And then I knew why he fussed and fidgeted and scratched: that sacred, anonymous drive to discover the engine that would bring peace and plenty to a world endowed with neither had been somehow diverted to an itch for fame. Old Man Chatterton, whose churlishness was a mask for the corruptibility he claimed to abhor, had become an eager victim of the world he sought to raze, a seeker for personal glory, for the flotsam of—poisonous hiss of a word—celebrity.

He was scratching again. “When can you start?” he asked. “Tomorrow?”

I was beginning to feel itchy myself. I rubbed my chin, to prove how pensively I considered his offer. Stalling for time, my eyes swept across the cluttered laboratory—dominoes strewn about, my dented old tuba gathering dust, the Gorelik clangor in a corner, by turns tremulous and deafening, circled by a group of Assamans in a demotic sing-along. The air was thick with their snufflings, and they shuffled with a kind of boneless grace—the whole room seemed to shuffle to the discord.

“I can’t do it,” I said, sealing my extreme regret with a suitable sigh. “If I did he’d turn you off like a spigot.”

“Would he dare to deny survival to humankind in the only world we’ve got?”

“I wouldn’t doubt it. He’s capable of anything.”

Chatterton stared into the far distance as if to seek sustenance from the world Grady would deprive him of, and I took the opportunity to be on my swinging-ass way before that itchy Chatterton fungus got a headlock on me. I never told him that I too had seen his cherries cavort and prance—without, however, the benefit of orchestration. Take a bite of an Asso cherry and you get a mouthful of worms.

Grady wasn’t at the airstrip. I headed home in the thickening darkness, only to find him waiting for me with Abdul at the edge of town.

“Where’s Valerie?” Abdul asked, trying to hide his apprehension. “Is she with you?” Certainly he could see that she was not. “She’s gone,” he said.

“Maybe she’s with Daphne,” I said.

“I checked,” Abdul said. “She’s nowhere about.”

“Then where the hell could she be?” My voice croaked like a man dying. If fear could kill, all of a sudden I was a corpse.

“I’ve got an idea,” Abdul said, “but I was waiting on the off chance she was with you. Let’s get Qazwini and the Number One Rat-Catcher.”

“What would they know about it?”

“We need them,” Abdul said. “Qazwini for fire power, Chapouk for tracking. I think she’s been stolen.” He walked fast, back toward the town.

“Who would do a thing like that?” I asked, catching up with him.

“I don’t know exactly,” he said, “but the night we got here, at the reception, there were tribal chieftains from the North. Any one of them could have kidnapped her.”