The shaken Man’s next argument was that he oughtta run us all in because we were funny-looking and suspicious characters. Mike countered by claiming that we were a professional rock-n-roll band in full stage dress, en route to a gig, and that he was our manager (proving this by yet another weird document from his wallet). He was ready to go on, but:

“All right! All right!” The Man gave in. “All right! So get the hell outta here!” He shoved clear signs of discontent.

“Right away, Sergeant,” burbled Michael. “Thank you, Sergeant.”

“Yeah. An’ just make sure you keep your nose clean ’round here, you understand?”

Mike agreed to everything. The Man very gradually split, trailing admonitions in his wake. At last Mike closed the door. Traffic started moving. So did we.

“Oh wow!” said I to Michael, “what a copper-bottomed drag!”

He grunted mild agreement.

“I thought for sure we’d had it that time. Wow!”

“The trouble with you, Chester, is that you’re afraid of cops. You don’t seem to understand: they’re on your side. You lack faith, that’s your problem. Like, what made you think that tired old sergeant was going to arrest us?”

“Well, for one thing, Gary the Frog’s holding. Copiously. And some of it’s been smoked — in plain sight of everyone in Times Square, mind you — and the whole bus reeks of burning marijuana. Why didn’t he bust us? All he had to do was inhale.”

“Like I said, Chester, you just lack faith. Here we have an old Irish cop in New York City. So there are two things you can count on his having: varicose veins and sinus trouble. Especially sinus trouble. He probably hasn’t smelled a thing since 1933.”

Mike’s right. I don’t have faith.

And there we were, moving fast up West Side Highway. The sun was sinking, time was growing short, but we were on our way at last. Maybe there was hope.

AFTER EXHAUSTIVELY not settling the problems of battle plan and weapons — “Just have faith,” was M. T. Bear’s refrain — we reached the reservoir with less than fifteen minutes to spare — not to spare, rather: we still had to find out where the enemy was lurking.

It was twilight — blue shadows, red and name-it sky, little wisps of fog hovering gold above the water and tabby-gray under the trees — as pastoral a scene as you could ask. I suppose it was beautiful — it usually is — but I knew a bit too much to enjoy it properly.

“Hold on,” Michael shouted. “Here we go!”

The bus angled steeply up the bank, bumped and tottered over the top, hurtled down the other side, then glided smooth and easy as you please across the water on beds of raging foam.

All the chicks and Gary the unmentionable Frog screamed shrilly as we plunged over the bank. Patrick Gerstein hollered, “Yippee!” on the way down, and all of us said, “Oh wow!” when we floated out over the water.

“Now how do we find them?” I inquired respectfully. Mike was now officially in charge.

“Don’t have to,” highly pleased. “I know exactly where they are.”

He piloted us mainly north, threading neatly through a cluster of inconsequential islands, while his look of smug self-confidence all but glowed.

“Back when I was in high school,” he explained with somewhat indecent delight, “I had this plot to dose the reservoir with LSD.” He almost never called it acid. “Never did get around to doing it, though. Got involved with some chick instead.” Pause. “Hell! I’ve forgotten her name. How about that? She was my first girl, too, if you don’t count my cousin Sheila — and you wouldn’t if you knew her, believe me. And now I can’t even remember her name. Let’s see…”

He was quite capable of carrying on like that all night if no one stopped him, so I stopped him. “What about your acid plot?”

“Oh yeah, that. Well, the first thing I did, of course, was scout the reservoir for a base to work from. I needed a place that was convenient to the road but well hidden — a wooded ravine or gully, say — with enough room for whatever equipment I might need, plus easy access to the water, like a sheltered beach or inlet. Found it, too. There’s just one place hereabouts that’s suitable for this kind of action, and we’re headed straight toward it now.”

It was getting dark, but I could see the place he meant ahead of us: a low beach leading into a willow-choked ravine.

Then, “Michael?” a bassoon implored. Andrew Blake had joined us.

“Yes, Andy?”

“We’re nearly there.”

“Right.”

“Yes. I’ve been wondering.”

“What about?” Mike reduced speed. The bus crawled toward the hostile beach.

“We’re planning to, ah, Fight these creatures. Right?”

“Right.”

“Yes. But how? We don’t even have a gun.” It was nice to see somebody else worrying about that.

“Don’t need guns, believe me. We’ve got the perfect weapon, Andy. Just relax.”

“What weapon?” We were getting closer to the shore. It looked deserted.

“Why am I the only person who can think around here?” Mike snapped. Andy recoiled in alarm. “Think, Andy, think! We already have the perfect weapon. You’ve seen it yourself. Now just think about it.”

The odds were 49 to 51 that Michael’s perfect weapon was essentially bull, quite unbeknownst to him, of course, but it was worth thinking about. I’d rather think about that than the withering tide of alien annihilation I expected to stream out at us from under those suspiciously innocent-looking willows. The perfect… Oh.

Andy had it, too, and stuck an index finger up to mark it “Of course!” he said in wonder. “Of course!”

“Sure,” I ratified. “The bus.”

“What else?”

What else indeed? The bus could go almost everywhere, over almost any obstacle, and its down blast was strong enough to turn even the biggest lobster into sky-blue library paste. But somehow I couldn’t feel as certain about it as Michael felt. A weapon, yes. Even a good weapon, yes. But perfect? Or even very good? I didn’t know yet what they were, but I knew in my bones there were serious flaws to Michael’s perfect weapon. At least one of these was that we didn’t know what kind of weapons the lobsters were likely to use.

Besides, I’m just not built to put much trust in perfect anythings. The word perfect seems to turn me off somehow.

We were now just a few yards offshore, cruising slowly back and forth parallel to the beach. The whole scene still looked thoroughly deserted, and I entertained the possibility of Michael’s having goofed.

The MacDougal Street Commandos had deserted their seats to bunch up at the shoreward windows, stampeding from one side to the other every time Mike turned the bus around. This complicated driving considerably, but Mike didn’t say anything about it. Most unusual for him.

“I don’t see nothing,” from Gary the Frog. “You see anything, Harry?”

“Not a thing, sugar lump.” God in heaven!

“Me too,” says Brother Gerstein. All the rest chimed in.

Now that we were actually there, I found myself feeling uncomfortable in a different, more practical way. The trouble was, I couldn’t hear anything. Nothing important, anyhow. Thanks to my absurd myopia (20-300), I’ve never been much of a visual cat. In fact, I’m more of an ear man, which is convenient, since I hear better than just about everyone I’ve ever met. But now my hearing was being sorely handicapped.

In our present situation, with night coming on strong and all, straining my eyes to see a hypothetical blue lobster in an almost black shadow didn’t make much sense, but if I’d been able to hear properly, I’d’ve known in a minute if the lobsters were out there, and if they were, exactly where they were hiding. A muffled claw click, willow leaves brushing against a carapace — such tiny, all but inaudible noises would’ve told me all I needed to know.