After the service, which stretched out over the course of three and a half hours, they all climbed back into their cars and drove to Tim’s house, feeling exhilarated. The experiment had been a success—they’d pulled it off—despite Julius’s breakdown and the fact that it was immediately apparent to everyone just who had gotten the drug and who the placebo. No matter. The first public experiment with psilocybin had gone off with barely a hitch and the students who’d received the drug were radiant with God, gushing enthusiasm, their eyes on fire, eager—burning—to get their experiences down on paper. All except for Julius, who never uttered a word, sitting as before in the middle of the backseat, his tie still rigidly aligned but his eyes unfocused and his shoulders slumped, no doubt an effect of the Thorazine. Fitz, his own trip waning, made a mental note to ask Walter about that, not only how Thorazine worked physiologically but also neurologically. Would it erase God or the Devil or whatever Julius had seen? Or would it consolidate it, would it make the vision concrete, a block of perception that could be kept intact or shattered and removed like a bad tooth?

Eva Pahnke and her daughter, a child of three or four in pigtails and a pink dress, were waiting for them, along with Alice, Peggy, Suzie and Flora Lu and her monkey, the grill on the back patio already sending up a powerful gland-clenching aroma of hamburgers and hot dogs. Tim handed out beers, stirred up a pitcher of martinis. Dick was aglow. And Walter—Walter was the star of the moment, his thesis all but written and the degree all but bestowed, and so what if he looked like Maynard Ferguson, who was off somewhere with his band, Fitz forgave him that. He felt aglow himself, the crisis averted, his bad trip blooming into something ecstatic in the moment, not God, not a drug high, just grace and light and the deepest penetrating love for everybody present, everybody in the world, even Kellard and Mortenson, the fools, the poor deluded fools . . .