Mark stuffed his mouth with a whole candy bar, realizing suddenly just how hungry he was. He ate some figs, and another Mars bar, and felt better.

But by then the sun was completely out of sight, leaving only a glowing green band across the horizon. Overhead the stars were beginning to open like tiny demon eyes. There were no clouds in sight to cover their malevolent gaze.

Mark burped softly, wiped a chocolate smear from the side of his mouth and mustache, and gazed ruminatively into his pack.

For most of his adult life Mark had sought shelter from the stresses of existence in chemicals. That was why his drug of choice was marijuana. He wasn’t interested in the artificial self-esteem of coke – self-esteem was pretty alien to his experience, and he wasn’t comfortable with it, and besides coke gave him shooting pains in his chest and made him honk like a Canada goose when he talked – nor in the edge you got from speed. He was mainly into taking edges off. He didn’t like needles, which mostly let heroin out, and besides he had a basic middleclass hippie prejudice against being a junkie, plus real concern about heavy physical habituation. His use of psychedelics he’d always regarded as experimental.

When he had to say, “Gimme shelter,” he’d turned to his old friend Mary Jane. Then Sunflower – Kimberly Anne Cordayne Meadows Gooding – had turned up suing for Sprout. For the first time in his life Mark had had real problems. He faced them cold-turkey. He came off the grass at the suggestion of Jokertown’s joker lawyer Dr. Pretorius. He had spent the first couple of weeks after the trial ended drunk, but that was a phase; he had basically spent the last two years clean and sober, as the yuppies say.

He’d scored himself some hash in Amsterdam, but that was mainly because he was bored after the constant fear-and-culture-shock rush of Takis and also because he was in Amsterdam, and that was what you did there. It had been dabbling, like a retired tennis pro who turns in a couple of sets occasionally for nostalgia’s sake.

Now the night was coming, and he wanted to hide. Not that he could hide completely; there was no overhead shelter except for these scraggly cypress trees. But creative chemistry would offer him shelter – if only a temporary one.

What’s the big deal about the stars? he tried to tell himself. What’s to be afraid of?

The answer, unfortunately, was death.

As a kid he’d loved comics. He’d grown up thrilling to the four-color adventures of Jetboy and the Great and Powerful Turtle – no Superman for him; he was only interested in actual aces, even though he understood their exploits were mostly made up by Cosh Comics or whoever held the license. He had wanted, more than anything in the world, to be a Hero, like the ones he read about.

That was the spring which drove him in his long search for the Radical. It was the obsession that had shaped the expression of his personal ace. He had become not one Hero but five.

– And yet, and yet. They weren’t him. At least, he could not accept that they were. He formed a theory that his “friends” were real, actual individuals, from alternate realities, perhaps – he was a science fiction fan, too, of course – whom he had somehow, unknowingly, abducted and trapped within the recesses of his own psyche. They seemed to buy that explanation too; the Traveler and J. J. Flash were always trying to figure out ways to spring themselves, or at least establish themselves as baseline persona instead of Mark, and Moonchild had the expressed goal of liberating all of them, Mark included, so that each could work out his or her own karma.

So while each of them performed many deeds that might be called heroic – J. J. Flash fighting in the raid on the Astronomer’s headquarters in the Cloisters, Moonchild defeating the gene-engineered Takisian killing machine Durg at-Morakh, Starshine deflecting a killer asteroid set on a collision course with Earth by the unholy alliance of the Swarm Mother and Tach’s dashing cousin, Zabb – Mark was adroitly able to escape taking credit for any of them.

Then the last two years happened. Sunflower came back into his life. The custody battle began. Mark not only went off the dope, he did the unthinkable: put the purple tailcoat and top hat out on the curb with the trash and retired Cap’n Trips. One final dose of blue powder had permitted him to escape the courtroom and the friendly clutches of the DEA, but after that he was cold-turkey – on his own.

It had not been easy. He had done things he was not proud of. But he had survived. On the streets and on the Rox. Alone. Without chemical crutches of any kind.

The time had come to call his friends back, to rescue his daughter from the living hell of a New York kid jail. But it was different, then. It wasn’t J. J. Flash or Starshine or Moonchild acting the hero on their own. Mark was the director, the initiator, deploying his friends like a combat commander his troops.

Of course combat had its casualties. He’d left the woman he loved dead by the side of a New Jersey road, fatally injured by the hand of Tach’s grandson, Blaise. And he had left Durg there, too, telling him that he was free, that he belonged now to no master but himself…

Yes, and that was the worst loss of all. He had not understood, though Durg had tried to tell him, that a Morakh could not be free, that they were bred to require servitude as they needed air and water. So Durg, the ultimate bodyguard, designed by Takisian genetic scientists to be master of the arts, not just of combat, but of strategy and diplomacy as well, had transferred his loyalty to the best available master.

Perhaps ten million Takisians had died as a result. Payback for the wild card, with interest, if only Mark could think that way. He couldn’t. Blaise had taken Doctor Tachyon’s body, with the mind of Kelly Jenkins trapped inside, and with Durg in tow as his adviser, had stolen Baby and headed back to Takis. Tachyon, trapped in Kelly’s body- impregnated by Blaise’s repeated rapes – had gathered his three dearest human friends and gone in pursuit.

Since then Mark had done wonderful things. He. Mark.

He had passed a test his boyhood idol Turtle had failed, stepping aboard the Network scoutship in the White Sands desert. The ship was too small to accommodate the Turtle’s shell, and Tommy, for all his proven love and loyalty to Tach, had been unable to leave it behind.

He had flown across the unimaginable distances of interstellar space, and found out spaceflight was mainly boring as hell.

He had taken part in the glittering, bloodstained intrigues of Takis, had helped commit murder, had seen the inside of a hareem that made the Thousand Nights and A Night seem tame. He had helped a woman – who was also his best male friend – give birth. He had fled with a captive princess across a snow-covered mountain range as mighty as Earth’s Himalayas. He had flown on the back of a winged predator the size of a Cessna.

His friends had been there. But he had made the tough decisions.

He had engaged in a wrestling match with Zabb, a Takisian warrior who made Errol Flynn look like a wimp. He had taken part in a desperate commando raid against an enemy castle. He had fought a battle in space.

And he had died.

Starshine, the poet with the wavy blond hair and jutting jaw, so politically correct he was actually solar-powered, was probably the most potent physically-oriented ace Earth had produced – Fortunato was more powerful still, but his powers were of the mind, of a scope and breadth even the Takisians had trouble grasping. Starshine was nearly as strong as Golden Boy, and he could fly through space at the speed of light and fire sunbeams from his hands. He was also a pain in the ass.

He was brave, though. In the battle with the Network he had fought a Ly’bahr cyborg, an alien brain encased in a body like a miniature battleship. He had done what no other being was ever known to have accomplished: defeated a Ly’bahr one-on-one in personal combat.