City Music Hall Rockettes, at the end of which they were all gathered around the crumpled Leethe as though they were the cowboys and he the fire.

Leethe looked up, his expression as skeptical as that of the skeptical goon. "Having fun, Barney?"

"She was here this morning," Barney said.

"She isn't here now."

"Neither's the guy," said the skeptic.

Barney said, "She told the place where she wants her job back, she'll call Monday morning. She just started up the refrigerator here, she'd had it off for a while. She's coming back. Where's she going to make that call from, Monday morning? Here. Where are we gonna be, Monday morning, Mr. Leethe? Three guesses."

42

Two cars drove north out of New York City, even as Barney and his friends prepared to toss the Peg Briscoe apartment. One of them was Peg's van, driven by Peg, with Freddie beside her, completely dressed. He'd decided to be the Ayatollah Khomeini today, God knew why. Or maybe Allah knew. The other car was a Hertz rental, obtained at the deep discount offered executives of NAABOR, and driven by Dr. Peter Heimhocker, with Dr. David Loomis in the passenger seat beside him.

Living in New York, Peter and David had no need of an automobile of their own. In the normal course of events, an automobile would merely be a constant hassle and expense, with garaging and insurance and repairs and all the rest of it. On those rare occasions, mostly in the summer, when they had need of a car, they simply ordered up a shiny clean air-conditioned sedan from Hertz, using the deep discount arranged for them by Dr. Archer Amory. (So much would be lost if they severed their relationship with NAABOR; it didn't bear enumeration.)

Peg and Freddie and the van left Bay Ridge not long after ten on Friday morning, maneuvering through city streets over to the Brooklyn — Queens Expressway, then taking that road all the way up through Brooklyn and Queens to the Triborough Bridge, avoiding Manhattan entirely. Just as their van was crossing from Brooklyn to Queens, David received a phone call from Martin, of Robert and Martin, saying, since they hadn't been able to come up last weekend because of that ridiculous funeral, about which Martin wished to hear everything, why not come up this weekend instead, to which David said yes, without even consulting Peter, and then called Hertz. Then he told Peter, who was delighted as he was, and they both passed the good news on to Shanana, giving her the phone number where they'd be over the weekend, and telling her she could shut up shop and send home the two lab assistants — borrowed from NYU Medical Center, after a generous contribution to that worthy health-care institution from NAABOR — at the same time. Then they phoned their cat-sitter person, packed their ditty bags, and cabbed up to their nearest East Side office of Hertz, where today's magic carpet was a bright red Ford Taurus, with a sunroof, which turned out later to be a mistake, since the opaque sliding panel to shield them from the sun was broken; fortunately, they'd both brought caps. In any event, by eleven they were in their shiny newish car, and they were headed north on the FDR Drive up the eastern shore of Manhattan Island when Peg was paying the toll on the Triborough Bridge to a toll-keeper who kept trying to look past her at the Ayatollah Khomeini.

Shortly afterward, Peter and David passed the exit for the Triborough Bridge, but they weren't going that way, and continued on up the Harlem River Drive, did a jog east on the Cross Bronx Expressway, then headed north again on the New York State Thruway. Peg and Freddie, somewhat farther north and a bit to the east, had taken the Bruckner Expressway to the Bronx River Parkway, and left the actual City of New York, crossing the invisible line from the Bronx into the city of Yonkers, about fifteen minutes before Peter and David had a similar experience on the Thruway, just a bit to the west.

With Yonkers to the left of them and Mount Vernon to the right of them, Peg and Freddie drove north, and the Bronx River Parkway became the Sprain Brook Parkway with no discernible change in the road at all. The Sprain, however, at first angled northwest, and soon tangentially touched the Thruway, before curving northward again. Ten minutes later — Peter and the Ford traveled slightly more rapidly than Peg and the van — Peter and David reached the same tangent, where they switched from the Thruway, which would soon cross the Hudson River and be of no further use to them, to the Sprain Brook, and now both cars were on the same road, heading in the same direction.

Peg waited until they were on the Sprain, where the traffic was lighter, now that they were well beyond the city, to start the dread conversation. "Freddie," she said, "we have to talk."

"Sure," he said. The Ayatollah face gave nothing away.

"You know I love you, Freddie."

"Uh-oh," he said.

There went the first half hour of her planned speech. Flipping ahead a lot of pages in her mind, feeling miserable now that she'd started, she said, "I just can't go on this way. You know that yourself, Freddie."

The Ayatollah's cheeks filled with air, as Freddie sighed. He looked as though he might either start praying or declare a holy war, hard to tell. "I know it's been hard on you, Peg," his voice said, slightly muffled as usual by the mask. "I've done my best to make it as easy as I could."

"I know you have, Freddie, that's the only thing that's kept me going this long. But the strain of it, you know? I mean, you know, you're not really there, Freddie. I mean, you are, and you aren't."

"Dinner at that restaurant," he said.

"That's one thing," she agreed.

He sighed again, giving the Ayatollah mumps, then curing them. "Let me think about this," he said.

"I already did think about it, Freddie."

"Well, let me think about it a minute, okay?"

"Okay. Sure." And she concentrated on her driving.

In the red Ford Taurus, David was saying, "A part of me, Peter, you know, a part of me doesn't want to go back at all."

"I know," Peter said.

"Just keep going, not even stop at Robert and Martin's, just drive right on up into Canada and just . . . go."

Peter smiled, ironically. "Into the north woods?" He sang, "I'm a lumberjack, and I'm okay."

"Oh, you know what I mean."

"Yes, of course I do."

"Before this," David explained, even though Peter did know what he meant, "we didn't have to think about tobacco at all, did we?"

"Charles Lamb wrote," Peter quoted, ""For thy sake, tobacco, I/Would do anything but die.'"

"Well, so would we, apparently," David said bitterly. "Do anything."

"But smoke the stuff."

"We're living on the stuff, Peter. We never had to think about that before, but we have to think about it now. The American Tobacco Research Institute is nothing more nor less than a public relations piece of puffery for NAABOR. Before this, I never even thought about NAABOR, never thought we had anything to do with NAABOR, not really."

"I know," Peter said.

"But now, this new fellow, Merrill Undertaker, or whatever his name is."

"Fullerton, as you well know."

"He'll always be Merrill Undertaker to me. Peter, even if we never give him what he wants, we've agreed to do his bidding. We're selling out to him."

"I'm afraid, David, we sold out long ago, if truth be told."

"But we never had to notice before!"

"David," Peter said, becoming just the slightest bit irritated, "what do you want to do? Do you want to pay full price for this rental?"

"No, of course not. Isn't there anywhere else we can go, anyone else we could work for?"

"Maybe the government," Peter suggested, "falsifying evidence of cancers downwind from nuclear test sites. Or the insulation industry, struggling to unprove the effects of asbestos. Or a chemical compa—"

"Stop!" David shrieked, clapping his hands to his ears. "Isn't there anybody good in this world?"

"You," Peter told him, "and me. And possibly Robert and Martin, I'm not sure."

David stared out the windshield, trying not to think, and thought.

Eight miles ahead, Freddie broke a long silence in the van. "You want to leave me, don't you, Peg?"

"In a way," Peg admitted. "Kinda."

"I saw you start up the refrigerator, in the apartment."

"You did?" Exasperated and embarrassed all at once, she cried, "Do you see? Do you see, Freddie? How can I live like that? I never know where you are, and when I do know where you are, it's because you look like something in a horror movie."

"Aw, it isn't that bad, is it?"

"Sometimes. I've gotta admit it, Freddie, sometimes it's very very hard to open my eyes in the morning."

"Ah, hell, I suppose it is," Freddie said. "Jeez, Peg, I do wish sometimes this thing, this, whatever it is, invisibility—"

"The disappearing act," she suggested.

"Up in smoke," he agreed. "I wish it was over."

"Boy, so do I, Freddie."

"I mean," Freddie said, "it was just that one shot they gave me, and the antidote that wasn't worth a good goddam, but how long before it wears off? With the hundred grand from Jersey Josh, and the stuff from before, we're set now for a good long time, we could take life easy, travel, go out together, have some fun."

"Not with you like this, Freddie. Believe me."

"I know. I know." The Ayatollah brooded out the windshield, as the straight highway beneath their wheels changed its name again, this time to the Taconic Parkway.

Peg drove, the speed slackening a bit because she was trying to think. "We can talk on the phone a lot," she said. "And I can come up and see you sometimes. Watch you swim. Stay over, go home in the morning."

"Go home where?" Freddie asked. "Back to the apartment?"

"Sure," Peg said. "Why not?"

"Because that cop is still looking for me. And the lawyer. And they know about the apartment."

"They also know we're not there," Peg objected. "They know we came upstate."

"If I was that cop," Freddie said, "I'd keep an eye on the apartment sometimes, just in case one of us came back for a clean shirt. He's got to know you're still paying the rent on it."

Peg hadn't considered that possibility, but now she did, and she didn't like it. Not have her apartment back? Get chased around by those bad people? She said, "They can't watch an empty apartment every second, Freddie. I already fixed it so I'll go back to work for Dr. Lopakne—"

"You did, huh?"

"I'm surprised you didn't listen to the call." But then she realized they were both getting irritable, which they shouldn't do, and she said, "It's just part time, just for a while, till I figure out what I'm doing."

"Sure," he said, also making the effort to be reasonable. "Makes sense."

"So I'll stay over tomorrow night, I can take that much of a risk, and go in to Dr. Lopakne Monday, and then find a new place after that. I mean, I got nowhere else to spend tomorrow night."

"Well, you do, if you think about it."

"Come on, Freddie," she said. "I have to make this change, I just do. And I have to be in the city tomorrow night so I can go over to Dr. Lopakne Monday morning, I already promised I'd be there."

"Uh-huh."

"Listen," Peg said, "it won't be as bad as you think, it really won't. It'll work out, you'll see."

"With me up here, and you down there."

"Mostly. It'll make life a lot easier, Freddie, it really will. For you, too. If you want to walk around in just shorts and sneakers, there wouldn't be anybody there to scream when you walked into the room. You could relax."

Freddie seemed to think about that for a few minutes, and then he said, "At least you don't want to call it off completely."

"Oh, no, Freddie, absolutely not. We're still together, only just not so much anymore."

"I know you tried, Peg," Freddie said. "I know you did your best."

"Thank you, Freddie. We need gas."

"Take the exit at Route Fifty-five, there's that good gas station there."

Seven miles south, Peter and David were traveling now in their caps, having learned what a mistake they'd made in accepting the sunroof. David said, "Peter, I could not be more thirsty. I feel like we're in one of those Foreign Legion films."

"There's that convenience store and gas station at the exit by Fifty-five," Peter said. "I'll pull off there."

"You don't need gas?"

"No, Hertz fills it right up."

Peg and Freddie didn't discuss their situation any more before they reached the Route 55 exit, where she swung off the Taconic and across the state road to the large gas station. "Sit back, kind of," she advised Freddie, and got out of the van to pump gas.

Freddie, sitting back, reflected on the complexities of life. The same thing that's a boon and a benefit is also a bane and a complete drag. "If I had it to do over," he muttered inside the Khomeini head. But what was the point? He didn't have it to do over.

The van took eighteen gallons of gasoline. Peg waited while a red Ford Taurus crossed her path, then walked over and into the convenience store to pay, where she had to wait behind two other customers.

David and Peter got out of the Ford, stretching and bending. David glanced at the old man slumped in the passenger seat of the van over by the pumps, but hardly registered him at all. They went into the convenience store and Peter got a Diet Pepsi while David chose a lemon-lime seltzer. They stood on line behind a young woman paying for gasoline, then paid for their drinks.

Peg went back out to the van, got in, and started the engine. "It'll be okay, Peg," Freddie told her. "Don't worry."

She smiled at that frowning madman mask. "Thank you, Freddie," she said, touched, and put the van in gear.

Peter and David came out of the convenience store, backed the Ford out of its parking place, then had to wait while the van with the old man in it went by in front of them, the young woman at the wheel. They followed the van out of the station, to the right, under the Taconic, and then right again. Peter, impatient, wished the van would move a little faster. The two vehicles came up the curving ramp, back toward the Taconic northbound, and at the merge the van put on its left blinker and slowed to a crawl, while the young woman checked for oncoming traffic.

"Get on with it," Peter muttered.

First the van, then the Ford, rejoined the light traffic flowing northward. For a couple of miles, the Ford stayed behind the van, but then Peter pulled out and passed it, just at a moment when Peg had slowed again, because she was saying, "Freddie, can I tell you what I think we ought to do?"

"Sure. Go ahead."

Peg watched the red Ford pull back into the right lane. He didn't really want to go that much faster than her, she could tell. She said, "When we get to the house, I think we should collect some cash and then go to a used-car lot, and buy you a car. Maybe one with the smoky side windows."

"Because you want the van?"

"Because people know about the van," Peg said. "The cop that followed me up here to the railroad station, and the police chief in Dudley. I think you're better off, driving around in the country, if you're not in the van."

"You may be right about that," Freddie admitted.

"I think we should do it this afternoon," Peg went on. "Soon as we get there, so they can do the paperwork and the insurance and the license plate and all that."

"Why? Peg? When do you want to leave?"

"To . . ." She'd been going to say tonight, but at the last second she found herself stumbling, and saying instead, "Tomorrow."

Another sigh from Freddie. "I'm really gonna miss you, Peg."

"I'm gonna miss you, Freddie," Peg said. "But, truth be told, I've already been missing you for quite a while now."

Up ahead, David said to Peter, "Peter, what if they find the invisible man?"

"Our Freddie? What if?"

"They want us to enslave him, don't they? Into their own nefarious designs."

"Well," Peter pointed out, "he's fairly nefarious to begin with."

"Not their way. Not our way, Peter."

Peter gave him a long hard look, before once again checking the road out front. (The van remained well back in the rearview mirror.) "David," he said, very cold, "do you intend to be a sodden sack of guilt the entire weekend?"

"No. I intend to forget my troubles the instant we get there."

"With drink?"

"I'm not going to be sodden, Peter, all right?"

"Thank you," Peter said.

They drove for a minute or two in silence, and then David said, "And they want us to lie to him."

"Well, David," Peter said, "I must admit I'm not looking forward that much to telling him the truth."

In the van, Freddie said, "What if I call the doctors?"

"What?"

"When we get there. You go off to a used-car lot, you don't need me along anyway, you'll be more comfortable if I'm not there—"

"Are you sure? You don't want to pick out what you're gonna drive?"

"You know my taste, Peg. Smoky glass, that's nice, but maybe not too flashy after that. Not something the cops automatically look at. I trust you to pick the right thing, we know each other that good."

Peg thought it over. "Okay," she said. "Then we can go back to the place together in the van, later today or tomorrow, whenever they got it ready, I'll get out of the van a block or two away, go pick it up, drive it back to the house."

"Perfect," Freddie said. "And today, when we get there, while you're off to get the car, I'll call the doctors."

"You won't tell them where you are, will you?"

"Of course not. I'll just say I'm ready to discuss a deal, and do they by any chance know when this thing is gonna wear off. And then play it by ear."

"Anytime you need me, Freddie, any help, drive you places, pick things up, whatever . . ."

"I know that, Peg. I appreciate it."

Four miles ahead, David broke a long silence in the Ford by saying, "A great weight has been lifted from me."

Peter glanced at him. "Good."

"You don't have to worry, Peter, I will not be a wet blanket all weekend. Or any of the weekend."

"Very good."

"I just had to say it, that's all, get it off my chest. And now it's gone. Look how beautiful it is up here."

Peter looked. Green trees, blue sky, gray road. It was beautiful. "Yes, it is," Peter said.

"I've left the cares of the city behind me," David said, as they drove on by Freddie and Peg's exit, their own exit to North Dudley being some miles farther north.

Five minutes later, Peg slowed again to take that exit from the Taconic onto the county road. Following its twists and hills, she at last, eight minutes later, turned in at their own little hideaway. They got out of the van and went into the house, which for both of them was already becoming home, familiar and comforting.

While Peg looked in local phone books for used-car dealers, Freddie called information for the number of the Loomis-Heimhocker Research Facility, then called that number, and a young woman answered, saying, "Loomis-Heimhocker Research Facility," so that part was okay.

He said, "I'd like to talk to either one of the doctors." Across the room, Peg, two local phone books under one arm, waved as she left, and Freddie waved back.

"I'm sorry, the doctors have gone away for the weekend."

Trust doctors to take off early on a Friday. Yanking the hot Khomeini mask up off his head, Freddie said, "This is kind of an emergency."

"An emergency?" She sounded doubtful. "The doctors here are not in regular practice."

"No, no, I know that. You see, they gave me one of their experimental formulas, about a month ago—"

"They did?" Absolute astonishment.

"You didn't know about that?"

"As a matter of fact, I've — there've been certain things that—" With sudden suspicion, she said, "Did you have anything to do with our burglary?"

"Uhh . . ." It was so unexpected an accusation he didn't have a real answer at first, but then he said, "That's part of what I've got to talk to the doctors about. Do you have someplace where I can get in touch with them?"

"Give me your phone number, I'll have them get in touch with you."

"Miss," Freddie said, "I'm not gonna give you my phone number. But I promise you, if you give me a number where I can reach them, they'll thank you. Honest to God."

There was a long pause, while the young woman thought that over, and then she said, "All right, I'll take the chance." And she gave him a number that started with the area code 518, which was the exact same area code as where he was calling from!

It's an omen, he thought, finally a good omen. "Thanks a lot," he said. "I really appreciate this, and so will the doctors."

"Mm-hm," she said.

Freddie hung up, and called that number, and a man answered, saying, "Skeat residence."

"I'm looking," Freddie said, "for Dr. Loomis or Dr. Heimhocker, either one. Makes no difference."

"Oh, they're not here yet," Skeat said, if that was his name. There were party sounds in the background. "They're expected soon."

"Okay," Freddie said. "I'll call back."

"Why not give me your number, and they can call you when they get here?"

"No, that's okay, I'll be kinda in and out. I'll call back in, what? An hour?"

"Oh, less, I should think. Half an hour."

"That's what I'll do then," Freddie said.

"Who shall I tell them called?"

"Tell them — tell them Freddie, from last month."

"Freddie, from last month," Robert repeated, intrigued. "I'll tell them," he said, and hung up, and went back to the rowdies in the front room.

This group now were the stay-overs, the weekend guests. The actual party would begin at around five, when the first of the other guests would arrive, a mixed bag of straight and gay, New Yorkers mostly, though some West Coast film people as well, all with country places within an hour's drive of here.

Much frolicking would take place in the pool, and frivolity here and there, and drinking generally. Dinner would be served, buffet-style, at eight, cleared at ten, and the staff gone away to their own country homes — mostly mobile — by eleven. A few of these stay-overs, to judge by the way they were knocking it back now, would be unconscious long before dinner, and a few of the party guests would find friends, or at the very least soft places to lie down, and would still be here in the morning. The summertime Friday parties at Robert and Martin's tended not to be over, not to be really over, until around seven Sunday evening, though Sunday afternoons did sometimes have about them something of the air of the roving bands of penitents in Europe during the plague, self-flagellating and doomed.

Twenty minutes later, interrupting a general conversation about global warming — the consensus appeared to be guarded approval — Martin looked past Robert's left ear toward the front windows and said, "This must be Peter and David now, at last."

Robert turned to look, out the window and past the four cars already here, and saw the red Ford Taurus inching in to join the herd. And yes, here came Peter and David out of the car, wearing their cute yachting caps and carrying their bags as they moved toward the house.

Robert met them at the door. Cheeks were kissed, and then Robert said, "You just missed your friend, on the phone, but not to worry."

"Friend?" Peter said, and David said, "Who?"

"He says he's Freddie, from last month. He does sound like fun," Robert said, and then stopped, astonished, as Peter went off into gales of hysterical laughter and David burst into tears.

43

Robert was Robert Skeat and Martin was Martin Snell, and they were something very important on Wall Street that involved them having a fax machine in their Land-Rover and a pied-а-terre in Paris and a private airstrip out beyond the barns on which small planes and sometimes helicopters landed, merely to bring Robert and Martin things they were to sign.

Robert and Martin had been together forever, which was why they had the logo of entwined S's on the archway over the drive leading to their house. It was a family joke that Robert always answered the phone, "Skeat residence," while Martin always answered, "Snell residence," and it was also true that they had never declared themselves openly on the Street. There were certainly rumors about them in their place of employment, had been for years, but, "Don't ask, don't tell" had been their byword since ages before those nervous Nellies in the Pentagon had stopped playing with their G.I. Joe dolls. And so long as they were so good at doing whatever it was they did, no one in their firm had the slightest desire to make trouble for Robert and Martin.

Weekends, particularly in the summer, Robert and Martin let it all hang out up at S&S in North Dudley, twenty-eight acres of rolling wooded countryside up a blacktop private drive from a dirt county road off a two-lane blacktop county road just a snap of the fingers from the Taconic Parkway. The house was large and sprawling, with seven bedrooms, plus a three-bedroom apartment in one of the barns. The pool was large and heated. The tennis court was clay, and magnificently maintained, as was the wine cellar. Robert and Martin had many friends, from a variety of worlds, including a number of straight worlds, and their country weekend parties were, in a word, notorious.

So that's Robert and Martin; usually, as you might suppose, the center of all eyes. But not today, not just this minute. Just this minute Robert and Martin and the nine other people here in the big front room of the main house were all staring hungrily, avidly, at Peter and David, waiting for them to get themselves under control, so they could tell all.

Both had been borne, had been half-carried, to this long sofa facing the fireplace with the brilliant flower arrangement in it, and both had been plied with drink, someone remembering that Peter liked vodka and grapefruit juice, and someone else remembering that David liked Campari and soda with a slice of lemon, and now everyone waited to find out what was going on.

Peter recovered first, and in fact had settled down to gasps and hiccups even before his vodka arrived, but then everybody had to wait while Peter did a miserable job of helping David recover, snapping at him with such useful lines as, "Pull yourself together," and, "Stop it, David, for God's sake," while David just kept on keening and sobbing in the most heartbroken manner you could imagine.

"Oh, do shut up, Peter," Martin finally said, and hunkered down beside the distraught David, holding up the cheery glass of red liquid and clear ice cubes and bright yellow lemon slice for David to see, saying, "David, come along, try to drink some of this, you'll feel much better, I promise, listen to Nurse Martin, now."

That did make David laugh, or at least giggle or snicker or something, through his tears, but the tears kept flowing, and David remained far too unstrung to hold a full glass of anything in those trembling hands.

Martin said, "David, we have the most wonderful new snorkel gear for the pool, it's phosphorescent, you glow in the dark, it's the most fantastic thing, you'll have to see it for yourself and advise us on it, it's probably madly carcinogenic, what do you think?"

David looked at Martin. His eyes were welling with tears, but they were grateful, too, and even amused. He gasped a bit, struggling to catch his breath. "Don't," he managed.

"Yes?"

"Don't . . ."

"Yes? Yes?"

"Smoke underwater!" David blurted out, and smiled through his tears, and looked up with comforted pleasure at his friends when they laughed, and the phone rang.

Utter silence. All eyes turned to Robert, as he crossed toward the phone. "If this is Susan," Robert said dangerously, "asking if she can bring dessert . . ." and left the threat unfinished, as he picked up the phone and said, in an amazingly normal tone of voice, "Skeat residence."

Pregnant pause.

"Yes, he is. Hold on." Robert turned and extended the phone toward Peter, at this point the more able-bodied of the two. "It's Freddie."

Peter knocked back half his vodka and grapefruit juice at a swig, put the glass on the floor, got to his feet, and strode over to Robert. David took the Campari and soda from Martin and drank it all down, his eyes never leaving Peter, who took the phone, cleared his throat, and said, "Dr. Peter Heimhocker here."

Everybody waited. Peter pointedly turned his back on the room, as though he would be permitted privacy at this moment in the exercise. "Yes, I recognize your voice." Accusingly, he added, "You took our things."

"Peter!" David hissed. "That hardly matters now!"

Gesturing violently at David to shut up, Peter said, "So would we, of course. Naturally." Then he seemed troubled, and said, "Well, that would be hard to say, we'd really have to examine you before we could do that sort of prognosis . . ."

"Oh, God," David said, brokenly, and handed his empty glass to Martin, who handed it to the canapй waiter, who knew what to do with it and went away and did.

Peter was saying, "We'll be back in the city Monday, we could — Well, if you don't trust us, I don't — oh, come now, you're the untrustworthy one, aren't you? I mean—" He took a deep calming breath, listening, and then apparently answered a question. "We're upstate. North of the city. A hundred miles north." Deeply troubled, Peter put a palm over the mouthpiece and turned to Robert. "He wants to know can he come up?"

"Yes!" said everybody in the room, all at once, except David, who cried, "God, no!" but was ignored.

Into the phone, Peter said, "If you really want to — all right, fine. Where are you now? I know you're in New York City, I mean where in New York City? Freddie, I just want to know where I'm giving you directions from, all right? I swear to God, you're the most paranoid heterosexual I ever met in my life."

"Pity," Robert said.

"All right, fine," Peter said, making no effort to hide his exasperation. "Do you know where the Taconic Parkway is, north of the city?" To the others, he said, "He says he'll find it." Into the phone, he said, "Do not cross the Hudson River. Stay to the east, as though you were going to New England. Come up the Taconic to the North Dudley exit, then drive east toward North Dudley, oh, about half a mile. Then turn left on County Route Fourteen, take that to Quarantine Road, take a — I don't know why it's called Quarantine Road, they named it two hundred years ago, it's perfectly safe. Freddie, the condition you're in, I don't think you need to worry about anybody else."

That made the other people in the room raise their eyebrows at one another. In the little silence, the canapй waiter gave David his new Campari and soda, and David wept quietly into it.

"All right, you take a right on Quarantine Road, it's a dirt road, and about three miles along on your left you'll see a very tasteful wrought-iron archway with entwined S's over a blacktop drive going — entwined S's." Peter exhaled, not calmly. "An S, Freddie, the letter S, and another letter S facing the other way, and they twine together, like vines. Freddie, it's the only archway on Quarantine Road. You come in there, about a mile—"

"Seven-tenths of a mile," said Robert.

"Seven-tenths of a mile," Peter said, through gritted teeth, and showed his tension even more by adding, waspishly, "If you were to go a full mile, of course, you'd drive right through the house without noticing. What? Nothing, I'm just—" Peter closed his eyes, swayed slightly, clutched the phone, opened his eyes. "I apologize to everyone," he said, into the phone and into the room. "I've merely been under something of a strain lately."

"Oh, God," David moaned, in agreement, and slurped Campari.

"It will take you—" Peter said, and broke off, and said, "Well, I don't know where you are, do I? It will take you two to three hours to get here, depending where you're coming from. Are you going to leave now?" Peter looked at his watch. "It's twelve-thirty-five."

"I'm forgetting lunch," Martin murmured, and beckoned again to the canapй waiter.

"Let's say," Peter said, "you should get here sometime around three. All right? What are you driving? A van. I don't suppose our lab equipment is still in it."

"Peter!" David hissed. "Don't antagonize him!"

"Yes, that's what I thought," Peter dryly told the phone. "You wouldn't, would you, like to give me a number I could call, in case you don't show up? No, I didn't think so."

Peter hung up, and gazed sardonically across the room at David. "Don't antagonize him?"

"The time has come, boys and girls," Robert said, "for class to hear today's story."

Peter came back over to stand beside David, but didn't take his seat on the sofa. David didn't stand, but he did look up, and say, in a half-whisper, as though he thought he couldn't be heard by everybody standing around, "What do we do?"

"What timing," Peter said.

"Pee-ter!" David cried, and waved his nondrink hand around to indicate the entire bright-eyed crowd. "We can't swear eleven people to secrecy!"

Martin, kindly Martin, kindly as ever, said, "David, you can, when you think of the alternative."

David blinked at him. "Alternative? What alternative?"

"There is none," Martin said, and smiled in sympathy.

44

Of all times for Peg to be away with the van, unreachable, and who knew when she'd be back. Maps spread on the dining table, Freddie's invisible finger moved along the colored road lines, but he couldn't keep track of anything that way, so he got a spoon from the kitchen, and used the end of the spoon handle to follow the road lines.

County Route 14, right up them, not far at all. Quarantine Road; gotcha, little black windy line goes over that way. Fifteen minutes from here, no more, north and a little east.

Fifteen minutes in the van.

What a pain. He could be there before one o'clock, could be there two hours before they expected him, could hang around, listen, watch, see what they were up to, if they were calling the cops, get the lay of the land. But, no.

Freddie went to the kitchen and put on the Playtex gloves so he could make himself a quick sandwich. He'd found it was easier, working around the kitchen, if he could see his hands. Putting the sandwich together, pouring a glass of tomato juice, Freddie tried to think of what to do. Then he removed the gloves and, carrying his sandwich, went out to the two-car garage that had come with the house, and there, as he remembered it, was the 1979 white Cadillac convertible, and it was still up on blocks. A car, and no damn use at all.

What? What? What?

The sandwich appeared to float in the open garage doorway, slowly converting itself into sludge as it oozed two feet lower. At last the transition from sandwich to sludge was completed, and Freddie started to turn away, to shut the garage door and go back to the house, and then he saw the bicycle.

Peter, being the calmer of the two, was elected to tell the story. "You all know," he began, "about Buffy and Muffy."

But then it turned out that, no, they did not all know about Buffy and Muffy. Seven of the eleven people in the room, including Robert and Martin, did know about the translucent cats and had seen them trotting around Peter and David's private quarters on the top floor of the research facility, but the other four had not, and so Peter had to start from the very beginning, and explain what melanoma was, and what science was, and what research was, and even what tobacco public relations was, all before finally getting to Buffy and Muffy, which didn't even begin to get them to Freddie.

It is very tricky for a naked man to ride a bicycle.

"He was a burglar," Peter said; they'd gotten that far at last. "He seemed like the answer to our prayers."

"If only we'd known," David said.

"Yes, but we didn't. And he did agree, we did have an agreement with the fellow."

"A crook," Robert said.

"Point taken," Peter admitted. Much of the tension had left him, now that he was getting it all off his chest. "Now," he said, "I'm afraid comes the difficult part, where I must say I do feel to some extent responsible. We both do. We share the blame."

"Thank you, Peter," David whispered.

Peter was again on the sofa, perched forward on the very edge of it, while David slumped back beside him. Peter took David's hand and squeezed it, and then said to the group, "We had these two formulae."

It was a thirty-gear bike, a virtual thesaurus entry of power and speed, adaptable to any terrain known to man; there was probably a gear for going across ceilings. Once Freddie'd figured out how to sit on the thing without pain or damage, it fairly flew along the verge.

These were country roads, and not heavily trafficked, but some vehicles used them. On an average of once every two minutes or so, a car, or more often a pickup truck, would come along, in one direction or the other, and the first few times Freddie tensed up a lot, waiting for who knew what to happen. After all, the people in those vehicles would be seeing a bicycle travel along beside the road all by itself, at a pretty good clip. The bicycle was on the right side, to go with the flow of traffic, but that was all that was even remotely right about it. (The sandwich sludge, growing fainter, was a minor element in the scene.)

So he'd expected cars to slam to a stop. He'd expected part of this exercise would be him from time to time racing away into the woods, or into the forehead-high cornfields, or otherwise eluding pursuers, before being allowed to proceed peacefully on his way. But in the first ten minutes of his journey half a dozen cars and trucks went on by, north- or south-bound, and nobody at all stopped, though he did see some surprised faces in passenger windows, and a couple of times he saw brake lights briefly flick on. But then every car or pickup continued on its way, some even faster than before.

Maybe country people, Freddie thought, are calmer than city people. Maybe they take odd things in stride, since living in the country is already such an odd thing to do. Maybe they figured it was a remote-control robot bicycle, like the remote-control robot airplanes that go sputter-sputter-sputter over every park in America in the summer, when you're trying to relax, or like those remote-control robot automobiles people give their kids at Christmas and the first thing the kid does is drive it into the tree and knock the tree over. Or maybe they were just people who mind their own business.

Well, no. Up ahead, the road dipped down, and then dipped up again, and then way up there it went around a curve. And that was where, headed this way, the police car appeared, coming around that curve, some kind of dark-colored state police car. No siren or lights or anything, but moving fast.

Somebody'd made a phone call.

To Freddie's right was a cornfield, the corn about five feet tall. The state-police car disappeared into the dip. Freddie turned right, and pedaled into the cornfield, as the state-police car reappeared, much closer.

They'd seen him, dammit; he heard them squeal to a stop. Sounds of car doors opening and closing. They couldn't see the bicycle, because it was shorter than the corn. And they couldn't see Freddie because they couldn't see Freddie. But Freddie could see them, two state troopers in uniforms and Smokey the Bear hats, conferring briefly beside their car.

Freddie, having driven fifteen or twenty feet into the cornfield, had turned left, and was now going between the rows, parallel to the road. There was almost room enough between the lines of corn plants for the bicycle, particularly if he held on to the handlebar in from the outer edge grips. The ground in here was hard as a rock, pretty smooth, and weedless; these are not organic farmers, you know.

Freddie worked his way through the gears until he found the one for cornfields, and then legged it, occasionally looking back toward the cops. They had apparently spotted his wheel tracks where he'd crossed the scrubland into the field, but once inside he'd left very little spoor on this hard dry soil; certainly not enough for anybody to track him. They were now moving around aimlessly back there, looking down.