“Can I tell you one of those modern fairy tales, Gard?”

“Lay it on me.”

“Have you ever beard the one,” she asked, “about the guy who invented a pill to take the place of gasoline?”

The sun was going down in a bright blaze of reds and yellows and purples. Gardener sat on a big stump in Bobbi Anderson's back yard, watching it go. They had talked most of the afternoon, sometimes discussing, sometimes reasoning, sometimes arguing. Bobbi had ended the palaver by declaring herself ravenous again. She made a huge pot of spaghetti and broiled some thick pork chops. Gardener had followed her out into the kitchen, wanting to reopen the discussion -thoughts were rolling around in his mind like balls on a pool table. Anderson wouldn't allow it. She offered Gardener a drink, which Gardener, after a long, thoughtful pause, took. The whiskey went down good, and felt good, but he seemed to have no need for a second-well, no great need. Now, sitting here full of food and drink and looking at the sky, he supposed Bobbi had been right. They'd done all the constructive talking there was to do.

It was decision-time.

Bobbi had eaten a tremendous supper. “You're gonna puke, Bobbi,” Gardener said. He was serious but still couldn't help laughing.

“Nope,” Bobbi said placidly. “Never felt better.” She burped. “In Portugal, that's a compliment to the cook.”

“And after a good lay -'Gard lifted one leg and broke wind. Bobbi laughed gustily.

They did the dishes ('Haven't invented anything to do this yet, Bobbi?” “It'll come, give me time. “) and then they went into the small, drab living room, which hadn't changed much since the time of Bobbi's uncle, to watch the evening news. None of it was very good. The Middle East was smoldering again, with Israel flying air-strikes against Syrian ground forces in Lebanon (and hitting a school by accident -Gardener winced at the pictures of burned, screaming children), the Russians driving against the mountain strongholds of the Afghan rebels, a coup in South America.

In Washington, the NRC had issued a list of ninety nuclear facilities in thirty-seven states with safety problems ranging from “moderate to serious.”

Moderate to serious, great, Gardener thought, feeling the old impotent rage stir and twist, biting into him like acid. If we lose Topeka, that's moderate. If we lose New York, that's serious.

He became aware that Bobby was looking at him a little sadly. “The beat goes on, right?” she said.

“Right.”

When the news was over, Anderson told Gardener she was going to bed.

“At seven-thirty?”

“I'm still bushed.” And she looked it.

“Okay. I'll sack out myself pretty soon. I'm tired, too. It's been a crazy couple of days, but I'm not completely sure I'd sleep, the way the stuff is whizzing around in my head.”

“You want a Valium?”

He smiled. “I saw they were still there. I'll pass. You were the one who could have used a trank or two, last couple of weeks.”

The State of Maine's price for going along with Nora's decision not to press charges was that Gardener should go into a counseling program. The program had lasted six months; the Valium was apparently going to go on forever. Gardener hadn't actually taken any in almost three years, but every now and then-usually when he was going traveling-he filled the prescription. Otherwise, some computer might burp out his name and a psychologist picking up a few extra bucks courtesy of the State of Maine might drop by to make sure his head was staying shrunk to a suitable size.

After she was in bed, Gardener had turned off the TV and sat a while in Bobbi's rocker, reading The Buffalo Soldiers. In a short time, he heard her snoring away. Gardener supposed Bobbi's snores would also be part of a conspiracy to keep him awake, but he didn't really mind-Bobbi had always snored, the price of a deviated septum, and that had always annoyed Gardener, but he had discovered last night that some things were worse. The ghastly silence in which she had slept on the couch, for instance. That was much worse.

Gardener had poked his head in for a moment, had seen Bobbi in a much more typical Bobbi Anderson sleeping posture, naked except pajama bottoms, small breasts bare, blankets kicked into disarray between her legs, one hand curled under her cheek, the other by her face, her thumb almost in her mouth. Bobbi was okay.

So Gardener had come out here to make his decision.

Bobbi's patch of garden was going great guns-the corn was taller than any Gardener had seen on his way north from Arcadia Beach, and her tomatoes were going to be blue ribbon winners. Some of them would have come to the knees of a man walking down the row. In the middle of it all was a cluster of giant sunflowers, ominous as triffids, nodding in the slight breeze.

When Bobbi asked him if he'd ever heard of the so-called “gasoline pill,” Gardener had smiled and nodded. More twentieth-century fairy tales, all right. She'd then asked him if he believed it. Gardener, still smiling, said no. Bobbi reminded him about Hangar 18.

“Are you saying you do believe there's such a pill? Or was? Something you'd just drop into your gas tank and run on all day?”

“No,” Bobbi said quietly. “Nothing I've ever read suggests the possibility of such a pill.” She leaned forward, forearms on her thighs. “But I'll tell you what I do believe: if there was, it wouldn't be on the market. Some big cartel, or maybe the government itself, would buy it… or steal it.”

“Yeah,” Gard said. He had thought more than once about the crazy ironies inherent in every status quo: open the U. S. borders and put all those customs people out of work? Legalize dope and destroy the DEA. You might as well try to shoot the man in the moon with a BB.

Gard burst out laughing.

Bobbi looked at him, puzzled but also smiling a little. “So? Share.”

“I was just thinking that if there was a pill like that, the Dallas Police would shoot the guy who invented it and then put it next to the green guys in Hangar 18.”

“Not to mention his whole family,” Bobbi agreed.

Gard didn't laugh this time. This time it didn't seem quite so hilarious.

“In that light,” Anderson had said, “look at what I've done here. I'm not even a good handyman, let alone anyone's scientist, and so the force that worked through me produced a bunch of stuff that looks more like stuff from Boys” Life plans than anything else-built by a fairly incompetent boy, at that.”

“They work,” Gardener replied.

Yes, Anderson had agreed. They did. She even had a vague idea of how they worked-on a principle which could be called “collapsing-molecule fusion.” It was non-atomic, totally clean. The telepathic typewriter, she said, depended on collapsing-molecule fusion for juice, but the actual principle of that one was much different, and she didn't understand it. There was a power-pack inside that had begun life as a fuzz-buster, but beyond that she was completely blank.

“You get a bunch of scientists in here from the NSA or the Shop, and they'd probably have this stuff down pat in six hours,” Anderson said. “They'd go around looking like somebody just kicked them in the balls, asking each other how the hell they could have missed such elementary concepts for so long. And do you know what would happen next?”

Gardener thought about it hard, his head down, one hand gripping the can of beer Bobbi had given him, the other gripping his forehead, and suddenly he was back at that terrible party listening to Ted the Power Man defend the Iroquois plant which even now was loading hot rods: If we gave these nuke-freaks what they wanted, they'd turn around a month or so later and start whining about not being able to use their blow-dryers, or found out their Cuisinarts weren't going to work when they wanted to mix up a bunch of macrobiotic food. He saw himself leading Ted the Power Man over to Arberg's buffet-he saw this as clearly as if it had happened… shit, as if it was happening right then. On the table, between the chips and the bowl of raw veggies, was one of Bobbi's contraptions. The batteries were hooked up to a circuit board; that was in turn hooked up to an ordinary wall switch, the sort available in any hardware store for a buck or so. Gardener saw himself turn this switch, and suddenly everything on the table-chips, raw veggies, the lazy susan with its five different kinds of dip, the remains of the cold cuts and the carcass of the chicken, the ashtrays, the drinks-they rose six inches into the air and then simply held there, their shadows pooling decorously beneath them on the white linen. Ted the Power Man looked at this for a moment, mildly annoyed. Then he swept the contraption off the table. The wires snapped. Batteries rolled hither and yon. Everything fell back to the table with a crash, glasses spilling, ashtrays overturning and scattering butts. Ted took off his sport-coat and covered the remains of the gadget, the way you might cover the corpse of an animal hit and killed on the road. That done, he turned back to his small captive audience and resumed speaking. These people think they can go on having their cake and eating it too forever. These people assume that there is always going to be a fallback position. They are wrong. There is no fallback position. It's simple: nukes or nothing. Gardener heard himself screaming in a rage that was, for a change, totally sober: What about the thing you just broke? What about that? Ted bent and picked up his sport-coat as gracefully as a magician waving his cape before a bedazzled audience. The floor beneath was bare except for a few potato chips. No sign of the gadget. No sign at all. What about what thing? Ted the Power Man asked, looking straight at Gardener with an expression of sympathy into which a liberal helping of contempt had been mixed. He turned to his audience. Does anybody here see anything?… No, they were answering in unison, like children reciting: Arberg, Patricia McCardle, all the rest; even the young bartender and Ron Cummings were reciting it. No, we don't see anything, we don't see anything at all, Ted, not a thing, you're right, Ted, it's the nukes or nothing. Ted was smiling. Next thing you know, he'll be telling us that old wheeze about the itty-bitty pill you can put in your gas tank and run your car on all day. Ted the Power Man began to laugh. All the others joined in. All of them were laughing at him.