“We work for a common purpose. You serve the state with your minds and bodies. I serve the state by opposing it. Drinking is an act of civil disobedience. I drink to end world hunger. I drink to protest the United States’ involvement in Central America. I drink to protest nuclear power. I drink…”

A sense of doom descended on Rivera as he watched. Unless The Breeze reappeared, his career was in the hands of this tightly wound, loosely wrapped, drunken idiot. He wondered what life might be like as a bank security guard.

On the screen the two officers looked away from their prisoner to the door of the testing room. The camera was mounted in the corner and fitted with a wide-angle lens to cover anything that happened without having to be adjusted. A little Arab man in a red stocking cap had come through the door, and the deputies were telling him that he had the wrong room and to please leave.

“Could I trouble you for a small quantity of salt?” the little man asked. Then he blinked off the screen as if the tape had been stopped and he had been edited out.

Rivera rewound the tape and ran it again. The second time, Masterson performed the test without interruption. The door did not open and there was no little man. Rivera ran it back again: no little man.

He must have dozed off while the tape was running. His subconscious had continued the tape while he slept, inserting the little man’s entrance. That was the only viable explanation.

“I don’t need this shit,” he said. Then he ejected the tape and drained his coffee, his tenth cup of the day.

AUGUSTUS BRINE

He was an old man who fished off the beaches of Pine Cove and he had gone eighty-four days without catching a fish. This, however, was of little consequence because he owned the general store and made a comfortable enough living to indulge his passions, which were fishing and drinking California wines.

Augustus Brine was old, but he was still strong and vital and a dangerous man in a fight—although he had had little cause to prove it in over thirty years (except for the few occasions when he picked up a teenage boy by the scruff of the neck and dragged him, terrified, to the stockroom, where he lectured him alternately on the merits of hard work and the folly of shoplifting from Brine’s Bait, Tackle, and Fine Wines). And while a weariness had come upon him with age, his mind was still sharp and agile. On any evening one might find him stretched out before his fireplace in a leather chair, toasting his bare feet on the hearth, reading Aristotle, or Lao-tzu, or Joyce.