"And you've got a new name too?"

Yes."

"None of my business what it is, huh?"

"Exactly."

Karl left that same afternoon, an hour before dusk.

As they accompanied him to the Range Rover, he withdrew an envelope from an inside pocket of his tweed jacket and handed it to Paige, explaining that it was the grant deed to the cabin and the land on which it stood.

"I bought and prepared two getaway properties, one at each end of the country, so I'd be prepared for this day when it came. Owned them both under untraceable false names. I've transferred this one to Ann and John Gault, since I can only use one of them."

He seemed embarrassed when Paige hugged him.

"Karl," Marty said, "what would have happened to us without you? We owe you everything."

The big man was actually blushing. "You'd have done all right, somehow.

You're survivors. Anything I've done for you, it's only what anyone would have."

"Not these days," Marty said.

"Even these days," Karl said, "there are more good people than not. I really believe that. I have to."

At the Range Rover, Charlotte and Emily kissed Karl goodbye because they all knew, without having to say it, that they would never see him again.

Emily gave him Peepers. "You need someone," she said. "You're all alone. Besides, he'll never get used to calling me Suzie Lori.

He's your pet now."

"Thank you, Emily. I'll take good care of him."

When Karl got behind the wheel and closed the door, Marty leaned in the open window. "If we wreck the Network, you think they'll ever put it back together again?"

"It or something like it," Karl said without hesitation.

Unsettled, Marty said, "I guess we'll know if they do* when they cancel all elections."

"Oh, elections would never be canceled, at least not in any way that was ever apparent," Karl said as he started the Rover. "They'd go on just as usual, with competing political parties, conventions, debates, bitter campaigns, all the hoopla and shouting. But every one of the candidates would be selected from Network loyalists. If they ever do take over, John, only they will know."

Marty was suddenly as cold as he had ever been in the blizzard on Tuesday night.

Karl raised one hand in the split-finger greeting that Marty recognized from Star Trek. "Live long and prosper," he said, and left them.

Marty stood in the gravel driveway, watching the Rover until it reached the county road, turned left, and dwindled out of sight.

That December and throughout the following year, when the head lines screamed of the Network scandal, treason, political conspiracy, assassination, and one world crisis after another, John and Ann Gault didn't pay as much attention to the newspapers and the television news as they had expected they would. They had new lives to build, which was not a simple undertaking.

Ann cut her blond hair short and dyed it brown. Before meeting any of their neighbors living in the scattered cabins and ranches of that rural area, John grew a beard, not to his surprise, it came in more than half gray, and a lot of gray began to show up on his head, as well.

A simple tint changed Rebecca's hair from blond to auburn, and Suzie Lori was sufficiently transformed with a new and much shorter style.

Both girls were growing fast. Time would swiftly blur the resemblance between them and whoever they once might have been.

Remembering to use new names was easy compared to creating and committing to memory a simple but credible false past. They made a game of it, rather like Look Who's the Monkey Now.

The nightmares were persistent. Though the enemy they had known was as comfortable in daylight as not, they irrationally viewed each nightfall with an uneasiness that people had felt in ancient and more superstitious times. And sudden noises made everybody jump.

Christmas Eve had been the first time that John dared to hope they would really be able to imagine a new life and find happiness again.

It was then that Suzie Lori inquired about the popcorn.

"What popcorn?" John asked.

"Santa's evil twin put ten pounds in the microwave," she said, "even though that much corn wouldn't fit. But even if it would fit, what happened when it started to pop?"

That night, story hour was held for the first time in more than three weeks. Thereafter, it became routine.

In late January, they felt safe enough to register Rebecca and Suzie Lori in the public school system.

By spring, there were new friends and a growing store of Gault family memories that were not fabricated.

Because they had seventy thousand in cash and owned their humble house outright, they were under little pressure to find work.

They also had four boxes full of the first editions of the early novels of Martin Stillwater. The cover of Time magazine had asked a question that would never be answered-Where is Martin Stillwater?-and first editions that had once been worth a couple of hundred dollars each on the collectors' market had begun selling, by spring, for five times that price, they would probably continue to appreciate faster than blue-chip investments in the years to come. Sold one or two at a time, in far cities, they would keep the family nest egg fat during lean years.

John presented himself to new neighbors and acquaintances as a former insurance salesman from New York City. He claimed to have come into a substantial though not enormous inheritance. He was indulging a lifelong dream of living in a rural setting, struggling to be a poet.

"If I don't start selling some poems in a few years, maybe I'll write a novel," he sometimes said, "and if that doesn't turn out right-then I'll start worrying."

Ann was content to be seen as a housewife, however, freed from the pressures of the past-troubled clients and freeway commuting-she rediscovered a talent for drawing that she had not tapped since high school. She began doing illustrations for the poems and stories in her husband's ring-bound notebook of original compositions, which he had been writing for years, Stories for Rebecca and Suzie Lori.

They had lived in Wyoming five years when Santa's Evil Twin by John Gault with illustrations by Ann Gault became a smash Christmas bestseller. They allowed no jacket photo of author and artist. They politely declined offers of promotional tours and interviews, prefer ring a quiet life and the chance to do more books for children.

The girls remained healthy, grew tall, and Rebecca began selectively dating boys, all of whom Suzie Lori found wanting in one way or another.

Sometimes John and Ann felt they lived too much in a fantasy, and they made an effort to keep up with current events, watching for signs and portents that they didn't even like to discuss with each other. But the world was endlessly troubled and tedious. Too few people seemed able to imagine life without the crushing hand of one government or another, one war or another, one form of hatred or another, so the Gaults always lost interest in the news and returned to the world they imagined for themselves.

One day a paperback novel arrived in the mail. The plain brown envelope bore no return address, and no note of any kind was included with the book. It was a science-fiction novel set in the far future, when humankind had conquered the stars but not all of its problems.

The title was The Clone Rebellion. John and Ann read it.

They found it to be admirably well-imagined, and they regretted that they would never have the opportunity to express their admiration.

THE END.

Berkley titles by Dean Koontz

THE EYES OF DARKNESS.

THE KEY TO MIDNIGHT.

MR. MURDER.

THE FUNHOUSE.

DRAGON TEARS.

SHADOWFIRES.

HIDEAWAY.

COLD FIRE.

THE HOUSE OF THUNDER.

THE VOICE OF THE NIGHT.

THE BAD PLACE.

THE SERVANTS OF TWILIGHT.

MIDNIGHT.

LIGHTNING.

THE MASK.

WATCHERS.

TWILIGHT EYES.

STRANGERS.

DEMON SEED.

PHANTOMS.

WHISPERS.

NIGHT CHILLS.

DARKFALL.

SHATTERED.

THE VISION.

THE FACE OF FEAR.