“Hi, yourself,” the little man replied in a note-perfect imitation of the child’s voice.

“Hey, Mom!” she cried. “He sounds just like me!”

“Hey, Mom!” Little Sir Echo said. “Come on over and listen to this guy!”

Jack noticed a tension in the mother’s smile and thought he knew why. The mimicked voice was too much like her child’s—pitch and timbre, all perfect down to the subtlest nuance. If Jack had been facing away, he wouldn’t have had the slightest doubt that the little girl had spoken. Amazing, but creepy too.

“You’re very good,” Mom said.

“I’m not very good,” he replied in a perfect imitation of the woman’s voice. “I’m the best. And your voice is as beautiful as you are.”

Mom flushed. “Why, thank you.”

The midget turned to Jack, still speaking in the woman’s voice: “And you, sir—Mr. Strong Silent Type. Care to say anything?”

“Yoo doorty rat!” Jack said in his best imitation of a bad comic imitating James Cagney. “Yoo killed my brutha!”

The woman burst out laughing. She didn’t say so, but she had to think it was awful… because it was.

“A W. C. Fields fan!” the little man cried with a mischievous wink. “I have an old recording of one of his stage acts! Want to hear?”

Without waiting for a reply, Sir Echo began to mimic the record, and a chill ran through Jack as he realized that the little man was faithfully reproducing not only the voice but the pops and cracks of the scratched vinyl as well.

“Marvelous, my good man!” Jack said in a W. C. Fields imitation as bad as his Cagney. “Marvelous.”

He moved off, wondering why he’d been afraid to let the midget hear his natural voice. Some prerational corner of his brain had shied away from it. Probably the same part that made jungle tribefolk shun a camera for fear it would steal their souls.

As he passed a booth with a green-skinned fellow billed as “The Man from Mars,” he glanced up and stopped cold.

Dead ahead, a banner hung over the midway. Faded yellow letters spelled out sharkman. But it was the crude drawing that had captured his attention.

Damn if it didn’t resemble a rakosh.

After what he’d seen here already, he wouldn’t be half surprised if it were.

Not that one of Kusum’s rakoshi had a single chance in hell of being alive. They’d all died last summer between Governors Island and the Battery. He’d seen to that. Crisped them all in the hold of the ship that housed them. One of them did make it to shore, the one he’d dubbed Scar-lip, but it had swum back out into the burning water and had never returned.

The rakoshi were dead, all of them. The species was extinct.

But something here might resemble a rakosh, and if so, he was extra glad he hadn’t brought Vicky along. Kusum Bahkti, the madman who’d controlled a nest of them, had vowed to wipe out the Westphalen bloodline; Vicky, as the last surviving Westphalen, had been his final target. His rakoshi emissaries had been relentless in their pursuit.