That pulled Latham's string. He actually jumped to his feet and raised his voice when he objected. Conower was pounding her gavel to restore order. She was going to sustain, no doubt about it. But he'd seen the flicker in her eyes. He'd gotten the point home. Punched her liberal-guilt button with his customary sledgehammer subtlety.

Christ, I hate myself sometimes.

After lunch break Pretorius asked, "Have you ever used illegal drugs, Ms. Gooding."

"Yes." She was forthright, meeting his eyes, not trying to evade an allegation she knew he could prove. "A long, long time ago. It was in the wind." A half smile. "We weren't as wise back then."

Nicely done. "And did you ever try LSD-25?" A pause, then, "Yes."

"Did you use it frequently?"

"That depends on your definition."

"I'll trust your judgment, Ms. Gooding."

She dropped her eyes. "It was the sixties. It was the thing to do. We were experimenting, trying to liberate our consciousness as well as our bodies."

"And did you ever stop to consider the genetic damage such experimentation might be doing?" He let it ring: "Did you not consider the welfare of your future children, Ms. Gooding?"

The courtroom blew up again.

After Conower called recess Mark was waiting for Pretorius, kind of hopping up and down without leaving his horrible chair, ergonomically designed to conform perfectly to the mass man but to fit no individual. He looked as if his ears were made of iron and had been stuck in a microwave.

"What was all that bullshit about?" he hissed at Pretorius. "Acid isn't a proven teratogen. Not like, like alcohol."

"Alcohol isn't the issue. They haven't gotten around to reprohibiting it yet, at least not in time for the morning editions. Latham wants to make an issue of drugs. So we'll give him drugs good and hard."

For a moment Mark could only sputter in outrage. "Wuh-what about the truth?" he finally managed to get out.

"Truth." Pretorius laughed, a low, sour sound. "You're in a court of law, son. Truth is not the issue here."

He sighed and sat. "Never believe that the days of trial by combat are over. Trials are still duels. It's just that the champions wised up and rewrote the rules. Now we fight with writs and precedents instead of maces, and instead of risking our own lives, all we risk is our clients' money. Or lives or freedom."

He rested both hands on the gargoyle-head knob of his cane. You don't like what I'm doing. Son, I don't either. But I take my role as your champion seriously. If I have to wallow in shit to win your case for you, that's what I do.

"These are witch-hunt times. You want to challenge that essential fact; hell, so do I. But if that's all I do, you lose your daughter. That's why they call it the system, Mark. Because like it or not, it's the way things work. Defy it too openly, it grinds you up and spits you out."

Mark and Kimberly had a date for that night, Friday. She didn't keep it. He wasn't surprised. He didn't even blame her. He felt dirtied by the way Pretorius had treated her, ashamed.

What was worst in his own mind was that he hadn't stopped him.

Saturday the guilty depression got to be too much. Mark closed the Wellness Center early. There was something he had to do. A matter of voices in his head.

The small man stood with one red Adida on the roof parapet, looking at the stop-and-go Third World traffic of jokertown a dozen stories below. He wore a red jogging suit over an orange T-shirt. His face was narrow, foxlike, with a sharp prominent nose and a sardonic bend to the eyebrows. Russet hair blew like flames in the stinking breeze.

He held a hand out before him. A jet of flame spurted from the forefinger tip. It became a ball, jumped from one finger to the next. He rolled the hand palm up. The flame swelled to baseball size, settled in the palm. For a moment it burned there, pallid in the sunlight, while he stared at it, as if fascinated. Then with a roar it shot into the high haze on a gusher of fire that seemed to spring from his palm.

He watched the flame dissipate. Then he drew a deep breath, let it sigh out through a lopsided grin.

"About fucking time," he said, and stepped into space. He let himself fall about fifteen feet, far enough to see a startled face flash by in a window. Then he straightened his body and put his arms out before him like a swimmer in a racing dive and took off flying. No point freaking the citizenry too much. The poor schmucks in J-town had enough on their plates already.

He flew north, toward the park, thinking Mark's really. put his foot in it this time. At least the poor fool hadn't quite had the nuts to make a clean break with the past. Didn't have a cold enough core to pour out his remaining vials of powder and see his other selves swirl away down the drain.

Thank God. It was chafing enough, the half-life he and the others led, like spectators at the back of an old and cavernous movie house where the film kept breaking.

He hated that he only existed on sufferance, only knew his own body, his own flesh, the feel of flight and the wind in his hair, in sixty-minute increments. For a man as full of life as he, that was hell.

Hell was a cold place, for him. The life that roared inside him, he expressed as flame.

A helicopter vaulted off a building top to his left. He angled toward it. When he was a thousand yards away, he kicked in some flame, went streaking for it like a SAM.

He threw himself into a corkscrew, drawing a spiral of orange fire into which the chopper flew.

It was a traffic chopper. The crew knew him; the announcer grinned and waved while his assistant pointed a live-action minicam at him.

JJ Flash, superstar. He grinned and waved. The pilot's face was as white as a brother's ever gets. He obviously hadn't run into Jumpin' Jack before.

That was fine, too. Flash had a certain amount of mean in him, that needed some harmless outlet. .. About then he realized where he was heading. He smiled again, wolfishly. His subconscious knew what it was doing.

Kimberly Ann Cordayne Meadows Gooding looked up from her magazine. A man was floating outside the glass corner of her penthouse, tapping with one finger.

She gasped. Her hand reached up to twitch her indigo robe a little more closed over the sheer lilac negligee. He made urgent gestures for her to open the window. She bit her lip, shook her head.

"It doesn't open," she said.

"Fuck," his mouth said soundlessly. He pushed away about six feet, rolled out his hand palm up, as if introducing his next guest on late-night TV Orange fire jetted out and splashed against the window.

Kimberly recoiled. Almost she screamed. Almost. The window wavered, melted in a rough oval. A breath of warm diesel-perfumed wind washed in. The man in red stepped through.

"Sorry about the window," he said. "I'll pay for it. I had to talk to you."

"My husband's a rich man," she said. Her voice caught, like a hand running over silk.

"I'm JJ Flash."

"I know who you are. I've seen you on Peregrine's Perch."

Without asking, he dropped onto a merciless white chair. "Yeah. And you've seen those pictures your fuck lawyer flashed around. Some poor teenybopper pan-fried by a psycho in a town I've never even been to."

She glanced at the window. The wind was blowing her hair. "Maybe Mr. Latham's the one you should be visiting."

"No. You're the one I want. Why are you jacking Mark Meadows around?"

She leapt up. "How dare you speak to me like thad" He laughed. "Can the indignation, babe. All your life… as long as you've known him, it's been the same. You tantalize and glide away. He's a putz in a lot of ways, but he deserves better."

He tipped his head sideways and looked more like a fox than ever. "Or are you just setting the boy up?"

For a moment her eyebrows formed fine arches of fury above eyes that had gone meltwater pale. Then she stood and spun, walked a few steps away. He watched the way her full buttocks moved the heavy cloth of the robe. "He must tell you a lot about himself," she said tartly. A grin came across Flash's face. He held up crossed fingers. "We're like this." The grin hardened, set. "Answer the question, babe."