At This Point

At This Point

S.M. Skaar

At this point in 1980 Dennis had been working in the corporate copy center for fourteen months and he was at the top of his form.  “Xerography is my life,” he told the stream of secretaries and administrative assistants who tripped daintily down the steel and concrete stairs of building G.

Like Linda Dunn, to name one of his favorite sweeties, a golden amazon who liked to sunbathe naked on the deck of her sailboat underneath Palo Alto’s Dumbarton Bridge.  Or like Lucy Snyder, a bit older, a sexy senior secretary with a smug, cynical attitude and a knockout ass.  Or any one of the ten or twelve other cute chicks Dennis had come to know well at Paradigm Control, Incorporated.

The company Dennis had signed on with lived largely off the efforts of a legion of women, and sooner or later they all came Dennis’s way.  Paradigm Control (PCI) had been founded a dozen years before, and it was home to a diverse fraternity of ex-Stanford consultants, each with his own “Gal Friday.”  It was Lucy Snyder herself, holding forth in a seemingly endless series of tarty, mini-skirted and tight-sweatered outfits, who really ran the Vermont division, who held all the keys and safe combinations.  As the consultancy grew it demanded an increasing pool of word processors, secretaries, document specialists to produce its mounds of proposals and reports.

Dennis’s latest dalliance, Leanne, a homegirl from Sunnyvale, had recently begun hanging out downstairs in the copy center to avoid the attentions of Lucy, the office manager.  She was just twenty-two, wearing baby-blue jeans and a doilied cotton top over a black sports stretch bra.  Leanne had come to Paradigm Control from Manpower, the same agency that had placed Dennis.  Before coming up the hill to Palo Alto, to become the junior member of the Aeronautical and Marine Systems division, she had worked the flats for Emergency Medical, driving ambulance.  Leanne was spiral punching a tall stack of documents with divider tabs.

“You don’t have to do that, you know,”  Dennis said, watching Leanne’s trim rear clench as she slid each set of pages against the switch.  “Consuelo said she’d take care of it.”

“She’ll just screw it up.  I’m tired of getting blamed for other people’s mistakes.”  Which wasn’t a bad answer.  At this point Dennis had developed a liking for girls who knew how to look out for themselves.  Leanne was dumb, but she was arrogant.  She was ‘Sally,’ from the ‘Dick, Jane, and Sally’ books, a brash and unskilled young woman thrust into the working world too soon.

“If you let her do it, you and I can slip out behind the oleander and blow this joint I have,”  Dennis told her.  Leanne looked back coyly over her shoulder and wriggled in assent.  Her brassy blond hair was feathered and blown dry like a rock and roll tramp.

From the outside, Paradigm Control was a first-generation concrete slab-constructed row of buildings, E, F, and G.  The buildings still stand, at Junipero Serra and Page Mill, in the old Stanford Industrial Park.  Dennis popped his badge against the reader and eased Leanne by him, the warm summer light splashing her young skin.   “You know this place?”  It was the edge of the corporate world beyond the oleander hedge, lank yellow hill grasses, a dry path, a couple of live oaks casting marginal shade.  “Have a seat.”  There was a broken gray trunk and Leanne swung her long strong legs astride it.

 “Look at you!” Dennis said, staring admiringly into the wedge of her blue-jeaned thighs and tossing the number and his lighter into her sculpted lap.   Leanne was really into fitness.  He had lusted mightily over the thought of her working breathlessly out at her health club, the Golden Venus, face down on a bench, her hamcakes bulging as she kicked seventy-five pounds off the floor.  Leanne couldn’t resist flattery or the drugs that Dennis had made every effort to supply her with.  She preened for him now, pushing back her hair backhanded and lighting up, sucking the fat joint until it glowed.

He sat down next to her, one hand touching her leg familiarly as he plucked back the number from her extended fingers.

“Good stuff,”  he said ambiguously.   “How’s it going upstairs, anyway?”  Almost from the beginning of her career in the corporate world Leanne had found herself on the outs with the strict hierarchy of the A&M division.

“Lucy Snyder is evil.  Evil.  Those slutty outfits she wears all the time.  She thinks she’s so superior.  I’m sick of filing contracts.  I could puke.”   Leanne was elemental, innocently Manichean, unwilling to evaluate the possible similarities and differences between her own baby-doll style and Lucy’s whore of the world act.  Which meant there would be some Monday she’d be transferred to a light on Lucy’s 12-button phone. There were stayers and there were goers in the corporate world, and that was one reason Dennis had moved so fast on Leanne.

“I can’t believe you did it with her.”

Dennis choked the heavy smoke out, his fist hiding his expression.  “I can’t believe I told you about it,” he said ruefully.  “I told you that story in strictest confidence.  Besides, I was drunk.   It happened way last year.”  Lucy Snyder was Leanne’s supervisor, forty-two, the very same nervous, chain-smoking overdressed executive secretary who in a surreal episode a few months before had taken Dennis to her apartment after encountering him at the Whomp-Whomp Room and fucked the snot out of him with all the skill and compassion of a cranked-up porn star.

“Listen, Leanne.  She’s just jealous and desperate.  It’s kind of sad.  She’s always been the office party gal and now the role’s getting a little old for her—or she’s getting too old for the role, or both.  Why do you think all her assistants up until now have been those wispy gay guys.  You’re young, beautiful, sex-y.  You’re like real competition for her.”

“I know it,”  Leanne said.  “Those engineers up there are on me like dogs.” 

Leanne accepted the compliment, raising her arms and dancing from side to side in a victory cheer.  She stretched to the left elaborately, unconsciously making a hard little bicep, the smoking reefer stuck between her curled knuckles.

“There’s a guy down here that’s after your bod, too.”  Dennis kissed Leanne, advancing his palm along her thigh.  “Or did I fail to get that message across the other night?”

“You wish.  That bitch Lucy scrambled up all those binders she made me do the other day and blamed it on me.  I don’t have to take this shit.”  Leanne returned Dennis’ kiss casually, clearly sublimely unwilling to consider the possibility that she did have to take that shit.   A true child of the silicon valley aerospace suburbia, making out to her was as natural to her as drugs, and was held in the same little locket as all her other rebellious sins.

“Think you could go back to the ambulance?”  Dennis murmured, drinking in the juices of her smoke-filled mouth.   He fondled the sleek swell of her titties beneath her stretch bra.    “Or how about this?  I’ll quit too.  We’ll move to Stockton and open that motel you talked about.”  He was half serious.  Or take her back to Montana and resume his former life as a carpenter.  Nah.  ‘Xerography is my life.’  At this point Dennis had become pretty much a company man.

“There’s this, guy, Rod.  No, I can’t work there again.  He’s the reason I started temping.  Didn’t you hear?  He came up after me last week.  Remember the ambulance?”   Sure.  Leanne’s former boyfriend had to be the over-muscled shithead who had parked his emergency vehicle conspicuously in front of the corporate lobby recently, giving everyone a moment of false hope that Pearson or Toomey might have had the mortal episode that statistically two men per year per company might reasonably be expected to achieve.

“What’s up with you and Rod?  Are you still with him or not?” 

“I think it would be just too much to ask for you to have to deal with Rod, Dennis.  I’d like you to move out.”

“You’re dumping me already?”  Even at this point Dennis was fairly quick on the uptake.  “We’ve only known each other for three weeks.  I thought we were having fun together!”

“Sure.  It was fine.  You’re really ‘good in bed’.  It’s just that I don’t think it looks right, you know.   I’m upstairs, you work down here, you know.  I’m really not ready for that yet.  You’re just like Rod, trying to trap me into your plans.  Like I don’t have my own plans already.  That stuff about Stockton and the hotel, that was just made up for you.  I got places to go, things to do.  This girl’s got a lot of living to do before she settles down.  Besides, when I heard about you and that old witch.  It feels creepy.”

It was just that she was so perfect for him except for this, her naïve selfishness, her beautiful and bouncy body.  It made you mad.  At this point Dennis had been dumped or rejected dozens of times, which far from making it easier was enough of a kick in the nuts to make you question even the motives of the few women who could hack you at all.  At this point it was only early afternoon and it was going to get worse.

They heard the sound of a car parking behind the bushes, heard the door slam and the sound of footsteps.  “I’ve got to get back to the job,”  Dennis told Leanne gruffly, unwilling for her to see him cry.  Waste of a good joint.  “Listen.  I’ll see you later.”  He stood up and blundered his way back through the oleander, being careful of his eyes.  And ran right into the headlight of James Toomey’s Coupe de Ville where he had swung onto the corner of the parking lot.

Toomey was a small man in a large car, the Caddy white with gold pinstripes.  What did that tell you all by itself?  They came ducking through the bushes as he was straightening his canvas car cover.  He was dark-haired but well shaven, five-six, the latest in a series of bullshitters Paradigm Control had brought in recently.  Toomey’s office was lined with strange “artistic” touches, framed cartoon caricatures he had drawn of tennis buddies, photos of him with other guys with rackets, a fringed, green glass shaded lamp.  How did Dennis know?  At this point one of his hobbies was roaming the office at night.  Anyway, Toomey considered himself artistic.

So did Dennis.  But not in that way.  “Afternoon, Jim,” he said, “beautiful day, isn’t it?”  Hoping that the smell of weed hadn’t stunk to him too bad.   Toomey was his bosses boss’s new HR director.  The corporate functionary regarded them both wordlessly, the point of a toothpick from his late lunch protruding through pursed lips.

“Cigarette break,”  Dennis explained.  “We better get back in there, Lee.”   Oh, man, did she look loaded.  Well, she could watch after her own self from now on, if that was how she wanted it.  At the stairs he stopped for a final disappointed gander at her well-toned figure.  He had been getting in shape to be with her, working off a little flab.  The two of them could have tried some new positions.

“Shit, Dennis.  Don’t take it so hard.  It’s just sort of like a generation gap thing, or whatever.”

“See, that’s just it.  Why make such a big deal out of a few years age?  You think I can’t keep up with you or something?  I’m the king of party.”  Over Leanne’s tanned shoulder Dennis could see Toomey watching them.

“It’s because Rod’s an older guy too.  And then I go and break up with him and the first thing that happens is I end up with another old guy.  I think I must be fucked up, some way.  Psychologically.”

At this point Dennis thought so too.  Why did they all have to go off on these headtrips this way.  But he knew that there wasn’t any point arguing.  “Well, listen, I’ve got work to finish up.  See you later, Lee.”

So I guess you could say that at this point Dennis was ready for a rebound, a new love interest, like a fuzzy duckling whose mother has been run over by a truck.  Normally he liked working high, now he was just fucking pissed off and depressed.  He flipped through the jobs on the incoming shelf listlessly.

Then Wendy Guerin appeared suddenly in the door of the copy center, dark-haired, pale-skinned, clutching two slim computer printouts.  Dennis crossed his arms, waited for the inevitable.

“I’m sorry, Denny, they just sprung this on me.  Can we, you know, do the closed door thing?”  She was tall, beautiful, with the serene arrogance of a chanter or meditator.  So out of Dennis’s league, and dangerously scary, too.  Dennis had never been into any of that hooty-gooty stuff. 

“Sure, Wendy.  Wanna fill out the request?   What do you think, Consuelo?  Are you caught up?”  In a few seconds they had closed the dutch doors into the repro room, where the two Xerox 9200 and 9400 copiers hulked end-to-end like wary dogs.  Dennis banged the handle on the side panel of the 9400 and clicked the two elbow hinges that released the middle transport cover.  He pulled the pin-feed gizmo from the shelf and held back the spring lock to fit it against the exposed sprockets, snapped the shields off both sides of the tractor feed.

“Let’s go,” he said, reaching for the printouts and the yellow request form.  Wendy pulled away from him. 

“I need, let me see, nine copies of this one, and one-two-three-four-eleven of these,”  Wendy ventured, “Unless…

“I always make a single master first and then run the other copies off of that,”  Dennis said, taking the printouts.  He flipped the header page up and checked the print.  It was light and he twiddled the density control up to the max, then threaded the greenbar paper up to the registration point.  He clicked seventy-four percent and listened as the optics in the big copier dropped to their new position.  Enter 1. Go.  He turned to Wendy.  She really was something, head to feet the embodiment of the Santa Cruz alternative life force, in a filmy rainbow dress and Birkenstock sandals, a strange talisman of Indian beads and feathers banding her long neck.  It didn’t bother Dennis that Wendy was also a genuine space case, but for some reason this hippie-chick outfit offended him.  Pretty much at this point Dennis had been forced by Toomey and others like him to become the kind of guy who always kept his nose hairs short and his shirt tucked in.

“Been dreaming lately?”

“It’s so funny that you ask.  I had the most crazy dream just a week ago.  Wow.  Yeah.”

It seemed apparent at this point that Dennis was not going to be made privy to the no doubt heavily archetypal contents of Wendy’s fantasy world.

“How’s Bill?”  Bill Copeland was the divorced father of two that Wendy had started dating.  He was an engineer in the Defense Division, one of the theoretical ones.  Dennis always enjoyed looking at his stuff.

Right after the ready supply of pussy, the constant flow of interesting reading matter was the most important fringe benefit in working for Paradigm Control.  The company would consult to you on anything, for a buck, and on a daily basis in the copy center a guy could run off an extra copy of some just flat out weird documents like “Emerad 70--an Anti-Aircraft System for the Republic of Kuwait“, “Preliminary Analysis of Tidal Effects in the Bay of Fundy”, “An Energy Control Center for the Republic of Yugoslavia”, or a DARPA paper provocatively titled “Weather on Jupiter.”  The list went on.  In his litero-phagic way, Dennis had come to associate each of these documents with the spirits of the various women who delivered them unto him.  Some had passed through his hands many times.

“He’s working on this thing to show the pictures from that thing they sent to Mars,”  Wendy said obscurely.  “They’re going to have them on as soon as they come in.”

“Have what where?”

Wendy shuddered as she forced her brain into action.  “They have all these computers and things that they’re taking to that place, you know, the Exploratorium in San Francisco.  And they have a line down to NASA Ames, where some people Bill knows work.  Would you like to go?  I think I could get you a ticket.”

Dennis was touched.  “Thanks, Wendy.  That sounds interesting.  Do you think you could get two?  I might take my girlfriend.”  Maybe if he showed Leanne they could do some things together.  He turned and pressed the linefeed button twice.  The printout fell crisply into its wire basket and he threaded the second one in.

“Are you guys like, in love?”  Wendy’s dark lashes flicked down, and Dennis chose that moment to punch a 2 into the selector.  Go.  The first report had been the monthly summary, he knew from experience.  The second was the “Compensation Study.”  The lower sorter rattled as the diverter, triggered by a light sensor beamed through the bins, detected the presence of the first job.

“I don’t know   Bill is so…”

He slapped the sheets out of the assembly and took off the feeder, then went around to the sorter.  He peeled the header and two blank pages off and dropped them into the half-high garbage can behind the copier.

“Nine copies, you said?”

“Let me see.  I think so.”  Wendy began to count again, and Dennis took the opportunity to pull the second copy of the Compensation Study from the lower sorter and drop it in the trash, with a moue of disgust.  Even a Repro God can make a mistake now and then.

He knocked off 9 copies of the first report and went around to the sorter.  “Stapled or clipped?”

“Clipped,”  Wendy said.  “I can do it.”  She loved to work the little binder clips.  Dennis pulled the original out of the document handler and flipped it into the trash, inserting the second report.  10.  Go.  When the lower sorter had finished rattling he extracted the second original and snapped a clip on it, handing it to her.

“Here you go.”

“Thanks.  Where’s that other copy?”

“What do you mean?” Dennis asked.

“The first one.  The original.”

“I gave it to you,” he offered, but Wendy was looking at him with a bothered expression.  Her pretty throat was tight within the beaded choker.

“You should dump Bill and his brats and go trekking in Nepal with me.  Yeah, here it is.  I punched in the total number, so I dropped this dummy in the garbage.  Do you want it for some reason?”

“Yes, please.  Wasn’t there some other stuff, too?”

“No-o-o.  I don’t know what you mean.  OK, then.  See you next time,” Dennis bluffed as blandly as he could.  Dingbat.  He eased Wendy out the door, flipping the Classified Processing sign around and nodding shortly to his Filipino assistant, Consuelo, who shuffled wearily into the room.  As soon as Wendy was out the door he spun and followed Consuelo in.

“Are you OK?”  he asked.  “Maybe you can finish up Miss Leanne’s binding job for me.  I can work in here for a while.”  Counting thinking time, he knew he might only have a few seconds before Wendy came back, and he didn’t bother to wait for Consuelo to leave before retrieving the purloined pages from the trashcan and flicking them beneath the sorter bin.  “What do we have going here?”

It looked like Dennis had gotten away with it again, and as the nervousness went away he felt the tiredness of the weed trying to take him over.

Six.  Go.   He said to himself and to the big copier which after all these months was nearly an extension of his own body.  The machine cycled into life, shooting six collated copies of a forty-page treatise on Bayesian Finite Element Analysis into the sorter.  Half a ream of paper in less than two minutes.  That was how the Xerox 9400 had gotten its name: nine-thousand, four-hundred copies-per-hour.  Dennis withdrew the last set and looked it over with a bleary eye.  Horst Salzwedel, Werner Von Braun’s Austrian love child, was offering up yet another gloomy assessment of the failure profile of the space station.  Worth a read, for sure.  Dennis popped a binder clip over the document and put it into the trash.  A second later James Toomey walked in, Wendy Guerin hanging nervously behind him

Toomey had never been to the repro center before.  He’d only been on the job for a month or so, the new director of Human Relations.   “Howdy, Boss,”  Dennis acknowledged, lifting his eyebrows.  He leaned his forearms down casually on the pebbled plastic surface of the doc feeder.

“Wendy tells me there’s a problem,”  the functionary said, looming under Dennis menacingly.  “Oh?”  Dennis asked.  The stupid little twit. 

Wendy shuddered again, but stepped forward to point at the trash-can.  “There was something else.  At least I think there was.  He threw it in there.”

He rolled his eyes between Wendy and the trash, making sure that Toomey got the point that the woman was a complete dingbat.  “Yeah.  Sorry about that.  I forgot to count the original in the total copies.  Bad mistake.  I apologize, Boss.  But I gave it to her.  You have it now, right, Wendy?  Ten copies instead of the nine you needed.”

“There’s another one in the trash.  I saw it!”  Wendy said shrilly to Toomey.  Dennis shook his head sadly.

“Be my guest,” he said, gesturing.  James Toomey looked down into the trashcan from his five-foot-five height, clearly unwilling to explore its depths.  Pussy.  Finally Dennis reached in himself.  “OK, maybe I get it now.  Maybe you saw me throw away this copy of Horst Salzwedel’s paper we ran this morning.  Same kind of thing, you forget about the original, and then you have an extra copy.  Happens all the time.  I hate it when I do it.”  He held the document from the garbage can, his palm concealing the binder clip,

”Wendy?”

“That must have been it,”  Wendy said uncertainly, mistrustful of Dennis’s legerdemain.  “I’m sorry, Dennis.  I understand now.”

“Sorry for the confusion, boss.”  Dennis tipped his head grimly toward her.  One other thing that Dennis had been trying not to think of was Toomey’s inclination to fire first and ask questions afterward.  You could go from a cushy job as a corporate flunky to temping again in no time.

“No sweat, Dennis,”  Toomey replied.  He still clenched the toothpick between his teeth.  “I’m glad it was nothing.  We’ll get out of your hair now.”  Which probably was a reference to Dennis’s now collar length hair and his ambition to regrow the waist-length mane he had had in his teen-age glory years as a carpenter in Montana.

The two of them left, but in a minute Wendy was back.  “I have those two tickets for you.  I’m sorry.  Let’s be friends.”

“I’m serious, Wendy.  Tibet, Nepal.  You’re never going to get off the wheel with somebody else’s kids hanging around your neck.  Screw it.  We’ll become the original Dharma bums together.”   Which wasn’t a bad idea.  Dennis had always wanted to follow in the footsteps of Jesus and Sherlock Holmes.

Dennis’s style was always just to feel around for things, like finding a meaningful conversation, even with a hooty-gooty dingbat like Wendy and one of his dependant clauses must have brushed one of her tantric nexuses.   Wendy glowed for him.  At this point, Dennis had never actually seen an aura before.

“Hold that thought,”  Dennis said to Wendy, peering deep into her vacant blue eyes, so hungry for enlightenment.  As if he had any to offer her.  “Thanks for the tickets,”  he said.  Wendy went out, looking away, as alarmed as a grazing doe, as Lucy Snyder, Bob Pearson’s carnivorous executive secretary, stamped noisily into the Copy Center.

“Hey Consuela!  Hi, Dennis.  You gotta give this lady a raise!”  she told Dennis.  Lucy paused before beginning her typical tirade.  “That son-of-bitching bastard Bob!  He gets to go home and on his way out the goddamn door he dumps this shit on me.  I’m so mad I’m ready to slit his throat.”  Lucy slammed down a thick stack of orange-coded documents.  She was wearing, rather astonishingly, a pair of metallic blue high heeled boots, white tights, and a low-cut blue-striped jersey with a red hammer-and-sickle insignia.  She winked seductively at Dennis from beneath a round hat circled with embroidered Russian characters.

“What’s with the outfit?  Thinking of going over to the other side?”  At this point Lucy had to be already in her forties, with more than ten years on Dennis, at a time when Dennis was just beginning to freak out over his own age.  But he drank in her confident sexuality anyway.  Lucy pushed the pillbox hat back rakishly above curled brass blond hair, raised her elbow in some kind of cold-war pin-up pose.

“Darlin’ let me tell you, I’ve always been on the other side.”  She scowled.  “It’s for Bob’s party tonight.”   Framed by the square neckline of the navy uniform, Lucy’s stretchy num-nums swayed pendulously.   Her deep cleavage showed the effects of over-exposure, sprinkled by blotchy freckles.  “It’s real.  Bob scored it off a guy at the Russian embassy when their submarine landed here last year.    Don’t you like it?”

Right from the beginning Dennis had been in glory at PCI.  It had to be something left over from the ‘Playboy Philosophy,’ although he could have sworn that all traces of that magazine had been scrubbed from his eighties brain.  Maybe those stupid cartoons.  Anyway the lingering letch for a leggy, well-turned stenographer had to be part of why he had responded in such a crazy way to Lucy Snyder those many months ago at the bar—the Night of the Long Dong.

But a guy couldn’t compete with someone who made a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year brokering Top Secret material from the DoD to his captive consultants.  Which was another part of the Playboy credo, he was sure.  The big dogs got the babes.  Dennis had to admit, Pearson had it made.  A Stanford grad, Bob Pearson now lived and partied hearty with a bevy of always-aestivating bitches in his mansion in Los Altos Hills.  Dennis had never needed anything from the guy.  He lived at least two dimensions away from Dennis’s life—deep in the secret society of military intelligence, high in the upper levels of corporate control, only occasionally getting off the secure phone, sending Lucy downstairs for classified copies.

“I guess when Bob wants to score, he scores,” he said snipishly, a little embarrassed at his reaction.  He had always liked Lucy, respected the cynical perspective that her dozen years at Paradigm Control had given her on the affairs of the corporation.  She shouldn’t have to play dress-up for that bozo. 

“Ooh—nasty today, aren’t we,”  Lucy gave him an inquiring look.  “Listen, I just need to get some copies and then I’ll get out of your hair.  Got some forms for me to fill out?”

Dennis had already picked up a collectors item paper on Towed Sonar Arrays from Lucy with an authentic orange and white striped Top Secret label.  Today she had plunked down nearly a dozen Trident submarine docs with the same designation.

“I’m serious, Lucy.”  He swallowed.  “You’re my hero, you practically run the damn company, from everything I can see.  You shouldn’t disrespect yourself.”

“Get yourself another hero, honey.  Besides, what the fuck do you know about it?  Your little downstairs hustle isn’t all that much different than what we have to do for a living upstairs.  Only maybe some of us have a little more fun doing it.”

“Don’t get me wrong.  You’re still a good-looking woman…”

“Oh, cram it, Dennis,”  Lucy said, getting him wrong.  That wasn’t what he meant, either.  He just meant, for her age…

“I suppose you think being a good secretary is enough?  I’ve got news.  Anywhere else and I take home at least $5K less than Bob gives me here.  I have bills.  And that’s if I even get another job.  There’s a lot of girls out there who can’t type but are willing to drop their panties at lunch.”

Dennis thought darkly about Leanne.  “What about that union thing?  Did you ever get any response on that?”  Lucy and some of the other senior secretaries had threatened to give notice unless they were allowed to organize.

“I just told you—that was the response,”  Lucy regarded Dennis bitterly.  “It was ‘shape up or ship out’.  So I guess you’d say that’s why I’m wearing the costume.  One more chance—don’t you like it?”

“Love it,”  Dennis said.  “Maybe you should think about going into business for yourself.”

“Doing what?  I’m not even a good whore, and thanks a lot for pointing that out.  I never even got my GED—I flunked the test cold.  Is someone else going to pay me for copying classified documents?  That’s all I know how to do.  Speaking of which, do you mind?”  He shrugged and opened the door of the copy room, re-hanging the “Classified” sign behind them.

Dennis knew the procedure backwards and forwards.  He logged each doc separately and stapled Lucy’s repro slips into the binder.  Three copies each.  He stopped.  “Where’s this one?”  he asked.  There was a signature sheet with no document—“Evasion Strategies in North Atlantic Waters.” 

“Shit,”  Lucy said.  “I must of left it up in the safe.”

“Well, I guess you better get your fanny back up to Bob’s office and get it, then,”  Dennis said.  “This is like the first example they teach us in DIS school.”  The DIS was this collection of GS-8 clowns from San Francisco the government entrusted with security in the Silicon Valley.  “Plus, he’s the authorized officer.  He needs to sign.”

“I can’t!”  Lucy went off.  “I told you.  Bob’s gone fucking home.  He’s getting ready to play with his band tonight at the party.  He’s supposed to be flying to Virginia with these documents tomorrow.  Isn’t there anything else we can do?”  She touched Dennis’s shoulder, her voice lowering, singing the last syllable.  “As a personal favor?”  

“Sure, for you, Lucy.”

“Why don’t you come up with me,” she suggested,  a quick change from her previous snotty attitude.  “I’ll show you how they live upstairs.  We could have a drink and do some repro before I head to the party.”

“That sounds kinky.  Sure.”  Upstairs, in Bob Pearson’s boardroom, Lucy opened the credenza and doled him out a big martini, complete with ice and speared olives, taking vodka herself.  They were far from the first after-hours highballs she had poured, Dennis realized.  Lucy had partied hard for years, and it showed in the way her bitter complexion became piquant and alert with the application of alcohol.  Now Dennis knew.

“So this is where the inner-most secrets of the company are divulged.”

“I couldn’t count how many times I’ve pulled a train on this conference table,”  Lucy bragged.  It was hard to know if she was serious.  “You wanna do it?  Come on, let’s go.”  Lucy’s aura burned around her, a fiery sickly orange.

Dennis stood silent, completely enthralled.

“You’re scared of me, aren’t you,”  she mused.  Dennis blushed.  So maybe it was an oedipal thing--he had always feared his mother’s sudden ability to get high, to burn bright in just this way.

“I think we better open the safe and find “Strategies in the North Atlantic,”  Dennis said, dry-mouthed.  If it had been Leanne he would have hopped her in a second.  Like the time he and Vickie had done it in the Mills College Art Museum.

“I think we better pop your nut,”  Lucy said predatorily.  “Then, I’ll open the safe.”

You couldn’t get more plainer than that.  He didn’t know why, but just like months before he had this raging hard-on for the old broad again.  Show her what having secrets really meant.  He came close to her, pulled her starched uniform down crisply to her waist, her sagging boobs undone beneath it.  Staring straight into her eyes.

“I want you to do something for me.”

“That’s  funny.  I want you to do something for me.”

Lucy went down on him, hiking an avocado chair to entrap him, a tang of vodka on her tongue, and undid his pants, his sweaty boner poking half out of his JCPennys.  Dennis leaned his ass back on the shiny conference table, aware of the possibility of shit-smear, and accepted her.

In a second she had pulled the sailor suit over her head and rubbed up on him, kneading his dick with her pillowy knockers while she gave his highness her first sucking kisses.  Dennis groaned.  At this point he had never been titty-fucked before.  It was the end of his virginity in a lot of ways.

“Let’s play a game,” he said,  “I’m going to fuck you until you open that safe.”

Chapter 2        Truth is better than Fiction

At this point Dennis had never been in a hot-tub with a bunch of other people before.  Pearson’s house was high on the rolling hills that lined the valley.  Dennis guided his Olds Cutlass up a curved, forested Los Altos way until he located the driveway and parked on the street.  The place was really big, a mansion really, with trees all around it, which was rare at that point. 

The sounds of the party Lucy had summoned him to filtered down from above as Dennis  ascended a stairstepped sidewalk that snaked upward around the trunks of a redwood grove.  He knocked tentatively at a door that was ten feet high and five-foot wide.

The man who pulled open the door was Jim Toomey, the HR director, but Dennis almost didn’t recognize him.  He was short and slim, with a chest full of lank black hair speckled with moisture.  He was nearly naked, wearing nothing but a small towel wrapped around his upper thighs.  He seemed puzzled by Dennis too.  Finally his expression cleared. 

“Just surprised to see you here.  Hi, Dennis.  Something happen at the office?”

“Lucy around?  It was Lucy Snyder gave me the invite.”

“Everyone’s in the tub,”  Toomey said, still reluctant, gesturing Dennis inside.  “Out on the deck.  Clothing optional.”  Dennis wandered inside, to where a band was tuning up.  “Toad Sonar,” the sign on the bass drum read.  An obscure reference to the sensor arrays that the Navy’s submarine chasers trolled behind them.  Very cute, Dennis had to admit, considering that Pearson did look a lot a toad. 

The Vice President was a broad-shouldered forty-five year old with acne eaten cheeks and jagged teeth.  He wore a long sleeved white shirt open over his chest and some really uncomfortable looking leather pants.  He was holding forth for a scattering of guests, some of the scientists that Dennis knew by sight.  For some reason a lot of the scientists liked to do their copying themselves, while the engineers all sent down their secretaries.  Horst Salzwedel was one of the closest to Pearson, his faced stretched, as always with the witless grin of an idiot savant.  Dennis liked Horst.  He pulled a beer from a nearby cooler and tried to mingle. 

“Hey, Horst, Vie Gehts?” 

“We all are preparing for the telemetry from the Mars Voyager tomorrow,” Salzwedel answered.  “Professor Pearson has arranged for the images from the space probe to be re-transmitted on the internet.”

“Right.  Yeah.  I’ll be there.  I’m going.  The internet.  That’s like ‘darpanet,’ isn’t it?”

Bob Pearson looked over at Dennis with brief interest.  “That’s right, that’s right.  Our contract monitor over at the ARC is a good friend of mine.  As soon as the images come in to the JPL labs in Pasadena they’ll be encoded real-time and broadcast on the DARPAnet.  Up here at Ames we hook up a leased-line and download live video.  It’s going to be a landmark event!”

“Ja..ah, if it works,”  Horst Salzwedel grinned.  Pearson looked at him questioningly for a moment and then laughed.

“Thanks a lot for the vote of confidence, Horst.   I know.  That’s why we keep you around.  Say, I don’t think I know you,”  he said to Dennis, extending his hand,  “Do you work at PCI?  Wait a minute.  The guy from the mailroom.  Come on in, dude.  Grab yourself a drink or something.”  At this point Dennis had never been called ‘dude’ before, either.

“Thanks, Bob,”  he said, wondering suddenly whether Pearson had read “Evasive Tactics in the North Atlantic” or how he might feel if he knew that just a couple hours before the ‘dude’ had done his secretary on top of a stack of classified documents.  “Got one already.  I’m set.”

“Horst’s my private cynic,”  Pearson went on.  “Right, Horst?   Tell us about the space station.”

“Ja-ah, Herr Professor Pearson.  You understand it is a matter of attitude control, nie?  I have been executing some angle-of-moment simulations on the VAX.  Would you believe that in 331 of 383 cases, stresses were encountered that exceeded the structural integrity constraints of the components?”

“Interesting,” Dennis mused.  “Gives a lot different meaning to ‘man in space.’  That’s based on using old 20^th century materials, I assume.  How about the composites?  How about those crystal monofilaments we’re going to grow in space?”

Pearson guffawed again.  “That’s right.  That’s a good one.  Twentieth century.  How about that, Horst?”

The tub was enormous, built into a wide redwood deck cantilevered over a great view of the bay.  There were already about ten and a half bodies in the hot tub, to subtract by the number of visible limbs.

“Welcome!”  shouted a slim, gray-haired man who perched on his elbows on the redwood decking, water draining down from his exposed cock and balls.  “Strip down and join us.  Have you got a drink, yet?”  It was Jim Toomey, the new director of Personnel.  Dennis waggled his beer.

“Fine, thanks.  I’m okay.  Hi, Lucy.”

“Oh come on, just do it, Dennis,”  Lucy said softly, red lips smirking, her droopy mums floating visibly just beneath the frothy blue-green water.   He grinned back.  How could anyone mistake the look they shared?    He only recognized a couple of the other people, uh-oh, Lucy’s best friend, Joan Cummins, Margie Popowicz, and the ubiquitous Horst Salzwedel.  Everyone was watching him, waiting for him to strip down.

Dennis set his beer to the side and pulled up his striped shirt.  He was in good shape at this point, doing a lot of running, but he still had this stomach from all the booze.  He uncinched his buttons and peeled out of his Levi 501s.  Joan Cummins inspected his nakedness malevolently.  No doubt Lucy had already been talking.  Salzwedel’s face, as always, was stretched in a grin, his eyes crinkled, both wise and idiotic.

“We’re approaching critical mass!”  Toomey joked, and everyone laughed.  Was this hostmaster thing a fringe benefit for him or part of his job description?  Dennis slid into the water beside Margie Popowicz.  Margie’s tanned tits rode pertly above the steam, dribbled with perspiration.  Beneath the surface, her thigh shifted languidly against him.

Everyone was talking about smoking again.  Palo Alto had just made smoking in the workplace illegal, an enlightened move, no doubt, but one that was personally painful for a lot of people.    “It’s flat out unconstitutional,” one of the senior consultants opined angrily.  “Social engineering.”

“I hear you, buddy,”  Dennis said, without much sympathy.  “I’d fight it, myself.   Unfortunately, I just quit.”

“Well, I didn’t,”  Lucy said.  “The bastards.  Where do they get off telling me what to do with my body?  Anybody got a cig?”  She had pinned her hair up in some kind of European, Grace Kelly doo, high above the steam.

Not that either of them had that much respect for legal authority.   Dennis smiled across the tub at Lucy, remembering her standing only a few hours before, in the boardroom behind Pearson’s office, de-pansed with a Winston ultralong stuck between her knuckles.  He didn’t know about the law, but pretty much it was a given that you weren’t supposed to screw in the workplace either.  It made Dennis want to do it again, and with the thought he felt his submerged pecker begin to twitch hard.

“When is Bob going to play?”  Joan Cummins asked Lucy.

“How the fuck would I know?  Go ask him.  If he’s wearing his leather pants it means he’s ready to rock and roll.  That’s if he can get his fat ass into them any more.”

“Ha-ha,”  Horst Salzwedel laughed, “Have another drink, Lucy.”

“What are you waiting for?  Another brilliant idea?”  Lucy said scathingly.  “Have one yourself.”

“Ha-ha-ha,” the German engineer laughed, his expression hurt, “You know I don’t drink, Lucy.  Otherwise I would.”

“Jesus!  Has everybody turned into a god-damned Austrian monk around here?  No drinking, no smoking.  What do you people do for fun?”

“What bothers me about it,”  Dennis said,  “is all these high priced people standing outside the front door, puffing their lives away.  It looks like shit, and it’s like this big waste of everybody’s time.”

“See, that’s exactly it!”  Jim Toomey said, hunching forward.

“I’ve got an idea,” Lucy slurred.  “I’m going to reach under and touch someone else somewhere, then that person does the same thing to another one, and the next person does it.  It’ll be like water twister.  Horst, what do you think?”

“Ja-ja. Ja-ja.”  Lucy reached unerringly to capture Dennis’s left foot, squeezing his softened instep passionately.  Dennis gave his eyes to Lucy, his smile to everyone else.  It was nice to be wanted.  He hadn’t thought about Leanne all evening.

“It’s me,” he announced, and leaned forward, his head and hands beneath the bubbles, selecting…Joan Cummins.  Her calf was long and narrow, and he let his finger trail down her shinbone, observing her flinch.  But she took no time in making her own contact.  In a few seconds, they were all giggling.  Dennis felt his thighs drawn apart by a hand from the left.  Margie’s?

It was actually kind of a special event.  As each person’s hands, feet and thighs were engaged, ways were found to engage other body parts, at least including Dennis’s semi-erect prick.  For a moment there was a real comraderie—the group had, if not an aura of its own, something else, both carnal and brotherly.

“See, that’s exactly it!”   Jim Toomey exclaimed.  “Wow!”  At this point, Dennis had at least heard of Esalen.  They were putting rattlesnakes in their mailboxes down there.

Dennis rolled over and gave Margie Popovicz a good kiss, and around the tub the others also touched mouths, a couple of the women giving twice.  But really, at that point it was all Lucy.  He looked across the mass of interlocked shoulders that had emerged from the scrum to her.  And that was even before the point at which all the other shit went down.

“Want to do a line?”  Jim Toomey asked him confidentially a little later.  Dennis looked at him incredulously.  Was everybody as corrupt as he was?  “Sure thing,” he said.  The man was as dainty nude as he was in his three-piece suit on the second floor.  He unfolded a glossy picture and coaxed a small mountain of powder onto a nearby mirror, mincing it vigorously with a razorblade.

“Take this hundred,”  Toomey ordered.  “Never been used.”  But Dennis immediately smelled the medicinal scent of cocaine on the rolled-up bill.  He leaned forward, hoping he wasn’t fucking up by never having done it before, and followed Jim’s edging blade down the length of the mirror.  Pow!

A few seconds later he was retching out his lunch.  “Excuse me,” he begged from his knees where he had taken a starboard spin to the floor.  “It’s OK,”  Toomey’s voice said,  “Happens to the best of us.”  Dennis nodded weakly.  At this point, he’d only had the four beers.

He  grabbed  a towel from the hot tub  and cleaned up the mess, now getting into the crystalline shape of it.  A little bit like mescaline, but more organic.  Dennis sniffed as the cool goop of the snort began to trickle its way into his throat.

There was the massive sound of an electric guitar riff.  “Just in time,”  Toomey said.

Continuous exposure had led Dennis to really detest the Rolling Stones, and he groaned as Pearson’s band cranked up into “Satisfaction.”  “And I try, and I try, and I try, and I try…”  the vice-president’s throaty voice strived for the tune.  Actually, though, the guy could sing okay.  His pizzaface cheeks shook as his head nailed the downbeat, and he kicked hard into “Git no.”

“Right Arm!” Dennis cheered as the song ended, with only a little bit of sarcasm.  The guy was good.  In the corner of a huge white-carpeted livingroom, in the space made by pushed away furniture, Pearson did an aw-shucks.  “Know any Creedence?”  Dennis called.  At this point Creedence Clearwater Revival was no more than eight or nine years out of date.

“Born on a Bayou.”  He should have figured.  The guy did a fair John Fogerty, dispronouncing well.   Dennis hadn’t been born on a bayou, Montana, instead, but that should have been sticks enough for you.  Well, whatever direction you went, it was hard to get the accent right.

“Bravo!”  Feeling good, Pearson singled him out with a forefinger.  “Thanks, dude.”

Dennis smiled a phony smile in return and left him on his own, fading into the audience to grab another beer, leering at the back side of the group, still a few bare-assed, Margie P’s boxy derriere  among them.  The magic powder had really done it to him.  Fortunately he had put his clothes back on--almost without thinking his tool was swollen up hard, fat and flat between his hairy stomach and the button-fly of his pants.  A long carpeted hallway led away from Pearson’s kitchen and Dennis went snooping, pretending he was looking for the john.   Like it would have to be a bank shot off the ceiling.

He came back in a moment, locating a towel-wrapped Lucy and simultaneously goosing her with a cold-necked bottle and his stiffened dick.    Beneath his hands her small shoulders were tight as they watched Pearson and his band grind through another sixties standard.  At least Pearson seemed immune to the malign influences of the next decade—the hated Doobie Brothers, Bad Company, Daryl Hall and John Oates.  At this point Dennis had begun to really dig the Rolling Stones again.

“I hate this shit,”  Lucy mouthed.  Dennis nodded.  “I know.”  He jerked his thumb meaningfully over his shoulder.  He had found Pearson’s office, a private bathroom and  another large room beyond, with Jesus, a heated waterbed.  All perfectly deserted as everyone listened to the boss perform.  Tugging the hem of her white towel, Dennis drew Lucy away into the private area.   So at this point I guess you could say what happened next was all his fault.

The towel fell away from her as she released her hands, and she stood, a little bit squinty, a little flatfooted, and swam up and passionately tongue-fucked his mouth.  It was the kind of hardball foreplay that Dennis had always found irresistible.  Even the filthy tang of tobacco on the older woman’s demanding mouth was exciting.

“I want to do it here, on his fucking desk.  Now.”  She told him with that same piquant slurred intensity, moving him back.  Dennis glanced a listen over his shoulder at the door.  It was “Gimme Shelter”, at least a four minute jam.  Pearson’s desk was made of some rare polished red wood.  At this point in 1980, it was weird, even though computers hadn’t even been invented yet, how the leatherbound blotter pad and onyx and brass pen set that framed the desktop looked archaic.  On the edge of the desk sat a stack of papers and magazines.

“Would you mind filing these for me, honey?”   Lucy mimicked, pushing the jumbled pile carelessly over the precipice.  “Why, no, Bob.  Why should I mind making a stark bloody fool of myself?”  She advanced on Dennis, undoing his pants and pulling them half down, taking steerage of him in the same predatory way.  She shoved him back on the desk with surprising strength, clambering to the top of the lacquered surface, her bent knees pointed into his shortribs, her shaggy little cunt just right there.   Dennis groaned and plugged her.

Not that, at this point, either of them was winning any style points.  Stimulated by the danger in spite of himself, Dennis’s upright boner stabbed wildly into Lucy’s churning groove.  It’s just a shot away, kiss away.  Yeah.  Was that Mick Jagger’s entendre or Bob Pearson’s solipsism?   At the last bonk of the electric guitar, Dennis found himself jerking guiltily out of her, as though to somehow keep their union provisional, but Lucy surged above him like a man,  her damp blond hair whipping his face, confidently re-cunting him, demanding his continued allegiance.

“Ooh, Shelter,” she cooed above him.

It had been the same way earlier, at the office, Dennis somehow enraged with lust and distrust that made him a man with no country, doomed to fly the naked staff for all time.  With Leanne it was the exact opposite, the Coer’d’Alene, heart of somethingorother.  Though at this point, it was all likely to have been the effect of the drugs, whether the cocaine or the beer or the number he had smoked on the way up.  At this point, although Dennis regularly got zonked, the crows had not yet come home to roost on his brain or his soul.

Far too heavy.  Dennis looked deep into Lucy’s eyes at this point and knew she was insane, knew decisively that he should not have done this.

“Fuck, Lucy!” Pearson’s big shouldered figure suddenly appeared in the posing mirror, looking irritated and somehow a little hurt too.  “Dude?”  His back pinned against the sticky surface of the desk, Dennis tried to kick upright, but Lucy held him down.

“Hey, Ma, I’m already doing sixty!”  Lucy panted, the punchline to the first dirty joke Dennis had ever heard.  Was this even realistic, he wondered.  Because it was definitely actually happening.  Dennis heard himself unexpectedly giggle.

“Jesus FUCK!”  Pearson’s temper flared.  “Get the hell out of my office, you sarcastic bitch!  Get off my desk!”  Instead of complying, Lucy bore down and began to texturize Dennis with long, fluid strokes, her closeup face a vengeful sneer. 

Which might have seemed a completely shriveling experience, except Dennis’s big rod just wouldn’t lie down.  He finally came hard, after a long time, and with painful electricity, another all-star screw.   And with the Vice-President in attendance.

“Get the FUCK out of here!”  Pearson repeated, grabbing Lucy by the hips and consummating a bizarre ménage-a-trois by shaking the last globs of cum deep out of Dennis’s tubes.

“Ooooh.  Ooooh,”  Lucy breathed as the executive touch brought her to a climax too.  Dennis was inches from her face and he knew the truth was being told.  In the crisscrossed spotlights of the office ceiling her skin was flushed bright with blood.  Against his will, Dennis felt himself curl forward to take her cheek to cheek with him, the woman still puffing with exertion and exhilaration against his neck.  Pearson fizzled spastically above them.

So, you would have to say there was considerable passion between them.  Dennis easily unjointed from Lucy now and leaned back against the edge of the desk, still cocky and acting like it, facing Bob Pearson with his own version of an ironic smile.

“Enjoyed your music, man.  Going to do more?”

Chapter 3        No Insurance

The two of them walked out of the room noble as you please, leaving Pearson wondering whether he should take the piss he went in for.  “Are we in deep shit, or what?”  Lucy giggled, tugging Dennis though the doors to the deck, as naked as a bean in the crisp Los Altos night air.  Dennis gauged the danger seriously.   “I believe that to be a true statement,”  he said.  “Hopefully, he’ll get over it.”

Inside the glass-lined interior, Bob Pearson had returned to the party, limping uncertainly.  The Vice President’s underslung jaw quivered as he swiveled from side to side, searching for them.  The dude from the mailroom.  It wouldn’t take long to straighten that out.

“Hopefully not,”  Lucy slurred angrily.  “Think I appreciated his ‘work-out sessions’ with that little temp slut from A&M?”  Dennis was sure that Lucy’s jealousy was justified but it didn’t do a lot for his situation, not to mention the perspective it put on Leanne’s new career path.  Very ambitious of her, Dennis had to admit.  He was dead meat.  Behind the glass, Bob Pearson picked up his electric guitar, struck an angry barred G, and slammed the instrument down.  Around him his audience sought its own world.

“Ready for another toot?”  Jim Toomey asked brightly, pushing his way outside and catching sight of Dennis.  This time the powder was a lot easier to take.  He straightened up and tipped the rolled bill at Lucy.  “I’d rather not,”  she snarled dismissively.  A few weeks later she would be singing a different tune, but at this point they hadn’t gotten into that.

“Sorry we didn’t have a chance to chat, earlier,”  Toomey said, shaking Dennis’s hand and eyeing his still turgid prick.  “Don’t worry.  Happens to the best of us.”  Against his will, Dennis found himself looking back—the HR Director’s penis hung from a dark pelt of curly hair, not too fat and a little too long, nicely nipped.

“Pretty young to be a VP aren’t you?”  he asked Toomey, curious.   It was the second time that evening he had ignored Lucy, and it had the predictable effect.

“Are you two fags finished,”  she sneered.  Toomey smiled, impishly, at this point acting like a real person, but already betrayed by the total lack of an aura.  He seemed amused, not letting go of Dennis’s eyes.  So that was the way it was.

“I had a really great mentor,” he said.

“Yeah, well, thanks for the blow.”  Dennis said, a moment latter realizing the double meaning and blushing red.

“Don’t mention it.”

Always in those days, Dennis’s muse lay in weed, only later the cocaine.  But even at this point it was amazing the way it magnified and shrank your personality.  I guess you could say that at this point Dennis was still just learning.

Dennis put his pants back on, carefully tucking himself back in.   In a flash the second snort of coke had left him limp but unretracted.  Or maybe it was Toomey.  “Let’s go back to the music.”  Dennis said, a reckless flush.  A little bit less confidently, he took Lucy’s hand and led her through the sliding door into Bob Pearson’s expansive livingroom.  Toomey followed them, close behind.

“I mean it, Bob.  I really like your stuff.  You should play some more.”  One thing Dennis had always been able to do was be nice to people and mean it—when he was in the mood, and at this point he seemed to be in the mood.  Everything had achieved a slow clarity, a danger sign he recognized from alcohol but ignored anyway.

Pearson looked at him, red, angry, bugged out eyes, and shook his arms at the guitar he had thrown to the floor.  “It’s all fucked up.”

“No, man, I bet it’s OK,” he joked.  “They’re like women, you know, they can take the abuse.”  Pearson made a grimace with his lower jaw and bent over to pick up his axe, feathering the steel strings carefully with his thumb.   The open chord rang flat, and every female in the room and a few of the males reached automatically for the key.

“Yeah,” he said, momentarily mollified.  Another beast tamed.  Dennis retreated, nodding to the hired bass player who stood awkwardly in the corner.   “Hit it.”

Pearson waved the hired hand off.  “You’ve got a lot of nerve,”  he began in Dylan’s broken, Liberty Bell voice,  “to say you are my friend.  When I was down, you just stood there grinning.”  It was not taking the best turn.

“Oh for the love of Mike, Lucy,” he hissed from the side of his mouth.  “I thought you told me you and your boss weren’t an item any more.”

“Do you take me for such a fool, to think that I would make contact?”  Pearson’s hammy treatment of the lyric seemed aimed right at him.   Dennis turned three-quarters and squeezed Lucy’s forearms hard, stifling her nervous guffaw.

“Hey, there, partner,”  Jim Toomey chided him, at this point not yet understanding, apparently still oblivious to the message behind the music, and Dennis ratcheted his grip a notch tighter on her chicken stick armbones, enough pressure to be certain it hurt.

 “With the one who tries to hide what he don't know to begin with.”

Positively 4^th Street” was like the raging deposed emperor of angry songs, Dennis thought wildly.  Pearson must be royally pissed at Lucy.  “Well, we are still married,” Lucy finally admitted.  Jesus.  At this point Toomey had begun looking at Dennis strangely.  “Gosh, I’m a little surprised to hear that, Lucy.  I wish you could have found a more convenient time to tell me,”  he replied, rattled by the revelation but still not comprehending it well from within the cocaine.

“I knew Bob’d catch us as soon as we tried to screw,”  Lucy bragged with alcoholic dangerousness.  “I couldn’t of planned it better if I tried.  You were just too good to resist, Dennis.  The prick’s been dead for me for years, but he won’t fucking give me a divorce.  I guess he thinks I want to take him for all his money.  Which at this point, I do, motherfucker.”  She swam up in Dennis’s arms, attempting to repeat her earlier rape of his consent.  Her hands were slight, frail, so thinly tissued and breakable, held down waist high in his tight grip.  He pulled them up and threw them back at her, leaving the woman grimacing at the painful release of pressure.

“You lying witch!” he flared angrily, finally catching on.  Let her and Pearson sort her own extramarital affairs out and leave him alone.  And yet even at this point, he was somehow all there and aware with it, that little bit of a shine of complicity.  Because, for some reason, at this point, Dennis always seemed to be busting up someone’s marriage or relationship, and sure you had to have some pity for the silly fool, but didn’t it always really go this way?  No one could pretend to be a virgin at this point.

“Wait.  You guys?”  Toomey asked, his smile turning tight.  “Oh, shut up!”  Dennis snapped, exasperated all the same by the sudden diminution of his options.   He shrugged back toward Pearson,  “Sorry, man,”  halfway meaning it, and then walked away from them  to join  the other partiers, who watched him nervously.

(This is the place where he talks to Pearson one-to-one in the crowd.)

Actually this scene should frontload the whole party.  There’s a drawing room scene where Pearson previews the high-tech internet link for the mars probe.  Keep it peppy, though.  Pearson waves him in and then turns back to his expounding.  Sees Lucy through the glass, chats with Horst, hears Pearson’s spiel, desires her, finally pulls away from Horst, who follows him to the hot tub.  Or else he chats with someone other than Horst, possibly even Pearson himself.  Or maybe it’s Toomey who meets him at the door.  I like that.  He needs a towel.

Pearson pulled Dennis back, trying to kill him, at this point his fighting even worse than his taste in music.  He grabbed Dennis by the shoulder, trying to spin him, looking confused when it didn’t work.   “Dude!”  he squawked again plaintively, “I mean, come on, you know.”

“Yeah, I know.  Like I said, ‘sorry.’  I’m innocent, though.  I didn’t understand the situation.  I’ll just go say goodbye to someone and then I’m leaving.”   Dennis turned away again.  A fair number of the party guests had drawn away from their boss’ public embarrassment and that was what he wanted to do too.   They gathered in the large dining area that cantilevered over the long ramp that led to Bob Pearson’s splendid home.  Dennis walked in.  A couple of otherwise sensible adults were playing “Pong” on a two thousand dollar color TV.  Not that, even at this point, it was that easy to buy a black and white, but “color” still carried the stigma of great value.  Why weren’t they watching Starsky and Hutch, or something.

“Vie Gehts, Horst.”  Dennis greeted the Austrian scientist as heartily as he could, considering his mood.    Remember, at this point, it wasn’t like TV wasn’t known to be vacuous.  It was acceptance of the nothingness that mattered.  Remember, at this point, Palo Alto still didn’t have cable, twenty years after it had become a staple throughout America.  For Dennis, growing up in Montana, cable had been a near continuous exposure to the schizy faces of normality that Salt Lake City media provided, Channels 5, 4, and 2.

“Ben is beating the pants off him,”  Salzwedel grinned, pointing to where Ben Freidlander wiggled his ‘paddle’ aggressively, an inch-long cursor of gleaming white phosphor, an oddly rectangular ball or puck.  Friedlander’s technique was to slam the paddle to the bottom of the screen repeatedly, bouncing quickly away like a small knobby bird attempting to fly.  Dennis noted the leather upholstered JoySticks that had been wired to the tiny system unit.  Nice.

“We all are preparing for the telemetry from the Mars Voyager tomorrow,” Salzwedel answered.  “Professor Pearson has arranged for the images from the space probe to be re-transmitted on the internet.”

“I heard about that.  Wendy got me tickets.”

“Can you imagine it?  Mars.”  Horst Salzwedel’s laugh was eerily infectious.

“No, man, I can’t,”  Dennis laughed back.  “Can you?”  But he could, somehow.  A whole new world.   “Will they have it pong-ified, so that you can knock the space probe and the planet back and forth?”

“No reason why they could not.”  The Austrian’s face wrinkled with the effort of assimilating the ridiculous suggestion, but he was up to the task.  “There is no reason why multiple different source video transfers could not be mosaic’d into a single view, vectored and rotated appropriately.  Ja.”

“Mosaic’d.  That’s a good word.  Like tesseract.”  Dennis proclaimed.  Though usually he would have been able to tell you the dammed difference.  The fucking drugs and the jolt to his reality was really telling on him at this point.

The floor length windows behind the German engineer were silvered by the twilight bay beyond, and in them Dennis couldn’t escape the reflected images of Toomey, Lucy, and Bob Pearson, who again slammed his electric guitar to the floor and stormed down on Lucy, who countered by giving him the finger.  “Screw you, Bob.  I know your game.  I know every fucking thing about you.  You can’t push me around any more,”  she proclaimed loudly.

“What’s a guy supposed to do?”  Dennis appealed to Horst Salzwedel, who grinned and blinked uncertainly.  “That woman’s going to get herself fired for sure.”

“She’s not the one who’s getting fired.” Toomey said, coming up behind Dennis and playing the toad card. 

Toomey tensed stupidly as Dennis turned, challenged by his size and unpredictability, and Dennis really wanted to just stick a fist in his gut and be done with it.  “You’re kidding,”  he said, incredulous.  The others shrank away from them, Joan Cummins gloating at him, Margie P. somehow wistful in avoidance of his angry embarrassed aura.  “This is Lucy’s gig, not mine.  I can’t believe that chickenshit prick would have the nerve to fire me just for balling his ex-old lady.  I’m out of here.”

“See, that’s exactly it,”  Toomey agreed.  “You are out of here.   I’m firing your ass for having the bad judgment to make my boss unhappy in my presence.  Go home and sleep it off, big fella.”  Which at that point had to be a little bit worse than being called ‘dude’.

“I’ll just get my coat.”  Dennis corrected his earlier mistake and pounded his fist into Toomey’s queer liver after all.  The little man cringed over satisfactorily and Dennis pushed by and went back outside.  The sweatshirt was where he had hung it near the bar, and on the bar was Toomey’s mirror with its razorblade and folded packet.   What was there to lose?  At this point, having just assaulted Paradigm Control’s new Director of Personnel, it seemed like the answer was not much.  Fuck it.  He scooped up the dope and looked back just one more time to where Lucy peered after him through the sliding glass, Pearson behind her, as hapless as ever, Toomey still not yet recovered.  Dennis kept going, down the side stairs of the deck, kicking out each of the ornamental lights that cornered his path down through the ivy and into the metaphoric dusk.

Chapter 4        Heavy Lifting

It was still a little before eight in the evening and even this early Dennis could see a certain sorry resemblance between himself and the fifteen year old Vista Cruiser he had parked the wrong direction on Terra Linda Way.   The broken passenger door groaned on its hinge as he got in, the big station wagon as battered as a beaten horse, dented on every panel, the hood painted primer white.  He had done the car up to make Leanne laugh, when he’d been trying to show her how hip he could be, since she had driven ambulance, lettering the front in backwards-writing the words ECNARUSNI ON.    Whether it had been viewed as confession or commitment, the proclamation had led to a different sort of memorable evening.

Dennis slipped into the back.  The back seat was folded down, a high flat platform with a thin pad.  He sat upright and cross-legged in meditation beneath the station wagon’s stately excursion window, a six-inch raised section of roof.  Ec Na Rus Ni Ooon.  It was sort of like a mantra.  Visualize revenge.

It had to bother a guy that Leanne and Lucy were so much the same, like he could be Superman, star-crossed with women from Krypton whose names began with L.  Both had the same brass blonde hair, Lucy’s styled and sexy, Leanne’s straight to her shoulders, bangs curling-ironed up away from her eyes.  And they were the same body type too, except that Lucy was big and meaty, nearly five ten, while Leanne was wiry, short and petite.

Just to stay in character, and without uncrossing his legs, even though he had to admit that he was pretty jittery from the shock of getting canned, Dennis leaned forward and flipped down the Vista Cruiser’s backseat ashtray, lighting one of the pre-rolled jays he kept there.  As if by paranoid coincidence the streetlights blinked on, through the cracks and divots in his windshield each a tiny holographic fragmentary image of the Man of Steel reaching to the sky.  Dennis let the touch of the pot waft his mind into pleasant thoughts of unscrewing the lug nuts off Toomey’s tires.   Toomey’s nuts in a box.  Even in those ruthless days of the early eighties it was a bit rare for most people to think about murder as a viable alternative, but Dennis’s temper always took him there first.

At this point one thing Dennis had learned was that even when things were over you could always work them for another screw or two, although for Lucy he was pretty sure he’d rather pass the ass, thanks and see you later.  Pearson, probably an electric guitar in the hot tub when no one else was around, he wouldn’t jangle too long before the circuits blew.

The big station wagon had belonged to Dennis’s old man, one of the many dubious gifts his mother’s second husband had bestowed, and one of the few Dennis actually appreciated.  The Vista Cruiser was as broad and long as a bus, and it cornered like an aircraft carrier.  No doubt Alistair’s altruism had come from his sensitivity to gas mileage, but even martyred by the Energy Crisis, and despite the fact that the son of a bitch broke down nearly every week, Dennis still drove the car.   He nosed the station wagon down through winding and Los Altos streets to the 280 freeway, gunning the mass of the big guzzler centrifugally up the circular on-ramp.

It was a long ten miles, a gallon of gas and a quart of 10-40, to where San Jose’s northern protuberences stuck up under Cupertino’s country dress, the apartment district where he had lived since getting the temp job at PCI.  But the goddammed piece of shit couldn’t even drag its stupid ass that far.  In the darkness of the curve near Foothill College the Vista Cruiser lurched suddenly down four inches and a lane to the left as Dennis’ front tire shredded.  He dragged the vehicle to a bumpy stop on the center divide and turned off its laboring motor.

Even though it was summer it was getting chilly in the bottom of the canyon at night.  Dennis had to hoof it from near the Magdelena exit to a phone booth by a Foster’s Freeze drive-in on the outskirts of downtown Los Altos.  This was at the point where phone booths were still a fairly familiar fixture of everyone’s existence.   He sorted his change for dimes in the light of the upright glass and metal chamber, still trying to think of someone else.  But it was going to have to be Leanne.   Leanne answered after the second ring, her voice worried and impolite.  “I told you over and over, quit calling me, Rod.  If I hear that siren outside one more time, I’m filing a complaint.”

“Hey, Leigh.”

“Dennis?  Oh God.  Now you.  Listen, I don’t want you calling me either.  Let’s just leave it where we left it this afternoon.  Friends and all, but don’t call me.  And don’t call me Leigh any more, all right?  What’s the matter?  You sound weird.”

“I don’t know whether I’m weird or not.  I don’t know who I am.  I’m not Rod.  Is that guy still bothering you?”

“No.  I don’t want to talk about it.  Yeah.”  Dennis could picture her in the bedroom of her apartment, wearing only a S.F. Giants baseball shirt, talking to him on her blood red nightstand phone.

“It sounds like you could really use a friend.  Leigh, you gotta help me.  I need a friend too.  I broke down on 280.  You’re the only person I know who can change a tire.” 

“Shit, Dennis.  I’m not even dressed.  Call triple A.”  He could feel Leanne start to hang up and embarrassed himself by squeaking.  “Wait.”  He upped the ante.  “I scored a little coke for you.”

“Shit,”  Leanne said gracelessly.  “Whatever.   The Foster’s Freeze?  I’ll be there in ten minutes.”

Leanne’s Ford Bronco came up San Antonio a little later and paused without opening.   Dennis unlatched the door with cold-stiff fingers and climbed inside, sinking back in a sheepskin seat cover.  After standing in the night air the rush of warmth from Leanne’s roaring dashboard heater felt good.

“It’s about a quarter mile up 280 on the other side.  I was just heading home.”

“Working late, Dennis?”  Leanne asked him archly.  “That’s a little out of character.”

“No, I was at a party.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, looking over at him meaningfully as she drove,  “I saw you and the dragon lady messing around upstairs after quitting time.  Did she take you to Pearson’s big bash from there?”

“What were you doing up there?”  Dennis sucked in air.

“The party?  Nah, I didn’t go.  Bob’s so nervous…  Oh, you mean the office.  I went in there to pick up my gym bag.  As of today, I’m Bob Pearson’s Personal Trainer.  Don’t worry, I didn’t see nothing.”  The only thing not alarming about those seven sentences was that at least Leanne hadn’t lost her bag.

“I guess maybe you just have a thing for sailor suits—is that it?”  Leanne pressed.

He let out the breath.  “I guess.  Something like that.  Something.  Thank you for helping me with my flat tire.”

“Guess I’m not really in any position to complain, am I?”  she apologized, a little insincerely, Dennis thought.  At this point he still had not produced the promised cocaine and if she didn’t shut up pretty soon he wouldn’t be likely to. 

“You just surprised me, that’s all.  What was it you didn’t see?”

“I didn’t see the end of what appeared to be an award-winning blowjob,”  Leanne said.   “Frankly, I could do better, though…” 

“I’m not really in the mood.”  At this point, he was more into roadside assistance than oral sex.

“Oh, like I’ll believe that.”  Right, like you will.   Dennis felt a throb of nausea as he suddenly realized how disinterested he really was with the whole thing.

“There’s my car.”

She spun the steering and levered the gearshift into reverse, backing down into the drainage between the two halves of the freeway and coming up the other side, emergency flashers plinking.  Dennis patted at his pockets.  Where had he put those keys?

“You got a jack?  Oh, never mind.  I can see you aren’t going to be any use to me.”  Leanne slid out of the Bronco, leaving Dennis to climb slowly from the uphill side.

She was already on her knees ahead of him, looking like the emergency medical technician she was at heart, a tomboy angel, shining a super-phallic flashlight at his front tire.  They packed about six or eight batteries in the long anodized aluminum case.  The tire was wasted, torn and tortured steel cords, the smell of melted rubber.

“That’s what I said,” he said.  “I might have one.  I never looked.”  He took her around to the tailgate, where he was pretty sure he had a spare.  Sure.  There was a thing that you turned, and underneath a rubber-matted panel was a tire, a scissors jack, and a four-ended lugwrench.

“Flat,”  Leanne pronounced, shining the flashlight again and rocking the tire in its recess.  In her own light she wore worn jeans and a sleeveless white shirt that showed off her arms, the slim muscles of a boy.  She jerked the thing up triumphantly with both hands and swiveled to press it at Dennis.  “Shit, look at this.  The belts are worn half through the steel.”

“It’s a spare,”  Dennis said defensively.  The tire was filthy and it had left its tread across her heaved-up chest.  “I guess we should put it on.”

“Are you a moron?  We have to take it to a gas station and get it filled first.”

“What, get gas?”  Dennis was embarrassed.  “Maybe we should take a moment in the Vista Cruiser before we proceed,” he said, changing the subject.  “I owe you a thing.”  He helped Leanne into his floating Xanadu--the folded down back seat lined with sleeping silks and furs, beneath the stately excursion dome.

“Take it a little slow at first,”  he warned her, handing her the rolled Ben Franklin.  She accepted it with short, pearly blue painted nails.  “Shit, I’ve snorted tons of shit.  Bob’s?” 

Dennis thought about it.  He had been thinking the cocaine had been Toomey’s but from the amount it made sense.  “Yeah, I guess.”

“Bob’s so generous,”  Leanne said matter-of-factly.  She inhaled a long stream of powder and propped the back of her thumb against her nose to hold it in.  “I thought you didn’t like this shit.”

“I’m getting to like it a little.”  Even in those days true shit was known to come out of the mouths of babes.  Dennis nudged his line straight with the packet, went up halfway with one nostril and halfway down from the top with the other.  Zow.

“So.  You must have moved pretty quick after we came back into the building.  I think you and Lucy Snyder just about beat me upstairs.”

“That’s me, Johnny Fuckerfaster…”  Dennis said wryly, shaking his head at the memory.  He turned the subject back as fast as he could.  “What’s up with you and Rod?  Are you still with him or not?”  Leanne’s former boyfriend was an over-muscled jerk who wore an ambulance company coverall like a special forces uniform.   He had shadowed her to PCI, parking his emergency vehicle conspicuously in front of the corporate lobby and giving everyone a moment of false hope that Pearson or Toomey might have had the mortal episode that statistically two men per year per company might reasonably be expected to achieve.

“Fuck Rod,”  Leanne pronounced.  She slumped sullenly back in the mess of unzipped sleeping bags that lined the body of the Vista Cruiser.   Dennis could see that reminding her of her former partner had set her into a dangerous and impulsive state, his imagined extra screw almost within reach.  But all the kick in the balls apathy he had felt before returned.  “I’m just worn out.”   Why would she care if some fat thirty year old could still eat a car?

“I’ve been thinking about our motel some more,”  he informed Leanne, trying hard to communicate despite the fatigue of the drugs.  “How’s this fit?   Stucco, single story, with blue trim, one of those courtyard operations.  We get use of the satellite TV and the pool free because we own the place.  We could set up our own gym too.”

For Leanne, he thought, it really was that motel in the East slope Sierra town, no matter how worldly she pretended to be.  With Wendy Guerin it was the Dharma Bum routine.  With Lucy, on the other hand, it was a cipher, a secret to be extracted, by force, if Dennis wanted.  What were his own desires?  Too secret to reveal.

“I can benchpress my own weight now,”  Leanne bragged suddenly in response to the suggestion.  “A hundred twenty-five.  How much are you, Den?”

”Heavy, man.”  Dennis was unimpressed.  There would always be some refrigerator you needed to get your boyfriend to lift.  Even though he had learned that Leanne studied karate, even with her profoundly muscular bottom and crescent dimples in her shoulders that could pull off a bottlecap, he had never felt that same sense of being overwhelmed.  How much could Lucy weigh, he thought uneasily, thinking back to the power of her wide hips as she pinned him to Pearson’s desk.

“Maybe you could be happy in a little town life like that,”  Leanne said.  “Not me.”

“That’s right, I forgot for a second.  Regular life isn’t good enough for you all of a sudden.  You’re a career girl.  Going places in the corporation.”

“You’re so mean.  Why can’t you just be happy for me?  Working for Bob is my big chance.”

“Keeping the boss in fighting trim?  That doesn’t sound like a very fulfilling career.”  Maybe if Pearson hadn’t just fired him Dennis would have felt different about it.

“I don’t know what you have against him.  Bob’s really a nice guy.”

“Sure he is.”  Leanne’s pretty pug-nosed face was suddenly swept by the moving headlights of a vehicle heading southward on the Interstate.   Dennis had already told himself that there was no need for her to know, at least not at this point.   “Well, I got a couple VIP tickets to your boss’s Mars thing in the city Thursday.  Want to go?”

Maybe it did just come down to the city/country thing.  It had taken a couple of years, and even though at this point Dennis had gotten used to sleeping in the same bed with the million or so people that shared his life on a daily basis, he somehow didn’t end up sleeping with any of them for more than a couple of hours.

“Well, no.  That’s what I told Bob too.  Why would I?  That stuff is boring.  My old man worked on the space program at Lockheed his whole life.  I know all about it.”

“I thought just because I was asking, maybe.  I didn’t mean to get personal.  Does your dad still work there?”

Leanne looked sad, snuffling a little, her sinuses numb from powder.  “Dad…passed away last November, Thanksgiving.  The house burned down and he…died.”  At this point the term “passed away” was just making a comeback.  It sounded weird to hear Leanne feel for and discard the phrase.

At points like these you suddenly realize on a couple of levels again how little you know about a person no matter how much you actually do know.  During all his time in the Silicon Valley Dennis had fallen into this thing again and again, a state change in his understanding of a woman in which normalcy always took a seismic jolt.  “Jesus, Leanne, I didn’t know.”

“No, it’s okay.” 

Was it Dennis’s honest face or what?   “You loved your Dad, I bet.”  At this point Dennis figured it was going to be a sympathy screw.  He touched Leanne’s arm, warm in the dark of the car.

“Shit, yeah, I guess so.  Except for the abuse.  You know how it is.”  Actually, Dennis did.  He pulled his hand back, the old tentative thing, then .  Whether you had suppressed those tender memories or come up with more, the territory was a lot the same.

The warbling whoop of an emergency siren interrupted the past, whatever the fuck it was.  Ruby light blared and blinked away through the steamy windows.  Dennis scrambled to collect the cocaine and barely succeeded before the circle of a flashlight pierced the tailgate window of the station wagon, outlining them both.  “Shit,”  Leanne muttered, “It’s Rod.”

Dennis had never gone to Vietnam.   His lottery number had tested negative and the draft board had called his conscientious objector bluff by offering to let him slide from active status to 4F in a brief three week exposure.  Dennis had been sure that it had been a ruse to break his spirit.   A press gang would bag him in that window of vulnerability, bop him on the head, throw him in a C-140 headed to Da Nang.  At this point Dennis had a pretty good feeling that the powers that be didn’t always have his best interests in mind.

It was the first time he had ever met Rod, although Leanne never stopped talking about him.  About his time in Vietnam, about his bad temper, about how he kept shadowing her, following her around.  That and a whole mess of other things were what had given Dennis a big hard on with regard to Rod.

Dennis went out first, enduring the flashlight beam that Rod pinned him with.  He was even larger than Dennis, probably 230 or 40, well over six feet tall, anonymous and angry in the glare of the light.  Leanne came out behind, waiting impatiently while hostilities between the two males were exchanged and a demilitarized zone established.  “Did you follow me fucking here?” she asked Rod furiously.

“What, were you fucking here?”  he snarled back,  flicking the flashlight Dennis’s way again.  “Ahh, come off it.  You know I like to cruise the freeways.  I recognize your truck.”  He shined the beam across the primer painted front of the Vista Cruiser, lips moving as he read the words, ‘ECNARUSNI ON’.  “Heh,”  he said finally, “Very funny.  Who’s this joker?”

“I…”  Dennis began.

“Roadside assistance,”  Leanne said quickly.  “A 10-42.  I was just on my way home from work.  He’s got a shredded tire.”

“Working late?  That’s a little out of character.”   Rod brushed by him and squatted to inspect the remains of the radial, his big knees cracking.  Dennis noticed a similar smell between this man and Leanne, partly medicinal, part musk.

“How would you know how late I work?”  Leanne flared again.  “I told you not to follow me around, Rod.  You don’t have any right to judge how I act.”

“He…”  Dennis started to point out.  The guy had just told her he had been cruising the freeway.

“Who’s judging?”  Rod glared at Dennis to shut up.  “I just know how you act.  You think after riding the range together for two years and seven months I don’t know everything about you?

“You…”  Dennis finally said.  Both Leanne and her former boyfriend turned and looked at him expectantly.  “You must be Rod.”

“Who the fuck is this?”  The big medical technician towered over Dennis threateningly.  Dennis smiled at Rod, thinking hard what it would take to kick off his kneecap, wondering if violence would work against the Vietnam vet as well as it had against Pearson’s queer HR director an hour before and not caring that much even though the cat was twice as big.  At this point one of the things Dennis had to count on, whether it was an asset or a liability, was the way he over and over found himself jumping without a safety net and somehow surviving.  ECNARUSNI ON.  But maybe not this time.

“Name’s Dennis, Rod,”  Dennis said, sticking out his hand.  “I work with Leanne at PCI.  Lucky she came by after my tire blew.   I’d be screwed.”

“Yeah?  I bet you would.  What were you two up to in there?”  It was a good question.  You rarely fixed a flat tire on a vehicle from inside it.  Dennis smiled at him again, squeezing the big veteran’s hand sincerely.  At this point lying was still more like a native talent than a regular habit.

“Out of the wind.  Waiting for professional help, obviously.  What do you say?  Can you give us a ride to the nearest service station?  My spare’s gone flat.”

“Shit.  Call triple A.”

“Forget it.   We don’t need this.  I’ll drive you myself.”  Leanne broke in. 

“Shit,”  Rod repeated.  “Whatever.”  He picked up Dennis’ spare easily, opening the back gate of the ambulance and sliding it inside.  “You and me have to talk, Leanne.  Your mother called.”

“The hell we do.  You get up there,”  she told Dennis, pointing to the front seat.  She climbed into the side of the ambulance, sliding racked equipment away.

“It’s okay, Dennis.  Rod is cool.  He gets high.  He gets high a lot.”  Rod scowled.  “Jesus, Leanne.”

“No, I mean it.  You guys should like each other.  You’re both a lot alike.  Controlling fucks.”

“Oh, I doubt it,”  Dennis said, leaving it there.  A lot of times it didn’t pay to get into it with them.

“Shit.”  Rod said,  similarly disconnected.  “Might as well.”  He popped a small plastic case and pulled out a doobie.

At the Chevron station a minute later Rod started laughing.  “Hee…Hee…Hee.   Look at this tire.”

“The fucker’s completely bald!” Leanne chimed in derisively.  “He won’t get fifteen miles.”

“Well, crap.”  Dennis said.  “How am I going to get to San Fran tomorrow night?”

“You asking my advice?  Buy some fucking tires,”  Rod said, still laughing,  “Silly sucker.”

Somewhere along the line they agreed that everything was okay--Dennis could go on idealizing Rod’s girlfriend as long as it was recognized that Rod had been there first.  Inch by inch Dennis saw that Leanne could probably be right.  He and Rod were enough alike that they could get along.  “You remind me of a friend of mine,”  the veteran said magnanimously a while later after the lines had been drawn again, other lines inhaled.  He accepted Dennis’s protestations about Vietnam with indifference.   “So much good dope there, man.  Bags of pure heroin.  Bags of it!  You think this shit of yours is something.”    After they put on the spare, the ambulance followed the Vista Cruiser slowly back to Leanne’s apartment.  “Would you mind coming in with me?”  she asked.  “You see what I mean.”

Dennis got out and walked back to the idling emergency vehicle.  “Rod,”  he said.  “I’ve got her, now.  Give it up, she’s with me.”

“That’s okay, man, I’m sure you do.  I’ll just sit here.”  At this point the big red and white unit loomed unlit in the middle of Curtner street, blocking all traffic in either direction.  After a while Dennis shrugged, thinking instead what he could do to use the situation to his advantage.

“Listen,”  he said.  “Do you like that space stuff?  I already invited Leigh.  We’re going to her bosses’ big rocket to Mars event in San Francisco tomorrow night.   Want to come along?  Really, what I need is a ride.  I’m afraid the Vista Cruiser won’t make it this time.”  Although at this point he had to admit, he must also have been thinking about the disruption factor, starship troopers arriving at the Exploratorium in a real ambulance, sirens flashing.   Pearson was going to shit his pants.

“Cool,”  Rod said.  Believe it or not there was a certain point in that half century when it was not cool to say cool, and Rod had nailed it.  “Mars, huh?  That’s like that place where the guy in the funny helmet comes from, isn’t it?  In the Bugs Bunny cartoons?”

“Right.”  Dennis said.  “Okay.  That’s cool then.  Tomorrow, around five-thirty.  Do you think there will be any traffic?”

“He’s just sitting there,”  he reported to Leanne a few minutes later.  “So, we all set for Pearson’s thing tomorrow?”  It took a little talking.  Her new boss would be happy if she showed up.  Maybe her dad would have liked her to go.

“Oh, screw you,”  Leanne said mournfully, but the promise and application of a few more lines of white powder finally did the trick for him.

Chapter 5        The Mission to Mars

“I thought you said “San Mateo,”  Rod let go of it finally.  “Frisco, huh?  See I never been there before.  I never been off of the peninsula, except for Vietnam.  And that was different.  They didn’t make me drive myself there.”  Which at that point you had to agree was a valid exception.

“Want me to drive?”  Dennis offered.  He was used to driving a big wagon.

“Company wouldn’t like it.  No insurance.  It’s just that, Jesus, you could have told me.”  The traffic down Lombard was solid, the street a mess of confusing neon.  Rod flicked the siren of the ambulance to scatter a running group of pedestrians.

“Wait, there it is.  Turn here!”  Dennis and Leanne both shouted.  Rod was already well past the turnoff, but he flicked the lights and siren on again and swerved the ambulance into it anyway, easily missing the fenders of a couple of cars blindly following the connector to the Golden Gate bridge.

Ahead was a circular grove of eucalyptus, a large round building like a bullfighting stadium before them.   “Parking!”  Leanne and Dennis screamed simultaneously, and Rod cruised left, and left again, entering a circular parking lot choked with idling cars each aimed in a different direction, a jumble of bacilli on a petri dish illuminated by the ambulance’s flashing lights.

“Palace of Fine Arts/Exploratorium, this way,”  Dennis recited, reading the sign.  “Look for the theatre.”   Rod thumbed off the lights and pulled the emergency vehicle nose up to nudge the bumper of a maroon BMW.   A man in a dark suit and a woman in an elegant dress turned and looked uncertainly back at them as though wondering if they were being summoned.   “Sorry!”  Rod smiled, waving.  He, Dennis, and Leanne followed a larger group that was funneling toward the curved Palace building.

“Dennis?  Oh, my!  I didn’t expect to see you here.  I thought…”  It was Wendy Guerin, looking even more disconnected than usual.  She wore a short suede leather skirt and jacket with beaded fringes.  At this point it was before leather had gotten that association with skin stolen from murdered animals.  Instead, people thought it was like a way to get back to your roots as a native American, even if you weren’t one, sort of like stealing your skin from a murdered animal.   Jesus, Dennis was getting cynical in his old age.

“Hi Wendy.  You look good.  Well, it isn’t like you die when you leave Paradigm Control, you know.  Just maybe your Systems aren’t controlled as much as they used to be.  These are my friends, Leanne and Rod.  Leanne works at PCI too.  You’ve probably seen her there.   Say, is there a way we could score another ticket?”

Wendy looked as though she might have a mental hernia, although at this point in psychology they still hadn’t come up with all this right-brain/left-brain crap.   “I gave them away!  I didn’t think you were going to come.  Could you just, you know, buy tickets?”

“Sure, no problem,”  Dennis said.  “How much is the tab, anyway?”

“Thirty-five.  It’s like a charity thing.  The tickets get you into the reception later.”

“Thanks for nothing, dear.”  At this point it was beginning to be sort of a bummer of a night, with no hint of the confusion that lay ahead.

A door opened in the curved surface of the Palace, and two odd figures emerged, their bodies not yet adjusted to the outside light.  Behind them was a backstage area, musty and muffled by tall curtains.  The stagehands looked warily at the large figure of Rod, wearing his uniform coverall as usual, but then shrugged and lit their cigarettes, one a Benson and Hedges, the other a Marlboro man.

“Oh!  It’s Erik,”  Wendy remarked, her aura suddenly attaining the clear pink of love as inspiration came and she recognized the men.  “Actually, if you don’t care about the reception, I’m sure we can get you in backstage.  Erik, can I ask you a great favor?  I’m sure you could use a little extra help, am I right?  Here’s three of my friends that have offered to assist you.”   At this point Dennis had to love her a little back.  Everybody who met Wendy in this modality did.  The shorter and broader of the two stagehands reached carefully down and stepped the coal off the end of his cigarette.

“Sure, Wendy, glad to.  Will we see you later?  Are you coming to the party?”

“Ohh, I’ll try.  You know what?  I will.  So I’ll see you guys there?”  The eyes of the two stagehands fixed on Wendy’s fringed goddess form, willing her not to depart as she broke away, another rift in the cosmos repaired.  “Thanks for coming, Dennis.”

“I’m Hamilton.  This is Terry Flickinger.  What can you guys do?”

“Well.  I’m a Xerox Key Operator.  Rod drives ambulance.  Leanne can bench a hundred and a quarter.”  Dennis said, stepping through the door into the backstage area.

“Swell,”  Hamilton said, following.  He was coming into focus now as a short-legged man in his late thirties, with long blond hair, dulled with age, and a frizzly beard.  He turned his back on them and sat down in an army issue canvas chair, and began to turn knobs on a stack of electronic equipment.   The other man, silent, short-haired but with a beatnik’s goatee, skinny as wire, stood diffidently to the side. 

“Are those the lights?”  Dennis asked.  It looked like dimmer switches, thick black tee-handled controls that slid down long slots.  He wondered out loud how they were planning to get the images from space.

“You kidding me?”  Hamilton asked, dismissively.  “Over here.   This interface is where our leased-line from Moffett field comes in.   They have an IMP on the ARPAnet that they’re going to use to get the images from the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena.   But you wouldn’t know what that means, would you?”

“I get the drift,”  Dennis said.   “Only, how do you get pictures through the wires?  Is it like cable?”

Hamilton shot a pitying look at him and elbowed his buddy Flickinger.  “Flick, would you take these three someplace where they can’t do any harm.  Tape down some coax or something.”

“No, seriously.  ARPAnet, that’s like the stuff Cordell Green’s group does, isn’t it?  Do you have some kind of modem or something here to decode the pictures?”  Hamilton took a second look at him and nodded, a nerd’s fish-eyed acceptance, then turned nervously back to his machines.

“That’s right.  Like I said to that other guy, really what we’ll be showing is a series of stills.  You gotta realize, that’s pretty much the way the telemetry at JPL is receiving the data too.”

“I love this techy stuff,”  Dennis confided to Rod and Leanne, who didn’t seem to be digging it quite as much.  “OK, fine, you guys.  We’ll find some seats.”

“See you, nice to meet you,”  Leanne said vacantly.  They were inside.

“I love this techy stuff,”  Dennis repeated.  “I should have studied it in college.”  Instead, it had been art, leaving him now somehow a spectator into the world of engineering he had found himself in at PCI.  He should have studied anything at college with the attention he had done here.  It had been an eye-opening education into practical science, the social calculus of what could be portrayed as knowledge.

The theater was already full, full of an unrestrained babble of conversation.  Dennis heard a lady’s snorting laugh a few rows away.   Dennis led them to the back, right below the projection booth and on the aisle where there were a few empty seats.  Ahead of them a short little twerp in a NASA flight jacket was holding forth in an English accent to a bunch of his friends.   “It’s going to be the most important mission since Mariner orbited nine years ago.  Up until then we didn’t have any pictures at all.”

Another man sitting to the side of them spoke up unexpectedly.  “I’m sorry, this is not really true.  The Mars 5 mission of 1972 send back some excellent images.”  He was  medium-tall, with short brown hair, and a nice blue suit jacket, a few years older than Dennis.  “Excuse me.  May I present myself.  My name is Valerie Voloshin.  A scientific attaché from the Russian Embassy.”

“That was after Mariner,”  the troop leader informed his group.

“How far away is this Mars?”  Rod asked.  Rod’s ignorance of everything scientific seemed profound.  “That’s like a star or something, isn’t it?”

“Well, no,”  Dennis said, a little embarrassed, looking away.  On the stage below a guy in gathered silk chi pants stood, looking back at the projection booth in irritation.  A slide with the words “Viking 1” splashed across the screen.  “Largah, largah!”  the man shouted through his hands.  The communication was impaired by a heavy English accent.  The picture swiveled violently away for a moment and then returned, smaller and to the right.  The man had to be like a director or stage manager.  He stamped his foot in frustration and then bounded up the stairs toward them.  “No!  Noo!”

“You like them like that, Leanne?”  Dennis asked,  “Sensitive and British?”

“Oh, Fuck You!”  she responded satisfyingly.  The man was thin also, dark, had what seemed to Dennis to be a purposely unshaven face.  His shirt was silk also, a slate purple long-sleeved blouse, open to a curl of dark chest hair.  He came to a stop on the level where they sat.

“Get these people out of my seats!” he demanded, although it was hard to tell of whom.  Dennis looked him top to bottom without moving.  After a moment the director seemed to think again, continuing up the rest of the way and banging on the door of the booth.  “Give me that live feed now.  This is a rehearsal, everybody!”

The NASA groupies had swiveled to look at the three of them, their leader scowling at Dennis disapprovingly, faced with a crisis in his semi-official capacity.  Dennis smiled friendlily and gave him the finger.

There was a sudden decrease of light from the projection booth and a small blurry spot appeared in the center of the screen.  A few seconds later the theater lights began to shut down in banks, right, center, left.  A spotlight wavered on an empty podium.  The hundred or so people in the auditorium hushed and became an audience.  But then, for a long time nothing else happened.  People began to talk again, but uncertainly now, as though unwilling to broach complex subjects.

“It’s the same still picture,”  the troup leader ahead of them said dismissively.  This is an old shot from Mariner.  Viking is going to get much, much closer.”  He looked over his shoulder at the Russian for a moment.  “Bob tells me we’re in for a treat—full motion video as it comes in from the probe, which of course is now three minutes away, at the speed of light.”

As if in confirmation, there was a disturbance above and the director burst back out of the projection booth.  “He’s a bloody actor.  Tell him to act.  I’m not going to take a fall over some technical glitch.  And get these people out of my seats.”  He spun and descended jerkily downward.

“Uh-oh,”  Rod said.  “That doesn’t sound positive.”  Between them, Leanne sighed deeply.  Dennis touched her arm, getting up and angling out to the aisle.  “Hang on.  I’ll find out what’s going on.”  He followed the director down the stairs and backstage, coming up behind him arguing in loud cockney with Hamilton.

“I was told ‘full motion video.’  I was told bloody beaver shots of the bloody planetoid!  What do you mean you haven’t even tested the communications?”

Hamilton was shrugging imperviously.  “Nothing to test, bud.  I know the phone line works.  You just saw the other picture I sent through.  That means the cable is all good and my converter works.  Now all we have to hope for is that they can make that internet connection between Moffett and JPL.”

“Hope for?  Hope for?  We have an auditorium full of bloody patrons.  It has to work!  What if it doesn’t?  Have you thought of that?”

Hamilton shrugged again, as though saying, ‘Not my problem.’

“It means that Scotty, you know, Scotty from Star Trek will be trying to explain why people shouldn’t want their money back.  You don’t want to hang Scotty out to dry, do you?”  The english director managed to make his voice both sarcastic and wheedling.

“Is there a problem here?”  It was Bob Pearson, wearing a tuxedo for some reason and looking nearly as odd and big shouldered in it as he had in tight leather pants and cotton smock a few nights before.  He pushed past Dennis to confront the two staffers, shooting Dennis a somewhat alarmed look.  “You must be Neville, my producer.  Welcome.  Erik, what’s going on?”

“Ahh, this pud’s just worried because I can’t totally guarantee the guys at Moffett and JPL will have their act together.  Hell, for that matter, I can’t guarantee that that Martian guy in the helmet from the Bugs Bunny cartoons won’t shoot his disintegrator ray at the Viking, boss.”

Pearson smiled sharkishly, exposing his jagged teeth.  “Got you.   When are they supposed to come on line?”

“Any time now.  I’ve been waiting.  We’re showing an old picture from the Mariner probe.  But the new pictures will be a lot better.”

“It isn’t bloody working.  That’s what I’ve been telling you.  We should have started ten minutes ago!”   The director was tapping his wristwatch vigorously.

“You’re kidding.  That probe is 35 million miles away.  It’s been traveling for more than six months.  You gotta cut us a little slack.”

Pearson looked troubled.  “Could you get on the horn and check for me?”  he ordered Hamilton.  “We’re almost out of time.  Scotty is on his way.”  It didn’t sound right to Dennis either.  They would know exactly where that thing was.

In a moment it was confirmed as Hamilton hung up the phone, his face red.  He examined a series of meters in a box in front of him, tapping one, jiggling a thick connector where it was attached.  “Something wrong,”  he muttered.

It made perfect sense to Dennis that Bob Pearson would be a Star Trek fan.  It fit right in with his taste in music, a frozen slice of genre that ended around 1967.  Dennis had to admit, he was impressed.  Of course it wasn’t as good as getting Shatner to work the event, or DeForest Kelley, but still, he had to admit he was affected on a gut level when Chief Engineer Scott and his escort came through the backstage door of the Palace of Fine Arts, wearing the pressed felt red dress uniform of Star Fleet.  His escort wore the mini-dressed women’s outfit, meshed tights revealing her long sexy legs.  It was Lucy.  Her eyes met Dennis’s and she blushed and looked guiltily down.  She dragged hard on a thin black cigarette.

“Hi, Scotty,”  Pearson greeted the actor with shy, nearly erotic intensity.  “You look great, babe,”  he threw at Lucy.  Lucy’s face burned with shame at the dismissive bite of his tone.  “Listen, Scotty, we have a small problem.”

“It’s OK.  No reason to panic,”  Pearson began speaking too quickly, and Dennis suddenly realized he was witnessing the birth of a fraud.  “We’ve got pictures of Mars in the can already.  It’s just that we might need you to spin some of your old space yarns, Scotty, you know, until we can re-establish communications with StarFleet Command.”

“Now listen, no one needs to know.  Here’s what you do,”  Pearson was saying to Hamilton and the director.  “Erik, when you hear Scotty say, ‘Aye, here she’s coming into focus now, Captain,’ that’s your cue to turn on this old picture.  Only I want you to just sit here and bounce your pencil eraser off the lens every ten or fifteen seconds.  Okay?”

“You got it, boss,”  Hamilton said.  “Should we have a transmission failure after a couple three minutes?”

“Unless we can get that real signal up, I don’t see that we have any choice,”  Pearson said, giving the director a meaningful glance.  “Right, Neville?  It’s going to be your job to figure out a way to keep things going.  No one needs to leave here unhappy.  We’ve got computers, projectors, pictures from Mars, no problem.”  The director looked for a moment as though he was going to object, but finally withdrew under the stern glance of his employer.  “Scotty?  Are you ready?  We’re almost ready to start.  I’ve ordered Lucy to get out there with you.  A little distraction.  She’ll do anything you need her to do.”

“Aye-aye, Captain, sir.”  The actor said.  He looked a lot more nervous in real life than Dennis could ever remember the Chief Engineer being when the antimatter hit the fan.  Lucy looked as if she was going to spit.

Across the room, in a fold of curtain across the hidden stage, Dennis saw the Russian attaché standing silently, also watching.  Spying, maybe you would have to say.  He must have followed Dennis down.  Well, it wasn’t like they were giving away the specs to the transporter or anything.  The Soviets shouldn’t need any instruction in how to fool people.  Dennis withdrew to the auditorium, rejoining Leanne and Rod.  A few moments later the Russian also returned to his seat, shooting Dennis a look of amusement.

“What did you find out?”  Leanne asked.  “Can we go yet?”

“Pretty soon, I think,”  Dennis whispered.  On the stage below, Pearson, Scotty, and the young leader of the group seated in front of them were gathering together.  After a moment the kid popped his finger on the microphone to draw everyone’s attention.

“Welcome.  Ladies and Gentlemen, your Viking team welcomes you,”  he said self-importantly.  “On behalf of the Santa Clara Valley L5 Society and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, we’d like to welcome you here to this…event.  Here with us tonight are two very good friends of mine.  May I introduce, Dr. Robert Pearson, Vice President and Chief Exectutive Officer of Paradigm Control, Incorporated, down in Palo Alto.  Bob, I know you can’t tell us about your real work, but maybe you can say a few words to our audience about how PCI came to sponsor this event tonight.”

Pearson had looked a lot more at ease as a rock and roller performing for his friends a few nights before than he did now in front of a real audience.  His mouth folded to a small smile, bad teeth protruding in a jagged line.  He hunched over the podium and spoke tightly into the microphone.

“That’s right, Stan,” he said jokingly.  “No one knows exactly what we do over there in Palo Alto, and we try to keep it that way.  But seriously…”  Pearson paused, although no one had actually laughed.  “Seriously, PCI has been a partner with NASA throughout most of the company’s history.  Whether it’s telecommunications, or global positioning for weather satellites, or, you know, defense, NASA knows it can count on our engineers to help it get the job done.  Stan, I want to make sure everyone knows what an honor it is for me personally to meet our special guest tonight.  Mr. James Noonan.  Scotty!

Dennis watched in embarrassment as Scotty bounded from behind the curtains, looking fat, ancient and awkward, dragging Lucy by the hand.   Lucy stumbled out, knock-kneed in patent Starfleet space boots, vamping feminine frailty.  Dennis thought that at some point it had to serve her right.  You are what you dress up as.

The audience around him clapped and cheered wildly, even Leanne and Rod.  Rod looked sideways at both of them, his mouth widening in a grin of recognition, as if getting it for the first time.  “It’s Scotty!”.  Dennis felt himself outraged as Lucy tipped her high-heeled toe in a leggy pose.  Was she so vain and self-centered that she could think all this applause was really for her?

“A-a-y-e, Captain!”  Scotty leaned close to the microphone.  “I dinna know how long we can hold on.  She’s getting ready to blow!”  He wrapped his arm around Lucy, making it clear he was making a filthy joke, his hand stuck under the short dress of the uniform, massaging her ass.  The audience, mostly male, mostly geeky, cracked up.  Lucy leaned forward to place her lipsticked mouth close to the microphone.  “Ohh, Scotty!”

“No time for that now, Lieutenant.  There’s an important transmission from Star Fleet arriving.”  Scotty leered theatrically into Lucy’s deep cleavage.  “Space—the Final Frontier.  These are the images of the space probe Viking.  Aye, Captain.  It’s all coming into focus now.”  Behind them, on cue, the projection screen popped with light and the tiny orange image of Mars they had seen before appeared again.  To the side of the stage Dennis could see the figure of the director gesture to someone in the booth behind them and the opening notes of 2001:  A Space Odyssey boomed through the speakers, a bastard combination of Science Fiction themes.

“This sucks,”  Leanne observed.   Dennis nodded agreement, but Rod was clearly captivated.

“Wait, though,”  he shushed them both, hunching forward in the small theater seat.  “I want to see what happens next.”  The image on the screen jumped suddenly, then wobbled back into place.

“Captain, there seems to be some interference.   A space vortex.   Remember, Ladies and Gentlemen, these pictures are coming in live from light years away, so there may be some fuzziness.   We’ll keep on showing the pictures to you as long as we can.  Lieutenant, can you take us in any closer?”

“Aye-aye, sir,”  Lucy said, a hostility made sullen by fear or shame evident in each of the three syllables.

“Oh God,”  Leanne said.  “I can’t believe it.  This woman is such a whore.  Did you know she was going to be here?”  Lucy was facing straight at them, lifting her long boobies saucily to the top of the low cut uniform, presenting them for the Chief Engineer’s inspection and the audience’s salacious delight.  Leanne elbowed Dennis angrily in the ribs as he continued to watch the woman on the stage manipulate her knockers.  

Dennis had to agree with Leanne, but he was all mixed up.  A second later Lucy’s eyes met his, stabbing him quickly and indifferently with her ironic lack of giving a shit.  Why did he always go for these bleak, messed up bitches?   If he had had her, he could have…just had her.  And he almost had.  I guess you could say that at this point, watching Lucy neck up to the revolting old man something like jealousy was going on.

Is this really any different than the show she put on for me the other night?  Dennis’s frustration exploded inside.  Her flirtation with the audience was offered in the same base and brassy coin she always displayed. 

“Thank you, Lieutenant.  I can see those celestial bodies emerging now.”    On the stage the lighting narrowed and intensified, a spot with a cyan gel hollowing Lucy’s facial bones, making her look sultry and severe beneath charcoal Vulcan eyebrows.  It would always be this kind of drama with Lucy, no line between what was real and what was pretense.

“Something’s happening, Captain!  A Klingon destroyer has locked on to our probe,”  Scotty suddenly screamed.   The screen jumped again, the image of the planet tracing a jagged trail across the darkness of space, joined an instant later by a tiny cutout of an evil enemy starship.    The director’s flashlight, Dennis realized.  “Captain!  Shields are down!”

“OK.  We can go now,”  he told Leanne and Rod.  Rod looked angry, unsure of what was going on.  Was this a real show?

“Ladies and Gentlemen, this just in from StarFleet Command,”  Scotty dead-panned gravely, touching his communicator and reading aloud from a half sheet of paper.  “We regret to inform the Federation citizens that the Viking 1 probe has encountered transmission difficulties.”

“Whether from the effects of space time disruption or under Klingon phaser fire, we may not ken for some time.  Fleet Command is assessing the situation.”  Scotty looked up somberly from his notes.  “Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m sorry I won’t be able to attend the reception afterwards, but as you might imagine, there’s an urgent summons for me to return to base.  We will be as forthcoming as possible with status updates for the Viking as information becomes available.  For tonight, thank you very much for coming.  Thank you for your generous contributions.  And could we all join together in again thanking our corporate sponsor, Dr. Robert Pearson, C.E.O of Paradigm Control, Incorporated.”

Looking happy to escape, Scotty angled his portly frame away from Lucy and offstage.   There was a brief spurt of applause, then unhappy noise.  “Is he kidding?  He must be kidding, right?”  Rod asked.  “Isn’t there something we can do?”   Left alone on the stage, Lucy curtsied deeply and also withdrew.  The audience simmered with discontent, beginning to fragment into unruly groups.

“Stan?  Stan?  Is that it?”  the members of the Santa Clara Valley L5 Society wheedled  their leader, whose head hung in shame.  Bob Pearson’s big shoulders squared fatalistically.  He rose and walked quickly out of the theatre.

Both Dennis and the Russian’s heads turned in search of the likely scapegoat, the director.  After a minute he reappeared, shrugging angrily.

“We want our money back!”  Dennis intoned.  Around them a couple of other people turned and picked up the chant.  The director winced.

“I don’t do the bloody tickets, folks.  The blokes you want will be at the reception.  Take it up with them if you like.  They may make some kind of adjustment.” 

“The pictures of the stars were all faked,”  Rod exclaimed loudly, threateningly, rising to his feet.  Leanne looked embarrassed, maybe because she knew the difference between a planet and a star, maybe because she didn’t.  She clearly didn’t want to participate in this.   “That’s right.  A complete fake,” she said.

“To be precise, an amateurish fake,”  another voice contributed.  It was the Russian.

“We want our money back!”  Dennis repeated, doing his best to rouse the sheepish crowd filing out of the theater.

“You know what?  Fuck you.  Like I say, talk to Dr. Pearson.”  The director spun away, elbowing people aside as he descended the steep aisle.

Their mission had kept the star troopers away from home base too long.  Leanne seemed worn out, her skin tones flaccid and blotchy. 

“Let’s go back to the car for a minute,”  Dennis suggested.  Everybody brightened.  But in the parking lot when he opened the glovebox and looked for the five grams he had put there for EZ access they were gone.  “Did you see that shit I left in here?” he questioned Rod sharply.   He checked the crumpled Carl’s Junior bag on the floor of the passenger side.  The rest of the blow was still there, fortunately.  See, that was what you learned in this city, never trust anyone.  At this point although Dennis wasn’t paranoid yet he was learning about paranoia fast.

Plus this whole Mars probe thing had put him in a vindictive mood, one that even the jumbo lines that they snorted couldn’t erase.   He hated to think about how much money he had just lost.

“Hey buddy.  Want to buy some blow?”  he asked the same suited gentleman as before, now helping his wife into a car parked nearby.  “Gram for eighty.”  Which had its predictable negative effect, but it also pays to advertise.  Almost before the couple had locked their doors Dennis had another sale going, and another after that.

“Good evening.”  Dennis looked up from shuffling a bunch of cash to meet the look of the Russian attaché he had seen inside.   Remember, O Dearly Beloved, that at this point it was even before ATMs were invented, you weren’t so used to seeing big wads of money unless you sold drugs.

The Russian attaché stood openly, illuminated by an overhead parking lot light.  He wore a sports coat the same color as his wood colored hair, a tan pullover sweater that imprisoned a red tie.  He wore an amused expression as easily as he did the academic uniform.

“Dosvedanya, Tovarich.”  Dennis said warily.

“You speak?  No, I understand.  Nothing but Clockwork Orange.  Would it be possible for me also to make a purchase this evening?”

Leanne leaned forward, entranced by the cultured accent.  “Are you really from Russia?”

“The Ukraine, actually.  A city named Odessa, on the Black Sea,” the Russian said.

“You shitting me?”  Dennis asked,  “I thought I heard you say inside you were with the embassy in some way.  What’s a clean cut soviet type like you doing trying to score?”

“Heh heh.  What do you think they make diplomatic immunity for?”  the Russian said ironically, leering at Leanne.  “No, but seriously, every embassy has a guy like me on the staff.  Our job is to get out and mingle, go places, buy things.  May I try a little sample?”  Dennis nodded grudging assent.

“Could you sell as much as four grams?”  the Russian bore in after a short pause.  Dennis nodded again, grinning fiercely, wondering whether there was some four gm legal threshold he should be aware of.   “No problem.  Thirty-two.”

“What?”

“No price breaks.  Three hundred twenty for the four.”  Beneath the dark dashboard Dennis separated out the packets.  “Pay the man in the booth,” he said, pointing to Rod in the back seat.

They had about a half an hour before the reception across town, falling into conversation.  After a while Dennis gestured and the Russian joined Rod in the back seat, sliding to the center to address them.

“What do you think actually happened in there?”  Valerie asked.  “Is it possible that something really happened to the Viking spacecraft?”

“Nah,”  Dennis volunteered.  “You heard them backstage—the communications was messed up.  It was all an act.”

“Oh, really?  Actually, I didn’t hear very much.  Sometimes I’m not able to get as close as I’d like.  What happened?”  The Russian leaned on the back of the front seat close to Leanne.  At least this was in the days when cars still had a full length bench between the front and back instead of bucket seats.

It wasn’t that Dennis was nervous about Russians.  At this point they had a couple three of them at Paradigm Control.  Nice guys, heavily into tobacco.  At this point it was over a year before Tsing-Ping and Chen, the two EEs from the People’s Republic of China arrived.  But he didn’t care much for the way that Valerie Voloshin was making himself  so familiar.

“I was right there.  The computer guy Erik said that their internet signal was broken.  Pearson ordered him and that wussy director, Neville, to fake it with the canned shots.”

“I felt sorry for Scotty,”  Leanne said, “He looked so embarrassed.”

“He deserved it.  The capitalist lackey.  My dissertation at university was on the racist imperialist propaganda of American Science Fiction.   You know the aliens in the stories are always either Africans or Chinese or Arabs.  Or socialist robots.  Can you deny it?”

Dennis snorted.  “That’s right.  Scotty himself.  In the Star Trek series he’s that stereotype of the Scottish steam engineer in the industrial revolution.”

The Ukranian’s eyebrows arched.  “But who was that Vulcan floozy with him?  Will she be at the reception?  I don’t think I’ve seen her before.”

“Shit, not you too,”  Leanne shook her head.  “Woman is the nigger of the galaxy, that’s all.  What is it about you men?  Not that that bitch doesn’t deserve it.”

“Something about a woman in a uniform just does it to me, I’m afraid,” Valerie admitted.  “It must be my KGB upbringing.  It’s just so out there, out in the open.”

Dennis explained about Lucy and her costumes.  Obviously in her case telling the truth or conning the public was of no concern.

“Haha.  Now I understand.  The naval uniform.  A couple of months ago I had an unorthodox request for a Soviet Navy uniform.  Unorthodox, that’s what we call them.  Don’t know if I ever knew what he traded for it or whether it was a gift.”

“Do you live here in Frisco?”  Leanne asked.  At this point it was almost as politically incorrect to use the F-word in public to describe The City as it is now.  The Russian smiled at the faux pas, white teeth in his blond face.  “In San Francisk.  Yes.  In Pacific Heights, not far from here.”

“I’ve never been to Frisco before,”  Leanne said.  It had been, Dennis and Rod had discovered, like coming to the land that time forgot, a generation of families who woke up too early for malls and too late for rural California, suburbia without a heart.

“I wish I could give Wendy Guerin a piece of my mind for making us come up here to be a part of this fraud,”  Dennis said.  It was beginning to nag at him that asking for money back when you hadn’t actually paid anything was a little silly.  Maybe they should just drop it.  He wasn’t sure they’d even be able to get in the door without tickets.

“I hardly think the publics will be invited to this party, especially after what happened.”  Valerie Voloshin was amused.  “I mean, did not happen.   To each according to his needs.  Allow me to offer you some tickets, compliments of the U.S.S.R.”  He reached into his pocket.  Dennis was surprised to see four cardboard rectangles with the Viking logo imprinted on them.

Chapter 6  The Reception

A few members of the space group from the theater, the L5 society, guarded the reception room at the Palace of Fine Arts, next to the Exploratorium.  Dennis and Rod and Leanne let their new friend go in first, then presented their tickets.  Inside, Bob Pearson was conversing earnestly with the reporter they had seen earlier.  Beyond him, on the other side of the blond paneled room, Dennis was immediately aware of Lucy Snyder, still outfitted in her Star Trek outfit, toasting his entrance over the rim of a glass, apparently oblivious to another adoring group of zitfaced L5’rs that bumped around her like sperm.    Fuck her and the landing craft she came in on.  Pearson moved toward them.

“Well, if it isn’t my new personal assistant!  Hey, Leigh,” the Vice President greeted Leanne first,   “Glad you could make it.  Are you into space exploration too?  I didn’t know.”

“Sure.”  Leanne simpered, moving close to her employer.  Why didn’t she do that for Dennis?  It seemed like it was all he could do these days to get a laugh out of her.  “I’m into all kinds of shit.  You’d be surprised.”

Pearson daggered gray eyes in Dennis’s direction.  “I hope you’re not into this shit,”  he said malevolently.  “This dude’s nothing but bad news.  Dude.  What are you doing here?   I thought we fired you.”

“That’s right, you did.”  Dennis said, meeting the Vice President’s glare without flinching.  “Only I didn’t die.  How goes the war against communism, Bob?  Better than your little event tonight, I hope.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“We just hate being lied to,”  Rod chimed in.  “You guys had a lot of nerve to show us that one stupid slide over and over when you were supposed to be showing a movie.  It wasn’t even the right star.   You should be ashamed of yourselves.”

“Oh, horseshit.  We knew something might go wrong, there were a couple of things that were beyond our control.  Everybody else knew that.   We were trying our best to keep folks entertained.  With Scotty.  Plus Lucy’s little T&A tease.”  Pearson gestured over his muscular shoulder to where Lucy stood, still sexy in the short star dress.  “Look, dude, I told you before I didn’t care who Lucy screws,” Pearson said,  “just as long as they aren’t Klingons.  You’re not a Klingon, are you, dude?  Let it go.”

Pearson turned back to the man he had been talking to.  A lapel badge identified him as “Francis Coughlin, San Jose Mercury News.”  “Even though there were a few technical hitches at the last minute,”  Pearson resumed his spiel, “I think we can say the evening was a success.  We showed we could bring the excitement of space exploration, live, as it happens, right to the people, so to speak.”

“I understand you’ve put together a real technical tour-de-force,” the reporter agreed.  “Dr. Pearson, in the future, do you think that events like this one will become commonplace?”

“Indeed I do, Francis.  What we have been using here tonight is something called the Internet, and it provides us with a vision of communications that potentially could allow anyone to obtain instant and complete access to information everywhere.  Tonight one of our network nodes is in orbit around Mars.  Think of the implications!”  Dennis leaned in to listen.

“Information Theory is one of PCI’s specialties, isn’t it, Bob?”  he said.  Pearson flinched slightly, nodding reluctantly.

“That’s right.  I was going to ask.  What business would a company with a name like Paradigm Control Incorporated be in, actually?”  the Mercury News reporter asked.

“I’m really not at liberty to say, Francis.  Agencies of the federal government.  Mostly classified contracts.”

“It’s fascinating stuff, I’ve got to tell you, Frank,”  Dennis contributed cheerfully, looking again at Lucy Snyder across the room, a secret touch of lust coloring his mood as he remembered the tight clench of the woman’s lips, an open classified container.  “Spook stuff.  Cruise Missiles, Trident subs.  Nuclear Theatre.  Bob’s into it all.”

“Really?” the reporter said.  “That’s interesting, because…”

“Shut the hell up, will you?”  Pearson growled.  “We do do some work with DARPA, as this guy knows,”  he admitted to the reporter.  “That’s the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.  And, of course, with NASA, as well.”

“You can certainly count on my discretion, sir,”  Francis Coughlin said. 

Dennis smiled.  Obviously at this point you can’t really count on mine, he thought.  It was going to get worse for Dr. Pearson for quite a while before it got better, as a second later Wendy Guerin showed up.  The personnel assistant looked strung out, stressed, but her aura was strong as she marched up and confronted Bob Pearson, her chin tilted tremulously.  “What on earth were you trying to put over on us tonight, Bob?  That was just so embarrassing.  I have to apologize to so many people.”  Wendy seemed to notice Dennis for the first time.  “Like Dennis.”

“I can’t think of any reason I would ever want to apologize to this creep,” Pearson said.

“It’s okay, Wendy.  No hard feelings.  Not your fault.”  Dennis loved the slim tension in the woman as she stood up to the executive.  Her shoulder blades were sharp and angelic beneath a filmy evening dress, her skinny body so different from Lucy’s soft sullen form.

“I know you said we might have to wing it if something went wrong, but that was a lie, wasn’t it, Bob?  You never planned to do anything except insult our intelligence, did you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Lady,”  Pearson said with a wounded tone.  “What reason would I have to do that?  Do you think I like looking foolish?”

“No.  Well, I haven’t figured that part out yet.  But I know you had something planned.  Why else would you make me hire that horrid actor?”  Wendy’s fine features wrinkled with disgust as she remembered Scotty.  Pearson looked hurt.  “I like Star Trek.  Scotty and I are good friends.” He said defensively.

“Let me get this straight,” the man from the Mercury News began.  “Scotty was covering something up?”  At this point the memories of Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein, the Washington Post were still fresh.   Every cub reporter in every High School in the country was ready to dig dirt with a career-making scoop.

“Absolutely not,”  Pearson stonewalled.  “Mr. Noonan was simply informed of what to do in case technical difficulties occurred.  Unfortunately, they did.  But, again, Francis, I’d like to stress the importance of the kind of communications link we’ve put in place here using the Internet.  That’s your big news story.  Wendy, you and I need to talk.  Could I have a minute, please?”

“Shall we get another beer?”  Dennis thought that Frank Coughlin was young, maybe even underage.  You couldn’t expect a reporter barely old enough to shave to be any good at getting information or even understanding it when it was dropped in his lap.  Remember, at this point, the San Jose Mercury News was just a crappy local paper, the kind that people read at all in order to remain ignorant of the news, not to get it.  Good business section, though.  Coughlin seemed somehow short and tentative, with dark, curly hair above a collared blue shirt, an inconclusive moustache.

“Got you,”  Coughlin said.  He pulled a small spiral notebook from the pocket of his dress shirt and began to write with a stubby ballpoint.  “I’m sorry.  Your name is?”

“Doug Green,”  Dennis said.  Something the guy could write down fast.  He turned and headed back to the bar, trying not to look at Lucy.

The bar was a set of brown folding tables covered with white paper,  a couple of beer kegs at each end.  Rather than being déclassé, the appearance of the rare draft form of Anchor Steam beer showed that someone, probably Pearson, had connections.  The bartenders, volunteers from the Exploratorium staff who had been paid extra for the evening, snapped to attention, pouring for the teen-aged reporter without question.   Dennis tipped plastic glasses with him in congratulations.  The beer was bitter, deep, much rougher than the Budweiser and Schlitz Dennis had learned to drink in Montana.

“San Jose Mercury News, eh?  Is this your regular beat?”  The kid swallowed most of his beer in a few seconds.

“Pacific Stock Exchange,” he said.  “The early morning shift.  No, I’m really getting to be up past my bedtime tonight.  I just came here because I used to be interested in astronomy.”

“Is the stock exchange an actual place?”  Dennis asked.  “I think I’m seeing that picture of the trading floor in Wall Street.  Is it like that?”

“Pretty much.  A lot of the trading happens other places too.”

“See, that’s what I’m getting at,”  Dennis said.  “This Internet that Pearson’s talking about.  Think how weird it would be if you didn’t have to be there at all to buy and sell stock.  You could be anywhere.”

“You mean, like with a Telex?  We already have that.”

“I think you’re going to have to leave,”  Pearson said, coming over to join them at the bar.  Wendy just explained the situation.  Your services at PCI have been terminated.  You shouldn’t have been here tonight at all.  Put that beer down.  This reception is for the press and the VIPs only.”

“I am a VIP, though,” Dennis asserted, taking a deeper drag of the beer.  It tasted better the madder Pearson got.  “I’m with the press too, now, as my friend Frank here will attest.  Lost that stick-on badge somewhere.  Very Important, actually.  But I got the ticket someplace.”  He presented the ticket that Valerie Voloshin had given him.  He stared straight into Pearson’s eyes, daring him to make a move.  “Come on, Frank.  Let’s mingle,” he said.

Dennis went looking for Wendy again, with the Mercury News reporter in tow.  She had retreated to the party’s service sector, standing with the two communications geeks, Hamilton and Flickenger, that they had met backstage.   The techies had drawn two plastic pitchers of draft beer for themselves and stood, refilling each other’s glasses.  “You knew this was going to be messed up?”  he asked.

“I…I had a feeling,”  the new ager said nervously.  “I was talking to Eric earlier.  It didn’t sound like he was able to make it work.”

“There was a finite chance that NASA wouldn’t be able to cooperate,”  Eric Hamilton said stiffly.  “It has to do with the connection to the Internet in Sunnyvale.  It’s going through a secure facility.”

“The ARC?”  The ARC was the advanced research center at Moffett field that Paradigm Control maintained for the Air Force.  Hamilton nodded shortly, his smile disappearing as Pearson again strode across the crowded room toward them.

“I finally figured it out,  boss,” he said sheepishly.  “They had some kind of wicked authentication we had to do to channel the data through.   It’s easy for us on this end, but hard for NASA.  I blew it, sorry.”

“Right.  You’re fired too.”  Pearson’s finger drew on the skinny form of Terry Flickenger.  “Flick, come see Wendy on Monday morning, if you think you still want a job.”  He spun and stalked off.

Dennis looked around for Valerie Voloshin, thinking how much the Russian naval attaché would be interested to hear the conversation, but the man was on the far side of the room, talking intently with Lucy.  Pearson looked as though he might be heading that direction, but then bulled toward the beer counter where Leanne stood, gesturing in frustration and barking gruffly at her.  Dennis realized Leanne must be freaked.  He hadn’t really gotten around to mentioning that her new boss had fired him a few days before.

“Is everyone upset about something or something?”  Frank Coughlin asked Dennis uncertainly.  He thought about it.  At this point the only person who had any real reason to be angry was Pearson, down an ounce of cocaine, a couple of employees, and with an unruly audience asking for their money back.  And that was really Pearson’s problem, not his own.

“Shit, no.  Everything’s cool,” he reassured the reporter.  “The boss just gets this way sometimes.  Let’s go see what brother Rod has dug up.”  Rod was listening attentively to Stan Kent, the leader of the L5 Society.  A small group of his followers and Horst Salzwedel were also standing by.

“The platform doesn’t matter, don’t you see.  O’Neil suggested using the flywheel to generate artificial gravity, that’s all.  There’s no reason why the colony couldn’t be established in permanent free-fall.  No reason at all.  There might be certain health benefits, long-term.”

“Ja, but…”  The German engineer looked agitated.

“No buts about it.  Energy on the High Frontier is free, completely free.  The L5 colony should be self-sufficient within two years by beaming power back to earth through its solar concentrators.”

“Ja, but you can’t make people live in cans that way,”  Salzwedel said.  “They’ll die.”

The visionary sneered.  “You underestimate the strength of the human will, my friend.”

“Nein.  I do not.”  Horst Salzwedel’s weathered face grinned.   “I estimate the strength of systems.  This is what I do.  Think of it so—a spacecraft, any spacecraft contains a large number of inter-related systems, which we model as a line of lamps in series.  When any of the lamps is burn out, whole system is broken, until the lamp is replaced.  And for a large structure, such as for a space station, the number of lamps is great, and the probability of lamps burning out is high.  Your colonists will die because they will simply be unable to keep up with the repairs to their home.”

“I’ve made up my mind.  Leanne and me are going.  They’ll need help,”  Rod burst out, with indomitable spirit, the tears of the converted brimming from his eyes.  However many astronauts it takes to change a light bulb, that light bulb will be changed.  At this point it was probably a full eighteen years before the Heaven’s Gaters finally achieved Satori, but occasional abductions had already been recorded.

Dennis stepped into the line between Rod and his former girlfriend.  Leanne was doing her best to calm Pearson and looking very chic doing it, in blue ankle-zipped slacks that displayed her proud calves, but with her skills at handling a hysterical chief executive being honed that moment against the “it’s not working…it’s not working” stone.

(This is where the fact that Dennis has stolen the coke becomes known to Pearson.)

Pearson’s broken shark teeth gnashed together in a furious flushed face.  “I’ll have your balls for breakfast,”  he hissed.

“Bob.  Bob,”  Dennis chastened the executive.  “Such a horrible thing to say.  To me the question isn’t about balls, it’s about cajones, as in who’s got some of what who wants, you know what I mean?”  Pearson’s body language, which at this point Dennis was still pretty good at reading, said he did.    Even after you extracted all the hooty-gooty analysis was taken away, Bob’s posture revealed a man with a need.

“Alright, then.  Bob, I want you to take that back, the castration thing, you know.  Cause I want you to know, I can’t do any kind of business with a man who wants my balls, you know what I mean?”

“Because if we screw up now, you know, Bob, it’ll be sorry about the stuff I snorted and give the rest to charity, or scatter it to sea.  Otherwise, if you apologize, maybe we can talk.”

“Yeah,”  Pearson scowled at last, shrugging insincerely.  “I didn’t mean it.  No offense.”

“Oh, well, shit, then, none taken.  But then there’s that other thing.  I don’t suppose it would be too much to arrange to get my old job back.”  Pearson spit a mouthful of bitter beer back into his glass.

“You screw my secretary in my own house and then steal my dope and you think I should un-fire you for some reason?”  The executive whispered incredulously, obviously wary of the closeness of the gathered reception.   “You really are a piece of work, aren’t you?”  He glared around angrily, as though wishing the room would empty and he could strangle Dennis on the spot.

“Well,” Dennis said, surprised, “Yeah.”  When you put it that way, it did seem kind of far-fetched.  At this point, he had more or less been going on the assumption that he was Pearson’s victim.  It was little embarrassing to realize that Pearson might see things differently, but at this point he was relishing his rediscovered talent for complication and there was no stopping the kid now.  

“Bob, here’s something I bet you haven’t thought through, all that classified repro that’s stuck in my safe at PCI.”  The safe that Dennis had down in the Copy Center, one of the old Bessmers, actually contained nothing but dust, but how would Pearson know that.  Besides, he had teased away Lucy’s combo in those few moments of foreplay the PCI boardroom those days before.  “I’ll tell you my numbers, you tell me yours,”  he had suggested to Lucy and she had agreed.

You could see Pearson realize belatedly that firing a guy who was an authorized administrator of a classified container would inevitably cause him a lot of grief.  “You can bet your red flag, the DIS will be down for a visit next week, if not sooner,”  Dennis said.  “Don’t worry, though.   I haven’t called the hotline yet.”  DIS was the Defense Investigative Service in San Francisco that looked after top secret affairs in the Silicon Valley.

“Shut up, dammit!”  Pearson bit at his glass of regurgitated beer again furiously.  “I’ll take care of the DIS.  But, listen.  I might be willing to pay out a reward for the return of certain items that were stolen from my home, you know, no questions asked.”

 (Additonal material to be added)

Chapter 7        Rear-ended

At this point, after being fired, Dennis was living on the Palo Alto streets, crashing in the Vista Cruiser nights.   He could have gone back to the apartment in San Jose, but there was still the probability that the old vehicle wouldn’t make it, he’d get pulled over, or his roommate Mark would want the rent.   On the second morning he found himself parked outside Lucy Snyder’s apartment waiting for her to leave for work.  A night of jangly electronic Junior College FM had given form to his fury over  the fucked up way Lucy had treated him.  He always slept with the radio on.  It was early morning on Picasso Way, Sunnyvale, California, curvy suburban returns that accessed their own hundred or so dwellings.  He was “fumigating”, or at least that was what he would tell anyone that asked.  He would wait for her to go to work, and if she didn’t go, well then she would still be there. 

Lucy came out of the front door of a single story house, dressed in a pantsuit of red and black Scottish plaid, tight through the hips, a ruffled white blouse buttoned to the top of the neck.  The costume seemed designed as an antithesis to Valerie Voloshin’s Marxist critique of the female role in capitalism a few nights before.  But the executive secretary drove a burnt-cream colored diesel Mercedes she never should have been able to afford on her own, probably another of Bob Pearson’s passing enthusiasms.

He followed the Mercedes up Alma to Palo Alto, wondering if Lucy would notice his massive and joke-lettered vehicle in her rear mirror, but she never did.  The Vista Cruiser cut the mustard for once, farting unburnt hydrocarbons but keeping up.  He watched Lucy loop into the underpass that led to Page Mill Road.   As she slowed at the bottom, peering left at the traffic from the Oregon Expwy Dennis let his brake slip and watched Lucy’s brassy blonde hair jerk as his ugly american rear-ended her fat assed foreign vehicle.  The impact pushed her out dangerously into the narrow, blind bend of the road, Dennis really half-hoping she’d get pegged.  He rolled down his window, gesturing with his arm for her to pull on through the subway.  It was cool, there wasn’t much traffic that early, no real danger.

“You could have killed me!  You ruined my car!  Were you following me?”  All the usual things.  “Sorry,” Dennis said, “Sorry.”  After his moment of rage passed the consequences did seem a little more severe than he might have hoped.  “Listen, is there someplace we can go?”

“Palo Alto Motors, you fucking creep.  I’m going to sue your silly ass off.”

“Sue an unemployed copy jock?  Can’t you read backwards?”  Dennis pointed without pity at his hand lettered hood, ECNARUSNI ON.  “Don’t make me laugh.  No, I’ve been thinking about what you said last night.  I split that coke into packages.  I’ve got about ten, twelve grams left.  I’m selling each one for sixty-five.  You tell Toomey I’ll give him first dibs.  He can write it out as a severance check.”

“Now, wait a minute, sweetie.  James told me there was a lot more than that.”

“No, I’m driving here.  Sweetie, apparently you’re forgetting those forged signatures in the docs log.  I’m so pissed off I have half a mind to turn your boss in to the DIS.  What if I tell them about Bob’s compulsive drug use, his bad taste in music?  Where’s that leave you, babe?  Are you sure you’ve thought this through?”

It was a strange moment, standing in the ivy beside their dented vehicles in the early Palo Alto morning.  Lucy’s gray eyes gauged Dennis balefully and her red lipsticked mouth set.  “You’re cute when you’re mad,” she offered inadequately.  “Antonio’s Doughnut House, across the parking lot from the Santa Clara County Courthouse.  I’ll meet you there.”

“I’ve been coming to this little dump since before Paradigm Control was even Paradigm Control.  Before Bob Pearson ever even heard of the CIA.  That must be like thirteen, fourteen years now.  We were all crowded together in an office on the ground floor in that building there.  All of us.  It was called Wolf Properties then,”  Lucy mused.  “Wow.  Those were the days.  A couple of horny real estate guys and a couple of Stanford engineering geeks.”  The store’s full-length windows were decorated with cartoon characters in baker’s hats who juggled heaps of brightly decorated doughnuts.  “Eat the Whole thing!!!” commanded the Nut House’s slogan, also painted on glass.  Dennis’s brain twisted.  Was writing from the back side the same as its image in a rear view mirror?  Maybe the outlines were the same, but one was a projection, the other a reflection, the right side and the wrong side reversed.

“It must have been hard,” he said helpfully, but without sympathy.   Lucy looked at him over a styrofoam cup of spiked OJ pinched between lacquered fingertips the color of crusted blood.   The white cup was dappled with brighter red lipstick prints.

“Nah.  Yeah.  It was hard-core, anyway,”  she mused.  “It took screwing a lot of Navy procurement guys to get us where we got to.  I used to think of it just as “Sales.”  You know, what the fuck.  See, that’s what I hate so much about Bob.  He thinks it’s fine to light my ass on fire so he can get his contracts, and then he pretends I’m too dirty to touch.  I can’t even get his dick to stick up any more.”  Lucy’s eyes sizzled with scorn, and Dennis had pity on Pearson’s poor pecker.

“You’re hung up on me, aren’t you?”  she announced.    And although at this point he was still a little bit afraid of her, Dennis had to agree.

“no,” he denied.  He took a bite of his maplebar, choking.  And yet again he found himself looking behind the make-up to Lucy’s uncertain features, a small, snippy nose, freckles, eyes watery blue.  He jolted hot coffee unexpectedly through the slot of his cup, scalding his upper lip.

“You’re paying to fix my fucking car, you know that, don’t you?”  Lucy pressed.

“Crap.  That’s what your insurance is for.”  At this point in the State of California if you rear-ended someone, it was automatically declared your fault, but Dennis couldn’t agree with that.  The little embolism of self that had exploded as he punched the accelerator into the three pronged logo on Lucy Snyder’s Mercedes had not completely dispersed.  She had deserved it. 

Lucy was quiet for a moment, biting a thick chunk of her candy-sprinkled doughnut and taking a suck of juice from the white cup to make it go down.  “Where were you thirteen years ago, Dennis?”  she asked finally.   Montana, still, he figured.  Probably not even out of Junior High at that point.  While Lucy had been already ready here in the fast track world of the Silicon Valley, wearing her nice clothes, hanging out with these cool people.  “That’s what I figured,”  she said, watching his face.  “You think it’s been like one big long old party for me.  Well, maybe.  I ain’t done partying yet, darling.  I’m for shit sure done with Doctor Robert Pearson.”

“Really.  How are you going to swing that?  You’re still working for him aren’t you?”

“Not for any longer than I have to.  I’m serious.  I’ve been talking to a woman lawyer who handles cases like mine.  I lived with the bastard for over eight fucking years.  Eight fucking years.  I’m entitled to something for that.”

“So then you weren’t really married?”

“That’s what I’m saying.  He promised me.”

“I guess that’s what you really need.  Someone to make an honest woman out of you.  Maybe you should marry me instead.”  Dennis couldn’t understand why hardly none of the women ever took these proposals seriously.  Maybe nothing was forever, but it was a start.  Or maybe it was the price he was asking.  He always meant it, though, every single time.    Lucy, meanwhile, seemed to have trouble swallowing her medicated orange juice.  “We can get a flight out of San Francisco International to Las Vegas for $80 each,” Dennis offered.  Always show them the car running, the ticket in hand, although at this point the proposal did have a little bit of the Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas element to it.

“Not an honest bone in this body, any more.  Including yours.  Okay.  I do.  But I think it’s goinna be at least a hundred to get there.”  He didn’t understand.  Lucy should have zero reason for blowing off her palimony case by hopping on a budget flight with a fired repro clerk.  He had thought this would have been before the point at which people started doing things like that.   “California is a community property state,” he joked nervously.  “I pick up half your wardrobe.  Can I wear those pants some time?  All you get is the other ten grams of coke I swiped from your boyfriend and a fifty-percent interest in my Station Wagon.”

“I do,”  Lucy repeated, as if closing a trap, and aside from not realizing at this point what all shit that was going to imply in the future, Dennis became instantly aware that marriage might not be the most financially rewarding decision he had ever tried to make.  “Well, then, babe, don’t plan on quitting your day job just yet,”  he said vengefully.  Twenty years later, when people finally did quit their day jobs, well, that was another story.

“See, I’m hung up on you, too,”  Lucy said.  And say what you want about co-dependency, which at this point wasn’t even a word, there had to be a lot of love between them, unless, as Dennis realized at some point, she was just trying to find a co-conspirator to help her get revenge on her so-called husband.

Chapter 8        Slut Mode

“I grew up in Mountain View, right across the line…there,”  Lucy said, her finger a compass needle pointing south.  She rotated away from Dennis, staring out the scratched windshield as he turned into the registration circle of Rickey’s Hyatt House.  “Those houses behind the San Antonio Mall, see?  Sears!  The Sears building.  You can’t believe how important that store was in my life.  And that’s East MV Fucking High, the so-called school I graduated from.”

“You know what?  You’re probably the first person I’ve told the truth to,”  Lucy said.  About what?   Oh, about her past.  “That’s why I need you to come with me to the reuninion.  Please, Darling?”  Dennis had proposed Las Vegas, but for some reason Lucy insisted on a dragging him on her trip down memory lane.  It was a couple of weeks after he had rammed her the first time.  The hotel they had checked into was a fairly swank place on El Camino, but certainly a poor second choice of location for an adulterous escapade.  “It’s my high school reunion.  My goddammed thirtieth,”  Lucy said, looking old.

“Why bother going back?  It seems like you don’t have very good memories.”  Dennis had always believed in moving on, himself.  At this point you would say that was why he was in California in fact, because for shits sake sure there had been no fucking future in Montana.    “Didn’t you say your folks lived in Salt Lake City or something?”

“Weren’t you listening to me?  That was just a story I tell people.  They’re both still here.”  Lucy continued to point, her arm extended through the window of the Vista Cruiser.  The bright western light swept across the woman’s weary, artificial smile.   It was strange to think of Lucy as having ever been a high school kid, when he had always thought of her as some kind of sophisticate, in the know, you know.

Not that they weren’t earning style points now.  Lucy had on a nice camel skirt, split at the knee, with an open white blouse and a spotted rayon scarf.  Dennis had been given a little fashion advice in advance—he wore a sweater over a collared shirt, a woven leather belt, light slacks.

“That’s right.  I was raised up right, here in Mountain View,”  Lucy said sarcastically.  “A model of rectitude and expectations.  I guess you could say that at some point I rebelled from all that.”  Even so, it was amazing to Dennis.  All around him the hotel lobby seemed populated with broad blondes just like Lucy, each aimed in her own bland, cynical direction, all apparently walking away from him in high-heeled disdain.  “Why go back,  Darlin’?   Because they owe me.” 

To Dennis, it really wasn’t clear whether she had said owe or own, and if it was owe, what was the debt she needed to collect.  “Who does?  Your parents?”

“Oh, fuck, no.”  Lucy took a long drink of vodka from the bottle of Smirnoff in the room’s honor bar, a little bit dribbling off her chin and running provocatively into her open blouse.  “My so-called classmates.  The Mod Squad.  I’ll introduce you.  Darlin’ we’re going to have such a good time!”

“I don’t know why I’m even here,”  Dennis groused sullenly.  “I hate the valley.  I hate fancy hotels.  Plus I can’t afford it, having just lost my fucking job.”

“Oh, now baby, don’t worry.  We’ll get you your job back.  Bobby will do anything I say.  Anyway, just think of this as like a little vacation, our honeymoon.”  Lucy pulled herself against him, turned her cheek to Dennis’s dry lips.  Honeymoon?  He had to admit that at this point he did feel a little bit over-committed.

It was always summertime in Mountain View.  The courtyard at Rickey’s Hyatt house hotel had some palm trees and the weather was hot and dry as usual.  Lucy and him had taken a room on the third level above the swimming pool, checking in early, mid afternoon before the reunion.  Rickey’s was only called a hotel because it charged $60 a night, offered valet parking, a “conference center.”  But it had cable and an ice machine, including a dirty movie channel, which at that point was pretty high tech.  Dennis barefooted back to the room in his skivs with a couple of the square beige plastic ice buckets.  Lucy seemed fixated on the small store of liquor that had accompanied the refrigerator in their room—after the two Heinekens Dennis lost interest, thinking instead of the bulky package with the cocaine he had placed in Lucy’s suitcase for safekeeping, reasoning that since she already had his clothes and underwear it was all the same thing.  At least that was what he would say.

It was good to unwind.  Lucy stood meditatively on the deck overlooking the pool, smoking her long brown cigarettes while Dennis poured her another drink, in the process taking proper possession of his dope again.  See, at this point this was like a dream, though when you thought about it, so was most of the rest of life.

Lucy was on the phone, checking the reservations.  “What time is the reception?  6:30?  Okay, thank you very much, Darlin’, we’ll see you all there.”  She hung up and popped open the suitcases Dennis had put on the bed.  “Is there an iron in this room?”  she asked.

"What are you going to wear, Dennis?" She took off her blouse and tossed it to the floor, unhooking a faded blue bra.

"Pair of raggedy gym shorts and a sweatshirt,"  he answered, "You are so nuts on this dressing up thing.  The reunion doesn’t start for four hours, I heard you say so yourself."  With her shoes and shirt off she seemed flat-footed and topheavy, shockingly graceless.  Her chesty, cheesy intimate air really knocked Dennis out.  It was weird the way Lucy could care so much about outward appearances and yet be so unconcerned about his presence.  “Why worry about me?  No one will be looking.  You’re the big actress here.”

“I want you to look good, that’s all.”  Lucy came toward Dennis, pressing him back against the edge of the big bed.  “You can bet my old girlfriends Mary and Mary will be paying attention.  Come on, baby.  I’ll help you.”  He voice was filthy, wheedling, whorish.

At this point Dennis was beginning to feel pretty edgy anyway and now it seemed he was doomed to another exhibition of the woman’s throating skills or her jackhammer lapdance technique.  Dennis had found Lucy’s talents impressive, but embarrassing somehow.  What was she after?

“Why don’t you go iron a shirt or something.  Jesus, calm down, would you?  I have my own ideas about having fun too.  Maybe one of these times I could be on top even, do you think?”  At this point the thrill of being thought an edible sexual prey was wearing off.  Lucy shrugged the rebuff away, but looked doubtful.

“Sure, baby, I guess so.”

“I’m going to get high.  You’re welcome to join me.”  Dennis produced the flat metal tin and took off the rubber band.

“Don’t get too wasted.  I’m going to need you later.”  After a final pause she withdrew, her nippled boobs swinging away, now unoffered fruit.

“Sooner or later, you’re going to have to take a little toot with me,”  Dennis said after her. 

“Sure, baby.  Maybe later.”  Lucy retired to the bathroom, leaving the door ajar.   “Don’t take too much.  Remember, Bobby might buy that stuff back.”  Dennis pried open the lid of the tin.

The first time he had looked at it, he had thought maybe a couple of ounces, maybe a half pound, because he was so used to buying weed in that quantity.  But the power powder was dense.  There was a great slug of it, only slightly diminished by the lines he and Leanne and Rod had taken.   It was no wonder losing it had Pearson and Toomey a little excited.

Recalling what Rod had told him about his experiences in Vietnam, Dennis had swiped an aluminum coffee spoon from Antonio’s Nut house.  “And then heat it up with a lighter until it just starts to steam.  The sign of steam.”  Rod had repeated, making the gesture of the flicked bic and the steady spoon.  Free-basing, he had called it.  Dennis crumbled off a big snowflake into the spoon and heated the cocaine until it slumped into a vaporous liquid, sucking the narcotic fumes through his lips.  That was all she wrote.  The last thing he was aware of was a massive iron spike driven into his chest.  Sudden death experience, and he clocked out and back in suddenly and suddenly he was two feet taller looking down, and there was hot slime dribbling all over the front of him.

“Huuuhhh,” he moaned, picking up the spilled spoon and discovering it could burn twice.  At this point it must have been the sound of the dropped utensils that brought Lucy back in.  “Are you okay, Dennis?”  she asked with concern.  Holy crap, was he okay?

“Sure, I’m, uh, okay…” he said, feeling weirdly guilty for being so high all of a sudden.  He tried to get up and clean himself off but sat back down as the tracers burst his vision into a million moving shards.  This was great!

“Really?”  Lucy came back into the room in another stage of undress, her skirt now gone, crinkled white underpants trapped between brown pantyhose and her fleshy hips.  “Because I’ve decided to let you be on top now.”

“That’s mighty open-minded of you, Lucy,”  he countered as manfully as he could.  “Well, I have that toot right here waiting.  Think it might slow you up a little.  You need to relax and enjoy things, lady.”  At this point, he could see her weighing the truth of it, finally nodding.  The depths to which drugs or nymphomania could take you.  You had to think though, that if it wasn’t love for sure they were on pretty much the same wavelength most of the time.  Dennis shoveled another spoonful of the coke, stirring the flaky powder for her inspection. 

“Sure, fine,” she said.  “Let’s do it.”

At this point it really shouldn’t have been any kind of surprise, or maybe that was the point, at any point, it was a new surprise for everyone that tried it.  Dennis executed the ritual, the steam rising from the blackened surface of the spoon.  “Breathe this in, Darlin’”  he mimicked.

Well, at this point maybe it was the drinks Lucy had had or something.  Lucy leaned toward his upraised hands, inhaling, and then her head snapped away and flopped loosely to the side.  It was funny to watch it happen to someone else.  But she didn’t come right back the way that Dennis had.  Instead her eyes rolled and she slumped unconscious to the bed.

“Lucy, Lucy!  You all right?”  he laughed.  She didn’t answer.  Her high cheeks were pasty and slack, her painted lips the only color left in her face.  Dennis realized he had never seen her asleep before.  He reached to check her breathing.  Still there.

At this point it was years before the term “date rape” was invented, though pretty much everybody had some experience with fucking drunk chicks.  Dennis moved fast, turning Lucy over and laying her down, rolling her pantyhose and underwear down over wide hips.  Lucy’s big ass was warm to the touch, soft and jiggly, shot with lines of butter.  Dennis freed the nylon garments from the woman’s ankles so that he could get inside, jamming a pillow beneath her stomach to position her comatose cunny. 

This might not have been what Lucy meant when she said she would let him be on top, but it was definitely still worth doing.  Dennis poked into her furry fundaments, making a hole.  Lucy’s circle widened.  Not that he was into necrophilia, but it was nice to have the run of the house for once.

Standing in front of the third floor elevator door Lucy and Dennis looked each other over one last time before bursting out laughing one last time, but actually, Lucy was getting twitchy as she contemplated her entrance.  “Here,”  she said, wiping lipstick from his cheek with a piece of sleeve.  “Here you go, darling.  Come on, let’s get serious now, darling, please.  Please.”   At this point, the elevator doors separated, revealing another couple, a small Pakistani woman, dark as a bruise, dressed in a tan jumper, her brown legs and her brown face sparkled with glitter. The male’s head was hairless and wearing a worried look.

“Lucy?  Oh my God!”  The woman whistled in mock surprise.  “Is it really you?  I heard your folks both died in that horrible fire.  Are you all right?”

“Die?”  Lucy answered ambiguously.  “Where did you come up with that?  And miss the reunion?  You’ve got to be kidding, Sofie!  Bob, this is Sofie, my Best Friend.”

Dennis was supposed to impersonate Pearson, he gathered.   Lucy seemed amused by her friend’s confusion, already swirling the evening away into new dimensions of dishonesty.   At this point, when he thought about it, although he didn’t happen to think about it at the time, it seemed to Dennis that this wasn’t right.  Of the women he knew, it was Leanne, not Lucy whose parents had burned up, wasn’t it?   Hadn’t Lucy said her folks still lived here?

In the lobby they got name tags, which simplified things a little, but left open questions.  The little woman was Sofia Moore, her husband Spence, or something like that, it was hard to read the scrawl of magic marker.  The four of them bustled in, the two men making an instinctive rush for the no-host bar.  “Let us buy you one,”  Dennis suggested to the man beside him, in part to get Lucy’s order in first.  She trailed behind him, glowering malevolently, making him nervous.

“Thanks.”  Spence was in his forties, a little flabbier than he should have been, but he seemed like an okay guy who wore an actual pin-striped blue suit well, the pants secured by patterned suspenders, a bold stroke of individuality.  He had candy colored hair and an edged beard.  He pulled down a Johnny Walker, white wine for his wife.   Behind them, vodka tonic in hand, Dennis heard Lucy Snyder continue her schemes.

“Bobby says that after we sell the summer house that maybe we should just take that time off we’ve always been talking about.  Bob works so hard.”

“Just beer, for me,”  Dennis told the girl at the bar cautiously.  Her hotel name plaque read “jeannie.”  He looked down at himself, at the sticky badge Lucy had pasted over his heart.  “BOB”, the inverted sign read, identical in its palindromic form to its reflection.  Could looking down on yourself really be the same as seeing your image in a mirror?  Dennis rallied, sticking out his hand.  Spence’s palm was soft and moist, cold from the glass. “What’s your line of business?”  he asked Spence as casually as he could.  Hopefully Supreme Court Justice or something like that.

“I sell telephone switches for Rolm Corporation.  TeleCommunications.  That’s where Sofie works too.”  Spence’s composure cracked and he sobbed suddenly:  “Bob, you should know that I just want to forget about it.  You know, what happened with Lucy.  I’m sure she feels the same way.”

Apparently, unbeknownst to him, the stakes had been raised to those of thermofuckingnuclear war.  Not that at this point you couldn’t have predicted that some sort of dirty bomb might have gone off a couple of times during the course of human history or the senior year of high school.   But really, who cared about that old shit?

“I’m sure she does.  Well, that was a long time ago.”

“Th>|<at’s funny,” the man hiccupped.   “It seems like it.  Anyway, I just wanted you to know that I never meant to mess things up for you and Lucy.  It’s a relief to see you here together tonight.  And to hear that her folks are >|< okay after all.  Gosh, >|<, I thought Sofie said you teach at Stanford, Bob.  I thought you would have had to be older, more >|< our age.  You know, I’m really, really sorry.”

“Well, you know, some of us got a little quicker start on life.  Don’t sweat it, Spence.  These things happen.”

Spence hiccupped again.  “Sofie doesn’t know.”

At this point, though, fuck, you had to wonder why this numbnut thought you owed him anything anyway.  Spence’s bearded face hung before him, bobbing pathetically.  Is there some sick resemblance she sees between this guy and me?  Or between me and “Bobby”?  She’s so wrong.

“Your secret’s safe with me,”  Dennis growled.  “Needless to say, if you’re worried about your wife finding out, you really ought to talk to someone that gives a shit.  Lucy, for instance.”

The entire Class Reunion thing had Lucy in her element, happily posing, posturing, and bantering, because it mattered, with the kids that counted.  She had put on a little black dress, sort of a classic choice in evening wear for a returning blonde.  It was a mini kind of thing, just a tad longer than her pubes and only a tiny bit taller than her tits.

“This old thing?  Thanks.  I don’t like to talk about it, though,”  Lucy was lying to a group of her former classmates,  “I had to buy it for the funeral, you know.  Didn’t you hear about my parents’ accident?”  Dennis watched her work in exasperated admiration, picking up a good buzz from the bar and her outrageous story.   Despite his initial reservations he was kind of getting into the spirit of self-invention, enjoying and enlarging on being Bob Pearson.  At this point it was years before “identity theft” became such a big deal.  In those days you could pretty much say whatever you wanted, and if someone knew otherwise, well, fuck it, what could they do.  Really, it wasn’t turning out to be too bad of a party.

“Cruise missles, spy satellites, that kind of thing,” he told a trio of thirty-eight year old corporate functionaries and city workers, brushing off the teary-eyed Spence.  They were Barry, Jim, and Mark, nice guys with better senses of humor.  “Any of you guys care to smoke a doob?”

It was fun to see their expressions as he passed around a couple of jays outside.  This guy was part of the military industrial complex?  Their military industrial complex?  “Speaking of drugs, one of the things the NSA is doing is color scans, spectrometric scans from space,”  he said expansively,  “It turns out we can hone in on the individual poppy fields in Afghanistan by their spectral signature.  Our guys can tell you the day a crop is ready for harvesting, probably better than the farmers can.”

Barry, the cat who worked for the City of Mountain View spoke up.  “I see.  And then we interdict the process when they begin to move the heroin to market.  Are the pictures good enough to see the trucks?  Given that, the rest is trivial.”  What did he say he was?  A lawyer?  Jesus.  From his words you would have thought a programmer.

“Very astute, my young friend.  They are indeed.  Ever see the movie “Blow-up”?  All the images are digitized, but they’re slices of some of the finest optics ever engineered.  Take away atmospheric haze and glare and we can easily resolve objects as small as one meter.  Not quite your license plate, but getting there.  Suffice it to say, if the boogers are big enough, we’re gonna catch you picking your nose.” 

Dennis was thrilled and alarmed at how easily he had absorbed Bob Pearson’s technical evangelist style.  Everything was true, unless the sky happened to be sort of hazy or you had wiped the snot off on the back of your knee.  It was all crap and jargon.

It played so well with this Silicon Valley crowd, though.  At this point, just to generalize, the region had become a fountainhead, a telepathic hive buzzing with the collective libertarian thoughts of a generation and a half of slide-rule wielding can-do aerospace engineers whose mechanistic views could be summed up by the mantra “It’s trivial.  All you gotta do is…”, but whose consequence had been lost in middle-aged fatigue.   

Each of the trivial measures they proposed ended up depending on some episodic malthusian extinction of the unfit, which contributed to a certain sangfroid that Dennis himself bought into and knew he could call on.   At this point these old guys were still keeping up. 

“Here’s the view from space, though,” he continued.  “Satellite imaging hasn’t been turned on yet in Northern California or Columbia.  That was some good Humboldt bud of which you just partook.  Now check this out, dudes.  Pure snow from the Andes.”  No actual responsibility was accepted, the consequence of any mortal action in the face of the natural rules of existence also seen as “trivial”.

“Dudes.”  Pearson never failed to use the term wrong but Dennis had nailed it and he knew it, just as much as he had nailed the political climate.  There was actually a fairly large proportion of morons in the valley.  He grinned at Kevin, the middle manager, offering him the rolled up hundred.

“How about it, Kevin?”  Kevin smiled goofily, sucked up a strong line, and sat back, waiting for it to happen.  A second later, it did, stabbing his heart muscle sharp as a spike.  Kevin said a word and collapsed as his center disappeared.

“Kevin?”  Someone said a while later.  “That must be good dope.  Kevin?”

“Kevin?”

Kevin was dead for sure, that last word his Om.  And, as though breathing his essence, Lucy stepped into the courtyard.

“I knew what I’d find out here!” she hooted brassily, not knowing.  At this point this was sort of Lucy’s lookout, Dennis thought.

“Somebody better call Nine-One-One.  Let’s give this man some air.”  Miraculously, the crowd of guys whirled away, though most of them probably were headed for the phone, and one or more of them remained, wavering uncertainly.

“Kevin.  Kevin.  Snap out of it, buddy.”  Dennis pinched the man’s flabby cheek as he lay.  Was it good or bad that the color didn’t change?

“Little too much for him,” he told Lucy.  She seemed horrified, sucking in a scream, her painted fingernails pressed back into her palms, her thumbs pointing out from her hips.  Her short spangled dress made her seem suddenly vulnerable.  “Why don’t you go to the ladies room, wash your face,” he suggested. 

He had to get out of there, too.  Fuck Kevin and his dying ways.  “Do you know Artificial Respiration or anything?”  He asked the guy who hadn’t left, Barry.  “Do it, then!”  Cops would be there any time.  Without moving fast he recovered his stash, making sure no roaches or paraphernalia were left around.

The reunion had gone quiet almost right away.  Dennis headed up to the bar.  “Shit.  Give me a vodka over with lemon, would you?  That poor guy’s really wiped out!”

“What happened?”  The girl, “jeannie,” was about twenty-five, Leanne’s age, and almost the same name in a weird way, wide-eyed at the idea of any serious event, she having been hired to sling free liquor for some completely unimportant reunion, and now this.

“Jesus.  This guy was out in the courtyard smoking up when someone offered him some of that cocaine and the poor guy just ate it.”

“I read that that could happen to you with that stuff.  It’s not as cool as they say.”  She was short, wearing black stretch polyester pants and a ruffled white blouse.   Dennis smiled.

In due course Lucy emerged from the bathroom.  “Another voddy for my wife, please, jeannie.”  Dennis held up a ten.  “Thank you very much.”

“Sure, mister, thanks.  Ohh.”  Suddenly, an ambulance had arrived, its lights pulsing red and white though the opening to the hotel lobby.  A moment later a coveralled paramedic pounded in through the double glass doors, hesitating impatiently as the sliding glass door trundled automatically to the side.

It was Rod.  Leanne’s dumbass ex-boyfriend was always showing up unexpectedly these days.  It was beginning to irritate Dennis, even though he liked the guy, really.  The vet had turned out to really have a liking for the power-powder Dennis had liberated from Bob Pearson, and the money, which Rod seemed to have plenty of, from his job with the ambulance, was keeping Dennis going now that he was unemployed.  But shit.

Rod nodded as he recognized Dennis, staring openly at Lucy, who ignored him, then strode quickly toward the courtyard, where a group of guests clustered around the still body.

Lucy took the outstretched drink and poured it down, obviously at this point already smashed.  “What was his name?  Kelvin?”

“Kevin, I think,”  Dennis said.  What the fuck?

Lucy turned to face the commotion in the hotel courtyard, tugging the neckline of her black dress askew.    “Kevin??” she quavered experimentally.  “Kevin?”,  gaining speed as she returned to the outdoor area.

“Oh, oh.  Better go monitor this,”  Dennis told the girl, smiling.  “I shall return.”

Outside Lucy was already in tears.  “Kevin, Kevin, Kevin,” she moaned.  Somehow she had gotten herself inside the circle of spectators watching as Rod, on his knees, hulked over the ex-graduate’s slumped body.  Dennis realized his hands were tight, his brain finally reacting the way it should.  Maybe there was something Rod could do, he hoped.

Expertly, Rod checked the victim’s breath, pulse, pried open his mouth.   Then he turned to the large box he had brought from the ambulance, muttering out loud.  “Gotta see if we can shock this guy.”  With one Frankensteinian motion he snapped the locks and brought out two plastic handled things trailing curled wires.

Whamm.  Whamm.  The sound was soul-less, electricity against mere meat, not even much lift to the legs, as Rod said at some point, maybe not then.  “Obvious overdose,” he had said.  Dennis shrank back from the corpse.

Rod looked up.  “Guy’s toast,”  he said, with an authority Dennis admired.  “Sorry.”  At this point it was still shocking to think that a paramedic might deliver this final verdict, but somehow even the cops seemed to be okay with that.

“Give me a call tonight,”  Rod said out of the corner of his mouth as he wrapped up his wires, “Got some business for you.”  Which Dennis really didn’t appreciate.

The cops.  There were two of them, a Car 54 act.  Dennis curled his lip behind his cocktail glass.  His modus operandi always was to brazen it out, only it didn’t always work, he recently having ignored an order to appear after blowing a joint in Peavey Park.  He tried to look past the uniforms in case either turned out to be the little prick who had jogged by him and produced a badge from the pocket of his sweatpants.   More nametags.  One of the pigs, the one that looked a lot like Dennis’s brother Allen, was “Morgan,”  the other “Green”.  Doug Green?  Dennis thought, thinking of the false name he had given the Mercury News reporter the day before.

The fact was, none of his encounters with police had ever gone right, so at this point he was visited with a kind of dream-dread in which he could only wait for the inevitable blow-up.  Like when his car had been pulled over by Suzie-Q’s father, the Montana Highway Patrol officer.  Like getting shoved around by the Hollywood detectives in Los Angeles (dope again).  Even going way back to grade school, when they had had to call the fuzz on him a couple of times.

But maybe Lucy was showing him a different way.  Her straw-blond coiffure was artfully distressed, her bare shoulders quivering in the blue uniformed policemen’s protective zone as she looked back at Dennis in sly delight.  Apparently if you were a female the same rules didn’t always apply.  Dennis stared back at Lucy with hardened envy.

He could imagine her triumphant chatter already--Well, I mean, sure I was a little freaked out to see the dead guy.   It doesn’t speak well for the occasion, as my mother always said.  Rest her soul, even if the bitch ain’t dead yet.  But it wasn’t like I’m happy that the guy has eaten shit, although from the look of him, it was going to happen sooner or later anyway.  You know, everybody dies.  You just can’t waste time worrying about it.

“It’s OK, Ma’am,”  the cop was soothing Lucy softly.  Although how could it be, if you really gave a crap about poor dead Kevin.  Dennis looked back down.  Kevin seemed to be bloating already, changing color from pink to green.  You know, Dennis knew he shouldn’t be feeling anything, but you had to feel for the guy, didn’t you.  How long was it before you displayed rigor mortis? 

He just wondered what they might do.  Whether they were going to talk to everybody or if he should blow.  He didn’t see the cops stringing up ribbon or setting up tables or anything.  He should probably just stick with it, go with the crowd, until he ended up in a gas chamber, or something.   When you put it like that, he needed a drink.

He wasn’t even officially here, having signed in as “Bob Pearson”,  not “Dennis Smith”, but you had to wonder which was worse, leaving, and getting Bobby listed as an absentee, or telling them some bullshit and getting things the fuck over with.

“Give me another beer, would you, jeannie?  Do you have any of that ‘steam’ beer?  Okay, fine, just a bud, please.”

He had thought he had figured out that the key to her pleasure lay in these lies and dissatisfictions she had been telling about her past, her parents, whatever it was that had happened to make her unhappy self.   But now he finally saw Lucy in a larger light, the top bill actress on her own stage, a world from which he was excluded.

“Do you smoke up?” he asked the young bartendress, looking around.  “I bet there’s some place back by the dumpster we could go.”  At least they would be a little further away from the Palo Alto police.

She was really sweet and he figured he could have fucked her, but he knew it was only because she reminded him of Leanne, young, naïve, pretty good-looking.  Tease a kiss or two from her, anyway?  No.

“Have you lived in the valley long?”

“Not really.  I moved up from Southern California two years ago.  You know where Orange County is?”

Dennis had been to Disneyland, sure.  His old college buddy had lived in Anaheim.  “Sure,” he repeated.  “Nice place.  California sun.”

That was all that happened.  They walked back into the hotel with a pleasant high.  Oh yeah.  The dead guy.  About six or eight of the classmates were milling around the bar when they got back, another guy in a white shirt and no tie serving up free drinks.

“Did you know him?”  Sure.  I had him in Zimmerman’s World History class.  Remember?”  “Kevin used to be such a funny guy.”  “Is he dead?  I didn’t hear.”  “Listen, honey, if you’re alive they turn on the siren.  They don’t put you in those black bags if you’re still kicking.”

“Where have you been?” the bartender snarled angrily to jeannie out of the side of his mouth.  The girl immediately freaked out, of course.

“I’m sorry, Jerry.  I had to go to the bathroom.”

“The fuck you do.  You reek.  I told ManPower—“No Stoners.”  Hit the road, Jeannie.  Felicia can sign your timecard.”

“jeannie” gifted Dennis with a last, wounded, uncapitalized look and was gone, another casualty.  “Hey.  Could I get another vodka tonic for my wife?”

“Just vodka over,”  Lucy put in.  She leaned against the bar for support, sneering stupidly, the withdrawal of her role removing her purpose as well.  “Bitch deserved to walk.”

You know, it’s times like this that make you wish that smacking them was still in style, because, not because of equality and that shit, because Dennis really bought into that, but just for being evil.    Sometimes you could literally see Lucy’s head revolve on her pretty neck.  At least it would after a good slapping.  She smirked again, daring him.

“I was asking her how to get through the back to check on our car, darling.  Which she did.   Excuse me, sir.  It was I who was smoking weed earlier, not your worker.  She just gave me directions.”

“I’ll bet she gave you directions,”  Lucy said.  “You always were the obedient type.”

“As if you’d know.”  Remembering his vicious knowledge of her unconscious carnals a few hours before with a flush of justification.  What the fuck did that mean.  Talking about how you got me to bang your crusty old ass at your husband’s party and get myself fired?  Get over it. 

The two cops had come into the bar area, mingling with the members of the shattered reunion.  The same one that had been consoling her before headed for Lucy again, which made Dennis mad too.  “By the way, nice performance in there.”  What if I did get a little something from the girl out back?

“Can we ask you a few questions, Ma’am?” the cop named Morgan bore in, a small notebook open in his hand.  Believe it or not, there have been times in our country when people didn’t bother to use these kind of stupid terms like “sir” and “ma’am”.  The cop’s words sounded stilted and phony.  He obviously had something down his pants for this mother-old blonde.  Woman in tears and that kind of crap.

“Forget it,”  Dennis accused.  “Lucy didn’t even know the poor guy.  She had to ask me what his name was.  She’s nothing but a used up old drama queen.”

“Who are you, sir?  Did you know the deceased?”  It was happening again.  “It appears that drugs may have been involved.  Would you know anything about that, sir?” 

“Uhh-uhh.”

“Because, sir, the deceased smelled a little bit of marijuana.  As though he might have been smoking it recently.  And in my professional opinion you may be under a similar influence.  You wouldn’t have any more of that wacky-tabaccy on you, would you?   You didn’t see what happened, did you?”

At this point, what Dennis had already learned from Lucy was that there was never any clear-cut situation that could not be complicated out of control for any number of reasons, none of which had to have anything to do with logic or reality.

“Kelvin, you know, Kelvin had all these drugs.  I don’t know where he got them.  We hadn’t seen the guy for what, three or four years, right, Lucy?”

“I’ve seen him since then, officer.”  Lucy contradicted.  Dennis swelled back to life as he sensed her amusement at his lie.  “Poor Kevin!”  Lucy was taking them into full slut mode now, sprawling back against the bar, air and the cop’s eyes wafting up the bottom of her short black dress.  Despite what she might be saying.

“You told me you were shopping!”  Dennis accused.  “So that’s where you’ve been on Wednesday nights!   I knew it!” 

“Oh, yeah, I was shopping.”  Lucy affirmed.  “Lot of bargains out there, used goods, mostly.  Hi, Sophie.”  Dennis looked around his shoulder.  Lucy’s diminutive classmate was more darkly furious than ever, her brown eyes glittering from her scowling face.  Behind her, gulping his fist, was her husband, Spence or whatever the fuck his name was.

“Wednesday’s bowling night, you know,”  Lucy admitted to the police officer, giving the hapless salesman an exaggerated wink.  “Oops.  Oops.  Giving away my secrets.  You can’t bust me for being a nympho, can you, Sophie?”

“I don’t know about that, ma’am.  You have a right to remain silent.  You seem to be embarrassing folks.  Did the deceased ever mention illegal drugs to you?”

“Only when he had any.  Kevin was such a generous guy.  It’s so sad.”

In a better world, you know, back in the seventies or whatever, Dennis understood that this sort of scene was supposed to end with a pornflick ménage-a-cinq or six, with the cop still wearing his hat and gun.  But it hardly seemed like anyone was into it, Sophie’s small body stiff with anger,  Spence’s large one limp and unconnected, his fat face shiny and red.  “Are there any more questions, officer?  I’d better take my wife home.”

Think about having Lucy finally tell what really happened with her parents.

Lucy:  my ass hurts.

The next week is difficult.  Lucy claims to be negotiating with Toomey to buy back the dope but it isn’t happening.  Meanwhile the stash is getting a bit smaller.  Dennis is actually living in the Vista Cruiser at this point, parked on the streets of Palo Alto, and now Rod has begun shadowing him.  “Got a spoon?”  Dennis is crazily jealous, believes that Lucy would skedaddle back to Pearson in a minute if she could.  Meanwhile he also hears through Rod that Leanne and the Vice President have become a regular thing.  “I thought you said you had her,”  he complains to Dennis.  “I thought I did,” he answers, looking down at his fat belly and realizing how out of shape he is.

Dennis goes for a run up the Stanford hill, thinking of mortality.  He’s living with Leanne at this point.  “At this point, he was living with Leanne, but screwing Lucy in the regular way every night after work, when Leanne was at her job.  Lucy liked to go to the pick-up bars.   There were a few of them in the valley, not nearly as many as you would think, but we know which was her favorite.  The Whomp-whomp Room, the Brass Rail.  Jesus.  It was fun, by now Lucy was taking a toot pretty often and Dennis had her wrapped.  Lucy had an amazing inventiveness that was sharpened to even a bitchier extent by the drug.  Dennis was drinking Calistoga water at this point and he was at the top of his form, exercising every day.

One night after some Dennis took Lucy to a fancy French Restaurant he had heard about.  They had started going out formally, cementing their emerging relationship as consenting adults, something cold, a bit like ballroom dancers.  Dennis held the door of Chez Ariane for Lucy, haute cuisine in an electric blue mini-skirted suit, her legs encased in the seamed fishnet black silk of a streetwalker, and smiled as he saw the maitre’d melt down.

“It’s Mr. Smith,”  Dennis said, as always, daring anyone to make a remark.  “We’re expecting another gentleman.  Has he arrived?”  It had been Dennis’ dear dad who had taught him to talk with this exaggeration of politeness.  The bloody backstabber.

“Monsieur Coughlin?  Oui, oui.”  The man gestured to the bar, where the young reporter stood with a drink.  His face warmed as Lucy approached.

“Mr. Jones, a.k.a. Mr. Smith,”  Frank Coughlin greeted them, reminding Dennis of the fake name he had given at the party in San Francisco those weeks before..

“My real name is Smith,”  Dennis said.  “You remember Lucy.”

Ariane was the name of the French commercial space program at that time, Coughlin reminded them in a whisper, gesturing at the figure of the chef through the open counter of a flame brightened kitchen.  “Remember last spring?  The very first launch blew up in the upper atmosphere.  Fifteen million dollars.  Do yourself a favor and don’t mention that fact to the owner.”

“What?  He lost his fortune and now he’s cooking in a French bistro in Palo Alto?”

Coughlin laughed.  “Not quite.  But the project had a hefty government subsidy, and as the booster fell out of the sky, so did our friend fall from favor with the post-Pompidou government.”

Dennis thought about it.  There was still something wrong with the timing.  “Oh, never mind,”  he said.  “Is that why you called me?  To share Silicon Valley gossip?”

“Yes, actually.  I was impressed by that list of spook stuff you rattled off to me in your boss’s presence the other night.  You guys are plugged in.”

“That’s right,”  Lucy said.  She had ordered a big vodka drink with a slice of lemon and she looked over it at him appraisingly.  “I’ve been working aerospace alley for twenty years, had a top secret for half that time.”

“Lockheed?”

“Sure.  General Electric.  Westinghouse.  I came up the hill to PCI in 1971.”

“Wow.  So you’ve seen it all.”  Francis Coughlin stared candidly into Lucy’s open shirt.

“I’ve seen enough.”

“Escargot?”  Dennis didn’t want to interrupt a tender moment, but he was getting hungry.

“Ah, Oui,”  Francis Coughlin said, passably.  “And let me introduce you to the specialty of the house,  the famous ‘Firewheel.’”    He shrugged.  “The Ariane booster failed in May 1980 with a number of satellites.  The most important of which bore this name.  I’m sure the owner does not appreciate that irony.  Still, the dish is very popular.”

The thing turned out to be a skirt steak with a bunch of vegetables laying on it.  There was some kind of good sauce, though, with a kind of burned, smoky flavor.  “What’s your angle, Frank?”  Dennis asked finally, belching, as the fucking waiter hovered over him with the bottle of wine again.  Lucy smacked him on the knee, whether at being foul or being a ham, or being indiscreet, he wasn’t sure.

“I mean, you asking me here.  Us here.  Certain hints you’ve been giving off.”

“I know that you see me as a mild-mannered reporter,”  Coughlin quoted,  “…but in reality.  I am a reporter,  financial reporter, you remember.  So I knew when a couple of French companies bought in to proxy companies here in Mountain View.  More or less innocent companies, but what they were was dealers, middlemen in the micro market.  I don’t mean computers, I mean 6800s, you know, process control technology, RAM chips, whatever.  They do a lot of business in France of course. “

“So?”

“What this brokerage allows them to do is to provide real-time intelligence of availability information to their owners.  It turns out that the money behind these ventures is a government-sponsored micro consortium.  They’re home-growing big R&D programs and building big fab facilities outside of Paris.”

“I know about 6800s,”  Dennis said, “We use them at PCI.  Process control like you said.  pumping stations, electric power generation farms.  Don’t try to bullshit me.”

“Think I don’t know that?”  Francis Coughlin smiled tensely.  “I have reason to believe that certain people, including possibly the proprietor of this restaurant might pay well for information concerning the state-of-the-art in industrial process control.”

Lucy looked confused.  “What are you guys talking about?”

“It’s the other division,”  Dennis mused.  “Matadero Creek.  That’s where they do all those projects.  Yeah…I’ve got stuff on that.”

Chapter ?

Dennis nursed the Vista Cruiser into San Fran the back way, on 280 where the wide lanes allowed a slow car.  Outside Colma the thing chugged and nearly died.  Dennis floored it and then let the petal flutter, searching the mirrors wildly for overtaking vehicles.  But the engine caught and cycled through, shuddering as it hauled the heavy frame of the station wagon up a long grade, curving past the StoneRidge Mall.

Dennis had scissored out a map of San Fran from the Palo Alto Library, worked out his route with these various decision points.  Mostly relating to the unreliable state of his automobile but also to reinforce the idea that he could change his mind and to give him a chance to recharge his own battery.  Like the stop at the tourist overlook on Crystal Springs Reservoir along 280, where he sneaked a snort of the coke he’d folded in a magazine page, or if there were a lot of police outside the embassy or whatever.   It was hard to know what to predict at this point.

His long hair might have seemed out of place in his former corporate world, but here in Frisco Dennis was hoping that he’d seem normal enough.  No one would think he was suspicious.  At this point, at thirty-one, Dennis was the same five-ten, but a little lighter than he would later become, although he had been getting fatter fast.   His hair was barn-brown, his eyes even darker brown, intense looking when you looked at them in the mirror.  He thought he looked a little like Picasso, except for the glasses, and sometimes wore striped shirts.

At this point Dennis had checked all the telephone books they had in the Library for the name of the Russian, Voloshin or Vuloshen, but he must have spelled it wrong.  At least the man wasn’t listed in San Francisco, or Oakland, or Marin County.  In the end he figured he’d just have to be brazen and take the embassy head-on, like Mission Impossible-style.  There was a photo in a book of the old embassy building, along with the address of the new one.  Dennis scissored that out too.  Maybe if the library’s coin-driven Xerox machines ever worked.  At this point Dennis had complained a couple of times, even offering to fix the fuckers himself, but the dilettantes and volunteers at the main desk couldn’t cope with that.

“Reconnaissance, Equipment, Alertness, Concept, Training.”  R.E.A.C.T.  Dennis didn’t remember where he had picked up the stupid acronym.  Probably some old Soldier of Fortune magazine.  There wasn’t time for much of that now.  In the city he parked and hung out for a couple of minutes before crossing the street to the embassy, which didn’t look anything like the picture.  He tried to imagine where the American spotters would be located and thought he saw one, a guy working up on a nearby roof.  That didn’t make sense, did it?  There were uniformed guards inside the gate.

The thing that Dennis noticed first was the clothes everyone was wearing.  Apparently the dictatorship of the proletariat imposed dress codes as much as a free capitalist society did.  Everyone had on a blue suit or a uniform, the few ladies who were in evidence dressed in matching attire.  As the door closed, Dennis felt like he had stepped inside a training school for airline stewards or something.  At this point the Russians seemed to be committed to some kind of stereotype of the bourgeois.  It was as though when you went to Paris you would put on a beret or wear short leather pants with straps, what did you call them, in Germany.  At this point Dennis had never been out of the country, but the syndrome was obvious.  Or maybe it was just obvious when you were on the receiving end.

“May I be of assistance?”  The speaker was a thin man, about Dennis’ age, with a scrubby moustache and a pinched expression.

“First day covers,”  Dennis explained loudly, looking around.  “I’m a philatelist, a stamp collector.  Someone told me that I could come here to arrange to have the new series of stamps mailed to me when they are released.  I’ll pay, of course.”  He leaned a little closer, confidentially, “Valerie Voloshin, please.”

“Va-lare-ee,”  the functionary corrected immediately, looking bothered by something other than the mispronounciation, maybe the offer of cash.  “I’m not certain that the undersecretary is in, today.  Can I help you in any other way?”

“Just give him this, please.  I’ll wait.”  Dennis had selected one of the best of the technical papers, a complex analysis of underwater sonar-boom deployment.  The doc was a copy, but Dennis, in those days when xerography had been his life, had taken the trouble to duplicate the front and back covers with their Naval Operations Center logo on the official blue cardstock.  Paradigm Control did strategic defensive work with the Navy’s sub-chaser operations as well as its offensive Trident missile stuff.  It didn’t feel as wrong to hand over this kind of thing.  Although at this point Dennis had pretty much put all the morality crap behind him.

He looked the embassy foyer over.  A few yards away a slim dark-haired woman sat in a cabineted desk unit, a small goosenecked lamp illuminating the loose sheaf of lined papers which she studied intently.  Dennis stepped toward her silently, at this point not sure whether he was going to speak, peering at the upside down words.  After a moment more she shook the papers into shape and looked up at him, pulling the sheets toward her blouse.

“Oh, excuse me, just spying,”  he joked, and she actually got it, smiling rather pleasantly as she placed her work face down in a drawer.  She reminded Dennis of Wendy Guerin, for some reason, although at this point he couldn’t really put his finger on it.  Maybe the short hair, or her aura, or something like that.

“Your friend told me to wait,”  he offered.  “I saw you over here.  Do you speak English?”  She was actually really cute, with smooth pale skin and dark eyes.  Just like Wendy, except that Wendy was much shorter and didn’t wear glasses.

“Nyet.  I’m sure Igor will be right back.”  Cold bitch.  Anyway, she was wrong.  Thirty seconds later Valerie Voloshin himself appeared, recognizing Dennis with surprise and striding to meet him with evident agitation.

“How are you, my friend?  Please, come to my office.  I didn’t expect to see you so soon after the other evening.”  Dennis smiled down at the secretary.  She seemed appropriately impressed, her pale skin warming with a faint blush.  Voloshin escorted him through a tall paneled door and down a hallway to a private room. 

“Igor has just passed on to me this very unusual document,”  Voloshin said, his blond eyebrows arched with tension.   “I had no idea that you had access to such material as this.”

At this point a lot had changed and a lot had happened, Dennis had to agree.  He sank into the padded wooden chair that Voloshin indicated, feeling the pregnancy of the moment.  It was really more of an interrogation cell than an office.  A barrier of some kind extended from the sills of both windows to mid-height, permitting only a three inch band of foggy light.  “Bullet-proofing,”  Voloshin remarked, regaining a little of the sang-froid that Dennis had seen before.  “In my own cubicle as well.  We can speak more freely here.”

“I’ve got more,”  Dennis said, getting back to it.   Don’t be “cool,” be cool.  “I’m thinking, ten thousand.”  Which at this point was just a bluff, a blind stab.

“Ten thousand,”  Voloshin repeated.  “I can assume you don’t mean rubles.”  He hesitated slightly,  “I’m sure something of the sort can be arranged.  Ten thousand.”

“What’s the matter?  A strain on the budget?  Because if we’re going to do business I don’t want this to be an issue between us.  You know, kind of a mutual benefit thing, that’s what I have in mind, like me, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”

“You’re a funny man, Mr. Smith,”  Voloshin smiled grimly,  “But I understand that you are no longer employed at Paradigm Control, Incorporated.”

Where had he heard that?  One of those Russian engineers?  Lucy, Dennis thought immediately.  But of course it was Horst, though at this exact point Dennis had no idea of this.

“How did you know that?”  he asked.  It had to be Horst.

“Oh,” Valerie Voloshin answered dangerously, “I’ve been keeping my eyes on you since we met at the reception.  At the least I wanted to be able to contact you for some more of that excellent cocaine.  Columbian, I believe.  No doubt transported via Nicaragua by the fascist military groups there.”

It was funny, maybe his matter-of-fact Russian aura or something, that this point was maybe the first time Dennis had really considered the concept of where the drugs had come from.  Could Pearson actually be involved with the CIA cowboys that flew in the cocaine in their black planes for the Reagan-sponsored Contras?  As soon as the drugs were mentioned, Dennis was immediately on guard.  Voloshin seemed young, still fit, and yet there was kind of hardening of age, a small mole in the center of his cheek, as what, an inerasable stain of sin or toxic pollutants on the skin of his generation.

“You’re a smart guy.  Claiming to be plugged in somehow.  How would you not know this?”  Dennis got the confused idea that the Russian was scolding him in some way.  “How do I know that you aren’t F.B.I?  Could it be even K.G.B.?”  Voloshin’s evident paranoia was alarming in its own way.

“I didn’t come here to be insulted,”  Dennis said, trying to feel his way.  “And I didn’t bring any dope with me.  What do you think I am, crazy?”  Although, at this point…

“Nyet, nyet.  Sorry.  I was up very late last evening with a diplomatic crisis.  I’m sorry, my temper is a little short today.”  It was true.  Voloshin looked much worse in the daylight than he had mingling with Bob Pearson’s techno-glitterati.

“I see where you’re coming from,”  Dennis said.  “But let’s just talk stamps.  It turns out I have a few rare first-day covers for sale.  Maybe I know the widow that owns the album, maybe not.  The question is, do you want these first-day covers or what?”

Voloshin smiled.  “Ah.  Indeed.  You might not suspect this, Mr. Smith, but from a very early age stamp collecting has been a special hobby of mine.   And yet, you’ll understand, I will need to check a catalog, perhaps consult with my wife, before committing to such a large payment.”

Dennis tried not to look disappointed or let his excitement show.  He didn’t know what he had expected, at this point.  At this point it seemed sort of stupid to expect the Russian to pull out a briefcase full of cash or something.  But it didn’t hurt to turn the screw a little.

“Lookit.  I’m not going to get mousetrapped here.  I’m leaving with the document I gave you, and I want those staples put back exactly like they were.  What day is it, Wednesday?  I think on Saturday morning you should meet me at the statue of Father Serra up above 280 with a sack of cash.  I might have some other stamps to show you.”

He figured the less time he spent at the embassy the better.