"I just wondered," Julianne said in a nettled tone.

Rob took a deep breath, but the words froze solid in his mouth. At the far end of the aisle, in naughty silence, the twins were scaling a floor-to-ceiling rack of men's work boots. The entire unit was pulling away from the wall, toppling forwards under their combined toddler weight.

Already the upper boots were falling.

Julianne screamed. Rob reacted instinctively. There were trying-on benches and clusters of startled customers blocking the aisle, and he had never possessed bodily deftness. Instead he now thrust like a javelin into the head of the closest person, a black shoe clerk in a red Kmart shirt. As if by remote control, Rob twirled the slim young man around and jammed him like a two-by-four under the teetering boot rack. The shoe clerk whinnied with shock.

Faster on her feet, Julianne plunged past the other shoppers and snatched a twin away with either hand. "You monkeys!" she cried.

Rob followed and shoved the rack rattling back into a more stable configuration again. Around him a hail of tan work boots tumbled to the floor. "You saved them!" he said loudly to the stunned shoe clerk. He caught Julianne's eye pleadingly.

Julianne covered for him magnificently. "That was so brave and clever of you!" she caroled. She seized the clerk's slim black hand in both her own and wrung it. "You saved my children from certain death! You're a hero!"

Everyone in earshot began to talk loudly and rapidly, exclaiming in wonder or explaining the situation to each other. Outraged at the abrupt interruption of their mountaineering expedition, the twins began to yowl.

The store manager and several assistants hurried up, peppering everyone with questions and nervously examining the boot rack, visions of liability lawsuits dancing in their heads. The noise was immense.

Trembling with reaction, Rob sat down on a try-on bench and hugged a wailing child in each arm. He had never done that before, forced a crude action on somebody like that. Thoughts, motives, memories even, but not action. Somehow the physical reality of this thing was a shock worse than a blow in the face. "I could do anything now," he muttered into Angela's damp blond curls. "Anything at all." Shoplifting, derelicts, all that was small change. He could rule this country not like a President, but like a god.

The thought made the sweat run cold down his armpits.

Under the pure horsepower of Julianne's praise, the store manager relaxed.

"I'll see to it that Mr. Akkam is our next Employee of the Month," he said.

"Good work, Akkam!" He patted the shoe clerk on the back.

In a thick foreign accent Akkam said, "I did nothing. I did not know to move. I just do it." His dark face was completely confused.

"You were wonderful," Julianne assured him. "What a superb sales staff you have here!"

Keeping up a steady fulsome barrage, she swept the family up and through the cashier checkout to the door. At the last moment Rob pulled himself together enough to mutter to an assistant manager, "I'd use six-inch T-toggles to refasten that rack to the wall."

When the kids were safely buckled into their car seats, Julianne turned towards Rob. "Are you all right, hon?" He nodded, and in an undertone she said, "That was you, wasn't it? You made that poor little man a hero."

"I wasn't close enough to help with my own hands."

"So you borrowed his instead? Good job! I didn't know you could jerk people around like that! Did it take a lot out of you, though? You look kind of shook up."

Rob sat down in the van's open doorway. "It took nothing out of me, Jul. It was easy as snapping my fingers." Very softly he added, "Jul, I'm scared."

"Pooh, you did exactly right." She patted his cheek and slung the bagful of sneakers past him into the rear seat. "Come on, I'll drive if you like. If we don't feed them soon they'll start whining."

CHAPTER 5.

Things began to roll at Chasbro the following day. Rob drove to a temporary setup at the building next to the old one. When everyone was assembled in the large echoing unfurnished space Danny announced, "Okay. The powers that be have given a tentative green light. The general game plan is this. A subcontracted salvage team flies in from L.A. tomorrow. The more daring of us will join them in digging through the rubble for disks and documentation and the backup tapes. Jeans and work boots, boys and girls. Lori, remember to swing by Hechinger's for two dozen pairs of work gloves. The rest of us will start setting up diagnostic programs here. The mainframes will be delivered and set up by next week. And may God have mercy on us all, they still expect us to meet the October delivery deadline."

Groans burst out on all sides, but they were cheerful ones. Obviously everyone would continue to have a job for now. Workmen began to arrive to install partitions and telephones. A truckload of rented office furniture pulled up at the delivery dock. Someone set up the all-important coffee machine on the first unloaded desk. A pleasant uproar filled the sprawling space as it came to life.

When one of the phone lines came on, Rob plugged a phone in and sat on the rug to phone Julianne. "Good news," he said. "I'm still employed."

"Oh, super!" Her sigh of relief rattled in his ear. "Because I may be losing mine."

"You're kidding!"

"That rat's ass Debra is going to squeeze me out, I just know it," she murmured. Debra was Julianne's boss, the bane of her professional life.

"Jul, don't they say that you should never attribute to malice what you can blame on ignorance?"

"This woman is both, Rob, I swear it. Dumb and mean together."

"You two get into this every few months," Rob said reasonably. "A flurry of memos, and it's all over until the next time. Don't take it so personally, Jul. Look at Debra-she isn't giving herself an ulcer about it."

"How do you know?" Julianne asked, her voice sharp with suspicion.

"No, Jul, I can't read her mind over the phone," Rob said impatiently. "I'm using my common sense. If she was as hassled by you as you are by her, you would've been out on your ear months ago."

"Look, Rob, how busy are you? You have the van. Can you join me for lunch?"

"Julianne, what do you have in mind?" Rob wished he really could probe her thinking over the phone.

"The pizza place at 12:30, okay? Look, I've got to scoot. See you then."

Click! She hung up. Rob put his receiver back more slowly. What on earth did she have in mind? Suddenly it really worried him. How far could he reach these days? Julianne's office was in Crystal City, a good 15 miles away.

There were desks now, but still no chairs. Rob moved over to a far window where nobody was hammering partitions or tucking cables into baseboards.

Across the sunny parking lot was their old office building. From here the only signs of the fire were the smears of black soot above the windows at the far end. A workman in an orange hard hat was sealing a broken window with black plastic and duct tape. Rob leaned against the window frame and closed his eyes.

It was as if he stood on a high place, a rooftop or a mountain peak, with a view all around. As far as he could see down below were flowers, cup-shaped blossoms like buttercups or crocuses. There were hundreds of them, in every color imaginable, the fantasy of a gardener with megalomania. And when Rob leaned over to look more closely, he saw the flowers were heads, the heads of people. The tops of their skulls were transparent. He could make out the busy secret life inside each one, humming and spinning away, hidden from everyone but him.

A little dizzy, he straightened up again and gulped. Either the mountain peak was growing, or he was going up, straight up towards the zenith. The horizon widened and widened, spreading out to show more flowers and yet more, millions of them. How many people could he encompass now-everyone in the greater Washington area? The state? The entire eastern seaboard? And he had more than a view. He had supreme power over these little flowers. He could tell them how to think, what to want, how to feel. He could force moralities and actions on them. He was omnipotent. Suddenly he couldn't bear to contemplate it any more. With a shudder he wrenched himself away, back to the window overlooking the parking lot. He opened his eyes and wiped his wet forehead.

"You don't look so good, Bobster," Danny said behind him. "Just this second, you've gone gray."

"The doctors said I'd be okay," Rob said. "But maybe you're right. I should take it easier. Go home and take a nap."

"Good idea," Danny said. "Nothing's going to get going here until all this housekeeping crap is set up. Next week we hit the ground running. You want to take a shot at sifting through rubble? You recognize the disks."

"Sure, Dan. Have Lori set aside a pair of work gloves for me." Rob had to force a smile as he said that. Next week- what will I be, next week? At this rate I'm not even going to be human. He gathered up his jacket and briefcase with trembling hands, and almost ran out.

Behind the wheel of the van he tried to relax. At least there'd be no problem now meeting Julianne for lunch. He arrived in good time at the Pizza Palace. It had been their favorite restaurant when they lived in Alexandria after the wedding. There was something enormously comforting in sitting up to a red-checked tablecloth in the familiar poky dining room.

"Pepperoni, extra cheese, red peppers, and half anchovy," he told the waitress. "And a small carafe of red." It was the standard Lewis order.

When Julianne came striding in she laughed at him.

"How long has it been since we did this?" she asked, sliding into the booth across from him. "Do you remember when we ate here practically once a week?"

"Those were the days," Rob said. "B.C.-before children! Remember?" He leaned forward on his elbows, taking her hand.

She sighed, smiling. She wasn't thinking about pizza. Rob didn't need telepathy to see that. He grinned back. There's another idea, he thought.

Use this thing in bed-it might be a lot of fun. What did sex do for women?

How good was it for Jul, when she moaned and juddered in his arms?

Inquiring minds want to know! Their love life was terrific, but you never knew. There might be room for improvement. Julianne's face grew pinker, as if his ideas were contagious.