"Appearances count for a lot in court, he says. See, the judge decided to hold open hearings at the end, not just take depositions and briefs like they usually do in custody cases. And Doc Pretorius says Sun-Kimberly's attorney's trying to get the press in, and they'll play it up big; the ace thing and all. You know how popular we are now. So this image thing, it's like, if a biker gets busted for murder or something, they shave off his beard and put a suit on him for trial."

"But you are not on trial."

"Dr. E says I am."

"Hmm. Who is the judge?"

"Justice Mary Conower." He bent, picked up a box, and brightened. "She's supposed to be a liberal; she was, like, a big Dukakis supporter. She won't let all these ace haters trash me. Will she?"

"I remember her from the campaign. Last fall I'd have said you were correct. Now… I'm not so sure. It seems we have few friends on any side."

"Maybe that's why Dr. E told me to go underground instead ' of doing the court thing. But I always thought being a liberal meant you believed in people's rights and stuff."

"A lot of us thought that, once." Something stuffed in a box caught Tach's eye. He stooped like a hawk. "Mark, no!" he exclaimed, brandishing a crumpled purple top hat.

Mark stood holding the box and avoiding his eyes. "I had to straighten up. Stop doing drugs. Pretorius said they'd ream me out royally if I didn't. Might even go to the DA and get me busted."

"Your Sunflower would do this to you?"

"Her attorney would. Dude named Latham. They call him, like, Sturgeon or something."

" `Sinjin.' Yes. He would do that. He would do anything." He held up the hat. "But this?"

The tears were streaming freely down Mark's shorn cheeks now. "I decided on my own, man. After the vials I got now are all used up, I'm not making any more. There's just too much risk, and I gotta keep Sprout. No matter what."

"So Captain Trips-"

"Has hung it up, man."

"Have you ever used drugs, Dr. Meadows?"

With effort Mark pulled his consciousness back to the deposition room. The oak paneling seemed to be pressing him like a Salem witch. His attention was showing a tendency to spin around inside his skull.

"Uh. Back in the sixties," he told St. John Latham. Pretorius opposed conceding even that much. But this new Mark, the one emerging from a cannabis pupa into the chill of century's end, thought that would be a little much.

"Not since?"

"No."

"What about tobacco?"

He rubbed his eyes. He was getting a headache. "I quit smoking in '78, man."

"And alcohol?"

"I drink wine, sometimes. Not too often."

"You eat chocolate?"

"Yes."

"You're a biochemist. It surprises me you aren't aware these are all drugs; addictive ones, in fact."

"I do know" Very subdued.

"Ah. What about aspirin? Yes? Penicillin? Antihistamines?"

"Yeah. I'm, uh, allergic to penicillin."

"So. You do still use drugs. Even addictive drugs. Though you just now denied doing it."

"I didn't know that's what you meant."

"What other drugs do you use that you claim you don't?"

Mark glanced to Pretorius. The lawyer shrugged. "None, man. I mean, uh, none."

When they got back to the Village from Latham's office, Mark could tell Sprout was tired and footsore, simply because she wasn't bouncing around in the usual happy-puppy way she had when she was out somewhere with Daddy. She wore a lightweight dress and flats, and her long straight blond hair was tied in a ponytail to keep it off her neck. Mark fingered his own nape, which still felt naked in the sticky-hot spring-afternoon breeze, rich with polynucleic aromatic hydrocarbons.

A couple of kids in bicycling caps and lycra shorts clumped by on the other side of the street. They watched Sprout with overt interest. She was just falling into adolescence, still skinny as a car antenna. But she had an ingenue face, startlingly pretty. The kind to attract attention. Reflexively he tugged her closer. I'm turning into an uptight old man, he thought, and tugged again at the loosened white collar of his shirt. His neck felt ropeburned by the tie now wadded in the pocket of his gray suit coat.

The light of the falling sun shattered like glass on windshields and shop windows and filled his eyes with sharp fragments. Even in this backwater street the noise of nearby traffic was like a rocker-arm engine pounding in his skull, and each honk of a horn threatened to pop his eyes like a steel needle.

For years Mark had lived in a haze of marijuana smoke. He dabbled in other drugs, but that was more in the nature of biochemical experimentation with himself as subject-such as had called up the Radical, and subsequently his "friends." Grass was his drug of choice. Way back in those strange days of the late sixties early seventies, actually, but the sixties didn't end until Nixon did-it seemed a perfect solace to someone who had come to terms with the fact that he was doomed to disappoint everyone who expected anything of him. Especially himself.

Now he was emerging from the cushioning fog. Off the weed, the world was a lot more surreal place to be. Someone stepped from the doorway of the Pumpkin, features obscured by the broad straw brim of a hat. Mark's hand moved to the inside pocket of his coat, where he kept a set of his dwindling supply of vials.

Sprout lunged forward with arms outspread. The figure knelt, embraced her, and then violet eyes were looking up at him from beneath the hat brim.

"Mark," Kimberly said. "I had to see you."

The ball bounced across the patchy grass of Central Park as though it were bopping out the lyrics to a sixties cigarette-commercial jingle. Sprout pursued it, skipping and chirping happily.

"What does your old man think of all this?" Mark asked, lying on his elbows on the beach towel Kimberly had brought along with the ball.

"About what?" she asked him. She wasn't showing her agency game face this afternoon. In an impressionistic cotton blouse and blue jeans that looked as if they'd been worn after she bought them instead of before, knees drawn up to support her chin and hair hanging in a braid down her back, she looked so much like the Sunflower of old he could barely breathe.

He wanted to say, "about the trial," but he also wanted to say, "about you seeing me," but the two kind of jostled against each other and got jammed up like fat men trying to go through a men's room door at the same time, and so he just made vaguely circular gestures in the air and said, "About, uh, this."

"He's in Japan on business. T. Boone Pickens is trying to open up the country to American businesses. Cornelius is one of his advisers." She seemed to speak with unaccustomed crispness, but then he'd never been good at telling that kind of thing. It had been one of their problems. One of many.

He was trying to think of something to say when Sunflower-no, Kimberly--clutched his arm. "Mark, look-" Their daughter had followed the bouncing ball into the middle of a large blanket and the Puerto Rican family that occupied it, almost bowling over a stout woman in lime-green shorts. A short, wiry man with tattoos all over his arm jumped up and started expostulating. Half a dozen children gathered around, including a boy about Sprout's own age with a switchblade face.

"Mark, aren't you going to do something?"

He looked at her, puzzled. "What, man? She's okay."

"But those… people. That is, Sprout ran into them, they're justifiably upset-"

He laughed. "Look."

The Puerto Ricans were laughing, too. The fat woman hugged Sprout. The tough kid smiled and tossed her the ball. She turned and came racing back up the slope toward her parents, graceful and clumsy as a week-old foal.

"See? She gets along pretty well with people, even if…" The sentence ran down uncompleted, as they usually did on that subject.