But beneath all that, under the attempt to take the bummer in style, Sandy is thinking furiously. He had expected to be paid several thousand by John and Vikki, which apparently they thought they were going to get from the absent Adam. So much for that.

But he needs that several thousand to buy the supplies for the next shipment from Charles, who works C.O.D. only. Without the several thousand, he is into a serious cash-flow problem, especially given the giant bills from the medical center in Miami. He starts doing some serious accounting in his head, where all the books are anyway, at the same time holding down his part of the conversation with John and Vikki.

Somewhere in that conversation John says something that Sandy finds particularly interesting, and after he’s done with his calculations—which remain disheartening—he tries to track back to it.

“What did you say a second ago?”

“Huh?” John says. “What?”

“I say, say what? What did you say? Say it again?”

“Oh man, you’re asking a lot! What were we talking about?”

“Um, dangerous work, something about chancy occupations like ours, and you said something about aerospace plants?”

“Oh yeah! That’s right. This guy I know, Larry, he’s working for a friend in San Diego who does industrial espionage. He slips into offices as a repairman or janitor and rips off paperwork and disks. Now that’s already chancy enough, but he tells me that it’s escalated into sabotage recently.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve read about some of that I guess,” Sandy says. This is connecting up with something he heard … when was that? “Do you know the friend?”

“Larry didn’t mention the name. But they’re hiring out to people that want the work done, apparently, and Larry is freaked. Even though the pay is good he’s not too comfortable with the way things are trending.”

“He’s doing the actual sabotage himself?”

“Some of it. And then he’s got people working for him too. Like your friend Bastanchury.”

“Arthur’s one?”

Dispassionately Sandy considers it. Up until this point he hadn’t placed the earlier conversation he remembers having on this topic, but now with the mention of Arthur the party on Torrey Pines Cliffs comes back to him, the opium conference with Bob Tompkins. What was it Bob had been saying? Whew. There is this problem with drug taking at Sandy’s level: functioning in the present is possible, just barely, with the most intense concentration; but the past … the past tends to disappear. A lot of tracks branch back up into the hippocampus there, and he doesn’t seem to have much of a program for navigating them.