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hundred; this was a request for a thousand, then.
    Among fronts, if transactions had to take place over public communications, a fairly good try consisted of masking a large one by an apparently small one. They could deal and deal forever, in fact, in these quantities, without the authorities taking any interest; otherwise, the narcotics teams would be raiding apartments and houses up and down each street each hour of the day, and achieving little.
    “ ‘Ten,’ “ Donna muttered, irritably.
    “I’m really hurting,” he said, like a user. Rather than a dealer. “I’ll pay you back later, when I’ve scored.”
    “No,” she said woodenly. “I’ll lay them on you gratis. Ten.” Now, undoubtedly, she was speculating whether he was dealing. Probably he was. “Ten. Why not? Say, three days from now?”
    “No sooner?”
    “These are—”
    “Okay,” he said.
    “I’ll drop over.”
    “What time?”
    She calculated. “Say around eight in the P.M. Hey, I want to show you a book I got, somebody left it at the shop. It’s cool. It has to do with wolves. You know what wolves do? The male wolf? When he defeats his foe, he doesn’t snuff him—he pees on him. Really! He stands there and pees on his defeated foe and then he splits. That’s it. Territory is what they mostly fight over. And the right to screw. You know.”
    Arctor said, “I peed on some people a little while ago.”
    “No kidding? How come?”
    “Metaphorically,” he said.
    “Not the usual way?”
    “I mean,” he said, “I told them—” He broke off. Talking too much; a fuckup. Jesus, he thought. “These dudes,” he said, “like biker types, you dig? Around the Foster’s Freeze? I was cruising by and they said something raunchy. So I turned around and said something like—” He couldn’t think of anything for a moment.
    “You can tell me,” Donna said, “even if it’s super gross. You gotta be super gross with biker types or they won’t understand.”
    Arctor said, “I told them I’d rather ride a pig than a hog. Any time.”
    “I don’t get it.”
    “Well, a pig is a chick that—”
    “Oh yeah. Okay, well I get it. Barf.”
    “I’ll see you at my place like you said,” he said. “Good-by.” He started to hang up.
    “Can I bring the wolf book and show you? It’s by Konrad Lorenz. The back cover, where they tell, says he was the foremost authority on wolves on earth. Oh yeah, one more thing. Your roommates both came into the shop today, Ernie what’s-his-name and that Barris. Looking for you, if you might have—”
    “What about?” Arctor said.
    “Your cephalochromoscope that cost you nine hundred dollars, that you always turn on and play when you get home—Ernie and Barris were babbling away about it. They tried to use it today and it wouldn’t work. No colors and no ceph patterns, neither one. So they got Barris’s tool kit and unscrewed the bottom plate.”
    “The hell you say!” he said, indignant.
    “And they say it’s been fucked over. Sabotaged. Cut wires, and like sort of weird stuff—you know, freaky things. Shorts and broken parts. Barris said he’d try to—”
    “I’m going right home,” Arctor said, and hung up. My primo possession, he thought bitterly. And that fool Barris tinkering with it. But I can’t go home right now, he realized. I’ve got to go over to New-Path to check on what they’re up to.
    It was his assignment: mandatory.

3
    Charles Freck, too, had been thinking about visiting New-Path. The freakout of Jerry Fabin had gotten to him that much.
    Seated with Jim Barris in the Fiddler’s Three coffee shop in Santa Ana, he fooled around with his sugar-glazed doughnut morosely. “It’s a heavy decision,” he said. “That’s cold turkey they do. They just keep with you night and day so you don’t snuff yourself or bite off your arm, but they never give you anything. Like, a doctor will prescribe. Valium, for instance.”
    Chuckling, Barris inspected his patty melt, which