The man had come forward two or three rows now so that he was standing directly in front of where Fitz, Ken, Fanchon and Charlie were sitting, and he seemed worked up over something, his chest heaving and his glasses slipping down the bridge of his nose. “I’m Gerry Klinger,” he said, and then looked round him as if he didn’t know where he was or how he’d gotten there. “And I’ve never laid eyes on you before in my life.”

Afterward, Tim couldn’t seem to stop laughing about it. “The joke’s on me, I guess,” he said when they were all back at the house on Homer Street and the first round of martinis was already circulating, because if ever they’d been needed they were needed now. “I mean, really, who would have thought Klinger would be there—did you see him? Just another lab rat like all the rest of them. Klinger! Jesus! Are you kidding me? He looked like he got off the bus at the wrong stop.”

It was ten past six and the sinking sun was throwing trembling patterns on the wall behind him. Everyone was gathered round in an extended circle. Ken had lit a fire and Charlie put Coltrane’s Lush Life on the stereo, the music meditative and warm and creeping in under the conversation in a consolatory way. Not that Tim seemed to need consolation—no, he was absolutely lit up with a kind of frantic joy, the life of the party, irrepressible, unbowed, and so what if a stake had been driven through the heart of the Psilocybin Project? What was it to him? Yes, McClelland was calling for all psilocybin samples to be turned in to him so he could monitor them and dole them out as he deemed necessary, but it was no secret to anyone in the room that the psilocybin phase of the research had been laid to rest when Hollingshead had showed up with his mayonnaise jar.

“They’re all lab rats,” Ken said, standing tall beside Tim, a band of light flickering across his chest, the branches in motion outside the window and making a shadow play of the wall. “I hate to say it but it’s the truth.”

Charlie joined in, his voice narrowed to a plaint: “They don’t understand, that’s all, they just don’t understand.”

“You can say that again,” Tim crowed, clinking glasses with him. Then he raised his own glass and everyone looked to him. “A toast! To the lab rats—may they stay mired in their mazes forever!”

“Hear, hear!” Fitz cried, the blood rising to his face. He felt exhilarated, vindicated, as if he himself had been on trial. It was all right. Everything was all right. Lewiston wasn’t his mentor or even his friend, or Kellard or McClelland or any of the rest of them. No, Tim was—Tim and Tim alone.