"If Roosevelt hadn't stopped us, we'd have gone to the Volga and wouldn't be in the mess we're in now. We were fighting the wrong people."

"Tom!"

Lucy takes me upstairs.

"How much of that was true?" I ask her.

"What? Oh, God, I don't know. Very little. I stopped listening ten years ago. He made himself a colonel last year. But if I have to listen to that damn duck call another day, and then about Rommel and Patton and Buck Van Dorn another night, I'm going to shoot him. I'm so glad you're here! Do you know what he's done in the fifty years since that war?"

"No."

"Nothing. I mean nothing. But shoot birds and animals and blow that duck call. The only thing he's learned in fifty years is how to do it with your fingers."

Upstairs in the hall Lucy hands me a pair of folded blue jeans, a light flannel L. L. Bean shirt, and pajamas. They're new. The pajamas are still pinned.

"I got these for Uncle Hugh, but they're too big." For some reason she blushes.

"Thank you."

"Get out of that smelly suit," she says brusquely, gives the lapel a yank. "I'm going to burn it."

There are four rooms upstairs and a wide hall, arranged exactly as below.

"You stay in here. Did you bring anything?"

"No."

"I thought so. Tch." She seizes my coat again between thumb and forefinger, gives it a hard tweak, brushes it back like somebody's mamma. "Look at you. You look like a jailbird. Thin as a rake. I'll fatten you up." She begins to close the door. "You knock on my door right there in exactly fifteen minutes. That's my office."

"All right."

The door closes. The room is empty of everything but a bed and an armoire, which is empty. Buddy Dupre has been cleaned out, all right.

I take a shower and put on my new jeans and Bean shirt. In exactly fifteen minutes I knock on her door. "Come in!" comes her cool hospital voice.

I blink at the fluorescent light. The room could be an office in Fedville. There are desks, data processors, terminals, keyboards, screens, cables, shelves of medical texts and journals, cabinets of discs and cassettes, the whole as brilliantly lit as a laboratory.

We sit side by side at a large particle-board table bare except for a keyboard, screen, black box, telephone.

"How do you like it?"

"It looks expensive."

"It is, but it's mostly federal equipment. As their epidemiologist I rate a terminal."

"Does that mean you're hooked up to-"

"Everything. All networks. To CDC in Atlanta, NIH in D.C., Bureau of the Census, State Department of Health in Baton Rouge, AT & T, GM, Joe Blow, you name it."

"I see."

The fluorescent light is unsuitable. I wish we were having a drink on the gallery.

"I think we have a lead."

"What's that?"

Lucy pushes a button. The room goes dusk dark.

"Well," I say.

"We have to wait for our eyes. We have to read the screens."

"All right."

She has both hands on my arm. "You want to know something?"

"Yes."

"I think you're on to something."

"I see."

"And I think we have a lead."

"Good."

"Okay. Let's boot up."

"Okay. What's the lead?"

"Correct me, but aren't the symptoms you describe in your syndrome similar to the findings in your paper about the heavy-sodium accident at Tulane years ago?"

"Somewhat. I've thought of that, but-"

"Do you think your syndrome could be a form of heavy-sodium intoxication?"

"It had occurred to me, but there's been no accident, no yellow cloud-"

"Did you know that thing over there"-she nods toward Grand Mer-"has a sodium reactor?"

"Sure, but there's been no accident."

"They call it an incident. Or an event. Or an unusual occurrence. An incident is worse than an event."

"But there's been no event."

She smiles. "How do you know?"

"I don't."

"Would you like to find out?" We're side by side on a piano bench. She settles herself, straightens her back, touches fingers to keys like a concert pianist getting to work.

"Sure." I am pleased she remembers my paper, my last scientific article written perhaps ten years ago.

"Something occurs to me." Now she's settled back again, tapping fingernail to tooth. "Did you know that when Grand Mer was licensed, the EPA required as a condition of licensure the monitoring of blood levels of heavy sodium in both Feliciana Parish and Pointe Coupee across the river?"

"How would they go about that?"

She shrugs. "Whenever a routine blood workup was ordered in a hospital, heavy sodium and chloride levels were checked as routinely as blood sugar or NPN."

"So?"

"So I'm wondering if they still do it."

"I wouldn't know. I haven't ordered much lab work lately."

"Let's find out."

"All right."

"Come over here by me now."

"I'm by you. Is that a terminal?"

"Yes. Now then-" She consults a little book, punches keys on the keyboard, punches other keys on a small black box, humming a tune, musing and busy. She reminds me of a chatelaine, the ole miss of Pantherburn. Red lights begin to blink on the black box.

The screen lights up with an arcane readout: LADPTPBH and a flashing question mark.

"Do you know what that is?" she asks me.

"Louisiana Department of Public Health?"

"Right, I use 'em all the time. Now"-humming-"let me get the access and user codes."

"Aren't they closed now?"

"They don't close, dummy. I'm not talking to people. I'm talking to their data bank." She's hitting more keys. The bank must be pleased, lights up with a merry flashing ACCESSED.

"You're in?"

"We're in. Now to ask the question. What's the question?"

"We want the mean plasma level of heavy sodium of hospital admissions in Feliciana Parish, say, for this year."

"Well expressed, well-" she muses, hitting keys.

The computer utters a sour bleat, flashes SNERROR.

"What does that mean? That is, doesn't know or won't tell?"

"It means we asked a dumb question."

"I feel like I flunked a test."

"That particular bank has a personality."

"Like Hal."

"No no. It's on our side. Hm. Tom, what did we do wrong?"

"How did you write heavy sodium?"

"As heavy sodium."

"Try Na-24."

"That's the atomic weight?"

"Yes."

"Smart." She hits keys. The thing is pleased, flashes a smiling ACCESS ACCESS ACCESS, then, as if it were thinking things over, waits a second and reads out: 6 mmg., meaning 6 micrograms. The symbol is really 6 but I figure this was not practical typographically. We gaze at it blinking. "Jesus," I say.

Lucy looks at me. "What does that mean?"

"Six micrograms. That is very little, but any is too much. I suppose it means the mean value of heavy-sodium levels in all hospital blood workups, including positives and negatives."

"Is it too high?"

"Any number would be too high."

"But that's very little, isn't it?"

"Yes, but too much." I feel a prickling under the collar of my new Bean shirt. I look at her musing. "What else can we ask?"

"We can ask any terminal any question. It's just a matter of framing the question."

"Well?" She looks at me, hands on keyboard. She's shifted now, from chatelaine to girl-Friday secretary, Della Street waiting for Perry to make up his mind.

"What we need is a control."

"Right." She waits, smiling.

"Let's do yours and mine. Have you had a complete physical lately?"

"Sure. I had to get one to get this job."

"You got it at Fedville?"