"But they saved our tails," I said.

Gretchen groaned. "Guess again."

Twenty feet away, at the south end of the roof, stood the Bald Avenger. He took a pistol from his jacket and walked toward us, his face rigid with determination.

In the cherry-picker basket, Boog put his hands on the Reverend's throat, and Bill w.i.l.l.y waved his arms at the Avenger. "No, brother! If you harm them, this creature will harmme!"

The Avenger ignored him. As he walked, he aimed his pistol at the floodlights illuminating the roof and shot them out one by one. I began to feel the February chill. The crowd moved toward the building again.

Boog released the Reverend and vaulted back to the roof. Willard leaped from the basket as well, knocking over the video camera in front of the platform. The movie screen went black, and Bill w.i.l.l.y scrambled off the roof into the arms of his followers.

With the screen dark, I, my friends, and the Avenger stood on an electric island in a sea of shadowed flesh. The Avenger shot out the last four lights on the roof, and then the only illumination was the orange flickering of the refinery flame and the yellow glow of the snack bar's interior. Flashlight beams stabbed up from the sea and dappled us with dancing spots.

The Avenger stopped walking. "I want you to die in the dark," he said. He was looking only at me. The pistol rose to point at my forehead.

Boog charged him, and the Avenger spun and fired. Boog fell, and the crowd cheered.

The Avenger turned back toward me, but shifted his pistol so that it pointed at Gretchen. "Accomplices first," he said.

The Bonanza was coming in low again, but it would not be low enough to knock the Avenger from the roof.

The w.i.l.l.yites were chanting: "SHOOT-SHOOT-SHOOT-"

The Avenger's expression changed, as if he wanted to kill, but didn't want the mob towant him to....

The Bonanza roared overhead. As the Avenger looked up, I felt for the lump of my garage-door remote control in the Moonsuit, found it, and pressed hard.

The aircraft's starboard door burst open, and a black shape plummeted into the crowd. The w.i.l.l.yites churned and parted, and Ringo, his galvanized chain collar gleaming, leaped up to the snack-bar roof.

He started toward me, but when he saw the Bald Avenger he changed direction and bared his teeth.

The Avenger shot at the Doberman, but the bullet sprayed gravel, and Ringo was on him. The man fell on his side, and Ringo shattered the pistol with one chomp.

Boog sat up, rubbing his chest, and I went to him. He grinned and pulled his crescent wrench from his bib pocket. "Better than a Bible," he said. The head of the wrench was bent where the slug had hit it.

Pete and Gretchen joined us and helped Boog to his feet. Meanwhile, the Bald Avenger was rolling toward the eastern edge of the roof. Ringo was going along, tearing coat fabric as he went.

"He's had enough," I called. Ringo ripped one more strip and then trotted across to me.

The Avenger, however, had not had enough, and he stood and ran toward us with his hands set in claws and his mouth in a rictus of rage. Ringo dashed at him again, but this time the man sidestepped, and the dog went off the roof. The Avenger's hands closed on my throat. Stumbling backward, I flailed at his head with my helmet and pried at his fingers with my free hand. We began whirling in a mad waltz, and the faces of Boog, Pete, and Gretchen flashed by in an instant.

Then the Avenger and I fell from the western edge of the roof. My helmet tumbled away like a small white moon.

We landed atop three w.i.l.l.yites, who crumpled. They and the Moonsuit protected me, but the Avenger hit the rocks on his back. He released my throat and stared.

Someone cried, "We have them now, brothers!" and I was hoisted over the heads of the crowd. A hand knotted in my hair and pulled my head back, and I was spread-eagled. A hundred fingernails ripped into the Moonsuit. The world turned upside-down, and I fell into the sky.

The mob swayed and spun, and the sky swayed and spun with them. In an accelerating blur, I saw my friends trying to fight off a swarm of w.i.l.l.yites who were ascending the snack bar. I could not see Ringo anywhere.

The sky spun faster. My tongue and fingers swelled. The glow of the snack bar became a dying sun. The Bonanza's strobes streaked like meteors. The roar of a tidal wave drowned the voice of the mob, and my vision became suffused with an ochre wash.

Then gravity slammed down like Maxwell's silver hammer, the lights went topsy-turvy, and an electric jolt spiked into my hips and shoulder. The ochre wash burned away in a white blaze brighter than a supernova.

A primal voice pierced through the roar. "All right, you pithecanthropoid freaks! Get away from him!

He's my client, and you're all in deep legal s.h.i.t! I'm a lawyer, and we're SUING!"

"Oliver!" another voice called. "Are you hurt?"

"Mother?" I croaked.

Someone grasped my shoulders and pulled me up and away from the blaze. When I was standing, her face came into focus: Sharon Sharpston. Beyond her, I saw the angry brown-and-blond-eyebrowed features of Bruce Werter.

The white blaze was the headlight of my Ariel.

Peggy Sue had found me. Her engine raced in recognition, then sputtered and died.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n!" Bruce exclaimed.

The mob had retreated a few paces because of Peggy Sue's raucous arrival, but now several ministers of the Corps of Little David appeared in their midst with slingshots at the ready. The Reverend Willard had vanished, as had the Bald Avenger. Up on the snack-bar roof, five w.i.l.l.yites were approaching Boog, Pete, and Gretchen.

The mob began to close in again. "You shouldn't have stopped here," I told Sharon.

"I didn't want to," she said, pulling me toward the snack bar's open west door. "It was Bruce's idea.

Somehow, he knew you'd be here."

"Thanks for the reprieve," I called to Bruce, who was jumping on Peggy Sue's starter.

"Reprieve, my lily-white a.s.s!" he said. "A reprieve is a postponement of punishment, and you haven't been convicted of anything!" He snapped down the bike's kickstand, stood on the footpegs, and addressed the mob. "As a member of the Kansas State Bar a.s.sociation, I order you throw-backs to cease and desist this p.i.s.sant vigilantism! Get a writ of habeas corpus!"

The mob kept coming. Overhead, the Beechcraft was diving again, but the w.i.l.l.yites had become oblivious to it.

Bruce took a deep breath and hollered,"Church and state are separate!"

The mob shrieked and lunged forward, knocking Bruce from the Ariel with enough force to throw him against me and Sharon. The three of us fell back against the snack bar's concrete-block wall, and Peggy Sue was trampled. The w.i.l.l.yites reached for us.

Ringo sprang from the open doorway and positioned himself between us and the mob. His black eye burned with a brilliant blue spark, and his lips were curled back from his teeth. An amplified snarl tore from his throat, and the w.i.l.l.yites hesitated.

"Shouldn't we get inside?" Sharon asked. As she spoke, three of the Reverend's flock came flying off the roof and toppled several of their brethren like bowling pins.

I glanced up and saw Boog's face. He was lying p.r.o.ne on the roof and looking over the edge. "n.o.body left here but us heathens! Come on up and we'll hold them off!"

I looked back at the mob. The Corps ministers were fighting their way to the front, where they would have easy shots at the three of us against the wall. We could enter the empty snack bar as Sharon suggested (and as I had wanted to do anyway), but then they would shoot through the windows because I didn't have the Reverend for protection anymore. If we went to the roof, though, we could flatten and make ourselves hard to hit. We might even have a chance to survive until the Authorities showed up. If they did.

Bruce and I lifted Sharon to Boog just as a ball bearing chipped the concrete next to my head. Bruce and I both yelped, but when Sharon was on the roof, we each cupped our hands to boost the other.

"You first," I said. "If I leave you down here and you die, Sharon'll never forgive me."

"Are you kidding? A published case study of you could make her famous. Ifyou die, she'll never forgive me!"

Gravel peppered our heads, and I looked up to see Gretchen's face next to Boog's. "a.s.sholes," she said.

Bruce was about to reply when a ball bearing hit his shoulder. I heard a crunch. His knees bent, but he didn't fall. Grimacing, he put his right foot in my hands. Boog and Gretchen were still pulling him up when another ball bearing hit the concrete, and then another, joined by white rocks. I imagined that I was back in Vacation Bible School playing sinners and saints, and I spread my hands to try to catch the next projectile. Then my left knee became as nothing, and I collapsed.

In the moment that I sat dazed, Ringo launched himself at a Corps minister who was reloading. The mob shrank back as he charged, but then they poured ahead like lava, engulfing both minister and dog, and coming on toward me.

I crawled to the doorway and into the snack bar, dragging my left leg after me. Once inside, I slammed the metal door and twisted the b.u.t.ton in the k.n.o.b to lock it, but I knew that wouldn't do much good for long. For one thing, the east door was still open.

A window beside the locked door shattered, and rocks bounced off the counter onto the grill. I reached up and flipped a switch, but that only killed half the light in the place. The w.i.l.l.yites would still be able to see me.

Faced with imminent destruction, I did as my mother had taught me: I prayed. I didn't have much time, though, so I just sang the first few lines of "Tell Me How."

Another window broke, and a shadow filled the east doorway. I crawled for the north wall. There was an inner door there, and no matter what was behind it, that was where I wanted to be.

I opened the door, flopped through, and kicked it shut with my good leg. It was only then that I saw the bright circle of a flashlight.

"Oh, great, just look at him!" a voice said over the noise of the mob outside. "Some rescuers we are!"

The flashlight beam pa.s.sed over a face that I recognized as that of my next-door neighbor Jeremy.

"Hold still!" he exclaimed. "I can't see what I'm doing!"

"You don'tknow what you're doing!" the first voice said, and I recognized it as Cathy's.

Strangely, I was unsurprised. "What are you trying to do?" I asked.

"It's a complicated story," Jeremy said. "We're fifteen thousand years old, and we no longer use bodies unless we have to, which we do now, because, well-"

"Your mother spoke with our enemies," Cathy said.

"Not enemies, Cath. Rivals, perhaps, although that isn't right either, is it?"

" 'Enemy' is the only term the fleshbound understand."

"And there's the rub, Mr. Vale. We have one opinion of how far to trust your kind, which is as far as you could throw Andre the Giant, and our rivals have another, which is that you deserve the benefits of what we've learned-" "And in which they are utterly wrong," Cathy said. "Which isn't to say that we wish you any harm-"

"Which is why we're here-"

"Except that we can't find our cousins-"

I interrupted. "What I meant was, what are you trying to do right now?" More gla.s.s broke in the snack bar, and I heard a scream from the roof. "Tell me fast," I said, crawling toward the flashlight. My eyes were adjusting, and I saw that we were in a cubicle dominated by machines. This was the projection room, where Bill w.i.l.l.y's show had been piped before being flashed across the lot to the screen. Cold air rushed in through the open window in the west wall.

"You see," Jeremy said, "we thought that if we could provide a diversion, that maybe you could-"

"Except that Jeremy designed inferior brains," Cathy said, "and we can't figure out how to do any of this."

I was beside Jeremy now. He was squatting over a toolbox and was fumbling with a tangle of cables, a screwdriver, power cords, and a portable AC/DC television. The toolbox was sitting next to the biggest video projector I had ever seen. And I had seen some big ones.

For the first time in my life, I knew my duty.

I had been charged to help Buddy Holly, and had not known how. But now I saw that all I could do, all I had ever been able to do, was help myself.

And that was the same thing.

I heard shouting w.i.l.l.yites enter the snack bar.

"Get out of the way and hold the light," I said, taking the cables and reaching into the toolbox. I had not dropped out of college and become a salesman at Cowboy Carl's for nothing. Fate had not made a mistake. Fate never did.

I became separate from time. My universe was defined by a mammoth video projector, coaxial cables, and a five-inch color TV. I hummed the "Holly Hop."

When all was ready, I turned on the TV and projector. The TV screen flickered, but the projector remained dead.

Time started again. The door opened, and a figure with a slingshot was framed by yellow light. Cathy cried, "Darling!" and leaped on him, riding him down as a steel ball ricocheted from the ceiling. Another figure appeared, and Jeremy yelled, "Darling!" and leaped on him as well.

I found a crescent wrench in the toolbox and whanged the projector's power supply seven times.

Three dazzling beams speared through the night to the movie screen, and a blast of sound with the energy of an atomic bomb exploded from a thousand speakers. Buddy was singing the chorus of "Rave On," and singing it loud. On the floor, Cathy and Jeremy looked up.

Beneath them, two ministers of the Corps of Little David looked up.

Beyond, at the counter and grill, a cl.u.s.ter of William Willard's followers stared through the west windows.

I braced my hands on the projector and stood. Then I hobbled past Cathy and Jeremy, past the ministers and w.i.l.l.yites, and out to the crowded theater lot.

Everyone faced the screen. In the sky to the north, even the lights of the Bonanza seemed motionless.

The song ended with a sharp staccato chord, and Buddy Holly looked down upon us while the echoes died beyond the refinery. Jupiter hung in the black expanse behind him, and the guitar-shaped silver object pulsed above his head. A low thrumming sound accompanied each pulse.

Buddy shifted his Stratocaster and spoke.

"I don't know just how to say this." His words reverberated throughout SkyVue with a calm power that made the Reverend's voice seem puny in retrospect. "I've been hearing a voice." He pointed upward.

The crowd murmured.

"It's been telling me things," Buddy said, pushing his gla.s.ses up with a forefinger. "Like how it might be decades or centuries before anyone comes to find me. Like how thirty years have already gone by as it is. Like how the world has changed, and how it wouldn't be home anymore."

The Bonanza pa.s.sed over the theater, flying slowly. Buddy tilted his head to look at the silver object, and it was as if he were gazing at the airplane as well.

The object began to descend to him.

"So I'm taking this thing up on its offer," Buddy continued. "At first I couldn't decide, so I tossed a quarter. I'm going on tour." He unslung his Strat and lay it at his feet. "I'm told that I won't have a body while I'm gone and won't need one to make music, so I'll leave this here. If anybody shows up before I do, you're welcome to use it. So long as you return it when I come back."

The silver object was so close now that its glow permeated his tousled hair.