“Not to worry. I’ll send Johnson and some of the men out with flashlights and shotguns. I’m absolutely fried from that joint. I’m not going out there—although we have to do something about that cat. He’s getting altogether too bold, and we have children about. I’m going to have to roust Johnson. Anyhow, welcome to the B-team, gentlemen—Har har! Try to get some sleep. Tomorrow is going to be a rather difficult…a rather gruesome…well, shall I say, it won’t be your typical day at the office? Up at dawn and that sort of thing.” Koestler tossed back the last of his drink. “Rude awakening, the leper colony. Not for the faint of heart.”

The young doctors grimly nodded an affirmation as Koestler made a pretense of cleaning up around the card table. He watched the two men stumble back to their rooms in the dorm, and when they were out of sight, he picked up one of the fat roaches that were left over from their party. He lit it with his Ronson and managed to get three good tokes off it. He heard the leopard out in the bush.

Who was it? Stanley? Was it Sir Henry Morton Stanley who had been attacked by a lion, shaken into shock, and who later reported that he had felt a numbness that was a kind of bliss—a natural blessing for those creatures who were eaten alive? Not a bad way to go. Of course, leopards were smaller. Slashers.

Koestler picked up Indiana’s drink, which was filled to the brim; it was warm, and the Coke in it had gone flat. It didn’t matter. There seemed to be a perfect rightness to everything. That was the marijuana. Well, what difference did it make? It was his current reality. When he finished the whiskey, Koestler got up and clicked on his small chrome-plated penlight and followed its narrow beam into the bush. The beam was just long enough to allow him to put one foot in front of the other. Finding Babbitt would be almost impossible. Amor fati. Choose the right time to die. Well, there was no need to overdramatize; he was just taking a little midnight stroll. The leopard, unless it was crazy, would run from his very smell.

As soon as Koestler got under the jungle canopy, the air temperature fell ten degrees. The bush smelled damp and rotten. Yet, for the first time in thirty years, Koestler felt at one with the jungle. A little T-Bone Walker blues beamed in from some remote area of the brain: They call it Stormy Monday, but Tuesday’s just as bad.