The old man s mood grew increasingly brittle as he began to

wrestle his Chevy Impala up the twisting grade toward the

summit. The one-hour trip down U.S. 280 from San Francisco to

the outskirts of San Jose had gone well enough, but his driving

was rusty, and Charley Hallinan remembered now with appre-

hension the twelve-mile asphalt corkscrew that wound ahead of

him over the hill toward Santa Cruz. The curves already seemed

sharper now than they had ten years ago, the lanes more narrow.

Worse, he began to fear that he might not make it to St. John s

before the pain came back.

A Japanese compact shot past hire in the narrow passing lane

with no more than ten inches to spare, rocketing his heartbeat

and producing an unwelcome giddiness. Damn fool, he muttered

after the driver, and hunched even closer against the steering

wheel, squinting over shiny knuckles like a sea captain on the

lookout for icebergs.

He turned on the radio, then irritably snapped it off, noticing

how poor the reception was once you got into the mountains. He

listened instead to the sounds of the Detroit clunker he had

borrowed for the trip, straining and groaning around the turns as

ff its archaic body were strung together with tape and baling

wire. Just like me. he thought, glancing up at himself in the

rearview mirror.

Charley quickly returned his attention to the road--partly for

safety, but mainly out of disgust--for looking back at him from

the mirror was a woru-out face he barely recognized, with

yellowing, lifeless eyes and concave cheeks covered with skin as

coarse as fishnet. In the center of the face sprawled a French

bore of a nose wrapped in a network of merging capillaries.

Loose skin hung from his cheeks, his chin, And the backs of the

pale, blue-veined hands that gripped the wheel were mottled with :

"Hooker s bumps," so named in honor of the chemical com-

pany that had once contaminated Niagara s Love Canal. To a