"Now let's say you're the infected employee, the zealot who has gotten infected with the PCB-eating bug. Dolmacher. You're smart, you know exactly what's happening, because you've been worrying about it. You tell your company that you've been infected and they say, 'Stay at home, Dolmacher, and we'll send you some antibiotics.' And they do. But they don't seem to work. And the company goes along day after day without announcing the extreme danger to the general public. You realize you've been set up. They've been sending you placebos. They're letting you die. And if they're willing to do that, maybe they're willing to assassinate you. You get intensely paranoid, you arm yourself. Some guy comes around from the company, God knows what for, and something goes wrong-he makes the mistake of threatening you and about a second later, he's wearing half a dozen slugs. So you hit the road. You get out of your house. You take one of your numerous guns, your electric Tazer, and start hitting drugstores and stealing mass quantities of antibiotics off the shelves."

"And then what do you do?" Jim asked, sounding as though he already knew.

"That, my friends, is the sixty-thousand-dollar question, and I'm not a good enough detective to predict the answer."

"This guy is a violence freak," Boone observed.

I agreed and told them about the survival game.

"Up in New Hampshire, huh?" Jim said. "Sneaking around shooting at people. Did it occur to you that Pleshy's stumping New Hampshire at the moment?"

We just sat there, stunned.

"Time to roll on down that lonesome highway," Boone said.

DOLLMACHER WASN'T THE TYPE to own Tupperware, but he did have a big half-gallon vat of some kind of margarine substitute in his fridge. I scooped all this unknown substance out onto his counter, ran the container under hot water to wash out the remains, sloshed some of his bleach around in there, and rinsed it. Then I dropped my 501s, squatted over the thing and deposited a sample. I put the lid on.

Borrowed a razor blade from Dolmacher's medicine chest, sterilized it, and cut one of my toes. Just a little cut. We got on the highway and followed the first series of HOSPITAL signs we saw, straight to the emergency room. I had Jim and Boone carry me in. We waited half an hour and then they came to look at me.

"Early this morning we were playing soccer down in Cambridge by the Charles River and I waded in after the ball and cut my foot," I said. "Tried real hard to keep it clean, sterilized it and everything, but now, shit, I'm vomiting, got the shakes, my joints hurt like hell, diarrhea...."

They shut me up by sticking a thermometer in my mouth. The nurse left me alone for a while so I put the thermometer on the electric baseboard heater until it was up into the lethal range, then shook it down to about a hundred and four.

Same as before: they shot me full of killer antibiotics, and gave me some more in pill form. We went out to the car and I ate some. I'd borrowed some of Dolmacher's essential supplies: aquarium charcoal and laxative. I took a lot of both and rode in the back of the truck. Enough said about that. We drove around to Kelvin's house in Belmont, a little suburb just west of Cambridge.

Kelvin is a difficult person to describe. We had gone to college together, sort of. He had this way of drifting in and out of classes. I'm not sure if he even registered or paid tuition. It didn't matter to him because he didn't care to have grades, or credits, or a diploma. He was just interested in this stuff. If one day's lecture was boring, he walked out, wandered up and down the halls and maybe ended up sitting in the back of an astrophysics or medieval French seminar.

Later I found out that he was on a special scholarship program that the administration had set up to lure in the kinds of students who normally went to Harvard or MIT. The university waived all tuition and fees, and set up a special dorm on Bay State Road. It wasn't really an expensive program because they didn't have to pay any money out. They just avoided taking any in from these particular students. That was no loss, because without the program those students wouldn't have showed up anyway.

Kelvin only showed up when he felt like it. He got in on the first year of the program, in the stage where they still had a few bugs to work out of the system. They decided that Kelvin was one of the bugs. So after the first year they started clamping down, insisting that he register for some classes and make decent grades. He registered for freshman gut courses, devoted an hour a week to them and aced them. The rest of the time he was hanging out in the astrophysics seminars.

The next year they insisted that he show steady progress toward a specific degree. That was his last year. Subsequently he went out and started his own company and did pretty well with it. He lived out in this house in Belmont with his wife, his sister and some kids, I could never tell exactly whose, wrote highly conceptual software, mostly for 32-bit personal computers and, every once in a while, helped me out with a problem.

It was past eleven when we got there and the house was mostly dark, but we could see him up on the third floor in his office, a kind of balcony surrounded by windows. He noticed us driving up; I stood there and waved since I didn't want to send the house into a frenzy by ringing the doorbell. He came down and opened the door.

"S.T.," he said, "what a pleasure." Completely genuine, as usual. His mutt came out and sniffed my knees. I was about to walk in when I realized that for once in my life I was in a house where children lived.

"I'm not sure if I should come in, Kelvin. I'm contaminated with a form of genetically engineered bacteria."

Kelvin was the only person in the world I could just say that to straight faced, without giving him prior notice that we were venturing into the realm of the totally bizarre. He found it unremarkable.

"Dolmacher's? he said.

Of course. Dolmacher would have done the same thing: thought of Kelvin.

"It's E. cob, with PCB-metabolizing plasmids, right?" he continued.

"If you say so."

"What do I smell?"

"I unloaded some of it in the back of the truck. Into a bucket."

"Just a sec." Kelvin went into his garage and came out with a can of gasoline. Taking the shit-filled bucket out of the back of the truck, he poured gasoline into it, walked about ten feet away and threw a match at it. We all stood around and watched it for a few minutes, not saying much. The Fire Department came around; the Alzheimer's victim across the street had called in a chimney fire. We told them it was a chemical experiment and they left.

"I'll let you in the back door. We can talk in the basement," Kelvin said, after it had burned down to ash.

We went into his basement, which was mostly full of electrical and electronic stuff. We sat around on stools and I put the sealed margarine tub up on his workbench. There was a naked light bulb hanging above it which filled the container with yellow light; the toxic turd cast a blunt shadow against the flower-patterned sides.

"Good. Dolmacher brought me a sample but he'd already weakened it pretty badly with antibiotics."

"How do you know this one isn't weak?" I asked.

"It's well formed. If you were taking the kind of antibiotics that are effective against Ecoli, you'd have diarrhea."

Boone and Jim exchanged grins. "Looks like we came to the right place," Boone said.

He was right. When it came to pure science, Boone and Jim had no idea what I was talking about. But Kelvin was as far ahead of me as I was of them.

"I'm sorry to come around at this time of night," I said, "but ... well, correct me if I'm wrong, but we are talking about the end of the world here, aren't we?"