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unexpected revelation for Jeffty and me that it dimmed our disappointment at the lessened quality of the current story.
    We read comics together, and Jeffty and I both decided—separately, before we came together to discuss it—that our favorite characters were Doll Man, Airboy and The Heap. We also adored the George Carlson strips in Jingle Jangle Comics , particularly the Pie-Face Prince of Old Pretzleburg stories, which we read together and laughed over, even though I had to explain some of the esoteric puns to Jeffty, who was too young to have that kind of subtle wit.
    How to explain it? I can't. I had enough physics in college to make some offhand guesses, but I'm more likely wrong than right. The laws of the conservation of energy occasionally break. These are laws that physicists call "weakly violated." Perhaps Jeffty was a catalyst for the weak violation of conservation laws we're only now beginning to realize exist. I tried doing some reading in the area—muon decay of the "forbidden" kind: gamma decay that doesn't include the muon neutrino among its products—but nothing I encountered, not even the latest readings from the Swiss Institute for Nuclear Research near Zurich, gave me an insight. I was thrown back on a vague acceptance of the philosophy that the real name for "science" is magic .
    No explanations, but enormous good times.
    The happiest time of my life.
    I had the "real" world, the world of my store and my friends and my family, the world of profit&loss, of taxes and evenings with young women who talked about going shopping or the United Nations, of the rising cost of coffee and microwave ovens. And I had Jeffty's world, in which I existed only when I was with him. The things of the past he knew as fresh and new, I could experience only when in his company. And the membrane between the two worlds grew ever thinner, more luminous and transparent. I had the best of both worlds. And knew, somehow, that I could carry nothing from one to the other.
    Forgetting for just a moment, betraying Jeffty by forgetting, brought an end to it all.
    Enjoying myself so much, I grew careless and failed to consider how fragile the relationship between Jeffty's world and my world really was. There is a reason why the present begrudges the existence of the past. I never really understood. Nowhere in the beast books, where survival is shown in battles between claw and fang, tentacle and poison sac, is there recognition of the ferocity the present always brings to bear on the past. Nowhere is there a detailed statement of how the Present lies in wait for What-Was, waiting for it to become Now-This-Moment so it can shred it with its merciless jaws.
    Who could know such a thing … at any age … and certainly not at my age … who could understand such a thing?
    I'm trying to exculpate myself. I can't. It was my fault.
    •
    It was another Saturday afternoon.
    "What's playing today?" I asked him, in the car, on the way downtown.
    He looked up at me from the other side of the front seat and smiled one of his best smiles. "Ken Maynard in Bullwhip Justice an' The Demolished Man ." He kept smiling, as if he'd really put one over on me. I looked at him with disbelief.
    "You're kidding !" I said, delighted. "Bester's The Demolished Man ?" He nodded his head, delighted at my being delighted. He knew it was one of my favorite books. "Oh, that's super!"
    "Super duper ," he said.
    "Who's in it?"
    "Franchot Tone, Evelyn Keyes, Lionel Barrymore and Elisha Cook, Jr." He was much more knowledgeable about movie actors than I'd ever been. He could name the character actors in any movie he'd ever seen. Even the crowd scenes.
    "And cartoons?" I asked.
    "Three of 'em: a Little Lulu , a Donald Duck and a Bugs Bunny. An' a Pete Smith Specialty an' a Lew Lehr Monkeys is da C-r-r-r-azi-est Peoples ."
    "Oh boy!" I said. I was grinning from car to ear. And then I looked down and saw the pad of purchase order forms on the seat. I'd forgotten to drop it