in a jet black sky.

Below, a tracked rover the size of a suitcase hustled over the surface of Mars.

Or at least that’s the way it looked.

Behind the glass, Ben, the Jet Propulsion Lab engineer from the Mensa murder mystery night at Joel Kinser’s, wiggled the rover’s controls, spun it around in a circle.

The name “Rath-Steadman” was stenciled on the side.

Ben offered the controls to Jimmy. Jimmy declined.

“When we were ready to put out the first pictures from the surface of Mars,” Ben said, “I downloaded a fuzzy image of Elvis and superimposed it over an up-slope, very dimly, perfect. But somebody caught it before it went out.”

Ben flicked the stick.

“Watch this.”

The multimillion dollar toy popped a wheelie.

In the JPL employee’s dining room, Jimmy drank a bottle of water and watched as Ben attacked his five o’clock “lunch,” a can of sardines with a pull-top lid and two slices of dark rye wrapped in wax paper.

“I’m not going to eat that pear,” he said.

Jimmy took the pear.

“Rath-Steadman. Past, present, or future?” Ben said.

“Whatever you know.”

“I know everything,” Ben said, a simple statement of fact.

“Start with the past.”

“When Rath and Steadman merged in 1977, two rather interesting companies were lost and one rather uninteresting company was born, producing a particularly undistinguished series of spectacularly successful airplanes.”

Jimmy took the first bite of the pear. Ben eyed him, as if he now regretted giving it up.

“Presently,” Ben said, “R-S is in a becalmed patch of sea, captained by Kurt Rath, who is a real son of a bitch, to use the technical term. As for the future, all eyes are on the sky . . .”

It was a joke. Jimmy didn’t get it.

“The war with the birds . . .”

Jimmy still didn’t get it.

They took Ben’s car, a dust-white twenty-year-old Honda Civic. Ben cut across Pasadena and then up through La Canada/Flintridge. He was a shortcut kind of guy, a surface street guy. He made fifty right and left turns in the twenty-m ile trip, maximizing the torque in each gear, sometimes violently downshifting as he yanked the car around a turn, all while Persian music squeaked out of the Honda’s cheap speakers, snake charmer’s music to the untuned ear, and too loud to talk over.

Jimmy held on, his head under the lowered cloud of the torn headliner. They came down Sepulveda from the north, faster than the cars on the adjacent freeway, right and left and right and left down into Van Nuys to an industrial park.

One last turn and they were on the tarmac of Van Nuys Airport.

“You have a plane?” Jimmy said.

Ben threw open the doors of a hangar. There was an experimental plane hardly longer than the Civic with an odd wing configuration, two place, prop aft.

“I built it. In my garage,” Ben said as he yanked away the blocks and shoved it toward the doorway.

The light plane had power. There was some chatter on the radio as they came up the runway, fast.

“It’s the same model as John Denver’s,” Ben yelled to Jimmy as he pulled back on the stick and the plane leapt into the sky. “That seems to impress some people.”

They crossed the city. What would have taken an hour and a half down below took ten minutes. They fle w over the Rath-Steadman headquarters, the parking lot where Jimmy had burned up the last hours of last night. It was late afternoon and the light and the distance and the angle made everything look good, the shining buildings and rolling, green manmade hills around them, even the refinery, Oz in this light.

Ben banked right, a steep turn, and they were facing the dropping sun. As they approached the coastline, Ben looked down, shouting over the noise.

“See any B-One-R D’s?”

“What?”

“B-1-RDs.”

“What?”

“Birds.”

Jimmy looked over the side.

Below was a grim expanse of what once were wetlands, a broad section that fed, in a few flashing waterways, into the Pacific. It was a landscape dotted with abandoned tuna boats and decaying pleasure craft and a few figures too far off to read.

Jimmy’s eyes darkened.

“Last wetlands in the South Bay,” Ben yelled. “Rath-Steadman wants to build RS-20s here. Buddy of mine has been doing a little stealth air-mapping for them. Immense plant, no more wetlands. Look for the PR campaign to start soon. ‘Birds for Jobs! ’ ”

Ben pushed the plane into a wild, diving turn.

“I like birds,” he shouted, “but I’d bet on Rath-Steadman . . .”

The little aircraft spiraled down over the cluttered wetlands for an up-close view.

A man in