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means n-n-nothing." A common illness, I'd tell him. A disease easily licked.
    "Jack — don't ."
    A mere two weeks. A feeble fourteen days.
    I ran to the kitchen, snatched up the phone. I need to see you, I'd tell her. This isn't about sex, Martina.
    610-400.
    It rang three times, then came a distant click, ominous and hollow. "The number you have reached," ran the recorded operator in a harsh, gravelly voice, "is out of service." My bowels became as hard and cold as a glacier. "Probably an unpaid bill," the taped message continued. "We're pretty quick to disconnect in such cases."
    "Out of service," I told Helen.
    "Good," she said.
    And I thought: 7 Lackluster Lane, Descartes Borough.
    Helen polished off her martini. "Now let's forget this ridiculous notion," she said. "Let's face the future with honesty, clearheadedness, and..." But already I was out the door.
    * * *
    Girding the gray and oily Pathogen River, Lackluster Lane was alive with smells: scum, guano, sulfur, methane, decaying eels — a cacophany of stench blaring through the shell of my Adequate. "And, of course, at the center of my opposition to abortion," said the somber priest on my FM radio, "is my belief that sex is a fundamentally disgusting practice to begin with." This was the city's frankest district, a mass of defunct fishmarkets and abandoned warehouses piled together like dead cells waiting to be sloughed off. "You might even say that, like many of my ilk, I have an instinctive horror of the human body."
    And suddenly there it was, Number 7, a corrugated tin shanty perched atop a cluster of pylons rising from the Pathogen like mortally ill trees. Gulls swung through the summer air, dropping their guileless excrement on the dock; water lapped against the moored hull of a nearby houseboat, the Average Josephine — a harsh, sucking sound, as if a pride of invisible lions were drinking here. I pulled over.
    A conjunction of narrow, jackknifing gangplanks brought me to the landing outside Martina's door. I knocked. Nothing. I knocked again. The door drifted open under the force of my knuckles.
    I called, "Martina?"
    The place had been stripped, emptied out like the Hob's hare whose photo I'd seen in Prendergorst's office. The front parlor contained a crumpled beer can, a mousetrap baited with calcified cheddar, some cigarette butts, and nothing else. I went to the kitchen. The sink held a malodorous broth of water, soap, grease, and cornflakes. The cabinets were all empty.
    "Martina? Martina?"
    In the back room, a naked set of rusting bedsprings sat on a pinewood frame so warped and askew it might have come from Toby's workshop.
    I returned to the hot, sour daylight, paused on the landing. A wave of nausea rolled through me, straight to my putative soul.
    Out on the river, a Brutality Squad cutter bore down on an outboard motorboat carrying two men in green panchos. Evidently they were attempting to escape —
    every paradise will have its dissidents, all utopias their defectors — an ambition abruptly thwarted as a round of machine-gun fire burst from the cutter, killing both fugitives instantly. Their corpses fell into the Pathogen, reddening it like dye markers. A qualified sympathy poured out of me. Such fools. Didn't they know that for most intents and the majority of purposes Veritas was as good as it gets?
    A male voice said, "Some people..."
    I looked toward the dock. A tall, fortyish, excruciatingly thin man in hip boots and a tattered white sweatshirt stood on the foredeck of Average Josephine .
    "Some people are so naive," he continued. "Imagine, trying to run the channel in broad daylight." He reached through a hole in his shirt and scratched his hairy chest.
    "Your girlfriend's gone."
    "Are you referring to Martina Coventry?" I asked.
    "Uh-huh."
    "She's not my girlfriend."
    "The little synecdochic cunt owes me two hundred dollars in rent." I descended through the maze of gangplanks. "You're her landlord?"
    "Mister, in my wretched little life