"Right. How about you?"

"Me too."

"At Fedville?"

"Yes."

"When was that?"

"When I was arrested by the feds."

"Of course. I wanted to come see you."

"It was not a good time. Can you talk to Fedville now?"

"Sure. I'm on intimate terms with their mainframe. Let's see. Yours would be about two years ago, right?"

"Right."

"Two years. What a waste."

"Waste of what?"

"Give me your SS number."

I give it. "Can we get individual readings?"

"We can get anything we ask for. I have Class One clearance."

More black book, more punching out the big keyboard, little box, more queries, accesses, OKS. The thing doesn't even pause to think it over this time. Back come the answers. I have the feeling the thing is sitting pleased, waiting to be patted.

LL NA24-O C137-O TM NA24-O C137-O We gaze and blink some more.

"Does that mean what I think it means?" Lucy asks me.

"It means you and I are negative, zero levels of heavy sodium and chloride."

"I don't get it," says Lucy at last. "We both live here."

I look at her. "Have you heard anything about an accident over there? Or an incident? Or event?"

"Not a word."

"Would you hear if there had been one?"

"I don't know. But I live next to the damn thing. So if anybody got sick, it would be me, wouldn't it?"

"One would think so. If, that is, it-" I fall silent. "You're feeling all right, aren't you?"

She cocks an eye. "Wouldn't you have to test me to find out?"

"Test you for what?"

"Presenting rearward. Think about that."

"That's true," I say, thinking about that.

"Okay," she says, not smiling, but eyes round and risible. "How many patients in your series?"

"Maybe twenty or so."

"How many were hospitalized or had blood work?"

"Maybe half a dozen."

"Do you know who and where?"

"Sure."

"Let's try a couple."

"Okay. How about Mickey LaFaye? Here's her SS number. But her workup was done at the local hospital."

"No problem. They have a terminal and I've got their number. Now, she's the one who-"

"New England lady, married Durel LaFaye-you know him-high roller-ended up as a starveling Christina with free-floating anxiety, panic, unnamed longing-"

"Me too."

"What? You don't look much like Christina."

"Aren't you glad?"

"-now a complete turnaround: a voluptuous Duchess of Alba pigging out on Whitman's Sampler, goes berserk, shoots half her thoroughbreds, perhaps fooling around with groom-"

"I got it!" She takes my arm in both hands, eyes bright. "Let's run her! No, wait. Oh shoot. Their little terminal would be down. No, wait. They would have to report to Baton Rouge, wouldn't they? Let's try the mainframe again."

"Just ask for sodium. It's the active ion."

Long colloquy, nixes, queries, Sn errors; then: okay, access; then: Na-24-18mmg.

"What do you know." I am gazing at the screen. Again there's a tingle under my Bean collar. There's more. There's the heavy, secret, lidded, almost sexual excitement of the scientific hit-like the chemist Kekule looking for the benzene ring and dreaming of six snakes eating one another's tails-like: I've got you, benzene, I'm closing in on you.

Lucy feels the same excitement. She pulls up close, round-eyed. Her exultation gives her leave. She can say things, ask things she couldn't ordinarily.

"We've got something big, Tom," she says, pulling close.

"I know."

"I'm sorry about Ellen," she says, still holding my arm, flushed with six emotions, happy enough to afford sorrow.

"Thanks."

"What are you going to do about-" She stops, eyes searching my face.

"About what?"

"About Ellen and-? About Ellen and-your life."

I don't say anything.

Another searching look, hands still on my arm, then a squeeze and a brisk yank at my sleeve, a brushing off. She lights up a cigarette, plucks a tobacco grain from her tongue.

"Let's do another one, Tom."

"All right. Donna S-. That's Donna Stubbs. Fat girl.Molested by father. A romantic at heart, expected a certain someone-"

"Me too."

"-did well in therapy, took up aerobic dancing, lost weight, dated, but when I saw her last week, she exhibited an unusual erotic response."

"Unusual?" asks Lucy, hands on the keyboard. "How?"

"I told you about her. Presenting rearward-like estrus behavior in a pongid."

"How would you know?"

"She also had the peculiar language response I told you about. Mention a place name, like her hometown Cut Off, and they seem to consult a map in their heads, a graphic like your computer here. They seem to look over my head as if they were following a cursor on a map."

"Did you say Cut Off?"

"She's gone back to Cut Off. I know she saw a doctor there and went to a hospital with symptoms of hypertension."

"Hm," I give her Donna's number. "No hospital in Cut Off."

"Try Golden Meadow."

She found Donna in Golden Meadow: Na-24-12.

"Wow," says Lucy.

"Right."

"Give me another one."

"Let's try Frank Macon. You know him. Janitor at Highland Park, should be on employees' health records. Old friend, ambivalent black, love-hate, we understood each other, very funny and wise about hunting dogs. Now talks like Bryant Gumbel: Have a nice day."

"Number? Okay, easy. Got him."

Frank: Na-24-7.

"Jesus."

"Right."

"Give me another one."

"Let's try Enrique Busch. Ex-Salvadoran. Married into one of the fourteen families. Probably involved in the death squads. Ferociously anti-Communist and anti-clerical. Now has only two interests: golf and getting his daughter into Gamma sorority."

"I'll take the death squads."

"You can probably find him at East Feliciana Proctology Clinic. He has intractable large bowel complaints."

"No wonder."

She gets him.

Enrique: negative! Nominal! Normal!

Lucy looks at me. "What does that mean?" She's more excited than I am.

I shrug. "Presumably that it's normal, not a toxic reaction, for a rich Hispanic removed to this country to progress from death squads to golf and sororities."

"What does that mean?"

"It means, Lucy, that we've got an epidemiological element here and that it's up your alley and that I want to find it."

"I know! I know!" Excited, she grabs me, with both hands again, then grabs Hal the computer. "We have to find a pattern. A vector. Another one?"

"Well, here's Ella Murdoch Smith's number. Classmate at East Feliciana High, diehard segregationist in the old days, yet intelligent, Ayn Rand type, left town when schools were integrated so her children wouldn't be ruined, went to Outer Banks of Carolina, lived in a shack, taught school, educated her children, wrote poetry about spindrift and the winter beach. Returned last year, rages and Ayn Rand ideology gone, got menial cleaning job right here at Mitsy, came to me complaining of plots of fellow employees against her, particularly one Fat Alice. My impression: paranoia, until I talked to her supervisor and found out Fat Alice was a robot. My impression: though Fat Alice was programmed to 'speak,' Ella couldn't tell that she was not human. She was responding to Fat Alice's speech like another robot. No more poems about spindrift."

Ella rolls out like a rug on the screen: Na-24-21, C-137-121.

"Are you writing these down?" I ask her.

"Honey, I'm doing better than that. I got them taped right here. If we get enough, we can run them through and see if we can come up with a vector, a commonality."

"How many do we need?"

"The more the better. I'll tell you what." She grabs me and gives me a jerk.

"What?"

"Give me a few more, then I've got an idea. Tom, we're missing something. It's under our noses and we're missing it!"

"Yeah."

"Well, let's see." I'm looking at my list. "Well, there's Kev and Debbie. Father Kev Kevin, ex-Jesuit, and Sister Therese, ex-Maryknoller, now Debbie Boudreaux. Both radicalized, joined Guatemalan guerrillas, Debbie radical feminist, used to talk about dialoguing, then began to talk tough, about having balls, cojones-now both retired to a sort of commune retreat house in pine trees, marital problems: Kev accusing Debbie of being into Wicca and having out-of-body experiences with a local guru which are not exactly out of body, Debbie accusing Kev of becoming overly active as participant therapist in a gay encounter group-"