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ridge of them. In three hours, beyond Cumberland, he found himself in Maryland’s wildest pastures in its farthest, westernmost regions, not wild like the Ouachitas but nevertheless free of the poison taint of the city and just barely tame enough to accommodate the most provisional sort of farming. It looked to be fine deer country, way out in Garrett County. He was searching for a town called Accident, and halfway between it and nowhere, just where they’d said it would be, he found the small Ramada Inn nestled under the mountains. He checked in, his reservations all made and an envelope waiting for him with a hearty welcoming letter and detailed instructions on how to reach the headquarters of Accutech at its shooting facility a few miles down the road. There was also his per diem, ten crisp twenty-dollar bills.
    Bob went to his room and lay down on the bed and didn’t go out anymore that night. He just thought it all out, trying not to be bothered that he had been followed his whole long trip out from the airport by a very good surveillance team.
    Like everything associated with RamDyne, the trailer was small and seedy and cheap. The outfit never did anything first-class and seemed only to have cretins of the prison guard mentality working for it, like the horrid Jack Payne. And now it was jammed with men Dobbler was supposedly briefing.
    The doctor sighed, looking at the dull faces in his audience.
    “Er, could I have your attention please?”
    He couldn’t. They paid him no attention at all. He was irrelevant to them.
    How far he’d fallen and how fast! Once the youngest member of the Harvard Medical School psychiatric faculty and the sole proprietor of one of the most flourishing private practices in the Cambridge-Greater Boston area, he’d had the life he’d dreamed of and worked for so furiously. One day, however, when he was tired and his resources nearly depleted, on a last appointment, he’d let his discipline slip. He’d touched a woman. Why had he done it? He didn’t know. In the nanosecond before he did it, it hadn’t even been in his mind. But he did it. He’d touched her and when she looked at him he realized that she wanted him to touch her more, the sexual savagery that spilled out stunned him. He made love to her right there in the office. It was the start of his out-of-control phase, abetted by a severe amphetamine habit. He seduced nine patients. Inevitably one had gone to the police; the charge was rape. The squalor played itself out over six melancholy months, climaxing in his acceptance of a plea-bargained second-degree assault conviction, which delivered him, courtesy of a feminist judge, to the ungentle ministrations of Russell Isandhlwana. The symmetry was perfect, even awesome—justice at its finest: Dobbler had fucked nine neurotic women in his office; in prison he was fucked by an immense man, who called him his dickhole.
    And now, he was Raymond Shreck’s dickhole. Not sexually, of course, but even Dobbler found a certain black humor in the irony: he’d gone from the ignominy of the prison to somehow secure a position in subservience to a man with the same (though somewhat modulated) sense of physical power and ruthlessness as Russell Isandhlwana, a man whom, like Russell, he totallyfeared but whom he needed for protection and strength.
    “Earth to Planet, Doctor!” It was the horrid Payne.
    “What?”
    “Hey, get with the program. You lost it there, man.”
    Ah! He’d lost his place again, wasn’t sure what question he was answering. It was the last briefing before the subject showed up.
    Oh, yes, he was holding forth on Bob’s unique capacity for utter near-death stillness, explaining to Payne’s perplexed listeners why it was that Bob, though in his room from five-thirty P.M . on the previous evening, had simply ceased to exist for their listening devices. He was trying to get them to see how
important
this was, for it got to the very nature of Swagger’s