“The lame duck has flown the coop,” I hopefully told the radio, using the code Mike and I’d agreed upon at breakfast. “I am following. Do you read me?” No response. Perhaps, I wished, my radio just wasn’t receiving.

Laszlo ranged the East Side like a slug in a rose garden, making numerous stops at this, that, and the other disreputable dive, but no stops long enough for me to grab some lunch or get rid of the coffee I’d taken on whilst waiting for him. You can always count on Laszlo, yes indeed.

I kept my mute wrist radio fully informed of Laszlo’s movements, on the off chance that Michael could hear me, but the longer we walked the less hopeful I was. Laszlo was clearly embarked on an endless chain of trivial errands, and I was doomed for my psychedelic sins to follow him forever. The temperature, furthermore, chose to linger in the nineties, and the smog became alarming, and I’d left my smog mask home.

We roamed through the East Side, always tending downtown, never stopping long enough for me to satisfy any of my needs, until just past five. We were on Canal Street then, Laszlo on the south side, I on the north. He stopped in front of a grotesquely ruinous loft building, one of those hundred-year-old, seven-story horrors, blackened brick and rusty fire escape, that leaned a nervous five degrees forward over the street. I hid myself in a urine-scented doorway and watched.

All at once Laszlo was being furtive. He looked suspiciously in all directions, peering myopically into infinity. He checked a watch I’d not have guessed he owned. He looked around again, then ducked into the building.

“April Fool,” I told the radio. “April… no, I mean Mayday. This is It.” I ran recklessly across the street, buffeted by the backwash from a million turbo-trucks. “Mayday,” I repeated. “Two three nine Canal Street. Mayday.” Then I was at the door and didn’t dare say anything more.

I pulled the door open with an unfortunate shriek of unwilling old metal, at which I cursed ingeniously. I stepped into the hall and stood there silently, listening. Somebody, hopefully Laszlo, was several flights above and climbing, oblivious to the music of the door.

“I’m going in,” I whispered to the radio and started up the stairs. They were marble stairs, blackened with time and deeply rutted, and next to impossible to climb silently in the boots I was wearing, but I managed, more or less.

The stairwell and halls were unlighted, darker than Laszlo’s heart, and malodorous and dank. I imagined Laszlo and a horde of Communist thugs waiting for me on every landing. My nerves went through a whole year’s wear and tear in less than seven minutes. I couldn’t imagine this job’s being worth what it was costing, but this was no time to be arguing about that.

I skulked up four dim flights — each step threatening to squeal — until I saw light of a sort oozing out an open door. I paused on the stairs.

Then, “We got it made, Chief,” I heard Laszlo whine.

Contact. Now I had two choices open to me, according to the one-sided discussion Mike and I had had at breakfast. I could either cut out homeward, calling for help, or I could stick around and gather data. Without exactly saying so, Mike’d made it more than clear which choice he preferred.

I disagreed, but, “What the hell?” I admitted, “I’m already here.” So I tiptoed the rest of the way up to the fourth floor, found the landing and hall to be conveniently full of packing cases, picked a good-sized case to hide behind, and hid.

There were two voices: Laszlo’s overly familiar mush and an odd, somehow pedantic voice, low baritone, that spoke in a strange accent involving clicks on every consonant that allowed them, like a professor of philosophy accompanying himself on castanets.

“Most good, youthful Laszlo,” said that voice. “It performs to satisfaction then, our little chemical?”

“Dig it,” Laszlo pushed.

“This indicates accord?”

“Groovy.”

“Groovy? Yes. It is so quaint, your language, here, so poetical, with such a richness of analogy. Yes, groovy.”

“Dig it, man,” Laszlo pressed on regardless. “Them pills are where it’s at, baby. I mean, like, I could sell ’em for…”

“Now,” interrupting, “we commence to — what is it, your clever word? Yes, escalate. Now we escalate to phase two. You agree?”

“Phase two?”

“Of course.”

I couldn’t place the other voice’s accent. (I couldn’t place Laszlo’s, either, but that was mainly because he’d made it up himself.) It didn’t seem particularly Russian, but who knows? Commies weren’t necessarily Russian in those days. There was still China, for instance. “Red China,” we called it. But the accent didn’t seem particularly Chinese, either. Oh well.

“No more small tests, youthful Laszlo, no. No further pills.”

“Hey!”

“Now must we begin to operate upon a grander scale. Mass testing now is called for. Phase two. Then comes phase three and finishes. Soon now, youthful Laszlo, very soon, and you shall come into your own, as we agreed.”

“No more pills?” Laszlo sounded gratifyingly pained. “Hey, baby, wait up. We gotta try it out some more, you dig?” He was nearly articulate in his despair. “I mean, like, dig it: we ain’t tried it out, you know, on teachers an’ like that, you dig? I mean…”

“Maintain a lowered temperature, youthful Laszlo. The pills are grown unnecessary now. Obsolete? Yes, obsolete. Now we must all think of larger things, and soon…”

Laszlo groveled fluently, never quite saying what he had in mind. I knew what he was after, of course. No more pills meant no more Laszlo Scott monopoly. But the strange accent kept explaining dispassionately that the pills were no longer necessary. I imagined Laszlo could’ve had as many pills as he wanted for the asking, but I couldn’t imagine him doing anything so honest and overt as asking for them. Neither, it seemed, could he.

For once, though, I was on Laszlo’s side. Now that I’d had some experience with the pills myself, the thought of phase two — whatever it might be — was frightening.

The discussion grew heated, at least on Laszlo’s side. The air grew thick with phrases like you dig?, like man, and dig it. I decided, hardly noticing how brave of me it was, to sneak up to that door under cover of Laszlo’s broken rhetoric and try for a peek inside. First, though, I whispered my plans into the radio. “Keep in touch,” Mike’d told me.

“But you must comprehend, youthful Laszlo, that the pills are inefficient on such a scale,” the voice was saying as I silently removed my boots — an engineering feat of which I was briefly proud. “Tomorrow night this city, then this world,” the voice continued. This sounded ominous, and Laszlo sounded unimpressed.

More stealthily than the cats of Queen Berúthiel I made my way to the door and peered in ever so cautiously. I was lucky: they had their backs to me, and I got a good, long look.

My mind very carefully boggled.

“Well,” I told myself, sneaking back to my packing case, “so much for Mike and his Communist plot.”

The other voice belonged to a six-foot-tall, deep blue lobster. This was getting more interesting than I really liked.

Half an hour later, nothing worth mentioning had changed. Laszlo and his lobster-friend were still inside, I was still behind my packing case in the dark hall, all that coffee I’d absorbed while waiting for Laszlo was still where it had been for altogether too long now, my lunch (I kept thinking of lobster thermidor) was still in the indeterminate future, Mike was wherever the hell Mike was, alas, and things showed little sign of getting better.

I’d spent the half hour whispering to my left wrist and trying to get my boots back on, with little luck in either project. My feet seemed to have swollen.

Some days it’s hard to maintain one’s native dignity. If I could’ve gotten my boots on I’d’ve split, having lost my taste for heroism, but I couldn’t bring myself to walk home in my stocking feet. “Anything,” says an old Anderson proverb, “is better than embarrassment.”