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TOWN. We checked the mail. I even did the combination to show Simon I was all right. There was nothing of particular importance in the mail. I noticed some new psychedelic hip posters in the post office, which seemed slightly ominous to me. They looked out of place. Government posters advertising “Get it through the mail” or some such thing. I shook it off. I didn’t want to think about it.

We went to the Works to get a little something to eat. Sitting there sipping coffee, feeling warmer and safer than I had in quite a while, still a little shaky but pretty sure everything was going to be all right, and then something new.

I started falling very deeply in love with the waitress and everyone else in the place. It seemed that they in turn were just as deeply in love with me. It was like something I couldn’t get out of my eye.

I didn’t understand it but I recognized it. There were all those little things that had happened occasionally between me and lovers before, but never this strong, never so lastingly, never with so many. I was completely in love, willing to die for or suffer incredibly for whatever they might want. A rush of warmth and emotion, spiritual and physical attraction, a wanting of oneness, a feeling of already oneness.

When I looked at someone they were everything. They were beautiful, breathtakingly so. They were all things to me. The waitress was Eve, Helen of Troy, all women of all times, the eternal female principle, heroic, beautiful, my mother, my sisters, every woman I had ever loved. Everything good I had ever loved. Simon was Adam, Jesus, Bob Dylan, my father, every man I had ever loved. Their faces glowed with incredible light. It was impossible to focus, to hate, to fix. They were so mobile, all moving, all changing. They were whatever I needed and more. I loved them utterly.

I worried about how complicated this could make my life. Maybe it was enlightenment but it brought up not inconsequential problems of engineering. Who sleeps with whom was one, but there were lots of others. Like what if two people I loved wanted me to do different things? Who would I spend time with, who would I talk with, who would I dedicate my life to? If I loved everyone there was no way to focus any more, no reason to spend time with anyone in particular.

What would Virge think about all this? I had somehow fallen in love with Simon, Jack, Kathy, the waitress, and assorted passers-by more powerfully and completely than I ever had with her.

I worried about what my eyes might be doing to other people. Was I making them fall in love with me? Was I hypnotizing them? I started keeping my eyes down. This thing could easily get out of hand if it wasn’t already.

Falling in love with everyone I see. Oh, Christ, what will those jokers from the Pentagon come up with next, the fun-loving boys in biological-chemical warfare? If the Marines walked in that door with submachine guns and gas masks I’d probably love them too. I’m certainly not in any mood to fight anybody. Maybe it’s the Russians. Not that it makes much difference. I wonder where the bastards put it. The air? The water? The food? I wonder if this stuff is supposed to be fatal or just debilitating. I wonder if there’s an antidote. I wonder how much longer I’ll be able to wonder about it or anything else. Better get my wondering in while I can.

I wonder if there’s been some sort of mistake. I wonder who’s trying to do what to whom.

Dogs and cats and even sometimes little children get into rat poison. War involves civilian casualties. Lots of them, usually more than military casualties. Middle-class white kids get into heroin. Luckless bystanders stop bullets all the time. Bullets and rat poison and heroin all work as well on the unintended as the intended, that’s the way they are.

I understand that good old American technology has developed a scanner that can discriminate on the basis of race as to whom it kills. It has something to do with the pH factor in sweat. I suppose one way to fight back would be to put something in American