"Me?"

"We've been looking for a guy like you. Of course, you're stone deaf without your hat, and you G.o.dd.a.m.ned vibrate all the time...."

"Parkinson's...."

"So you need help yourself. But among us we've got all the parts."

"And where would we go?"

"Mr. Kaplan has a burning mission," the judge told me, his face swinging from side to side.

"My daughter Monica," Kaplan explained, "is in her late forties. Five years ago she marries a client of mine, 'Boots' Bacci. From that talk show on the Moon? Remember him? Always wore silver boots? I get admitted into Cedars with a stroke, the snake talks me into signing over the house in Brentwood. I get released from Cedars, and instead of taking me home, he gets behind my wheelchair, crams me into his sports car, then pushes me in here."

"Time for a little payback," Judge Ortiz said, pushing on his cane and rising from the couch. "Are you with us?"

A sharp animal sound, a yapping, came from the direction of the lobby. I adjusted my cap, feeling abit frail. My companions didn't strike me as completely stable, but. ..."Is that a dog?"

"No, it's a Yorkshire terrier. Animal therapy day."

I like animals, but I recalled how the previous week a potbellied pig had fouled the library floor. "I'm with you, gents. Let's roll."

And so I stood there the next morning, shaking on my walker, leaning on the gurney, fresh air just ten feet away. Dennis was scanning our forms into the web station with a frown, Nurse Tucker looking over his shoulder. Partly because we were dressed in street clothes, my two partners in old suits, myself in cords and a cardigan, we'd attracted a bit of a crowd. There was Agnes Dorchester with her humped back and blue nightgown, Ted Makelena with his robe pockets filled with sweets, Marjorie Walters in her ridiculous tracksuit.

Nurse Tucker grimaced over the terminal. "What about him?" she asked, pointing to the gurney that Kaplan had instructed me to push.

"He's with us. Tiger Montelban," Judge Ortiz said. Even I remembered him as a screen playboy.

He'd been Kaplan's most productive client.

"Medical data's in order, but what's he do for your 'pod? He's been comatose for a year."

"He can pee, which I can't," Kaplan said. "Wanna see my catheter?"

Tucker rolled her eyes. Actually, so did I.

"Look here," the judge snapped. "It doesn't matter if he can do anything. The law says that the sum of our powers merely has to replicate those of a normal adult."

Tucker sighed, puzzled over the terminal, then it beeped. "Admin says you guys can go," she said with quiet surprise. "What name?" As a new single legal ent.i.ty, we had to provide a separate name.

"Story Musgrave," the judge answered. Musgrave had been my idea. The bald ex-marine, one of the first astronauts, had been active into his nineties, had six graduate degrees including one in medicine, and at ninety-seven was with the crew that went to Mars.

The sliding doors opened and we took our first step through.

It was surprisingly easy going at first. We weren't fast, exactly, but the gurney I was pushing stabilized my tremor and provided a platform for Judge Ortiz to walk along as he tapped his way. Kaplan was out in front, leading us to the parking lot. He'd been savvy enough to hire a van, a big one, into whose capacious back the driver helped us slide Tiger Montelban's gurney.

I took a deep breath and smelled the hot pavement, the wet gra.s.s under the sprinklers. I heard noise from traffic on Wilshire, and, yes, birds!, so loud I had to turn down my hat. The sunlight was amazing, the sky huge. I knew Pinkie would have been proud of me. I swung closed the rear door. "Why are we taking this guy along?" I wondered.

"Kaplan said he owed him one last ride," Ortiz shrugged. "Now help me in."

At the judge's suggestion, Miguel, our driver, first drove us toward the Pacific at Venice, then through the park in Santa Monica and up along the beach in Malibu. Ortiz had his head out the window like a Lab, his thin hair streaming in the wind. What a pleasure it was to be along the blue ocean, the wide stretches of sand, to see the girls on their maglev boards weaving down pedestrian tracks. Trees! Dogs!

People whose hair wasn't white! At a crosswalk, an infant in a stroller made me realize how much I'd missed seeing children. When we turned back toward the city, I rolled down my own window and caught a scent on the breeze and remembered something else: Mexican food!

But before we could eat, Kaplan insisted, we had an a.s.signment at his house in Brentwood.

"What's the plan?" I asked, not for the first time. The night before, Kaplan had prattled about "degrading a.s.sets," but he hadn't been entirely clear. I had him diagnosed as manic, the judge as suffering from cerebral arteriosclerosis, a side effect of which is senile dementia. I suppose I had a touch of that myself.

"First step, we shake him up. Ground zero, the garage," Kaplan said. "That sports car of his? He's got one of the first fuel cell Lamborghinis. The model that looks like a shuttle?"

I sucked in air between my teeth. "We'd stoop to petty vandalism?" "No no no no. He loves that car more than he loves Monica. It's his financial security, see? His first two wives got all his money, and it's the only a.s.set he has. Aside from my daughter." From a pocket of his wheelchair, Kaplan extracted a small black case. "I've still got a remote for the garage," he whispered.

"And?"

From another pocket, he pulled a spray can with an ugly, mustard-colored top. "Think you can handle this, Doc?" he said with gloe. "The idea is, I open the door, then we...well, you...decorate the Lamborghini."

I raised a shaking hand. So vandalism it was. My first impulse was to refuse, but then I took a deep breath...and imagined Pinkie laughing. So what if we got caught? And maybe we could get it over with quick, like a prostate exam. We could have a wonderful day. "And then?" I asked.

Kaplan hesitated, his eyes glazed with confusion.

"And then the rest of the plan develops," Ortiz said gamely. He was still half out his open window, the breeze on his face, a self-absorbed smile on his lips. "We take it one step at a time."

From a block away, Kaplan's house looked to be an impressive small mansion in the Tudor style. It had a gabled portico, two stories with a large east wing, a sizable pool and a cabana in the side yard, and a four-car garage.

"Somebody's there!" Kaplan choked. Miguel pulled along the curb, and I watched a heavyset man heave himself out of the pool. I saw him slip on silver sandals and with a shock recognized that it was Boots Bacci himself. He had put on a lot of weight since he'd returned to Earth's gravity, and the way he scratched his ample belly, he was not expected at the studio anytime soon. He pushed his wet black hair back, and it seemed to lift from his scalp. "Say, how old's that guy?"

"Sixty-two," Kaplan muttered. "You'd think he'd have more consideration, right?"

Boots bent toward his towel and sungla.s.ses, picked up a script, threw the towel around his shoulders, looked toward the street. He cast a quick, hostile glance at our van, and walked into the house.

We could follow his progress through a side window, see him step half naked into a small room, ease his dripping body into a leather chair, hoist his feet up....

"My teak desk," Kaplan said in a small, unhappy voice.

Then Boots pointed a remote toward the window and closed the blinds.

Kaplan had Miguel move up the block, putting a stand of bright pink oleander between us and his house.

Kaplan and Ortiz started bickering. Under the pretext of a battery problem, I took off my hat and fiddled with it as they talked. That's the one thing, the only thing, about my deafness for which I am grateful: I don't have to hear anything I don't want to hear. You can imagine what that did to my psychiatric practice toward the end. Now, though I'd lost confidence in Kaplan, I was still glad to be away from Arcadia. My jiggling foot tapped a rhythm on the van's floorboards.

After a while I realized that Kaplan was shouting at me.

"I can hear you now," I said, adjusting my hat.

Kaplan ordered Ortiz and me out, got out himself, and dispatched Miguel back to the house. His mission was to ring the doorbell and ascertain if Monica was at home. Kaplan's idea was that if she was home, we could discreetly enter through a side door and occupy the screening room, where we could lock ourselves in. The plan sounded lame.

Turned out she was at work, at her desk at the William Morris Agency in Studio City. And Boots Bacci made it clear to Miguel that if "that van" didn't "evaporate" from the neighborhood, he was calling the cops.

"Do you think he made us?" the judge asked as Miguel put the van in gear.

"I tol' him we was gardeners. You know, mow and blow?"

"Where now?" the judge asked.

"Weapons," Kaplan said. "Tasers. Pipe bomb." "Dios," Miguel muttered under his breath.

"You're obsessing, Marv," I told Kaplan in my best professional voice. "You're going to give yourself another stroke. I prescribe lunch."

"All right, Miguel," Kaplan said with dismay. "Head for Casa Escobar. On Alvarado Street."

The new "old" Mexican part of town, for all its advertised ethnic uniqueness, looked a lot like the Beverly Hills Mall. Half the buildings were sand-colored stucco, with heavy black timbers, Mission-style arches, and red-tiled roofs. Many of the arches opened onto recessed mini-malls disguised as blocks of market stalls. Miguel maneuvered us into a disabled parking s.p.a.ce, and we formed our pod again, Ortiz and Montelban and I in a wedge behind Kaplan's wheelchair.

We moved through the crowd fronting Pescado Mojado like a tanker in heavy seas, past Selena World, past Hologames 'R' Us, past Alberto's Secret. I had forgotten the theme park domesticity of the new old part of town, the fountains, the fishponds, the forests of cacti and rented ficus, the tidy upscale families with their matching body studs. Interiors were uniformly dense with epiphytes and those sheet-water walls that have become so big. Really, I hate it when I accidentally lean against one.

"Whoa," I heard Kaplan shout. "Senoritas at eleven o'clock!"

I looked ahead. Three elderly women were pushing along a narrow white table high with what I took to be catered food.

"What's he talking about?" Ortiz asked.

"Senoritas," Kaplan said. "Babes."

"Good grief," I said. "They're pushing a gurney."

"Tell me what they look like," Ortiz said.

"They look as old as we are. Except the one in front-Kaplan's right-she's some...babe. Big blue hair, leopard skin outfit, wide black belt, gold high heels. Great legs. Behind her, alongside the gurney, there's a woman who looks like...I guess you'd say a giant robin. Big bosom, big behind.

Grandmotherly. She's got a red-and-white striped cane. Laser guidance."

"Come to Papito," I heard Ortiz say, to my surprise.

"The thin one on the other side reminds me of Pinkie. My late wife. She's using one of those electric canes. That woman up front, though. She's got to be somebody's daughter."

"Faster, Doc," Kaplan urged, leaning forward into his wheelchair and pushing hard. "Let's cut them off at Orange Julio's."

"An all-woman Geropod?" Judge Ortiz marveled. "I'm absolutely charmed."

"Such a gentleman," the blind woman replied, feeling around the table discreetly for her venison burrito with one hand, fingering the straw in her fluorescent green margarita with the other.

We were cl.u.s.tered at the rear of Casa Escobar. There'd been some trouble about the gurneys, but we arranged to park them just outside, in a quiet alcove with a little birdbath. To my great relief, the woman who reminded me of Pinkie turned out to be a retired intensive care nurse. Between us we checked vital signs on Tiger and started a new IV line on her temporary patient, a one-hundred-and-twelve-year-old woman whose hair was so white, whose still smile was so beatific, she looked like a porcelain angel.

Kaplan had settled deep into the red booth alongside the woman with the blue hair. Her name was Bette. Her makeup was very thick, but expertly applied. She was as old as the rest of us, it turned out, and a marvel. Her artificial lungs gave her a breathy voice and she'd somehow managed to keep her figure, or at least had tucked and squeezed it into the leopard skin suit in a way that belied her age.

Unless you looked closely, you might have easily mistaken her for a woman in her early fifties.

"Were you in the industry?" Kaplan asked. "Films? Holos?"

"I was on a poster once," she said coyly.

"If you'd had the right representation..." Kaplan speculated, flattering her in the easy way of an experienced professional.

Bette's false eyelashes fluttered so vigorously I thought I felt a breeze. And so we ate and talked. By the time it came to coffee and flan, the restaurant was almost empty.

Ostensibly to try one another's laser canes, Ortiz and the blind woman groped their way into a separate booth for dessert.

The ex-nurse and I went out to the alcove to check on our charges again. Her name was Barbara.

"So how do you like being old?" I asked, adjusting my hat.

"Today is fun," she said. "But it's hard to do things."

I nodded. "I suppose I had some training. In med school they had us put on scratched-up goggles-like we had cataracts. Plugged our ears with wax, gave us heavy rubber gloves...."

"Like arthritis...."

"Put marshmallows in our mouths...."

"Mmmm. Post-stroke paralysis."

"...corn kernels in our shoes, braces around our necks. The worst thing was the padded diapers."

She laughed and blushed. "Let me guess. They had you try to read prescription labels with the goggles on, count out pills with fat fingers, eat around the marshmallows."

"Exactly."

"In nursing school, we had to spend a morning in a hospital bed, got applesauce shoved into our mouths every half hour. Isn't it great to be out here?"

"Want to walk down Alvarado?" I asked.

It took us forever, but not since Pinkie died have I spent such a pleasant hour with a woman. We lingered in Casa DIY, admiring the lawn furniture and the barbecue grills. Outside Burrito Loco her electric cane got confused by a pa.s.sing maglev scooter. She started to stumble, and I reached out to hold her arm to steady her.

When she regained her balance, she slipped her warm fingers into mine, and we made our way back down the sidewalk holding hands.

"I'd give you my heart," she said as we approached the restaurant, "but it's plastic and I think it needs a new battery."

I laughed. "Like my kidney," I said. "But how about if I ask you for a date sometime?"