Ken was there, as was Charlie, sans Alice, and Rick Roberts too, but no Dick and no Hollingshead, which was a surprise, but the biggest surprise was Tim. He looked, as usual, as if he’d just stepped out of an ad in a men’s fashion magazine, with one exception: he was wearing a sombrero, a great towering elaborate thing with a brim the size of an extra-large pizza trimmed with bright blue balls of thread. The effect was—well, ridiculous—but this was a joke, this was Tim in high spirits, reveling in thumbing his nose at everything academic, everything Harvard. He was a Mexican now, and as he would soon announce, he was bored with the science game because the science game was too confining and had no place in it for pure experience.

What else? There was a bottle of tequila on the desk, along with a cutting board, some wedges of lime and a salt shaker. A Styrofoam cooler containing ice and bristling with the amber necks of beer bottles sat on the floor beside Tim’s chair.

“Fitz,” Tim said, “well met. We were just wondering where you were.” He gestured at the desk, tipped back his sombrero. “We’re getting acquainted with Mexico tonight, Fitz—you ever been there? No? Well, no matter. We’re having a little tequila party here in honor of the lease I signed last week on this hotel, eighteen rooms cooled by the sea breeze, and right on the ocean. Very isolated. No roads—you have to fly in, Fitz, can you imagine that? And the manager, the most admirable Swiss in the world, is letting us have it all summer because summer is his slow season in any case and he’d just as soon see us set up our research project there as have the place sit empty. You see what I’m saying?”

Fitz was standing just inside the door, trying his best not to step on Fanchon’s white, white thigh or the place where her calf was tucked under it. He was grinning. Everybody was grinning. He gestured at Tim’s sombrero and said the first thing that came into his head. “So you’re going native now?”

“Damn right I am.” Tim stood, a bit uncertain on his feet, and poured a double shot of the tequila into one of the waxed paper cups on his desk and handed it to him. “You know how this is done?”