Donald Westlake - Smoke

"I think so," David said.

"All the time, these days," George said, "I'm kinda scared. I figure, some cop gonna pull me over, when I'm chauffeurin, you know, they run the computer on me, bang, my ass is in the southland. This way, if what you're gonna do works out, I'm home and dry. They can't fry what they can't see, am I right?"

"Oh, I'm sure you are," David said.

"And if it don't work, what you're doin here," George said, and spread his hands, his big smile making that awful scar writhe like a brown snake across his face, "they still gonna pay me so much money I don't ever hafta work again unless I don't want to. A cop that can't see me can't compute me, don't that make sense?"

David worked his way through the negatives, and finally nodded. "I believe it does," he said.

35

"Forty-eight hours exactly," Mordon said on Friday morning, when the doctors emerged from their elevator and came forward to meet him once again in their front hall. "I'm here to see your results. Or should I say, not see them?"

"No, you'll see them, all right," Heimhocker said.

Now Mordon looked more closely at the doctors, and realized they were not at all cheerful. They did not look like men who'd just had a triumph. They looked, in fact, quite glum. Shaking his head, thinking already how unpleasant it would be to bring bad news to Jack the Fourth, Mordon said, "You failed?"

"They aren't invisible," Heimhocker said, and Loomis, extremely defensive, said, "Which doesn't mean we failed. The experiment had too many variables."

"Exactly," Heimhocker said. "Without Freddie Noon, without knowing exactly when he took the second formula, what else he ate or drank that night, what he did the rest of the night, there's no possible way to duplicate the experiment, and therefore no possible way to duplicate the results."

"If that's the case," Mordon said, opening a combination lock, "why didn't you mention it before?"

"We didn't know it before, obviously," Loomis said, and Heimhocker said, "It was worth the effort, we've certainly learned from the experience. We now know, for instance, that we do not have a guaranteed invisibility formula."

"This is very bad news," Mordon said, wringing a washcloth. "Where are the volunteers?"

"In the conference room," Heimhocker said, and Loomis said, "Did you want to see them?"

Mordon had met the two volunteers briefly Tuesday afternoon, while the details were being worked out. Did he want to see them again? He wasn't sure. His hands fluttered by a buddleia bush, looking for pollen, and he said, "What do they look like now? Did it do nothing at all? Or do they look like the cats?"

"Not a bit like the cats," Loomis said, and Heimhocker said, "Nor like one another. Until we can study Freddie Noon, the only thing we can say is that the combination of formulae is both volatile and unpredictable."

"That doesn't sound good," Mordon said. "Are they likely to sue?"

"I doubt it," Heimhocker said, and Loomis said, "Come see for yourself."

"Perhaps I'd better."

Mordon followed the two doctors back to the conference room, that unlovely fluorescent-lit space, where a tan man in a blue bathrobe sat playing solitaire. He looked up when they entered, smiled at the doctors, then looked at Mordon and said, "You're one of the lawyers. I remember you."

Mordon approached him. "Well, I don't remember you, " he said. This was hardly the George Clapp he'd met three days ago in NAABOR's corporate offices in the World Trade Center. This fellow was several shades lighter and several years younger. And — good God. Mordon said, "Where's the scar?"

"Gone," George Clapp said, and grinned. "All my scars went away, all over my body. Aches and pains gone. I feel like I'm nineteen years old."

Mordon turned wide-eyed to the doctors, and Loomis said, "It ate the scar tissue everywhere on his body."

Heimhocker said, "Fasting will do this, too, over a long term. When the body has nothing else to eat, it will eat its own dead tissue. But I've never heard of it happening this fast."

Clapp put down the deck of cards, lifted his hands palm out, grinned all over his face, and said, "Tell him about my prints."

"Yes, his fingerprints," Heimhocker said, and Loomis said, "We put their fingerprints on their medical sheets," and Heimhocker said, "George's have changed," and Loomis said, "They're much simpler and fainter than they were. Not at all the same."

" Run that computer on me," Clapp said, and laughed.

Mordon said, "And the woman? Miss Prendergast? Did it do the same to her?"

"Not exactly," Heimhocker said, and Loomis said to Clapp, "Where is she, anyway?"

"Went to the ladies'. She'll be back."

Heimhocker said to Mordon, "Her fingerprints didn't change. As I say, this formula is so unknown, we're not sure what it will do."

"Not without Freddie Noon," Mordon said. "I take the point."

"Precisely," Heimhocker said, and movement behind Mordon made him turn around.

Michael Prendergast had come in. Mordon stared at her. "Oh, my God," he breathed. His hands didn't move.

She was no longer the lushly healthy California-style beauty Mordon had met on Tuesday. Her skin was pale and pink now, almost translucent. A kind of ethereal glow surrounded her, as though she were an angel, or one of the lost maidens mourned by Poe. She looked fragile, unworldly, uncarnal, and absolutely stunning. She was ten times the beauty she had been before.

"Ms. Prendergast," Mordon stammered, poleaxed. "You are the most beautiful thing I have ever seen in my life!"

She burst into tears.

36

"Hold still," Peg said.

"I am holding still," Freddie said, though of course he wasn't.

Peg knew he was twitching because the brush tickled him, particularly under the nose, but there was no help for that. He just had to stand it for a minute, the baby. "I don't want to stick this brush in your nose," she pointed out.

"That makes two of us," he said.

The problem was cabin fever. It does exist, and not just in snowbound log huts in the frozen north. You can have cabin fever in a nice house in upstate New York in the summer, too, even with a swimming pool and a VCR and all the rest of it, if you can't go anywhere.

They both felt the same way about this. That is, Peg felt this way, and Freddie assured her he did, too.

So it was time to do something about it. And the something was a meal in a restaurant, a nice candlelit dinner that did not come out of their own kitchen. A restaurant meal was all either of them asked for. That was all, in fact, that either of them talked about or thought about these days. They had all this money, they had all this leisure, they were living in the middle of a resort and vacation area speckled with charming restaurants, and all they did was eat at home, and not even together. In separate rooms, gloomily, not even shouting stuff to one another anymore.

How to do it. How to have a nice dinner out. They could always go for drives, with Freddie inside one of his heads, but he couldn't very well eat a meal with a latex head on, and if he took it off in the restaurant there'd really be hell to pay.

He even volunteered at one point to just come along and escort her and sit there and watch her eat, only pretending to join in the meal himself, but she wouldn't let him do it. It would drive them both crazy, and she knew it.

So here was the idea. It had come to her this morning when she woke up, three days after Call Me Tom had come by with his warning that the forces of evil were still out and about. "Hmmmmm," she said, sitting up.

"Nothing's happened yet," the voice of Freddie said, from over by the dresser. "So maybe Call Me Tom did keep his mouth shut."