A man has to know when he's in over his head. What kind of coward would wake his teenager in the middle of the night to help him deal with an emergency? This kind. I fiddled with my watch, and Erin materialized next to us, and after that, a whole lot of words got said, but I can't think of a reason to burden you with any of them.

It wasn't that bad. It could have gone much worse. It was no more than half an hour after dawn when I managed to get the last of us-me-to sleep. But the upshot was, all three of us started the next day feeling unusually tired . . . and of course, it turned out to be a worse day than the one before.

Not that it started out that way.

I was able to sleep in a little, for one thing. I run the kind of bar where it's not strictly necessary for me to be there when it opens. Everybody knows where everything is, and just about any of them is competent to step in and serve a newcomer if need be. (It must be h.e.l.l to serve alcohol to people you don't trust with your life.) When I finally emerged, showered and nearly human, from my home into the morning light, Long-Drink McGonnigle was behind the bar, and the dozen or so people in front of it all seemed content with his stewardship. A glance at the sun told me it was early afternoon on a nice day, if that last clause isn't redundant in Key West. Two steps later, I stopped in my tracks, paralyzed by a dilemma that might have killed a lesser man.

Two paths lay before me. The right-hand path led to the pool-where Zoey sprawled in a chaise longue, sunbathing. (Not tanning. Thanks to the Callahans, none of us is capable of it. Our bodies don't believe in ionizing radiation, any more than they believe in bullets. Perhaps this is regrettable-but since it kept us from being toasted by an exploding atom bomb once, I've never quite managed to regret it.) My Zoey has the most beautiful body I've ever seen-have I mentioned this?-as generously lush as my own is parsimoniously scrawny, the kind of body Rubens or t.i.tian would have leapt to paint, the kind they call BBW on Usenet, and when it glistens with perspiration . . . Well, it glistens, that's all.

But the left-hand path led to coffee.

I might be standing there now, my nose still pulling me in two different directions, if I hadn't noticed the small bucket of coffee my darling had placed on the flagstone beside her recliner.

"Can I have some of your coffee, Spice?"

She raised her sungla.s.ses. "If it's worth your life to you."

"Thanks." Cuban Peaberry, it was, somewhere between a medium and a dark roast. To forestall my a.s.sa.s.sination, I took a seat down at the end of the recliner and began rubbing her feet. Young men, forget Dr. Ruth and heed the advice of a middle-aged fart: Rub her tootsies. This is the only Jungle Love Technique you will ever need; done properly, it will melt a Valkyrie.

"Have some more coffee," Zoey murmured shortly. And a little later, "All right, you win; I will tell you of our troop movements." Then nothing but purring for a while.

After I judged enough time had gone by, I said, "Has Erin filled you in?"

"Yes. It ought to be manageable. She's working on it now."

As if we'd invoked her, Erin came out of the house just then. From a distance, in shorts and halter and bare feet, she looked pretty enough to make a bishop dance the dirty boogie. Closer up, though, the frown spoiled the effect a little. n.o.body can frown like a new teenager.

When she reached us, she dropped like a sack of laundry into the chaise longue next to Zoey's and said, "I think we're screwed."

"I'm just rubbing her feet," I said.

"Good morning to you, too," her mother said, ignoring me. "Good morning," Erin conceded.

"That's better. How screwed?"

"The law says just what I thought it did: We can get me evaluated by quote any Florida-certified teacher unquote."

"Well, to put it in technical terms, Ludnyola has the whammy on us. She didn't just pull some strings; she winched some cables. The deck is not just cold, she's dipped it in liquid nitrogen. I won't tell you the details of how she rigged it, because I'd get too mad. But the ultimate carriage-return is, there's now one and only one person in the state of Florida authorized to evaluate me."

Zoey and I groaned together. How odd that our groans of genuine dismay sounded precisely like the moans of pleasure Zoey had been making as I rubbed her feet.

"You guessed it," Erin confirmed. "Accent on the rjgh-as in, 'What a dorjgkh!'

Zoey and I exchanged a glance. "Screwed," I said, and she nodded.

"Well ... ," Erin said, and trailed off.

After a while, her mother said, "You won't be well for long if you don't finish the sentence."

"Well, we may have one thing going for us. I'm afraid to trust it, though."

Why does evolution require humans approaching p.u.b.erty to become exasperating? My theory is, so their parents will go away and let them get some experimenting done. The only defense is to refuse to be exasperated. (Or, of course, to go away.) After another while, Zoey said gently, "I might better advise you if I had some sense of what it is."

"What what is?"

"The one thing we may have going for us that you're afraid to trust."

"Oh, yeah-sorry. It sounds paradoxical, but the only edge we may have is that Ludnyola is a real bureaucrat."

Zoey and I were beginning to be tired of exchanging glances, so we stopped. "This is good?"

"In a twisted way. It could have been much worse: she could have been like half the other people in civil service." "Who are-?"

"Who are chair-warming buck-pa.s.sing trough-slurping fakes, pretending to be bureaucrats because that's an acceptable excuse for not being a human being. As far as I can tell from study of her record and interrogation of her computer, Ludnyola is the genuine article: a machine with a pulse."

"Yeah, so?" I grasped the distinction, and from my limited acquaintance with the field inspector, agreed with Erin's a.n.a.lysis . . . but I still didn't see how this helped our cause. I suspected caffeine deficiency, and signaled Long-Drink to send a Saint Bernard.

Zoey seemed to get it, though. "Is that true, Jake?" she asked.

"Yeah, she's Mr. Spock without the charm, all right. So what. Why is this good for the Jews?"

"Don't you grok, Daddy? From everything I've been able to learn about her, she's a cyborg. And cyborgs always follow their programming. They have to."

"Sure. And she's programmed like a Saberhagen Berserker . . . or an Ebola virus molecule."

"She's not an a.s.sa.s.sin, Daddy; she's a bureaucrat. They live and die by rules. By the rules. If we are very lucky, if she's as genuine and as hardcore as we think she is, it just won't be possible for her to break the rules, any more than an Asimov robot could punch somebody."

Alf arrived with the drinks cart; I thanked him, gave him a quick scratch around the base of the horns (who doesn't enjoy that, eh?), and traded Zoey's empty for the new coffee. It was Tanzanian Peaberry, roasted by Bean Around The World tip in British Columbia, the mere scent of which always kick-starts my cortex. Sure enough, after only one sip-okay, gulp-I saw with crystal clarity that I was still confused.

Zoey saw it, too. "Jake, take it from the top."

"Okay. Ludnyola wants to take our kid away and put her in h.e.l.l. Using the G.o.dd.a.m.n rules." More coffee. It was literally priceless then. No Tanzanian coffee was sold anywhere in the world that year, because all the Tanzanians who were supposed to harvest the coffee either were butchered or starved to death. The only way to get any was to have a teleport who loved you in your family.

"What is her thesis?" Zoey prompted.

"We're s.h.i.tty parents."

"And her proof of this is that we-"

Light finally dawned. "Ah."

"-that you did a s.h.i.tty job of educating me," Erin supplied. "And you didn't."

"We didn't do a d.a.m.n thing!" I felt obliged to point out, though I was already beginning to see what she meant.

"Exactly. You stayed out of my way. How many universities have that much sense? It was a terrific education."

"-and we can prove it," Zoey said.

"Exactly," Erin agreed. "If she has any doubts after ten minutes of conversation, let her give me the Mensa test! Or any other test she's capable of comprehending herself-I've got more IQ points on her than she weighs, Daddy."

I wanted to agree with them and cheer up, but I just couldn't seem to work it up. "And you think if we just prove to her that she's wrong, she'll go away?"

She sighed. "Well, like I said, I'm afraid to trust it. But if she's a genuine bureaucrat-"

"I don't know," I said, finishing my coffee. "I think you may he underestimating the ability of even the most robotic bureaucrat to interpret the rules. Remember, she's related by blood to Beelzebub."

"That's the question," Erin agreed. "How important is family to a robot? Cousin Jorjhk, back on Long Island, was as corrupt, venal, and nepotistic as any other public official on Long Island: one glance at his record will tell you that. But Ludnyola here comes across as . . . well, as a laser beam. Straighter than any straight arrow. I think she got into this because she believed what her relatives told her, and what she saw yesterday didn't help: she thinks we're all some kind of cult of anarchists and hippies."

"We're not?" I said, and Zoey pinched me. Never mind where. By the poolside, okay?

"She'll never understand us much better than that; she's not equipped. But we don't need her to. If I'm reading her right, the only thing she cares about is whether my education has been neglected. We can demonstrate that it has not, no matter how she may stack the deck. That may be enough to deactivate her-whatever she may privately wish she could do to us."

"I follow the logic," I agreed, and looked for words to explain my doubt. "Back in the late sixties, I lived in Boston for a while. There was a drug cop there like you're talking about, Sergeant Holtz. Like Inspector Teal in the Saint stories, he lived by the rules, and as long as he didn't catch you violating any laws, you were safe from him. This made him unique among drug cops, then or ever. Well, this one pot wholesaler who thought he was as slick as the Saint-come to think of it, his name was Simon-used to yank Holtz's chain all the time. Simon was slick enough to get away with it, too, was never on the same block as probable cause. But he was unwise enough to rent a third-floor walkup . . . and one night Sergeant Holtz arrested him for coming home.

"He'd turned up the fact that Simon was one-eighth Mohawk-it probably wasn't hard, the guy used to brag about it-and then he'd done a little research. Turned out there was a very old law still on the books in Boston, then-might still be, for all I know-that made it illegal for an Indian to go above the first floor in any public dwelling. Sergeant Holtz explained matters to a judge who was just as much of a stickler for rules as he was, and Simon would have done time if he hadn't jumped bail."

"Okay, I get your point," Erin said. "But Simon really was a drug dealer, Pop. I'm really not an uneducated kid."

"Agreed. The trick will be to overcome Ludnyola's presumption that you are one. Whether we can depends on how thick her blinders are. And I'd have to say in the short time I shared with the Field Inspector, her mind seemed as made up as a bed the second week of boot camp."

"Oh, big deal," Erin said. "I don't see what everybody's worried about, anyway. No matter what, she's not taking me away from you guys."

I didn't say anything. Neither did Zoey. When neither of us had said anything for several seconds, Erin repeated, "She's not," with rising pitch and volume.

"Of course not," her mother said gently. "But think it through, honey. If she comes after us, she has the whole machinery of the state behind her."

"So? We can whip 'em all!"

"Sure," I said. "But not without causing talk."

"Oh. s.h.i.t."

"If a state cop whips me upside the head with a baton, and I don't seem to mind, he and all the other policeman will become very curious to know why not. Sooner or later they'll learn me and my family are bulletproof, too, and then we'll be talking to a lot of humorless people from Langley, and life will be much less fun. Those guys would have uses for bullet-proof people-ugly ones. One way or another, it'd be the end of The Place; I doubt they'd leave us alone to drink in the sun." I reached for an empty mug and started to pour myself a beer.

"I'm not going underground at my age," Zoey said. "I took that cla.s.s."

"Wait a minute!" Erin said. "So are you saying if we can't head her off, I'm supposed to go with that nimrod? To some foster home?" The pitch of her voice began rising on the second word, and by the last it was close to supersonic. I opened my mouth to reply, genuinely curious to hear what I would say, but I never got to, because just then the man monster walked in.

It was as though he had been constructed specifically to refute my belief that a bureaucrat is the scariest thing there is. He was good at it, too.

First of all, he was big as a mastodon. I saw him right away, before he even entered the compound, and I spilled the beer I was pouring myself. I take great care not to spill beer. He had to turn sideways to come through the open gateway, which is not small. I remembered big Jim Omar carrying that gate away in one hand, an hour or two earlier, and estimated that this guy could have carried Omar and the gate in the same effortless way.

It wasn't until you got past the sheer mountain-out-for-a-stroll size of him and got a close look at his face that you really started to get scared.

Look, he wasn't quite as big as the late great Andre the Giant, okay? And if Andre was ever defeated in the ring, I never heard about it. But the moment I saw this guy's eyes, I knew he could take on an armed squad of angry combat-trained Andres, barehanded, with a high degree of confidence. And probably would have, given the opportunity, for no other reason than to prove he was alpha male. I stared at those eyes of his for several long seconds, and the first human emotion I was able to identify there was a very mild disappointment that none of us men present was enough of a challenge to be any fun to kill. I felt keen relief. He ignored all the women present. I sensed that to him women were interchangeable; when he was ready, he would simply take the nearest one.

Then his eyes went toward the spot where my thirteen-year-old daughter was sitting.

3.

BIG STONES.

It 's funny. I knew, for a fact, that there was no way he could form a real danger to Erin. Try to bear-hug her, he'd end up holding her empty clothes. Try to shoot her, he'd be in serious jeopardy from the ricochet. Try to outsmart her, and G.o.ds who'd been dead a thousand years would come back to life just to laugh at him. I knew all that. Do you think it made the slightest difference in how I reacted? If so, you must be childless. Some of the basic human wiring is buried so deep it simply cannot be dug up and replaced with fiber-optic cable. I wanted him dead, wanted to do it myself, and knew I would die trying. Every gland in my body went into full production.

But Erin was not where she had been sitting a moment ago. She was behind the man monster now, looking at me. Her face was expressionless, but her eyes seemed slightly brighter than anything else in my visual field, twin tractor beams locked on my own eyes. Far away, someone said something. I found myself remembering what Erin had said yesterday about the fight-or-flight response. Were those really the only two alternatives? I hoped not. He didn't look like a fight I wanted any part of, and I was not going to flee my home. I'd done that more than once in the past, and I was sick of it.

I perceived that Erin was breathing in and out in long, slow, measured breaths. I could almost hear her voice saying, We can't afford to give up any IQ points, Pop, and I knew it was true. I struggled to follow her example, for the ten or twenty seconds it took the man monster to reach the bar area, and by the time he was close enough for me to throw peanuts at, I was getting a pretty good supply of oxygen to the cerebral cortex, and beginning to feel fairly confident of bladder control.

Unfortunately, by then he was close enough to smell. Something about his smell went straight to some atavistic part of my brain that lay even deeper than the basic human wiring. Externally it was as though my friend Nikola Tesla were playing one of his benign practical jokes with electricity on me: every single hair on my body tried to stand on end at once. The silhouette of my head must have expanded by 10 percent.

I forced myself to devote all my energy to my breath, like Captain Kirk telling Sulu to divert all power to the shields. In. Om mani padme hum. Out. Om mani padme hum. In. 0 pinupdi podbe dorhal- The man monster reached the bar; cleared a section of debris such as drinks, coasters, ashtrays, and bowls of snack food with his forearms; and leaned forward to rest his weight on them. The groaning of the bar top coincided with a squeal from the foot rail below. Our faces were now two or three feet apart.

In spite of myself, kicking myself for it, I dropped my eyes from his. Only then did I take in how he had dressed to come to south Florida. Dark double-breasted suit. White shirt with b.u.t.ton-down collar. Wide necktie. Stingy-brim fedora. I already knew he wasn't local-no way he could live on an island the size of Key West for as long as a week without every Conch hearing about him. In my years as a barkeep, I've become pretty good at guessing where the tourists are from, but this guy was almost too easy: he fit one of the oldest templates I have on file. The way I phrased it to myself was, from the neighborhood: half a wise guy. I glanced quickly over at Fast Eddie and saw that he had spotted it, too; he rolled his eyes at me.

So I was less surprised than I might have been when the monster made a perfunctory left-right sketch of looking around the place and said, in a voice like a garbage disposal working on a wrist.w.a.tch, words anyone else would have realized were a ridiculous cliche: "This a real nice joint ya got here, chief. Be a f.u.c.kin' shame if somep'm bad was to happena the place, ah?"

Down at the end of the bar, Maureen emitted a gasp that was almost a shriek, and then clapped a hand over her mouth.

I didn't blame her. He was an evolutionary throwback. Go to any museum with a diorama of Early Man, shave the Missing Link down to a ten o'clock shadow like an extremely coa.r.s.e grade of sandpaper, and you'll have something very like his face. Failing that, there are a couple of Frank Frazetta cover paintings that depict him trying to rip Tarzan's throat out.

Okay, Mr. Sulu-divert a little power to the voice.

To my great relief, it did not quaver when I said, as nonchalantly as I could manage, "I've always thought so." I forced myself to meet his eyes. "Not for nothing, but you're a long way from home, ain't you, pal?" I asked.

He squinted at me and pursed his lips. He was thinking about frowning at me, and if he did, I was going to have to drop my eyes again. "You born inna Bronx, chief?"

I nodded. "Moved out to the Island when I was six."

He aborted the frown. "Oh. For a minute there, I fought you was squeezin my shoes, talkin at way." Without warning he smiled, and I needed full impulse power to keep the blood from draining from my head. "Okay. So you unnastan the way things work. Terrific." The smile went away, like a furnace door slamming shut. "Half a the mutts down here, I gotta drawer 'em a pitcher, an then come back inna couple days when they heal up enough to talk again. Waste a f.u.c.kin time, nome sane?"

"Yeah, I know what you're saying," I said. "We don't get many guys like you in Key West. You're the first I've seen, and I've been down here ten years."

He shrugged. "All good things come to a end, chief. You own iss dump?"

"On paper," I agreed. "I'm Jake Stonebender. What's your name?"

He smirked. "f.u.c.k difference it make, really? Like you just said, there's only the one of me."