The sun beat down. Along the avenue, loose asbestos panels banged  in  the  permanent  four  o’clock wind.  The old man  lay on the warm air – one arm  outstretched,  opposite  leg bent, as if demonstrating  how to swim sidestroke – leaving a faint blissful wake. He was a little higher up now. His smile had secretive qualities, and he seemed to be straining his eyes to look over his shoulder. Two or three dice floated around  his head. In addition he’d attracted  an  advertisment,  which,  blown  fifty miles from some promateur  image-safari in the edges of the twilight zone, swooped  and  fluttered  in  counterpoint to  his  lazy, horizontal figure-of-eight. ‘Amid the perpetual shadows of the terminator,’ it was informing him when the assistant arrived, ‘technical challenge abounds  for amateur  and  professional  alike: but to those most  in  harmony  with  its subtleties,  Kunene  Golden  Hour  is first choice for all the haunting, sometimes disturbing moods we most love.’

R.I. Gaines remained a mystery to her.

‘Skull Radio,’ he had told her, ‘brings down most of the major vibes.’ But when she looked into the device he’d left her, it was like looking in a cheap souvenir. He hadn’t told her how to work it. Her shadow operators discovered nothing. ‘We’re happy to help, dear, of course we are,’ they said: but if Gaines was a name, no one had used it since 2267, the year their kind of records began. ‘So happy to help,’ they said. Meanwhile, EMC was a firewall; it was imperturbable.  No other agency claimed him. He was a man with the dress sense of another age. He walked through walls. The assistant sat on the bed in her room and held up the radio at eye level. The little baby skull stared back at her, nested in red lace and drifting sequins.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Hey!’ the radio said excitedly, in R.I. Gaines’s voice.

Next, it folded open in some way so that  it contained  her – though she could still feel it like a solid object in her hands. She heard a kind of music. Sequins floated out of the skull’s mouth and through  the assistant into her room, where walls and floor absorbed them. It was a process. Gaines swam into view shortly afterwards. He seemed nervous. She couldn’t quite see what was going on behind him, but she had the idea it was happening in a very large space. ‘Hey!’ he said again.

He said he was a little busy right then.