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the cockpit, where a guard captured it, but not before he had slammed his elbow into a navigational instrument, causing a possible malfunction. The device had to be checked and rechecked. All in all, the flight was delayed one hour and forty-six minutes.
    Gulietta hadn’t flown before. She was confused by the objections to the contents of her luggage. She refused to eat the snack served by the still-flustered stewardess.
    How could Leigh-Cheri make Gulietta understand the Great Hawaiian Mongoose Reaction?
    Hawaii once had a rat problem. Then, somebody hit upon a brilliant solution. Import mongooses from India. Mongooses would kill the rats. It worked. Mongooses did kill the rats. Mongooses also killed chickens, young pigs, birds, cats, dogs, and small children. There have been reports of mongooses attacking motorbikes, power lawn mowers, golf carts, and James Michener. In Hawaii now, there are as many mongooses as there once were rats. Hawaii had traded its rat problem for a mongoose problem. Hawaii was determined nothing like that would ever happen again.
    How could Leigh-Cheri draw for Gulietta the appropriate analogy between Hawaii’s rodents and society at large? Society had a crime problem. It hired cops to attack crime. Now society has a cop problem.
    The answer, of course, is that Leigh-Cheri could not draw that parallel at all. That parallel had never occurred to her. It had occurred to Bernard Mickey Wrangle, however.
    Bernard Mickey Wrangle sat in the economy cabin of the Northwest Orient airliner and pondered the rat/mongoose-crime/cop analogy. Bernard Mickey Wrangle sat in the rear of the aircraft with seven sticks of dynamite strapped to his body.
    Bernard Mickey Wrangle was clever. Most likely, he could have successfully boarded the flight to Hawaii with seven sticks of dynamite strapped to his body under any conditions. Certainly, though, the frog had helped pave his way.
    (The frog, incidentally, was released at a pond near the Sea-Tac runways. For being close to a busy airport, it was a pleasant pond. It featured lily pads and cattails and fat mosquitoes for lunch. But let’s face it, damn it all, it wasn’t Waikiki.)

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    THE JETLINER, missing one small green traveler but carrying a bonus seven sticks of dynamite, continued its crossing of what every novice surfer knows to be the most inappropriately named body of water on earth. The jetliner whistled to conceal its fear of gravity. Leigh-Cheri read magazines to conceal her excitement.
    Excitement widened in her eyes like periods at the end of billboard sentences. Commas of excitement wobbled in her tummy, and question marks squirmed in there as well. Every once in a while, she felt as if she were sitting on an exclamation point.
    Such a wonderful idea was the Geo-Therapy Care Fest that it was surprising to her that it hadn’t happened before. An assembly of the best thinkers, the most advanced technicians, the most concerned scientists, the most enlightened artists, pooling their knowledge and their dreams for the betterment of all. That was what the United Nations would be were the United Nations not in the hands of the dull and the corrupt. Were it not in the service of ego-politics.
    At the Maui conference, Buckminster Fuller would deliver a paper on “Harvesting Pollution: Thar’s Gold in Them Thar Spills.” Gary Snyder would talk about “The Buddhist Approach to Fighting City Hall.” The lecture by the environmentalist Dr. Barry Commoner (his name induced in the Princess a twinge of superiority followed by a deeper twinge of guilt) would be entitled, “There’s No Such Thing As a Free Lunch.” The Alternative Birth-Control Workshop would be led by Linda Coghill, the woman who singlehandedly slashed the illegitimacy and abortion rates in Portland, Oregon. On the morning of February 26, Leigh-Cheri would have to choose between a demonstration of the photovoltaic cell (a breakthrough in reducing the expense of solar power) and a panel