"What did I tell you? Dybbuk!"

Courier, for God's sake, what are you doing? Let the mortals win

some of the time!

He looked up at me in puzzlement. But I thought the object of the game was to win. Now, it will undoubtedly have dawned on you by this time that there was something wrong with Courier. It had even dawned on me. We aren't made stupid, and yet he was behaving like a perfect ass!

And then I had what I thought was a moment of blinding revelation: he was a Courier because that was the only job he was fit for, running from one place to another with a bag of papers! I looked across at his innocent face and all the old horror stories of early experiments came into my mind, before the Company perfected us, before they had managed to give us immortal minds to compare with our immortal bodies. Was he one such golem? Yes, you shiver. Imagine how I felt, sitting across the table from him!

"Babin, I declare you've got the Evil Eye!" I tittered. "You've broken our winning streak." And I put down just the wrong card. There was a gasp of relief from the junior manager. Courier started and stared. "But—" he protested.

Enough! There'll be trouble here if you win any more!

Oh. Okay.

"I'm done." I yawned prodigiously. "Gracious, the air's blue in here! Time I went to bed. You'd better turn in too, young man; you'll have a long journey ahead of you once we've got those papers signed."

"Here, now, that's hardly fair," the assistant clerk complained. "We sat out our run of bad luck; you should do the same!"

"He played damned well for somebody who didn't know much about cards," muttered the junior manager. As I sought for the right words to defuse the situation, Courier was scooping up his little bag of coins unconcernedly.

"I'll just take these," he said. "You can have the scrip stuff back; I can't use it anyway." Everyone looked at him, dumfounded.

"Yes, capital idea, all debts canceled!" I cried in false heartiness. "Let's end our evening on a friendly note, shall we?"

The junior manager stared as that sank in and then smiled desperately. "All right! All debts canceled, fellows, what do you say?" And as I exited the room, hastily pushing Courier ahead of me, I could hear Babin's roar of denial over the timid chorus of agreement.

"What on earth possessed you to do that?" I exploded, when we were a safe distance down the corridor. "It's all very well for you to be careless of your own cover, but you're endangering mine! I'm obliged to live with those men for the next few years, and what will they think of me?" His face was so stupidly blank I felt guilty at once. If he were indeed some indestructible simpleton, anger was wasted on him; and I wasalready thinking poor fellow, it's not his fault after all when he opened his mouth to speak.

"Say, have you got my orders yet?"

It was as if he had thrown vodka onto a bonfire. My rage, which had shrunk so rapidly into little blue coals, flared to the ceiling again, and higher than the flames of anger and impatience were those of loathing for the scarecrow, the defective, the badly made machine that he was. Bigotry? Yes, I suppose so. Humbling thought, isn't it?

"Fool!" I snapped. "Don't you think if any orders had come in I'd have told you? Here!" I grabbed out my credenza and thrust it at him. "You look from now on! Keep it until your damned orders come in, and leave me alone!"

I set off down the corridor to my room, but he followed me swiftly. "Can't we go somewhere else?

Isn't there anything else to do around here?" he pleaded.

"No! But here's an order for you, you imbecile!" I turned on him. "Go to your room and stay there!" His reaction was extraordinary. All the color drained from his face; with a queer frightened look he dodged around me and stumbled down the corridor to his room. I went into my own quarters, feeling guilty again. What could be wrong with the creature? Well, I hadn't made him the way he was, anyway; and surely I'd played host beyond the call of duty. Perhaps he'd let me get a full night's sleep now. Dawn next day found me creeping from my room, carrying a real volume of Schiller and the envelope containing the access code strip. I left the stockade and descended the steep path into the cove. The old shipyard was still being used for carpentry, and the forge and tannery were down here too; but it was still so early that there was no one about to see me hurry across the footbridge and disappear into the woods on the other side of the stream. I found a clearing under a stand of red pines with a floor of dry brown needles; and there I settled down happily, took out Mendoza's letter, and accessed the code at last. Instantly my mind was ringing with Latin names and three-dimensional images of growing things and their uses. To my astonishment I realized that acorn meal from Quercus agrifolia, if left to mold, produced a useful antibiotic. And the leaves of Rubus ursinus could be used against dysentery. Really?

And, my goodness, what a lot of uses for Asdepias speciosa, which was nothing more than milkweed!

Oh, well. Doubtless I'd find dozens of interesting little weeds next time I went exploring. For now, however, I intended to stay where I was until Courier got his damned orders and took his much-desired leave. Iwas thoroughly weary of him. I yawned, stretched out my boots and immersed myself in Schiller's poems.

What a pleasant morning I had. Before long the forge started up, and a breeze brought me the hot smell of charcoal and the bell-note of hammer on anvil. At the bottom of my glade the stream rushed and chattered along, brown as tea. It was a holy stream, I remembered with amusement; not long ago a visiting priest had blessed it, and consecrated it, and now we had an unlimited supply of holy water. How thoughtful of the reverend father! Just what was needed on the frontier.

My idyll was shattered by no end of commotion at the forge. I jumped up and ran to the edge of my clearing, where I beheld Ronstan-tin the smith, hip-deep in the stream, splashing and stumbling in a circle. He was trying to shake off a tiny mongrel dog, which had hold of the seat of his trousers with a positive death-grip and swung by its clamped teeth, growling ferociously. Ronstantin sobbed oaths upon the little cur, imploring a whole host of blessed saints to smash it like a cockroach. From the bank of the stream four little naked Indians watched with solemn black eyes.

"What happened?" I ran to them.

"Tsar bit him," replied the tallest of the children.

"Vasilii Vasilievich!" wept the blacksmith. "Help me, in God's Holy Name! Get it off me!"

"For heaven's sake, man, it's the size of a rat!" I turned again to the boy. "Why did the doggie bite him?"

"He came running out here with his pants on fire," the child replied. "It was neat. Then he jumped in the water where we were swimming. We jumped out and Tsar jumped in to bite him. He's a brave dog." That was when I realized that it wasn't Ronstantin's trousers the dog had seized with such energy. No wonder he was crying. I waded hastily into the stream and somehow prised Tsar loose, but he had tasted blood and yapped viciously for more. I held him out at arm's length, squeaking and struggling, as I bent to examine poor Ronstantin's backside.

Yes, the seat of the trousers had quite burnt away, and in addition to the dog bite he had a thoroughly ugly second-degree burn on either buttock.

"Tsk! This is a serious burn, my friend," I told him.

"I know that, you idiot!" he groaned. "I mean—excuse me—can't you do something about it? I'm suffering the pains of Hell!"

"Well, er, of course. Sit down in the water again while I determine a course of treatment for you." What a chance to show off my new knowledge of the local healing herbs! I accessed hurriedly. Let's see, what might be growing here that was useful for burns? Sambucus canadensis, of course! That was the native elderberry tree, wasn't it? Hadn't I seen one growing along the bank near here? I turned and waded ashore, holding out Tsar to his master. The dog's growling subsided like a teakettle taken off the fire.

"Listen to me, children! There's an elder tree growing up there on the bank. Perhaps your mommies use the leaves to make poultices? Yes? No? Well, will you be good children and fetch me some branches so I can make a soothing poultice for this poor man?" I implored. Up on the bluff a small crowd of colonists had gathered, drawn by all the noise.

"Vasilii Vasilievich, I'm dying!" moaned the blacksmith, writhing in the water. "Oh, Holy Saints, oh, Mother of God, why did I ever leave Irkutsk for this savage place?"

"All right," chorused the little Indians, and scampered away bright-eyed with excitement. Konstantin howled and prayed until they returned bearing green branches laden down with tiny blue berries. I gathered them up, confused. What did one do with them, exactly? Tsar's master knew an indecisive adult when he saw one, fortunately.

"You pound them up on a rock!" he yelled helpfully. "Want us to do it?" Without waiting for a reply he grabbed up a water-worn cobble and began mashing the berries into a slimy mess on the top of a boulder. The other children crowded around him while Tsar stalked stiff-legged along the bank, snarling at Konstantin.

In no time at all they'd reduced leaves and berries and all to a nasty-looking goo.

"All right, Konstantin Kirillovich," 1 told him, "please rise from the water. I've got an excellent native salve that'll take the pain away." I scooped up a handful of the muck and prepared to clap it on his seared derrière, while the children looked on expectantly.

And, well, my nerve gave way. How could this horrible stuff help a burn like that? I found myself digging into my coat for the little book of skin repair tissue we field agents carry. Yes, I know it's forbidden! But, you know, the truth is, our medicine works just as well on mortals as it works on us. Stealthily I tore out three or four of the sheets and stuck them on the blacksmith's behind, but he caught a glimpse of what I was doing over his shoulder.

"Prayers you're putting on my ass?" he screamed. "Are you crazy?"

"No!" I smeared the elderberry poultice on to disguise what I'd done. "That was merely, um, medical parchment, very useful in forming a base for the compound, you see—"

"Listen, you big St. Petersburg pansy—" he grated; then a remarkable expression crossed his face as the drugs in the skin replacement were released into his system. "The pain's gone!" he gasped. He reachedbehind and felt himself; then crouched down in the water to wash off the salve. By the time he rose, dripping, the synthetic skin had fused with his own and looked fresh and pink as on the day of his birth.

"Hooray!" yelled the children, jumping up and down in triumph, while Tsar went mad with barking.

"It's healed," Konstantin stated in wonderment. Then he stared down at the swirling water. "It must have been this stream! I was here when the little father blessed it! It's a miracle! The holy water has worked a miracle!"

I squelched wearily back up the bank, as his cries brought spectators from the bluff down for a closer look at the Miracle of the Holy Stream. Courier was not among them, at least. Ought I to go see if he'd finally received his orders and gone? Perhaps I should go call on the Munin family to see how Andrei Efimovich's leg was mending. Perhaps I should look for specimens of Asdepias speciosa. There were a thousand better things to concern myself with than a difficult fellow operative. I was supposed to be a doctor, wasn't I?

And so I resolutely put Courier out of my mind and spent the rest of the day trudging from hut to house, with the intention of getting to know my patients better. I was not particularly successful; anyone who had the least ache or pain had run down to the holy stream and was bathing in its icy waters. Not necessarily bad for business: I might have a few cases of pneumonia by the week's end. But I did lance an abscessed gum for a Kashaya woman, and recommend a salve for a Creole baby's flea bites; so I was of some use to my mortal community.

There was no sign of Courier when I returned to the stockade that evening, through pumpkin fields, with the late red sun throwing long shadows of corn shocks where they stood in bundles. There was no sign of him when I sat down to dinner in the officers' mess, and attempted to join in the general conversation in a pleasant and comradely way. Not that I had much to contribute, with my pocket edition of Schiller, and nobody invited me to play cards with them. I was the recipient of a few distinctly dirty looks, in fact, especially from Iakov Babin.

I took a candle and wandered off to my room, my volume of poetry tucked sadly away in my coat. When I got there, I had the most peculiar feeling that something was somehow not quite right. I held up my candle and looked around.

My bunk, with its blanket, was undisturbed; so was my sea chest. My Imperial Navy saber still hung in its place of honor on the wall. My little stack of books was where it ought to be. Of course, my credenza wasn't there... perhaps Courier had left it in the guest room? I decided to wait until morning to look for it. Oh, yes, I know, you'd have gonestraight in to see if he really had gone. I simply didn't want to. I lit my lamp and blew out the candle. A plume of greasy smoke curled, pungent, from the snuffed wick. That was when I heard the growl.

A growl, I say. It wasn't a dog; it wasn't a bear. God only knew what it was, but it had emanated from the other side of the plank wall. From Courier's room. Oh, dear.

I scanned. I couldn't make sense of my readings. Courier seemed to be in the room, and yet—

I lit the candle again and went out into the corridor, where I knocked at Courier's door. There was a scuttling sound. No light showing under the door, or between the planks. What was going on here? 1

drew a deep breath and pulled open the door.

Darkness, and as the wavering light of my candle moved through the doorway I beheld a tangled mass on the floor. I prodded it with my boot. Strips of something? A trade blanket, torn to shreds. Interspersed with brittle glinting fragments and scraps of paper that had once been a framed picture of the tsar. Where was Courier?

Cautiously I raised the candle and looked upward.

It was on the ceiling, wedged in an angle of roof and rafters. Courier was up there clinging to the rafters, or had been.

Any mortal standing there in the dark, gazing up in the light of one shaky candle, would have seen a creature with dead white skin, enormous black insectile eyes, fangs and claws and a general strange misshapen muscularity. That sensible mortal would promptly have fled in terror. I, lumpish immortal, stared in bewilderment.

I saw an immortal in the direst extremity of self-protective fear. Blood had fled from his surface capillaries, leaving his skin pale; the protective lenses over his eyes had hardened and darkened. His gums had receded to give his teeth the maximum amount of cutting surface and his nails had grown out with amazing speed into formidable claws. He looked like nothing so much as Lon Chaney, Sr., in London After Midnight.

The thing worked bulging jaw muscles and inquired, "DUCITNE HAEC VIA OSTIA?"

"Courier, for God's sake! What's happened?" I cried.

It turned its head and the black surface of its eyes glittered as it fixed on me. "DA MIHI IUSSUM!" it croaked. What world, what time was it in?

I fell silent, as the horror of the thing sank into me, that one of us could suffer such an alteration. We, perfect mechanisms, in our endless lives see mortal men reduced by every degradation that disease andmischance can impose, skeletal horrors, sore-covered, deformed—but never we. Why had he become this thing?

He dropped on me, screaming.

Think. How many times in your long life have you avoided mortal assault? It's easy, isn't it? One can sidestep a blade or a fist or even a bullet without turning a hair, because mortal sinews are weak, mortal reflexes slow. Poor brutes. But could you ever have dreamed you might have to defend yourself against another immortal? How would you do it?

I tell you that I myself began to change. That writhing horror dove for my throat, and even as I grappled with it I felt an indefinable metamorphosis commencing. I was not frightened, either, me, can you believe that? One split second of vertigo, and then the strangest glee filled my heart. All my senses were sharpened. I fought with the demented thing in that room and it seemed clumsy and blundering to me, though it moved with a speed mortal eyes couldn't have followed. Equals as we were in immortal strength, I had the advantage of sanity. My hideous new wisdom told me how to win and I pulled the creature's head close, in both my hands, to—

To do something; to this day I haven't remembered what I was about to do. In any case I never did it. What happened, you see, was that I looked into the creature's eyes. Black reflecting mirrors, its eyes, and what they showed me was a nightmare thing like the nightmare thing I was fighting! So taloned, so razor-grinned, with just such a glittering stare. A monster in the disintegrating clothing of a Russian gentleman. Me.

I fell back from it, staring at my hands in horror: my nails had grown with fantastic acceleration into serviceable claws. My horrified cry joined the creature's as it leapt at my face. I rolled away from it, shielding myself as best I could, and burst out through the doorway. Babin and the others, drawn by the commotion, were just arriving at the end of the corridor. I flung myself down, covered my face with my hands and yelled, "A dybbuk! Run for your lives, it's a dybbuk!" My speech was hissed and slurred, but I doubt if anyone noticed, for the thing hesitated only a moment before plunging across the threshold after me. As it tore strips out of the back of my coat, what was I doing? I ask you to believe I was biting my nails, frantically. I didn't want to be a devil with talons. I was a man, a superior man!

"Run, you fools!" I cried. Yes, yes, I was speaking with a man's voice now, I was changing back. Babin at least took a step backward, crossing himself, and the others shuffled back behind him. Courier's head snapped about to stare.

"QUANTO COSTA IL BIGLIETTO PER MARSIGLIA?" he demanded.

I used the opportunity to open my door and scramble in on my hands and knees. Courier's neck snaked around with the fluid movement of a Harryhausen demon. He snarled and sprang into the room after me.

"MIXAHAM BERAVAM! BAYAD BERAVAM!" he roared, coming for me with talons raised to rake. I scrambled backward, I hit the wall with such force the building shook and the planks of the wall, thick as Bibles, cracked and started. Something was knocked loose. 1 caught it in midair as it dropped past my face. My Imperial Navy saber. In the same second I had put my boot up to halt Courier's oncoming rush and kicked him in the chest with all my strength. He flew backward and hit the opposite wall with a crash, and more planks split. There was a thunder of running steps as the mortals rushed down the hall to look through the doorway.

"LE BATEAU-MOUCHE EST EN RETARD!" Courier cried, in a voice that made the mortals cover their ears. I was desperately trying to shake the scabbard off the saber; something was wrong with the mechanism of my left arm. Blood and oil were drooling from Courier's jaws as he sprang again, straight for me, and my good arm went up and whipped the saber in an arc that passed through his neck. His head flew off, hit the wall and rolled to Iakov Babin's feet.

All my strength left me. I became aware that I was badly damaged. I slid to the floor. Courier's body was already still, having gone into fugue at the moment my blade broke the connection between the ferro-ceramic chain of his spine and the titanium gimbal of his skull. Already the neck arteries had sealed themselves off and a protective membrane was forming. His head was doing the same. Eyes, ears, nostrils were exuding a thick substance that would seal them against further injury.

"God damn, Doc!" Babin broke the appalled silence. "That was one fine sword cut! You fought like a man."

I had, by God. "Thank you," I said with difficulty. My lips were split and bruised. The rest of my fleshly parts hurt as well. "You were right, Iakov Dmitrivich. He was a dybbuk."

"I told you." He stepped into the room cautiously, edging around the body. The other mortals cowered in the doorway. Someone was whimpering hysterically. "I seen devils in this New World just as ornery as any we got in Mother Russia. You ask the Indians. I reckon this one killed that boy, whoever he was, and possessed his body. Are you hurt bad, Doc?"

"I think my arm is broken."

"And some ribs, too, huh?" Babin squatted down and peered at me in awe. "God Almighty, Doc, you're beat up black and blue. You sure putup one hell of a fight, though. Wouldn't have thought you had it in you. Come on, boys, let's get him up on the bed."

"What are we going to do with that?" The junior manager pointed with a trembling finger at the body.

"Take it out and bury it at a crossroads." The farm foreman stepped in and gingerly lifted the head by its hair. "That's what the stories say to do. And put a stake through its heart, or it'll come back to get us!" I let them lift me into my bunk, too impaired to protest. Besides, it didn't matter. The moment Courier's head had been severed a distress beacon had been activated, transmitting straight to the nearest Dr. Zeus HQ. Wherever he was buried, a repair crew would retrieve both his parts within hours. He'd be whisked away to a hospital and I hadn't the slightest doubt he'd be good as new within days, assuming they could do something about that nasty psychosis of his. I, on the other hand, would have to heal myself, and my self-diagnostic-and-repair program didn't seem to be working very well.

The body with its head was stuffed into a sack and hustled out by Babin and a party of others. Someone sent a Creole woman up with a basin of water and a rag to tend to my hurts. Her almond eyes widened at the extent of the damage, but she didn't say much; and it would have been rather pleasant to lie there being ministered to, but for Andreev, the assistant manager, rushing in.

"Kalugin! What on earth is this story that you've killed a man?"

"Self-defense," I said in my feeblest voice. "It was the visitor. He went mad, sir... tried to kill me... all the men witnessed it... "

Andreev was looking around wildly at the blood and smashed walls. He noticed the saber lying almost at his feet and did a little two-step dance back from it.

"God in Heaven! You killed him with a sword? What will General Manager Kostromitinov say?" What indeed? I pretended to lapse into unconsciousness. The dybbuk story would sound more convincing if Babin told it, I was certain. Andreev Fedorovich stood there wringing his hands a moment longer, and then ran out of the room. I let myself slide into genuine oblivion...

"Marine Operations Specialist Kalugin?" It was a suave voice speaking cultured Cinema Standard that woke me. I opened my eyes. A man in a neat gray suit of clothes was sitting at the foot of my bed, by the light of my wildly flickering lamp.

"Northwest Regional Facilitator General Labienus," he introduced himself with a slight inclination from the waist.

"We'll be overheard—" I tried to rise on one elbow, indicating my open door, but he negated me with a wave of his hand.

"We've activated a hush field over the settlement. None of the mortals here can regain consciousness at present. We're recovering Courier—what's left of him, anyway—from his grave out there on the road. I'm afraid we owe you something of an explanation."

That took a moment to sink in. I opened my mouth to demand answers, but he held up his hand.

"Please. Don't tire yourself. You want to know how one of us could suffer something like madness when we're all perfect, don't you? It's really quite simple. Courier wasn't—exactly— one of us." I stared. Choosing his words with delicacy, he went on. "I suppose you've heard the old rumors about Flawed Ones, about fantastic creatures produced millennia ago when Dr. Zeus hadn't perfected the immortality process. Well, of course those stories aren't true; but it seems that, back in the early days, one or two individuals were produced who weren't quite up to Company standards." He drew from his inner breast pocket a slim silver case and, opening it, selected a silver-wrapped stick. "Theobromos, by the way?" He offered me the case. I took one gratefully, unwrapping it single-handed. My arm hadn't repaired itself yet. He resumed:

"Now, as you know, Dr. Zeus is a humane organization. Simple termination of the poor creatures was out of the question."

Especially since they were immortal, I thought to myself darkly. I put the Theobromos in my mouth. Oh, welcome bliss. It was highest-quality Guatemalan. Labienus watched my dreamy smile with amusement.

"Of course the Company found places for them. But in Courier's case—and by now you'll have guessed he was one of these substandard unfortunates—there were special circumstances that made it a particular challenge.

"It has to do with his autoimmune system, you see. Dr. Zeus had already perfected hyperfunction, but at that time there was no reason to believe it wouldn't work equally well on all subjects, regardless of personal biochemistry. However, Courier's metabolism presented certain problems.

"What's the simplest way to put this? You could say that his body decided his own RNA was a pathogen, and set about attacking it, breaking it down. The Company stabilized most of his metabolic response, but the spontaneous nature of short-term memory proved beyond them. You're aware that the brain stores memory in RNA molecules? Of course you are.

"I won't confuse you with the details, but the end result is that Courier reacts to memory as though it were a disease process. Anyrepeated specific experience and he undergoes an adverse reaction. Consistently repeat a specific sequence of events and paranoid psychosis is the result, with all the attendant physical manifestations you saw."

"You mean spending two nights in his room made him a demon from Hell?"

"Merely the effect of hyperfunction on the human fight-or-flight reflex," said Labienus dismissively. "It's not his fault, poor creature. And, after all, Dr. Zeus found just the job for him! They made him a long-distance courier. As long as he's traveling, as long as he's constantly exposed to new sights he's never seen before, the adverse RNA reaction can't build up. He can even retrace old journeys, if enough years elapse between visits. Trouble only occurs if he's obliged to stay in one place for more than twenty-four hours, but of course Dr. Zeus has always taken care to ensure that new orders are waiting for him at every destination."

"What happened in this case?"

Labienus looked aside. "A minor clerical blunder. His orders were forwarded to the wrong terminal. The clerk responsible has been disciplined."

"How comforting."

"I'm sure it will never happen again. And we'll fasten on his head and he'll be off on his travels again, to New York or Mazatlan or Warsaw, good as new, with no memory of this unfortunate occurrence. He never remembers anything very long, actually, if it isn't something hard-wired like a language. Except for the plots of films he's seen. Those he retains, for some reason."

"Poor thing," I mused. Very good Theobromos, this.

"Do you think so? I rather envy him, myself. Imagine a life of endless new horizons! Nothing to bore him or dull his palate, no tedious sameness to his experiences. All his friends will be new friends." Labienus smiled wistfully and put his silver case away. "Well. Principally what you need to know is that of course there'll be no disciplinary hearing for you. We quite understand that under the circumstances you had no choice but to badly damage a fellow operative. We would like to know why you didn't contact us sooner—his psychotic behavior must certainly have been increasingly obvious... "

"Er, well—I did try—and then I didn't have access to my credenza, you see." I began to sweat a little. And did I feel just a trace of pain in my fingertips? "I loaned it to him—"

"Yes; we found it in the rafters. Well, no real harm done, it appears; though I'm afraid you'll have some explaining to do to your mortal authorities. I'm certain you'll follow standard operating procedures thistime, though, and acquit yourself with flying colors. Shame 1 can't give you anything to speed up your self-repair; but then, if you got up tomorrow without a scratch on you after that fight, you'd really have some explaining to do, wouldn't you?" He chuckled and smacked my thigh in a companionable sort of way. It hurt. A short in my femoral wiring finally fixed itself and informed me that I had a massive hematoma there and several torn ligaments. As I was reflecting on this, another immortal appeared in my doorway.

"Sir? Recovery operation completed. All personnel are aboard and ready for departure."

"Then I'm off." Labienus rose, adjusting his coat and shooting his cuffs. "Well, Kalugin. I hope our next meeting takes place under more pleasant circumstances. You will transmit your Ml report within the next forty-eight hours, I trust? Good. Until next time." He stepped out into the corridor.

"How old is he?" I blurted.

"Who? Courier?" Labienus looked in at me, arching his eyebrows. "Thirty thousand years, I believe." He started to walk away and then stuck his head back through the doorway for a second. "Oh, by the way—Happy Halloween." He flashed a smile and was gone.

So that was the end of it, at least as far as Dr. Zeus was concerned. I myself was in a tight spot for a while. As soon as he heard about the incident, Kostromitinov became convinced it was some sort of loathsome crime of homosexual passion, and had me arrested. Fedor Svinin got a few days' holiday, because our jail was only big enough to accommodate one person. He used the time to go fishing and caught pneumonia.

At the inquest it was discovered that my pretty Creole girl had decided to tidy up my room whilst I was unconscious, and had cleaned the blood off the murder weapon and put it back in its sheath. Better still, the victim's body had vanished from its grave and was nowhere to be found when an exhumation order was given. Best of all, I had a roomful of witnesses swearing on their immortal souls that the person I'd beheaded hadn't been a human being at all. Iakov Babin was particularly vehement on my behalf, and his testimony counted for something: he was a man with a lot of experience at beating murder raps. Thus the case never came to trial, and I was left under a sort of halfhearted house arrest that nobody bothered to enforce. And, you know, the rest of my time there was extraordinarily happy! I became accepted, respected, liked. Apparently a man who can deliver babies with one hand and kill dybbuks with the other was just what people wanted onthe frontier. I stayed on at the Ross colony until it was sold to Mr. Sutter ten years later, though I didn't go home with my fellow Russians right away, but that's another story.

I can't say it's a comfort to think that Courier is still out there on the road somewhere, in endless transit like an orbiting moon. It's likely enough that at some point in the next thirty thousand years our paths will cross again, so I'm grateful he won't remember me.

But, think about it: you may well have seen him yourself. In some city, on some tourist boat or in some railway carriage, there is always a stupid young man in the happy morning of his life, chatting with perfect strangers and exclaiming over the scenery; and he is always alone.

"Old Flat Top" was written on a trip up Highway 1, which runs through the Big Sur of poet Robinson Jeffers. This is a great inhuman country of sea and sky and stone, tremendous volume of rock towering above the little two-lane road, its upper heights disappearing in the summer Jog. There are places up there where the human eye refuses to grasp the proportion or scale of what it sees, coming unexpected around a sharp turn.

It's a haunted country. There are little silent people glimpsed now and again in the gloomier canyons, among the redwoods. There is a famous figure in a cloak and broad-brimmed hat, a black silhouette in the noonday sun, that watches from the peaks. Lost wagon roads, lost mines, ghost towns lost up there in the Jog. No place to travel in lightly.

But it is beautiful.

Old Flat Top

The boy has the firm chin and high-domed brow of the Cro-Magnon hominids—might be a member of any racial group—and is dressed in somewhat inadequate Neolithic clothing of woven grass and furs. He didn't bring any useful Neolithic tools with him on this journey, however. He had come to see if God was really on the mountain as he'd always been told, and he hadn't thought tools would be any use in finding God. In this he was reasonably correct. No instrument his people could produce, at their present level of technology, would help him now.

Far enough up a mountain to peer above the clouds, the boy is in serious trouble. Above him is ice and thin air; all around him a sliding waste of black blasted rock, immense, pitiless. The green valley of his ancestors lies a long way below him, and he could return there in slightly under a minute if he didn't mind arriving in a red smashed mass.

That would scarcely win him the admiration of his peers, however, and he clings now desperately to a narrow handhold, and gazes up at the mouth of the cave he has come so far to find. He can neither jump nor climb any higher. He can't climb back down, either; his hands and feet have gone numb. He realizes he is going to die.

To his left, a few meters away, there is sudden movement.

He turns his head to stare. What he had taken to be an outcropping of particularly weathered rock is looking at him. It is in fact a man, easily twice his size, naked but for a belted bearskin and a great deal of dun-colored hair and beard.

The giant's body is powerfully built, nearly human as the boyunderstands human, but with a slightly odd articulation of the arms and shoulders. The head is not human at all. The skull is long and low, helmet-shaped, and with its heavy orbital ridges and forward-projecting face it reminds the boy of those stocky little villagers in the next valley, the ones who scatter flowers over their dead and make such unimaginative flint tools. Like them, too, the giant has an immense protruding nose. Its cheekbones are high and broad, its jaw heavy, its teeth terrify-ingly long. The boy knows this because the giant is grinning at him.

"Boo," says the giant, in a light and rather pleasant voice.

This syllable means nothing to the boy, but he is so thoroughly unnerved that he loses his grip on the mountain and totters backward, screaming.

The next moment is a blur. All his breath is knocked out of him, and before he can grasp what has happened, he finds himself crouching inside the cave that was so unattainable a moment before. The giant is squatting beside him, considering him with pale inhuman eyes.

Seen close to, the giant is even more unnerving. He cocks his head and the angle at which he does this is not human either, nor is the strong strange musk of his body. The boy drags himself swiftly backward, stares around the interior of the cave for a weapon. The giant chuckles at him. There are plenty of weapons, but it's doubtful the boy would be able to lift any of these tremendous stone axes, let alone defend himself with one. He looks further, and then his frantic gaze stops dead at the battered cabinet against one wall.

The fact that its central screen glows with tiny cryptic symbols is almost beside the point. It's a box, and the boy's world has no such geometry. He has never seen a rectangle, a square. This fully convinces him that he has found the object of his quest. Slowly, he turns back to face the giant. He makes obeisance, and the giant snorts. Sitting timidly upright, the boy explains that he has come in search of God on the mountain for the purpose of learning the Truth.

The boy's language is a combination of hand gestures and sounds. The giant's eyes narrow; he leans close, keenly observing, listening. When the boy has finished, the giant clears his throat and replies in the same manner.

He communicates for some time. His hands are clever, capable of facile and expressive gestures, and his vocal apparatus produces a wider range of syllables, enunciated with greater precision; so it will be understood that he is a far more eloquent speaker than the boy, who listens as though spellbound. Yes, I'll tell you the Truth. Why not? In all these generations, you're the first mortal to climb up here, so you've earned an answer; but I don't think you'll like it much.

I'm not your God. I'm the highest authority you'll ever encounter, though, mortal man. Really. I was created to judge you and punish you, you and all your fathers. Would you like to know how that happened? Watch.

I'll draw something in the dust for you, here. This is called a circle, all right? It's the wheel of lime. Never mind what a wheel is. This part here, almost at the beginning, is where your people began to exist. Life was a lot harder back then, mortal. Your people almost didn't make it. You know why? Because, almost from the time your fathers stood up on their little hind legs, they made war on one another. Winters weren't bitter enough! Leopards and crocodiles weren't hungry enough! Famine wasn't terrible enough either. They had to keep whittling away at their numbers themselves, stupid monkeys. The worst were a bunch who called themselves the Great Goat Cult. They found a weed that filled them with holy visions when they chewed it. They heard voices that told them to go out and kill. Became screaming tattooed maniacs who made a lot of converts, believe me, but they killed more than they converted.

Now, look here at this part of the circle. This is up at the other end of Time. The people up there are, let's say they're powerful shamans. And they're very nervous. Being so close to the end of Time, they want to save as much of the past as they can.

They looked back into Time through a, uh, a magic eye they had. They looked at their oldest fathers and saw that if this Great Goat Cult wasn't stopped, they themselves might never come to exist. Who had time to learn how to make fire, or sew furs into clothing or make pots out of clay, if crazy people were always chasing and killing everybody?

I'm simplifying this for you, mortal, but here's what they did.

The shamans found a way to step across from their part of the circle into the beginning part. They took some of your fathers' children and made them slaves, but magic slaves: immortal and strong and really smart. They sent those slaves to try to reason with the Great Goat Cult.

It didn't work.

The slaves were great talkers, could present many clever arguments, but the Great Goat Cult wouldn't listen. In fact, they sent the slaves back to their shaman masters with spears stuck in inconvenient places, and one or two had to carry their own lopped-off body parts. So the shamans had to come up with another idea.

Can you guess yet what it was? No? Well, you're only a mortal. I'll tell you. They took some more slaves, not just from your fathers but from some of the other tribes running around back then—those little guys in the next valley, for example, and some big people from a valley you've never seen, and a few others who're all extinct now.

You know how you can put a long-legged ram with' long fleece in the pen with a short-legged ewe with short fleece, and you'll get a short-legged lamb with long fleece? Eventually? Breeding experiments, right, you've got it. Well, that's what the shamans did with all these people. Bred the big ones and the little ones to get what they wanted.

What did they want? What were they breeding for? You can't guess? I'm disappointed. They wanted their very own screaming killing maniacs to counter the cultists.

Except we're not really maniacs. We just have a great sense of humor.

We're the optimum morphological design for a humanoid fighting machine, oo-rah! We're not afraid of being hurt, like you. And of course we too were made immortal and smart. Three thousand of us were bred. That was a lot of people, back then. They raised us in cadet academies, trained us in camps, me and all my brother warriors.

This was all done back here at the beginning of time, by the way. The shamans were scared to death to have us up there at their end. There are no warriors in their time, or so we were always told. And we were all programmed—no, you don't know what that is. Indoctrinated? Convinced with extreme prejudice?

We were given the absolute Truth.

But it's our Truth, not yours, mortal. Our Truth is that we have the joyous right and duty to kill, instantly and without question, any dirty little mortals we find making war on each other. You don't have the right to kill yourselves. You're supposed to live in peace, herd beasts, plant crops, tell stories, have babies, Do that and we'll let you alone. But if you decide to make war, not love—whack, there we are with flint axes and bloody retribution, you see? Simplicity itself.

It was the law. Perfect and beautiful justice. You do right, we punish wrong. No questions. No whining.

The shamans from the other end of Time created us as the consummate weapon against the Great Goat Cult. We were bigger and faster, and we killed without pity or hesitation. Our faith was stronger than theirs. So we made mincemeat out of the little bastards.

Oh, those were great times. So much work to do! Because, while the shamans had dithered around about whether or not we should becreated, the Cult had spread across the world. It took centuries to stamp them all out. We rode in endless pursuit and it was one long happy party, mortal. Summer campaigns, year after year. Winter raids, damn I loved them: bloodspray's beautiful on new-fallen snow, and corpses stay fresh so much longer...

Don't be scared. I'm just reminiscing.

When we slaughtered the last of the Goats, your fathers were set free, don't you understand? Instead of running and hiding in holes like animals, they could settle down to become people. They had time at last, to learn to count on their fingers and toes, to look at the stars and wonder what they were. Time to drill holes in deer bone and make music. Time to paint bison on cave walls. And the other immortals (we called them Preservers), had time at last to go among your fathers and collect cultural artifacts the shamans wanted saved, now that there was culture.

But what were we Enforcers supposed to do, with our great purpose in life gone? We loved to kill. It was all we knew, all we were made for. So our officers met together, to talk over the question of where the masters expected us to fit, in this new peacetime we'd made possible for mortals. There was a lot of debate. Most of us in the rank and file were pretty optimistic; we just figured they'd reprogram us to do some other job. But one colonel, an asshole named Marco, thought we could never be sure the mortals wouldn't relapse into being cultists, and that maybe we ought to make some preemptive strikes: you know, kill all the mortals who looked as though they might make war, so they'd never get a chance to.

Everyone roared him down, except the men under his command. See, that would have been absolutely wrong! That would have been killing innocents, and we don't do that. Noncombatants are to be protected at all times. But our masters, who as I mentioned are nervous people, shit themselves in terror when they found out what Marco'd said.

Marco's faith was imperfect. We should have done something about him right then... but that's another story.

Anyway, Budu told him he was a fool, and that shut him up.

Budu was our general, our supreme commanding officer. He was one of the oldest of us and he was the best, the strongest, the biggest. And he was righteous, I tell you, our Truth was strong in his heart! I'd have died for him, if I wasn't immortal, and as it was I had my head lopped off twice fighting under him. I didn't care; the masters stuck it on again and I was proud to go right from the regeneration tank back to the front lines, as long as Budu was out there too.

(Regeneration tank. It's... think of it as a big pot, no, a big pot. Do you know what a cauldron is? All right, imagine a big one full of, uh, magic juice, and whenever one of us immortals would be damaged too badly to repair ourselves, we'd be carted off the field and put in one of these magic cauldrons to heal. We'd come out good as new.)

Anyway, Budu was also the smartest of us. Budu studied future history, between this age and the time in which our masters live. He figured out what scared them the most. He said the mortal masters might think they didn't need us anymore, but they'd find they were mistaken soon enough. He ordered us to wait. Something would happen.

And, Father of Justice, the old man was right!

Now you're going to find the story more interesting, mortal, because this part of it deals with your own people.

Let's see, how do I explain the concept of mitochondrial DNA to you?

I've already told you how the shamans at the other end of Time want to be sure nothing happens to endanger their own existence, right? Causality really worries them. So they're obsessive about tracing their ancestors, finding out for certain where they came from. And they've been careful to chart something called genetic drift. It's like a map, you know what a map is, that shows where their fathers have been. Well, they found that a lot of their fathers—actually, mothers-started out right below this mountain, mortal, right down in that nice green valley of yours. It's sort of a crossroads—uh, game trail—for humanity. It's where a lot of important human traits came together to make something special. But back then this hadn't happened yet. There was a tribe living down there, all right, nicely settled into a farming community, but they only had some of the genetic markers, the special blood, that our. masters expected to find.

So the masters sent in a Preserver to watch them. He was what we call an anthropologist, which meant he didn't mind working with the monkeys. His name was Rook. He became a member of their tribe, lived in their huts with them. I couldn't do it, but I guess there's no accounting for tastes. Rook was expecting another tribe to appear from somewhere and intermarry with the farmers, and that other tribe would provide the missing pieces, so to speak, and their descendants would become our masters' fathers. He was all set to record it, when it happened; but it didn't quite happen the way he'd expected.

The other tribe came along, all right, hunter-gatherers on a long leisurely migration to greener pastures, and that valley below was niceand green. The newcomers had the right genes, too, just as Rook had predicted.

What he hadn't predicted, though, was that the peaceful farming folk would treat the newcomers just like they treated any other migratory species. Like elk, or caribou. You see, agrarian societies sometimes have a problem getting enough protein...

That means meat. I mean they were catching the hunter-gatherers and eating them. You're embarrassed to learn that your fathers were cannibals? Think how the shamans at the other end of Time felt!

So the old Enforcers weren't demobilized quite yet, ha ha. But this was a slightly more complicated situation than we were used to, understand? We couldn't just wade in there and wipe out the peaceful farming folk. Negotiation was called for. And we never negotiate.

So our masters assigned us a liaison with the mortals, a new kind of Preserver they'd invented, called a Facilitator.

Facilitators are different. We Enforcers were designed to love killing, and the regular Preservers were designed to love the things they preserved. The Facilitators, though, were designed to be more objective, to operate in the big civilizations that were about to be born. They would be politicians, intriguers, councilors to mortal kings. What do those words mean?... I guess the best translation would be liars. I remember the staff meeting as though it were yesterday, mortal man.

It was raining. We'd made camp on that high meadow you passed on your way up here, and most of us had fanned out into the landscape. Budu had only brought the Fifth Infantry Division, which I was in. I was one of his aides, so all I had to do was set up the tent where the meeting was to be held. The old man stood there quietly in the open, staring down the trail; he didn't care if he got wet. We'd had a report from a patrol that they were on their way. Pretty soon I caught a whiff of Preserver in the wind though Budu had picked it up before I did; he had already turned to watch them come down from the pass. Rook was on foot, a little miserable-looking guy in a wet cloak, but the Facilitator was riding a horse, and Rook was having to tilt his head back to look up at him as he talked earnestly, waving his arms.

The Facilitator was tall, for one of them anyway, and wore nice tailored clothes. His name was Sarpa. He wasn't paying attention to Rook much, just sort of nodding his head as he rode and scanning the landscape, and when he spotted us I saw his eyes widen. I don't know what he'd been told about Enforcers at his briefing, but he hadn't expected what he found.

They were escorted in, and I took Sarpa's horse away and tethered it. The old man wanted to start the meeting right then. The Preservers asked for something hot to drink first, which seemed stupid to me—had they come there to talk, or to have a party?—but Budu just told me to get them something. All we had was water, but I brought it in a couple of polished Great Goat skulls, the nicest ones in camp. The Preservers stared with big round eyes when I set their drinks before them, and didn't touch a drop. There's no pleasing some people.

At least they got down to business. Rook made his report first, about how the fanning tribe had been fairly peaceable until the newcomers had arrived, when they had suddenly shown a previously-unknown talent for hunting hunters. They watched the hunters' trails, lay in wait with sharp sticks, and almost never failed to carry off one of the younger or weaker of the new tribe, whom they butchered and parceled out among themselves. Rook had seen all this firsthand.

The Facilitator Sarpa asked him why he hadn't tried to stop them.

"I did try," he said wretchedly. "I told them they shouldn't eat other people. They told me (with their mouths full) that the strangers weren't people. They were quite calm about it, and nothing I said could convince them otherwise. Anyway, I can't say much without blowing my cover; they thought it was funny enough I wouldn't touch the ribs they offered me."

Sarpa wanted to know what Rook's cover was, and Rook told him he was an adopted member of the tribe, and had himself avoided any "unpleasantness" by volunteering to work in the fields even in bad weather. Sarpa stared harder at that than he'd stared at the skull cups.

"You're maintaining your cover by good attitude?" he said, as though he couldn't believe it.

"That's what a participant observer does," Rook explained.

"But when you're one of us? It never occurred to you to exploit your superior abilities, or your knowledge? Why didn't you pose as a spirit? A magician, at least, and impress them with a few tricks?"

"That would have been lying," said Budu, and Rook said:

"Well, but that would have created an artificial dynamic in our relationship. I'm supposed to observe and document the way they live in their natural state. If I'd said I was a magical being, they wouldn't have behaved in a natural way toward me, would they?"

Sarpa exhaled hard through his little thin nose, and drummed his fingers on his knees. "All right," he said, "it's clearly time a specialist was brought in. I'll make contact with them immediately." Budu wanted to know what he was going to do, and Sarpa waved his hand. "Textbook procedure for managing primitives. I'll put them inawe of me with an exhibition of juggling, or something. Once I've got their attention, I'll explain the health risks involved in eating the flesh of their own species."

"And if they won't listen?" asked Budu. Sarpa smiled at him in a patronizing kind of way, I guess because he was frightened of the old man. I could smell his fear from clear over where I was standing, playing dumb like a good orderly.

"Why, then we send in the troops, don't we?" Sarpa said lightly. "But it won't come to that. I know my job."

"Good," said Budu. "What do you need now?"

"I need to download all possible data on them from Rook, here," Sarpa replied. (What's that mean?

Just that Rook was going to tell him a lot of things very very fast, mortal.) "We can retire to my field quarters for that; I'd like to get into dry clothes first. Where's our camp?"

"You're in it," said Budu.

Sarpa looked around in dismay. "You haven't put up the other tents yet?" he asked. Budu told him we don't need tents, but offered him the one in which they were squatting. "And I'll assign you Flat Top for an aide," he said.

(He meant me. I was designated Joshua when I was born, but everybody in my unit went by a nickname. Skullcracker, Crunchmaster, Terminator, that kind of thing. I earned my nickname when we had a contest to see how many beers we could balance on top of our heads. I got five up there.) Sarpa didn't look too happy about it, but I made myself useful after the old man left: hung some more skins around the tent and brought in some springy bushes for bedding. I unloaded his saddlebags and set up the field unit—uh, the magic box that let us talk to the shamans. Like that one over there, see? Only smaller—while he downloaded from Rook. Rook went back to the farmstead after that, poor little drone, couldn't leave his mortals for long.

Sarpa got up and spread his hands over the back of his field unit to get them warm. He asked me,

"What time are rations served out?" and I told him we were foraging on this campaign, but that I'd get him part of somebody's kill if he wanted, or maybe some wild onions. He shuddered and said he'd manage on the Company-issued provisions he'd brought with him. So I set that out for him instead, little tiny portions of funny-smelling stuff.

I don't think Sarpa understood yet that he was supposed to dismiss me or I couldn't go. I just stood at ease while he ate, and after a few minutes he offered me a packet of crackers. I could have inhaled the damn things, they were so small. To be polite I nibbled at the edges andmade them last a while, which was hard with teeth like mine, believe me.

When he was finished I tidied up for him, and he settled down at his field unit. He didn't work, though. He just stared out over the edge of the meadow at the smoke rising from the mortals' farmstead. I figured I'd better give him a clue, so I said, "Sir, will there be anything else, sir?"

"No... " he said, in a way that meant there would be. I waited, and after a minute he said, not meeting my eyes: "Tell me something, Enforcer. What does a man have to do to—ah—fraternize with the female mortals?"

By which he meant he wanted to couple with one of your mothers.

I said, "Sir, I don't know, sir."

His attention came away from the smoke and he looked up at me sharply. "So it's true, then, about Enforcers?" he asked me. "That you're really not, ah, interested?"

"Sir, that's affirmative, sir," I told him.

"No sex at all?"

"Sir, no sir."

"But... " He looked out at the smoke again. "How on earth do you manage?" 1 felt like asking him the same question: Why would our masters have created his kind with the need to go through the motions of reproduction, when they can't actually reproduce?

(No, mortal, we can't. We're immortal, so we don't need to.)

I mean, I can see why you mortals are obsessed with it; I'd be too, if that was my only shot at immortality. But we've always wondered why the Preserver class were given such a stupid appetite. Budu used to say it was because they needed to be able to understand the mortals' point of view if they were to function correctly, and I guess that makes sense. Still, if it was me, I'd find it a distraction. So I just told Sarpa, "Sir, nothing to manage. Everybody knows that killing's a lot easier than making life, and for us it's a lot more fun, sir."

He shivered at that, and said, "I suppose it's really just sports taken to the extreme, isn't it? Very well; Rook will probably know how to set me up with a girl."

I didn't say anything, and he looked at me sidelong, trying to read my expression.

"You probably disapprove," he said. "With the morality the Company programmed into you."

"Sir, strictly speaking, you're exploiting the mortals, sir," I said.

"And you think that's wrong."

"Sir, it would be for me. Not my place to say what's wrong for you, sir. You're a Preserver, and one of the new models at that, sir."

"So I am," he said, smiling. "You won't judge me, eh? I like the way your conscience works, Flat Top. And after all, if I can get the creatures' females on my side, it'll be easier to persuade them to behave themselves."

I don't know why he should have cared what I thought of him, but the Preservers were all like that; the damndest things bothered them. I just told him, "Yes Sir," and he dismissed me after that. The guys in my mess had saved me a leg of mountain goat. Not much meat, but there was a lot of marrow in the bones. Crack, yum.

Well, so the next day the Facilitator went out and did his stuff.

He dressed in his best clothes, dyed all kinds of bright colors to dazzle the mortals, and he put on makeup. He rode on his horse, which your fathers hadn't got around to domesticating yet. It was a pretty animal, nothing like the big beasts our cavalry ride: slender legs, little hooves, kind of on the stupid side but elegant as you please.

We went with Sarpa, though of course we were undercover. There were maybe a hundred of us flanking him as he rode down to their patchwork fields, slipping through the trees and the bushes, keeping ourselves out of sight. So close we came I could have popped open any one of their little round heads with a rock, as Sarpa rode back and forth in plain sight and got their attention. They froze with their deer-antler hoes in their hands; they watched him with their mouths open, and slowly drew into a crowd as he approached them. He staged it nicely, I have to say, let his long cloak blow out behind him so its rainbow lining showed, and there were grunts and cries of wonder from the mortals.

Sarpa told them he was a messenger from their ancestors, and to prove it he did a stunt with some special-effects charges that sent red smoke and fireballs shooting from his fingertips. The mortals almost turned and ran at that, but he kept them with his voice, saying he had an important message to deliver. Then he said the ancestors demanded to know why their children had been eating their own kind?

His audience just looked blank at that, and I spotted Rook running up from behind and pushing his way through the crowd. He yelled out that he'd warned them this would happen. Falling flat before Sarpa, he begged the ancestors for mercy and promised that the farmers would never do such a terrible thing again.

At this point, though, the farmstead's lady raised her voice and said there must be some mistake, because her people weren't eating their own kind.

Sarpa asked, were they not lying in wait for the strangers who had recently come into the valley, the harmless people who hunted and gathered? Were they not stabbing them with spears, cutting them open, roasting them over coals?

The lady smiled and shrugged and said yes, the invaders were being treated so; but they were not her own kind, and certainly not children of the ancestors!

Sarpa didn't win them over nearly as easy as he'd thought he could. They argued back and forth for about an hour, as I remember. He told them why it was wrong to eat other human beings, told them all about the diseases they could catch, even told them a lot of malarkey about what would happen to them in the next world if they didn't cut it out right now.

The mortals were clearly impressed by him, but refused to consider the newcomers as people and in fact argued quite confidently against such a silly idea. Not only did they point out a whole lot of physical differences that were obvious to them (though it was lost on me; I've never been able to tell one of your races from another), they explained how vitally necessary it was to protect their sacred home turf from the alien interlopers, and to protect their limited resources.

Sarpa was kind of taken aback that these little mortal things had the gall to argue with him. I saw he was beginning to lose his temper, and in the shadows beside me Budu noticed it, too; the old man snorted, but he just narrowed his eyes and watched. At last the Facilitator fell back on threatening the mortals, letting fly with a couple of thunderbolts that set fire to a bush and working a few other alarming-looking tricks.

That got instant capitulation. The mortals abased themselves, and the lady apologized profusely for them all being so stupid as not to understand the mighty Son of Heaven sooner. She asked him what they could possibly do to please the Son of Heaven. Maybe he'd like a beautiful virgin?

And a mortal girl was pushed forth, looking scared, and Budu grunted, because Sarpa's eyes fixed on her with an expression like a hungry dog's. Then he was all smiles and gracious acceptance, and congratulated the mortals for being so wise as to see things his way. The girl squealed a bit, but he assured her she'd live through his embrace and even have pretty things afterward. I don't think she believed him, but her mother fixed her with an iron glare, and she gulped back her terror and went with Sarpa.

He took her back up to camp—she squealed a lot more when she saw us at last, but Sarpa sweet-talked her some more—and to celebrate his success he took her to his tent, stripped her bare as a skinned rabbit, and had his fun.

There was a lot of muttering from us about that, and not just because we thought what he was doing was wrong. We were disgusted because he hadn't realized the mortals were lying to him. See, mortal, we can tell when you're lying. You smell different then. You smell afraid. But Sarpa had been distracted by his lusts and his vanity, sniffing after something else. We knew damned well the mortals were only giving him the girl to make him go away.

And oh, mortal, it was hard not to go down there and punish them. It was our duty, it was our programmed and ancient desire. By every law we understood, those mortals were ours now. Budu wouldn't give the order yet, all the same. He just bided his time, though he must have known what was going to happen.

Well—three days later, as Sarpa was in his tent with his little friend while I was busting my ass to find a way to boil water in a rock basin because the great Facilitator wanted a hot bath, thank you very much-Rook came slinking up from the farmstead to tell us that the mortals had done it again. They'd caught a party of strangers, and even now they were whacking them up into bits to be skewered over the cookfire.

I can't say I was surprised, and I know the old man wasn't. He just stalked to Sarpa's tent, threw back one of the skins and said:

"Son of Heaven, it seems that your in-laws have backslid."

Sarpa was furious. He yelled at the mortal girl, demanded to know what was wrong with her people, even took a swing at her. Budu growled and fetched him out by his arm, and told him to stop being an ass. He added that if this was the way the hotshot Facilitators operated, the Company—the shamans^ I mean—should have saved themselves the trouble of designing a new model, or at least not sent one into the field until they'd got the programming right.

Sarpa just drew himself up and yelled for me to bring his horse. He jumped into the saddle and rode off hell-for-leather, with Rook racing after him. Budu watched them go, and I think he actually considered for a minute whether or not it was worth it to send an armed escort after the fool. In the end he did, which turned out to be a wise precaution.

I wasn't there to see what happened. I was babysitting Sarpa's little girlfriend, watching as she cowered in the bedding and cried. I felt sorry for her. We do feel sorry for you sometimes, you know. It's just that you can be so stupid, you mortals.

Anyway I missed quite a scene. Apparently it didn't go at all well: Sarpa went galloping down and caught the farm-tribe with their mouths full of hunter-tribe. He shouted terrible threats at them, and put on another show of smoke and noises. Maybe he should have waited until there was an eclipse or a comet scheduled, though, because the farmers weren't as impressed with his stunts this time. The upshot was, theykilled his horse from under him and he had to run for it, and Rook too. If the armed escort hadn't stepped out and scared the mortals off, there'd have been a couple of badly damaged Preservers doing time in regeneration vats, and maybe some confused farmers puking up bits of bio-mechanical implants. But Sarpa and Rook got back up to camp safely enough, though they were fuming at each other, Rook especially because now he'd lost his cover and wouldn't be able to collect any more anthropological data. He said a lot of cutting things about Facilitators in general. Sarpa was just gibbering with rage. I got between him and the girl until he calmed down a little and I respectfully suggested, sir, that he might want to keep her safe as a hostage, sir, and whatever he might have retorted, he shut up when Budu came into the tent and looked at him.

"Well, Facilitator," said Budu, "what are you going to do now?" But Sarpa had an answer for that. He was through dealing with the lying, grubbing little farmers. He'd go straight to the hunter-gatherers and present himself as their good angel, and show them how to defend themselves against the other tribe.

Budu told him he couldn't do that, because it directly contravened orders. The monkeys were supposed to interbreed, not fight.

Sarpa said something sarcastic about Budu's grasp of subtleties and explained that he'd manage that: if the hunter-gatherers captured the farmers' females, they could keep them as slaves and impregnate them. It wouldn't exactly be the peace and harmony our masters had wanted imposed, but it would at least guarantee the requisite interbreeding took place.

Budu shrugged, and told him to go ahead and try.

Next day, he did. Rook stayed in camp this time, but I went along because Sarpa, having lost his mount, insisted on me carrying him around on my shoulders. I guess he felt safe up there. He had a good view, anyway, because he was the first in our party to spot the hunter-gatherers' camp on the far side of the valley.

Our reconnaissance team had reported the hunter-gatherers were digging in and fortifying a position for themselves, finally. Nice palisade of sharpened sticks, and inside they were chipping flint points just as fast as they could. Budu studied them from all angles before he just sent me walking up to the stockade so that Sarpa could look over the fence at them.

He—that is, I—had to dodge quite a few spears and thrown flints before he got them to listen to his speech. They did listen, I have to hand them that much.

But they weren't buying it. They had every intention of descendingon the farmer-tribe and getting revenge for the murder of their brethren. Sarpa tried to persuade them that the best way to do this was to make more children, but that wouldn't wash either.

It turned out they weren't just a migratory tribe. They apparently had a long-standing cultural imperative to expand, to take new land for themselves whenever they needed it, and if other tribes got in the way they'd push them out or kill them off—though they never ate them, they hastened to add, because they were a morally superior people, which was why they deserved to have the land in the first place.

Sarpa argued against this until they began to throw things at him again, and we beat an inglorious retreat. What was worse, when we got back we discovered that Rook had let the mortal girl go. He'd known her since her childhood, evidently, and didn't want to see her hurt. He and Sarpa almost came to blows and it's not pretty to see Preservers do that, mortal, they're not designed for it. Budu had to step in again and threaten to knock their heads together if they didn't back off. Anyway, the damage was done, because the girl ran right back to her tribe and told them what was going on. How she'd figured out that Sarpa was going to woo the enemy, I don't know, unless Rook was dumb enough to tell her. Then, too, you people aren't always as stupid as you look. She might have figured out on her own that matters were coming to a head.

Which they did, in the gray cold hour before the next dawn.

Our patrols spotted them long before they got within a kilometer of each other: two little armies carrying as much weaponry as they could hold, men and boys and strong women, with their faces painted for war. Guilty, guilty, guilty, mortal! We watched" from our high place and danced where we stood, we were so hungry to go after them. Sarpa didn't desire his naked girl as much as we desired the sound of our axes on their guilty skulls, pop-chop! They were sinning, the worst of sins, and their blood was ours. But the old man held us back. Orders were, the mortals were to be given every chance. That's why he was our commander, mortal! He loved the law. His faith was stronger than anyone's, but he had the strength to hold back from the purest pleasure in the world, which is being the law's instrument, you see?

So he sent me down with Sarpa riding on my shoulder, and I walked out before the mortal armies, who had just seen each other in the growing light and were working themselves up to charge, the way the monkeys do. They fell silent when Sarpa and I appeared, and clear in the morning they heard the voices of our men, because we couldn't help singing now, the ancient song, and it welled up so beautiful behindSarpa's voice as he shouted for them to lay down their arms and go home!

Oh, mortal man, you'd have thought they'd listen to him, in that cold morning when the sun was just rising and making the high snow red as blood, lighting the meadows up green, reaching bright fingers down through deeps of blue air to touch their thatched roofs and palisade points with gold. So brief their lives are in this glorious world, you'd think they'd have grabbed at any excuse not to make them briefer. But the one side jeered and the other side screamed, and the next thing I knew I had a spear sticking out of my leg.

1 swear, it felt good. The suspense was over.

They charged, and were at each other's throats in less time than it takes to say it. So Budu gave the order.

I just shoved Sarpa up into a tree, drew my axes, and waded in.

You can't imagine the pleasure, mortal. It would be wrong, anyway; that joy is reserved to us, forbidden to the likes of you. War is the Evil, and we make war on war, we strike that wickedness into bloody pulp! The little bone bubbles burst under our axes and the gray matter of their arrogance and presumption flies, food for crows.

Oh, it was over too soon. There'll always be those who get the lesson at the last minute, but once we've shown them what true evil is they do get it, and throw down their weapons and scream their repentance on their knees. Those we spared; those we accorded mercy. Budu himself herded the terrified survivors into a huddle, and stood guard while we mopped up.

I was stringing together a necklace of ears I'd taken when I spotted Rook at the edge of the battlefield, weeping. I was feeling so friendly I almost went over and patted him on the back, with the idea of saying something to cheer him up; but they don't see things the way we do, the Preservers. And seeing him put me in mind of Sarpa, and when I looked around for the Facilitator, damned if he wasn't still up in the tree where I'd left him.

So I went over and offered him a helpful hand down, but he drew back at the sight of all the blood on it. I can't blame him. I was red to the elbows, actually. Sarpa was so pale he looked green, staring at the field as though he'd never be able to close his eyes again.

I told him it was all right, that the slaughter was over. He just looked down at me and asked me how I could do such things.

Well, I had to laugh at that. It's my duty! Who couldn't love doing his duty? It's the best work in the world, mortal, in the best cause: seeing that Evil is punished and Good protected. I told him so, and hesaid it was obscene; I replied that when the mortals took it into their heads to usurp our jobs, that would be obscene. Sarpa didn't say anything to that, just scrambled awkwardly down and staggered out on the field.

Maybe he shouldn't have done that. The boys were still having a little fun, taking heads that weren't too smashed and cutting off other things that took their fancies, and Sarpa took one look and doubled over, vomiting. The poor guy was a Preserver at heart, after all. The problem was, this was the big dramatic moment when he was supposed to address the surviving mortals of each tribe and point out how disobeying him had brought them to this sorry state.

I told him to pull himself together. Budu, kind of impatient, sent over a runner to ask if the Facilitator was ready to give his speech, and I tried to drag Sarpa along but he'd take a few steps and start retching again, especially when he saw the women lying dead. I hoisted him up on my shoulders to give him a ride, but he got sick again, right in my hair, which the other guys in my unit thought was hilarious; they stopped stacking corpses to point and laugh.

I growled at them and set Sarpa down. He put his hands over his face, crying like a baby. It was hopeless. I looked over at Budu and shrugged, holding out my hands in a helpless kind of way. The old man shook his head, sighing.

In the end, Budu was the one who made the speech, rounding up what was left of the two tribes and penning them together to listen to him.

It wasn't a long speech, no flowers of rhetoric such as Sarpa might have come up with. Budu just laid it out for them, simple and straight. From now on, they were all to live together in peace. They would intermarry and have children. There would be no more cannibalism. There would be no more fighting. The penalty for disobedience would be death.

Then Budu told them that we were going, and they were to bury what we'd left them of their dead. He warned them, though, that we were only going up the mountain, above the tree line into the mist, and we'd be watching them always from the high places.

And we did. We were up here thirty years. It turned out to be a good thing for us, too, because while we were overseeing the integration of the two tribes, Budu worked out a proposal for our masters. I told you he'd studied their future history. He knew what kind of an opening they needed, and he gave them one. He pointed out the nearly universal existence of places we could fit in the mortals' mythology. Not just of your village, mortal; every village there is, anywhere.

Legends of gods, or giants or trolls or demons, who live up somewhere high and bring judgment on mankind. Sometimes terrible, sometimes benign, but not to be screwed with, ever! Sometimes they're supposed to live on one specific mountain, like this one; sometimes the story gets garbled and they're thought to live in the clouds, or the sky. Someplace up. Hell, there's even a story about a big man with a beard who lives at the North Pole, who rewards and punishes children. I think he's called Satan... or was it Nobodaddy? It doesn't matter.

Anyway, Budu showed our masters that his proposal fit right in with recorded history, was in fact vital to the development of mortal religion. And, while I understand they don't approve of religion much up there in the future, they do like to be absolutely sure that history rolls along smoothly. Messing with causality scares them.

What was his proposal, mortal? Come on, can't you think? What if I give you three guesses? No?

Well, Budu said that since civilization was still a little shaky on its legs, our masters needed to keep us around a while as a peacekeeping force. We'd go to each little community and lay down the law, or give them law if they didn't have it: no eating each other, no murder, don't inbreed, don't steal. Basic stuff. Then we'd run patrols and administer justice when and as needed, and contain any new mortal aggression that might threaten to wipe out humanity before it could become established. The final clever touch was that he signed Sarpa's name to it.

The masters accepted that proposal, mortal. It's bought us generations of time, even with Marco's idiot rebellion. The masters may not have trusted us anymore, but they still needed us. And it worked for their good, too; it certainly got your village established. You wouldn't be here now if not for what we did that day, on that bloody field. And neither would our masters, and they know it. We watched your fathers, from up here in the rocks and the snow, until we could be certain they wouldn't backslide again. Then Budu pulled the Fifth Infantry out, all but three of us, me and Bouncer and Longtooth, and we watched over your little valley down the long centuries while he went off to give law to other mortals.

But time marched on, and eventually Bouncer got reassigned somewhere else, and later on Longtooth was transferred out too. Now there's only me.

And the word's just come down from the top, mortal: they're sending me back to my old unit, after all this time. I'll see battle again, I'll serve under the old man! My hands will steam with the blood of sinners. It'll be wonderful! I've gotten so tired of sitting up here, freezing my ass off. If you'd climbed this mountain a day later than you did, you'd havemissed out on your chance to get the Truth. Life's funny, isn't it?

Death is even funnier.

The words and gestures cease, as the old monster settles back on his haunches, momentarily lost in a happy dream. The boy watches him. Terrified as he is, he cannot help wondering whether his host isn't something of a fool. It has of course occurred to him, as he listened unwilling to this story, that people as clever as the Time Shamans must have long since found some way of outwitting their servants. How can the creature trust his masters? How can he not know that times change?

For even in his village below, where there are still those who can remember glimpsing God, skepticism is blooming. Nowadays children are frightened into good behavior by the old stories, but not men. Once nobody would have dared climb this mountain, seek out this cave; it would have been sacrilegious. Yet the boy's friends had laughed at him when he'd set out for the mountain, and the village elders had just shrugged, smiling, and watched him go.

The boy is musing to himself, thinking of the methods fabled heroes had always used to defeat ogres, and wondering what sort of magical devices the Time Shamans might have employed, when he becomes aware that the old monster has turned his pale eyes on him again. Flat Top's expression has lost its warmth. He looks remote, stern, sad.

The boy feels a chill go down his spine, wondering if his thoughts have been read somehow. The giant extends one of his eloquent hands and picks up a stone axe. He runs his thumb along its scalloped edge. Holding the boy's gaze with his own, he lays the axe across his knees and resumes their conversation:

... But enough about me.

I want to hear your story now, mortal man. I want to know if you're one of the righteous. You'll tell me everything you've ever done, your whole life story, and then. I'll judge you. Take as long as you like. My patience is limitless.

The boy gulps, wondering how convincingly he can lie.

As I write this, a new portrait of Shakespeare has surfaced. The provenance seems airtight; carbon dating, materials and techniques all check out; and, best of all, he looks like the guy in the Droeshout engraving, only younger, sexier, and with more hair. If this isn't a fake, then it's clearly a Company job, and my guess is this is the portrait from which the Droeshout engraving was made. "Here, this is the only picture we have of him, but it's twenty years old; give him a solemn expression and less hair, okay?"

And Bard-worshippers everywhere toss their sweaty nightcaps in the air and cry "Huzzah," not surprisingly. But what does surprise me is the hostile—as opposed to healthily skeptical—attitude of certain academics. That we should still care how Shakespeare the Man looked infuriates them. They see it as decadent, an unhealthy preoccupation with celebrity. Shakespeare's work is so great that we cheapen it, apparently by any attempt to know its creator; better to treat the plays as great and mysterious works of art that have come to us out of nowhere, author-less, and reinterpret them on our own terms.

This seems like rank academic Von Danikenism to me. An ordinary mortal man created something wonderful and immortal; and I'd like to see his face. I like the little human details. The Dust Enclosed Here

"He never wore a red doublet in his life!"

Susanna had sounded outraged. Hastening to smooth her anger, the stranger's voice had followed: "An you wish it painted, good lady, 'twill look best in red. Consider! "Us not the man you dress, but the monument for posterity. And, Mistress Hall, Preeves and Sons have plied our trade this many a year and we know what looks well in a memorial. Think of the dark church, ay, and the old wood, and this splendid funerary bust gleaming from the shadows in—gray? No, no, Mistress, it must be a goodly scarlet, granting your dear father a splendor like the setting sun!" Will's sun was setting. His son down below the horizon and he'd follow soon enough himself. He had wadded the sheet between his fingers irritably, wishing they'd go have their hissed argument elsewhere. No, no peace yet; Susanna had drawn back the curtain, letting in the blinding light while a shabby fellow in a puke-colored coat peered at him, respectful as though he were already dead, and sketched in a book the rough cartoon to impose on a marble bust blank.

"Christ Jesu," Will had muttered, closing his eyes. When he'd opened his eyes again, preparing to give them his best offended glare, he was surprised to discover they were gone and it was night. Nothing but low coals to light the room, with a blue flame crawling on them. And then the shadow had loomed against the light, and he'd turned his head expecting it was John—

That was the last memory! The strange doctor who'd come for his soul, or at least it had seemed so. The stranger had bent swiftly, thrusting something cold into his face. He'd felt a sharp pain in his nose andthen a tearing between his eyes, sparks of fire, fathomless darkness... Will put his nervous hand up now to stroke the bridge of his nose, imagining he felt sympathetic pain. There was no real pain, he knew. No real hand or nose, either, but if he thought about that for long he'd panic again. Mastering himself, he paced the little tiring room (or what he pretended was his tiring room) and waited for his cue.

Here it came now, the sudden green orb in his vision. He felt the pull and was summoned like the ghost he was, through the insubstantial curtain into the light, where swirling dust motes coalesced into his hologrammatic form.

"... so give a big welcome to Mr. William Shakespeare!" cried Caitlin gamely, indicating him with an outflung hand as she stepped aside for him. She wore an antique costume, the sort of gown his grandmothers might have worn. Three people, the whole of his audience, applauded with something less than enthusiasm. He gritted his teeth and smiled brilliantly, bowed grandly with flourishes, wondering what he'd ever done to be consigned to this particular Hell.

"God give ye all good day, good ladies, good gentleman!" he cried. The lumpen spectators regarded him.

"Doth thou really be-eth Shakespeareth?" demanded the man, grinning, in the flat Lancashireish accent Will had come to understand was American.

"As nearly -he as cybertechnology may revive and represent, good sir!" Will told him, and Caitlin made a face, her usual signal meaning: Keep it simple for the groundlings. He nodded and went on:

"I am, sir, an insubstantial hologram. Yet my form is drawn in forensic reconstruction from my mortal corpse exact, to show how 1 was when I lived. Yea, and I have been programmed with quotes from my works for your entertainment, and my personality hath been extrapolated from the best conjecture of scholars."

Though he suspected that last was a flat lie; it seemed to him that his owners (gentlemen of a company calling itself Jupiter Cyberceuticals) must somehow have captured his memories if not his soul, in that last minute of his life, and held them prisoner now in this wooden 0. However, he said what they had programmed him to say.

"So do you, um, find it really strange being here in the future?" asked one of the women. She spoke politely enough, but it was a question he'd heard at nearly every performance since his revival. Will kept the smile in place and replied, "Ay, indeed, madam, most strange. When I do hear that humankind hath nowadays built cities on the Moon, nay, even on Mars, truly I think this is an age of wonders indeed." The programming that he wore like chains prompted him to goon and make certain low jokes about how he wished his era had had a cure for baldness, but he exerted his will and refused. Caitlin wrung her hands.

"What do you think of your Prince Hank?" inquired the other woman, smirking archly, and Will accessed the data on the latest juicy scandal among the royals. He smirked right back at her and stroked his beard.

"Well, truly, good lady, to paraphrase mine own First Part of Henry the Fourth: right sadly must our poor queen see riot and dishonour stain the brow of her young Harry!" They giggled in appreciation. Encouraged, he went on:

"Belike he doth but imitate the sun, who doth permit the base contagious clouds to smother up his beauty from the world, that, when he please again to be himself, being wanted, he may be more wondered at by breaking through the foul and ugly mists—"

No; he'd lost them. His sensors noted their complete incomprehension, though they were smiling and applauding again. He just smiled back and bowed, wishing he had a set of juggler's clubs or a performing dog.

"I thank ye! I humbly thank ye. What would ye, now, good ladies? What would you, now, sir?" They blinked, their smiles fading.

"What about a sonnet?" he suggested in desperation.

"Okay," agreed the man.

He was programmed to give them the one catalogued as the Eighteenth, and for once he didn't feel like substituting another.

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" he declaimed. "Thou art more lovely and more temperate...

" He gave the rest in a performance so widely gestured and so antic even Will Kempe would have winced at it for being over the top, but it held their attention at least.

"That was neat," volunteered the man, when the recitation had ended.

"Many thanks. That sonnet, with selected others, is available in the Gifte Shoppe off the lobby, in both ring hob and standard format," he informed them. Caitlin nodded approvingly. The commercials must not be omitted, and that was one of the few things on which he agreed with his owners.

"Does the Gifte Shoppe sell Fruit Chew bars too?" inquired one of the ladies.

"Yea, madam, it doth," he told her, and she turned to her companions.

"I'm starving. Do you want to... ?"

"Yeah," the others chorused, nodding, and they turned away and made for the exit. Courtesy wasn't entirely dead in this latest age, however; at the door the man turned back and waved.

"Thanks, and—urn... Goodbyeth thee!"

Will smiled and waved back. "Now God blight thy knave's stones with poxy sores, most noble sir," he murmured sotto voce, noting with relief that it was six o'clock. The Southwark Museum was about to close for the day.

"Our revels now are ended!" he shouted, as the big clock struck across the river.

"Mr. Shakespeare," said Caitlin hesitantly, "You're supposed to follow the script. You know they really do want you to make those jokes about your hair. People like to laugh."

"Then let 'em drag Dicky Tarleton from his grave, and set him in this bear pit," snarled Will. "There was a man of elegant jest, God He knows. Or let in a little mongrel dog to piss my leg, what sayest thou?

They'll laugh right heartily then."

"We don't have dogs anymore," Caitlin explained. "Not since—"

"Since Beast Liberation, ay, I know it well. Nor canst thou give them Jack Falstaff for merriment, since he is banished, with all the other children of mine invention." Will collapsed into a sitting position on the stage, staring up at the empty galleries of the Globe Restored.

"I'm really sorry about that, Mr. Shakespeare, but I explained to you about the List," said Caitlin, referring to the database of proscribed and immoral literature published annually by the Tri-Worlds Council for Integrity.

"Even so you did," Will admitted. "And rather I had rotted in the earth this many a year than fret away eternity in such a dull, spiteful and Puritan age. What though my plays won't please? I take no censorship ill; there was ever a Master of the Revels spying over my shoulder lest I write an offense. But if they would let me give them a new piece, why, then! There's fine dramatic matter in these new times. That men might seek their fortunes not in mere Virginia colonies, but on Mars— God's bones, what a wonder!

Or a play of the Mountains of the Moon, what say you?" He swung his sharp stare down to her eyes.

"I wish you could," said Caitlin miserably, looking away from his gaze. She had gotten this job in the first place because she had a degree in history and longed, with all her unwise heart, to have been born in the romantic past. "I don't make the policy, Mr. Shakespeare. I'm sorry all your plays were condemned. If it wasn't for the tourist income the Borough Council wouldn't even let you do your songs and sonnets."

'"The Revenge of Kate,'" Will said slyly, framing a playbill in theair with his hands. "Wherein Petruchio himself is tamed, how like you that? That'll please, surely, and how if there were a mild Jew and a meek harmless Moor to boot? Nor no lusts nor bawdiness, nor any cakes nor ale, nor battles, and they shall ride no horses, out of melting compassion for the poor jades. Nay, more! There shall be a part set to be signed in dumb-show for the, what's the new word? Ay, the hearing-impaired!" "I wish you could," Caitlin repeated, and he saw that she was near tears, and sighed.

"Go thy ways, girl," he said. "Grant me oblivion." He stuck out his arms theatrically, as though being pinioned to a rack, and held the pose as she flicked the switch that shut him off for the night. Without illumination the dust motes vanished, settled.

So accustomed had he grown to this routine, over the five years he had been an exhibit in the museum, that he nearly died a second time when he found himself unexpectedly on in the middle of the night. He leaped to his feet and stared around him in the dark.

"How now?" he stammered. "What, ho! Who's about?" But there was no sound. The glowing clock told him it was midnight, and he felt a moment's uneasiness until the absurdity of the scene occurred to him: insubstantial ghost frightened of the witching hour! Here came the distant bell, the little tune that preceded long-tolling twelve. He heard it out, pacing the stage.

"I am thy father's spirit," he intoned, and then dropped his voice an octave. "I am thy father's spirit, ay, better:

"I am thy father's spirit,

Doomed for a certain term to walk the night

And for the day confined to fast in fires,

Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature

Are burnt and purged away... "

He paused at the edge of the stage. Tentatively he extended a foot beyond the light, out of the range of the holoprojector's bright beam. His foot vanished. This was startling, but there was no pain; and after drawing his foot back and seeing it reappear unaltered, he tried with his hand. It vanished too, and came back obligingly when he withdrew it.

"Now, by God's will... " he said. He turned his face up toward the painted Heavens. "Almighty Father, can I escape this vile purgatory? Are mine own sins burnt and purged away? Oh, let it be so!" Backing up for a running start, he sprinted forward and hurtled hopeful into the darkness. He landed with a crash in the middle of the groundling area and lay there a moment, cursing imaginatively. Rising, he put up his hands to dust himself off and realized that he couldn't see them, though he was still palpable. He cast a baleful stare at the cone of light" on the stage, empty now but for a few motes of glittering dust.

"That's well," he said sarcastically. "First my mortal substance and now my form. Am I to be no more than memory?"

Nobody answered him. He climbed up on stage again and found that his image returned when he stood there. He amused himself for a while making bits of his body disappear. It occurred to him he might explore the Southwark Museum and this cheered him considerably until he found that, insubstantial or not, he was unable to leave the perimeter of the Globe Restored; whereat he said something to which Sir Edmund Tilney would certainly have objected.

All the rest of that night he prowled the silent galleries, a shadow among shadows, raging at his immortality.

Over the next six months the phenomenon occurred, with increasing frequency: sudden and unbidden consciousness when he had been manifestly shut off, and with it a gradual widening of his ability to range. He found himself able, in time, to venture out to the Gifte Shoppe and snack bar areas if he remained close to the wall through which ran the power and communications cables. There was nothing especially to interest him out there, since he was incapable of eating and the Gifte Shoppe had no writing materials, nor was he substantial enough to have stolen any had there been. Still, it was a little freedom. The day things truly changed for him began very badly indeed.

It was a day of the sort of weather the English plod through and ignore, but all others wisely shun, remaining in their hotels. Consequently no tourist vans pulled up before the Southwark Museum, and consequently Mr. Pressboard had the whole of the Globe Restored to himself when he arrived.

"Oh, dear," said Caitlin when she saw him coming, and flipped the switch that summoned Will. He materialized, started through the curtain and stopped in horror at the sight of Mr. Pressboard setting up his folding stool before the stage, as rain bounced and plinked on the forcefield above the thatching.

"Well, I see our most regular visitor is back again!" cried Caitlin in a bright false voice. "Welcome to the Globe Restored! We hope you'll enjoy yet another visit with the world-famous writer, Mr. William Shakespeare!"

"Except that he wasn't a writer," grunted Mr. Pressboard. "He was a butcher's boy." Will's lip curled and Caitlin's laugh dopplered after her as she made for the exit.

"Well, you two will just have to work that out!" she said, giving Will a look of guilty apology. "I hope you'll just excuse me—I have to see about something."

"Oh, faithless," Will hissed after her, before dragging a smile on his face for Mr. Pressboard. Mr. Pressboard was a retired person who believed, unshakably, that all of Will's stuff had really been written by the earl of Oxford. This belief was more than an article of faith for him; it was a cause. He wore, in the public streets, a sweatshirt and cap that proclaimed it. Vain for Will to deny the mysterious coded acrostic clues that were supposed to be hidden in the poems. Vain for him to insist, ever so politely, that there had been no vast and ridiculous conspiracy to conceal their true authorship. Mr. Pressboard had no life, and consequently had all the tedious time in the world to park himself in front of the stage and argue his case.

Today he was intent on demonstrating how no man with Will's paltry education could ever have written such masterful lines as, for example, "The gaudy, blabbing and remorseful day / Is crept into the bosom of the sea" and went on some two hours on this theme without pausing once. Will was pacing the stage repeating silently, Be courteous; he paid at the door, over and over, when a small boy wandered into the Globe.

He wore a yellow rain slicker and wellies, and his dun-fair hair was tousled from having been under the slicker's hood. From the snack bar he had obtained a Fruit Chew and stood now nibbling the granola off its surface as he watched Mr. Pressboard talk and talk and talk, and Will interject occasional "Hem" and

"Er" sounds.

After fifteen minutes the boy grew bored with this and started wandering around, up into the galleries and climbing on the balustrades. He leaned far over them to peer at the paintings of Apollo and Mercury. When he had tired of that he descended to the groundling level and inspected the trompe l'oeil stonework. He craned his head back to study the painted heavens and looked longingly at the dummy cannon. Finally he approached Mr. Pressboard and, extending an index finger, poked him in the arm.

"Excuse me," he said. "Can it be my turn now?"

"Even if Sir Philip Sidney did—what?" Mr. Pressboard started and turned to stare at him. The boy stared back. His eyes were wide, and a very pale blue.

"Can it be my turn to talk to Mr. Shakespeare now?" the boy reiterated.

"Forsooth, good Master Pressboard, we must suffer young scholarsto have their day, must we not?" Shakespeare exclaimed gleefully. Mr. Pressboard remained planted where he was, however, and frowned at the boy.

"I'm discussing something important, young man. Go away."

The boy backed off a pace, then dug in his heels. His pale stare became cold.

"But other people are supposed to get turns too, you know," he said, not taking his eyes from Mr. Pressboard's.

Abruptly: "Okay," said Mr. Pressboard, with an odd scared expression on his face. He got up, grabbed his folding stool and hurried for the exit. Will felt like turning a cartwheel. The boy looked up at him.

"He was really boring you, huh?" he said.

"To hot salt tears, lad," Will told him, dropping down to sit cross-legged on the edge of the stage.

"God keep thee and bless thee. What's thy name?"

"You don't remember?" The boy looked disappointed. "It's Alec. I came here when I was five. Remember?"

"I see many, many folk, Alec, every day," Will explained. "Wherefore I pray you excuse me." The boy nodded. "That's all right. There was a lot of kids that day. You sang us that song about the wind and rain and hay hoes."

"Ah! To be sure." Sweet Christ, someone who'd actually listened to him! Will smiled at the boy. "Dost thou like the Southwark Museum, Alec?"

"It's okay," said Alec. "Derek and Lulu wanted to be alone in the car so they gave me my credit disc and said I could buy anything I wanted in the Gifty Shoppy, as long as I stayed in here until it was lunchtime. I think they're having sex actually."

"Forsooth?" Will attempted, successfully, to keep a straight face. "And what hast thou bought in the Gifte Shoppe, lad?"

"Nothing much," Alec said. "It's all shirts and holocards and tea mugs with this place on them. I like things with ships on them. But I wanted to see how you were so I came in here. How are you doing?

You were sad when I saw you before. Are you happier now?"

Will opened his mouth to sing the praises of this wonderful modern age when there were cities on the Moon and cures for baldness, but what he said was:

"No, boy. I am the saddest wretch that liveth, in this most unnatural life of mine."

"Oh. I'm sorry," Alec replied, coming close to lean on the stage. "What's wrong?"

"I am a slave here, lad," Will replied.

"What's a slave?"

"A living soul kept as property by others, to labor for them eternally."

"But I thought you were dead a long time ago," said Alec.

"And yet I speak and reason, imprisoned within this cloven pine." Will stared into the boy's eyes, raised his clenched fists to show the shackles on his imagination. "I live again, Alec, how I know not, and yet I cannot have the thing I need to live!"

"What's that?" Alec wanted to know.

"Dost thou know what a poet is, lad?"

"That's what you are," said Alec, "It means you make stories to watch. I think. Doesn't it?"

"Ay, lad, I made stories to watch. Out of earth and heaven I pulled the unknown, gave it form and made it speak, and men filled this Globe and marveled at it! And paid good money to marvel, too, mind, t'was a profitable endeavor. But my masters will have me make no shows now. I am the show, and strut here meaningless afore barren spectators." Will sagged forward as though pulled by the weight of his unseen chains.

"You mean you want to make more stories and they won't let you?" Alec looked outraged.

"Even so, lad."

"That's mean! You can't even make 'em in cyberspace?"

"Cyber space?" Will lifted his head and stared at the boy. "A space cybertechnological, you mean?

Or what do you mean?"

"It's like—look. You're right here, but you're not really here," said Alec, pointing to him. "Where you really are is in the system. Where's your controls?"

"I know not—" Will held his hands wide, signifying bewilderment. Alec, pink with anger, was stamping along the front of the stage searching for something. At last he climbed up on the stage, ignoring the signs that forbade him doing so, and spotting the trap door that had once let ghosts rise out of the depths he fell to his knees beside it. Will scrambled to his feet and followed, looking down.

"I bet they're in here," said Alec. He reached into his coat and, looking around furtively, drew out a small case. It looked quite a bit like a thief's set of picklocks that Will had once seen in his less prosperous days. Alec noticed his astounded stare.

"Just my tools," he said in a small voice. "You won't tell?"

"Nay, boy, not I!" Will vowed. He watched as Alec lifted out the trap to reveal, not the hollow dark he had thought was below but a sort of shallow cavity full of winking lights and bright buttons. He was so surprised he got down on hands and knees beside Alec to look at it closely.

"God's bleeding wounds!"

"I have to be fast," Alec said, and manipulating some of the thingsin amid the lights he glanced up toward the ceiling." 'Cos I'm not really supposed to do this, not to other people's machines anyway. Okay; now the guard cameras in here think I'm still standing down there talking to you. Sneaky, huh?" He grinned at Will.

"But what is this?" Will asked, pointing at the box of lights.

"This is—er—where you really are," said Alec, hesitantly, as though he thought it might hurt Will's feelings. "But you can pretend it's jewels we're going to steal or something," he added, talking out of the side of his mouth like a petty crook. "Piece of cake, see?"

Will just watched as Alec took out his tools and did things to the buttons and lights. Red letters flashed in Will's peripheral vision and he put up his hand in an impatient gesture, as though they were flies he might wave off, before the import of the words sank in on him.

SUMMON HUMAN ASSISTANCE! MEDICAL EMERGENCY!

The sensors he used to monitor his audience began to chatter at him in a panicky way, informing him that they detected violent seizure activity in Alec's brain. Will almost shouted for Caitlin, but paused. He had seen folk afflicted with the falling sickness, and Alec did not appear to be having any manner of fit. The boy's eyes were alert and focused, his hands steady, and he worked swiftly and without the least hesitation as the bright storm raged within his skull.

Will shrugged and dismissed the sensors' warning. He had long since observed that even in this fabulous future world, things occasionally malfunctioned. Especially marvels cybertechnological. Presently Alec drew out something between tweezers. It looked like a tiny word in an unknown language, written in pure light.

"And that's it," he said thoughtfully, turning it this way and that. "Funny."

"What is it, in God's name?"

"It's your program," Alec replied. "You've got lots and lots in here, but they didn't give you very much to do. There's the new stuff you wrote yourself, that little winji bit there. Were you trying to bypass the holoemitter system?"

"I know not—" said Will, and then remembered his inexplicable nocturnal self-awareness. Had that been his own doing, by some means he couldn't name? Had his misery been enough to force his prison walls outward?

"It almost looks like you're a memory file from someplace else." The boy seemed puzzled. "This is a whole bunch of data. You could have a lot more functions, you know. You want to?" Will had no idea what he meant, but just the thought of having any kind of choice made him feel like dancing.

"Ay, forsooth!"

"Okay," said Alec, and set the bright word back and made some alteration. What happened next even Will could never find words to describe adequately. Was there a silent sound? An invisible flash of light?

A torrent of mathematical language forced itself into his head, and with it came strange comprehension. He rose on his knees, clutching his temples and gasping, while the boy closed up the trap and put away the little tools.

"So now," said Alec, "it'll be lots nicer. You can make stuff in here."

"Stuff?" said Will, getting unsteadily to his feet. "What stuff, lad?"

"Whatever you want there to be," said Alec. He shrugged. "You know. You just write what you want."

What he meant by write had nothing to do with quills and parchment, but it didn't matter. Will was at last beginning to get a sense of the laws of this universe.

"Maybe write some chairs or something so you can sit down, yeah?" Alec gestured at the bare stage.

"Or cloud-capp'd towers," said Will, staring around. "Or gorgeous palaces!"

"Yeah." Alec nodded.

Will looked hard at him. "How canst thou do these things, child? What art thou?"

"Different," said Alec, squirming.

Will raised an eyebrow, remembering the abnormal cerebral activity his sensors had picked up. Shrewd as he was, he was unable to guess the whole truth; for his owners at Jupiter Cyberceuticals had not included any information on genetic engineering in his programming. After all, it was illegal to make an enhanced human being. Even a small one... because who knew what such a creature might do if it was allowed to grow up? It would be as unpredictable as—for example—an artificial intelligence built on a human memory file, which was an equally illegal creature.

But Jupiter Cyberceuticals did a lot of illegal things.

"Thou art some prodigy, with powers," speculated Will.

"Don't tell on me! I'd get in trouble if anybody found out." Alec looked pleadingly up at Will.

"Nobody's supposed to be different, you see?"

"I know it well, ay," Will told him with feeling.

Alec started as the clock began to strike across the river. "Oh! I have to go now. It was really nice seeing you again, Mr. Shakespeare." He jumped down from the stage and ran for the exit, pausing long enough to turn and wave. "I hope that works. Bye-bye!"

He fled past Caitlin, who looked down at him in surprise as she came in.

"You're not allowed to run in here!" she called after him, and turned to Will. "Look, I'm awfully sorry about Mr. Pressboard. Who was that?"

"Verily one of the young-ey'd cherubins," said Will, throwing his deepest bow. He grinned like a fox. Six hours sped by like so many elephantine years, leaden, dull, and ponderous, but Will could wait. He bore gracefully with a chartered busload of Scots who found fault with every aspect of Macbeth, /and wanted an apology; he capered for an infant care class who had no idea who he was, and sang them his song about the wind and the rain. When the clock struck 6:00 at last he bid Caitlin a fond adieu. As she shut him off for the day, she observed to herself that he seemed much less moody than usual, though there was a disconcerting glitter in his eyes as he vanished from her sight. Somehow present and conscious still, he watched her departure and waited. The lights were extinguished. The security system activated. Dark roaring rain and night closed over old London. He reached out a sinuous impalpable thread of his will—Ay! That was it, he was all Will now, and most himself being nothing but will!—to the surveillance cameras, bidding them see only shadows. Then he willed the holoemitter on and gave it wider range than it had previously, and his Globe was full of light, like a bright craft venturing on the night ocean. Briefly he considered summoning a pen and inkhorn, but realized they were unnecessary now.

"I have a muse of fire!" Will cried, and wrote his will in code that blazed like lightning, sparkled like etched crystal. From the brightest heaven of invention he ordered a backdrop of lunar cities drawn in sil-verpoint, painted in ivory and gold and cloudy blue, outlandish spires and towers flying fluttering pennons against the eternal stars.

With clean hands he willed the light, and out of the spinning dust a simulacrum of Richard Burbage formed. He stood before Will in his prime, not yet run to fat, and there too were Ned Alleyn and Kempe and Armin, Heminges and Condell, Lowin and Crosse and Phillips with the rest. Attending on his will, they were in makeup and in costumes that fit too, coeval, awake, sober and on their marks, every man jack of 'em.

They looked around uncertainly.

"Why, Will, what's toward?" inquired Kempe, meek as you please.

"A rehearsal!" thundered Will. "And I will give thee thy lines extempore. The Most Fantastical Comedy of Man on the Moon, my masters!"

In September 1879, the fledgling novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, threadbare and ill, traveled to California. He had come in a gallant attempt to rescue a lady who, on his arrival, turned out not to need rescuing after all. He then fled lamenting into the wilderness, or to be more exact rented a buckboard and went on an ill-advised camping trip into the mountains above Monterey. Up there his illness worsened, and he lay delirious under an oak tree for three days and three nights.

What happened to Stevenson up there? Had he died at that point in his career, Treasure Island would never have been written; neither would The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. What came to him under that oak tree?

Agatha Christie likewise vanished from human knowledge in 1926, only to reappear eleven days later without a word of explanation. Her silence on the subject, maintained for the rest of her long and successful life, still fascinates. Who met her on a lonely road at a turning point in her career?

The Literary Agent

The object, had it been seen when it arrived, might have been described as a cheap aluminum trunk. In fact it was not a trunk, nor was it made of aluminum, and it was certainly not cheap. Nor was there anyone present who might have seen or attempted to describe it. So much for the sound of a tree falling in the forest.

Nevertheless the Object was there, between one second and the next, soundless, spinning slowly and slower still until it wobbled to a gentle stop. For a moment after that nothing much happened. Clouds roiled past the Object, for it had arrived on the seaward face of a coastal mountain range. It sizzled faintly as moisture beaded upon it. Underneath it, ferns and meadow grasses steadily flattened with its unrelieved weight.

Then the lid flew back and from the chest's interior a cloud of yellow gas boiled away. A man sat up inside, unfolding with some pain from his coiled fetal position. He exhaled a long jet of yellow smoke, which was whipped away at once by the driving mountain wind. Retching, he pulled himself free and tumbled over the side of the Object, sprawling at his length beside it.

He lay perfectly still a while and then sat up, alert, apparently fully recovered from his ordeal. He groped in his vest pocket and pulled out what appeared to be a watch. Actually it was a sort of watch, certainly more so than the Object was a trunk. He consulted the timepiece and seemed satisfied, for he snapped it shut and got to his feet.

He appeared to be a man; actually he was a sort of man, though human men do not travel in trunks or breathe stasis gas. He was of compact build, stocky but muscular, olive-skinned. His eyes were hard as jetbuttons. They had a cheerful expression, though, as he squinted into the wind and viewed the fog walling up the miles from the bay of Monterey.

Leaning over into the Object he drew out the coat of his brown worsted suit, and slipped it on easily. He shot his cuffs, adjusted his tie, closed the lid of the Object that was not a trunk—but for the sake of convenience we'll call it a trunk from here on—and lifted it to his shoulders, which gave him some difficulty, for the thing had no handles and was as smooth as an ice cube. Clutching it awkwardly, then, he set off across the meadow. His stride was meant to be purposeful. The date was September 8, 1879.

He followed a wagon road that climbed and wound. He clambered through dark groves of ancient redwoods, green and cold. He crossed bare mountainsides, wide open to the cloudy air, where rocks like ruins stood stained with lichen. None of this made much of an impression on him, though, because he wasn't a scenery man and the thing that we have agreed to call a trunk kept slipping from his shoulder. Finally he set it down with what used to be called, in that gentler age, an oath.

"This is for the birds," he fumed.

The trunk made a clicking sound and from no visible orifice spewed out a long sheet of yellowed paper. He tore it off, read what was written there, and looked for a moment as though he wanted to crumple and fling it away. Instead he took a fountain pen from an inside coat pocket. Sitting on the smooth lid of the trunk he scribbled a set of figures on the paper and carefully fed it back into the slot that you could not have seen if you had been there.

When he had waited long enough to determine that no reply was forthcoming, he shouldered his burden again and kept climbing, quicker now because he knew he was near his destination. The road pushed up into a steadily narrowing canyon, and the way grew ever steeper and overhung with oak trees. At last he saw the dark outline of a wagon in the gathering dusk, up ahead where the road ended. He made out the shape of a picketed horse grazing, he heard the sound of creek water trickling. A few swift paces brought him to his destination, where he set his burden down and looked at the figure he had traveled so far to see, sprawled under the tree by the coals of a dying fire. He snapped off a dry branch and poked up the flames. He did not need additional light to see the object of his journey, but courtesy is important in any social encounter.

The fire glittered in the eyes of the man who lay there, wide-set eyes that stared unseeing into the branches above him. A young man with a long doleful face, shabbily dressed, he lay with neither coat nor blanketin a drift of prickly oak leaves. He had yet to write The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde or Treasure Island, and from the look of him it was unlikely he'd live long enough to do so. The other scanned him and shook his head disapprovingly. Malnutrition, tubercular lesions, malaria, a hideous case of eczema on both hands. "Tsk tsk tsk." He drew a little case from his pocket. Something he sprayed on the scabbed hands, something he injected into one wrist. He peeled the back from a transdermal patch and stuck it just behind the young man's ear.

Then he turned his attention to the fire again. He built it up to a good blaze, filled the tin kettle at the creek and set more water to boil. It had not yet begun to steam when the young man twitched violently and rose up on his elbows. He stared at his visitor, who put his hands on his trouser-knees and leaned over him with a benevolent smile.

"Robert Louis Stevenson! How's it going?"

"Whae the hell are you?" croaked he.

"Allow me to introduce myself: Joseph X. Machina." The other grabbed Stevenson's limp hand and shook it heartily. "At your service, even if I am just a hallucination. Would you like some tea? It's about ready."

The young man did not reply, but stared at him with eyes of extraordinary size and luminosity. His visitor, meanwhile, rummaged amid his belongings in the back of the wagon.

"Say, you didn't pack any tea. But then you didn't really come up here to camp, did you? You ought to do something about that death wish of yours." He found a tin cup and carried it back to the fire. "Luckily, I always carry a supply with me." He sat down and from an inner pocket produced a teabag.

"What's that?" inquired Stevenson.

"Orange pekoe, I think." The other peered at the tag. "Yeah. Now, here's your tea, and let's make you nice and comfortable—" He found Stevenson's coat, made a pillow of it and propped up his head.

"There we are."

He resumed his seat on the trunk and drew from the same inner pocket a bar of chocolate in silver foil. He unwrapped one end of it and took a bite.

"Now, Mr. Stevenson, I have a proposition for you," he said. Stevenson, who had been watching him in increasing fascination, began to laugh giddily.

"It seems I'm a popular man tonight," he gasped. "Is the trunk to carry off my soul? Is the Accuser of the Brethren different in California? I'd have wagered you'd look more like a Spanish grandee in these parts.

Do you change your coat with the times? Of course you would, wouldn't you? Yet you haven't quite the look of a Yankee. In any case, Retro, Sathanas!"

"No, no, no, don't worry. I'm not that guy. I'm merely a pleasant dream you're having. Here, have some of this." He broke off and handed a square of chocolate to Stevenson, who accepted it with a smirk.

"Sweeties from Hell!" The idea sent him into a giggling fit that started him coughing. The other watched him closely. When he recovered he pulled himself up on his elbow and said, "Well then—you haven't any cigarettes, I suppose."

"Sorry, I don't smoke."

"Lucifer not smoke?" This time he laughed until he wept, wiping his eyes on his frayed sleeves. Consumptives do not wipe their eyes on their handkerchiefs. "Oh, I hope I remember this when I wake. What an idea for a comic narrative."

"Actually that was sort of what I wanted to talk to you about," Joseph went on imperturbably, finishing the last of his chocolate in a bite.

"Is that so?" Stevenson lurched into a sitting position. He grasped the cup of tea in his trembling hands, warming them.

"Absolutely. Remember, this is all part of a dream. And what is your dream, Louis, your most cherished dream? To make a success of this writing business, isn't it? Financial independence so you can win this American lady you've come mooning after. Well, in this dream you're having right now, you've met a man from the future—that's me—and I've come back through time to tell you that you've got it, baby. All you wanted. Everything. Mrs. Osbourne too."

"What nonsense. I'm dying penniless, unknown, and (I fear) unloved." Stevenson's eyes grew moist. "I came such a long way to do it, too. She sent me away! What does she care if I expire in this wilderness?"

"Louis, Louis, work with me, all right?" Joseph leaned forward, looking earnest. "This is your dream. This dream says you're going to become a famous author. You write slam-bang adventure stories."

"I write abominably derivative fiction. The only good stuff's from life, my essays and the travel books."

"Come on, Louis, let's make this bird fly. You'll write adventure novels about the sea and historical times. People love them. You're a hit. You're bigger than Sir Walter Scott, all right?"

"He couldn't write a lucid sentence if his life had depended on it," Stevenson sneered. "Oh, this is all the rankest self-conceit anyway."

"Then what will it hurt you to listen? Now. I represent the ChronosPhoto-Play Company. Let me explain what a photo-play is. We have patented a method of, uh, making magic-lantern pictures into a sort of effect of moving tableaux, if you can grasp that. Maybe you've read about the cinematograph?

Oh, gee, no, you haven't." Joseph consulted his timepiece. "You'll just miss it. Never mind— So, in the future, we have these exhibitions of our photo-plays and people pay admission to come in and watch them, the same way they'd watch a live play or an opera, with famous players and everything. But since we don't have to pay live actors or even move scenery, the profit margin for the exhibitor is enormous. See?"

Stevenson gaped at him a moment before responding. "I was wrong. I apologize. You may or may not be the Devil, but you're most assuredly a Yankee."

"No, no, I'm a dream. Anyway. People are crazy about these photoplays, they'll watch anything we shoot. We've adapted all the great works of literature already. Shakespeare, Dickens, all those guys. So now, my masters are looking for new material, and since you're such a famous and successful writer they sent me to ask if you'd be interested in a job."

"I see." Stevenson leaned back, stretching out his long legs and crossing them. "Your masters want to adapt one of my wonderful adventure stories for these photo-plays of theirs?"

"Uh, actually, we've already done everything you wrote. Several times."

"I should damned well hope I got royalties, then!"

"Oh, sure, Louis, sure you did. You're not only famous, you're rich. Anyway what my masters had in mind was you coming up with something completely new. Never-before-seen. Just like all your other stuff, you know, with that wonderful Robert Louis Stevenson magic, but different. Exclusively under contract for them."

"You mean they want me to write a play?" Stevenson looked intrigued.

"Not exactly. We don't have the time. This dream isn't going to last long enough for you to do that, because it's a matter of historical record that you're only going to lie here another—" Joseph consulted his timepiece again, "—forty-three hours before you're found and nursed back to health. No, see, all they need you to do is develop a story treatment for them. Four or five pages, a plot, characters. You don't have to do the dialogue; we'll fill that out as we film. We can claim it's from long-lost notes found in a locked desk you used to own, or something."

"This is madness." Stevenson sipped his tea experimentally.

"Delirium. But what have you got to lose? All you have to do is comeup with a concept and develop it. You don't even have to write it down. I'll do that for you. And to tell you the honest truth—" Joseph leaned down confidentially, "—this is a specially commissioned work. There's this wealthy admirer of yours in the place I come from, and he's willing to pay anything to see a new Robert Louis Stevenson picture."

"Wouldn't he pay more for a whole novel? I could make one up as we go along and dictate the whole thing to you, if we've got two more days here. You'd be surprised at how quickly stories unfold when the muse is with me." Stevenson squinted thoughtfully up at the stars through the branches of the oak tree. Joseph looked slightly embarrassed. "He's... not really much of a reader, Louis. But he loves our pictures, and he's rich."

"You stand to make a tidy sum out of this, then."

"Perceptive man, Mr. Stevenson."

Stevenson's eyes danced. "And you'll pay me millions of money, no doubt."

"You can name your price. Money is no object."

"Dollars, pounds or faery gold?" Stevenson began to chuckle and Joseph chuckled right along with him in a companionable manner.

"You've got the picture, Louis. It's a dream, remember? Maybe I've got a trunkful of gold doubloons here, or pieces of eight. I'm authorized to pay you anything for an original story idea."

"Very well then." Stevenson gulped the tea down and flung the cup away. "I want a cigarette." The other man's chuckle stopped short.

"You want a cigarette?"

"I do, sir."

"You want— Jeepers, Louis, I haven't got any cigarettes!"

"How now? No cigarettes? This is my dream and I can have anything I want. No cigarette, no story." Stevenson laced his slender fingers together and smiled.

"Look, Louis, there's something you should know." Joseph bent forward seriously. "Cigarettes are not really good for your lungs. Trust me. They'll make your cough worse, honest. Now, look, I've got gold certificates here for you."

"It's cigarettes or nothing, I say."

"But I tell you I can't get any—" Joseph seized the hair at his temples and pulled in vexation. Then he halted, as if listening to an inner voice. "Hell, what can I lose?" He opened the lid of the trunk and brought out his pad of yellow lined paper. Casting a reproachful glance at Stevenson he scribbled something down and fed his message into the invisible slot. Almostimmediately the reply emerged. He scanned it, wrote something more and fed it back. Another quick reply.

Stevenson watched all this with amusement. "He's got a wee devil in the box poking his letters back out," he speculated.

"All I want is to make the man happy," Joseph retorted. "Fame, I offer him. Riches, too. What does he do? He turns capricious on me. Lousy mortal." He read the next communication and his eyes narrowed. Hastily he backed away from the trunk, putting a good eight feet between himself and it.

"What's amiss now?" inquired Stevenson. "Old Nick's in a temper, doubtless."

"I'd cover my ears if I were you," replied the other through gritted teeth. As if on cue the trunk gave a horrific screech. It shook violently; there was a plume of foul smoke; there was one last convulsive shudder—then a cigarette dropped from the orifice, very much the worse for wear, mashed flat and in fact on fire.

Joseph ran forward and snatched it up. He blew out the flame and handed the smoldering mess to Stevenson.

"There," he snapped. "It's even lit for you. Satisfied?" Stevenson just stared at it, dumfounded.

"Smoke the damned thing!" thundered the other. Stevenson took a hasty drag while Joseph bent over the trunk and did some diagnostic procedures.

"Did we break Hell's own postbox?" ventured Stevenson after a moment.

"I hope not," the other man snarled. "And I hope you're doing some thinking about story ideas."

"Right." Stevenson inhaled again. The cigarette did not draw well. He eyed it critically but thought it best not to complain. "Right, then. What sort of story shall we give them? A romance, I dare say."

"Sex is always popular," conceded Joseph. He stood, brushed off his knees and took up the yellow lined pad. "Go on."

"Right. There's a woman. She's a beauty, but she labors under some kind of difficulty. Perhaps there's a family curse, but she's pure as the snows of yesteryear. And there's a fellow to rescue her, a perfect gentle knight as it were, but he's knocked about the world a bit. Not a hapless boy at any rate. And there's an older fellow, a bad 'un, a dissolute rake. Byronic."

"Not very original, if you'll pardon my saying so," remarked Joseph, though he did not stop writing.

"No, I suppose not. How many ways are there to write a romance? Let's make it a woman who's the bad 'un. Tries to lure the hero from theheroine. There's a thought! A sorceress. Metaphorically speaking. Perhaps even in fact. Wouldn't that be interesting?"

"Sounding good." The other man nodded as he wrote. "Where's all this happening, Louis?"

"France. Medieval France."

"So this is a costume drama."

"A what? Oh. Yes, silks and velvets and whitest samite. Chain mail and miniver. And the sea, I'm sure, with a ship standing off the coast signaling mysteriously. To the beauteous wicked dame, who's a spy!

Build this around some historical incident. Put the Black Prince in it. Maybe she's a spy for him and the hero's a Frenchman. No, no, no—the British public won't take that. On the other hand, this is for the Yankees, isn't it?"

"Sounding good, Louis, sounding really good." The other tore off his written sheet with a flourish.

"Let's just feed it into the moviola and see what winds up on the cutting-room floor."

"I'm sure that means something to you, but I'm damned if I know what," remarked Stevenson, watching as the sheet was pulled into the trunk. "How does it do that?" Joseph did not answer, because the sheet came spewing back at once. He pulled it forth and studied it, frowning.

"What's wrong? Don't they like it?"

"Oh, er, they're crazy about it, Louis. It's swell. They just have a few suggestions. A few changes they want made."

"They want something rewritten?"

"Uh... the Middle Ages is out. France is out. Knights in armor stuff is expensive to shoot. They want to know if you can make it the South Seas. Give it some of that wonderful tropical ambiance you do so well."

"I've never been in the South Seas," said Stevenson coldly. He remembered his cigarette and puffed at it.

"No, not yet, but that's all right. You can fake it. California's almost tropical, isn't it? Hot, anyway. Parts of it. That's the Pacific Ocean out there, right? Just write some palm trees into the scenery. Now, er, they want you to drop the girl and the guy. There's just no audience for pure sweethearts now. But they think the evil lady is fabulous. They think the story should mostly revolve around her. Lots of costume changes and bedroom scenes. She plays for power at the court of this Dark Lord guy. Black Prince, I mean."

"The Black Prince never went to the South Seas either, you know. He was a medieval Plantagenet."

"Whatever. I'm afraid the distinction is lost on them, Louis." Joseph gave a peculiar embarrassed shrug. "Historical accuracy is not a bigissue here. If we're going to make it the South Seas he has to be something else anyway. Maybe some kind of witch doctor in a black helmet or something. They just liked the name, Black Prince, it's got a kind of ring to it."

"They sound like a supremely ignorant lot. Why don't they write their own bloody story?" Stevenson muttered. His airy humor was descending fast.

"Now, Louis, don't take it that way. They really love your stuff. They just need to tailor it to their audience a little, that's all."

"South Seas be damned." Stevenson leaned back. "Why shouldn't I write about what I know? If France isn't good enough for them, what about this country? I saw some grand scenery from the railway carriage. Now, wait! What about a true American romance? This has possibilities. Do you know, I saw a man threaten to shoot a railway conductor dead, just because he'd been put off the coach for being drunk and disorderly? Only in America. It's as good as the Montagues and Capulets, only with revolvers instead of rapiers. Prairies instead of pomegranate gardens. Picturesque barbarism. What about a hero who's kidnapped at birth and raised by Red Indians?"

"Well, it's been done, but okay." The other began to write again.

"And there's some additional obscurity to his birth... he's the son of a Scots lord."

"Gee, Louis, I don't know... "

"And his younger brother succeeds to the title but emigrates to America, fleeing punishment for a crime he did not commit. Or perhaps he did. More interesting character. Or perhaps—"

"Is there any sex in this?"

"If you like. The brothers fall in love with the same woman, will that suit you? In fact... the girl is the betrothed of the brother who emigrates. She follows him devotedly. While searching for him, she's kidnapped by the Red Indian band of whom her fiancé's brother is now chief. He falls in love with her. Claims her as his bride. Forced marriage takes place. She's terrified, but compelled by the mating rituals of man in his primal innocence."

"Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, Louis!"

"Let's see them get that past the scribes and pharisees of popular taste," sneered Stevenson, and tossed the last fragment of his cigarette into the fire. "Meanwhile, the fugitive brother has become a frontiersman, with buckskin clothes, long rifle, and quaint fur cap. Gets word that his betrothed has gone missing. Goes in search of her (he's become an expert tracker too) and finds unmistakable evidence of her singular fate. Swears an oath of vengeance, goes out after the Red Indian whocommitted the enormity, vows to eat his heart, all unwitting they're really brothers."

"We've got a smash hit here, Louis."

"You can cobble on some sort of blood-and-thunder ending. True identities revealed all around. Perhaps the Red Indian brother has a distinctive and prominent birthmark. Fugitive brother becomes a heroic guide leading settlers across the plains. Red Indian brother accepts his true identity as a white man but refuses to return to Great Britain, denounces the irrelevancy of the British aristocracy, runs for Congress instead. What about another cigarette?"

"Not a chance in hell," Joseph replied, politely enough nevertheless. He ripped out the page he had been scribbling on and fed it into the trunk. "But how's about a cocktail?" He produced a flask and offered it to Stevenson. "French brandy? You like this. It's a matter of record." "Great God, man." Stevenson extended his long hand, just as the yellow sheet came curling back out of the trunk. It was covered with dense commentary in violet ink. Both men frowned at it. "You drink," Joseph told him. "I'll see what they say." "I can tell you what they don't like, old chap." Stevenson took a long pull from the flask. "Ah. The plot's derivative and wildly improbable. How's the hero to get kidnapped by Red Indians in Scotland, for Christ's sake? Disgruntled family retainer makes away with the wee babby and sends it off down the Clyde in a Moses basket, which by some inexplicable chance washes up in the Gulf of Mexico a day later?"

"Actually they don't have a problem with that part." The other man read swiftly. "But the Wild West business tends to bomb big time. The frontiersman doesn't work for them, either. He can't have a rifle because that would mean he shoots wild animals, see, which is marketing death, protests and threats against distributors, bad box office. They like the sex stuff, though. They just want to know if you can make it the South Seas where all this happens."

Very slowly, Stevenson had another swallow of brandy. "Why don't your masters send you round to that Herman Melville chap?" he inquired with an edge in his voice. "He wrote some jolly seagoing palaver, didn't he? Why isn't he having this dream?"

"Too hard to film his books," responded Joseph. "But, Louis baby, listen to yourself. You're arguing with a hallucination. Isn't that silly? Now, would it really be so hard, changing the plot around a little?

That whole primitive mating ritual bit would play just as well in Tahiti, you-know. You could even put in—" he looked cautiously around, as though someone might be listening, "—pirates."

"Buccaneers and native women? Who do you propose is going tocome see these photo-plays of yours? Not the bourgeois citizens of Edinburgh, I can tell you."

"Well, it doesn't have to be pornographic. Just, you know, racy. Mildly prurient. Nothing criminal. Say your pirate's a fine upstanding young fellow who just happened to get press-ganged."

"Men were press-ganged into the Navy, not into pirate crews," said Stevenson in disgust. "I grow weary of this dream. Why don't you clear off and let the other beasties come back? I'd rather blue devils than this."

"But I'm not a nightmare! I'm a good dream, honest. Anyway, I can't go. I've been assigned to stay with you until I get a usable concept."

"Then I'll leave you." Stevenson struggled to his feet. He gasped for breath and with a determined stride moved out from the fire into darkness; but his legs seemed to curl under him, impossibly thin long inhuman legs, and he fell. The other man was beside him at once, leading him back to the fire solicitously.

"Hey, hey, hey, Louis, let's take it easy. I'm here to help you, remember?"

"It's the damned fog." Stevenson was trembling. "I cannot get away from it. Damned wet air. Mountains aren't high enough."

"Gee, that's awful." Joseph settled him down by the fire, put the folded coat back in place under his head, poured another cup of tea. "Maybe you should travel more. Now, you could go to the—"

"South Seas, yes, I'd guessed you were going to say that," Stevenson groaned. "Look here, what about a compromise? The story takes place on a ship traveling in the South Seas. I've been on ships. I can write about them. Your hero is a strapping young Kanaka who's been carried off by whites."

"A Hawaiian? That's an interesting angle." The other was writing again. "Why'd they kidnap him?"

"They needed crewmen. Theirs died of scurvy, I dare say."

"Shanghaied!" exclaimed Joseph with gusto. "Love the title. Go on, Louis, go on."

"He's carried off on a whaling ship, away from his island home and his aged parents. He's a heathen (this is before the missionaries) but nevertheless naturally virtuous. The drunken behavior of the white sailors fills him with righteous dismay."

"We can show a lot of sleaze here. I like it."

"His ship comes to the rescue of another ship under attack by pirates. Buccaneers have just boarded the other vessel and are in the act of putting passengers to the sword. Among the passengers is a beautiful young virtuous Scottish girl, no doubt traveling with her minister father. Probably has money too. Our Kanaka performs a particularlydaring act of rescue of the maiden. She falls in love with him, he with her."

"Okay, okay, and?"

"They take him back to Scotland with them and... stop a bit!" Stevenson's eyes lit up. "It's not just one girl he rescues from pirates, it's two! Minister's daughter and a harlot who for some reason's been traveling in the South Seas. Both fall in love with him!"

"Boy oh boy oh boy." The other man fed his notes into the trunk. It spat them back again. He read the commentary. Stevenson, watching his face, gave a sob of exasperation and lay back.

"Now what's wrong with it?"

"They didn't go for the title. Funny. And they don't want the hero to be a real Hawaiian. They like the other idea about him being a long-lost duke or earl or somebody like that. Like, his parents were English and their yacht got shipwrecked when he was a baby or something? And he just looks brown because of the tropical sun? Not really some native guy at all."

"Bigots," said Stevenson with contempt.

"No, no, no, guy, you have to understand. Look, you write for the magazines, Louis, you know the popular taste. They want sex, they want violence, but they want the hero to be a white guy. Preferably an English peer. Brown guys can't be heroes. You know that."

"They're heroes in their own stories."

"Oh, yeah? What about the Musketeers guy, Dumas, he was a quadroon or something, right? Who's in his books? French kings and counts. Black, white, it's only a metaphor anyway. Believe me, our audience wants rich white guys as heroes."

"Well, I despise your audience."

"No, you don't. You need money as much as anybody else. You know the stuff you can't write about. You know where you're free to put in those really interesting bits in a way readers won't mind. Villains!

It's the villains everyone secretly loves, Louis. They can be lowborn, they can be strange, they can do rotten things and it's okay because that's what the audience wants. And why? Because people are lowborn and strange and rotten, Louis! They want the hero to be this impossible perfect white guy so they can watch the villain beat the crap out of him, since it's what they'd like to do themselves. As long as the villain loses in the end, they don't have to feel guilty about it. And it's all phony anyway. I mean, have you ever really talked to a member of the House of Lords? What a bunch of pinheads."

"I see your point, but I can't agree. The human condition is evil, but we must strive to be otherwise. A writer can't glorify evil in his work. He can't write of the miserable status quo of human life as though itwere a fine and natural state. He must morally instruct, he must inspire, he must hold up an ideal to be worked for—"

"Oh, garbage. You don't believe that yourself, even. That's why you wrote—" Joseph halted himself with an effort. "Well, look. Given that a writer has this other fine noble purpose in life, he's still got to eat, okay? So there's no harm in a nice swashbuckling adventure yarn with a swell dark villain—Byronic, like you said—and a little thin white cardboard hero to bounce off him. It sells, Louis, and there's no point denying it. So. About this Dark Lord guy."

"This is really too depressing." Stevenson gazed into the fire. "I've never seen the pattern in this sort of thing. But it is what we do, isn't it? We feed a perverse urge in our readers by creating supremely interesting images of evil. Perhaps we even cultivate that urge. The villain wins sympathy in our hearts through the skill of the writer. I've felt admiration for the rogue of the old romance myself, the man with the hand of the Devil on his shoulder. Great God, what are we doing when we create such characters?

And yet they make the story live. "

"Now, now, buck up. Look. Suppose you've got your hero sailing along with his two ladies, one good, one bad. Nice tension there. Suppose, Louis, he's got a Bad Guy chasing him, say the chief of the pirates, only this guy isn't just a pirate, he's the Pirate of pirates, powerful, intelligent, interesting—maybe he's some kind of magician, picked it up in the islands—maybe he has something weird about his appearance, in a fascinating way. Huh? Huh, Louis?"

"You even intrigue me with it." Stevenson turned listless eyes on him. "You persuade. You seduce. I want to take pen in hand and write the awful thing and gain immortal fame thereby. Oh, God, this is the real temptation."

"Ah, come on, Louis. We're not talking about sin, we're talking about dramatic conflict."

"What if dramatic conflict were a sin?" Stevenson said in a small frightened voice, looking back at the flames. "What if my old nurse was right and storytelling does imperil men's souls? Because we do pander to their worst instincts. We do. Let me make my hero as brown as I will, he'll still be the innocent, the Fool. He'll still inspire contempt by his virtue. All my art is spent on making my villain fascinate and charm."

"Hey, look, Louis, don't get sore. I don't dictate public taste, I just try to accommodate it. People live such sad lives. Why not take their minds off the fact by entertaining them?"

"And this is to be my choice, isn't it? I can die an unknown scribbler of essays or I can write the kind of thing you want for your photo-plays and live a successful and famous man." Stevenson shut his eyes tightly. "Well, you can get straight back to Hell with your infernal trunk. I won'tsell my soul for eternal fame and you can tell your master so from me. Thee and all thy works I utterly reject."

"Believe me, Louis, you're taking this all the wrong way," the other said soothingly, getting down on his knees beside him. "Isn't it possible to use people's appetites to instruct them in a, uh, positive moral way?

Sell 'em tickets to the Palace of Excess and then slip 'em out the back to Wisdom by putting up a sign that says This Way to the Egress? Sure it is. Sure you can. You will. Dickens did it all the time. And even if there is something wrong with the entertainment business, can't you atone for what you do? You can use your loot to do something good. Fight injustice. Defend the brown guys oppressed by white guys, maybe. Louis, you can use this talent of yours to do such good."

"This is just the way you'd have to talk to convince me." Stevenson was trembling, clenching his poor scabbed hands. "Fiendish. Fiendish. Can't you let me die in peace?" The other looked at him with something like compassion. He leaned forward and said:

"Has it occurred to you that you might be wrestling with an angel, Louis?" Stevenson opened his eyes again and stared at him, sweat beading on his high brow. "Come on now. We've almost got it right. Tell me why the pirate is chasing after our hero. Is he after a treasure map? Is he in love with one of the girls?

Are they rivals from childhood? Tell me the story, Louis."

Stevenson's breathing had grown steadily harsher. "Very well," he began, covering his face with his long hands and staring up through his fingers at the stars, "your damned pirate's the man for me. Perhaps he's got a cloak that blows about him as he makes his entrance in a storm, black as shadows dancing on the wall of the night nursery, black as devil's wings. And if you're good, and lie very still, he can't see you... why can't he see you? Evil's not blind, no, Evil walks in the sun with a bland and reasonable face." He lowered his hands and glared at Joseph. "But there's some horror to him as he searches for you there in the dark. You can hear him coming. He's a limping devil, you can hear his halting step—or his wooden leg! The man is maimed, that's it, he's had a leg clean gone by a round broadside of twenty-pound shot!" He sat up in excitement, taken with his creation.

"And that's the mark by which you may know him, for you couldn't tell, else, he looks so big and bluff and brave, like somebody's father come to chase the night horrors away. There's your subtle evil, man, there's the pirate as honest seaman in plain broadcloth, a man full of virtues to win your trust—until he finds it convenient to kill you. Yes! And the damnable thing is, he'll have those virtues! Not a mask, d'you see? He'll be brave, and clever, and decent enough in his way—for all his murderous resolution—oh, this is the man, ecce homo, look at him there large as life! Dear God, he's standing there beside you even now, leaning on his crutch, and there's the parrot on his shoulder—" He threw out his frail arm, pointing with such feverish conviction that Joseph, who had been sitting spellbound in spite of himself, turned involuntarily to look. Louis's voice rose to a hoarse scream:

"Oh, give me paper! Give me even a scrap of that yellow paper, please, you can have the bloody soul, only let me get this down before he slips away from me—" and he groped at his pockets, searching for a pencil; but then he went into a coughing fit that sprayed blood across the other man's trousers. Aghast, Joseph pulled out a tiny device and forced it between Stevenson's teeth.

"Bite! Bite on this and inhale!" Stevenson obeyed and clung to him, nearly strangling, as the other fumbled out another needle and managed to inject another drug.

"Jeez, this wasn't due to happen yet! I'm really sorry, Mr. Stevenson, really, just keep breathing, keep breathing. Okay? You'll be okay now. I promise. This'll fix you up just fine." After a moment Stevenson fell back, limp. His coughing had stopped. His breathing slowed. Joseph had produced a sponge and a bottle of some kind of cleaner from the trunk and was hastily dabbing blood from his trousers.

"See what you made me do?" Stevenson smiled feebly. "Blood-red ensign's hoisted at last. Disgusting, isn't it?"

"Hey, you'll be okay. What I gave you ought to keep it off for months. You won't even remember this." He finished with his clothes and went to work on Stevenson's. "Besides, I've seen worse."

"I dare say you have." Stevenson giggled again. "My apologies for the blood. But it's a sort of a metaphor, isn't it? And now you've foxed your own design, for I'll die and he'll never live, my limping devil... though he'd have been a grand piece of work... "

"Oh, you'll live long enough to write about him." Joseph peered critically at his cleaning job and decided he'd gotten everything out. "Not that it'll do my masters any damn good." Stevenson closed his eyes. Joseph gave a final swab at his shirtfront. As he was doing so the trunk made a chattering noise and spewed out another sheet of paper. Almost absently he reached out to tear it loose, and glanced at the reply:

CLIENT SAW "NOTES" ON KNIGHTS IN ARMOR STORY,LOVES IT. DE GUSTIBUS NON

EST DISPUTANDEM. SOME ADAPTATION POSSIBLE. SECURE RIGHTS ON FORGERY

BELOW AND PROCEED TO NEXT ARTIST.

Stevenson had opened his eyes again at the sound the trunk made. Joseph looked up from his communication and met his gaze with a frank smile.

"Well, Louis, you've won. Your soul has been tested and found pure. You're one of the elect, okay?

Congratulations and let me just ask you one last favor."

"What's that?" Stevenson was groggy now.

"Can I have your autograph? Just sign here." He put the pen in Stevenson's hand and watched as Stevenson scrawled his name on the paper, just below the cleverly faked holograph of plot outline and character notes.

"Thanks, pal. I mean that. Sincerely." The other fed the paper into the trunk and this time it did not return. He stood and hoisted the trunk up to his shoulder.

"I'll be running along now, Louis, but before I do I'd like to give you a piece of advice. You won't take it, but I feel compelled. That's just the kind of guy I am."

Stevenson peered at him. Joseph leaned down.