Foxx smiled. "I'm afraid that would be impossible. You'd have to be dead to donate it."

Irma giggled. "Oh. Well, I guess it's back to dancing at the Metropole."

Foxx dug his thumbnail into her ear in a gesture of endearment. Irma giggled. "Be right back," he said. He returned a moment later.

His hands were sheathed in rubber gloves. In his left hand was a brown, medicinal-looking bottle. In his right, a thick wad of cotton.

"What's that?" Irma asked.

"Something to make you crazy."

"Like drugs?"

"Like." He poured some of the contents of the bot­tle onto the cotton wool. The fumes stung his eyes and made his breathing catch.

"You're really good to me, you know that?" Irma tit­tered. "I mean, champagne, now this. ..."

"Breathe deeply," Foxx said.

She did. "I'm not getting off."

"You will."

"This the new thing at the discos?"

"The latest. They say it's like dying and going to heaven."

"What's it called?" Irma asked, her eyes rolling.

"Prussic acid."

"Groovy," Irma Schwartz said before she died.

Chapter Two

His name was Remo and he was climbing an electrified fence. He'd had trouble before with electric­ity, but after the old man had shown him how to con­quer it, the matter of scaling a twelve-foot high screen of electrified mesh was no problem. The trick was to use the electricity.

Most people fought against the current, just as they fought against gravity when trying to climb. The old man had shown Remo long ago that gravity was a force too strong for any man to fight, and that was why most people fell off the sides of buildings when they tried to climb them. But Remo never fell off a building because he used gravity to push him forward, then re­directed the momentum generated in his body by the gravity to push him upward.