Jack shook his head wordlessly, scratched the back of his hand, and walked on.

"Hey!" yelled the man to another potential customer. "Be a joker for a day! Tomorrow you can go back to being yerself " Jack shook his head. He wasn't sure now whether it would be better to go on being depressed, or just go back and rip out the hat vendor's throat. He looked at his watch. Five before seven. The bus would be in. The salesman's life was temporarily safe.

The Port Authority building was a darker gray, bulking large in the chill gray of the Manhattan morning. Then Jack noted that most of the human traffic seemed to be exiting rather than entering the building. It reminded him of an Avenue A apartment after the exterminators set off their chemical bombs-an exodus of cockroaches carpeting every exit.

He fought his way through one of the main doors, ignoring the hulking men importuning, "Hey, man, want a cab? Want an escort in to your bus?" Most of the storefronts along the interior promenade were locked and dark, but the snack bars were doing a land-office business.

Jack looked at his watch again. 7:02. Ordinarily he would have stopped and appreciated the huge "42nd St. Carousel" kinetic sculpture, a glass box enclosing a marvelous and musi cal Rube Goldberg contraption, but now there was no time. Less than no time.

He checked the arrival board. The bus he wanted was coming in at a gate three levels up. Merde! The escalators were broken. Most of the foot traffic was coming down. Jack made his way up the stationary metal flights. He felt like a salmon struggling upstream to spawn.

Only a minor current of the incoming tidal crest of humanity seemed to be the usual sorts of people who arrived in Manhattan bv bus. Most seemed either to be tourists-Jack wondered whether this many people would actually be coming into the city for this particular holiday-or jokers themselves. Jack noted wryly that the normals were obliged by the constraints of the stairs and escalator steps to associate much more closely with jokers than they might otherwise have wished.