The Pennsylvania Turnpike is an old road as four-lanes go; in spite of upgrades, it's narrow, and there's little separation between the opposing lanes, so it was a little nerve wracking for Dave to drive early the next morning. However, he had the advantage rush-hour traffic going the other way. By the time he got out of the Philadelphia area things were relatively light, so he soon had the driving set on automatic with the Chevy's cruise control keeping him just above the speed limit.

Given the late start from Shae's the day before and the longer than expected time he'd talked with Eve, it was close to dark before the two of them had gotten out of the hot tub, their skins shriveled like prunes. At least as far as Dave was concerned then, he was feeling pretty relaxed and at ease with where things were now. After they'd rushed through the cold air to the house and gotten dressed again, Eve had asked if he really intended to get on the road that evening after all, and Dave had conceded he didn't really want to. Eve offered the use of their spare room for the night -- Shae usually stayed there, and it had a lot of her things in it -- and under the circumstances Dave wasn't willing to refuse.

John had already made a pretty good start on dinner. He finished getting it ready while Dave talked with him in the kitchen and Eve spent some time one on one with Sergei and Milla, who were going pretty good by that time. Dave had been through it and not long ago, so he knew what was involved.

The five of them had dinner and just hung out for a while talking afterward, too. Dave also spent some time playing with the kids and proved he could tell a story, too -- although nowhere as good as Shae, he knew.

Once the kids had been put to bed, John broke out a bottle of wine and the three unwound a bit. At one point over the course of the next couple hours, the subject came up of how John felt about being married to a transsexual -- it was a question he'd been asked before, and he wasn't shy about it. It turned out there was a little denial going on with him, too: he was a little unusual in that he'd been only one of a couple people -- the other being Cheryl -- who had known Eve at all well during high school, but only as Eve. He'd never met Denis as Denis, only when he was presenting as Eve, which was a fair statement up through the end of high school. So, even though he knew better -- he'd been through much the same thing with Cheryl, whose birth name was Paul -- Eve had always been a female to him, though one with a condition that precluded children. As Eve said, it didn't have to make sense, but it worked.

Dave explained that he understood, as something similar was going on with him: he really had no proof that Eve really had been Denis. Short of something like fingerprints, Eve could have been a genetic female who had just been well briefed on Denis. Dave and the Bradford '88s, except for Shae, would be unable to prove any different.

Together, Eve and John explained how things worked a little differently between Chad and Cheryl, though they worked just as well. Chad had never known Cheryl as Paul, but was fully aware of her being transsexual. But Chad, it turned out, was a little bisexual and had had liaisons both ways before he met her. While he was mostly heterosexual, Cheryl having once been male tickled his bisexual side just enough to keep things smooth. "Whatever works," Eve commented.

They wound things up early -- the McClellans had to get up fairly early in the morning to get the kids around. In the summers the kids were often left with Eve's parents, who lived in their summer house a few miles away, but they were now in Florida for the winter. Now, a nanny came in to watch the kids during the day so Eve and John could go to work.

They got up early, and Eve offered to make breakfast. It was a little on the light side, cereal and toast and juice, but Dave thought it could hold him for a while. On the way to their vehicles, all had made promises to see each other again soon.

All in all Dave felt much better about things as the result of his time in the hot tub with Eve. While he conceded that he didn't exactly have things all the way back together, they were coming along. He was still a little concerned about how fast things were moving with Shae, but at least he wasn't dissatisfied with the direction they were going and was looking forward to eventually getting a little more serious with her.

So, Dave was in a good mood as he headed westbound up the turnpike that Monday morning, and didn't feel as if he needed to spend the next ten hours agonizing over the things that had bothered him over the weekend. In fact, to a degree, the way Dave dealt with stress was to turn his back on it, and he'd had enough stress over the weekend to hold him for a while, so resolved to think about something else while driving home. Rob's suggestion to think about an alternative way to assess new manuscripts seemed like it had potential as a topic.

His comment to Rob on Thursday came back to him, about authors spending hundreds, even thousands of hours working on a manuscript, to only have it rejected out of hand with little real consideration, sometimes possibly because the reader was just in a bad mood or didn't like or know enough about this type of story. Granted, a lot of the crap that came through the slush pile was just that, slush -- but occasionally something good came through, and more often something just potentially good, but needed more work.

Like many editors, Dave had long harbored quiet fantasies of writing a book himself, but he'd never gotten around to giving it a try. If he were to write one, he was pretty sure he could get it published, if for no more reason than he had a major inside track. If it were anything but pure crap, Rob would probably publish it as a courtesy to him -- or some other publisher might pick it up for no more reason than the politics that often went on between publishers. The heck of it was it wouldn't be fair -- not fair to the hopeful authors who didn't have his inside track, not fair to the publisher that took it for a reason other than it being good, and worst of all, not fair to himself because he would have no real proof if it were good or bad. To be fair, he'd have to submit it under an assumed name and have someone else make the buy-or-bounce decision -- and it would not be hard to manage.

What if he were to write a fantasy book?

Face it; he knew his way around the genre as well as anyone, in fact, more than most new authors. At least as much as any editor, he knew what was good, and what was bad. He knew what worked and what didn't, the forms and givens, what needed to be explained to the reader and what the normal reader of fantasy would understand without question. The odds were good that if he were doing an adequate job of judging his own work, it would be better than all of the crap that came through the slush pile.

Maybe it was his own ego talking, but he thought if he were to write a fantasy book, he wouldn't write something conventional, but something that would push the limits of the genre, trying to plow some new ground while staying within the limitations -- something that could cross over into the general area of literature. After all, he had a master's in literature; he ought to be able to prove he knew something about it. He'd always shied away from writing something original in the past. Partly, it had been because he had enough going across his desk that he didn't need to add to it, partly because he didn't need the ego boost a book would give him, partly because he doubted he had the necessary imagination, as he was a grounded kind of person. And then with his salary and Julie's, they hadn't needed the money.

Hell, he didn't need the money now. Julie's money still seemed very unreal to him, even though he'd known about the brokerage account money for months. It was just there, something to remind him of her, something that needed to be administered. But realistically, it was a lot of money. There was no telling how much until Aaron Tietelbaum got done with looking in all the nooks and crannies then figured out how much would have to go to the Internal Revenue Service. Dave could be pretty certain what was left would be well over a million by the time everything was said and done, and most likely over two million. If that money were invested conservatively it could provide an ongoing return. How much?

For the sake of figuring, suppose he could get a five-percent interest rate on it. He had no idea of what bank interest rates on various investment plans were at the moment, but they might go that much or higher, and be insured to boot, so there would be little risk. He had little talent for doing math in his head, but it didn't take much talent for him to work out that five percent of a million was fifty thousand, which was a pretty nice sum. Hell, he could retire on that, and just forget about Dunlap and Fyre. Fifty thousand a year was really more than a little on the small side to live in New York, especially Manhattan, but it would be a darn good income for Bradford; he could live there comfortably on fifty grand a year. And, fifty grand was just about a minimum, worst-case figure -- it almost certainly would come to more than that.

The thought surprised him -- he had never quite thought about the money in that way before. Basically, he'd worked for Dunlap and Fyre and put up with all the hassles because he'd needed the money and on balance he enjoyed the work. Now, he could be pretty sure that, once Tietelbaum got done with his account, he wouldn't need the money from work if he were careful with Julie's money.

But what the hell would he do if he weren't working? Good question! The work was a centerpiece of his life; as much as anything else, it had kept him sane the last couple months -- being able to turn to it had taken his mind off of the pain of losing Julie. Things would have been a hell of a lot worse if all he'd had to do was to sit around and mope; he'd learned that in the first week in Shae's apartment. Whatever he did, he'd have to have something to do, something to keep him centered and focused and organized. He might be able to be a little more flexible about it, a little more free about taking off if he wanted to do something else.

So it raised the question: did he really want to go back to New York and work at Dunlap and Fyre like he had been doing a couple months ago? And especially, without Julie? If Julie had still been alive, he probably wouldn't have considered anything else -- but if he'd figured out anything this weekend, he had to admit Julie was gone -- and he didn't have to go back to the old way for the sake of her memory.

It all needed much more thinking about than just some idle musings on the Pennsylvania Turnpike -- he needed to run it by Eve at a minimum, and Shae, and maybe even Emily, just for an independent viewpoint. In any case, nothing could be done until Tietelbaum had worked out what he was dealing with in the first place -- thank God that Rob had gotten on his case about his finances!

But what would he do? The obvious answer was to not change things much and wait until something came along. Maybe he could approach Rob about still doing editing, but on a contract basis. The old office politics issues that had made him reluctant to work out of Bradford no longer seemed to apply, because he would no longer be scrambling to keep a career growing. Perhaps as an independent he could work for other publishers, or, even better, perhaps he could work for writers, especially ones trying to break into the market. He could afford to work cheap, maybe even on shares, for someone he thought had talent but needed a little honing.

Or, maybe he could write. After all, he'd have the time to concentrate on it, with no financial worries -- he could use his better times of the day, and not be forced to write late at night or on the weekends while working full time, like so many aspiring authors had to do. He could use his experience to do things right, and go beyond the normal, the expected, the formula, and maybe even set a new standard.

What to write about? There had been a number of times in the past he'd thought this idea or that idea could be developed into a good story, but he'd never gone past the thought.

It would be nice to honor Julie somehow, even though he didn't want to get within ten miles of the subject of the World Trade Center for good and personal reasons. He suspected September 11 was going to be a point of contact in plenty of books in the upcoming years, and almost by definition he wanted to separate himself from them. But what kind of fanaticism must it have taken for those Muslim fundamentalist bastards to do something like that? Muslim fundamentalist fanaticism had taken Julie from him, but what the hell did they plan on accomplishing other than tearing down a something that was more a symbol to them than it was to us, and killing a lot of unbelievers in the process? The obvious answer was that they wanted to jam their point of view down everyone's throats and keep jamming until they got what they wanted.

What the hell kind of society would develop if they were to succeed?

Not a pretty one, for damn sure. You'd have a very conservative religious dictatorship run by people who only looked to ancient writings for guidance, not to modern realities. Much like would happen if the conservative Christian evangelical fundamentalists were to get their way, too. There'd be a very closed society, very controlled, with religious police to make sure everyone stayed that way. Actually, not a hell of a lot unlike Saudi Arabia, but without the moderation introduced by money and international influences and oil. Left to themselves and without a great deal of money, the Saudis would be a very strict and conservative society, and what they had today might be pretty liberal . . . from a modern viewpoint, it would be a pretty ugly society at best and more than likely an ugly dystopia.

OK, hold that idea, he thought. How in hell could a society like today's get to something like that? A number of worst-case outcomes, maybe a nuclear war to knock things back a few centuries? Then some kind of invasion, jihad, and holocaust? Given a century or three, a radical fundamentalism could easily morph into an entrenched orthodoxy.

He contemplated the thought for a moment. Dave wasn't at all thrilled about doing a post-apocalyptic story. There had been an awful lot of them done in the years since the fifties. Most fantasy was written in a more or less medieval setting, although the setting often was in a world different from earth. But not all -- one of the things that had attracted him to Castle Wyrthingham was the fact it was fantasy set in a steampunk gothic world -- an England in which the Regency lasted another ten years or so, where Victoria wasn't such a prude. A lot of the theme had to do with Celtic gods adapting to the Industrial Revolution world. So, setting a fantasy story in a post-apocalyptic world wasn't an impossibility, especially if you set it far enough in the future that the nuclear holocaust and the jihad holocaust that followed were but dim memories verging on legend. If the history of the time wasn't respected, or restricted by the religious zealot overlords, then, say, five hundred years would be plenty of time for even legends to fade.

Given the proposed post-apocalyptic Muslim jihad -- and let's say of North America -- what happened to the Christians? Dumb question; a holocaust so bloody it made Hitler in the 1940s seem like a playground squabble. Maybe a few Christians converted, and a smaller number yet tried to maintain an underground hunted down by the religious police and members brutally and publicly killed as examples. A little of Christianity might have fused into the life of the overlords, but probably damn little.

And before we get any farther, Dave thought, let's get rid of the terms 'Muslim' and 'Christian', as well as some of the terms that would identify with them as either. The damn fundamentalists of whatever branch get touchy if you diss their plans for world domination, no matter how odious and oppressive they are. I ought to be able to write it so anyone with half a brain will be able to see whatever words I choose are the metaphors for, anyway. There are plenty of ways to do it even if the words aren't the same.

That gives us a society, and not a pretty one: a despotic theocracy, very conservative, very static, where new or different ideas are abhorred because they don't fit someone's idea of what's in the holy book. Women are especially beaten down -- they're at best little better than slaves, kept mostly away from society in a virtual lockdown, maybe a harem, at that. They have no rights and nearly no privileges; on the odd occasions they're allowed in public they have to be "fully modest" which implies something like a burqa or worse. The temptation women put on men is the root of all evil in the world, just ask any fundamentalist Muslim imam today.

But where's the story? OK, the society is almost monolithic, but not quite completely. An underground remains -- small, scattered, not well coordinated. Possibly it included what was left of the Christians, or at least a part of it. But we've got to get some fantasy in here, so let's throw in remnants of the ancient Druids. Not Wiccan, at least the modern version of it, but the real old-time ancient ways -- they've survived the Romans, they've survived the Christians and for damn sure they plan on surviving the Overlords. Obviously, they're very stealthed and always have been, and they have limited powers with the Gods that help them keep it that way. They're friendly with the Native American remnants, and in many ways they're little different, just different names for the same thing. The remnant Christian underground are not their friends -- they differ with them on many things and each group has a history of ratting the other out to the Overlords rather than getting along, so there's no particular trust there. There could possibly be other remnant groups, Jewish, perhaps, or a couple different flavors of Christians. Hell, some figure deep in the underground could claim to be the Pope, for instance.

In any case, the internecine warfare between the remnant groups is almost as serious as the difficulties with the Overlords, and sometimes more so. Intrigue and treachery are the way of life. There is no real hope of victory -- in fact, the wise among them realize that victory, in terms of driving out the invaders, is impossible -- after five centuries they aren't invaders anymore. But there is hope for at least a little liberalization, at least cutting back on the jihads against unbelievers.

All right, Dave thought as he drove along, I think I'm getting somewhere. There ought to be a lot of room for stories in that world and working in fantasy is not far off, but we need more complexity, yet another group with their own goals and motivations, but there's no room for one . . . oh, yes there is! The invaders have brought slavery along with them, initially enslaving unbelievers who, for whatever reason, weren't swatted like flies or wiped out in an arena. The thought of a pitched battle to the death between Christians and Jews in Yankee Stadium for the right to become slaves and stay alive crossed his mind, but it would have had to have happened long in the past before the time of this story. It could still be part of the legends, though. But slaves -- there's a lot more of them than there are remnants, although there is some crossover among the group.

Maybe the slaves have it pretty good in some ways. Perhaps the Overlords have decreed slaves subhuman and therefore not allowed to have religion. Maybe some of the other restrictions on people in a normal society don't apply either, like maybe the modesty restrictions for slave women are relaxed, even though they still have to have slave collars and chains. While a slave's life sucks in many ways, this makes the slaves the main source of movements to liberalize the society as a whole. Maybe a slave revolution might be in the offing, maybe advanced thinkers among the slaves or the remnants have been working toward that goal for centuries. Maybe you can't kill all the Overlords, but you can kill enough to put the rest in their place. But maybe that's a pipe dream; on the other hand, you can't free slaves; slaves have to free themselves. A lot of black people today still identified themselves with slaves, thought of themselves as some sort of slave, because they haven't worked up the initiative to free themselves, Dave thought, remembering a heated argument in a classroom at Columbia years before, one that had come close to degenerating into a fist fight.

If we don't have a few magical or near-magical powers we're not doing fantasy. The powers can't be real powerful, but have to have some effect. What? Possibly a strong empathetic sense, to be able to tell, well, not how other people are thinking, but how they're feeling. Something like it could give warning of the approach of the religious police, which would make it an important survival trait for both the individual and the group.

Or, along the same lines, he remembered reading a story long ago where a man had the power to make other people not see him -- not that he was invisible, just under the right circumstances the bad guys didn't take notice of him. Interesting thought . . . or maybe, the power could make it possible for the bad guys to think they're seeing something other than what they're seeing. Sort of a shapeshifter in the other guy's mind. That had potential, too. Again, a basically defensive trait, but useful offensively when stealth was required.

Where did the powers come from? From the Gods, obviously, maybe at least some of them. But in a post-apocalyptic world, they could be the result of a genetic experiment gone wrong, or maybe gone right. But wouldn't it spread throughout the population? Not necessarily, Dave thought. Parkinson's disease was genetic, after all, but some people who had it in their ancestry didn't get it, but became carriers. Or might not be carriers, but not get it, either. In any case, it might only be passed down to a small number of descendents.

Or, as far as that went, it could be the source of the ancient powers -- a random mutation millenniums before, passed down through families, occasionally hitting someone but mostly missing, and explained in terms of sorcery -- or something. In any case there was some room for magic, sorcery, weird powers, although exactly what those other powers might be would involve thinking about it some more.

Also, if this is done as a post-apocalyptic story, there might be a few working remnants of ancient technology that could be worked into the story.

OK, fine, Dave thought. I've got the working start for a society and a time that could be used for a lot of stories. Let's explore a possibility or two.

The main protagonist is a woman, and a slave, the biggest reason being she'd be right at the bottom of the social ladder, which makes for a more interesting climb upward. Fantasy readers seemed to identify with women pretty well, anyway and a lot of the readers tended to be female. A smile crossed Dave's lips as he thought of the fantasy novels he'd seen -- and the even greater number of proposed covers he'd seen -- where there were two or three guys in various types of armor or chain mail or whatever, and the female protagonist was wearing about three ounces of pure froth and carrying a huge broadsword. Well, there wouldn't be much room for that kind of near nudity in this book; it was going to make it hard for the artists . . . or maybe not.

For every rule there's an exception, and a scene sprang to Dave's mind immediately: a girl slave, sixteen or seventeen or eighteen, maybe not even that old, shackled rather cruelly to a pole in a slave market. Her arms have been put over some kind of a board or pipe so that she has to stand upright. Maybe she's ball-gagged, too. It is rather painful, but it is customary in the slave market, just as her nudity is customary. The slave sales are popular among the Overlord men, since it's the only time they can see a woman nude, maybe even in their own homes, which is why the custom has prevailed. After all, slaves are subhuman and the same rules of modesty don't apply. The custom applies to slave men, too; their purchasers may want to check out how well muscled they are, or how well hung as it's pretty common knowledge there's a lot of homosexuality going on behind the closed and locked doors of some of the Overlord's compounds. In any case, it would set any cover artist to drooling . . .

Anyway, our girl is scared as hell, and with good reason. She's been brought up as a house slave owned by a pretty reasonable family, and she's had a pretty good existence as a slave, so far as it goes. But the owner has died and his estate has to be split up among his sons, who can't agree on who gets what, so they decide to sell the whole damn show, slaves and all -- the women of the household are divided up by lot. This means what had once been a relatively bright future for our girl is now extremely uncertain and not very promising at best. Her best hope is to be picked up as a house slave again, but from her eyes it doesn't seem as if there are many buyers looking for them. She knows a lot about what kind of buyers there are, and she knows brothel operators are there looking for fresh meat, and since she's young and pretty chances are pretty good she might end up a whore. Whores are illegal but unofficially accepted by the Overlords, except when some religious bigot starts screaming revival, and then the whores get dragged out into the streets and whipped, and sometimes stoned to death. It's no big loss to the owners since there are always more slaves.

Even worse, there's an Overlord running around who has a totally evil reputation among the slaves, for it's known he enjoys torturing young girl slaves to death -- slowly and painfully. He's obviously looking for his next victim, and she's a likely candidate, and he has frankly told her she's going to be his to do with what he wants.

She's trembling in fear and would be crying out loudly were it not for the large ball gag jammed in her mouth. It's not helping that she's being poked and prodded mercilessly, that fingers are trying out the size of her vagina, that her breasts are being fondled and slapped, and there's nothing she can do about it. As she is descending into abject terror, an old man she doesn't know comes and looks her in the eyes. She almost feels as if she can see herself through his eyes, and she feels a soothing calmness wash over her, as if she knows everything is going to turn out all right, at least today.

So it comes down to the auction, with her still painfully shackled to the post. Being that she's young and pretty the bidding is spirited, but soon everyone falls out except the bad guy and the old guy. The old guy finally wins the bid, but only because of a ruse that distracts the bad guy at the crucial moment. The bad guy swears he's going to get revenge and she will be his in the end. He becomes a regular opponent and villain and there is always the risk and the fear he will succeed, by means either fair or foul.

The old man unshackles her from the post, buys her a slave robe, and takes her home, at least in theory as a house slave -- but one with a difference. He's seen from her aura that she has the potential to be an adept of the Old Way, and tests her in it. He was once a slave, he tells her, but was purchased and rescued by another much as he did for her, now he must pass along what he has learned to her. Only slowly does she learn what it means to be an adept, to be a servant of the Old Way; only slowly does she learn some of the lessons he has to teach. From time to time he sends her on mysterious missions that test her powers as well as advance their cause, whatever it is. On several occasions she has close escapes from the bad guy. Some time passes, probably years, before she learns a key fact: there is an old prophecy, almost legendary, that someone will arise like the nearly forgotten Joan of Arc to unite the slaves and the remnants of the underground and lead them to overthrow the power of the Overlords. Her mentor thinks she's that person, because much about her fits the prophecy, and he has some adherents to his view although they are not many.

As Dave drove on up the Pennsylvania Turnpike, various potential scenes kept popping into his mind, filling out the initial framework and adding to the complexity. This would not be a simple story line; there would plots within plots within plots, treachery and deceit, lies and truths, and plenty of chances for a misstep, plenty of narrow escapes. He hardly had a complete picture of it in his mind, but there were steppingstones here and there that seemed to indicate he had a potential story on his hands.

The story kept bouncing around in his mind, new ideas coming with each different look at the story, sometimes two or three at once with no chance to examine them. It was an exciting exercise; he had always been used to watching stories unfold linearly as the author took the reader from one step to the next. Now the story was coming at him in little pieces, some of which connected and others which didn't seem to yet but seemed to offer potential. It was a burst of creativity he'd never experienced before, and it awed him. How he managed to keep his attention on the road enough to drive he wasn't sure, but the fact he wasn't paying much attention to his driving was finally brought home when the Chevy's low-fuel alarm began to ding. It took the alarm a little while to get his attention and longer for him to figure out what it meant, but fortunately there was a service plaza not far ahead and he pulled in to tank up.

He was now several hours out of John and Eve's, and not quite halfway home. Immersed in his story though he was, he decided it would be a good idea to get something to eat, so he parked the car, grabbed his laptop and went into the McDonald's that had replaced real restaurants on the road. It only took a minute or two for the help to come up with a Big Mac, fries and a Coke; he took them over to the table, turned on his laptop, and had a bite of the hamburger while he waited for the machine to boot up. Since he was sitting down and not driving, he thought he might as well make a few notes on the story while it was fresh in his mind, and started typing furiously.

He had no idea of how much time passed while he typed as fast as he could go. Only when the laptop started beeping "low battery" did he pay any attention to anything but the story blooming under his fingers; he saved the story and reached out to take another bite of his hamburger, to discover it was stone cold, as were the fries. The ice in the Coke had all melted, leaving a flat, watery, syrupy something that tasted awful. He looked up to realize the sun was low in the western sky. He had to have been sitting there typing for hours, but he had roughed in much of the story at least in general terms, had several scenes pretty well blocked out, and he was darn sure he had the potential for one hell of a book on his hands. Or even a series of books -- the ideas were proliferating like mad. A little disgusted, more at the low battery on the laptop than with himself, he got up, threw the whole food mess in the trash bin, and ordered another round, this time to go so he could eat it on the road while he mentally explored more of the story.

It was late when Dave finally pulled into Bradford. The boys were certain to be asleep across the street at his mother's house, and there was no point in waking them. Besides, there was something more important to do.

His mind had kept pulling up ideas for the book all the rest of the way back from the abortive lunch stop -- possible scenes, more detail, more complications. It had been clear from the beginning that this was going to be a large book, and possibly a launch pad for a series. It was going to be a rather dark and dystopian world, but there was nothing wrong with that, under the circumstances. Somewhere around Cleveland he'd started thinking of his heroine as "Andraen" and the snuff-loving villain as "Garboncias", although a lot of other characters remained to be named. There were so many ideas he needed to get noted while they were still fresh, so he carried his suitcase into the house, set the desktop to booting up, made some coffee, used the bathroom, and sat down to jot things down.

Once again time got away from him, and he didn't realize how much had passed until the phone started ringing, drawing his attention away from the computer. He grabbed the phone and yawned, "Hello."

"I take it you got home all right," Shae said brightly. "I tried to call you last night but no answer, so I figured I'd better try before I headed in to Avalon."

"Huh?" he replied, then glanced at the window. It was light outside, and he'd worked all through the night. "Oh, I got in late," he explained lamely.

"What took you so long?" she asked, a touch of concern in her voice. "Did you have car trouble or something?"

"No, nothing like that," he told her. "I had this idea for a book, and I stopped at a service plaza to take some notes. I guess the time got away from me a little."

"Dave," she sighed. "Does this kind of thing happen with you often?"

"First time ever," he admitted truthfully. "But it was real interesting."

"I suppose it's a dirty book and filled with all kinds of lusty, squirmy monkey sex," she laughed. "I'd ask for the details but I've got to get to work. I'll get all the news tonight."

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