Have you done them yet?

“This is Manfred,” Bob says to Sandy. “Manfred, Sandy.”

Manfred nods, his eyes bright and very dilated. “Good to meet you.” They shake hands across the green silk.

“Well, let’s try out some of my latest while we talk about Manfred’s proposition.” Bob puts a big round wooden platter on the middle of the bed, between the three of them. He gets a smallish hookah from the collection, puts it on the platter, sits down, fills one part of the multichambered bowl with a black tarry substance. There are three tubes coming out of the bulbous ceramic base of the pipe, and they each take one and breathe in as Bob waves the flame of a lighter over the bowl. The moment the smoke hits his throat Sandy begins coughing his lungs out. The other two are coughing too, more moderately but only just. On the wall screens it looks like a whole gang of men have just been teargassed in a bordello.

“Gee,” Sandy chokes out. “Great.”

The other two wheeze their laughter. “Just wait a couple of minutes,” Bob advises. He and Manfred take another hit, and Sandy tries, but only starts coughing again. Still, the pattern of the bedspread has lifted off the bed and begun to rotate clockwise as it becomes ever more elaborate; and the bronze flake wallpaper is glittering darkly, breaking up the subdued lamplight from the dresser into a trillion meaningful fragments. Strangely beautiful, this chamber. “A great reckoning in a little room,” Sandy mutters. He puts his thumb over the soapstone mouthpiece of his tube while the other two smoke on. Advanced-lane opium smokers, here. Pretty primitive stuff, opium—noisy as hell, kind of a sledgehammer effect to the body. Sandy finds himself thinking he can do better than this in his lab. Still, as a sort of archaeological experiment … Jim should be in on this, didn’t the Chinese who built the California railroads use this stuff? No wonder there are no more railroads.

When Manfred and Bob are done smoking, they sit back and talk. The talk flows in unexpected channels, they laugh a lot.

Finally Manfred tells Sandy their proposition. “We’ve got a very illegal drug from Hong Kong, by way of Guam and Hawaii. The amounts are fairly large, and the DEA has got a spike into the source, so it all added up to trying a different channel for getting it in.”

“What is it?” Sandy asks bluntly.

“It’s called the Rhinoceros. The tricky thing about sexual arousal is that you have to be stimulated and relaxed in the right degrees of both, and in the right synergy. Two systems are involved and both have to be squeezed just right. So we’ve got a couple of compounds, one called Eyebeep and the other a modified endomorphin imitant. They self-assemble in the limbic region.”

“An aphrodisiac?” Sandy says stupidly.