I heard what he’d been up to long before I saw it. In the cramped pile of BRITs that served as Chatterton’s laboratory, Gorelik coaxed shrill glissandi from his flute, and a few of the local performers who had provided the fanfare on our first night fiftully emitted a few responding blasts. They greeted me with extravagant inattention, just as their predecessors had that morning when I first appeared among them in Maryland; some things never change. Chatterton, despite his invitation, hailed me like a man preoccupied, as if I had intruded on some gorgeous fantasy he was intent on pursuing.

“We are on the cusp of a breakthrough,” he shouted, beguiled as always by the misty splendor of his dreams. He shouted because the tumult his musicians raised was thunderously reproduced by an entanglement of mikes hooked up to a clunky but effective generator. “How are you, my boy?” he hollered.

At the far end of the complex, Gorelik and his backup band stood surrounded by Copros, like the bulb of an onion within its concentric leaves. Gravely they crowded in, ignoring the din, paying homage not to the reedy voice of his flute but to the hump on his back. K’tu Bomumbojum, something like that, they called him, Lord Camel, for the hump, like madness, was of divine origin and proved he was favored by some animistic tutelary.

I had suspected that Chatterton’s madness would have qualified him as a candidate for veneration, with an adoring claque all his own, but it didn’t. I had expected to find him jubilant, as he had been on the plane, by the prospect of having landed a receptive home for his crew as they untangled the sweet mysteries of ur-science, but he wasn’t. Rather, he was full of frowns and fidgets, scratching his bare arms and legs fiercely, as if to mortify the flesh, and with no relief from whatever it was that tormented him. He dug his nails into his scalp as if the source of the itch resided there. When finally he quit scratching, he looked well enough in his loose-fitting toga. The cloak was knee-length and knotted at one shoulder, of a kind that elders of the tribe threw on to ward off the evening chill whenever the temperature dropped below ninety. Despite the immoderate exposure of wrinkled and raddled skin, he carried it off with the lumbering grace of a Clydesdale; he looked better in his toga than, say, Caligula, and it was a large improvement on that travesty of a bathrobe he sported back home.

“Ah,” he said, crooning a nostalgic song, “we had some grand old times in Maryland, didn’t we, when we were all pulling the load together.”

I wasn’t aware of them, but let it go.