steel table that, for some reason, looked comfy as a feather bed. I stretched out on it and had a little snooze.
An indeterminate time later, a voice growled through my doze like a buzz saw through soft pine. “Well, well, well,” said Milval Hines, “look at this mayonnaise motherfucker over here.” His use of that phrase should have rung alarm bells in my head, but no bells could sound through my thick cranial batting. I rolled over and looked up. Hines was staring down at me, his misshapen (it struck me then) face silhouetted against the bare energy-saving twisty bulb overhead.
Vic was standing to his left, looking smugly flipped, which seemed according to plan.
But Allie stood to his right, which somehow did not.
You know what cognitive dissonance is, right? The grimness that grips you when you try to hold two contradictory ideas in your head at once. This wasn’t that, exactly. More like just, “What’s wrong with this picture?” Given my state of mind just then, all the phantom colors I was seeing, I couldn’t be entirely sure she wasn’t a pigment of my imagination. I tried to make eye contact with her, get some unspoken explanation, but she looked right through me. I had to check my extremities to assure myself that I had not, in fact, become transparent.
Hines placed two fingers against the knot on my forehead. I winced at the touch. “Does that hurt?” he asked. He pushed down hard with both fingers and, yeah, it did hurt. I managed to slither away, just far enough to fall to the floor.
“Gravity,” intoned Vic. “Not just a good idea, it’s the law.” He seemed inordinately pleased with my pain.
Hines heaved me into a chair. He grabbed another one, spun it around and straddled it, facing me. I flashed back to the day we met and I’d straddled a chair exactly the same way. Odd that I could remember something from weeks ago but, suddenly, nothing from early today or yesterday. It was like my near-term memory had been whacked out of my head and replaced with a sign that read “This space intentionally left blank.”
“So, Radar,” he asked, “where’d you get that nasty bump?”
“Cut myself shaving,” I muttered.
“You know that makes no sense,” he said. I blinked at him. All six of him. “Well, whatever,” said Hines. “I’ve been having some interesting conversations with your friends here. Seems they think you’re something of a cheesedick.”
“I am,” I confessed. “A great hulking pepper-jack pecker.” The effort of speech sent a radiating blob of pain outward from my forehead, but I kept spreading the mustard on my bravado sandwich. “What do you want me to do about it now?”
“Well, at first I was thinking of a twelve-step program: Assholes Anonymous. Teach you to socialize like a decent human being. But then I thought, ‘That’s Radar Hoverlander. If he can’t bluff being a decent human being, no one can.’ So no rehab for you, Radar. Unlike a ham, you’re incurable.” He reached over and thwacked my forehead. My eyes twitched and watered uncontrollably. “This is fun,” he said. “I like this.”
“Go easy on him, Milval,” said Allie. “Can’t you see he’s hurt?”
“Yes, of course I can see he’s hurt. That’s why I’m having so much fun.” He thwacked my lump again. This time I may have whimpered. “I’m still wondering how it happened, though. What’d you do, Radar? Bang your head against your ego?”
Hines started winking in and out of view, as if someone were flipping miniblinds open and shut between us. As that seemed unlikely, I imagined that it was my own consciousness turning off and on like a light. A phrase floated up from nowhere to the top of my brain, and made it out my mouth. “The Dead Man’s Switch …” I said.
Hines laughed. “The Dead Man’s Switch is a joke,” he sneered. “A pretty good one, I have to admit. You really had Scovil going. You even had me going for a little while. But I checked with some economically minded friends of mine, and they assured me that the global calamity you predict is impossible.”
I tried to say, “Your friends don’t know what they’re talking about.” I suppose I got close enough to that, because Hines laughed again. I felt like I was being a good host at a party.
“They may not,” he said. “In my experience, people are idiots. But my other friends here”—he gestured toward Vic and Allie—“inform me that the whole threat is