In the Threed hotel Strong bought a safety razor, some shaving cream, and a bottle of asprin from the gift shop. He used each, and fell asleep in his clothes.

In the morning there was a knock at the door. He fixed his hat, ran his hands over his shirt until he realized it was a lost cause, and looked through the keyhole. He saw the bottom of a short skirt. He opened the door.

"... Hello, dear?"

"This is Mister, ah, Makepeace Thackeray's room, right?" A well-built woman, wearing a blouse and a jacket that matched the skirt and the most flamboyant sun-hat Strong had ever seen, was staring at him, her cigarette tilted up in her mouth.

"For another three hours, it is. What's it to you?"

"Why, William." She paused. "I was one of your fellow passengers on the bus--don't you remember?"

"Seems to have somehow slipped my mind." Strong had a distinct urge to fix his hat some more.

"Wasn't very nice of you to jump out the back way like that, Mr. Thackeray. They kept the bus overnight after they couldn't find that character they were looking for. Strong, I believe, was his name?"

"I wouldn't know. I wasn't paying much attention."

"Well, in any case, those people are still looking for him. In this hotel."

She had gone deliberately quiet, quiet enough that Strong could hear a gruff voice asking for Alden Strong in the ajoining room.

"If you'll excuse me, I've got another date with a window."

"Third floor? I think they'll notice that." The adjoining room's door slammed shut. Strong felt for his gun. The woman pushed him out of the doorway, walked through it, and kissed him on the mouth. Hard.

Through his one unobscured eye, Alden watched the men pass by. One seemed slightly embarrassed, and the other flashed him a thumbs-up before moving on. Both were in uniform, though he once again was in no position to see what the uniform was.

Meanwhile, the woman was still kissing him. Finally he pushed her back. "They're gone now."

"Who said anything about them, Alden? I'll see you." She walked out the door opposite the way the Uniforms had gone. Strong went downstairs to check out.

Outside the hotel Strong tried his office again, but there was no answer. The next bus for Onett left later that afternoon, but he wasn't sure he'd take it. Instead he walked to the police station, a clammy, rattling old building off the main road.

The blue paint--Alden never understood why every police station in Eagleland was blue, but most of them, at least, weren't this regrettable shade--was coming off in sheets. The door creaked like an old man's joints, vibrating shakily as it dragged across the concrete. The door opened into a spare, dusty room, big and unfurnished, with a secretary sitting at a lonely desk at its center. She stammered when she spoke. "Hello. Can I ask your business here today?"

"Name's Alden Strong. I'm a federal agent."

"All right."

There was a lull of silence. Somebody had missed a social cue; Strong tried to pick it up. "I need to see somebody in charge."

The woman nodded. "I'll get someone. You can wait here."

Strong looked for a chair. There wasn't one. He tried to make a gesture that would lead the secretary to laugh and produce one, but none was forthcoming. She sat at the desk and looked right through him.

Strong got back to the hardened creases in his shirt.

After ten minutes the woman looked up. "Sergeant Wilkes will see you now." She nodded to the one door, in the back of the room. Strong stared at her for a second, then walked through. "It's at the end," She added as he opened the door, without affect.

He was in a hallway, doors running down it on either side. Sergeant Wilkes's office, at the end, was just as spartan as the entryway, only much smaller.

"I don't suppose you have a chair?"

"Yes--eh, we're remodeling. So." Sergeant Wilkes was as monotone as the secretary. He twirled his mustache incessantly.

"Ah, yes. Thanks. My name's Strong, I'm a federal agent." He sat down. "I told your secretary as much, but she seems to talk to you via telepathic link so I wasn't able to know if she mentioned that. I'm being followed by a pack of uniformed buffoons. I don't suppose you know anything about it."

"You were on that bus, then?"

"Yeah, exactly."

The mustache twirling stopped. "I heard about that. But I can't tell you anything about it."

"Can't tell?"

"I don't know. Just got a bunch of tourists in here begging for compensation. And your head, actually. Seems you should've been there to straighten things out."

"Yeah, I had an appointment."

"Well, I wish I could help you out, Strong, but we're a small town station. My best man here spends most of his day pulling cats out of trees."

"Yeah." Strong stood up and shook the Sergeant's hand.

"Here's my card, if you need anything while you're here."

"Thanks."

As he made his way out of the station he tried casually to avoid eye contact with the secretary. He walked out into the cool Threed mid-morning, exactly where he was a half-hour ago.

And then he was nearly hit by a car, a big Nash Ambassador straight out of a Fitzgerald novel.

The driver got out of the car and ran first to the front of the vehicle. "Oh, crap. Crap. Crap. Is the wheel bent? I think it's--right over the curb. Crap."

Strong lurched to his feet and patted sadly at his clothes. He looked at the driver. "God, Sophie?"

The girl jumped, then turned and faced him. "Oh, Boss. Sorry, I was just--I borrowed this car from Jim, and he bothered it from his parents, and I didn't want to ruin three people's car, and--are you all right?"

"Yeah, I'm fine. But what I mean is--" Strong went to pick his hat up off the sidewalk. "What in God's name are you doing here?"

"Your fault. You called and sounded so distressed, and I waited but you didn't call back."

"I got cut off."

"Right. But--what happened to your clothes? Did you sleep in them?"

"Yeah, and I rode a bus in them, and I almost got hit by a car in them. It's a long story."

"Tell it to me at the circus."

"The what?"

"The Threed circus. I'm not stealing a car and driving to Threed and missing the Threed circus."

"Steal?"

"It'll be borrowing after I explain it to Jim."

"All right, then. I'm sure the bureau's glad they're employing a felon."

The big top--and it was big, dwarfing most of the buildings around it--was the focal point of Threed, and it seemed like half of the population was underneath, on rickety wooden bleachers and standing underneath them. The three rings were a clamor of manic activity, people hurtling through the air and riding elephants and taming lions, often without benefit of a ringmaster to explain the purpose of the tricks. Only Sophie, putting a program under intense scrutiny, seemed to be able to make things out. "The one in the red, on the trapeze there, hails from deepest Scaraba. His family was killed by roving marauders, and until the circus discovered him he made a living as a cat burgler."

"Looks pretty Eaglelandian to me."

"Quiet, the ringmaster's about to say something."

A man in a star-spangled top-hat cleared a path of dueling horses and fire-jugglers to the middle of the center ring. He stood in a dramatic, vaudevillian position, and bellowed: "Ladies and gentleman, boys and girls--we have for you today the most amazing of spectacles, so new and mysterious that P.T. Threed himself knows not his true identity or origin. A man so unique that, in his fifty years of trotting the globe, Mr. Threed has never found his equal. A man able to conjure the elements of the ancient Greeks out of his bare hands. A man we know only as..." By now the other acts had all left the stage, and the only light was on the barking ringmaster. "Parmenides Polestar!" A shadowy figure walked beside the ringmaster.

Sophie thumbed furiously through her program. "He's not in here."

"Well write his name down, quick. That's the guy that cut off our phone conversation."

Sophie patted herself down. "I don't have a pen."

Strong was already extricating himself from his seat; he grabbed a pen, bent from one recent misadventure or another, and the officer's card. "Here, write it down."

"Er, you already wrote on this, Boss."

Strong raised an eyebrow and took a look. Scrawled on the back of the card, in pencil, was the following:

saw them follow you to the P.T. Threed Offices--it's not safe here--anywhere in Threed

go.

"Perhaps I should've noticed that sooner. Come on, Sophie. Don't look at me. Don't look at Polestar. Just stand up and walk, very carefully, very casually, out of the tent. He could make us both look very much like a sad accident very fast, if what he did to Ma Bell was any indication. I'm going to pretend to be very interested in the inside of my fedora for a minute, and then I'll get out myself. Meet me with the car in front of the police station."

Sophie sidled toward the edge of the bleachers, trying to hush the annoyed expletives hurled her way from fellow audience members as the man on stage shot jets of fire and ice into the air. Strong held his breath.