There’d been a session the night before, conducted under the stars by Tim and Dick, and though it was almost noon practically no one was stirring besides himself. Somebody was stretched out on a chaise longue just off the front steps—was that Paulette?—and he’d seen a couple of the kids heading down the drive for town half an hour earlier, but that was about it, and if the sickle needed sharpening every once in a while and cabbage moths drifted through a shaft of sun like blotches on a movie print, it was all right, just another summer’s day. He’d done only half a dose himself the previous night, along with Lori, because they both agreed—or at least he’d made the case and she went along—that things had gotten out of hand at the Fourth of July party, and not just because of the dosage, but the scene itself. They needed to get back to the basics. To the meditative. The inner, not the outer.

But here came that noise again, a crackling, a screech, a snatch of music, and he straightened up and looked off down the drive, but there was nothing there. Lori was asleep still, upstairs in his bed—their bed—and that was all right too. They’d come to an understanding in the aftermath of the party and scaled back not only the sacrament but the other amusements floating around the group—marijuana, hashish, amphetamine—and in the interval they’d spent most of their days and nights together, though she had a tendency to vanish without a word for hours or even days at a time, and where she went he didn’t know and kept himself from asking. All he knew was that when she was around he felt he was soaring, with or without the sacrament, and he’d even begun to see a way around his academic dilemma—or at least a way to sidestep it. He was going to write about this, about Millbrook. About an ongoing experiment like no other in the history of the world, and there were no lab rats involved, no monkeys, because they were the subjects themselves. The idea excited him—liberated him—and when he told Lori about it she clapped her hands and laughed. “Will I be in it?”

“Of course, but all the names’ll have to be changed—”

“What’s mine going to be?”

“Yours? I don’t know—how about just L, period?”

They were sitting on the edge of the bed in his room, and she gestured at his desk and the chaos of papers scattered across it, charts, diagrams, the abortive text and the thick sheaves of his notes, his endless notes. “What about all this? Your fecis?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“Let’s burn it.”