Derek and Daphne were comparing professional notes. He glanced up at me guardedly, looked away, holding me in the corner of an eye, like Bambi in the piney woods treating a pit viper with circumspection. He looked great, I had to admit (now that he was no longer a candidate for Valerie’s affections), his raging blondness projecting the aura of a sun god. Cute as a bug he was, warm as an ice cube, while Daphne beside him rucked her skirt above her thighs and acted saucy.

“The camera was always good to me,” she told Derek, unzipping her travel bag and showing him a deck of publicity stills. “My bod holds a lot of light.”

He nodded sagely and said in that sinewy voice, “Wow,” and “Right on.” He was full of such feeble expressions, to which he invariably appended exclamation points. Fortunately, she wasn’t listening to him any more than he was listening to her.

“In a good screw-action flick,” Daphne said, “you need rape and a couple lesbian scenes. Something sweet and gentle, you know?”

“Yeah,” he agreed, “as Stanislavski says—”

“Yeah, well, my twin strengths have always been energy and intuition.” She tittered, larking it up, pointing to one breast. “This one is energy,” she said, and caressing the other, “and this is intuition.”

“Aeschylus,” Derek said, “invented the tragic kothornos, the sandal with the platformed sole, which gave an actor an additional three inches of height on a raked stage.”

“Yeah,” she said, “lovely.”

“When you make contact,” Derek said, “you know by the way the audience reacts.”

“Yeah,” she said, “it’s blissy.”

Derek pulled on his cigarette, exhaling a great histrionic contrail of smoke. “This Assama thing is just a brief excursion for me; I’m doing the prince a favor.”

“It’ll put me,” she said, “in the same league as Wally Warfield Simpson, you know the Duchess, and that Princess Di and Betsy Patterson who married Napoleon’s little brother Jerry.”

“When I come back, I’m going to make it big,” Derek confided like destiny’s own tot, “and when I do I’ll never forget the little people.”

I walked on. A familiar voice was saying, “…prefer truth to delusion. That is the crux of science.” Then, looking up, “Ah, wunderkind!” Chatterton greeted me with a smile suitable for framing. Without a pause he turned back to Grady and said, “So what is at stake is neither more nor less than global habitability. If we keep it up,” he warned, “we’ll be a few grams of dust on the slaughtered planet.”

Grady nodded abstractedly, tapping the palm of one hand with a rolled newspaper held in the other.

Chatterton was in a festive, expansive mood, as he had been since the uplifting day when Grady told him of the new home for his project.