Sprout lunged forward with arms outspread. The figure knelt, embraced her, and then violet eyes were looking up at him from beneath the hat brim.

"Mark," Kimberly said. "I had to see you."

The ball bounced across the patchy gra.s.s of Central Park as though it were bopping out the lyrics to a sixties cigarette-commercial jingle. Sprout pursued it, skipping and chirping happily.

"What does your old man think of all this?" Mark asked, lying on his elbows on the beach towel Kimberly had brought along with the ball.

"About what?" she asked him. She wasn't showing her agency game face this afternoon. In an impressionistic cotton blouse and blue jeans that looked as if they'd been worn after she bought them instead of before, knees drawn up to support her chin and hair hanging in a braid down her back, she looked so much like the Sunflower of old he could barely breathe.

He wanted to say, "about the trial," but he also wanted to say, "about you seeing me," but the two kind of jostled against each other and got jammed up like fat men trying to go through a men's room door at the same time, and so he just made vaguely circular gestures in the air and said, "About, uh, this."

"He's in j.a.pan on business. T. Boone Pickens is trying to open up the country to American businesses. Cornelius is one of his advisers." She seemed to speak with unaccustomed crispness, but then he'd never been good at telling that kind of thing. It had been one of their problems. One of many.

He was trying to think of something to say when Sunflower-no, Kimberly---clutched his arm. "Mark, look--" Their daughter had followed the bouncing ball into the middle of a large blanket and the Puerto Rican family that occupied it, almost bowling over a stout woman in lime-green shorts. A short, wiry man with tattoos all over his arm jumped up and started expostulating. Half a dozen children gathered around, including a boy about Sprout's own age with a switchblade face.

"Mark, aren't you going to do something?"

He looked at her, puzzled. "What, man? She's okay."

"But those ... people. That is, Sprout ran into them, they're justifiably upset-"

He laughed. "Look."

The Puerto Ricans were laughing, too. The fat woman hugged Sprout. The tough kid smiled and tossed her the ball. She turned and came racing back up the slope toward her parents, graceful and clumsy as a week-old foal.

"See? She gets along pretty well with people, even if..." The sentence ran down uncompleted, as they usually did on that subject.

Kimberly still looked skeptical. Mark shrugged, then by reflex touched the pocket of the denim jacket he wore despite the heat.

Maybe he did rely on the implicit promise of his 'friends' too much. He'd have to go cold turkey from that, too, one of these days. He wasn't calling up the personae too often. Occasionally he felt the peevish pressure in his brain, like heckling from the back of an old auditorium, though he had explained to his 'friends' what he had to do and thought most of them accepted it. But eventually the powders would be gone.

As it was, Pretorius would kill him if he knew he still had any of them.

Pretorius thought a raid was a real possibility, and the vials contained a wider variety of proscribed substances than a DEA agent was liable to resell in a year.

But what am I supposed to do? Pour them down the drain? That felt like murder.

Then Sprout's arms horseshoed his skinny neck and they went over, all three of them, in a laughing, tickling tangle, and for a moment it was almost like real life.

The Parade of Liars, as Pretorius called the succession of expert witnesses he and Latham took turns deposing, trudged on from spring into summer. The Twenty-eighth Army taught the students in Gate of Heavenly Peace Square what the old dragon Mao had told them so often: where political power springs from. Nur al-Allah fanatics attacked a joker-rights rally in London's Hyde Park with bottles and brickbats, winning praise from Muslim leaders throughout the West.

"Secular law must yield to the laws of G.o.d," a noted Palestine-born Princeton professor announced, "and these creatures are an abomination in the eyes of Allah."

A skinhead beat a joker to death with a baseball bat. The media swelled with indignation. When it turned out that the chief of staff of the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee had tried the same thing back in '73, liberals called it "a meanness out there, a feeding frenzy" when people took him to task for it. After all, he had helped to pa.s.s some very caring legislation, and anyway the b.i.t.c.h survived.

Kimberly flitted in and out of Mark's life like a moth. Every time he thought he could catch hold of her, she eluded him. She seldom kept a date two times running. But she never stayed away long.

The hearings began.

Pretorius turned up precious few character witnesses for Mark. Dr. Tachyon, of course, and Jube the news dealer; Doughboy, the r.e.t.a.r.ded joker ace, broke down and sobbed mountainously as he recounted how Mark and his friends had saved him from being convicted of murder- and, incidentally, saved the planet from the Swarm. His testimony was corroborated by laconic Lieutenant Pilar Arrupe of Homicide South, who chewed a toothpick in place of her customary cigarillo.

Pretorius wanted to bring on reporter Sara Morgenstern, but she had dropped from sight after the nightmare of last year's Atlanta convention.

No aces testified on Mark's behalf. The Aces High crowd was laying low these days. Besides, most of them seemed embarra.s.sed by Cap'n Trips and his plight.

He just wasn't an eighties kind of guy.

"Dr. Meadows, are you an ace?"

"Yes."

"And would you mind describing the nature of your powers?"

"Yes."

"What do you mean by that?"

" I mean, -I, uh--I would mind."

"Your honor, I ask that the court take notice of the witness's lack of cooperation."

"Your honor-"

"Dr. Pretorius, you needn't gesticulate. You and Mr. Latham may approach the bench."

Pretorius always thought the rooms of the New Family Court on Franklin and Lafayette had all the human warmth of a dentist's waiting room. The too-bright fluorescents hurt his eyes.

The media were back in force, he noted with displeasure as he gimped to the bench. After the publicity that attended Mark's getting served, the press had lost interest; lots of nothing visible had happened for a while.

"Dr. Meadows is refusing to answer a vital question, your honor," Latham said.

"He can't be compelled to answer. Indiana v. Mr. Miraculous, -I964. Fifth Amendment protections against self-incrimination apply."

With blue eyes and blond hair worn in a pageboy cut, judge Mary Conower looked more pretty than anything else-ingenue, belying her reputation as a hard-a.s.s. A slight dry tautness to her skin gave her the appearance of a cheerleader gone sour on life.

"This isn't a criminal trial, Doctor," she said. Pretorius bit down hard on several possible responses. He was getting kind of old to pull another night in the Tombs for contempt.

"Then I object on the grounds that the line of questioning is irrelevant."

Conower raised an eyebrow at Latham. "That seems valid."

"Mrs. Gooding contends that the fact of her former husband's acehood const.i.tutes a threat to the welfare of her daughter," Latham said.

"That's absurd(" Pretorius exclaimed.

"We intend to demonstrate that it is not at all absurd, your honor."

"Very well," Conower said. "You may attempt to so demonstrate. But the court will not compel Dr. Meadows to describe his powers."

Latham stood a moment before Mark, staring holes in him with reptile eyes. In the audience someone coughed. "You have friends who are aces, Dr. Meadows?" Mark glanced at Sprout, busy drawing doodles on one of Pretorius's legal pads, at Kimberly, who was dressed like the centerfold in Forbes and wouldn't meet his eye. Finally he looked to Pretorius, who sighed and nodded. "Yes."

Latham nodded slowly, as if this was Big News. Mark could feel the press begin to rustle around out there like snakes waking up among leaves. They sensed he was getting set up; he sensed he was getting set up. He glanced at Pretorius again. Pretorius gave him a drop-'em-and-spread-'em shrug.

"It's been suggested that you play a sort of Jimmy Olsen role to several of New York's most powerful aces. Is that a fair a.s.sessment?"

Mark tried to keep his eyes from sidling to Pretorius yet again. He didn't want Conower to think he was shifty-eyed. This justice trip was a lot more complicated than he ever thought.

... It came to him he had no idea how to answer the question. Other than, No, more of a Clark Kent role, which he badly did not want to say. He turned red and stuttered.

"Would it be fair," Latham continued, with a fractional smile to let Mark know he had him right where he wanted him, "to say that you are on intimate terms with certain aces, including one who variously styles himself Jumpin' Jack Flash and JJ Flash?"

"Um ... Yes."

"Briefly describe Mr. Flash's powers for us, if you will. Come, there's no reason to be coy; they're not exactly a secret."

Mark hadn't been being coy. Latham's smug unfairness didn't make it easy to answer.

"Ah, he, ah--he flies. And he, like-I mean, he shoots fire from his hands."

Plasma, schmuck, a voice said in the back of his skull. I just pretend t.i.t's fire. Jesus, you're making a royal screw-up out of this.

He looked around, terrified he had spoken aloud. But the mob showed blank expectant faces, and Latham was turning back from his table with a manila folder in his hands.

"I'd like to call the court's attention," Latham said, "to this photographic evidence of the damage done by just such a fire-shooting ace."

In the crowd somebody gasped; someone else retched. Latham pivoted like a bullfighter. Mark felt his stomach do a slow roll at the sight of the eight-by-ten photo he held in his hand. Judging from the skirt and Mary Janes, it had been a girl not much older than Sprout.

But from the waist up it was a blackened, shriveled effigy with a hideous grin.

Pretorius's cane tip cracked like a rifle. "Your honor, I object in the strongest possible termsl What the h.e.l.l does counsel think he's doing with this horror show?"

"Presenting my case," Latham said evenly. "Preposterous. Your honor, this picture is of a victim of the ace the press dubbed Fireball, a psychopath apprehended by Mistral this spring in Cincinnati. Whatever his relationship to Mark Meadows, JJ Flash had no more to do with it than you or I or Jetboy. To show it here is irrelevant and prejudicial."

"Do you suggest I might be swayed by evidence not germane to this case?" Conower asked silkily.

"I suggest that Mr. Latham is attempting to try his case in the press. This is rank sensationalism."

Conower frowned. "Mr. Latham?"

Latham spread his hands as if surprised. "What am I to do, your honor? My opponent avers that ace powers are harmless. I demonstrate the contrary."

"I aver no such d.a.m.n fool thing."

"Perhaps he would put it, Ace powers don't kill people--people kill people. I intend to demonstrate that the destructive potential of these powers is too enormous to be dismissed with a flip syllogism."

Pretorius grinned. "I have to hand it to you, St. John. You are stone death walking to straw men."

He shifted weight to the cane from his bad leg and turned to the judge. "Mr.

Latham is trying to drag in atrocities with no connection to JJ Flash other than that they were committed by an ace with fire-related powers. And even if Flash were involved, to indict Dr. Meadows on that account smacks of guilt by a.s.sociation."

"If Dr. Meadows commonly a.s.sociated with known members of the Medellin Cartel,"

Latham said ingenuously, "would your honor say that fact lacked relevance to his suitability as a parent?"

Conower squeezed her mouth till her lips disappeared. "Very well, Mr. Latham.

You may present your case. And may I remind you, Dr. Pretorius, that I'm the one charged with evaluating the evidence?"

Mark felt more exposed and humiliated than he ever had in his life. This was worse than one of those b.a.l.l.s-outon-Broadway dreams. All his life he'd shunned attention, in his own persona at least. Now all these strangers were looking at him and Sprout and thinking about those awful pictures.

Pretorius turned away from the bench. His eyebrows bristled over blue-hot eyes.

Latham approached the witness stand with a look like an Inquisitor with a fresh-lit torch.

Kimberly was studying her fingernails. Mark looked at Sprout. Seeming to sense his attention, she looked up into his eyes and smiled.

He wanted to die.

"We need to do more, Mrs. Gooding," St. John Latham said.

"Such as what? You seem to be doing a marvelous job of emasculating my ex-husband as it is."

Latham stood. She sat on the couch, to the extent sitting was possible on a chrome-framed Scandinavian slab. It was more a matter of trying not to slide off onto the black marble floor. If the lawyer noticed the bitter sarcasm in her voice-as if she and Mark were on one side and he on the other-he didn't acknowledge it.

"Dr. Pretorius is a chronic romantic, and his notions of human nature and interactions downright quaint. Nonetheless, he is not a total fool. He is cunning, and he knows the law. And you are not without your vulnerable points."

She threw her cigarette half-smoked into her drink and set the tumbler down on the irregular gla.s.s coffee table with a clink. "Such as?"

"Such as your breakdown in court during the first custody hearing. It lost the case for you then. It cannot help you now"

The two exterior walls that met at one corner of the Goodings' living room were gla.s.s. Kimberly gazed out over Manhattan and thought about how much the view reminded her of a black velvet painting. Apartments with panoramic views like this one always came off better in the movies, somehow.

" I was under a lot of stress."

"As are you now. It is not inconceivable that Pretorius might try to reduce you to another such breakdown on the stand."

She looked at him. "Is that what you'd do in his place?"

He said nothing.

She lit another cigarette and blew smoke toward him. "Okay. What did you have in mind?"

"A concrete demonstration of your husband's ace powers. Or solid evidence of the actual nature of the connection between him and Flash and Moonchild and the rest, if he is no more than a Jimmy Olsen figure."

Her eyes narrowed. "What are you saying."

"If your former husband loves your daughter as much as he claims, a perceived threat to her would certainly lead him to employ any powers he might have."