'But I've got to go now. Please-forgive me.'
Sheelagh sat hunched over her tears in fearful confusion, and when Carl galloped out of the apartment and the door banged behind him, she collapsed under an avalanche of sobs.
Carl phoned Zeke from Ames, Iowa, and had him take the next flight out. The trip was Zeke's first time out in the world by himself in a long time. He dressed inconspicuously in loafers, gay slacks, blue shirt, bowtie, and tweed blazer. He was apprehensive about being recognized, and a fugitive anxiety accompanied him even in the privacy of the cab to the airport.
His mind was clear, however, and he was pleased with how easily he flowed back into the stream of things.
A limo picked him up at the Des Moines airport and drove him through the long fluent miles of resinous land to a lonely warehouse big and empty as a ship's hull. Workers toiled with electric saws, hammers, and welders, fitting living quarters into a corner of the warehouse.
Carl met him-at a scaffolded loading dock cluttered with lumber, fixtures, and pipes. They sauntered toward the warehouse under streamers of construction noise, and Carl told him about the spore.
Zeke went moth-white and fluttery. His eyes were glazed brown fruits when they saw the bandage strapping Carts hand. Carl explained about Sheelagh and him, and Zeke sat down on a stack of cinderblocks.
'You've known about this all along?' he asked in a shadowy voice. 'Why did you come back?' The answer returned to him with the shock of a revelation: Carl had never left. His bodymind had journeyed among universes but his soul was everyone around him-all complicit with his betrayal of life on earth. A-shudder twitched through him.
All Zeke could think to say was: 'I can't believe you've had the balls to shave each morning.'
Carl's contrite face brightened. ' I don't. I use this.' He lifted his left arm, and the red lens of the lance glinted from under his cuff.
Zeke experienced a warm flush on his cheeks and chin, and he looked down to see a fine dust of whiskers' powdering his shirtfront. 'You're, the crazy one,' he said, challenging Carl with the boldness of his stare.
'You're surprised at that?' Carl responded. 'After all I've lost, you expect me to be sane?'
'Lost?' The veins in Zeke's temples drummed. He thought of slugging Carl, but knowledge of the spore dissuaded him. 'You've got a perfect body, an armor with godful powers, and a lance that gives a great shave. What've you lost? Earthone, a savage greedconfounded toxic dump?
Evoe? Does she love you with more passion and more surrender than Sheelagh? Is she more beautiful?'
'It's not that.'
'Damn right. What have you lost?'
'The ordinary.' He dragged out a sigh. 'It's strange now. I can barely remember when life was ordinary enough to be boring. I miss that. '
'So you've endangered a whole world to recapture
a feeling?' Zeke thwacked-his notebook across his knee and looked away.
'You're the one that believes the universe is infinite. What are you worried about? There are plenty of other earths, right?
And besides, you're the one who told me to take my pleasure when I found it.'
'Mat was before I knew you had parasites.' Zeke stood up and looked about at the hustling workcrews. 'What the hell is all this about?'
'It's a place for you to stay while the lynk converts you for.
the jump. We go in three weeks, but now it's too dangerous to stay in New York. So we're going to have to stay with the lynk.'
'But the lynk is with the pigshit in Barlow'
'I'm moving it. Now that I've so handily charmed Sheelagh, I've got to cover our tracks. The dung and the lynk will arrive here tomorrow at the end of a trail of redtape that completely buries any tie between this place and Alfred Omega.
I started the process weeks ago, after you told Dr. Blau who I was.'
'That's the smartest thing you've done yet,' Zeke muttered as a foreman approached Carl and presented an order sheet for his signature.
When they were alone again, Carl confessed: 'It was the armor's idea.'
'I should have known.' Zeke's heart was erupting with feeling. The shock of what Carl had revealed mingled hotly with the gleeful expectation of the journey ahead. He felt gargoyled. 'Perhaps Sheelagh won't go to the authorities. Maybe the spore wasn't released.
It is just a scratch, right? And the armor hasn't implod-ed you.' 'Sheelagh may be all right,' Carl agreed. 'But if I were her'
'You mean, if, the armor were her-'
'Yeah, it's the armor's belief that Sheelagh is going to turn us in. It's her only way of keeping me here.'
'The armor's right. I asked Sheelagh once if she'd come with us. Her look would have poached an egg. She wants you, and she wants you here.'
'But we're so close to getting away, Zeebo. I'm going to see if I can talk her out of interfering.'
Zeke's face bobbed forward. 'You're what?'
