Marvin looked and replied, 'Eight.'

Valdez wrote down the result, then asked for the date of Marvin's birth, his social-security number, his shoe size, and height in centimetres. To this he gave a numerical value. He asked Marvin to pick a number at random between 1 and 14. With this, he added several figures of his own, then scribbled and calculated for several minutes.

'Well?' Marvin asked.

'Remember, this result is merely statistically probable,' Valdez said, 'and has no other grounds for credence.'

Marvin nodded. Valdez said, 'The duration of the Set-Expansion Factor, in your particular case, is due to expire in exactly one minute and forty-eight seconds, plus or minus five minimicroseconds.'

Marvin was about to protest vehemently about the unfairness of this, and to ask why Valdez hadn't made that vital calculation earlier. But then he looked down upon the road, now glowing a singular white against the rich blue of evening.

He saw a figure moving slowly towards the posada.

'Cathy!' Marvin cried. For it was she.

'Search completed with forty-three seconds of the Set-Expansion Factor unelapsed,' Valdez noted. 'Another experimental validation of Search Theory.'

But Marvin did not hear him, for he had rushed down to the road, and there clasped the long-lost beloved in his arms. And Valdez, the wily old friend and taciturn companion of the Long March, smiled tightly to himself and ordered another bottle of wine.

And so they were together at last – beautiful Cathy, star-crossed and planet-haunted, drawn by the strange alchemy of the Location-Point; and Marvin, young and strong, with his swallow's-flash smile in a tanned, good-humoured face, Marvin, setting out with a young man's audacity and easy confidence to conquer the challenge of an old and intricate universe, with Cathy at his side, younger than he in years, yet vastly older in her woman's inherited store of intuitive wisdom; lovely Cathy, whose fine dark eyes seemed to hold a brooding sorrow, an elusive shadow of anticipated sadness that Marvin was unaware of except to feel a great and almost overwhelming desire to protect and cherish this seemingly fragile girl with her secret, that she could not reveal, who had come at last to him, a man without a secret that he could reveal.

Their happiness was flawed and ennobled. There was the bomb in Marvin's nose, ticking away the inexorable seconds of his destiny, providing a strict metronomic measure for their dance of love. But this sense of foredoomedness caused their opposed destinies to twine closer, and it informed their relationship with grace and meaning.

He created waterfalls for her out of the morning dew, and from the coloured pebbles of a meadow stream he made a necklace more beautiful than emeralds, sadder than pearls. She caught him in her net of silken hair, she carried him down, down, into deep and silent waters, past obliteration. He showed her frozen stars and molten sun; she gave him long, entwined shadows and the sound of black velvet. He reached out to her and touched moss, grass, ancient trees, iridescent rocks; her fingertips, striving upwards, brushed old planets and silver moonlight, the flash of comets and the cry of dissolving suns.

They played games in which he died and she grew old; they did it for the sake of the joyous rebirth. They dissected time with love, and put it back together longer, better, slower. They invented toys out of mountains, plains, lakes, valleys. Their souls glistened like healthy fur.

They were lovers, they could conceive of nothing but love. But some things hated them. Dead stumps, barren eagles, stagnant ponds – these things resented their happiness. And certain urgencies of change ignored their declarations, indifferent to human intentions and content to continue their, work of breaking down the universe. Certain conclusions, resistant to transformation, hastened to comply with ancient directives written on the bones, stencilled on the blood, tattooed on the inner side of the skin.

There was a bomb that needed explosion; there was a secret that required betrayal. And out of fear came knowledge, and sadness.

And one morning, Cathy was gone as if she had never been.

Gone! Cathy was gone! Could it be possible? Could Life, that deadpan practical joker, be up to disastrous tricks agam?

Marvin refused to believe it. He searched the confines of the posada, and he poked patiently through the little village beyond it. She was gone. He continued his search in the nearby city of San Ramon de las Tristezas, and he questioned waitresses, landlords, shopkeepers, whores, policemen, pimps, beggars, and other inhabitants. He asked if they had seen a girl fair as the dawn, with hair of indescribable beauty, limbs of a previously unheard-of felicity, features whose comeliness was matched only by their harmony, etc. And those he questioned sadly replied, 'Alas, señor, we have not seen thees woman, not now or ever in our lives.'

He calmed himself enough to give a coherent description, and found a road-mender who had seen a girl like Cathy travelling west in a large automobile with a bulky, cigarsmoking man. And a chimney sweep had spied her leaving town with her little gold and blue handbag. Her step had been firm. She had not looked back.

Then a gas-station attendant gave him a hastily scrawled note from Cathy that began, 'Marvin dear, please try to understand and forgive me. As I tried to tell you so many times, it was necessary for me-'

The rest of the note was illegible. With the aid of a cryptanalyst, Marvin deciphered the closing words, which were: 'But I shall always love you, and I hope you can find it in your heart to think of me occasionally with kindness. Your Loving Cathy.'

The rest of the note, made enigmatic by grief, was unsusceptible to human analysis.

To describe Marvin's emotion would be like trying to describe the dawn flight of the heron: both are ineffable and unspeakable. Suffice it to say that Marvin considered suicide, but decided against it, since it seemed entirely too superficial a gesture.

Nothing was enough. Intoxication was merely maudlin, and renunciation of the world seemed no more than the act of a peevish child. Because of the inadequacy of the attitudes open to him, Marvin struck none. Dry-eyed and zombie-like he moved through his days and nights. He walked, he talked, he even smiled. He was unfailingly polite. But it seemed to his dear friend Valdez that the real Marvin had vanished in an instantaneous explosion of sorrow, and that in his place there walked a poorly modelled representation of a man. Marvin was gone; the ringer who moved in his place looked as if, in its unfailing mimicry of humanness, it might collapse at any moment from strain.

Valdez was both perplexed and dismayed. Never had the wily old Master of Searches seen such a difficult case. With desperate energy he tried to rally his friend out of his living death.

He tried sympathy: 'I know exactly how you feel, my unfortunate companion, for once, when I was quite a young man, I had quite a comparable experience, and I found-'

That did nothing, so Valdez tried brutality: 'Christ damn me for a winnieburne, but are ye still mawking abaht after that bit of fluff wot walked out on yer? Now by God's wounds, I tell thee this: there's women past counting in this world of ours, and the man's no man who'd curl himself up in the corner when there's good lovin' to be had without …'

No response. Valdez tried eccentric distraction:

'Look, look over there, I see three birds on a limb, and one has a knife thrust through its throat and a sceptre clutched in its claw, and yet it sings more merrily than the others! What do you make of it, eh?'