“Yeah,” he said, “well, I’m different too and so’s Nancy.” He was on his feet suddenly, brushing by her and heading for the door, and it occurred to her in that moment that he was taller than she was, taller by an inch, maybe more, and how could she have missed that?

“I don’t mean it that way,” she said. “Corey, come back here, I’m talking to you—”

He turned at the door to give her a look. “No, you’re not,” he said. “Not anymore.”

Halloween was on a Thursday that year, which meant that for all practical purposes the party was going to be a four-day affair, and the big question was how they were going to pace themselves. Fanchon argued for a group session on the night itself—“For the feeling of the spirits on the true date, the veritable date, no?”—and then maybe following it up with another session on Saturday, when the main influx of guests was expected. Charlie pointed out that a lot of people he’d talked to were coming for the weekend, which meant they’d be arriving on Friday and expecting the fullest efflorescence of Millbrook hospitality, and Paulette said, “That’s fine. If they want to trip they can trip,” and Tim, who was presiding over what amounted to an impromptu meeting in the kitchen over cocktails and the sweet sustaining scent of the bread Paulette and Susannah had been baking all afternoon, said, “Okay, that’s it then—group consensus. We play it by ear.”

The real problem at this juncture was the question of supply. Though LSD (the sacrament, as Tim called it, or, alternately, heavenly blue) was legal, it was almost impossible to obtain after all the negative publicity surrounding Harvard and Zihuatanejo and the way the drug had jumped out of the lab and onto the front pages of the tabloids. Sandoz backed off, no longer offering free samples, but charging now, as with any other drug. Tim and Dick, seeing which way the wind was blowing, managed to come up with ten thousand dollars, which Tim sent in the form of a personal check to the Sandoz affiliate in New Jersey, along with an order for enough doses to keep half the Eastern Seaboard seeing visions for the next five years, but Sandoz returned the check with a terse note indicating that the drug would henceforth be made available only in small quantities and only to qualified researchers, which apparently was a status Tim and Dick no longer enjoyed. The solution? Dick, who was an amateur pilot in possession of his own plane, flew to Canada, where the authorities weren’t yet infected by all this negativity, and obtained what they needed—not through Sandoz but a Czech company that was producing its own iteration of the drug and didn’t much concern itself with what Sandoz did or didn’t do.