What I’d been saying to the radio all this time, disregarding random words on which the UNCC would frown loudly if I was being (hopefully) monitored, was mostly along the lines of, “Help! Get me out of here! Call out the Marines! Like, help!” plus everything the lobster was telling Laszlo.

Laszlo being Laszlo, this was plenty. The lobster, with amazing patience for a lobster, explained everything at least five times before I stopped counting, everything in this case being an elaborate extraterrestrial plot to conquer the Earth.

Honestly. It offended my sense of propriety something fierce, this hackneyed invasion-from-outer-space routine, but the lobster sounded quite sincere, and who was I to doubt the word of a six-foot-tall blue lobster?

Who indeed?

So all this while I crouched behind the packing case, elaborately not sneezing, ignoring even more pressing other needs, becoming acutely uncomfortable and frustrated, listening to an absurd blue crawdad telling Loathsome Laszlo how the Reality Pill was going to conquer Terra without endangering precious lobsters or involving them in anything so crude as physical violence.

Lobster: “We, of course, cannot inflict pain or,” rattling shudder, “death upon another rational being, dissimilarly to you so vicious aborigines that do such things for — what is your word? — kicks. Impossible. Not since we left our oceans, now some ten to the seventh years ago, have we been able to commit such things except as final acts of defense, and few of us could long survive such acts. You must comprehend that we are a mature culture, we Kkkkk,” a sound like a flam paradiddle, doubtless what the lobsters called themselves.

Laszlo: “But dig it, man, you’re pushin’ it too fast, you dig? We gotta — you know — test them pills like Uptown, unnerstan’? I mean, like…”

Anderson, uncomfortably: “Michael? Oh, Michael. Do you, what’d you call it, read me? Oh hell. Michael?”

Lobster: “But, youthful Laszlo, we need room, new shorelines and new seas. We Kkkk are a growing race and long-lived. We must grow or die, and to grow we must conquer. Do you comprehend?”

Laszlo: “Look, man, give it another week, you dig? I mean, like, in a week I can prob’ly…”

Lobster: “However this is not the paradox it might seem to your unsophisticated intellect. Your science, biochemistry, is to us an art form. Likewise your psychology. We need but study any race some while in order to produce such clever drugs as will induce said race to be its own conquistadores. Yes? Nor is our skill in forming psychological devices any less.”

Laszlo: “At least gimme another day or two, huh? Whaddaya say?”

Lobster: “Whereupon we show ourselves when the native violence subsides, reestablish order, and become as gods or heroes to our newly subject peoples. All so simple. Many hundred times has this been done, nor have we ever failed. We cannot fail.”

Laszlo: “You don’t unnerStan’!”

Lobster: “We are kindly masters. Have no fear.”

Anyhow, after thirty minutes of this double monologue, something finally happened. I was standing, boots in my right hand, briefcase in my left, peering over the top of my friendly packing case at the shadows Laszlo and the conquering lobster cast on the hall floor, trying simultaneously to figure out what to do and how to get away, when something hard and cold, but not metallic, suddenly grabbed me under both armpits, hoisted me a good four feet off the floor, and carried me off toward the lighted room.

I screamed, spectacularly gave up on the coffee problem, dropped my boots and briefcase, and kicked vigorously, all to no avail at all. What had grabbed me was another blue lobster, somewhat taller than Laszlo’s buddy, who took great care not to hurt me or let me go, and paid absolutely no attention to my attempts to hurt him.

Moving more smoothly than I’d thought a lobster could, my chitinous captor hauled me to the lighted doorway and stopped there. “Ckckckckck,” he said, or words to that effect.

Laszlo’s eyes bulged. His friend’s eyestalks fully extended themselves and examined me from wildly unlikely combinations of angles. My captor continued to rattle like a baritone snare drum. I continued to kick, my heels hitting my captor’s cephalothorax with a dull booming sound, until he grabbed my ankles with two lesser pincers and held me motionless.

My hands remained free, however. I raised the wrist radio to my mouth, turned the volume up to full, and yelled, “I’m caught! I’ve been captured! Send help!” I intended to say much more, but a prehensile segmented feeler curled down from behind me, removed the radio, and crushed it like a grape before my eyes. Okay, I’m easily convinced. I went limp and waited to see what would happen.

Both lobsters were rat-a-tatting on at a great rate now, and Laszlo’s expression was slowly changing to something I knew in advance I wasn’t going to like. I was right.

“Well, if it ain’t Mister Wiseass Anderson hisself,” Laszlo drooled. “Fawncy meeting you here.” Then he laughed, an uninspiring sound.

“Aha, youthful Laszlo,” said the first lobster, while the second continued to clatter. “This person is known to you?”

“Dig it,” Laszlo admitted. “This here’s ol’ Wiseass Anderson.”

“Oh. What is it, this wiseass?”

“He’s jus’ another MacDougal Street bum, man. That’s all he is.”

“Indeed. And did you bring him here, Laszlo Scott?”

“Me? Hell no. He brung hisself, man. Like, he’s jus’ tryin’ to Spy on me, that’s all. He’s always, you know, tryin’ to Spy on me an’ like that.”

“A spy?”

“Dig it.”

“Indeed.” The lobster advanced toward me menacingly, its huge blue claws snapping fiercely bare inches from my face. “Well now, we know exactly what to do with spies. Indeed we do. Exactly. Oh my, yes.”

I missed Michael very much. Indeed I did. Oh my, yes.

AND WHERE was Michael all this time?

As soon as I was safely on my way to Laszlo’s, Mike went back to bed, of course. After all, he explained, it was only eighty-thirty, and he was still tired from last night’s adventures with the pill, and he knew Laszlo wasn’t likely to be up and moving much before noon, and he knew I’d want him to be at his best — alert and well-rested — in case following Laszlo led to complications. Right?

“It wasn’t as if I were deserting you or anything, Chester. Really, I don’t see how you can discuss it in those terms, not even in jest. Look, I even had the radio on the nightstand by my bed, turned up to full volume, to make sure I’d wake up if you called. Christ, Anderson, when you get into these unreasonable moods…”

But sleep is Michael’s finest art. I’ve seen him sleep through a fire in the same room (complete with firemen et cetera, some of whom thought he was dead until I pulled his thumb out of his mouth and they heard him groan), the big Los Angeles quake of ’69 (or was it ’70?), countless deadlines, appointments without number, three exceptionally loud recording sessions, one very raucous birthday party (his) — in short, through just about everything that might wake up any normal person. If Mike ever gets famous enough to rate a biography, I mean to write it myself and call it The Magnificent Sleeper, or maybe The Man Who Slept Through Everything.

Anyhow, Mike had no trouble sleeping through my early-morning efforts to call him. No, what finally woke him — at half-past one, when I’d already shadowed Laszlo back and forth across Tompkins Square three times — was the vidiphone, to which he is psychically attuned.

The call was from a chick named Yvonne on whom Mike’d once had improper but futile designs, whom he hadn’t seen in eighteen months. She was just in from some far place and was entertaining improper designs on Michael for a change. Would he care to have lunch with her?