I could feel the day at last begin to curve in toward a close. A day full of years. Mortal fear, mortal combat, victory, justice, and repentance: suddenly and all at once that day I had encountered concepts that I’d always thought were mythical, and they just weren’t what they’d been cracked up to be.

The ship rose above my nuclear lamps and out of sight. A few minutes later we all heard a pop like prepubescent thunder and I knew they were gone.

“Swell,” Mike privately rejoiced, then, louder, “Okay, everybody. Let’s pack it up and hit the road.”

Silently — the trial and its aftermath had put us in a collective thoughtful mood — we dismantled our imaginary artifacts and boarded the tripsmobile.

Mike had to get us home somehow without the benefit of my expert worrying. I fell asleep the minute I sat down.

AND THAT, we all naively thought, was that.

The world was saved to a fare-thee-well and only slightly battered. Laszlo and the lobster gang were gloriously out of it for real. The papers were hilarious with mad and earnest speculation on the curious corpses we’d abandoned in the reservoir. Sean’d bought me a bottle of spring water. And I had a practically inexhaustible supply of Reality Pills for Halloween, saturnalia, and bar mitzvahs.

There was, of course, a skinny outside chance that somebody might want Little Micky’s absence explained, but it wasn’t bloody likely. Micky’d been one of the hundreds of Villagers in vacuo: no family, no relations, no hometown, no background, no pad, no chick, no past, little present and let’s don’t have any morbid talk about the future. Out of the nothing, into the here and away — just one of the hundreds. It didn’t seem reasonable to expect Little Micky to have more kinfolk dead than he did alive; and, barring that acute unlikelihood, we didn’t have a problem to our names.

But all day Thursday afternoon I kept finding random little things I wanted right there underneath my hand, which wasn’t really consonant with my established way of life.

And the first tweet of the vidiphone brought me Andrew Blake saying, “Chester! God in heaven help me, it’s Happening again!” as openers for a half-hour lamentation on his new, improved, four-color Art Nouveau psychedelic Carnaby Street halo.

And Sandi phoned a little after that and did nothing but giggle uncontrollably for seven minutes.

And after that, when I was donning my gaudiest celebratory threads for work, I happened to look out my bedroom window and see in the courtyard below a perfectly lovely small quiescent steam calliope all garlanded with improbable blossoms.

And then Mike’s malty, dry, let’s-explore-the-obvious voice tiptoed into my room, saying, “Know what, Chester? I’ve been thinking,” and I braced myself.

“And what have you been thinking, O Michael?” I dreaded, entering the living room. Sean, looking rurally concerned, was already there.

“I’ve been thinking that we dropped a god-awful lot of those Reality Pills last night.” Michael was standing on his head, feet and buttocks braced against the west wall. He’d never done anything remotely like that before. My spirit or something trembled.

“Go on.”

“And an awful lot of Very Strange Things have been happening to everybody all day long. And somehow I’ve acquired this irrational conviction that we’re never ever coming down.”

He looked good, standing on his head. It became him, somehow. I piously wished that I didn’t believe him.

But Sean, that puppy, hollered, “GrOOvy!” and hallucinated an intense silver and scarlet butterfly with, printed across its wings in some invisible color our eyes could read like electricity, the magic words:

But it wasn’t, really.

Not at all.

Oh my, no!