An unlit Alta Camina cigar jutting from between his teeth, Planck said, ‘Then away we go, us and your pet worm. To record the greatest handless piano player of the century. Hey, I got a joke, Nat. One day Richard Kongrosian is in a pub-trans accident; he's all battered up in the wreck, and when they take the bandages off he's grown hands.'

Planck chuckled. ‘And so he can never play again.'

Lowering her book, Molly said frigidly, ‘Be entertainment, is that what it's going to be on this flight?'

Planck coloured, bent to fumble with his recording gear, checking it automatically. ‘Sorry, Miss Dondoldo,' he said, but he did not sound sorry; he sounded chokingly resentful.

‘Just start up the ‘copter,' Molly said. And returned to reading her book. It was, Nat saw, a banned text by the twentieth-century sociologist C. Wright Mills. Molly Dondoldo, he reflected, no more a Ge than he or Jim Planck, had no anxiety over publicly reading an item forbidden to their class. A remarkable woman in many ways, he thought with admiration.

He said to her, ‘Don't be so harsh, Molly.'

Without glancing up, Molly said, ‘I hate Be wit.'

The ‘copter started; guiding it expertly, Jim Planck soon had them in the air. They moved north, over the coastal highway and the Imperial Valley with its criss-crossed endless miles of canals stretching as far as one could see.

‘It's going to be a cosy flight,' Nat said to Molly. ‘I can make that out already.'

Molly murmured, ‘Don't you have to sprinkle your worm or something? Frankly I'd prefer to be left alone if you don't mind.'

‘What do you know about the personal tragedy in Kongrosian's life?' Nat asked her.

She was silent a moment and then she said, ‘It has something to do with the fallout of the late ‘90s. I think it's his son. But no one knows for certain; I have no inside information, Nat. They say, though, that his son is a monster.'

Once more Nat felt the chill of fear which he had experienced at the idea of visiting Kongrosian's home.

‘Don't let it get you down,' Molly said. ‘After all, there've been so many special births since the fallout of the ‘90s. Don't you see them meandering about all the time? I do. Maybe, though, you prefer not to look.'

She shut her book, marking the place with a dogear. ‘It's the price we pay for our otherwise unblemished lives. My god, Nat, you can adjust to that thing, that Ampek recorder, and that positively gives me the creeps, all shimmering and alive like it is. Perhaps the child's deformation is due to factors derived from his father's Psionic faculty; maybe Kongrosian blames himself, not the fallout. Ask him when you get there.'

‘Ask him!' Nat echoed, appalled.

‘Certainly. Why not?'

‘It's a hell of an idea,' Nat said. And, as frequently in the past in his relations with Molly, it seemed to him that she was an exceptionally harsh and aggressive, almost masculine woman; there was a bluntness in her which did not much appeal to him. And on top of that Molly was far too intellectually oriented; she lacked her father's personal, emotional touch.

‘Why did you want to come on this trip?' he asked her. Certainly not to hear Kongrosian play; that was obvious. Perhaps it had to do with the son, the special child; Molly would be attracted to that. He felt revulsion, but he did not show it; he managed to smile back at her.

‘I enjoy Kongrosian,' Molly said placidly. ‘It would be very gratifying to meet him personally and listen to him play.'

Nat said, ‘But I've heard you say there's no market right now for Psionic versions of Brahms and Schumann.'

‘Aren't you able, Nat, to separate your personal life from company business? My own individual tastes run to Kongrosian's style, but that doesn't mean I think he'll sell. You know, Nat, we've done rather well with all sub-types of folk music for the last few years. I'd tend to say that performers like Kongrosian, however popular they may be at the White House, are anachronisms and we must be highly alert that we don't step backward into economic ruin with them.' She smiled at him, looking lazily for his reaction. ‘I'll tell you another reason I wanted to come. You and I can spend a good deal of time together, tormenting each other. Just you and me, on a trip ... we can stay at a motel in Jenner. Did you think of that?' Nat took a deep, unsteady breath.

Her smile increased. It was as if she were actually laughing at him, he thought. Molly could handle him, make him do what she wanted; they both knew that and it amused her. ‘Do you want to marry me?' Molly asked him. ‘Are your intentions honourable, in the old twentieth-century sense?'

Nat said, ‘Are yours?'

She shrugged. ‘Maybe I like monsters. I like you, Nat, you and your worm-like F-a2 recording machine that you nourish and pamper, like a wife or a pet or both.'

‘I'd do the same for you,' Nat said. All at once he felt Jim Planck watching him and he concentrated on watching the earth below them. It obviously embarrassed Jim, this exchange. Planck was an engineer, a man who worked with his body -- a mere Be as Molly had called him, but a good man. Talk of this sort was tough on Jim.

And, Nat thought, on me. The only one of us who really enjoys it is Molly. And she really does; it's not an affectation.

The autobahn fatigued Chic Strikerock, with its centrally-controlled cars and wheels spinning up invisible runnels in massed procession. In his own individual car he felt as if he were participating in a black-magic ritual -- as if he and the other commuters had put their lives into the hands of a force better left undiscussed. Actually it was a simple homeostatic beam which justified its position by making ceaseless references to all other vehicles and the guide-walls of the road itself, but he was not amused. He sat in his car reading the morning New York Times.

He kept his attention on the newspaper instead of the grinding, never-stopping environment which surrounded him, meditating on an article dealing with a further discovery of unicellular fossils on Ganymede.

Old-time civilization, Chic said to himself. The next layer down, just on the verge of being uncovered by the autoshovels operating in the airless, near-weightless void of midspace, of the big-planet moons.

We're being robbed, he decided. The next layer down will be comic books, contraceptives, empty Coke bottles. But they -- the authorities -- won't tell us. Who wants to find out that the entire solar system has been exposed to Coca Cola over a period of two million years? It was, for him, impossible to imagine a civilization -- of any kind of life form that had not contrived Coke. Otherwise, how could if authentically be called a ‘civilization'? But then he thought, I'm letting my bitterness get the better of me. Maury won't like it; better curb it before I arrive. Bad for business. And we must have business as usual. That's the watchword of the day -- if not of the century. After all, that's really ail that separates me from my younger brother: my ability to face fundamentals and not get lost in the maze of external rituals.

If Vince could do that then he'd be me.

And he'd perhaps have his wife back.

And Vince would have been in on Maury Frauenzimmer's scheme, put by Maury to Sepp von Lessinger in person at a conference of ersatz engineers in New York in 2023, to make use of von Lessinger's time travel experiments to send a psychiatrist back to 1925 to cure Fuhrer Hitler of his paranoia. As a matter of fact, von Lessinger had made some attempt in that direction, apparently, but the Ges kept the results to themselves -- of course. Leave it to the Ges to protect their privileged status, Chic thought to himself. And now von Lessinger was dead.

Something sizzled to the right of him. A commercial, made by Theodorus Nitz, the worst house of all, had attached itself to his car.