"Hi, Mr. Redman," he said, strolling across the room. He stuck out his hand, clad in a thin transparent rubber glove, and Stu, surprised into the defensive, shook it. "I'm Dick Deitz. Denninger said you wouldn't play ball anymore unless somebody told you what the score was."

Stu nodded.

"Good." Deitz sat on the edge of the bed. He was a small brown man, and sitting there with his elbows cocked just above his knees, he looked like a gnome in a Disney picture. "So what do you want to know?"

"First, I guess I want to know why you're not wearing one of those space-suits."

"Because Geraldo there says you're not catching." Deitz pointed to a guinea pig behind the double-paned window. The guinea pig was in a cage, and standing behind the cage was Denninger himself, his face expressionless.

"Geraldo, huh?"

"Geraldo's been breathing your air for the last three days, via convector. This disease that your friends have passes easily from humans to guinea pigs and vice versa. If you were catching, we figure Geraldo would be dead by now."

"But you're not taking any chances," Stu said dryly, and cocked a thumb at the nose-filter.

"That," Deitz said with a cynical smile, "is not in my contract."

"What have I got?"

Smoothly, as if rehearsed, Deitz said, "Black hair, blue eyes, one hell of a suntan ..." He looked closely at Stu. "Not funny, huh?"

Stu said nothing.

"Want to hit me?"

"I don't believe it would do any good."

Deitz sighed and rubbed the bridge of his nose as if the plugs going up the nostrils hurt. "Listen," he said. "When things look serious, I do jokes. Some people smoke or chew gum. It's the way I keep my shit together, that's all. I don't doubt there are lots of people who have better ways. As to what sort of disease you've got, well, so far as Denninger and his colleagues have been able to ascertain, you don't have any at all."

Stu nodded impassively. Yet somehow he had an idea this little gnome of a man had seen past his poker face to his sudden and deep relief.

"What have the others got?"

"I'm sorry, that's classified."

"How did that fellow Campion get it?"

"That's classified, too."

"My guess is that he was in the army. And there was an accident someplace. Like what happened to those sheep in Utah thirty years ago, only a lot worse."

"Mr. Redman, I could go to jail just for telling you you were hot or cold."

Stu rubbed a hand thoughtfully over his new scrub of beard.

"You should be glad we're not telling you more than we are," Deitz said. "You know that, don't you?"

"So I can serve my country better," Stu said dryly.

"No, that's strictly Denninger's thing," Deitz said. "In the scheme of things both Denninger and I are little men, but Denninger is even littler than I am. He's a servomotor, nothing more. There's a more pragmatic reason for you to be glad. You're classified, too, you know. You've disappeared from the face of the earth. If you knew enough, the big guys might decide that the safest thing would be for you to disappear forever."

Stu said nothing. He was stunned.

"But I didn't come here to threaten you. We want your cooperation very badly, Mr. Redman. We need it."

"Where are the other people I came in here with?"

Deitz brought a paper out of an inside pocket. "Victor Palfrey, deceased. Norman Bruett, Robert Bruett, deceased. Thomas Wannamaker, deceased. Ralph Hodges, Bert Hodges, Cheryl Hodges, deceased. Christian Ortega, deceased. Anthony Leominster, deceased."

The names reeled in Stu's head. Chris the bartender. He'd always kept a sawed-off, lead-loaded Louisville Slugger under the bar, and the trucker who thought Chris was just kidding about using it was apt to get a big surprise. Tony Leominster, who drove that big International with the Cobra CB under the dash. Sometimes hung around Hap's station, but hadn't been there the night Campion took out the pumps. Vic Palfrey ... Christ, he had known Vic his whole life. How could Vic be dead? But the thing that hit him the hardest was the Hodges family.

"All of them?" he heard himself ask. "Ralph's whole of them?" he heard himself ask. "Ralph's whole family family?"

Deitz turned the paper over. "No, there's a little girl. Eva. Four years old. She's alive."

"Well, how is she?"

"I'm sorry, that's classified."

Rage struck him with all the unexpectedness of a sweet surprise. He was up, and then he had hold of Deitz's lapels, and he was shaking him back and forth. From the corner of his eye he saw startled movement behind the double-paned glass. Dimly, muffled by distance and sound-proofed walls, he heard a hooter go off.

"What did you people do?" he shouted. "What did you do? What in Christ's name did you do?" do?"

"Mr. Redman-"

"Huh? What the fuck did you people do?" do?"

The door hissed open. Three large men in olive-drab uniforms stepped in. They were all wearing nose-filters.

Deitz looked over at them and snapped, "Get the hell out of here!"

The three men looked uncertain.

"Our orders-"

"Get out of here and that's that's an order!" an order!"

They retreated. Deitz sat calmly on the bed. His lapels were rumpled and his hair had tumbled over his forehead. That was all. He was looking at Stu calmly, even compassionately. For a wild moment Stu considered ripping his nose-filter out, and then he remembered Geraldo, what a stupid name for a guinea pig. Dull despair struck him like cold water. He sat down.

"Christ in a sidecar," he muttered.

"Listen to me," Deitz said. "I'm not responsible for you being here. Neither is Denninger, or the nurses who come in to take your blood pressure. If there was a responsible party it was Campion, but you can't lay it all on him, either. He ran, but under the circumstances, you or I might have run, too. It was a technical slipup that allowed him to run. The situation exists. We are trying to cope with it, all of us. But that doesn't make us responsible."

"Then who is?"

"Nobody," Deitz said, and smiled. "On this one the responsibility spreads in so many directions that it's invisible. It was an accident. It could have happened in any number of other ways."

"Some accident," Stu said, his voice nearly a whisper. "What about the others? Hap and Hank Carmichael and Lila Bruett? Their boy Luke? Monty Sullivan-"

"Classified," Deitz said. "Going to shake me some more? If it will make you feel better, shake away."

Stu said nothing, but the way he was looking at Deitz made Deitz suddenly look down and begin to fiddle with the creases of his pants.

"They're alive," he said, "and you may see them in time."

"What about Arnette?"

"Quarantined."

"Who's dead there?"

"Nobody."

"You're lying."

"Sorry you think so."

"When do I get out of here?"

"I don't know."

"Classified?" Stu asked bitterly.

"No, just unknown. You don't seem to have this disease. We want to know why you don't have it. Then we're home free."

"Can I get a shave? I itch."

Deitz smiled. "If you'll allow Denninger to start running his tests again, I'll get an orderly in to shave you right now."

"I can handle it. I've been doing it since I was fifteen."

Deitz shook his head firmly. "I think not."

Stu smiled dryly at him. "Afraid I might cut my own throat?"

"Let's just say-"

Stu interrupted him with a series of harsh, dry coughs. He bent over with the force of them.

The effect on Deitz was galvanic. He was up off the bed like a shot and across to the airlock with his feet seeming not to touch the floor at all. Then he was fumbling in his pocket for the square key and ramming it into the slot.

"Don't bother," Stu said mildly. "I was faking."

Deitz turned to him slowly. Now his face had changed. His lips were thinned with anger, his eyes staring. "You were what?" what?"

"Faking," Stu said. His smile broadened.

Deitz took two uncertain steps toward him. His fists closed, opened, then closed again. "But why? Why would you want to do something like that?"

"Sorry," Stu said, smiling. "That's classified."

"You shit son of a bitch," Deitz said with soft wonder.

"Go on. Go on out and tell them they can do their tests."

He slept better that night than he had since they had brought him here. And he had an extremely vivid dream. He had always dreamed a great deal-his wife had complained about him thrashing and muttering in his sleep-but he had never had a dream like this.

He was standing on a country road, at the precise place where the black hottop gave up to bone-white dirt. A blazing summer sun shone down. On both sides of the road there was green corn, and it stretched away endlessly. There was a sign, but it was dusty and he couldn't read it. There was the sound of crows, harsh and far away. Closer by, someone was playing an acoustic guitar, fingerpicking it. Vic Palfrey had been a picker, and it was a fine sound.

This is where I ought to get to, Stu thought dimly Stu thought dimly. Yeah, this is the place, all right.

What was that tune? "Beautiful Zion"? "The Fields of My Father's Home"? "Sweet Bye and Bye"? Some hymn he remembered from his childhood, something he associated with full immersion and picnic lunches. But he couldn't remember which one.

Then the music stopped. A cloud came over the sun. He began to be afraid. He began to feel that there was something terrible, something worse than plague, fire, or earthquake. Something was in the corn and it was watching him. Something dark was in the corn.

He looked, and saw two burning red eyes far back in the shadows, far back in the corn. Those eyes filled him with the paralyzed, hopeless horror that the hen feels for the weasel. Him, Him, he thought. The man with no face. he thought. The man with no face. Oh dear God. Oh dear God no. Oh dear God. Oh dear God no.

Then the dream was fading and he awoke with feelings of disquiet, dislocation, and relief. He went to the bathroom and then to his window. He looked out at the moon. He went back to bed but it was an hour before he got back to sleep. All that corn, he thought sleepily. Must have been Iowa or Nebraska, maybe northern Kansas. But he had never been in any of those places in his life.

CHAPTER 14.

It was quarter of twelve. Outside the small pillbox window, dark pressed evenly against the glass. Deitz sat alone in the office cubicle, tie pulled down, collar button undone. His feet were up on the anonymous metal desk, and he was holding a microphone. On top of the desk, the reels of an old-fashioned Wollensak tape recorder turned and turned.

"This is Colonel Deitz," he said. "Located Atlanta facility code PB-2. This is Report 16, subject file Project Blue, subfile Princess/Prince. This report, file, and subfile are Top Secret, classification 2-2-3, eyes only. If you are not classified to receive this material, fuck off, Jack."

He stopped and let his eyes fall closed for a moment. The tape reels ran on smoothly, undergoing all the correct electrical and magnetic changes.

"Prince gave me one helluva scare tonight," he said at last. "I won't go into it; it'll be in Denninger's report. That guy will be more than willing to quote chapter and verse. Plus, of course, a transcription of my conversation with Prince will be on the telecommunications disc which also contains the transcription of this tape, which is being made at 2345 hours. I was almost pissed enough to hit him, because he scared the living Jesus out of me. I am not pissed anymore, however. The man put me into his shoes, and for just a second there I knew exactly how it feels to shake in them. He's a fairly bright man once you get past the Gary Cooper exterior, and one independent son of a bitch. If it suits him, he'll find all sorts of novel monkey-wrenches to throw into the gears. He has no close family in Arnette or anyplace else, so we can't put much of a hammerlock on him. Denninger has volunteers-or says he does-who'll be happy to go in and muscle him into a more cooperative frame of mind, and it may come to that, but if I may be pardoned another personal observation, I believe it would take more muscle than Denninger thinks. Maybe a whole lot more. For the record, I am still against it. My mother used to say you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar, and I guess I still believe it.

"Again, for the record, he still tests virus-clean. You figure it out."

He paused again, fighting the urge to doze off. He had managed only four hours of sleep in the last seventy-two.

"Records as of twenty-two-hundred hours," he said formally, and picked a sheaf of reports off the desk. "Henry Carmichael died while I was talking with Prince. The cop, Joseph Robert Brentwood, died half an hour ago. This won't be in Dr. D's report, but he was all but shitting green apples over that one. Brentwood showed a sudden positive response to the vaccine type ... uh ..." He shuffled papers. "Here it is. 63-A-3. See subfile, if you like. Brentwood's fever broke, the characteristic swellings in the glands of the neck went down, he reported hunger, and ate a poached egg and a slice of unbuttered toast. Spoke rationally, wanted to know where he was, and so on and so on and scooby-dooby-do. Then, around twenty-hundred hours, the fever came back with a bang. Delirious. He broke the restraints on his bed and went reeling around the room, yelling, coughing, blowing snot, the whole bit. Then he fell over and died. Kaboom. The opinion of the team is that the vaccine killed him. It made him better for a while, but he was getting sick again even before it killed him. So, it's back to the old drawing boards."

He paused.

"I saved the worst for last. We can declassify Princess back to plain old Eva Hodges, female, age four, Caucasian. Her coach-and-four turned back into a pumpkin and a bunch of mice late this afternoon. To look at her, you'd think she was perfectly normal, not even a sniffle. She's downhearted, of course; she misses her mom. Other than that, she appears perfectly normal. She's got it, though. Her post-lunch BP first showed a drop, then a rise, which is the only halfway decent diagnostic tool Denninger's got so far. Before supper Denninger showed me her sputum slides-as an incentive to diet, sputum slides are really primo, believe me -and they're lousy with those wagon-wheel germs he says aren't really germs at all, but incubators. I can't understand how he can know where this thing is and what it looks like and still not be able to stop it. He gives me a lot of jargon, but I don't think he understands it, either."

Deitz lit a cigarette.

"So where are we tonight? We've got a disease that's got several well-defined stages ... but some people may skip a stage. Some people may backtrack a stage. Some people may do both. Some people stay in one stage for a relatively long time and others zoom through all four as if they were on a rocket-sled. One of our two 'clean' subjects is no longer clean. The other is a thirty-year-old redneck who seems to be as healthy as I am. Denninger has done about thirty million tests on him and has succeeded in isolating only four abnormalities: Redman appears to have a great many moles on his body. He has a slight hypertensive condition, too slight to medicate right now. He develops a mild tic under his left eye when he's under stress. And Denninger says he dreams a great deal more than average-almost all night, every night. They got that from the standard EEG series they ran before he went on strike. And that's it. I can't make anything out of it, neither can Dr. Denninger, and neither can the people who check Dr. Demento's work.