In the living room, Arctor picked up the mail from the coffee table and started through it. He tossed a large junkmail piece toward the wastebasket. It missed.

In his bedroom Luckman heard that. He stiffened and raised his head as if to sniff the air.

Arctor, reading the mail, suddenly scowled and said, “I’ll be dipped.”

In his bedroom Luckman relaxed, set the ax down with a clank, smoothed his hair, opened the door, and stepped out. “Hi. What’s happening?”

Arctor said, “I drove by the Maylar Microdot Corporation Building.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“And,” Arctor said, “they were taking an inventory. But one of the employees evidently had tracked the inventory outdoors on the heel of his shoe. So they were all outside there in the Maylar Microdot Corporation parking lot with a pair of tweezers and lots and lots of little magnifying glasses. And a little paper bag.”

“Any reward?” Luckman said, yawning and beating with his palms on his flat, hard gut.

“They had a reward they were offering,” Arctor said. “But they lost that, too. It was a little tiny penny.”

Luckman said, “You see very many events of this nature as you’re driving along?”

“Only in Orange County,” Arctor said.

“How large is the Maylar Microdot Corporation building?”

“About an inch high,” Arctor said.

“How much would you estimate it weighs?”

“Including the employees?”

Fred sent the tape spinning ahead at fast wind. When an hour had passed, according to the meter, he halted it momentarily.

“—about ten pounds,” Arctor was saying.

“Well, how can you tell, then, when you pass by it, if it’s only an inch high and only weighs ten pounds?”

Arctor, now sitting on the couch with his feet up, said, “They have a big sign.”

Jesus! Fred thought, and again sent the tape ahead. He halted it at only ten minutes elapsed real time, on a hunch.

“—what’s the sign look like?” Luckman was saying. He sat on the floor, cleaning a boxful of grass. “Neon and like that? Colors? I wonder if I’ve seen it. Is it conspicuous?”

“Here, I’ll show it to you,” Arctor said, reaching into his shirt pocket. “I brought it home with me.”

Again Fred sent the tape at fast forward.

“—you know how you could smuggle microdots into a country without them knowing?” Luckman was saying.

“Just about any way you wanted,” Arctor said, leaning back, smoking a joint. The air was cloudy.

“No, I mean a way they’d never flash on,” Luckman said. “It was Barris who suggested this to me one day, confidentially; I wasn’t supposed to tell anyone, because he’s putting it in his book.”

“What book? Common Household Dope and—”

“No. Simple Ways to Smuggle Objects into the U.S. and out, Depending on Which Way You’re Going. You smuggle it in with a shipment of dope. Like with heroin. The microdots are down inside the packets. Nobody’d notice, they’re so small. They won’t—”

“But then some junkie’d shoot up a hit of half smack and half microdots.”

“Well, then, he’d be the fuckingest educated junkie you ever did see.”

“Depending on what was on the microdots.”

“Barris had his other way to smuggle dope across the border. You know how the customs guys, they ask you to declare what you have? And you can’t say dope because—”

“Okay, how?”

“Well, see, you take a huge block of hash and carve it in the shape of a man. Then you hollow out a section and put a wind-up motor like a clockworks in it, and a little cassette tape, and you stand in line with it, and then just before it goes through customs you wind up the key and it walks up to the customs man, who says to it, ‘Do you have anything to declare?’ and the block of hash says, ‘No, I don’t,’ and keeps on walking. Until it runs down on the other side of the border.”

“You could put a solar-type battery in it instead of a spring and it could keep walking for years. Forever.”

“What’s the use of that? It’d finally reach either the Pacific or the Atlantic. In fact, it’d walk off the edge of the Earth, like—”

“Imagine an Eskimo village, and a six-foot-high block of hash worth about—how much would that be worth?”

“About a billion dollars.”

“More. Two billion.”

“These Eskimos are chewing hides and carving bone spears, and this block of hash worth two billion dollars comes walking through the snow saying over and over, ‘No, I don’t.’ ”

“They’d wonder what it meant by that.”

“They’d be puzzled forever. There’d be legends.”

“Can you imagine telling your grandkids, ‘I saw with my own eyes the six-foot-high block of hash appear out of the blinding fog and walk past, that way, worth two billion dollars, saying, “No, I don’t.” ‘His grandchildren would have him committed.”

“No, see, legends build. After a few centuries they’d be saying, ‘In my forefathers’ time one day a ninety-foot-high block of extremely good quality Afghanistan hash worth eight trillion dollars came at us dripping fire and screaming, “Die, Eskimo dogs!” and we fought and fought with it, using our spears, and finally killed it.’

“The kids wouldn’t believe that either.”

“Kids never believe anything any more.”

“It’s a downer to tell anything to a kid. I once had a kid ask me, ‘What was it like to see the first automobile?’ Shit, man, I was born in 1962.”

“Christ,” Arctor said, “I once had a guy I knew burned out on acid ask me that. He was twenty-seven years old. I was only three years older than him. He didn’t know anything any more. Later on he dropped some more hits of acid—or what he was sold as acid—and after that he peed on the floor and crapped on the floor, and when you said something to him, like ‘How are you, Don?’, he just repeated it after you, like a bird. ‘How are you, Don?’ ”

Silence, then. Between the two joint-smoking men in the cloudy living room. A long, somber silence.

“Bob, you know something …” Luckman said at last. “I used to be the same age as everyone else.”

“I think so was I,” Arctor said.

“I don’t know what did it.”

“Sure, Luckman,” Arctor said, “you know what did it to all of us.”

“Well, let’s not talk about it.” He continued inhaling noisily, his long face sallow in the dim midday light.

One of the phones in the safe apartment rang. A scramble suit answered it, then extended it toward Fred. “Fred.”

He shut off the holos and took the phone.

“Remember when you were downtown last week?” a voice said. “Being administered the BG test?”

After an interval of silence Fred said, “Yes.”

“You were supposed to come back.” A pause at that end, too. “We’ve processed more recent material on you … I have taken it upon myself to schedule you for the full standard battery of percept tests plus other testing. Your time for this is tomorrow, three o’clock in the afternoon, the same room. It will take about four hours in all. Do you remember the room number?”

“No,” Fred said.

“How are you feeling?”

“Okay,” Fred said stoically.

“Any problems? In your work or outside your work?”

“I had a fight with my girl.”

“Any confusion? Are you experiencing any difficulty identifying persons or objects? Does anything you see appear inverted or reversed? And while I’m asking, any space-time or language disorientation?”

“No,” he said glumly. “No to all the above.”

“We’ll see you tomorrow at Room 203,” the psychologist deputy said.

“What material of mine did you find to be—”

“We’ll take that up tomorrow. Be there. All right? And, Fred, don’t get discouraged.” Click.

Well, click to you too, he thought, and hung up.

With irritation, sensing that they were leaning on him, making him do something he resented doing, he snapped the holos into print-out once more; the cubes lit up with color and the three-dimensional scenes within animated. From the aud tap more purposeless, frustrating—to Fred—babble emerged: