HOW did we meet," DL's voice finding some agitated soprano   level.   "Well!   Through   Ralph  Wayvone, really. I had been spending years and years of my life with these fantasies of taking revenge on Brock Vond. I wanted to kill him — one way or another he'd taken away the lives of people I loved, and I saw nothing wrong with killing him. I was that off-center, it afflicted me, wrecked my judgment." At first she'd thought Ralph was some kind of groupie. She'd noticed him, among the spectators, always wearing a suit. He finally approached her in a coffee shop in Eugene, where she had been staring dejectedly, apparently for some time, at a plate with four rubber scampi, rushed in fresh from the joke store down the street and covered as completely as possible with tomato sauce. She became aware of Ralph, looming over her food and glaring at it. "How can you eat that?" "Just what I ask myself. Anything else?" Her visitor sat down across the table, clicked open an armored attache case, and produced a folder with an 8 x 10 of a face she knew, a Fresson-process studio photograph of Brock Vond, looking like he'd just had a buffer run all over him, the high smooth forehead, the cheeks that still hadn't lost all their baby fat, the sleek and pointed ears, small chin, and slim little unbroken nose. This photo was clipped to some stapled pages, where she saw federal seals and stampings. "It's all from the FBI. Perfectly legit." He glanced at some ultrathin expensive wristwatch. "Look — you want him . . . we want him . . . say yes, both our wishes will come true."

She'd already checked out the cut and surface texture of Ralph's suit. "Well," she inquired, "what's ol' Brock up to these days?"

"Same public servant he always was, only bigger. Much, much bigger. He figures he won his war against the lefties, now he sees his future in the war against drugs. Some dear friends of mine are quite naturally upset."

"And he's too big for them? Please, you've got to be rilly desperate, comin' to me."

"No. You've got the motivation." At her look, "We know your history, it's all on the computer."

She thought of the white armored limo at Inoshiro Sensei's house, long ago. "Then you know how personal this is. If you want real ninja product, that could get in the way. ... I assume you're buying skills and not just feelings here?"

"Buy, sure, but how about give? The one thing you truly want, huh? A good crack at a evil man? I know 'cause I see it in your eyes."

She didn't exactly shift her eyes away, didn't react much to this lowlife flirtatiousness, either, but there it was — he had her number, and it looked like he'd gotten it from the FBI. What was going on here? Did Ralph have a line into their NCIC computer? If they knew Brock was a target of Ralph's friends, why fail to protect one of their own? Unless of course the unfortunate setupee here was more likely DL herself, attempted assassination of a federal officer, some time in the Bureau of Prisons' mindfucking system perhaps. . . .

Ralph Wayvone, master of telepathic anxieties, tried to be helpful. "They wouldn't need any fancy excuse, Miss Chastain, they just go in, get anybody they want, do the paperwork later — what, you ain't figured that one out yet? I'd known you was such a little kid I'd o' brought yiz a Barbie doll."

"Yeah but why me? Thought you folks were more into pistols, dirks, car bombs, 'at sort of thing."

"I have heard," Ralph almost misty-eyed, "there's this touch that you can put on somebody, so lightly they don't feel it then, but a year later they drop dead, right when you happen to be miles away eating ribs with the Chief of Police."

"That would be the Vibrating Palm, or Ninja Death Touch." She went on to explain, in tones carefully free of exasperation, about the procedure, and how serious a matter it was. You didn't, for example, just go around putting it on people you didn't like. It was useless without a long history of training in martial disciplines, took years to master, and when used was a profoundly moral act. But at some point she realized she was also pitching herself to him. So did he. Patting her hand, "You're telling me I don't have to worry."

"In my time, Mr. Wayvone, I was the best."

"I remember," he said, instead of "So they tell me," but she didn't catch it. He'd heard about her in fact years before on the YakMaf grapevine, early dojo rumors, something extraordinary said to be happening at a certain regional elimination meet. So he'd driven across the Mojave all night one night to see her in action. From a dank cement arena her hair had blazed at him like the halo of an angel of mischief. In the Rolodex of Ralph's memory, young DL would be flagged that brightly. He was actually then to follow her for a time, meet to meet through the South and West, along a circuit of grim, early ex-Nam faces, motels always miles from the venue and down the wrong freeway, shoptalk, drinking, possession of weapons, T-shirts featuring skulls, snakes, and dangerous transportation. Ralph never thought of the look on his face as the helpless stare of an older man through a schoolyard fence, but as more the alert beaming of a micromanager. And sometimes he was right. In DL's case, the time he'd invested had yielded him a file he knew he'd make use of one day, and so it had come to pass.

He'd presented DL, however, with a crisis. She knew she'd been slowly poisoning her spirit, drifting further into her obsession with Brock Vond. Here was Ralph, promising resolution and release. What was she complaining about? Only that acts, deeply moral and otherwise, had consequences — only the workings of karma. One unfelt touch to the correct piece of Vond anatomy could commit her to a major redirection of her life. There was no question that she'd ever be free of Ralph. A girl did one Death Touch job and right away people started getting ideas. Whatever she chose to do would get her in trouble. She promised to give him her decision at dinner the next evening, and then she got the hell out of town, leaving the last of Ralph's tails near Drain, Oregon, beside a late-model Oldsmobile with steam pouring from beneath its hood.

She had to switch cars again before she got to L.A., then took the bus out to a bank branch on mid-Wilshire where she had once providentially stashed a packet of documents that would now give her a choice among identities, paid cash on Western Avenue for a '66 Plymouth Fury, bought a wig at a place across the street, went into a certain ladies' gas-station toilet on Olympic legendary in the dopers' community, and emerged a different, less noticeable person. The car radio, tuned to KFWB, was playing the Doors' "People Are Strange (When You're a Stranger)" as she injected herself into the slow lane of the eastbound freeway and settled in, hating to let any of it go, Banning, the dinosaurs, the Palm Springs turnoff, Indio, across the Mojave, to be redreamed in colors pale but intense, with unnaturally fine sand blowing in plumes across the sun, baby-blue shadows in the folds of the dunes, a pinkish sky — holding on, letting go, redreaming each night stop the less easterly places she'd been in all day, coming slowly unstuck, leaving for the United States, trying not to get emotional but still hanging on the rearview mirror's single tale of recedings and vanishing points as we hang on looks our lovers give.

On inertial navigation, knowing she'd know what she was looking for when she found it, DL didn't stop till the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, which she first beheld around midday in a stunning onslaught of smog and traffic. By this time she was used to the car and its unorthodox push-button shifting, having made the analysis "stick shift — penis" and speculating that a push-button automatic might at least appear more clitorally ladylike, or, as DL might've put it, regressive, if there'd been anybody anymore to talk to, which of course there wasn't. She took a little apartment and found a job at a vacuum cleaner parts distributor's, typing and filing.

Columbus must have promised a life that some residual self, somewhere in the stifling dark, had wanted always. "Superman could change back into Clark Kent," she had once confided to Frenesi, "don't underestimate it. Workin' at the Daily Planet was the Man o' Steel's Hawaiian vacation, his Saturday night in town, his marijuana and his opium smoke, and oh what I wouldn't give. ..." An evening newspaper . . . anyplace back in the Midwest . . . she would leave work around press time, make a beeline for some walk-down lounge, near enough to the paper that she could feel vibrations from the presses through the wood of the bar. Drink rye, wipe her glasses on her tie, leave her hat on indoors, gossip in the dim light with the other regulars. In the winter it would already be dark outside the windows. The polished shoes would pick up highlights as the street lamps got brighter ... she wouldn't be waiting for anybody or for anything to happen, because she'd only be Clark Kent. Lois Lane might not give her the time of day anymore, but that'd be OK, she'd be dating somebody from the secretarial pool. They'd go out for dinner sometimes to this cozy Neapolitan joint down by some lakefront, where the Mussels Posillipo couldn't be beat. "So instead of being able to fly everyplace," her friend had replied, "you'd have to climb into some car you're still making payments on, drive on out, you, Clark Kent, to the scene of some disaster, blood, corpses, flies, teen technicians wandering around stoned, eyewitnesses in shock. . . . Superman never has to get involved with any of that. Why should anybody want to be only mortal? Better to stay an angel, angel." DL, more generous in those days, only thought her friend had missed the point.

In Columbus she spent days in shopping centers, Ninja Steno, assembling an invisibility wardrobe — murky woolens, dim pastels, flat shoes with matching purses, beige hose, white underwear, surprised how little of a chore it was — the blandest of accessories would call out to her from shop windows, the misses' sections of discount stores were acres of abundance waiting to be picked through. She had by now grown into a relationship with the Plymouth, named her Felicia, bought her a new stereo, was washing her at least twice per workweek plus again on weekends, when she also waxed the vehicle. She swam and did t'ai chi and continued to practice the exercises she had learned in Japan. She grew used to her disguised image in the mirror, the short haircut with the rodent-brown rinse, the freckles subdued under foundation, the eye makeup she'd never have worn before, slowly becoming her alias, a small-town spinster pursuing a perfectly diminished life, a minor belle gone to weeds and gophers before her time.

So that when they came and kidnapped her in the Pizza Hut parking lot and took her back to Japan, she wasn't sure right away that being sold into white slavery would turn out to be at all beneficial as a career step. They took her with a matter-of-factness that made her feel like an amateur. Her little car was left alone in its space, sometimes, across miles and years, to call out to her in a puzzled voice, asking why she hadn't come back. She fought, but whoever it was had sent experts that specialized in not damaging young women. The story she heard eventually was that a certain client would pay a fee in the hefty-to-whopping range for an American blonde with advanced asskicking skills. "No telling what's going to turn men on," whispered her bunkmate Lobelia as they waited in a hotel in Ueno to be brought to auction, " 'specially the ones we're gonna meet."

Dense transport and travel clamored all day, all night long. The rickety hotel, almost a disposable building, was pressed shuddering between the Yamanote Line and Expressway 1. The girls ate yaki-tori from the carts on Showa and were permitted out, in supervised groups, only to shop at the pitches under the tracks. Some of these girls, the market being what it was, were boys, of whom DL's friend Lobelia was among the most glamorous. "Wow," she had introduced herself, "are you a mess," launching then unbidden into a verbal hair-to-toenails makeover for DL, who at some point ducked her head, murmuring, "Guess I should be writing some of this down."

Lobelia paused and blinked. "Sugar, I'm trying to help. Think about it — you'll be up there on the block, how are you gonna feel if all they sell you for's a dollar ninety-eight?"

"Pretty cheap."

"Exactly, which is why I'm saying you need the purple liner, and at least three different eyeshadows, trust me, I know what these customers like, and right now honey, I don't mean to be cruel, but —"

So when the big night came, DL went to her purchasers wearing a painting of yet another face she could hardly recognize as one of hers. The room seethed with odors of drinking, smoke, cologne. Koto and samisen music came from hidden speakers. Hostesses tiptoed, knelt, fetched, and poured. Outside, wind was beating on sheet metal, city traffic circulated in humid fricatives, neon colors, some of them unknown outside Tokyo, turned the streets to a high-gloss display of transgression and desire. But in here, light-tight behind rubberized drapes, the auction room kept its colors to itself, with a crew of moonlighting studio gaffers beaming merciful salmons and pinks at the girls in their eye-catching outfits, each chosen earlier from a giant walk-in, in fact drive-in, closet filled with every kind of getup any customer who'd passed through here'd ever found erotic, schoolgirl uniforms tonight being the big favorite, some enhancing an already youthful look, others worn for the less forthright nuances that make grown women in juvenile attire so widely irresistible, much attention being paid of course to details like school crests, belt styles, underwear, and pleats, for any all-but-invisible discrepancy here could easily wreck a sale. "Girl, you have never seen picky," as Lobelia put it, "till you've been in one of these Jap meat shows."

Though a few women had come to bid, the audience was nearly all male. The auctioneer was a popular television comedian. Older gentlemen with fingertip deficiencies could be noted circulating in the crowd, attentive as geishas, although to other signals. Prospective buyers chatted softly, paged through catalogues, scribbled on notepads. Out in the bar a baseball game was on, Central League playoffs, and a few guests had lingered till the traditional 8:56, when the transmission from the ballpark was abruptly cut off, in the middle of a double play, in fact. In commotion, voicing their displeasure, the last stragglers entered the room in a cloud of ambiguous smoke, the heavy jade-inlaid doors swung shut and were locked, the houselights were dimmed, the music track segued to romantic disco, the comic took the mike, and the auction was on.

Each girl had a number pinned to her outfit. When it was called, she had to step into a spotlight and do a basic tits-and-ass or beauty-pageant turn. The girl just before DL came from a high valley in northern Thailand, bartered as part of a heroin deal, dolled up tonight in black chiffon and mink eyelashes, about to enter a world where she would never again meet anyone who had ever heard of the place she'd been born in and taken from. She was sold for a million yen and slipped from kinder theatrical lighting down into the dark to join her new owner, feeling something warm but unyielding, like padded steel, slide around her neck, around one wrist... no one spoke to her. No one would, for days.

DL, remembering beauty-contest interviews back on the childhood Tube, thought Just relax and have fun, picked up the beat, and stepped out into the warm fall of light to let everybody have a look. The minute she appeared she could hear altered breathing and interjections in a number of tongues, but was oddly aware herself only of one electrician, poised silent near a small fill light. . . just out of her field of vision, his smoky and blurred presence more real to her than any bidder in the room, any future master. . . . How could that be? Relax, have fun. She smiled even with her eyes, Lobelia's eyes, alert now at nipples and clitoris, the price being bid upward deliriously. Suddenly she heard a new voice. Others may have recognized it too. There were no more bids. The hammer fell, she left the light, blind for an instant, adrift on treacherous runway in high heels, but then feeling the hand take her arm firmly as shackles and steer her instead off into the wings. . . .

When she could see, moving quickly into the chill of outdoors, into an alley where a long American automobile waited, she turned to have a look at her purchaser. Shades, black and white outfit, inches shorter but — she already knew by touch — faster and better. "Relax, lady," he warbled pleasantly. "I'm only the agent here." He opened a rear door. In a slither of tulle, she ducked and curled, alone, into the back seat. The man disappeared up front, doors latched solidly, and off she was driven into neon confusion. Waiting for her on the seat were fresh flowers — orchids. She lifted her chin. As a girl she had missed every single dance, including school proms, and this happened in fact to be her very first orchid corsage in her life.

Tonight's blind date turned out to be none other than Ralph Wayvone, who had a suite at the Imperial. They eyed each other across a spacious sitting room. She'd slid off her shoes first thing and now flexed her toes in the deep carpet. "You're pissed off, huh," she ventured.

Ralph was pouring champagne. He turned, holding the two glasses, and DL noticed changes in his packaging. His suit fit like Cary Grant's, he appeared to have shaved sometime in the last hour, and he was wearing a pink tropical blossom in his lapel. He still smelled, however, like the far end of a men's toiletries section in a drugstore, and his haircut had been performed by someone who must have been trying to give up smoking.

A lightning storm had appeared far out at sea and now, behind them out the window, was advancing on the city, taking brightly crazed shots all along the horizon. Somewhere in here a stereo began to play a stack of albums from the fifties, all in that sweet intense mainstream wherein the tenor drowns of love, or, as it is known elsewhere, male adolescence.

"Couldint believe it was you," handing her the fluteful of champagne, beaded in the humid night, his voice slow, almost dazed. She twirled for him, as she had just before he'd bought her, and drank champagne.

"You sure paid a lot."

"Annual event, goes in a pension fund."

"Oh — you only pretended to buy me."

"Not exactly. Let's say you're here till you can get away again."

"You still want Brock Vond."

"Now more than ever." He had his lower lip out, trying to look sinned against.

"Please — I just needed a vacation from my life. You never heard of that?"

"Should I be reprimanding my intelligence people? Are they giving me faulty data on you? It don't sound to me like you're really all that hungry to get this little fuck. Like you've —" she was expecting "lost your nerve," but he thoughtfully went for "changed your attitude," instead.

She met his look. "Long as you're here in town, why not talk to some talent scouts, I'm not the only one knows 'is particular Oriental trick, you know."

"But you are the one who can execute." Tony Bennett had been singing "The Boulevard of Broken Dreams." Ralph touched her bare arm lightly. "Darryl Louise, think of who you are — mentioned in Black Belt before you were ten, the Soldier of Fortune interview, that centerfold in Aggro World, almost made runner-up in the Dangerous Teen Miss pageant in '63. . . ."

"Best I could do was Miss Animosity, why are you bringing up my rap sheet here?"

"All that great gift — you wanted to just escape it? Spend the rest of your life typin' up invoices and dodging the customer-service reps? I could cry."

"Could you. And would I have to deal with that?"

"Ahh, you cold cookie. ... I can take ya, but I'll never break ya." He put down his glass, held his arms open. "Come on, Black Belt. Dance with an old gentleman."

Ralph had shifted — she could feel it — into a fifties time warp, and DL, once in his arms, found, surprised, that she could now think about her situation clearly for the first time since the Pizza Hut. Even putting champagne and orchids aside, here was the first human in her lifetime of running away who'd ever taken the trouble to come after her, not to mention publicly buy her, however much in play, for the sticker price of a Lamborghini plus options. How could a girl not be impressed? And as lagniappe she'd get the chance to ice detestable Brock Vond once and for all.

They drifted across the neutral carpeting, crooners crooned, and the storm came sweeping on. He was careful, mouth close to her ear, to speak only during instrumental breaks. "You might even get to like working for us. Our benefits package is the best in the field. You get to veto any assignment, we don't ask for weekly quotas, but we do run a cash-flow assessment on each of you quarterly. . . ."

"What's this, then, your leisure outfit, where's 'em gold chains, 'at endangered-species hat?"

"Ufa, mi tratt' a pesci in faccia — my dear Miss Chastain, who'd ever try to run a lady such as you, with your independent ideas plus all those lethal talents, do I look that stupid?"

Well, the problem of course was that he didn't look quite stupid enough. Had a certain luminous shade of skin not balanced out the wrong-length sideburns, the tightly rationed smile not likewise made up for the no-eye-contact eyes, why she'd most likely've passed on the venture and had to arrive at other, less hopeful arrangements. But it came about, after a night and a day of jack-hammer sex, amphetamines, champagne, and Chaliapin Steaks ordered up from Les Saisons, that she was sped by Lincoln limo, semen drying on her stockings and one earring lost forever, through rainglare and wet streets to the notorious Haru no Depaato, or Department Store of Spring, installed in a room of her own, and handed a large clutch purse stuffed full of yen, for transitional expenses till she went officially on the payroll.

"Your other clients," Ralph trying to be helpful, "they'll just be there for your cover, right?"

"Ralph, wow, I — I feel better already." In fact, she did, not because of the clients, who were no worse than expected, but because she was finally back getting some dojo time in, stretching, striking, working out with 'chuks and eagle catchers, meditating, finding inside herself the way back to shelter she'd wondered more than once if she'd lost for good. Outside the establishment, in the street, to keep herself in the mood, she paid special attention to car collisions, ambulances in a hurry, even bowls of severed shrimp heads in the noodle shops, as she and Ralph Wayvone went nailing down the scenario for Brock's assassination.

"He'll be flying in for a two-week international prosecutors' symposium, staying at the Hilton. We have a schedule of his free time, unless he's also one of those mischievous lads who like to play hooky. You'll wait, you'll live by his schedule — sooner or later he'll show up, he's a regular here whenever he's passing through."

"But he'll ID me, he'll remember."

"Not the way you'll be."

Uh-huh, the way she'd be ... of all the jacking around she was getting, that makeover would prove to be the real shocker. Soon as the Depaato beautician staff got to work, the minute they brought out the wig she was to wear, dyed and styled precisely, she knew. And when she saw it on, a shivering crept all over her skin, as she looked at her own face on Frenesi's head. "Mr. Brock Vond," the girls assured her, "likes American girl, looking just this way, always the same," the little sixties outfits, the lurid makeup of the time. . . . But I'll have to wear shades, she thought, he'll see my own pale eyes and it won't work, surely he'll want hers, those fluorescent blue eyes of Frenesi's. . .. And so he would, but that was all taken care of too — when the time came, DL would be wearing tinted contact lenses.

"I knew it!" Prairie exploded. "My mother and this creep, and you better tell me how serious, DL —"

"Serious."

"So my dad and my grandma've been lyin' to me all the time? They told me she was on the side of the people — how could she've ever gone near somebody like this Brock guy?"

"I never could figure it either, kid. He was everything we were supposed to be against." But the shock had been different for DL — it was in finding out that he loved Frenesi but did not possess her, and was driven to fetishism in faraway countries as his only outlet, helpless to change — obsessed, though it gagged her to admit it, as DL. And Ralph, the fucker, must have known the whole story all along. Was he getting off on this? What kind of a sense of humor was that, anyway? Sometimes, waiting in her room, she'd wonder if this was all supposed to be some penance, to sit, caught inside the image of one she'd loved, been betrayed by, just sit. . . . Was it a koan she was meant to consider in depth, or was she finally lost in a great edge-to-edge delusion, having only read about Frenesi Gates once in some dentist's waiting room or standing in line at the checkout, whereupon something had just snapped and she'd gone on to make up the whole thing? And was now not in any Japanese whorehouse waiting to kill Brock Vond at all, but safely within a mental institution Stateside, humored, kindly allowed to dress up as the figure of her unhappy fantasies? For company while she waited she left the Tube on with the sound off. Images went rolling in and out of the frame as she sat, quiescent, sometimes teasing herself with these what-is-reality exercises, but keeping always balanced, right on that line, attentively breathing herself through the turn of the hours, the rise and fall of the five elements and the body organs governed, the combinations, the dance of husband-wife and mother-son laws. Today, of course, you can pick up a dedicated hand-held Ninja Death Touch calculator in any drugstore, which will track, compute, and project for you quick as a wink, but back then DL had only her memory to rely on and what she'd learned from Inoshiro Sensei, obliged early, she and her brain, to enter a system of eternal repayment humming along with or without her existence. Sensei called it "the art of the dark meridians," warning her repeatedly about the timing. "Perfect blow to the correct alarm point, but at the wrong time — might as well stay home — watch a Run Run Shaw movie!" She asked if she could visit him. They said no.

Meanwhile, Takeshi Fumimota was in and out of Tokyo for reasons of business connected with the mysterious obliteration of a research complex belonging to the shadowy world conglomerate Chipco. About a week after Brock Vond's arrival, Takeshi was standing at the edge of a gigantic animal footprint which only the day before had been a laboratory. From an insurance point of view, the place was totaled, though free of fatalities, the event having occurred precisely during an evacuation drill. Strange!

Looking through the dark morning drizzle, Takeshi couldn't even see over to the other side of the foot-shaped crater. From up here on the rim, about all he could make out were the yellow headlamps of the tech squads moving far below, taking samples of everything, every last splinter, for testing. Here and there edges of the footprint had begun to slide in.

As Takeshi made his way cautiously down, he found a network of plastic duckboards and temporary traffic lights already in place. Traffic was heavy. He paused at a turnout, poured himself another cup from his coffee thermos, and took another amphetamine capsule. "It's going to take a while," he chuckled aloud, drawing a stare or two, "to get to the bottom of this!" Another strange element, as his former mentor Professor Wawazume, eccentric CEO of Wawazume Life & Non-Life, had reminded him over the phone last night, was that recently Chipco had wanted a floater written in on an inland marine policy, against "damage from any and all forms of animal life." The demolished complex was located on a lightly traveled piece of coastline, and Chipco could certainly argue that something had come up out of the surf, put one foot in the sand for leverage, and stomped on the lab with the other.

Since it had happened at low tide, any second print on the beach would have got washed away when the tide came back in. "Clearly reptilian," the Professor had summed up, "or possibly the work of a — disgruntled environmentalist!" Takeshi, by the time he got to see it from the air, didn't want to rule out another secular possibility — a professional job. There were some fancy blasters around, studio special-effects people, Yank veterans of Vietnam, few yakuza maybe — Takeshi knew most of the boys and girls, though it wasn't always easy to keep track, and the work could get pretty sophisticated. Size 20,000 here could be an artifact from heel to claw-tip.

Having begun well inside the corporate embrace of Wawazume Life & Non-Life, high above the violet radiance of the city, through ghostly Marunouchi dusks he had dreamed of disengagement and freedom, of working as a ronin, or samurai without a master, out free-lancing in a dangerous world. By the time his life brought him here, down in the reeking beast-print, the hazy red, green, and yellow lights and striped barricades, the struggling in the mud and rain after a mystery that might at the end be only as simple as greed, become at least independent, though Professor Wawazume still kept sending a lot of business his way, no more corporate pin on his suit lapel, only the buttonhole unadorned, lordless, his one fixed address now a cubicle in outer Ueno he shared rent on, containing an armored file cabinet, a telephone, and the signed, framed photo of himself the Professor had given him when he left to go out on his own (an enlarged paparazzo shot, the Professor looking even more goofy than usual, lurching after a noted beauty in gold lame, flip hairdo, and two-centimeter eyelashes outside a bar in Shinjuku, a lucent string of drool begun to descend from one corner of his mouth), Takeshi had already long been a nomad in the sky's desert, continuing to depart in kerosene fumes to seek another connection in another Pacific port, to nod to faces he had last seen coming out of the Yat Fat Building in Des V?ux Road, to check the body of the stewardess and what he could see out the window of the body of the airplane, and at last, when they began to lift, to commend himself to the gods of the sky. But despite his millions of passenger miles, he could never recall being in their domain, instead only groaning, laboring along, just above the webs of power lines, almost sharing expressway space, making unnumbered short hops between local airfields, places Takeshi had never heard of, invisible under industrial smoke and traffic exhaust, kept away from all promises of wild blue yonder.

He had arrived now at the bottom of the strange crater, far below sea level, after long detours and a sense of time forever lost. . . . Tech-squad people he'd tried to talk to had all, so far, been evasive. I knew it! he realized. I haven't been buying enough drinks! The rain clouds had settled in. Looking up, Takeshi could no longer see the rim he'd descended from. A group of Techs nearby had started shouting angrily at each other, their headlamp beams swooping and crossing. Takeshi recognized his acquaintance Minoru, a government bomb-squad expert. Not a genius, exactly, more like an idiot savant with X-ray vision. When the discussion moved on, Minoru remained, gazing at something cupped in his hands.

"Pretty strange today, Minoru-san!" "Strange! Here, look at this!" Familiar. "Eastern bloc, ne?"

"?. But now — watch!" Minoru rotated the fragment. "Hen na!" But he allowed Minoru to ID the modification. "South African!" "Motto hen na!"

Finally Minoru waved and started away. "Never been in a hole like this one. Don't like it!"

"Let's go have drinks!" Takeshi called after him. Whatever Minoru may have replied was lost in a sudden down-rush of noise, a terrific roaring quite close by in the mist. Everyone Takeshi could see stood or crouched, looking up, not really poised to flee — where in this mud deathtrap was there to go? — but relaxing helpless under some imminent unthinkable descent.. . and what was it, appearing out of the cloud cover, causing a reflex wave of oh's to sweep the paralyzed onlookers . . . what was this glistening surface of black scales, dripping with seawater and kelp, these giant talons, curving earthward?

"It's come back!" People began to scream and run. Others, producing cameras, tried to photograph the confusion, or angrily waved radiation meters and microphones at the approaching object. By the time Takeshi could even react, the mysterious visitor, smaller than at first supposed, had angled over toward a makeshift landing pad, where it turned out to be one of Chipco's fleet of customized jumbo passenger helicopters, whose underside its crew, a byword of practical jokery throughout the firm, had playfully disguised, with plastic sheet and fairings of appropriate textures, as a monster's sole. Everybody had been fooled!

The helicopter had come to evacuate everybody from the hole, immediately, according to an announcement over its speakers. Was this another joke? "Who cares?" Takeshi muttered out loud, "I'm ready! Enough work for one day!"

"I heard that," said Minoru, climbing on board with him. "Were you serious — about those drinks?"

"Sure." He had something on his mind — what was it? "Think we can get — Singapore Slings?" As they took off, rising up the mud cliffsides crumbling away now in dark roaring collapses, Takeshi remembered his car, still at the parking lot. Could he go to the rental company and plead force majeure yet again, thin as the excuse was by now? They ascended into deep clouds and flew in zero visibility for what could have been an hour or more. Passengers, mostly Techs and military, read tabloids and comic magazines, listened through earphones to pocket radios, played cards or go. Takeshi and Minoru headed aft to a small bar with a price list that made up in exorbitance for what it lacked in variety. There were no Singapore Slings, so they drank beer instead. As empties accumulated, rotor-throbbed into vibrations along the bar, Minoru grew more cryptic and sly. "I like it up here . . . it's like a toilet for me — a final, private space." "Ah —you fly a lot?"

"Business — much of it offshore these days. Last year I was in the sky — more than I was on the ground!"

Takeshi reminded himself that whenever his companion wasn't actually trying to take apart strange bombs in person, he was irrevocably ordering someone else to.

"We haven't flown together," Minoru went on, beaming maliciously, "since Lhasa International, good old LHX!" "Aw. Knew you'd bring that one up."

"Been on my mind — especially today! Maybe you can guess why!"

The helicopter came out into midafternoon sunlight. They were flying over some vast yellow-gray industrial reservation full of buildings whose only purpose was to shield the activities inside from viewers overhead. There were also areas set aside as parkland, and what looked like shopping and amusement centers. The PA came on. "We are approaching the famous Chipco 'Technology City,' home of 'Chuck,' the world's most invisible robot." Takeshi and Minoru tried to order two more beers, but the bar was closing. "How invisible," the voice continued, "you might wonder, is 'Chuck'? Well, he's been walking around among you, all through this whole flight! Yes, and now he could be right next to you — o-or you!" They began to descend, signs came on, Minoru sighed. "I'd rather stay up there!" The PA had begun to recite train information. Chipco had its own stop on the Tokaido Shinkansen, from which it would be a little under three hours to Tokyo.

On the train they got back to the Himalayan caper. There were similarities — assault on the inanimate, the Czech origins of both the initiator unit and the explosive, Semtex . . . and the dummy motive.

"So," Takeshi said, "you don't think this was self-inflicted."

"Who wrote the floater?"

"Professor Wawazume himself." Same as the Himalayan incident. They looked at each other, the two weary old hands, feeling as usual like jungle indigenous going in after a firefight to scavenge brass for pennies a ton. Far above them some planetwide struggle had been going on for years, power accumulating, lives worth less, personnel changing, still governed by the rules of gang war and blood feud, though it had far outgrown them in scale. Chipco was in it up to their eyeballs, and it looked like the Professor might have been fading some of the action. Nothing surprised either Takeshi or Minoru by now about the game, in which the everyday pieces were pirate ships of the stratosphere and Himalayas held for ransom.

"Those Himalayas!" Takeshi reminisced. "Right at the worst part, that sudden blizzard sweeping in —"

"— and we'd lost our way — everything white! Couldn't find the pass! The seconds were — ticking down!"

"Your wristwatch — with the turquoise numbers — only thing in the storm anybody can see! The bomber is already back in Geneva — with a perfect alibi! Suddenly — who do we run into, in that little shack — at the edge of infinity . . . literally!"

"Kutsushita-san!" Both men collapsed in laughter. "Everybody thought he'd drunk himself to death —"

"Instead he'd gone off to Tibet — to save his soul!"

"My first nuke assignment," Minoru recalled, after they'd finished laughing.

Takeshi nodded. "We called you — the Kid!" They had a nice spin in the time machine, but arrived at Tokyo Station with nothing about the present case any clearer. Minoru headed for a public phone while Takeshi waited, reaching for his Georgian silver snuffbox, where the shabu were. Minoru, growing agitated, made another call, hung up suddenly, and, with white now visible all the way around the irises of his eyeballs, came after Takeshi, who got ready to run the other way.

"Somebody we have to see! Right now! It could already be too late!" He grabbed Takeshi by the necktie and pulled him, protesting loudly, through the bustling station till they found a taxi. Minoru told the driver to go to the Tokyo Hilton International in west Shinjuku. There was a convention in town of prosecutors from all over the world, including Interpol heavies, big-city DA's, and restless global travelers, among whom Minoru could easily find half a dozen who'd tell him all about the initiator fragment, even get facsimiles while he waited of the sales slip, with the purchaser's current address, if he liked. Takeshi kept his hand on the door handle but forgot, each time the cab slowed, to jump out. It was '78, during a period of epic and bloody street war among all major factions of the yakuza, and no place public was safe from liability. Pedestrian life in Shinjuku shared the same nervous dread. Disco music coming out the club doors was all in minor keys tonight, the beat slower, undanceable. Through years of stately unfoldings of the deep actuarial mysteries that allowed him to go on making a living, Takeshi had come to value and watch closely in the world for signs and symptoms, messages from beyond, and even discounting the effects of drug abuse, nothing about the city seemed quite right tonight, as if a day already tough was about to start getting worse....

At the Hilton, Minoru found the names on his list all conscientiously engaged in scheduled evening activities, one at a Yak Doc Workshop, another at a Plea-Bargaining Clinic, yet another at a symposium titled "Funding That First Election Campaign." Frustrated, they headed for the bar and sat drinking till somebody paged Minoru, who disappeared and remained that way. After a while Takeshi wandered off to the toilet, but could not immediately find his way back and after a couple of wrong turns walked into some sort of rear foyer, just off the street, where he could hear large V-8 engines idling. Two Americans in brown gabardine suits were arguing.

One of them was Brock Vond, who was saying, "We need time to round up some troops. Don't want them to know we found anything out, hm? They'll have their checkpoints between here and there, so what we need now is a plausible head and shoulders in the back seat. Who knows, Roscoe, you may even have to go in there."

"They'll ID me in two seconds, Brock. Naw, what we need —" Looking around rhetorically, he spotted the mentally confused Takeshi. "Hey — this could be just the customer. Kombanwa, m' friend, you speak English?" Which is when Takeshi actually saw Brock Vond for the first time, moving forward into the light, and thought for a terrified second or two it was himself and something radical, like death, had just happened. It was a stressed and malevolent cartoon of his face, of what he shaved and had long looks at, but its steady glide forward had him hypnotized. Brock slid a rectangle of white plastic into the breast pocket of Takeshi's suit jacket. "Your passport to an evening you'll never forget," whispered Brock, and "Don't say we never did nothing for you," added Roscoe. And there was Takeshi in the back seat of a strange oversize American car, locked in, being borne through the streets of Shinjuku southward, crossing the Expressway, into Roppongi, expecting street mines, storms of automatic-weapon fire, convinced he had stumbled into the middle of some Japanese gang-war drama with a couple of gaijin bit players in it.

The car let him off beside a building the size of a warehouse, whose only light was next to a metal door, illuminating a slot the size of the card he'd been given. The neighborhood was deserted. Takeshi tapped on the car window, but the car only revved up and moved out and was soon around the corner and gone. Takeshi looked at the card. Next to a logo of a pleasant-looking young woman in provocative attire, it said, in English, "GENTLEMEN TITS ASS CLUB / For the Connoisseur." It sounded like Takeshi's sort of place, yet he knew Brock and Roscoe were sending him in as a decoy. "A tough call," he admitted — "what would you have done?"

"Found a cab," Prairie said. "But then again. . . ." She'd finally got to meet Takeshi, who'd showed up in the dead of night talking a mile a minute and demanding to be put on the Puncutron Machine, a device he apparently believed had brought him back to life once. When they were introduced next morning at breakfast, she saw this shorter, older guy wearing a truly gross suit, in synthetic fabric but printed to look like some tweed of bright powder-blue flecks against a liver-colored background. The pants bagged at the knees. DL leaned lightly on his shoulder and looked down at him, a little apologetic. "Just got to keep an eye on his feet, you'll be fine," as Takeshi took Prairie's hand and leered genially. "Here," DL reaching over and swiftly brushing bangs down over his eyebrows while he tried, muttering, to push her away, "who's he remind you of?"

"Moe!" Prairie cried.

He winked. "What's she been tellin' ya, Toots?"

"All about it," said DL.

"Looks like I got here just in time." From then on he was not shy about putting in with color commentary on DL's version. Until, just before the dark metal door with the plastic key, he paused and wondered aloud, "Maybe we should just skip over the sex part here. . . ."

"She is just a kid," DL agreed.

"You guys?" Prairie protested.

"Heedlessly then — fingering its smooth rigid contours, I — took the plastic card and — thrust it into the slot, shuddering as — something whined and the object was — abruptly sucked from my fingers...." After a brief scan it was stuck back out at him, like a tongue. Inside, he found the place all but vacated, little evidence of any night's business, no fumes of sake, no screened clatter of gaming tiles, or feminine crossings and glimpses. . . . Had there been a police raid? Had Brock already found his troops? From distant margins of the place voices could almost be heard. Suddenly he'd walked right into the middle of a piping of parlormaids, easily a dozen of the charming soubrettes in scandalously short outfits of organdy and taffeta, who gathered around him like shiny birds of doom. He began to sweat with panic and also to get an erection. He was hustled along, daintily coerced with flashing burgundy nails, through room after room, barely able, in the delicate stampede of high heels, to keep from tripping, down deserted hallways, trying to be a sport, going, "Ladies, ladies!" and "What's all this?" But he was only cargo. Surrounded by airy petticoats and fluttering eyelashes, he was billowed at length into an elevator, and they all dropped suddenly, pressing together, till the doors opened onto a corridor lit by musk-scented black candles, with only one other door in it, down at the far end. As they were shoving him out of the elevator, the girls acknowledged him for the first time. "Have an enjoyable evening, Vond-san," they cried. "Don't be so nervous!" Then all together, rustling, breezy, they bowed and departed by elevator, reaching as the doors closed into necklines and stocking tops for cigarettes and matches and lighting up.

"Vond-san"? Must be — his lookalike, back at the Hilton! They thought he was this American! What should he do? He looked around for a button to summon back the elevator, but there was none, the walls were smooth. The one door at the end of the passage was covered in black velvet, with a silver doorknob. As carefully as he approached, he couid still hear his shoes squeaking in this muffled place. Maybe it was all Minoru's idea of a practical joke. He tried to knock on the door, but the velvet surface absorbed the blows. He was supposed to turn the knob himself, open, step in. ... There was DL, lying in bed, hat, long earrings, miniskirt? Incredible! This Vond character must be — a miniskirt man too! She smiled. "Hurry, Brock. Get those fuckin' clothes off."

Oboy, an assertive woman! Takeshi thought, I love it! "But that's not —" he began.

"Ssh. Don't talk. Undress. You're safe here."

Trembling in a way whorehouses seldom got him to do, Takeshi stripped, conscious of each article coming off, of the air and the weight of her watching against his skin. Somewhere the hour chimed. By the ancient system, it was the hour of the cock, "In more ways than one," as Takeshi in later years liked to interpolate in comical accents, predictably to DL's annoyance. A bird usually associated with the dawn, the cock, by the laws of the Death Touch, belonged to early night. By now the chi cycle of the victim would have arrived in the region of his triple warmer, considered wife to the bladder, which was thus endangered. In the Dim Mak method, the Needle Finger DL intended to use could be calibrated to cause a delay of up to a year in the actual moment of death, depending on the force and direction of its application. She could hit Brock Vond now, and months in the future be safely in the middle of a perfect alibi at the moment he dropped dead.

"Now wait a minute," Prairie interrupted, "you're right there in this superintimate situation with a guy taking his clothes off, and it's obviously Takeshi here, a stranger, but you're still calling him Brock?"

"It was 'ose contacts they made me wear," said DL, "to make my eyes as blue as your mom's — yours, for that matter. Cheapskates at the ol' Depaato wouldn't even spring for a pair that was in my prescription."

"You had on somebody else's contacts? Eeoo!"

"And I couldn't see shit. Brock and Takeshi were both about the same size and body format anyway, and my mind right then was switched onto more of a transpersonal mode."

"Payin' attention to what you were doing," Prairie guessed.

So much so that it wasn't till later that DL remembered the contact lenses, which had been repossessed almost as soon as the deed was done. The more she considered, the more thickly came the birds of creepiness to perch on her shoulders. She never found out for sure, but had come to believe that the lenses had been taken from the eyes of a dead person. That furthermore she had been intended to witness her own act of murder through the correction to just this person's eyesight. Likely a hooker, DL speculated, who'd been caught holding out, who'd spent her whole short life off the books, whose name, even names she'd used professionally, nobody remembered anymore. As lost now as she could get.

But whose countersight DL was looking through that hour as she straddled the naked man on the bed, found his penis and slipped it in, breathing with precision, conscious only of the human alarm points spread below, defenseless, along those dark meridians. No longer needing anyone's eyes, she went in by other sensors, direct to the point, opposing his chi flow, spiraling her own in with the correct handedness. Takeshi never felt it. It wasn't till he climaxed moments later and started screaming in street Japanese that DL, de-transcending, realized something might be amiss. She hung over the side of the bed, groping at her eyes, Takeshi with a softoff sliding out and away in some confusion. When he saw her face again, he was amazed at the sudden green paleness of her irises, as if something had drained away. She clenched her lids, blinked.

"Oh — God — oh, no —" faster than he could follow, she had rolled off the bed and taken a fighting stance with the door to her right.

"Hey, beautiful," Takeshi up on one elbow, "if it was something I did—"

"Who are you? No — never mind —" She turned and fled out the door, in her high-sixties outfit, observed as she went by any number of cameras, population now returning to the corridors, plausible copies, for DL, of known enemy faces, bearing old wrongs, old scores to settle, converging here around her sloppy, amateur attempt at homicide. . . .

Ralph Wayvone, who'd been patched in as a courtesy from the Imperial, followed DL's progress out to the street on his own monitor, as well as Takeshi's slow bewildered dressing and departure. "Better put somebody on that Japanese guy. Maybe we can help."

"Want me go get her?" inquired Two-Ton Carmine Torpidini.

Ralph appeared to think about it. "Let her go, we can always find her again . . . she'll know how much she owes us now."

The phone rang, Carmine took it. "Says that somebody tipped off our boy. So he must have sent in a stuntman."

Ralph kept watching the screen, watching her go, those long, beautifully-in-shape legs, that slowed-down martial-arts lope, finally with an extravagant "Mmwahh!" blowing her a kiss as she vanished. "So long, babe. I was hopin' you'd be the one. If you couldint nail him, who can?"

"He's too lucky," Carmine philosophized. "But he's livin' on borrowed time, 'cause a lucky streak don't last forever,"

"Fuckin' Vond," Ralph Wayvone sighed, "he's the Roadrun-ner."

DL flew back to California, homing brainlessly in once again on the Kunoichi Retreat, where she'd been coming since her adolescence, then leaving, then coming back again, building a long-term love-hate affair with the Attentive staff, Sister Rochelle in particular. But this time Rochelle could see how awful she looked, and only assigned her to a cell and suggested gently that they talk the next day.

It would have given DL time to try and look quietly, frontally, at what she'd done. No use. She cried, failed to sleep, masturbated, snuck down to the kitchen and ate, snuck into the Regression Room and watched old movies on the Tube, smoking cigarette butts out of the public ashtrays till the birds woke up. By the time she dragged in to see the Senior Attentive, she was a sleepless wreck. The older woman reached, smoothed hair away from DL's sweating forehead. "I've done something so —" DL sat trembling, couldn't find a word.

"Why tell me?"

"What? Who else can I tell that'll understand?"

"Just what I wanted today, just when the cash flow's starting to turn around, just as I'm finding my life's true meaning as a businessperson, I might've known it, in you waltz and suddenly I've got to be Father Flanagan." She shook her head, pursed her lips like a nun, but sat and heard out DL's confession. Finally, "OK, couple questions. Are you sure you didn't, at the last instant, pull back?"

"I'm — not sure, no —"

"Paying attention," darkly, " 's the whole point, DL-san." The body transaction had been complex, referential, calling in not only chi flow and the time of day but also memory, conscience, passion, inhibition — all converging to the one lethal instant. The Senior Attentive gazed evenly at the bent nape, the averted face. "Just from your life pattern already, here's what I think. Living as always let's say at a certain distance from the reality of others, you descended —"

"I was taken!"

"— you were brought — down again into the corrupted world, and instead of paying attention, taking the time, getting prepared, you had to be a reckless bitch and go rushing through the outward forms, so of course you blew it, what'd you expect?"

And that was when DL remembered Inoshiro Sensei's remarks about those who never get to be warriors, who on impulse go in, fuck up, and have to live with it for the rest of their lives. He had known — he had seen it in her, some latency for a bungled execution at a critical moment, somewhere in her destiny — but how could he ever have warned her? DL realized she had been nodding solemnly for a while. "What I need to know," she whispered at last, "is, can it be reversed."

"Your life? Forget it. The Vibrating Palm, well yes and no. It depends on many variables, not least being how quickly it'll get seen to."

"But. . ." but what was she saying? "but I was just down there____"

"Since you were here with us last, we've built up a good medical unit — couple of licensed DOM's on the staff now, some new therapy machines — and while we don't see that many Ninja Death Touch cases, your victim has a better chance the sooner you can get him up here."

"But how'll I ever find him again? I didn't think I'd — I wanted —" but DL thought better of it.

But Rochelle said, "Let's have it."

"I hoped there might be ... ," a small failing voice, "some way I could stay?"

Out the window, screened by eucalyptus trees, could be seen once-white walls overgrown with ivy, a distant bight of freeway tucked into the unfolding spill of land toward "down there" — while up here the wind blew among the smooth gold and green hills, it seemed endlessly. Here was the deep quiescent hour, the bottom dead center of the day. The women sat in the Ninjette Coffee Mess and watched the caustics of sunlight flutter on the insides of their cups.

"If there were ninjitsu jury boards," Rochelle suggested, "you'd get your card pulled for what you say you did. Maybe this is the time, sister, that you'll finally start pulling your weight. We've always believed in your sincerity, but it can't get you much further — when do we ever see you concentrate, where's the attention span? Blithely driving off down the road in some little low-rent touring machine, showing up again in something from an assistant buyers' sale at Zody's beggin' to be taken back, on again off again over the years, no continuity, no persistence, no ... fucking . .. attention. All we see's somebody running because if she stops running she'll fall, and nothing beyond."

"I thought you'd take me in no matter what I'd done."

"And if I wanted you to leave us forever, I'd just say 'Leave,' wouldn't I?"

"And I'd have to leave." For the first time in the interview the sun-haired girl raised her eyes to those of the motionless Headmistress — a compound look, flirtatious while at the same time pushing away, clearly desperate at, any thought of having to go find Takeshi again. "But if I bring him back up —"

Sister Rochelle rolled her eyes in mock surrender. "We should reward you by letting you stay forever? Oh, child. Thirty-year-old, hardcase, cold and beautiful child."

It was as much blessing as DL was likely to get. She asked for and was granted a few days to prepare. And had got to where she could stay away from other people's smokes, keep her hands off her pussy, and hypnotize herself to sleep when who should appear at the gate but Takeshi, looking for her, saving everybody the trouble.

Not that he hadn't been through some difficulties of his own, of course, beginning back in Tokyo with the swamp of primal fear he'd been fighting through since finding out what had happened, which hadn't taken him long. The morning after his adventure at Haru no Depaato he tried to call Minoru at his office in the an-titerrorist subministry, but all he got was a lengthy runaround, including suggestions that the person no longer existed in the form Takeshi had known. After a while, no matter what extension he called, he was immediately put on hold and left there.

Takeshi went around all that day and the next feeling like a toxic dump. Symptoms of everything, particularly thoracic and abdominal ones, lanced through him. He quit ordering from room service because the sight of food now nauseated him. The final hammerstroke came when he got his suit back from the cleaners, the suit he'd worn to and from his encounter with DL, and found it full of holes, each five to ten centimeters across, in the front of the jacket and at the top of the pants, the edges ragged and black, as if burned and rotted through at the same time. He called the dorai kuriiningu, who were apologetic but unhelpful.

"Used perchloroethylene — like we do on everything! I was amazed — when all those holes started!"

"Started? Started what?"

"To get bigger! Only took a few seconds! Never saw anything like it!"

Sweating and aching, deeply apprehensive, Takeshi made an emergency appointment with one of the staff croakers at Wawa-zume Life & Non-Life, remembering to bring the afflicted suit with him. Dr. Oruni laid it out on an examining table and sent some automated scanning device over it while he and Takeshi watched a video screen in the next room, displaying the data in graph and print form. "These are all alarm points," the doctor showing with a cursor the pattern of holes. "Some strange, corrosive energy — very negative! Have you been in a fight?"

Takeshi remembered what he'd been trying all day not to — the American girl — the way she'd stared, the terror and failure in her face just before she turned and fled. He told the doctor about their rendezvous in the Haru no Depaato while he ran Takeshi through an abbreviated physical, grunting darkly at everything he seemed to find. Nothing really showed up, though, till the urine scan. Doc Oruni pulled a bottle of Suntory Scotch out of a small refrigerator, found two paper cups, poured them 90% full, put his feet up on his desk, and dolefully surrendered to mystery. "There's no cancer, no cystitis, no stones. Proteins, ketones, all that — it's normal! But something very weird is happening to your bladder! It's like trauma, only — much slower!"

"We — can't be more specific?"

"Why, do you — think you can find this somewhere in some — actuarial table? And once you see the odds, and learn the name, it'll go away?"

"It — doesn't happen often, ne?"

"I've never seen it — only read articles, heard talk around the clubhouse — anecdotes. If you like, I'll send you to somebody who can give you details. . . ."

"Just whatever you can tell me, then?"

"Ever heard of the Vibrating Palm?"

"Yeah — been in there once or twice!"

"Not a bar, Fumimota-san. An assassination technique — with a built-in time delay! Invented centuries ago by the Malayan Chinese, adapted by our own ninja and yakuza. Today a number of systems are taught — same effect!"

"She did that to me?" Effect? "But I didn't feel anything."

"Dewa — there's your good news! Allegedly, the lighter the touch — the longer you've got to live!"

"Well — how long?"

The doc chuckled for a while. "How light?"

Takeshi rode the elevator down alone, fully taken over, through the descent, by the fear of death. Now he could feel each of his suffering alarm points, count different struggling pulses, imagine his chi flow, in turbulence — blocked, darkly reversed, stained, lost — slowly destroying his insides. Any time he went to piss now would be an occasion for terror.

"My own sleaziness — has done me in!" It was too late even for remorse over the years squandered in barely maintaining what he now saw as a foolish, emotionally diseased life. He came reeling out of the elevator under the combined influence of speed, Scotch, and some new tranquilizer nobody knew anything about but which the detail man had left a huge barrel of samples of in the waiting room, with a sign urging passersby to take as many as they wished, so what some might have called his glibness no doubt had its origins in the realm of the chemical.

Back at the hotel he found a ticket to SFX tonight on the redeye, with a note from Two-Ton Carmine expressing sympathy for his recent inconvenience and the hope that once in San Francisco he would communicate with the enclosed phone number. What difference did it make? Takeshi shrugged. He packed a carry-on bag with two weeks' supply of amphetamines, a change of underwear, and an extra shirt and grabbed the hotel bus out to Narita.

The hours on the airplane were among the worst of his life. He drank steadily and, when he remembered to, popped green time-release capsules of dextroamphetamine plus amobarbital. He took some time to read through the stuffer for the tranquilizers he'd picked up at the doc's. Oh, ho, ho! Look at all these contraindications! Every variety of shit that was seething around already in his system, as a matter of fact, was prohibited. "Well!" out loud, "that being the case —" he ordered another drink and swallowed some more tranquilizers. His seatmate, a serious-looking gaijin businessman with a hand-held computer game that had up till now claimed his attention, looked over at Takeshi and then continued staring for a while. "You aren't committing suicide, are you?"

Takeshi grinned energetically. "Suicide? Nah! Uh-uh, buddy, just — trying to relax! I mean — don't you just hate flying? Huh? when you start thinking — about all the possibilities.. . ."

The young man, even though in a v/indow seat, did his best to edge away. Takeshi went on, "Here, you want to try one of these? Huh? they — they're really good. Evoex, ever heard of them? Something new!"

"There's a hidden camera somewhere, right? This is a commercial?" The question rang almost prayerfully in these surroundings, the moonlit childhood-picture-book clouds out the rounded toy windows, the lambent fall of electric light on faces and documents, the affectless music in the earphones, the possibly otherworldly origins of Takeshi's madness. . . .

"You'd be — real interested in this!" Takeshi began, "maybe even — tell me what you think I should do — because frankly, I'm at my wit's end!" proceeding then to rattle out the whole story, sparing no medical detail. The suit-wearing juvenile was more than willing to listen to anything, as long as it delayed the moment, easily imagined, when Takeshi would produce a weapon and begin to run amok in the aisles.

When Takeshi paused at last, the American tried to be sympathetic. "What can you expect? A woman."

"No, no! Somebody thought I was — somebody else." "Hmm. Maybe you thought she was somebody else." Takeshi grew instantiy paranoid, assuming, for some reason, that the young man was talking about his ex-