"Of course I will," he said.

She smiled. And her dark eyes danced.

"No problem," he said. "I'll go back to the store and type it there. We can mail it off together."

From her mail-pouch purse, Zina brought out an envelope. "Manny wrote out the letter for you. This is what he wants you to say. Change it if you want, but-don't change it too much. Manny worked real hard on it."

"Okay." He accepted the envelope from her. Rising, he said, "Let's go back to the shop."

As he sat at his office typewriter transcribing Manny's letter to the Fox-as Zina had called her-Zina paced about the closed- up shop, smoking vigorously.

"Is there something I don't know?" he said. He sensed more to this; she seemed unusually tense.

"Manny and I have a bet going," Zina said. "It has to do with -well, basically, it has to do with whether Linda Fox will answer or not. The bet is a little more complicated, but that's the thrust of it. Does that bother you?"

"No," he said. "Which of you put down your money which way?"

She did not answer.

"Let it go," he said. He wondered why she had not re- sponded, and why she was so tense about it. What do they think will come of this? he asked himself. "Don't say anything to my wife," he said, then, thinking some thoughts of his own.

He had, then, an intense intuition: that something rested on this, something important, with dimensions that he could not fathom.

"Am I being set up?" he said.

"In what way?"

"I don't know." He had finished typing; he pressed the key for print and the machine-a smart typewriter-instantly printed out his letter and dropped it in the receiving bin.

"My signature goes on it," he said.

"Yes. It's from you."

He signed the letter, typed out an envelope, from the address on Manny's copy . . . and wondered, abruptly, how Zina and Manny had gotten hold of Linda Fox's home address. There it was, on the boy's carefully written holographic letter. Not the Golden Hind but a residence. In Sherman Oaks.