Then—he was gone.
John just slipped out of my grasp—Zloomph and all—and was gone—completely and irrevocably gone. I even risked a broken neck and jumped in the manhole after him. Nothing—nothing but the smell of ozone and an echo bouncing crazily off the walls of the conduit.
"—is it.—is it.—is it.—is it."
John Smith was gone, so utterly and completely and tragically gone it was as if he'd never existed....
Tonight is our last night at The Space Room. Goon-Face is scowling again with the icy fury of a Plutonian monsoon. As Goon-Face has said, "No beeg feedle, no contract."
Without John, we're notes in a lost chord.
We've searched everything, in hospitals, morgues, jails, night clubs, hotels. We've hounded spaceports and 'copter terminals. Nowhere, nowhere is John Smith.
Ziggy, whose two fingers have healed, has already bowed to what seems inevitable. He's signed up for that trip to Neptune's uranium pits. There's plenty of room for more volunteers, he tells us. But I spend my time cussing the guy who forgot to set the force field at the other end of the hole and let John and his Zloomph back into his own time dimension. I cuss harder when I think how we were robbed of the best bass player in the galaxy.
And without a corpus delecti we can't even sue the city.