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broader horizons than other people is all.”
    She smiled up at me, “And now there’s two of you?”
    I smiled back. The Pure Land could wait.
    ============
Note on “Jumpin’ Jack Flash”
    Written in Spring, 1976.
    The 57th Franz Kafka , Ace Books, 1983.
    This apprentice exercise touches upon some of my favorite SF themes: time-travel, UFO aliens, brain-eating, and sex. It also marks the start of my “transreal” practice of modeling some of my characters on myself, my friends and my long-suffering family. Loosely speaking, I’m Jack Flash and Si Bork was my Geneseo English professor friend Lee Poague. Lee also appears in White Light , and his younger brother Dennis became the Stahn “Sta-Hi” Mooney character of my Ware series of novels. Not that my family, friends or I are really very much like my fiction characters. The distinction is comparable to that between an actor’s real life and the life of the characters whom he or she plays.
    The word “geezel” is an homage to the master Robert Sheckley, who once used it to stand for a kind of alien food; and “lesnerize” is from a Golden Age story that used it to mean “sneeze.”

Enlightenment Rabies
    His boots looked so perfect. Two dark parabolas in a field of yellow; slight three-dimensional interest provided by the scurf strewn about. Time to act. Bodine took a newspaper the size of a bubblegum wrapper from the stack at the android’s elbow.
    “Three dollars.”
    Handing over the money, he again forgot where he was. Or entered another spacetime. “The cave and the marketplace” is what he called it. Buying the newspaper was marketplace, and grooving on his boots was cave. This was an old Zen distinction comparable to the One/Many distinction of the Greeks. Bodine tried to live at the interface of complementary world-views; but more often than not he was just really out of it.
    He passed through the news-shop’s air-curtain and glanced up at the sky. A shareholder jostled him, then remarked, “They’re saying it’ll rain tonight, uh.”
    “I don’t care what they’re saying. I make my own weather,” Bodine snapped.
    The shareholder’s face froze behind his stunglasses and began to fade. Bodine elaborated, “If you let those glasses tell you what tomorrow’s weather is today, then you don’t have your tomorrow. You have their tomorrow. Lose the consensus, Jimmy. Wake up, uh.”
    The shareholder gave him a cautious but superior smile. “You had your vaccination?” he asked with exaggerated clarity, and walked on.
    Bodine fell into a dream looking at the gauzy white clouds against the light and bright November sky. Good day for something. He put some music in his workspace and started walking. The shareholder’s question surfaced in his mind.
    Vaccination. Damn. Seemed like they’d just been through all that a few weeks ago. Bodine had nearly been swept that time. He’d caught the disease…“Dirtbug” they’d been calling it…he’d caught it and would have died if he hadn’t been able to score some anti-toxin. Had cost him ten grand, and he’d had to kill a man to get the money. This time he’d do it the easy way and let the state vaccinate him.
    Bodine sat down on a bench and took the newspaper out of his packet. It was really a small white-light hologram. He held it up to his eye and looked through to see an old-fashioned newspaper spread out on a table. Social hygiene was page four.
    … tragic death of three patients at Veterans’ hospital…ten soldiers at research center…new virus isolated…disease has been named “Enlightenment Rabies” …
    Bodine laughed bitterly. There must be more people working the interface than he’d realized. The state invented the diseases and spread them, but it always named them after some perceived social ill. This time it was enlightenment, next time it might be underconsumption or dirty teeth. In any case, the point was that if you were too wasted or stubborn to go get the