“Estimated arrival at this locale in forty-eight minutes …”

Maharal’s gray ghost shakes its head.

“I hoped for more time, but it can be done.”

He hurries away, abandoning our conversation, returning to his preparations. Preparations that would use me -

— use us! Little Red insists.

— use us to help elevate his soul, amplifying it to some grandiose level of power. Typical bloody Smersh-Foxleitner. The mad scientist’s disease.

I wonder. Could this really work? Might the ghost of a dead professor manage to transform himself beyond any need for an organic brain, or even a physical link to the world? Perhaps rising so high that life on a mere planet becomes trivial and boring? I could picture such a macro-Maharal entity just heading off, seeking cosmic-scale adventures among the stars. Which’d be cool by me, I guess, so long as he went away and left this world alone.

But I have an uneasy feeling that ditYosil has in mind a more local kind of deification. Both more provincial and deeply controlling.

Many of the folks I know won’t like what he’d become.

Oh, and the process will probably use up the “mirrors” of his … glazier. Whatever the outcome, I don’t figure i/we (gray/red) will much enjoy serving as Yosil’s vehicle to reach this personal nirvana of his.

“You know—” I began, hoping to distract him.

Only then another pulse struck.

Tuesday’s child is full of grace -

Wednesday’s child is full of woe -

Thursday’s child has far to go, and -

And? I wondered. After my eventful and generously extended span on Earth — more than two whole days — what next?

Not much, at the rate my body was starting to decay. I could feel the familiar signs of golem senescence creeping in, plus glimmerings of the salmon reflex, that urge to report home for memory inloading. To escape oblivion by returning to the one real organic brain where I might yet live on.

A brain that might actually still exist! Just when I had grown accustomed to the idea that it was blown to bits, I wondered. Suppose Albert Morris lives, and I could somehow reach him before I dissolve. Would he have me back?

Assuming he still lived?

As Beta flew his agile little Harley through the night, that seemed a growing possibility! According to web reports I viewed while crammed behind Beta’s pilot seat.

“That settles it,” one of the amateur deduction mavens announced. “They never found enough protoplasmic residue in that burnt house for a whole body!”

“And see how the police are behaving. Munitions auditors still swarm all over, but the Human Protection Division is gone! That means no one was killed there.”

I should be glad. Yet, if Albert did exist, he probably commanded a whole army of himselves, using high-class grays and ebonies to track down the villain who destroyed my … our … his garden. Why, in that case, should he welcome back a stray green who refused to mow the lawn?

Good question — and moot if I couldn’t find him! Where was Albert when the missile struck? And where was he now?

Beta tossed a theory at me, turning his head to be heard over the engines. “See what some hobbyist ditectives found in Tuesday’s streetcam data.” His domed head gestured to a display globe showing the Sycamore Avenue house, before it was destroyed. Leaning my chin on Beta’s pilot seat, I watched the garage door open in soft pre-twilight. The Volvo crept out.

“He left! Then why did everybody think he was still there when the missile … Oh, I see.”

As the car turned down Sycamore, one camera got a fine view of the driver. It was an Albert Morris gray. Bald and glossy — the perfect golem. By implication, realAl must still be in the house.

Beta knew better. “Appearances mean nothing. Your archie is nearly as good at disguises as I am.” Strong praise from a master of deception. “But then where … ? I spent lavishly for a top freelance voyeur. She tracked the car from camview to camview along the Skyway Highway, to this camera-blank road.” ditBeta waved past the windshield at a slender desert lane below. Moonlight painted wan, lonely tones — a different world than the ditto-clogged city, or suburbs where comfortably unemployed realfolk distract themselves by pursuing a million hobbies. Below, nature reigned … subject to advice and consent from the Department of Environments.

“What could Albert be up to, coming out this way?” I wondered aloud. Our memories were the same Tuesday noon. Something must have happened since.

“You have no idea?”

“Well … after I was made, Ritu Maharal phoned with news that her father was killed in an auto wreck. My next move would’ve been to study the crash site.”

“Let’s see.” Beta twiddled chords on a controller. Images rippled, zooming to a rocky desolation, underneath a highway viaduct. Police and rescue cruisers surrounded a ruin of twisted metal. “You’re right,” Beta announced. “It’s not far from here, and yet … odd. Albert drove some distance past the crash site; we’re already fifty klicks south.”

“What could be south, except …”

Abruptly I knew. The battle range. He was heading to see Clara.

Beta asked. “Did you say something?”

“Nothing.”

Albert’s love life wasn’t any of this character’s business. Anyway, I had seen Clara today, rummaging through the ruins. So they must not have connected, after all. Something was fishy, all right.

After flying in silence for a while, I asked Beta for a chador. He took a compact model from the glove compartment and passed it back. Wriggling in the cramped space, I slipped the holo-luminescent folds over my head and spent a while rapid-reciting a report, summarizing what happened since the last time I filed, not caring if Beta listened in. He already knew all about events that took place after Palloid and I left the Ephemerals Temple.

“Who’re you sending the report to?” he asked casually when I removed the chador. A keypad glowed nearby, ready for any net address. The in-box of the chief of police. The whistle-blowers page of the Times. Or the fan/junkmail queue of one of those golem astronauts who were on Titan right now, taking turns exploring for a day or two, then dissolving to save on food and fuel till the next replacement came out of storage.

I asked myself the same question. If I send an encrypted file to Albert’s cache, there’s no guarantee Beta won’t tag it with a parasite-follower.

Clara, then? What about Pal?

Assuming the Waxers hadn’t hurt my friend amid all that mayhem, he’d be in a helluva state — either steaming mad over the loss of Palloid’s memories or else in a stupor if they made him take a forget-sniff. Either way, Pal didn’t know how to be discreet.

Then I thought of someone fitting … with the added virtue that it’d gall Beta. “Inspector Blane of the Labor Subcontractors Association,” I told the transmitter unit, with an eye to my companion’s reaction. Beta merely smiled and fussed over the controls while my report went out.

“Include a copy of the film,” he suggested. “Those pictures Irene took.”

“They implicate you—”

“In Class D industrial espionage. A trifling civil matter. But the sabotage attempt at UK was serious! Realfolk might have been endangered. Those pictures prove Kaolin—”

“We don’t know it was him. Why sabotage his own factory?”

“For insurance? An excuse to write off capital equipment? He strove hard to blame all his enemies — Gadarene, Wammaker, Lum, and me.”

I’d been thinking about Kaolin. What’s in the Research Division that he might want to destroy? A program he couldn’t justify shutting down … unless it were ruined by some act beyond his control?