Pandemonium

The offer wasn’t entirely altruistic. As soon as he got in the passenger seat he set his beautiful silver laptop atop his lap and proceeded to daisy-chain himself to the car: cigarette lighter to laptop to cell phone to headset to ear.

“Smile,” he said, and took my picture with his phone. “I’m sending this to Amra.”

“You guys do this all the time?”

“Sure. We send each other pictures during the day. Or just IM. And e-mail, of course.”

“Lew?”

“Del?”

“What do you do when you two have sex, put on body suits and touch serial ports?”

“Nobody’s had sex through serial ports since 1987. We’re strictly FireWire, bro. My baby needs the bandwidth. Don’t you, baby?”

I hadn’t even realized Amra was on the line. I tried to ignore Lew while they talked, but it was impossible. There were several reallys?

and sudden glances at me that kept me on my toes.

“Okay,” Lew said, and pulled off the earphones and mike. “The cops called, but Amra thinks it was just routine, they were calling everybody who stayed in the hotel.”

“Do they know who did it yet?” I asked.

“It doesn’t sound like it, but I’ll check the online news in a sec. But here’s the weird thing. Did you call any of your friends and tell them that you were at our house last night?”

“What are you talking about? Of course not.”

“A guy stopped by this morning as Amra was getting ready for work. He said his name was Bertram Beech. This is the same guy who was calling Mom’s house, right?”

“He was at your house?”

“She said the guy creeped her out. Very intense, said he had to speak with you, said it was a matter of life or death.”

“No way.”

“Uh, way. What kind of head case says ‘a matter of life or death’?”

“The Bertram kind,” I said. “Did she tell him where I went?”

“Of course not. But listen, man, you can’t have him coming by the house again. Call him and tell him that it’s not cool.”

“All right, I’ll call him.” What could Bertram want? The phone calls were bad enough, but now he’d traveled all the way to Chicago, and somehow found Lew’s house. Well, that maybe wasn’t that difficult. I’d talked about my family with him in the hospital, and these days it wasn’t hard to find a phone number for almost anybody. I suddenly realized that I was coming up on the bumper of an RV, and switched over to the left lane.

“Who is this guy?” Lew said. “Somebody from Colorado?”

“I met him in the hospital.” I saw the eyebrow raise in my peripheral vision. “Yeah, that hospital. He believes that powerful telepaths are secretly in charge of the planet, and that they’re possessing people for their own entertainment.”

“Powerful telepaths . . . ,” Lew said.

“Slans,” I said.

Lew burst out laughing.

“You mean you didn’t know that Slan was nonfiction?” I said.

“Bertram belongs to an organization that believes that Van Vogt intentionally—”

“What did you say—Van Vaht? It’s Van Voh.”

“No it’s not. You’ve gotta pronounce the T at least.”

“What, Van Vote? Don’t be an idiot. I bet you still say Submareener.”

“My point—,” I said.

“And ‘Mag-net-o.’ ”

“—is that Bertram thinks Van Voggatuh used fiction to cloak the truth.”

“As opposed to, say, your friend P. K. Dick, and Whitley Strieber, and—”

“Streeber.”

“And L. Ron Hubbard, who just made up shit and said it was the truth.”

“Exactly.”