the velvet worm. These were small creatures that looked like worms with innumerable nubby legs on which they stalked their prey before snaring it in slime shot out of the face. Dr. Aluys’s delight, as he witnessed, with Myron, the rare Peripatopsis leonine catching with slime a grasshopper in midleap, was so intense that Myron felt a little embarrassed for him. But he told the good doctor the story of the snake, the frog, and the parasitic worm, and Dr. Aluys in response danced a little jig on his ancient sticklike legs.
Oh, he could discourse wittily on any topic, but favored, in addition to natural philosophy: dueling, baroque architecture, and décolletage.
“I have a hypothesis subject to you,” he told Myron. “Look at your carriage. You march so lightly now, you must be something large when you finally transform. I think you are a mammoth, trapped for of eons in the ice and only now thawed out.”
For a moment, Myron was about to say that made pretty good sense. But then he remembered that he was the chosen one. Or, at the very least, if he wasn’t, he had to pretend he was the chosen one a little bit longer.
“I’m the chosen one.”
“’Tis just a hypothesis.”
The doctor, Myron noted, clearly believed Mignon Emanuel was the raccoon she claimed she was, and he wondered if he should disabuse him of this notion. But who knew if he could trust a three-hundred-year-old alchemist?
For that matter, if Mignon Emanuel was not immortal, perhaps only alchemy could explain her youth across the decades.
Dr. Aluys was there when Mrs. Wangenstein brought back from town a black suit for Myron, fitted precisely to his measurements. He was there when Mignon Emanuel coached Myron on the inspirational speech she’d written for him. He had a knack, learned in the courts of kings, doubtless, of loitering almost forgotten in a corner and then suddenly materializing when needed. It made him a congenial companion, and the days before the conference passed quickly. Myron realized at some point that he had been either under observation or in his tower room almost the whole time he’d been in the big house; but he liked having Dr. Aluys around anyway.
It was the first guests at the conference that finally drove the doctor away, back, presumably, to his underground labs. The Central Anarchist Council showed up to the conference twenty hours early, and not at the front but at the kitchen door. There were four of them, and they were very excited that they had managed to slip past the sentries, who had apparently left their posts to chase a strange man with a bow through the woods.
The Central Anarchist Council was excited. There was supposed to be some big, earth-shattering announcement at the conference, and that’s why everyone was showing up, but they had their own agenda, they told Myron and Dr. Aluys as they both ate peanut butter and honey sandwiches at the kitchen counter. “In Sèvres, France,” the CAC explained, “they have the prototype meter bar—that’s the platinum bar that shows the official length of a meter. What we’ll do while we’re here, we’ll get everyone to agree to go to Paris and destroy the meter bar. After that, no one will know how long anything is! No one will be able to measure anything ever again!”
“Non! Non! Le prototype du mètre!” cried Dr. Aluys, and he ran out of the room.
Myron didn’t see what all the fuss was about. No one ever used meters, anyway. But he was sorry it had upset Dr. Aluys, whom he never saw, incidentally, again. Finally Florence came into the kitchen to show the Central Anarchist Council to their rooms.
“Where’s Oliver?” Myron asked her.
“I think he’s in the billiard room,” Florence answered absently.
The Central Anarchist Council left behind several empty cans of spray paint, and a tube of airplane glue, which one returned to the kitchen a few minutes later to collect.
“Say, are you Myron?” he asked Myron.
Myron was.
“Man, Gloria wasn’t exaggerating about you.” He had seen Gloria, it turned out, in Chicago last month. She had refused to come along to the conference. “She used to be a legend; but now she’s never up for anything.”
Myron finished his sandwich and went to look for Oliver. He walked through the grand ballroom, where tough men dressed in camouflage were hanging up a banner, WELCOME, DELEGATES. He walked along the tables, noting the engraved nameplates. The Knights of Columbus. The Branch Davidians. The Wallenbergians. The Free