Aw, to hell with it. I took another swipe at the fern tree.

Laszlo was being clever. Well, tricky. Backtracking, hiding in doorways to wait for whomever to pass, going in one door of such buildings as had more than one and coming out another, turning corners and running like mad, striking up conversations with policemen (a most unusual stratagem for him), and otherwise boring Michael with his puerile games.

“I’d like to know who the hell he thought was chasing him. I’d also like to know what made him think he could lose a tail with stunts like that. Too many movies, that’s Laszlo’s problem.”

Except that one of Laszlo’s stunts worked. Michael turned the corner of Third Street and Second Avenue two and a half seconds after Laszlo did and found no visible Laszlo, none at all. Oh, the shame of it.

He checked the halls of all the nearby tenements and heard no Laszlo on the stairs. He checked the two bodegas and one bar that were open nearby and found no Laszlo lurking. He couldn’t remember having seen a taxi on the avenue, so he checked the halls again, with no results. Finally, after maybe half an hour, he gave it up.

“Christ,” he told himself in something close to shock, “the little bastard shook me. He actually Shook me. And I can’t figure out how the hell he did it.”

So the evening shouldn’t be a total loss, Michael went to visit Sandi Heller and Leo Pratt, who were roughing it in an old law tenement a few blocks farther east. All the way there, he berated himself for letting Laszlo get away, wondering how he could ever bring himself to tell anyone about it.

“I was afraid I was either going to have to bear the shameful secret to my grave or take to haunting low taverns and unburdening myself to heedless strangers, as it were. Maybe I could hire an analyst? And how did the little freak do it, anyway? He couldn’t’ve sprouted wings. Maybe he just vanished, like Judge Crater. Nah, that’s too good to be real. Laszlos never vanish, no such luck.”

And then he was across the street from the Heller-Pratt pad, waiting for the traffic light to change.

“Jesus H. Christ!” he whispered, crouching quickly behind a parked car.

Laszlo the Lost was cautiously emerging from the Heller-Pratt hallway. He opened the door, poked his little round head out, looked four or five times in every direction, scurried out into the nearest shadow, and slunk furtively toward the east.

Mike, considerably shaken, followed.

“Oh yeah, Laszlo,” Leo explained some fifteen hours later. “Wasn’t that something? Sandi was checking something out with the I Ching and I was trying to work out some new changes for ‘Dark Girl’ on this banjo somebody left in the John a few months back, and then there was this Scritching on the door. Chi-ki-chi-ki-chi-ki, you know, like mice — or a very Sensitive pussycat.

“So I said, ‘Who’s that scritching on my door?’ and this real strange haunted kind of voice whispers, “Leo?”

“ ‘Who’s there?’ I say, and this same voice whispers, ‘Leo? Are you home?’

“ ‘So what the hell? Friend or foe, I had to find out what that voice was coming from, so I opened the door and Wow, there stood Laszlo Scott in all his queasy glory, not the sort of thing I’m accustomed to finding on my doorstep, not at all.

“So I said…”

“Oh good Lord, Leo!” Sandi has a sense of style. “They just want to find out what he wanted. You don’t have to make a novel out of Everything!”

“Oh yeah. Right. Well, once upon a time I told little Laszlo that I’ve got a friend who’s an analytic chemist, spade cat name of Chauncy Mitchell. So Laszlo wanted Mitch to analyze something for him, that’s all.”

“Pills?”

“Yeah, I think so. Sure, little blue pills. Looked like some kind of laxative or something. He gave me a little aspirin bottle full of ’em and told me to ask Mitch to hurry, which was funny on account of Mitch’s in Switzerland. But what the hell? I told him Mitch’d hurry and he split. That’s all there was to it. He wasn’t here five minutes. Was he, hon?”

“Groovy. What happened to the pills?”

“Nothing. I gave them to the chick across the hall. She’ll take Anything. Thinks it’s hip or something.”

From the Heller-Pratt pad Laszlo went straight home, though it wasn’t even two o’clock yet.

Mike stationed himself in the candy store doorway across the street and watched Laszlo’s windows. Oddly dressed persons of unknown age and gender tried to proposition him in foreign languages, but he ignored them. Scrawny kids trying to look mean in skin-tight leather slouched by muttering obscure insults, and he ignored them. A rather pretty long-haired chick in standard artist’s garb walked by, slowed down, smiled at him and walked on, and he even managed to ignore Her. Michael meant business.

After fifteen minutes of this, the lights went off in Laszlo’s pad. Mike didn’t believe a word of it. He stood firm in the candy store doorway, waiting for Laszlo to try some funny business, for upward of an hour, or until two wary fuzz approached and one of them, hand poised above his pistol, snarled. “All right, buddy, what’s your problem?”

“Nothing, officer, nothing at all. Just catching my breath. Long walk, you know.”

“What does it take you, an hour to catch your breath? C’mon, buddy, move along before I run ya in.”

So Michael went home, feeling deeply unfulfilled.

I was motion in the boundless universe. I was the square root of minus one. I was covered with thick beige fuzz that moved of its own accord. I was ten feet tall.

I was a pastrami ice-cream cone. I was the key of G minor. I was full of tiny gears and printed circuits and my batteries needed charging.

I was pregnant and I knew the people responsible. I was law west of the Klamath River. I was without form, and void. I was a long-playing microgroove record.

I saw the best minds of my generation and I was appalled. I was a platinum gas tank. I was an army advancing toward I was an army.

I was the ghost of Christmas past. I was the rabbit in the moon. I was as corny as Kansas in orbit.

I wasn’t thinking very well at all.

CLICK!

Zap!

“Good morning, Mister Spy. Do you wish to talk now?”

It was over. Finished. Dead. Ktch’d turned my torture off, plunging me with a morbid Click! from breathless peaks of subjective ecstasy to Wednesday morning. Wow, what a bringdown.

“Mister Spy?”

The lobsters were at it again, all twelve of them — a ghastly sight — scuttling here and there about the loft with fifty-gallon steel drums in their claws; all but Ktch, who was standing still with one pincer resting on the largest torture device and both eyestalks pointed at me. These were the kind of lobsters that liked to gossip while they worked, too — the worst kind of lobster — and the loft sounded like a firing range at rush hour. I hate loud noises in the morning.

“Can you hear me, Mister Spy? Are you all right?”

And this morning I was ready to hate almost everything. I was still drenched with metabolized coffee, for one thing, clammy and reeking. And I still hadn’t had yesterday’s lunch yet, not to mention supper, snack, and breakfast. The inside of my mouth felt like it was digesting itself, and tasted like it, too.

“You’re not — oh my — you’re not Dead, are you? Tell me you’re not dead!”

And I hadn’t slept, either. That was another thing. All-night torture sessions are fine and groovy if you dig that sort of thing, but I’m a cat who needs his sleep.

Furthermore, Michael hadn’t rescued me — first time he’d failed me in three and a half years. The world was still unsaved. These filthy lobsters’ evil plans were still intact, unfoiled. Everything had gone wrong. Everything.