He ran the tuner on the Dodge's radio, and was amazed as a flood of conflicting transmissions poured out of the speakers-rock-and-roll, countryand-western, and classical music stepped all over each other. Somewhere in the background he could hear Paul Harvey extolling Amway. He turned the dial further and caught a momentarily clear transmission so surprising he pulled over. He sat staring at the radio with big eyes.

It was speaking in Japanese.

He sat and waited for the inevitable clarification -'This lesson in Beginners” Japanese has been brought to you by your local Kyanize Paint dealer,” something like that. The announcer finished. Then came the Beach Boys “Be True to Your School.” In Japanese.

Leandro continued to tune down the kHz band with a hand that shook. It was much the same all the way. As it did at night, the tangle of voices and music got worse as he tuned toward the higher frequencies. At last the tangle grew so severe it began to frighten him-it was the auditory equivalent of a squirming mass of snakes. He turned the radio off and sat behind the wheel, eyes wide, body thrumming slightly, like a man on lowgrade speed.

What is this?

Foolish to speculate when the answer lay no more than six miles up ahead… always assuming he could uncover it, of course.

Oh, I think you'll uncover it. You may not like it when you do, but yeah, I think you'll uncover it with no trouble at all.

Leandro looked around. The hay in the field on his right was long and shaggy. Too long and shaggy for August. There hadn't been any first cutting in early July. Somehow he didn't think there was going to be any August cutting, either. He looked left and saw a tumbledown barn surrounded by rusty auto parts. The corpse of a “57 Studebaker was decaying in the barn's maw. The windows seemed to stare at Leandro. There were no people to stare, at least not that he could see.

A very quiet, very polite little voice spoke up inside him, the voice of a well-mannered child at a tea party that has become decidedly scary:

I would like to go home, please.

Yes. Home to Mother. Home in time to watch the afternoon soaps with her. She would be glad to see him back with his scoop, maybe even more glad to see him back without it. They'd sit and eat cookies and drink coffee. They would talk. She would talk, rather, and he would listen. That was how it always was, and it really wasn't that bad. She could be an irritating thing sometimes, but she was…

Safe.

Safe, yeah. That was it. Safe. And whatever was going on south of Troy on this dozy summer afternoon, it wasn't at all safe.

I would like to go home, please.

Right. There had probably been times when Woodward and Bernstein felt that way when Nixon's boys were really putting the squeeze on. Bernard Fall had probably felt that way when he got off the plane in Saigon for the last time. When you saw the TV news correspondents in trouble-spots like Lebanon and Tehran, they only looked cool, calm, and collected. Viewers never had a chance to inspect their shorts.

The story is out there, and I'm going to get it, and when I collect my Pulitzer Prize, I can say I owe it all to David Bright… and my secret Superman wristwatch.

He put the Dodge in gear again and drove on toward Haven.

He hadn't gone a mile before he began to feel a bit ill. He thought this must be a physical symptom of his fear and ignored it. Then, when he began to feel worse, he asked himself (as one is apt to do when he realizes that the nausea sitting in his stomach like a small dark cloud is not going away) what he had eaten. There was no blame to be laid in that direction. He hadn't been afraid when he got up that morning, but he had been feeling a lot of anticipation and high-spirited tension; as a result he had refused the usual bacon and scrambled eggs and settled for tea and dry toast. That was all.

I would like to go home! The voice was now more shrill.

Leandro pushed on, teeth clamped grimly together. The scoop was in Haven. If he couldn't get into Haven, there would be no scoop. You couldn't hit “em if you couldn't see “em. QED.

Less than a mile from the town line-the day was eerily, utterly dead-a series of beeping, booping, and buzzing noises began to come from the back seat, startling him so badly that he cried out and pulled over to the side of the road again.

He looked in back and at first was unable to credit what he was seeing. It had to be, he thought, a hallucination brought on by his increasing nausea.

When he and his mother had been in Halifax this past weekend, he had taken his nephew Tony out for a Dairy Queen. Tony (whom Leandro privately thought was an ill-mannered little snot) had sat in the back playing with a plastic toy that looked a bit like the handset of a Princess phone. This toy was called Merlin, and it ran on a computer chip. It played four or five simple games which called for simple feats of memory or the ability to identify a simple mathematical series. Leandro remembered it had also played tic-tac-toe.

Anyway, Tony must have forgotten it, and now it was going crazy in the back seat, its red lights flashing on and off in random patterns (but were they? or just a little too fast for him to catch?), making its simple series of sounds again and again and again. It was running by itself.

No… no. I hit a pothole, or something. That's all. Jogged its switch. Got it going.

But he could see the small black switch on the side. It was pushed to Off. But Merlin went on booping and beeping and buzzing. It reminded him of a Vegas slot-machine paying off a big jackpot.

The thing's plastic case began to smoke. The plastic itself was sinking… drooling… running like tallow. The lights flashed faster… faster. Suddenly they all went on at once, bright red, and the gadget emitted a strangled buzzing sound. The case cracked open. There was a brittle shower of plastic shards. The seat-cover started to smolder underneath it.

Ignoring his stomach, Leandro got up on his knees and knocked it onto the floor. There was a charred spot on the seat where Merlin had lain.

What is this?

The answer, irrelevant, nearly a scream:

I WOULD LIKE TO GO HOME NOW PLEASE!

“The ability to isolate a simple mathematical series.” Did I think that? The John Leandro that flunked general math in high school? Do you mean it?

Never mind that, just bug OUT!

No.

He put the Dodge in gear and drove on again. He had gone less than twenty yards when he thought suddenly, with crazy exhilaration:

The ability to isolate a simple mathematical series indicates the existence of a general case, doesn't it? You could express it this way, come to think of it:

ax[2] + bxy = cy[2] + dx + ey + f = 0.

Yup. It'll work as long as a, b, c, d, and f are constants. I think. Yeah. You bet. But you couldn't let a, b, or c be 0-that'd fuck it for sure! Let f take care of itself! Ha!

Leandro felt like puking, but he still uttered a shrill, triumphant laugh. All at once he felt as if his brain had lifted off, right through the top of his skull. Although he didn't know it (having pretty much dozed through that part of Nerd Math), he had reinvented the general quadratic equation in two variables, which can indeed be used to isolate components in a simple mathematical series. It blew his mind.

A moment later, blood burst from his nose in an amazing flood.

That was the end of John Leandro's first effort to get into Haven. He threw the gearshift into reverse and backed unsteadily up the road, weaving from side to side, right arm hooked over the front seat, blood pouring onto the shoulder of his shirt as he stared out through the back window with watering eyes.

He backed up for almost a mile, then turned around in a driveway. He looked down at himself. His shirt was drenched with blood. But he felt better. A little better, he amended. Still, he didn't linger; he drove back to Troy Village and parked in front of the general store.