“Shall we be real for a moment? No one cares for your opinions. Your presence is an intolerable embarrassment.”

“Me, an embarrassment? Pal, that’s the case for somebody somewhere from the moment I put my shoes on in the morning. You guys aren’t special. Oh, hold the phone. You have your great, important work. I almost forgot.”

“Nature is red of tooth and claw. You are familiar with this idea.” He lowered his voice and said it the way a secret agent might relay a code to his contact, probing for verity. “Terrible outcomes are guaranteed should you persist. Against all reason you are fated to persist.”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Foote? Since you’re in a verbose mood, care to grace us with a pearl of wisdom?”

The Magician shut his eyes.

“Rich and poor,” he intoned. “Man and ant . . . Darkness surrounds us. Our atmosphere is a veil. The crust of the earth we walk upon is thinner than an eggshell. It’s quite useless, this struggle. Struggle we shall, for men are beasts enslaved by their wants and their fears.”

Mandibole appeared satisfied.

“There you have it from the lips of an ascetic possessed of dreadful knowledge.”

“Let me recap to be certain I’ve got the gist,” I said. “Thinner than an eggshell and very dark. The woods are teeming with wild beasts. Men are beasts and slaves. Beasts die, men die. Ants. The moral is, I don’t care.”

“Be that as it may,” Mandibole said. “I’m sure you comprehend. Who among us doesn’t occasionally bow in obeisance to dread and terrible forces?”

“Namely gravity,” I said.

The Magician opened his eyes.

“The Kaleidoscope will revolve, soon revolve.”

The Mares of Thrace whipped their heads in unison to glare at the ancient. The boys snarled; the girls hissed.

The Magician winked at me.

“To Hades with climate change, with asteroids, nuclear holocaust.” His voice began, scratchy and weak. He gained steam. “To Hades with half measures.”

“Mr. Foote, if you please—” Mandibole said.

“The Kaleidoscope is the surest method. It will remove humankind from the galactic map and send us back to the Dark Ages. Perhaps a new Stone Age. We would be preserved—”

Veronica shrieked in rage and raked her cotton-candy-pink nails through the tablecloth and into the hardwood. Wood shavings and sawdust piled around her fingers. Slick and Golf Pro leaped to their feet and onto their chairs, visages twisted in hate, spitting curses.

“Stifle yourselves!” Mandibole slapped the table, flashing a bestial snarl like Dracula breaking up a catfight in his harem. The Mares subsided with alacrity. The Magician hunched, staring at his plate and the roast bone.

I gave tempers a moment to cool.

“What the hell do you want, Tom?”

Mandibole rubbed his temples.

“Mr. Foote speaks truly. It is necessary to pay homage to the lesser of evils. Because so much worse is out there in the dark.”

“I’ll rephrase the question. What do you want, Tom?”

“I wanted to touch you. To shake your hand. To break bread. To show you the futility of your mission, the fragility of your very hypermasculine existence. To remind you that your instincts are correct, but also futile.” Mandibole scrutinized me. One moment, he was a real boy; the next, plastic. “I must ask. Are you an agent of the Labradors?”