The little man in my head had escaped from his hole and was running around frantically, as if on fire. "None!" I said. "I mean, with all due respect, Carl, I can't lose any of them. It's not fair to them, for one thing, but for another thing, I need them. Michelle's doing well now, but believe me, that's not going to last forever. You can't ask me to cut myself off at the knees."

I pushed back slightly from the table. "Jesus, Carl," I said. "What's going on here? First the science fiction, now with my clients — None of this making much sense to me at the moment. I'm getting a little nervous, here. If you've got some bad news for me, stop twisting me and just get to it."

Carl stared at me for the fifteen longest seconds in my life. Then he put his feet down, and moved his chair closer to me.

"You're right, Tom" he said. "I'm not handling this very well. I apologize. Let me try this again." He closed his eyes, took a breath, and looked straight at me. I thought my spine was going to liquefy.

"Tom," he said, "I have a client. It's a very important client, Tom, probably the most important client we as an agency will ever have. At least I can't imagine any other client being more important than this one. This client feels that he has a very serious image problem, and I'd have to say that I agree with him there. He has a special project that he wants to put together, something that needs the most delicate handling imaginable.

"I need someone to help me get this project off the ground, someone that I can trust. Someone who can handle the job for me without my constant supervision, and who can keep his ego in check for the sake of the project.

"I'm hoping you'll be that someone for me, Tom. If you say no, it won't affect your role at the agency in the slightest — you can walk out of this office and this meeting that we've had simply won't have happened. But if you do say yes, it means you're committed, whatever it takes, for as long as it takes. Will you help me?"

The little man in my head was now pounding on the backsides of my eyeballs. Say NO, the little man was saying. Say no and then let's go to TGI Fridays and get really, really drunk.

"Sure," I said. The little man in my head started weeping openly.

Carl reached over, covered my hand like it was his computer mouse, and shook it vigorously. "I knew I could count on you," he said. "Thanks. I think you're going to enjoy this."

"I hope so," I said. "I'm in for the long haul. So who is the client? Is it Tony?" Antonio Marantz had been caught fondling a sixteen-year-old extra on the set of the latest Morocco Joe film. It was a bad situation made worse by the fact that the sixteen-year-old that People's "Most Eligible Bachelor" was fooling around with happened to be a boy, and the son of the director. After the director's fingers were pried from Tony's throat, everything was hushed up. The director got a million dollar raise. The boy got a Director's Guild "internship" on the Admiral Cook biopic that was filming in Greenland for the next six months. Tony got a stern lecture about the effect that cavorting with underage boys would have on the asking price of his next role. The crew got lesser but still fairly rich favors. Everyone stayed bought; It didn't even make the gossip column of Buzz. But you never know. These things spring leaks.

"No, it's not Tony," Carl said. "Our client is here."

"In the building?"

"No," Carl said, tapping the aquarium that was between us. "Here."

"I'm not following you, Carl," I said. "You're talking about an aquarium."

"Look in the aquarium," Carl said.

For the first time since I entered the room, I took a good look at the aquarium. It was rectangular and neither especially big or small — about the size of the usual aquarium you'd see in any home. The only thing notable about it was the absence of fish, rocks, bubbling filters or little plastic treasure chests. It was filled entirely with a liquid that was clear but slightly cloudy, as if the aquarium water hadn't been changed in about a month. I stood up, looked over the top of the aquarium, and got a closer look. And smell. I looked over the aquarium at him.

"What is this, tuna Jell-O?"

"Not exactly," Carl said, and then addressed the aquarium. "Joshua, please say hello to Tom."

The stuff in the aquarium vibrated.

"Hi, Tom," the aquarium gunk said. "It's nice to meet you."

"How do you do that?" I asked Carl.

"Do what?" Carl asked.

"Make it speak," I said. "That's a really neat trick."

"I'm not making it speak, Tom." Carl said.

"No, I know that. I realize it's not a ventriloquist thing," I said. "What I'm asking is, how does sound come out of it at all. Jell-O doesn't strike me as the most efficient medium for sound."

"I'm not really sure about the physics of it, Tom," Carl said. "I'm an agent, not a scientist."

"This is very cool technology," I said, touching the surface of the gunk. It was sticky, and resisted my fingertips a little. "I mean, I'm not going to rush out and buy Jell-O speakers, but it's still very cool. What is it? Something from a science fiction movie? Is our client doing a film about gelatinous aliens or something?"

"Tom," Carl said. "It's not about a movie. That," he pointed to the aquarium, "is our client."

I stopped playing around with the gunk and looked over at Carl. "I'm not following you," I said.

"It's alive, Tom," Carl said.

The stuff wriggled slightly under my fingers. I pulled them back so quickly I felt a seam on my suit jacket rip. An inside seam. Near the shoulder. I had paid $400 for the jacket, and it let me down in the first moment of crisis. I focused all my mental energy on considering that jacket seam, because the only other thing to think about at the moment was that thing in the tank. The jacket seam, that I could handle.

Finally, after a few minutes, the words came, something that, I think, covered the enormity of the situation and what I was experiencing in my head.

"Holy shit," I said.

"That's a new one on me," said the aquarium gunk.

"It's just an expression," Carl said.

"Holy Christ on a pony," I said.

"So's that," Carl noted.

"Ah," said the gunk. "Listen, do you mind if I get out of this box now? I've been it all day. The right angles are killing me."

"Please," Carl said.

Thank you," said the gunk. A tendril formed off the surface of the gunk and arched towards the conference table, touching down close to the center of the table. The tendril wobbled slightly for a second, then thickened tremendously as the gunk transferred itself out of the aquarium through the tendril. When the transfer was over the tendril reabsorbed into the main body, which now sat, globular, on the conference table.

"That's much better," the gunk said.

"Carl," I said. I was keeping my distance from the gunk. "You'd really better catch me up on what's going on here."

Carl had put his feet back on the table. They rested not too far off from where the gunk was piled. That seemed a bad idea to me. "Do you want the long or short version?" He asked.

"Give me the short version for now, if you don't mind," I said.

"Fine," he said. "Tom, have a seat, please. I promise Joshua won't leap on you and suck out your brains."

"I won't," the gunk that was apparently called Joshua agreed. "I'm a good alien, not like those bad aliens that make for such good movies. Please, Tom, sit down."

I didn't know which was more fundamentally disturbing: that Jell-O was talking to me, that it had a sense of humor, or that it had better manners than I did. My body sat down in my seat; the man in my brain readied himself for a sprint to the door.