THE EPOXY GOAT [Novelette], David Lewis

I pretty well remember how the Goat was conceived. We were heading in toward Detroit on I-96, John driving while I tried to find room for my legs. I had pushed the seat as far back as possible but my knees were still getting cramps, bent up the way they were, and I was looking for some better way to fold them when John jammed his elbow through my side.

"Jeez, Mike," he said. "Look at that, why don't you!"

"Because I'm busy," I returned heatedly, but I looked anyway. I had known him since MIT days, which wasn't as long as it sounds, and was still willing to oblige a simple request.

"Over there," he said as I squirmed erect.

"Other side," he added peevishly.

I looked out the other side. Nothing. The usual cars heading west beyond the median. Yellowing, dehydrated pasture land. A covey of road workers picking up trash and dumping it in blue plastic sacks. Nothing.

"The fools," muttered John. "There ought to be something."

"How about watching the road?" I suggested.

"I was," he snapped in self-righteous fury. "Some people never understand! It is possible, you know, to do two things at once! Or it is for me; I don't know about you."

I could have said something, but it wouldn't have gotten us anywhere. Instead, I asked what he wanted me to see. He answered my question with a long, incredulous stare and shook his head.

"The workers, Mike," he said. "The guys collecting trash. Jeez!"

"Sure," I retorted, annoyed. "The guys collecting trash. Like all the other guys collecting trash that we've seen all day without mentioning. Of course. I should have known."

"Yes," he agreed with amiable superiority, "you should have. But there ought to be a better way to do it. Shut up and let me think."

With an inviting gesture in my direction, his hands left the wheel, the surrounding cars responded accordingly, and I found myself crawling frantically across his short but bony legs, trying to regain control. And in retrospect, maybe that's where I went wrong. In light of all that happened later, perhaps we should have crashed.

Patience is a tender medium; like with water colors, it's hard to keep the colors from smudging. Sometimes patience is surrender. Sometimes it's an excuse for tyranny. Sometimes it can make you feel good all over, like a flower blooming in an early spring thaw, and sometimes you can hate yourself for showing a single petal, like that same flower when the cold snap returns. The Lord knows why I put up with John, and maybe He doesn't know either. I was patience personified, but the wherefore is hard to say.

John - John Gordon Drey, as he would have preferred - was one of those rare, impossible people, a raw bundle of talent. No corner of that brain was wasted on tact, patience, or human understanding, but tact or no tact he could conceive, design, and create 'most anything under the sun, at any cost, monetary or human. Other humans, that is. I had met him at MIT, had been his best friend, had lost my best girl to him, had been best man at the wedding, and best clean-up crew after the divorce. That last means that when John Gordon Drey appeared on my doorstep one blustery, autumnal day, I opened my door and let him in. And now, a full year later, he was still in, using my car, using my bank account, and at the same time using up an incredible amount of my inexhaustible supply, of patience, that may be merely spinelessness and intimidation or may be honest to God brotherly love, woefully misplaced.

We arrived in Detroit, and there I tracked down a job while John remained in the apartment or its immediate environs, running up grocery bills and collecting lunatic mounds of old transistors, relays and what-have-yous from nearby salvage yards and, I suppose, thinking about his idea, his capitalized Idea. The smog obscured the sun; the jets thundered out of Detroit Metropolitan, sprinkling soot across our crowded block, and drag-end housewives eyed us from camouflage nettings of curlers and hair pins and clucked their tongues in disgust. These are patterns calculated for despair, and I assure you that I felt it. John remained intensely oblivious of anything but himself, and that made it all the worse.

Angela Batterly is a sweet girl. Not pretty, but sweet. She has that peculiar kind of temperament that can see as much beauty in a thrice-painted junkshop table as in a Sheraton breakfront china cabinet, which may explain why she and John hit it off so well in the beginning, what with his scatterbrained piles of transistors and all. But while sweet, slightly gawky, and not particularly attractive to anyone other than me, Angela does have that flexibility of nature that allows one to be a tyrant if the situation demands it, and it was this trait that had sent John Gordon Drey back to his best man's house, a year after the gloves and top hats had been put away.

I was a fool to open my door, I concede it, but I imagine it was as much a blow at Angela as it was a gesture for John, since she had, after all, rather effectively jilted me, and it was about time for us gentlemen to take a stand against female tyranny. I had always maintained that her capacity for toleration could profitably be increased. Then I experienced John for myself and began to understand. And then I also began to realize that John being in my house meant that there was only one person in hers, and I began the gradual process of reconciliation, so that by the time John and I were established in a hundred-resident demi-tenement beneath the flight path to Detroit Metropolitan Airport, Angela and I were back on speaking terms. Not, I must confess, that I expected to be speaking as soon as I did, the event being:

My birthday, God bless it, twenty-eight years down old Father Time and not a single accomplishment to show for the last five or six of them. The location being:

Big Mac's Hamburgers/Fishburgers, the street lamps burning arc-light blue, the cars soft-shoeing it down the divided highway, highschoolers pushing and jostling or leering and wheezing or smiling with a certain softness you never quite find in another girl once you've lost the first one, and Big Mac himself, Vietnam vet from the destroyer Shannon, tattoos bulging on bicep waves and a freckle-faced youth and a pale blond girl taking orders and rendezvousing behind the double broiler whenever they're not badly needed and me, all twenty-eight worldly-wise years revealed by the doodles on my napkin and the Big Mac hamburger infiltrating my interior with a telltale smear of relish on scraggly chin hairs. And a sudden female form sliding in across the table who happens to be: Angela.

I looked at her with appropriate astonishment.

"It's Matahari," I said. "Cheezit, the cops," and satisfied that her face was as disoriented as mine, continued, "How'd you find me?" and she

"I asked John, of course" and I

"Of course? I thought you weren't on speaking terms" and she

"No, he's the one who isn't on speaking terms, but he didn't know it was me. I phoned, silly" and I said

"Aaah."

And she said, "I disguised my voice."

And I said "Aaah" again, and then we looked at one another.

"How's the world been treating you?" I asked.

"The same," she answered. "And you?"

And if I indulged in self-pity and hyperbole, what can I say other than that it was my birthday and that for five or six of the past twenty-eight years I appeared to have accomplished nothing. She listened dutifully until I ran down, and smiled beatifically.

"Why don't you kick him out?" she said.

"Huh?" I said.

"I mean John," she said. "Why don't you kick him out? He seems to be behind a lot of it."

"Well, maybe he is," I conceded.

"Then it's settled," she said brightly. "You kick him out."

"You mean it's settled for you,"

I pointed out with the wit and wisdom of my age, "but that doesn't mean it's settled for me. I'm not in the habit of kicking out best friends, or husbands, or prospective husbands, for that matter."

"I know," she responded, the smile a little strained. "You're going to tell me my capacity for toleration could profitably be increased. You always used to tell me that."

Maybe my smile was a bit strained, too.

"But I tell you. Mike," she continued, "your capacity for intolerance might be increased as well."

"If you were not my thwarted heart's desire," I observed, "I would be deeply hurt. However since I expect such cruelty I am not at all surprised. No, I might say, not at all. Verily, how sharper than a serpent's tooth is a thwarted heart's desire. Verily."

"You shouldn't let him intimidate you," she said.

"I'm not intimidated," heatedly. "I just, believe," coolly, "that you have a moral obligation," puritanically, "to help out friends in need."

"The only help he needs," simplistically, "is a good kick in the rear."

Silence.

"Be sensible, Mike! Helping doesn't mean giving your arm to a leech! Maybe the hermit crab can do something great if he doesn't have a shell to hide in!"

"Yeah," I observed wittily, "so that's how you rationalized it. You were just kicking a crab out of his snail shell. And what if the crab gets eaten?"

"John," she said, "will never be eaten. Just the poor snail. Happy birthday, Mike."

And gone.

"Well," I told myself, ever so maturely, "she didn't leave a present. Guess she thinks her gangly presence's enough."

And I guess, in retrospect, that she was right.

The Idea came to partial fruition the next day. Upon returning from work at the garage, I found that an incredible collection of junk from a nearby scrap yard had found its way inside our apartment. I also found that our apartment had become a ground floor one with a picture window, called "Easy Access" by the resident genius, which cost fifteen dollars per month more than the old one.

"That's all right," assured the resident genius. "When I market the Goat I'll be rich."

"That's nice for you," I told him, "but what about the sap who pays the rent?"

"What?" he said.

"Oh," he said.

"I guess you'll be rich too," he said.

"Thank you," I muttered, and went into the kitchen to get dinner. Then I came back out again.

"Would you mind telling me, Resident Genius," I demanded, "what your bloody trash is doing in my kitchen?"

"Your kitchen!" he cried.

"Yeah," I said, "my kitchen by right of monthly payment. So speak up!"

"The kitchen," he explained stiffly, "is the Design Room, and that 'trash', I'll have you know, is the start of a metal detector. Jeez, Mike. What's got you so uptight?"

"Nothing," I evaded, retreating to the kitchen with vague guilt feelings. "I saw Angela yesterday."

"Angela who?" he said. Guilt feelings disappeared.

"Your ex-wife, fool!"

"Oh God," he said. "Don't tell me Miss Prissy Pushy's - "

"Mrs., fool!" I shouted. "And keep your mouth shut about her!"

"Jeez," he said.

"Jeez, yourself!" I shot back, and slammed the kitchen door for good measure. I stood in the room for a silent minute or two, feeling slightly ridiculous and at the same time ridiculously pleased with myself and my snappy comebacks. The room itself was in a remarkable state. Wiring slopped like bird's-nests from the sink. The stench of melted plastic held fast despite the fan. I surveyed the carnage and drifted over to the dining table. A blueprint peered out through pencils and day-old ravioli. I pulled it out, reveling in the clatter.

"Mechanical Goat," said John's telltale scrawl. I looked a little harder.

The Idea had grown, had metamorphosed from an abstraction to a bona fide concrete. In perspective drawings, schematic drawings, structural drawings and detail drawings, the Goat revealed itself to be a bland metal box twelve feet long and six feet high. Centipedal balloon tires fringed the sides, driven by electric engines which were fed in turn by fuel cells and/or roof-mounted solar batteries, weather permitting. The trailing eight feet contained a series of storage bins. The leading four were a mass of ducts, suction fans, magnets and brushes. Jutting out the front, like the claws of a freak praying mantis, were a pair of gimbal-mounted cutting torches. The entire construction was sheathed in duro-steel and looked like a T-22 armored personnel carrier, only more potent. The price tag looked like the gross national product of Luxembourg, only bigger.

I was impressed. I scanned the sheets, traced out the functions of subassemblies, made a correction in his relay layout, and returned to the living room.

"That's quite a device," I said. "The Goat, I mean."

"Sure is," said John amiably. "It's the most original, creative, and practical machine since the cotton gin. Just set it loose by a freeway and bingo, nonstop, twenty-four-hour trash removal. The cleanest medians in the world! Hey, come on. I'll show you the plans."

"I just saw the plans," I told him.

"Never mind that," he said, peeved. "I'll show you what those lines mean. Lord. You laymen think you know everything! Come on."

"Aren't these gorgeous relays," he was saying, five minutes later.

"Yeah," I told him. They were mine.

Then it's July, eleven months after the plans first spread through my captured castle. The location is I-96, heading in toward Detroit. The fields, still clinging to their bleached and willowy chlorophyll, have all the grace of bathroom rugs left moldering between highway and railroad tracks. A hazy sky hovers twixt blueness and thunderheads, as though God knows not whether to laugh or cry.

But other than that, things that day were about the same as they had been eleven months before, when John Gordon Drey, looking out his car window, had said, "The fools," and Michael Johannen, uncramping his legs in the rusting Pinto, had retorted, "What fools?" and John Gordon Drey had said peevishly in return, "The workmen, Mike. The guys collecting trash." Except that now Michael Johannen had a whole median to stretch his legs across and there were no poor fools but only some rich ones, not to mention John. Gordon Drey himself and one dull metal box which, when looked at objectively, was what the whole affair was about. And that was enough.

"Yes, gentlemen," John was saying in his naturally pompous manner, "the Goat is, even speaking with due modesty, a Revolution in litter control. Completely automated, completely independent of wall socket or gas tank, solidly constructed to withstand the elements, capable of locating, removing, identifying and separating waste material, it is among the finest examples extant of Creative Engineering. And, I might add, a testament to the shrewd financial judgment of our many distinguished guests, representatives of the front lines of Progressive Thought in industrial and governmental circles."

"Get on with it," said Angela, nudging me to make sure I noticed.

"Shush," I said.

"Come she snapped. "You're not listening to that twaddle any more than - "

"Shush," I said.

She kicked my ankle, discreetly.

"Run by solar energy," John was saying, "the Goat is, nonetheless, capable of operating on fuel cell power alone. This, combined with its solid construction, guarantees all-weather, twenty-four-hour litter control. But enough said on the limitless capabilities of this machine. Before we are given a demonstration of its bad weather operation," lukewarm smiles, "let us set the Goat in operation. 'Ask not,' " he added profoundly, "'what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.'"

"What was that about?" demanded Angela.

"Relevance," I informed her "The cream for the cat; the cheese for the rat."

"Aaah," she said knowingly. "He's such a sap."

I tried a smile. It was lukewarm, too.

John, though, was beaming. Moving to a packing crate, he reverently lifted an excelsior-dripping ball of wire and metal from its wooden crib and huddled over it protectively.

"Gentlemen," he said, "the brain of the Goat. It is this device that will integrate all the varied and ingenious workings of the Goat into a smoothly functioning whole."

Beckoning with his free hand to two bored-looking workers, he glided over to an open panel in the Goat's monotonous hide. The coveralled gentlemen, one chewing, one smoking, followed, dragging an acetylene torch. John carefully picked the last shreds of excelsior from his precious burden, then inserted it deep into the black hole. He remained poised there for some minutes, attaching wires and other connections, then stepped back and lowered the metal flap.

"Gentlemen, if you please," he said.

The workers exchanged sardonic grins, lowered their face masks, and started welding. We all averted our eyes until the hissing had stopped and the access hatch to the brain had become one with the rest of the side.

"Gentlemen," John then informed us, "the Goat has been activated."

We all stepped back, the workmen withdrew with their torch and tobacco, and every last one of us, millionaires and garage men, waited, stock still, while the Goat basked in the sun without quiver of tire or wiggle of cutting arm and the only movement came from heat waves squirming off its hide.

"Uh," said John, "the sensors, no doubt, are sweeping the area now, uh, no doubt."

It was then that I noticed. This was a gala inauguration, was it not? And you can't have trash strewn around a gala inauguration, can you? To prepare for the introduction of a labor-saving litter controller, some misguided bureaucrat had sent a contingent of laborers out to pick up every shred of trash around!

"The dolts," I said, and, removing one of my shoes, I tossed it about ten feet in front of the lethargic box. At 11:32, July 24, 1978, the Goat began to move.

"You're the dolt," Angela said on the way to her car. "What are you going to walk on now?"

"Pride," I told her. "Superiority and pride."

And, I told myself, one hell of a lot of blisters.

From the fine perspective of history, many things are evident that once remained obscure. In retrospect, I realize that then was the time to leave John and accept the vacation offer that Angela extended as the Goat dwindled in the rearview mirror and the bathroom-rug fields swayed to the tentative, opening gusts of the storm. He had money, fame, and an offer to work in the design department of MacDonald-Douglas and Affiliates Applied Technology Plant in Savannah, starting September. He could have lasted two months on his patent money and publicity. He could have eaten Big Mac hamburgers until he reached Georgia and a steady income. And I could have gotten away scot free.

Just follow the freeway a-winding up and down over the Penn Central tracks, past the Ford plants, through Detroit, across the river to Windsor, on up to Ontario, across Quebec, plunging nonstop in Angela Batterly's Maserati to her Nova Scotian retreat where she spent her summers when not pulling in forty thousand a year from her New York City bank vice-presidency. I could have watched the waves come booming in to the cheers of the curlews and felt the sand shift up between unshod toes and let my consciousness sweep up to the aurora borealis and purge itself in a shimmer of ethereal light and all that, as would happen eventually regardless. What I'm saying is that it could have happened sooner and spared me another week's scars. But then, I've always liked symmetry.

So the bad times had finally changed to good times, and the rise of our empire was complete. Over the eleven preceding months, as the Goat had changed from blueprint to sheet metal in the centers of industry and government, our mode of life had been gradually improving, leading at last to a rented house with ample garage space in Detroit's northern suburban sprawl. True, my auto-mechanics job had continued to pull in the greater part of our livelihood, but it was a livelihood no longer diverted into salvage-yard scrap or even food, really, as John was swept increasingly into the circles of luncheon conferences and dinner parties where his insufferable arrogance could grate against the insufferable arrogance of cigar-puffing execs and the circumspect tolerance of government agents adept at seeing through mud to solid profit.

Besides which I had, while John was hobnobbing with government contractors, so thoroughly renovated Sandusky's Auto Service/Auto Parts, by way of my own junkyard pilgrimages and scribbled designs, that Sandusky had offered his prize employee a pleasant salary increase as reward for a pleasantly swelling customer list. Which had done my ego as much good as it had my pocketbook. For the first time since the aerospace layoffs I had been able to look myself in the eye with pride. And since John resurrected his particular genius for submerging himself in absorbing tasks, we had both been too busy to infringe on one another's nerves.

In short, I had already been getting back into the habit of enjoying life, and when the Goat moved implacably down upon my shoe that July inaugural day and sedately consumed it, delegating the plastic sole to one storage bin and the cheap leather to another, I figured I'd just about reached the door to paradise. And I was sure of it when John didn't even bother to return home with us. I shared a drink with Angela, declined her offer again, waved good-bye to her hotfooting car, and went to bed. The next day, I told myself, I'd buy the best patent leather shoes on Earth, and hang the bloody expenses!

At three a.m., the phone rang.

I listened to it for several minutes, feeling the damp bedclothes entwined about my legs and wondering whether I should get up. I decided, no, I'll let whoever it is ring his ten times and go to bed. Maybe, I thought, there's been an accident. Well, I told myself, if anyone can handle an accident it's John. Then I thought, maybe it's an accident with Angela and I sat up and realized that the phone had rung at least fifteen times, which suggested that someone was set on getting me up, three a.m. or no, and I roused myself. The bedclothes unraveled down the hall behind me, furry anacondas lounging on the floor.

"Hello," I said.

"Mr. Drey?" said the telephone.

"God, I hope not," I said.

"Beg pardon?" said the phone.

"Permission granted," I said, smiling inanely. This is, I told myself, no way to behave.

"Mr. Drey," said the telephone stuffily, "I apologize for the late hour, but I have serious news, and would greatly appreciate your help."

Properly reprimanded, I complied. "My apologies," I told the receiver. "This is not Mr. Drey. He has not yet returned home. This is his constant comrade through adversity." You're slipping, I told myself. "May I take a message?"

"You are Mr. Johannen?"

"That is correct."

"You assist Mr. Drey in the Mechanical Goat project?"

"You might put it that way."

"Mr. Johannen, this is the State Police. We have been informed by the Highway Patrol that the Goat is no longer in its designated area. We would appreciate your assistance."

"My God," I said to myself.

"Beg pardon?"

"Nothing," I said hastily. "I just - where is the Goat?"

The telephone hesitated. "Nobody knows," it said.

"My God," I said.

"Beg pardon?"

"I said, 'My God!' " I snapped. "I'll be the yellow Pinto, MNM830, heading west on I-96 at a hundred miles an hour. And if I were you, I'd start tracking down Mr. Drey and pronto! I haven't seen him since yesterday noon, but God knows we'll need him maybe. I," I stopped to catch my breath, "thank you for calling."

I hung up. The anacondas lay expectantly in the hall. The mantel clock registered 3:05. "My God," I said, and ran for the car.

Not, as I reflected later with the night air cutting through my pajamas and the Pinto shaking over the pavement, that there was much I could do. The Goat was John's baby, which meant he had faith in it. And when John Gordon Drey had faith he never planned for failure. I remembered the ceremony of the day before, the welding shut of the hatch to the brain. That had been a testament of faith. There was no other way in. The Goat was designed to stop when its bins were full to capacity, at which time it would trundle to a designated dumping zone, where a trash truck, automatically notified by the Goat's transmitter, would be waiting to transfer the rubbish to a recycling center.

As far as I knew there was no other way to stop it short of getting to the brain. That would mean cutting through a half-inch wall of duro-steel, or possibly finding another way in. Well, the suction fans could pull you in through the intake mouth, after which the trash separators would delegate your various parts to the appropriate storage bins, or you could try opening the bin access hatches, which would leave you in the same place, only intact. There were access panels to the ducting and fans, but they were several tangled feet from the brain. There had been but one relevant hatch, and Showman John had welded it shut.

The highway railing drifted over to start a conversation. I watched it listlessly and we ran along side by side, an inch apart. Casually, the steel corrugations reached out to bump my car and send it skidding across the lanes. I watched that with interest, too, but somewhere along the line my reflexes woke up and sent the Pinto clewing back into place. It was 3:45. Ninety, the speedometer said. A familiar sign began rising in the distance, and I slowed down to scan the writing.

"Your Highway Taxes At Work," boasted the sign. "The next twenty-five miles patrolled by the Mechanical Goat, a government-subsidized litter-control machine, keeping the Interstate Highway System beautiful for you, the American Taxpayer." I hit the brakes and pulled off onto the center median. I cut the engine, listened to my Pinto whinny and subside, and got out. The wind billowed my pajamas beneath a coldly disapproving moon. This was it. There were the tire tracks from the limousines and Angela's Maserati. And here I was. And here that blasted, 'poxy Goat was not.

Far to the east an electronic siren whooped up in ascending intervals, growing louder by quantum jumps. The police, I decided. At least three of them. Before long I could see their lights lancing down the barren, early-morning freeway; their brakes squealed in tandem as first the sign, then my battered car, cut into their line of sight. I got off the hood where I had propped myself and stepped out to meet them.

"Captain Swanson," said the apparent leader, a tall, gawky young man who probably wore contact lenses and reminded me of myself. "And you?"

"Michael Johannen. Pleased to meet you."

Embarrassed silence.

"Uh," I said, "have you located Mr. Drey yet?"

Swanson jerked back his wandering attention.

"No, no. They've got a small army looking, but no luck, I guess."

We stood silent in the moonlight, having nothing more to say, while Swanson's own army assembled, a bleary variety-pack of officers, loaded down with tear gas, walkie-talkies, pistols and, here and there, M-16 automatic rifles.

"Is this all of you?" I asked.

"What?" said Swanson. "I, oh sure, yeah, that's all of us."

"Well, then," I said, tucking in my pajama tops, "tallyho!"

And we were off, in pursuit of the great tin bogeyman. I knew it had been through the area, for the median was clear, no paper, no bottles, no cans. Also no tire tracks. Thanks to its ponderous flotation tires the Goat left no trace of its passage beyond a conspicuous neatness.

"Mr., uh, Johannen," said Captain Swanson after a while, rubbing his hands across his eyes, "just, uh, what are we doing, exactly?"

"Well," I told him, "exactly, we're strolling down a freeway looking for a big metal box that the Highway Patrol has already told us isn't here."

Swanson nodded to himself, sagely.

"Yup," he said, "that's what I figured. That's just about it." He turned to me curiously. "Doesn't it seem a bit pointless, I mean, sort of useless, even to you?"

"Well," I ruminated, "the way I look at it, sooner or later we're going to reach a point where the median isn't clean anymore, at which point we can safely assume that the 'poxy Goat left for the open range. Of course, we could save time by driving to that point instead of walking, but that would take a lot more initiative than I've got left in me right now."

Swanson looked at me blurrily, running his tongue along the inside of his cheeks so that they bulged like. a chipmunk's, first right, then left.

"Sure enough," he said, and turned. "Hey!" he shouted. "Everyone back to the cars! Drive west till you see trash, then get out and look for traces of the box leaving the road! You follow me?"

They followed him, and we two started back toward my Pinto.

"If you don't mind," he said, "we'll use your car."

"Who am I to mind?" I said. "Me, I'm just a citizen. You're authority."

"Yup" said Swanson, "guess that's so. See them running for the cars?"

"I see them," I admitted.

"Bet you do," he said with satisfaction. "See, you can always get up initiative if'n you need it. Even at four in the a.m."

"That's very profound," I said.

"Hey?"

"No, no," I assured him, "I mean it. That's profound. Getting up initiative when you need it. Very profound." I looked darkly in his direction and thought about long-term-parasite John. "Are you some kind of guardian angel?" I demanded.

"What?" he said.

"Nothing," I told him. "Just a coincidence."

"Sure enough," he said amicably. "Whatever you say."

It wasn't a coincidence that the Pinto was too small for us. It had always been too small for me, and Tom Swanson was no midget. We bounced painfully onto the concrete and pursued the dwindling squad cars, searching for space for our legs. We were so busy doing that that I nearly plunged into the end of the convoy when the others slammed, on their brakes.

"This is it," I said. "Again."

"Yup," he said. "Again. Tallyho."

We spent a minute extricating ourselves, then tramped down to the men huddled on the right shoulder. The median was still clear of trash for about a hundred yards, but beyond that a general resumption of chaos could be seen, like dirty foam on the lip of a tide. What held their attention, though, were the more immediate remnants of a sign. Part of it read: "Lansing 57." The rest was missing. The melted edges told me that the Goat's cutting torches had been at work.

"Well?" said Swanson.

"Well," I returned, and tried to think.

What had happened was pitifully clear. The Goat had trundled this far without a hitch when, by purest chance, it had stumbled upon the impossible variable, a highway section devoid of trash for at least a hundred incredible yards. There, in the implacable light of the moon, the Goat had idled, to track down its next target. First the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree sensors had made their five-meter-radius sweep. Nothing. Then they had made their ten-meter sweep. Still nothing. Fifteen meters. Not a can. Twenty meters. Not one yellowing newspaper. But at twenty-five meters, the jackpot! A chunk of metal bigger than any the Goat had yet found, twenty-five meters away on the right. The box swung around in instant pursuit.

Perhaps there was a moment's hesitation as the vertical sensors reported the transition from grass to concrete. The computer brain had been programmed against concrete, but it moved swiftly into its contingency plan. The three-hundred-sixty-degree radar searched for objects approaching at dangerous velocities, but found none on the late-night freeway. Electric engines whirred, balloon tires spun, the Goat heaved itself across the high way and into Nirvana. The world's biggest aluminum can! The acetylene torches swung on their gimbals to hone off pieces small enough for the suction pumps to handle.

It must have taken a long time. The sign was big, and even after one piece dropped out of sight and out of mind onto the solar battery banks the amount remaining was prodigious. Undaunted, the machine nibbled away, until all but that errant chunk were gone. Then it looked around. The five-meter sweep. Nothing. The ten-meter sweep. Jackpot. More trash to the right. Reassured by the presence of grass underfoot, the Goat rumbled over and down the embankment, gnawed its way through a barbed wire fence and, lured by the paper and bottles and beer cans and panty hose lining a country road, it set off across country. And we, many hours later and many miles per hour slower, followed, lured by the piece of traffic sign that had fallen off when the Goat lurched over the embankment.

Swanson and I stood knee-deep in grass, looking down an awesomely clean dirt road winding dimly into the distance.

"How far could it be?" he wanted to know.

"Well," I told him, "assuming that it hasn't had to chop up any more signs and is just sucking up things straight, it should be making, oh, fifteen, sixteen miles per hour. And for how long is anybody's guess."

Swanson considered. He looked at me sadly across his prominent nose.

"Tell me, Mike," he said. "Could this here beasty of yours be dangerous?"

"We-ell," I said. (Let's see; John had said something about a built-in response in case the Goat was beset by vandals. And if some farmer came out and found the beast chopping through his eight-thousand dollar tractor ...) "We-ell," I said, "if some farmer came boiling out of his house with a pitchfork, and the sensors picked up the metal, I wouldn't feel too secure."

"Yup," nodded Swanson to himself, "that's kinda what I figured. And you say this beasty might be making fifteen miles per hour?"

"Or sixteen," I told him.

"And," he finished morosely, "it may have been making fifteen, or sixteen, miles per hour for five or six hours maybe. I figure we better do something."

He fingered his walkie-talkie.

"'Lo," he said. "This is Swanson. Yup, Swanson. Say, you found that Drey fellow yet? You haven't, huh? Well, in that case, Kathy, tell you what. Get me the National Guard."

We got the National Guard at about 4:50, in three Bell Iroquois helicopters, while a King Cobra gunship with guide-line antitank missiles hovered overhead and occasionally eclipsed the moon. All told, Lieutenant Fletcher informed us, there were twenty-four combat-ready infantrymen at our disposal, two with bazookas, while a Quad-. 40 antiaircraft tank (it was all they had, he apologized) was on its way from Pontiac with an armored personnel carrier and two trucks. He would, he informed us proudly, soon be in command of nearly a hundred men, more than he had ever commanded before. His father had been a colonel in Italy, we learned, with a thousand soldiers at least, but that had been wartime and nowadays it was quite a thrill just to have a flight of helicopters and a company-sized ground force with armor. And where was the target, anyway?

We told him that we didn't know and that we only wanted his helicopters to fly around and try to track it down for us, but before he was disappointed we assured him that his troops would be useful in looking, too, and that if they did find the Goat it would be quite all right if he deployed a hundred, two hundred or a thousand infantrymen to keep it at bay, though we would rather they didn't open fire. It was, after all, relatively harmless.

What was this, this "Goat," he wanted to know.

This 'poxy Goat, Swanson corrected him.

An automated-mechanical-trash-picker-upper, I told him.

"Oh," he said, visibly shaken, and rode his Iroquois back into the sky. After a moment's comical hesitation the aerial armada spread out in a ragged search pattern and moved on. There would be little sleep north of 1-96 that night.

"Nice fellow," said Swanson.

"He's nothing," I told him bleakly, "to John Gordon Drey."

"How so?" he inquired.

"Ah," I said. "That you won't understand until John Gordon Drey arrives." Which happened shortly thereafter.

This time it was a police helicopter, mysteriously equipped with pontoons instead of the usual landing skids. As such, it opted to settle in a duck pond behind the farm we were reconnoitering, where a submerged 1963 Chrysler ripped open one of the incongruous floats and left the whole insane contraption at a fifteen-degree angle amidst the fowl. I helped John out, wading knee-deep in muck. He stared at me happily.

"Howsadoin Mikey," he said. "Howcumserindawader? Lo-ordy."

"He's all yours," swore the pilot, poking at his sunken helicopter. "I had to ride with that all the way from Lake Michigan."

"Thasright," giggled John. "Pickudmeupdidnchee? Offolsenadorvanwyckeesyachtdidnchee?"

"Did you?" I asked.

"As God is my witness," said the pilot proudly, "with a gale warning up and no landing pad but the lake and that running six foot swells if they was an inch, so help me God! So then," he finished furiously, "I sink in a lousy duck pond!"

"Quack quack," wheezed John. "Quack quack ducky!"

"John," I said.

"Quack quack," he said.

"Over you go," I finished, and dumped him in the pond.

"Lord, Mike!" he roared. "What's the big idea!" and things were back to normal.

"Mr. Drey, I presume," said Swanson, extending a hand as I steered the dripping John to shore. "I'm Tom Swanson, State Police."

"Congratulations," snarled John. "God, I feel lousy. Mike, where'd you get to?"

"Right beside you," I said drily. "Damn fool thing to do," he said, "dumping me that way. I need some coffee. What's going on?"

"Your Goat, John," I told him, "your 'poxy, flea-bitten Goat is running amok somewhere, and Little Bo-peep doesn't know where to find him, much less how to stop him when she does. And I hope, I pray, no less, that you can unclog your head enough to figure it out."

"Of course I can," he said. "Where's the coffee?"

"There isn't any coffee," I told him.

"Jeez," he said.

Swanson popped his head out of the squad car he had ducked into. "It's Lieutenant Fletcher," he announced cheerily. "He says they've found the Goat. Hold on a moment. He says the King Cobra found it. He says that's a good helicopter, a, hold it, a real good helicopter. He says it's the best helicopter in the National Guard. He says it's the best - "

"Damn the helicopter!" I raged. "Tell us where he is!" Swanson smiled and passed it on verbatim. "All aboard," he said a moment later. "We've gotta way to go."

And go we did, gravel drumming the bottom of the car, dust streaming out in dirty contrails, radio reports crackling in our ears and the frequent screams of helicopters drowning out the early-morning birds. The moon was a translucent slip in the west, the sun just striking the peaks of piled cumulonimbus, the road as bone-jarring as the Aberdeen Proving Grounds and John as ear-jarring as the worst of times I had almost forgotten while I filled him in on the situation. And somehow I succeeded, over the course of half-an-hour's unforgettable movie-chase spectacular, succeeded so well, in fact, that by the time we swung onto the runway of the new Genesee County Municipal Airport he was able to settle back in the black upholstery, look out past the wire grating separating us from the front seat, and say, "Jeez, Mike. I don't know what to do."

"Well," I told him with a lurching, sinking feeling, "you'd better figure out something fast, because I think we're about there," there being:

The end of the main runway, where a United Airlines 737, just swinging out for its take-off run, had sat motionless a few extra minutes while a private Cessna cleared the runway, only to find, when it again started to move, that a large metal box had darted from the undergrowth and commenced sawing into its soft aluminum underbelly in such a way that moving forward would involve leaping a six-by-twelve-foot block of duro-steel. And that was the way matters rested five minutes later, when Lieutenant Fletcher's "real good helicopter" bored in to find its prey.

That was also the way matters rested thirty-five minutes later, after our squad car skidded to a halt among six helicopters, several airport crash vehicles, three more squad cars, two National Guard trucks and a hundred soldiers who had, by some awesome application of self-discipline, refrained from firing, even when egged on by an antiaircraft tank charging cross-country with fragments of fencing still stuck to its khaki snout. I was impressed, first by the chaos, then by the calm, collected attitude of all those present - the hundred weekend-warriors, the twelve police, the fifteen-odd airport officials, the sixty airline passengers - all of whom stood idly about, chatting and watching the Goat execute its victim with the finesse of an open-heart surgeon. No one, it seemed, had the heart to disturb its meal.

"Look at that!" crowed John. "Forty-five miles cross-country and not a scratch! What perfection! Lord, what perfection!"

"All right, Mr. Present Perfect," I growled, "go get your loved one to stop."

"Me?" he said, aggrieved.

"That's right," I told him.

"Aren't you going to help? Lord, Mike!"

I looked at him, more carefully than I had for a long time.

"No," I said eventually. "No, I'm not going to help. I'm going to do it all, sooner or later, and you know I will, too. But if you want to call it 'helping', I'll let you. Now, are you ready?"

"Uh," he said tentatively. "Good," I said, "let's go."

We started across the concrete, picking up momentum as we approached the massed people. They were worth watching, too, in and of themselves. All their inactivity had lulled them into an even deeper inactivity. Having let the Goat start cutting, when all they needed to do was back up twenty yards or so, they could no longer conceive of challenging it. It demanded its way; they let it have its way, and thus were they trapped. Now two people had appeared with a certain sense of determination about them, and the crowd made way like water. But still they made no move of their own. Maybe they didn't see the necessity for it. Maybe they were unaware that they might hurt themselves by maintaining the status quo. It often takes a different perspective to see things in their proper light. My perspective, for instance, told me that the Goat, which had now transferred its attention to the wing, rotating and extending its cutting torches to hack away overhead, was something like five minutes away from sticking a shaft of white-hot acetylene gas into fifteen thousand gallons of aviation fuel. Sometimes you need to act.

"John," I said, "there isn't any way to deactivate this beast?"

"Just by removing the brain," he said.

"How long would it take to cut that duro-steel? Quick!"

"Jeez, what's your rush? Twenty or thirty minutes, that's all."

"Well then," I said sweetly, "why don't you go over to that airport official, the one in the checked jacket, and ask him to get a cutting torch and a crew to work it, O.K.?"

He gave me a curious and suspicious look.

"If," I added, "it's not too demeaning to ask."

His face was a study to behold.

"Of course I'll ask," he snapped. "I'm no prig like others I know!"

Turning on his heel, he strode toward the official. And I turned and sprinted for the plane.

Once, years ago, I flew an Air Force ROTC F-5, but a Boeing 737 is a heck of a lot different. I didn't want to fly this baby, though. I just wanted to roll her down the runway. I bounded into the cockpit, swung into the pilot's seat, and looked for the taxi controls. The plane quivered around me; the crew had mercifully left her powered-up. A quick look out the cockpit window revealed that the Goat, in maneuvering to assault the wing, had cleared the undercarriage. Releasing the brakes, I increased the power and, almost imperceptibly, the plane inched forward. I moved a few feet and stopped, uncomfortably aware of the jam of men and machines ahead of me. I looked out the window to see what was happening below.

Dedicated to its task, the Goat had rolled along in pursuit and resumed work as dangerously as before. I had to divert it. I had to get the plane far enough away, or some other "food" close enough to the box's sensors, to make it change its target.

Activity was stirring in the crowd, self-interest prevailing over all. The National Guardsmen had scattered and were moving their tank. It was contagious. With the prospect of a jet airliner crushing their tender hides, the masses were clearing the runway. Reassured, I started the aircraft rolling again.

"Mike!"

Small and tinny, a voice played against my ears from outside. I looked down to see John running frenetically beside the fuselage.

"Mike," he was shouting, "what are you doing! They're bringing the torch!"

"Never mind me!" I shouted back. "Feed the Goat!"

"What!" he gaped.

"Your shoe, damn it!" I raged. "Throw your shoe at the Goat!"

He gave me an expression matched only by the one given me earlier, then kicked off one shoe and held it reflectively.

"Throw it, dummkopfl" I roared as he slowly receded behind me. He threw it. Some maintain that he threw it at me and missed, but in any case, the British Oxford landed directly beneath the Goat's blunt nose, and who am I to complain? Looking out the window I could see the Goat halt, suck up the leather, and immediately resume the chase. But I was gaining on it.

"The other!" I shouted, hoping to be heard. "Throw the other!"

And John, whether on my urgings or, as he will coldly maintain, his own initiative, threw the other, and sent after it his jacket and tie, his shirt and trousers and socks, until the Goat was so far from its former prey that it gave up and furiously assaulted a runway marker light where, half an hour later, a triumphant, skivvy-clad John Gordon Drey extracted its feeble brain.

Tom Swanson and I observed the proceedings from the terminal building coffee shop. Then, when the diminutive figure had stepped back from the suddenly motionless box and the reporters had crowded around, we returned to our cinnamon doughnuts, final duty done.

It was pure curiosity that sent me back onto the field once my alter-ego officer friend hit the road for Detroit. The last helicopter was swinging up into fragmented clouds as I arrived on the runway; the Quad-40 and Lieutenant Fletcher had long since vanished in the general direction of glory, and only newsmen remained, poking fingers through the Goat's trash intake and noting with awe the singed skin of the 737's fuel tank. And, of course, interviewing John.

At the moment it was a battery of CBS cameras, the same group which had covered the Goat's inauguration some twenty-four hours before. A reverent hush fell over the crowding camera-wielders as the canticle was read to the masses.

"So," John was saying, "when I suddenly saw the danger, I told Mike, 'For God's sake,' uh, you'll have to excuse the language; just trying to be authentic."

"That's just fine, Mr. Drey," hastened the commentator. "We appreciate your accuracy. Yes sir, we do."

"Well, I must say, that's very kind of you gentlemen of the press, but anyway, For God's sake, Mike,' I said, 'move that DC-9,' what, oh yes, 737, 'move that 737 before the Goat cuts into the fuel tanks.' I would have done it myself, of course, but Mike is a registered jet pilot, and I thought, this is no time for glory, John. Mike can get that plane rolling faster than you and you know it. So I just went to Mr. Korowitz of the airport staff here and saw to it that the people and equipment were cleared out of the way and that we'd have a torch ready to start cutting as soon as the plane was clear. I, uh, how's the time?"

"Oh, you needn't worry about time, Mr. Drey; no sir, you needn't worry a bit."

"Now, that's very kind of you gentlemen. I realize that time is precious to the fine press corps of this nation, so anyway, I saw that Mike had the plane moving, but I also saw what he didn't see, that the Goat was following right along behind him. In short, when he stopped we were no better off than before. That was when I started running out with an eye toward keeping him moving and at the same time distracting the Goat from the plane - "

He stopped and bulged his eyes a little as he saw me. I smiled at him and raised an eyebrow.

"Do go on, Mr. Drey," I said. "Oh, do go on, yes, sir."

His eyes unbulged. I give him credit. In all the time I knew him he never missed a step. Never.

" 'Go on, Mike,' I shouted at him, and when he started to move again I tried desperately to distract the Goat. I was at a complete loss when suddenly I had, well, I suppose you might call it an Inspiration. If I could get some other object closer to the Goat's sensors than the plane, it would stop and clean up the nearest. That was when I threw my shoe and, of course, it worked. After that it was easy."

I drifted away from the enthralling monologue, cut through the airport terminal, and out into the parking lot, uncomfortably remembering that I had abandoned my Pinto on I-96. Just as I was starting to look for a taxi, though, I was surprised by a now familiar voice.

"Hey, Mike," shouted Swanson, "here's your car!"

There it was, every battered inch of it. And there Tom was, every battered inch of him.

"I was just driving along, you know," he said apologetically, "when I saw it sitting out in the median where you left it and I thought, sure enough, how's he gonna get home? So I had the boys drop me off, and I brought it back."

"Tom Swanson," I told him, awed, "you shouldn't have. Now how are you getting back?"

"We-ell," he said, "course I should've. You've done plenty for me, haven't you? And you have, too. Far as getting back, that copter, you know, the one in the duck pond? They've got it ready to go, and it'll be here any minute."

"I don't know," I told him, "what to say. Honestly."

"Well," he said, "you might say you'll drop in up at headquarters now and then, when you're able. Hoops, here's the bird. So long!"

And he was off, galloping for the drunken helicopter as it settled across the driveway. "I made it, by God!" the pilot was shouting. "Two cows in the way and chickens flying like snow, so help me God!" and gone. I reached out and patted the Pinto, careful lest it vanish.

"Well, Mike," interrupted John unexpectedly from behind. "What did you mean, back there with the newsmen? Was that any way to treat a friend?"

"Why, whatever do you mean," I said, not turning around.

He moved up to stand by the car, examined me for a moment, then shrugged the matter off. "Well," he said, "guess it's time to start back. I was just wondering how we'd get home. Thought I'd have to rent myself a car."

"Yeah," I said meditatively, "I guess that's what you'll have to do. You'll have to rent a car."

He double-taked. "What," he started, stopped, and finished, "did you say?"

"What I guess I'm really saying," I told him reflectively, "is that I've had it, you know, up to here. I mean, it's nice to sit back and watch that little box feeding and all, but sooner or later you're going to see that, so long as you give that Goat all he's asking for, he's going to ask for as much as he can, and maybe it'll be better for both of you to stop giving him feed. It'll make that Goat go back to trash-collecting, the way he's supposed to. And it might give that airplane a chance to fly again, for itself, instead of being glorified fodder. So I guess that's what I said, John. You have money. You have a nice, big job coming up, and you really don't need me anymore, if you ever did. So, let's say you start out being independent now and hire yourself a nice Hertz automobile, because I'm not going home."

"You really mean that?" he demanded, incredulous.

"Yes," I smiled, and since he didn't have anything more to say, and since I didn't either, I got into the Pinto and drove away.

So down I-96, the Pinto soft-shoeing slow and easy along the freeway and over the railroad tracks, the medians dirty, but wanting no more than a Goat with a few improvements to make them right, and on through Detroit and across into Windsor and long up Ontario and fast through Quebec and out to Nova Scotia and the headlands and the cheering curlews and the flicker of northern lights. And the driveway, curving up through a tunnel of firs, and beyond it the big oak door. And Michael Johannen stopped his car.

I walked up the cobble-stone sidewalk. I knocked on the oak door.

"Open up, Angela!" I shouted. "I'm home!"