After I had named Joshua, Uake excused himself to attend to ship's duties. As we shook 'hands', I managed a glance at my watch. It was 11:30 in the morning.

"Uh-oh," I said. "I have to go."

"You haven't had a tour of the ship," Gwedif said.

"Don't bother," Joshua said. "These people just do not know how to decorate."

"I'd love to, but I'm late," I said. "I already missed a day yesterday. By now my assistant Marcella has called my house looking for me. If I don't show up at the office today, she's going to file a missing person's report."

"Well, there's a problem," Gwedif said. "It's daytime now. We can't really risk being seen doing a drop."

"So don't do a drop," Joshua said. "Make it a one way trip."

"We could do that," Gwedif said. "But there's a problem with that, too."

"What's that?" I asked.

"It depends," Joshua said. "How well can you control your sphincter muscles?"

Gwedif explained it as we headed to the hangar. They could build an unmanned cube the size of the pickup, launch it, and have it land near where we had departed. But, as with the 'meteor' and the black cube, it would have to arrive full-speed to avoid being picked up on radar for any length of time. Another thing: the cube would have to be transparent.

"Why?" I asked.

"Black cubes in the daytime sky are suspicious," Gwedif said. "Red Datsun pickups in the daytime sky are merely unbelievable. Even if someone saw it, no one would know what to think of it. And that's not a bad thing."

"Good thing you haven't had anything to eat in a while," Joshua said.

A few minutes later, as I prepared to get behind the wheel of my pickup, I said my good-byes to Gwedif and Joshua. I asked Gwedif when or if I would see him again.

"Probably not for a while," Gwedif said. "When we send someone again, it will be Joshua. But even he will stay here for a few months, to benefit us with your knowledge — now his — as to how to approach humanity. We probably won't see each other until the day our race makes its debut. But I look forward to that day, Carl. I will be happy when it arrives. We'll finally take that stroll through the tivis gallery."

"I can't wait," I said, and then turned to Joshua. "I look forward to seeing you again, then."

"Thanks, pop," Joshua said. "It'll be soon. Get a better car by then."

I got into the pickup; immediately a cube began to grow around the truck. It indeed took longer to make a cube than to break it down, but not by much; within five minutes I was entirely enclosed. Then the cube became totally transparent, and it was as if it wasn't there at all. I looked at Gwedif and Joshua and waved. They waved back.

Suddenly I was flung into space, the Ionar receding behind me like a fastball thrown by a titan. The large blue plate that was the planet Earth began to grow at a distressing rate.

It didn't get bad until the last minute, as the pickup showed no signs of slowing down and the surface of the planet became ever more sharply defined. The last five seconds I couldn't even watch — I covered my eyes and sobbed out the Lord's Prayer.

And then I was just off the unmarked road I and Gwedif were picked up from. I didn't feel the landing, but when I opened my eyes, dust was swirling around and there was cracked earth underneath my pickup that matched the cracked earth on the other side of the road.

I started the pickup and went home. Then I went to work. Marcella said that if I hadn't have arrived in those last ten minutes, she had been planning to call the FBI.

Carl looked at his watch. "Damn," he said. "I've missed my 4:00."

"The Call of the Damned premiere was four months ago, Carl," I said. "What have they been doing between now and then?"

"Grilling Joshua, I'd imagine," Carl said. "Remember, he's got my memories — it's better than having me there, really, since I don't know that I'd be up for a daily brain-sucking. It's with Joshua that the Yherajk came up with the idea of using us to be their agents."

"I don't get that," I said. "If they have all your knowledge, I don't see why they would need you or me to do anything for them."

"Well, they are still gelatinous cubes," Carl said, "which does limit their ability to blend. But I think there's something else to it. I think they have a plan already, but they wanted to see what I, and now you, would come up with. For them, It's not simply a matter of the most efficient way of doing something, otherwise Joshua would be addressing the UN right now. But there's that notion the Yherajk have of surrendering to the crucial moment, burned right down into their reproductive strategies. I think that once again, they're surrendering the moment to us — they're saying, here, we trust you to take this, the most important moment in the history of both our races, and make it work."

"That's a lot of trust," I said.

"Yes, well, frankly it's also annoying," Carl said. "I'm not saying that we should refuse the responsibility, not at all. But we're carrying the entire load — if it gets messed up, the failure is entirely on our shoulders. All the pressure is on us. On you, actually, Tom, since I foisted it on you. Have you, since we started this, really thought on what we're doing here?"

"I've tried to avoid doing that," I said. "It just makes me sort of dizzy. I try to concentrate on the smaller things, like hoping that Joshua will turn up sometime today."

"That's probably the right attitude to have," Carl said. "Now, I think about it quite a bit. It's monumental and exhilarating — and I wish it were already done with."

"It's going to work out fine, Carl. Don't worry about it," I said. I was taken aback by Carl's comment — it didn't sound like the Carl Lupo we all knew and feared.

Carl must have realized it, because he sudden gave a wolflike grin, true to his name. "I can tell you these things, Tom, because we're both in on the biggest secret anyone's ever had — no one else would believe me. Or you. Who else are we going to tell these things to?"

"That's funny," I said. "Joshua once said the very same thing."

"Like father, like son," Carl said, and stood up. "Now, come on, Tom. We have to head back. I can't keep Rupert Murdoch waiting much longer. He gets testy when he's stood up."

"Three and a half hours for lunch?" Miranda said, as she followed me into the office. "Even by Hollywood standards, that's a little extravagant. Your boss would kill you, if it weren't for the fact you had lunch with him."

"Sorry, mom," I said. "I'll do all of my homework before I go out tonight."

"Don't get fresh," Miranda said, "or you'll get no dessert. Would you like to hear your messages, or do you want to give me more lip?"

"Oh, I'd like messages, pretty please," I said, sitting.

"That's better," Miranda said. "You have six, count them, six messages from Jim Van Doren. In one two hour-period before your lunch. I think that qualifies as stalking by California law."

"I should be so lucky," I said. "What does he want?"

"Didn't say. Didn't sound particularly happy, however. I suspect if he hasn't been raked over the coals by his editors at The Biz, he may be in the process of being torched right now. Carl called me this morning to get some information on the mentor program of yours. He mentioned that he was planning to rip Van Doren and The Biz new assholes in the Times. Not promising for either of them, if you ask me."

"God," I said. "That's just going to make them both more annoying. Anyone else?"

"Michelle called. She's apparently having some sort of difficulty with the Earth Resurrected folks. She said something about a latex mask. It didn't make much sense to me. She also said that Ellen Merlow is definitely out of Hard Memories, and that she now felt she was up to the role, because she read 'Iceman in Jerusalem'." Miranda looked up at me, confused. "She can't possibly mean Eichmann in Jerusalem."