I got to sleep at six. Neither Joshua or Ralph had made an appearance. When I finally left the house at 11 for my lunch with Carl, the two of them were still missing.

The one space alien on the entire planet, and I had managed to lose him. I was fired for sure.

"God," Carl said, holding his half-eaten corn dog in front of him. "I love corn dogs. Who would have thought that hog snouts could taste so good if you just rolled them into a tube, shot them up with nitrates and breaded them in corn paste? But there it is. How old are you, Tom?"

"I'm 28," I said.

"When I was your age, Tom, I'd come out here with Susan, my first wife, and we'd get a couple of corn dogs and then we'd walk to the end of the pier and watch the sunset. This was in the late 70s, when the smog was so bad breathing the air constituted a health hazard."

"I remember those days," I said. "I got out of a lot of P.E. classes that way. We had to stay inside and watch filmstrips. I learned all about the California missions that way."

"I don't really miss all the smog, mind you," Carl said, staring off. "But they made for some beautiful sunsets. The late 70s were a horrible period in the history of the universe, Tom — you had stagflation, the American hostages in Iran, and some terrible, terrible apparel. And smog. But the sunsets weren't so bad. It doesn't make up for anything, but it goes to show not everything can be bad all at once."

"I didn't know you had been married more than once," I said. "I had thought Elise was your first wife." Carl's wife Elise was the scariest person you'd ever want to meet — a terrifyingly intelligent trial lawyer who also had a doctorate in psychology. She was thinking of running for Los Angeles District Attorney. From there it would be a short hop to mayor. Between the two of them, Carl and Elise would be running southern California within the decade.

Carl glanced over. "Elise is my second wife. We were married in '88. Susan died in '81. Car accident; some drunk idiot came up the wrong way on an onramp and plowed right into her car. They both died instantly. Pregnant at the time, you know."

"I'm terribly sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to bring up any painful memories."

Carl waved it off. "No reason you should know. I never talk about it and no one ever talks about it around me. One of the advantages of being the sort of boss that scares the Hell out of the subordinates. Susan was a wonderful woman — but so is Elise. I've been very lucky."

"Yes, sir." We ate our corn dogs in silence.

"Come on," Carl said, after he had finished his dog. "I haven't walked on the beach for weeks. We can chat while we walk." We walked off the pier, stopped off at Carl's car to drop off our shoes and socks, and then walked into the sand towards the surf.

"So," he said, when we walked to the water. "How is Joshua doing?"

I swallowed and saw my career flash before my eyes. "He's missing at the moment, Carl," I said.

"Missing? Explain."

"He and Ralph — my neighbor's dog — went out for a walk in the woods yesterday, while I was off seeing Elliot Young. When I got back into the office, Miranda had a message from him, saying that something had happened, and that he'd be late. That's the last I've heard of him. I went looking for him last night, but I didn't find him. I stayed up until six this morning, and he hadn't returned."

"Where would he go?" Carl said. "He's not exactly inconspicuous."

"The Angeles National Forest starts more or less in my backyard," I said. "They went into the woods."

If I were Carl, this would have been the point where I would have fired me. Instead, Carl changed the subject. "I hear you flattened Ben Fleck's nose yesterday."

"I did," I admitted. "He pinched Elliot Young off of me. He's also the 'Lupo Associates insider' in that damned story in The Biz. Punching him seemed the only alternative to breaking his neck. Although I'm feeling guilty about it now. I think I may have broken his nose."

"It's not broken," Carl said. "We had some x-rays done at Cedars Sinai. It's merely 'severely bruised.'"

"Well, that's good," I said. "I mean, relatively speaking."

"It is," Carl agreed. "Be that as it may, Tom, I would prefer in the future that you find some less dramatic way to resolve your issues with Ben. Ben may have been asking for it, but that sort of thing isn't very good for company morale. Also, all things considered, it's drawing unwanted attention to you at the moment."

Carl was referring to the blurb in the Times' "Company Town" column — one of the office spectators had leaked to the paper, and the paper did the legwork and found out that Ben had snaked one of my clients. It also mentioned the article in The Biz as a contributing factor, giving the article credence in the process. For even more fun, the Times had called my office this morning as well, looking for a comment on The Biz and its editorial practices. It felt like the media had pried up a floorboard looking for a bug, and that bug was me. I just wanted to fade back into the darkness.

I laughed. Carl look at me oddly. "What's so funny?" he asked.

"I'm sorry," I said. "I was just thinking about it. This week I was ditched by two of my clients, was labeled insane by a magazine, assaulted a colleague and let an alien walk off into the woods, where he's probably been eaten by a coyote. I'm trying to imagine how this week can get any worse. I don't think it can."

"We could have an earthquake," Carl said.

"An earthquake would be wonderful," I said. "It would give everyone else something to think about. A nice big one, 7 or 8 on the Richter scale. Major structural damage. That'd work."

Carl stood there a moment, seemingly preoccupied. I followed his line of sight down to his toes. He was busily squelching sand through them. After a few seconds of this, he stepped out of his footprints and let the tide wash into them, partially erasing them. Then he put his feet back into them.

"Tom," Carl said, "Don't worry too much about Joshua at the moment. He'll be fine. The Yherajk are pretty much indestructible by our standards, and I doubt that the coyotes or whatever are going to get a bite out of him. Joshua can make a skunk seem like a bed of roses. He and ...Ralph?" — He looked for confirmation; I nodded — "are probably just roughing it or something. You didn't tell me that he had made friends with a dog."

"They get along great," I said. "They're the solution to each other's boredom. I think Joshua likes Ralph better than he likes me."

"Well, that's good news, at the very least. Anyway, I expect Joshua will be back soon enough. Try to relax a bit."

I snorted just a little. "Now if I could just get The Biz off my back, I'd be set."

"Some of that's been taken care of," Carl said. "The Times is doing a story on The Biz, you know."

"They called me this morning," I admitted, "I've been sort of dreading calling them back."

"I've already talked to them," Carl said. "Gave them a nice long chat about how The Biz took our company's innovative mentoring policy and made it look like you were having a nervous breakdown. I said that if you were having a nervous breakdown, then I and several of the senior agents were also having them, since we've also started mentoring some of our newer agents."

"Thanks," I said. "You didn't have to do that."

"Actually, I did," Carl said. "It keeps the bad press to a minimum. I'm not blaming you about it — this Van Doren character was already working on something, and you just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time with him. Anyway, the mentoring idea is not a bad one; we've been a sink-or-swim agency long enough. It might do some good to do things the other way for a while."

"I'm surprised you found out about it," I said.