"Come!" The voice was confident and cheery. Barbarossa sat up and turned as Rob stepped in.

At least he had given his first words some thought. "How's Katie?" Rob said.

"Katie? My niece? She's fine . . . Are you-holy mike, it's the Heimlich guy from Central Park!" He bounced up and shook Rob's hand. "How are you? You look to be in better shape than before! What's your name, by the way?

Mine's Edwin."

Somehow it hadn't occurred to Rob that he'd have to tell his name. And Barbarossa made an intimidating figure, in a white lab coat with pens and an X-acto knife stuck in the pocket. Under his tan the skin had an olive cast. He was a little shorter than Rob, but more strongly built, with a deep chest and powerful shoulders. In another decade or so, his round cheeks and clean-shaven chin would be imposing. But now his face was too open and youthful to merit the word-cute rather than handsome. He looked entirely capable of dissecting Rob at the drop of a hat. But there was no time to chicken out now. "I'm . . . Robertson Michael Lewis," Rob said haltingly. ".. .call me Rob."

He stuck there, completely out of practice at normal conversation. Luckily Edwin had no difficulty holding up both ends of the talk. "I remember last time, you called me 'Idiot!' It was great, exactly true. I looked up the statistics on infant choking when I got back. Enough to make your blood run cold! Let's go down to the cafeteria and grab a cup of coffee. You want to leave your bag? It's safe enough while Dr. Lal is here."

He turned the CD player off, and swept Rob along the maze of stuffy corridors and down the stairs, chatting easily about nothing. But when they sat down in the cafeteria with their coffee, Edwin suddenly said, "I owe you, you know. You came here for a reason, didn't you? What is it?"

Rob forced the reluctant words out, one by one. "I guess . . . just to talk. It's scary. I don't. . . know anybody anymore. So I picked you.

Because I had your card."

It didn't make much sense, but Edwin said, "Okay." Rob stuck here again a little, so Edwin continued, "Were you homeless in New York? How long have you been on the street?"

"Not too long. Just the summer. I-I think that's what I need to tell. How I hit bottom. I want to come back. And I can't. Unless I tell."

Edwin nodded. "Confession is good for you."

Nettled, Rob retorted, "No, it isn't. It's going to be horrible. Because I've been horrible."

Edwin grinned at him over the brim of his plastic coffee cup. "You won't shock me, Rob. How old are you?"

"Thirty-one," Rob said, surprised.

"I'm thirty-four. I've had three whole extra years on you, to pile up sins.

Nothing you say can surprise me."

Now it was Rob's turn to smile. "Want to bet?"

After all his worries, Rob was astonished at how easy it was. With practice, the logjam on his tongue went away and his whole story poured out, painlessly and without stress, as if it had all happened to someone else. Edwin was a world-class listener, instinctively knowing when to be silent and when to ask a prompting question. Even the gravest difficulty Rob had foreseen-the complete impossibility of his entire situation- didn't weigh on Edwin at all. "But isn't the whole thing unbelievable?" Rob demanded.

"I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast," Edwin replied. Oh great, Rob thought. I get it. He thinks I'm a nut.

They bought sandwiches and walked across the campus to a picnic table near the Clinic building. It was a perfect autumn day, with the trees turning saffron and red against a diamond-clear sky. "When you come right down to it," Rob said, "I know so little about what's happened to me, it's pathetic. I do stuff without knowing how. Sometimes stuff happens when I don't intend it, and I never can break on through to understand how or why.

I spend all my time thrashing around in the dark."

"So is that your goal? To understand your condition, the how and the why?"

Edwin unwrapped a submarine sandwich as long as his forearm, and squirted mayonnaise from a deli packet onto the cold cuts with a generous hand.

Rob had chosen the smallest sandwich on offer, a Monterey Jack-and-pita which he probably wouldn't be able to finish. As he poked the alfalfa sprouts around into a more even and biteable layer, he noticed his dirty broken fingernails, revolting crescents of black. He stuck his hands into his coat pockets, and said, "You won't believe this. It's embarrassing to admit it. But once, at the very beginning . . . You ever read comic books when you were a kid? Superman, the Fantastic Four? That's what I thought I could do. Fight crime. Save the world."

Edwin stopped in midbite to look at him. "You wanted to do good things.

That's so great!"

Rob's smile felt as wry and twisted as a lemon peeling. "And look what I actually accomplish. I bully weaker people, and rape teenage girls."

"But you didn't actually go through with that." Edwin spoke gently, without even a tang of condemnation.

A little comforted, Rob took his hands out of his pockets again and bit into his pita. The taste of food reawakened his appetite, and he ate rapidly. "Another thing I thought about," he said between bites. "I'm so isolated, it drives me crazy. If I just had someone to share this with, an equal! It's the terrible imbalance of power that makes it so lonely. I wonder," he added, struck by the idea, "if I could just split it with somebody? With you, say. It might be interesting to try."

Edwin was so calm that Rob was sure now he was just humoring him. "Is it the sort of thing-like this sandwich, for example-where if I give you half I only have half left? Because then giving bits away might be helpful to you. Or is it more like the flu-you give the virus to me and then we both get equally sick?"

"I don't know," Rob admitted. "I told you I know squat about this thing.

You think it's even possible?"

"I was putting that question aside, because I don't think it is. This is part of you, not me. You couldn't share your hair color with me, for instance. And I don't believe that equality and friendship work like that."

"With me it's different," Rob said.

"So you've got strong gifts. So? Other people will have other gifts."

"You don't understand," Rob said with despair. Damn it. Should he just muscle the belief into Edwin's head? But that had really bombed, the last time he tried it. Rob realized how desperately he yearned to be believed and understood in his own right, without weird mental meddling-to be treated like an ordinary human being.

Edwin put down his sandwich and set his right elbow on the picnic table between them. "Look. Arm wrestle?" His hands were solid and square, with the clever strong fingers of a musician or surgeon. Black hairs sprouted from the backs of his palms and furred the wrists up to the cuffs of his white coat.

"What for?" But Rob put his arm up.

The other man's grip was surprisingly warm, and implacable as a table clamp. Edwin pushed his arm over without even straining. "Come on, two out of three."

"Forget it!" Rob said, laughing. "I've lost too much weight this summer!"

"But you see what I mean. In one way you've got it on me, but in others I've got it on you. It's a waste of time running around making comparisons." Edwin took a large bite of his sandwich and chewed. "That's the unselfish reason why I'd decline the honor," he said. "The selfish reason is, I don't want anything to keep me from passing my physical."

"You need a physical to work here?"

"No, but I'm on the NASA long list for the manned Mars mission."

"Wow! That's super! But what do they need a microbiologist for on Mars?"

"Rob! Don't you read your science fiction? If there's life on Mars at all it's at the cellular level. Good grief, if they don't bring a microbiologist they might as well not go at all!" Rob had to laugh at this lopsided view, and Edwin laughed too. "Actually my chances aren't so great.

But it's nice to dream about it."

"I envy you," Rob admitted. "Not Mars, but having a dream, a future. I guess-to answer your question-I don't know what I want any more. This summer I've been lost, drifting without an anchor."

"Well, we haven't even begun to work on you yet. Have you finished your lunch? Let's go back up to my lab and begin."

When they went through the outer office Dr. Lal was still motionless at her microscope. Rob wondered if she ever budged at all. Edwin cleared a chair in his nook by moving a clutter of slide trays to another stack. "There's some seltzer water behind those books there," he said, turning the music on again. "Help yourself. I just want to look something up. Do you remember your old phone number in Fairfax?"

"Sure, it was 246-2741." Rob found the water bottle and poured while Edwin dug into a cupboard. Then he saw that Edwin was consulting a Northern Virginia White Pages. "You're not going to phone Julianne, are you?"

"Oh no-I'm just seeing if she's still listed."

"Checking up on my story?"