Smoke

'Your telephone disappeared?'

'Yes!'

'Right out of your hand?'

'Yes!'

'That's like the missing Ambroses,' the older guy said.

Freddie and both kids now gave this new arrival a lot closer attention, realizing he was going to be more interesting than they'd thought. The insurance man, glaring pop-eyed, cried, 'Ambroses? Ambroses?'

'Sure,' the other guy said. 'Somebody was collecting Ambroses, Charles Fort wrote about it.'

The insurance man had expected skepticism, scorn, disbelief; he hadn't expected Ambroses. 'What the hell has that got to do,' he cried passionately, 'with my phone?'

The other guy took his magazines out from under his arm and started to leaf through them, as though one might contain an article explaining where the insurance man's telephone had gone. 'Then there's Judge Crater,' he said. 'Now, in parapsychology—'

'I don't want any of your crap!' the insurance man screamed, waving his arms around. 'I want my phone!'

It seemed to Freddie the insurance man was doing a very nice job of drawing attention to himself and away from anything else that might happen on this block, so, while all eyes turned toward this unexpected entertainment on the sidewalk, Freddie skipped through the gathering throng and went off in pursuit of the woman with the shopping bags. She was still plodding forward, step after step, doggedly homeward bound.

Unfortunately, just as Freddie arrived, the woman stopped. She frowned. She gazed down at the shopping bag into which Freddie had dropped the phone. Her eyes widened. 'Hello?' she said.

Now what? Freddie had just caught up, and had been about to reach into that bag to retrieve the phone, but he couldn't very well do that with the woman staring at the bag that way.

Then things got worse. One-armed, the woman raised that plastic bag toward her head, a listening expression on her face. And then Freddie could hear it, too. In a tiny tinny voice, the plastic bag was saying, 'Hello? Hello?'

The woman screamed, sensibly enough. Then she dropped the plastic bag onto the sidewalk — something glass broke in there, Freddie heard it — and legged it down the street at a milk-horse trot, listing to the side where she still toted groceries, but making good headway nonetheless.

So now while most of the people on the street were watching the insurance man do his mad lost-telephone dance, the rest of the people on the street turned to watch the fershlugginer woman with the one plastic bag, trotting and shrieking. A great moment for Freddie to retrieve the phone, which he did, and scoot with it into the tapered recess of the storefront dentist's entryway. Hunkering down there, so he could keep the phone below the level of the storefront window — he didn't want the receptionist in there to have to wonder why a cellular phone was flying solo in her doorway — he raised it and heard the thing still going, 'Hello? Hello?'

What persistence. 'Sorry, wrong number,' Freddie told it, and closed the two halves of the phone together, which made it hang up. He waited a couple seconds, then opened it again, put it to his ear, and the plaintive hellos were gone at last, replaced by the welcome dial tone. Quickly he punched out his own number, and Peg answered on the second ring: 'Hello?'

'It's me, Peg, I'm gonna come home now.'

'Okay. Your brother Jimmy called.'

'Oh, yeah?'

'He said don't call him back, he'll ring again later.'

'What's it about?'

'He didn't say.'

Freddie looked up, and there was a kid of maybe eight years of age standing in the doorway, looking with deep interest at the floating cellular phone, which was just now saying, 'I'll make you a turkey sandwich, okay?'

'Ssshhhhh,' Freddie said.

The kid said, 'I didn't say anything.'

Peg said, 'Freddie? Something wrong?'

'I got to hang up now,' Freddie said, and folded the phone on itself.

The kid gazed, neither frightened nor excited, just intensely interested. He said, 'Are you a magic phone?'

'Yes,' Freddie said.

'Do you belong to that man back there?'

'I didn't like him anymore,' Freddie said, 'so I went away from him.'

'He's really mad.'

'That's it,' Freddie told the kid. 'He's just got too excitable a personality, I get yelled into all the time, that's why I left.'

'What are you going to do now?' the kid asked.

'I'm going to fly away,' Freddie said. Standing up, he held the phone in both hands, then opened and closed it, opened and closed it, which made it look like something with wings.

Freddie left the dentist's doorway and headed toward home, holding the phone in front of him at about wrist level, opening and closing, opening and closing; every time he looked back, the kid was still there, watching.

Other people were watching, too, their attention caught by the vision of something weird flying by. Nobody tried to grab the phone, though, and Freddie made sure to steer himself so he never got too close to anybody.

Moving like that, he made it to the corner, and turned away from the shopping street onto a residential side street, where maybe he could get a little peace and quiet. His idea was, he'd stash the phone under a bush or a rock or something, so he could come back and use it every day at lunchtime and solve his telephone problem for good and all.

But when he looked back, an army of the curious was coming around the corner behind him, led by that damn kid, who was loudly explaining to anybody who'd listen that that was a magic flying telephone up ahead there, and that it didn't want to be yelled into anymore.

Freddie sped up, waggling the phone wings like mad. Behind him, the crowd also sped up, and some of them were considerably speedier than Freddie, mostly because they were wearing shoes and he was not.

Too damn many people, that was the problem. You can distract a thousand of them, there's still another hundred to give chase. The downside of city life.

Freddie could see his plan was not going to work. If he didn't abandon this telephone, before the end of this block somebody would catch up, reach for it, touch him, yell like mad, touch him some more, and then grab. And then a lot of people would grab.

Come to think of it, since they wouldn't be able to see him, they wouldn't know what they were grabbing, or where they were grabbing it. They could knock him down onto the sidewalk and trample him and never even know it.

Would they be able to see his blood, once it was outside him, all over the sidewalk?

These were not comforting thoughts. At the moment, Freddie was running past narrow yellow-brick two- story houses, all alike, two feet apart from one another, built up a tiny slope and back from the sidewalk, with gray-brick steps and walks, and scrubby little plantings in front of their enclosed porches. As he ran on by them, the shouts behind him closer and closer, and as he came to understand at last how the fox feels when all those loudmouth hounds are in his near background, Freddie finally tossed the telephone up and away, toward the shrubbery in front of house number 261-23.

Good-bye, telephone. Tomorrow we'll work out something else.

Freddie kept running, but the shouts behind him receded, and when he at last dared to look back the crowd had all run up the steps to 261-23 and were diving into the bushes there. More and more of them came, ripping greenery out by the roots in their frenzied search for the magic flying telephone.

Freddie was winded. He stood where he was, panting, holding his side where the pain was, and watched people toss the phone into the air and leap to catch it and fight over it and toss it some more, trying to make it fly. A throng of people had gathered in front of 261-23 now, ballooning out onto the sidewalk and even to the street, and nobody even paid any attention when the lady of the house, outraged at this attack on her brushwork, came