THE INFORMATION

'Can you imagine the shit we'll have to sit through if it's Abdel-razak?'

'Okay. Jung-Xiao … tricks Gupta-?

'Not Gupta. How about Yukio?'

'Tricks Yukio? Are you kidding?'

'Okay. Piotr . . .'

'Yeah. Piotr.'

'Jung-Xiao tricks Abdelrazak into revealing that Piotr … is one of them.'

'A bioengineer.'

'Or a Fed.'

'Way-wait. Gupta hates Solomon, right?'

'Right. And so does Abdelrazak. And Yukio hates Jung-Xiao. And Eagle Woman hates Conchita. And Padma hates Masha.'

'And Baruwaluwu hates Arnaujumajuk.'

'. . . Why in Christ's name would Baruwaluwu hate Arnaujumajuk?'

'Because they're always going after the same funding.'

'Way-wait . . . Conchita is spreading a mutant disease through Amelior.'

'… Which she got from the bioengineer: Piotr.'

'.. . Who's also having a thing with Jung-Xiao.'

'… Who's putting out for Yukio.'

'. . . Who's feeding it to Abdelrazak.'

'.. . Who's deep in the jeep with Eagle Woman . . .'

Asked to comment, after an unusually long silence, Gwyn said,

'There's no love and no hate in Amelior.'

'That's true, Gwyn. We wondered about that. And everyone has these diseases anyway.'

'The hardback is in its eleventh printing,' said Gwyn, who went on to list the hemispherical achievements of Amelior. 'All this without love and hate. Perhaps you should think about that.'

'There has to be love and hate, Gwyn. Even if it means hazing the ethnic distinctions-and making them all Americans.'

'And losing the diseases. There has to be love and hate. So we care.'

'So we care.'

'So we care.'

'While we're on the subject of caring,' said Richard, who was about to take his leave (Gwyn would be lunching with the team), 'can I ask a question? There's a big dump bin in reception, where we came in. It's got a little stenciled sign on it which says 'Caring Barrel.' What's a Caring

Barrel? It looks like a big trash can.'

'Ah yes. That's the Caring Barrel. The Caring Barrel was placed there after the earthquake for-' 'After the riots.?

'After the riots. The Caring Barrel is for concerned employees to … deposit food or warm clothes for …'

'Those who might be in need.'

'Thanks,' said Richard. On his way to the door he passed the third executive, who was frowning and massaging his eyebrows and saying,

'Is that what it is? I thought it was just a big trash can.'

While the lady in reception called him a cab Richard had a good look at the Caring Barrel. It did indeed contain an old scarf and a pair of socks and a couple of packets of cookies and cereal, half hidden by all the regular trash tossed in there by employees who didn't know it was a Caring Barrel. Richard cared. Caring was what Richard was all about. If caring was wrong, then-yes-Richard was wrong. But he didn't know he cared so much. In later years, he supposed, he might have to spend a lot of time peering into Caring Barrels and caring about what they contained.

Back at the hotel he threw in a call to the Lazy Susan. Sure enough, sales were holding firm at one copy.

During the tour Richard had been solicitous of his own health, careful, for instance, to stop drinking every night when he was still a good milliliter clear of liver collapse; he quite often remembered to take his Vitamin C, until it ran out; and of course his smoking had been much reduced, or much rearranged. The confinement and immobility and canned air of modern travel, and the effects of at least three huge and ill-chosen meals a day, he offset with his frequent sprints to the bathroom and with his roilingly aerobic insomnias. But in Los Angeles he definitely started to let himself go. The thing seemed to be that he was making a superhuman effort to avoid thinking about the future, and it was taking a lot out of him.

Everyone said that Gwyn was meant to be taking it easy-secluding himself from the pressures ranged against the successful novelist. But he looked and behaved like a walking power surge, and continued to indulge and even embolden the publicity boy. When he wasn't being interviewed elsewhere, Gwyn Barry, wearing white tennis shorts and black espadrilles, was being interviewed out by the pool. Sometimes Gwyn would be accompanied by the publicity boy; sometimes (there were at least two occasions Richard knew about), the publicity boy's place was taken by Audra Christenberry, the young screen actress, and her publicity boy, or agent, or agent's agent: this young man was in any case Audra's reality-handler, just as Gwyn's reality was handled by his publicity boy. Audra, who claimed to be a great admirer of Gwyn's material, was up for the role of Conchita in Amelior. Richard had to say thatAudra didn't look the part. She was no longer the fresh-faced tomboy from Montana. After six months in Hollywood, Audra was now a corny phantasm of man-pleasing artifice-whereas Conchita, in the book, was just another fresh-faced tomboy in straw hat and coarse dungarees with green fingers and a chest condition.

But this was Hollywood, and Audra was heady effluvia from the dream factory. And Richard stood alone, he felt, in the real world. Stood before the mirror, in fact, where he auditioned or screen-tested himself in his swimming trunks, and decided no. There wasn't a publicity boy good enough to handle the reality that faced him. It was decidedly inopportune that his reading-and-signing engagement was scheduled for the end of the tour, in Boston. Had he read and signed in Washington, in Chicago, Richard thought, his mail sack might by now have been lightened, or even emptied. And then there were the biographies, which habit forbade him to discard. And anyway his suitcase, with its appalling tonnage, seemed to provide a chiropractic counterbalance to the sadistic burden of his mail sack.

The mirror said it was reality. He felt convinced that he had lost at least three inches in height since leaving London. He stood there, in the wizened trunks; his polyplike pallor was relieved only by the loud rash or broad abrasion that swathed his right shoulder. There was also a kind of bedsore in the corner of his clavicle. The right arm itself felt okay if it wasn't being asked to do anything but when he sobbed himself awake at night it felt numb and blood-logged and inflexibly swollen. When he could distinguish his hand, in the dawn, he expected it to look like a boxing glove. His one pair of shoes bore testimony to what gravity was doing to him: there they wallowed on the carpet, like cowpats indented by unfortunate footprints.

So he never went out. Except when the maid came, he never went out. He developed a liking for The Simpsons, a cartoon sitcom about an average American family, awkward-bodied, totem-faced; they bickered a lot. He was also intrigued, as they say, by all the pornography. The television in his room went about its transmissions nonjudgmentally, but to Richard the set itself often seemed scandalized and even persecuted by these gladiatorial displays-this modern marriage of window-