She leaned toward me. "I let down--!" She smiled and shook her head. "Am I so wicked?" "Nope. If you tried, you might make it. Right now--" I left her in that subdued, shiny-eyed jizzle. 3 The door slipped out of my somewhat moist palm when I opened it and was slammed not by the day's breeze, for there was no breeze, but by a draft that sucked through the Astolat Hotel--a current of air bearing the odors of food, carpets, paint, luggage, and the scents of rich women--a damp, thermal issue that would have incubated eggs. Paul sat bolt upright in my bed. He saw me, first. He stared at the room. He swung his feet to the floor. "Gotta get going. Any news of her?" "Take it easy, bo." "What time is it?" I told him. "You've let me waste half the day?" His voice broke. "Not waste it. Thought the rest would do you good. Bring you back to your senses a little. Seems not." "God damn you--you should have waked me up. I feel horrible." "Snap out of it! Try to remember what the poet says about rags, bones, hanks of hair--and a good cigar is a smoke." His eyes were so wild that I took pity on him. "Jump in the shower. I've got Dave Berne--an old pal of mine--working on your Marcia. He probably has detectives on the hunt this minute." Paul heavily rubbed the stubble on his face. "I _thought_ you'd take charge." While he used my shower and my razor I had his clothes pressed and ordered some breakfast for him. But he ate the food only because he had to wait for the valet. I couldn't remember having seen anybody in such a tizzy about a girl since the days of my youth--since my own tizzies. And tizzy wasn't the right word for Paul's condition. It was pretty nearly psychopathic. He ate and ran from my rooms, after I'd made him promise to report back later in the day. I got into the serial again and the sun moved across the blue-hot sky, driving from Manhattan everybody with the fare. Ambulances were collecting prostration cases. Cops were going around shutting off the fire hydrants which wilted citizens were opening with wrenches. Cops trying to save the water supply against fall drought, against fires, against winter snow that could be flushed into the sewers, and in behalf of the thirst, cookery, and cleanliness of the millions. The heat wave had become big headlines in the papers. Sometimes I looked out the window at the glaring roofs of the metropolis and tried archmeasures of cortical autohypnosis, imagining the sky gray, snow falling in hushed and steady spirals, shop windows green and red for Christmas, and Salvation Army Santa Clauses ringing handbells beside their tripods and kettles on the main intersections. It wasn't any good. My personal limits of trained tolerance had been exceeded by a great, tormented gob of atomic fire ninety-three million miles away and right here on my windowsill. Still--I made fair progress. The light was losing its intensity, though the air was no less fevered, when I got a call.