They're all speaking for me. Kane thought. Funny, a damned funny custom. It was a reflection of something else. What did it really mean? His feeling of unease seemed exaggerated. But then their efforts to make him welcome seemed pretty exaggerated too....

"Everybody happy?" the fat man yelled.

"Yes!"

"We're happy aren't we, honey," Laura said.

"Sure," Kane said.

Why not?

Kane noticed the amazing dearth of traffic on Madison Avenue.

No traffic cops either. That had changed too. One thing you had always been sure of seeing and that was a cop in New York.

When Kane asked about it, the smiles almost fled from every face, and the moment of silence seemed like a form of shock. Kane realized then that there hadn't been even a second of silence before then.

"It's hard to realize we've been away so long," Phil finally said.

"I'm really tired," Kane said to Phil as they went on past the Midtown Hotel toward Lucille's apartment. "I was intending to go directly to the hotel and rest up a while—"

"We'll relax at Lucie's," Jenny said. "We got music, we got music, we got music, who could ask for anything more?"

"But—" Kane started to protest at least mildly, but the rest of the sentence was blotted out by a long kiss from Laura.

They had all crowded into an elevator, and then rushed into Lucille's apartment on a high level of The Sunny Hill building near Washington Square. The apartment consisted of one huge room with a circular couch in the middle upon which everyone immediately sat.

Laura sat beside Kane who was getting more tired every minute. There was just enough room for the gang to squeeze up tight to one another in a circle around a table supporting some kind of machine with wires that were immediately run from it and attached to everyone's wrist, and to a narrow metal headband with which everyone's head was crowned.

Kane was listening to music. It was like being dropped unexpectedly into the middle of a large symphony orchestra. The sound seemed to pulse and 

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