“Will you plug the goddamn thing in already?”

So I took a deep breath, murmured “In the name of God,” and plugged it in.

The first frightening sensation was of being suddenly engulfed by a grotesque glob of flesh. Nero Wolfe weighed a seventh of a ton, 285 pounds or more. All Audran’s senses were deceived into believing he had gained a hundred and thirty pounds in an instant. He fell to the floor, stunned, gasping for breath. Audran had been warned that there would be a time lag while he adjusted to each moddy he used; whether it had been recorded from a living brain or programmed to resemble a fictional character, it had probably been intended for an ideal body unlike Audran’s own in many ways. Audran’s muscles and nerves needed a little while to learn to compensate. Nero Wolfe was grossly fatter than Audran, and taller as well. When Audran had the moddy chipped in he would walk with Wolfe’s steps, take things with Wolfe’s reach and grasp, settle his imaginary corpulence into chairs with Wolfe’s care and delicacy. It hit Audran harder than he had even expected.

After a moment Wolfe heard a young woman’s voice. She sounded worried. Audran was still writhing on the floor, trying to breathe, trying merely to stand up again. “Are you all right?” the young woman asked.

Wolfe’s eyes narrowed to little slits in the fat pouches that surrounded them. He looked at her. “Quite all right, Miss Nablusi,” he said. He sat up slowly, and she came toward him to help him stand. He waved at her impatiently, but he did lean on her a bit as he got to his feet.

Wolfe’s recollections, artfully wired into the moddy, mixed with Audran’s submerged thoughts, feelings, sensations, and memories. Wolfe was fluent in many languages: English, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, Serbo-Croatian, and others. There wasn’t room to pack so many language daddies into a single moddy. Audran asked himself what the French word for al-kalb was, and he knew it: le chien. Of course, Audran spoke perfect French himself. He asked for the English and Croatian words for al-kalb, but they eluded him, right on the tip of the tongue, a mental tickle, one of those frustrating little memory lapses. They — Audran and Wolfe — couldn’t remember which people spoke Croatian, or where they lived; Audran had never heard of the language before. All this made him suspect the depth of this illusion. He hoped they wouldn’t hit bottom at some crucial moment when Audran was depending on Wolfe to get them out of some life-threatening situation. “Pfui,” said Wolfe.

Ah, but Nero Wolfe rarely got himself into life-threatening situations. He let Archie Goodwin take most of those risks. Wolfe would uncover the Budayeen’s assassins by sitting behind his familiar old desk — figuratively. of course — and ratiocinating his way to the killers’ identities. Then peace and prosperity would descend once more upon the city, and all Islam would resound with Marîd Audran’s name.

Wolfe glanced again at Miss Nablusi. He often showed a distaste for women that bordered on open hostility. How did he feel toward a sex-change? After a moment’s reflection, it seemed the detective had only the same mistrust he held for organically grown, nothing artificially added, lo-cal, high-fiber females in general. On the whole, he was a flexible and objective evaluator of people; he could hardly have been so brilliant a detective otherwise. Wolfe would have no difficulty interviewing the people of the Budayeen, or comprehending their outré attitudes and motivations.

As their body grew more comfortable with the moddy, Marîd Audran’s personality retired even further into passivity, able to do little more than make suggestions, while Wolfe assumed more control. It became clear that wearing a moddy could lead to the expenditure of a lot of money. Just as the murderer who’d worn the James Bond moddy had reshaped his physical appearance and his wardrobe to match his adopted personality, so too did Audran and Wolfe suddenly want to invest in yellow shirts and yellow pajamas, hire one of the world’s finest chefs, and collect thousands of rare and exotic orchid plants. All that would have to wait. “Pfui,” grumbled Wolfe again.

They reached up and popped the moddy out.

There was another dizzy swirl of disorientation; and then I was standing in my own room, staring stupidly down at my hand and at the module it held. I was back in my own body and my own mind.

“How was it?” asked Yasmin.

I looked at her. “Satisfactory,” I said, using Wolfe’s most enthusiastic expression. “It might do,” I admitted. “I have the feeling that Wolfe will be able to sort through the facts and find the explanation, after all. If there is one.”

“I’m glad, Marîd. And remember, if this one isn’t good enough, there are thousands of other moddies you can try, too.”

I put the moddy on the floor beside the bed and lay down.

Maybe I ought to have had my brain boosted a long time ago. I suspected that I’d been missing a bet, that I’d been wrong and everybody else had been right. Well, I was all grown-up and I could admit my mistakes. Not out loud, of course, and never to someone like Yasmin, who’d never let me forget about it: but deep down inside I knew, and that’s what counted. It had only been my pride and fear, after all, that had kept me from getting wired sooner — my feeling that I could show up any moddy with my own native good sense and one cerebral hemisphere tied behind my back. I unclipped my phone and called the Half-Hajj at home; he hadn’t gone out yet for lunch, and he promised to pass by my apartment in a few minutes. I told him I had a little gift for him.

Yasmin lay down beside me while we waited for Saied to arrive. She put a hand across my chest and rested her head on my shoulder. “Marîd,” she said softly, “you know that I’m really proud of you.”

“Yasmin,” I said slowly, “you know that I’m really scared out of me wits.”

“I know, honey; I’m scared, too. But what if you hadn’t done your part in all this? What about Nikki and the others? What if more people are killed, people you could have saved? What could I think about you then? What would you think?”

“I’ll make a deal with you, Yasmin: I’ll go on and do what I can and take whatever chances I can’t avoid. Just stop telling me all the time that I’m doing the right thing and that you’re so glad I may be dead in the next halt-hour. All the cheering in the reserved seats is great for your morale; but it doesn’t help me in the least, after a while it gets kind of tiresome, and it won’t make bullets or knives bounce off my hide. Okay?”

She was, of course, hurt, but I meant exactly what I’d said; I wanted to nip all this “Go out there and get ‘em, boy!” choo in the bud. I was sorry that I’d been so hard on Yasmin, though. To cover it, I got up and went to the bathroom. I closed the door and ran a glass of water. The water is always warm in my apartment, summer or winter, and I rarely had ice in the little freezer. After a while you can drink the tepid water with its swirling, suspended particles in it. Not me, though. I’m still working on that. I like a glass of water that doesn’t stare back at you.

I took my pill case from my jeans and scrabbled out a cluster of Sonneine. These were the first sunnies I’d taken since I got out of the hospital. Like some kind of addict I was celebrating my abstinence by breaking it. I dropped the sunnies into my mouth and took a gulp of warm water. There, I thought, that’s what will keep me going. A couple of sunnies and a few tri-phets are worth a stadium full of well-wishers with their bedsheet banners. I closed the pill case quietly — was I trying to keep Yasmin from hearing? Why — and flushed the toilet. Then I went back into the big room.