“Hah!” said Grelich.

Mayer went on, “So far I have been unable to locate Nathan, the lab tech, the one who actually did your operation. Or botched it, I should say.”

“Nathan,” Grelich said darkly.

“He is the one we will have to talk to, the only one likely to have an explanation for how this sorry situation came to pass.”

“But where is this Nathan?” Ritchie asked.

Mayer shrugged. “I phoned his boarding house, he wasn’t there. I talked with his rabbi, whom he gave as his main reference when he applied for this job. His Rabbi, Zvi Cohen, said he hadn’t spoken with Nathan in over a week. I went myself to the handball courts at 92nd and Riverside, at the rabbi’s suggestion. None of the players had seen Nathan in several days.”

“Have you notified the police yet?”

“I shall have to, if he doesn’t show up very soon. I have no other way to trace him.”

Ritchie asked, “What about my own body? The Castleman body?”

“I’m afraid it didn’t survive the transfer,” Mayer said. “As we expected. It has been disposed of according to your instructions.”

Hearing that his body was irrevocably gone gave Ritchie a pang of regret. It hadn’t been a particularly nice body, but it had been his for a long time. And now he had no physical body. Except for Grelich’s body, and Grelich didn’t seem so keen on giving it up any longer.

Back at his apartment, Ritchie decided it was time to find Nathan Cohen, the missing tech who was probably responsible for the whole megillah, a word that Grelich supplied him with.

But before he could get started with that, he got a telephone call, which Grelich didn’t prevent him from answering.

“Ritchie Castleman here,” he said.

Mr. Castleman? I am Edward Simonson. Mr. Mayer has recently hired me to run the lab. I am a graduate of CCNY, fully accredited and certified. I worked for two years at the Zeitgeist Institute in Zurich. If you want—”