ONE-ON-ONE

by Sheila Paulson

            A hot wind whirled down the deserted street, twirling an old newspaper ahead of it and plastering it against Egon Spengler's legs. Unnoticing, he stood, hands tight around the handle of his thrower, staring up toward the sky, his face twisted with shock and pain. The demon's words rang in his ears, damning him with every remembered syllable, torturing him with a bitter memory.

            "You were not good enough, Egon Spengler. Because of your failure, your friends are dead, and you alone cannot fight my kind. I have destroyed the Ghostbusters." Its mocking laughter rang in Egon’s ears as it vanished, leaving him alone.

            Destroyed the Ghostbusters? Yes, destroyed them for all time, beyond hope of recovery. He had failed and his friends had paid the price. His friends were dead.

            For an endless moment, Egon could not look beyond his misery. Never see them again... It was unthinkable. Never hear the sound of Peter’s teasing, never see his friend sprawled lazily on the sofa making sardonic comments, urging Egon to share his amusement with a sparking eye? Never share a marathon lab session with Ray while the occultist’s avid enthusiasm propelled them through the most complex of tasks? Never listen to Winston’s down-to-earth advice? The pain slashed through Egon like a dagger to the heart. He stood in shock while the wind tugged the newspaper away and whipped it along the street, staring into the emptiness where his friends had been imprisoned, and he spoke hoarsely, bitterly. "No." The sound of his own voice shocked him, but it didn't stop him from raising it and bellowing to the skies, "Nooooooo!"

            "Peter?" He held his breath, waiting for the answer that would never come. "Ray? Winston?"

            Aching with loss, he screamed their names, then he forced himself to calm down. This couldn't just be about his pain. He was still a Ghostbuster. He had work to do. Necessary work. Essential work that only he could do.

            Could he do it? He had failed here. What made him think he wouldn't fail there as well?

            No, impossible. Janine waited back at headquarters. He couldn't lose her, too. He couldn't let the demon destroy Manhattan because Egon Spengler was a failure.

            Purpose hardened his heart. It would be so easy to lose all sense of purpose as he railed against fate, but he couldn't do that. After he had stopped the demon, that would be the time to mourn.

            Remembering the terms of his bargain, he raced madly for Ecto-1 and called headquarters on the mobile phone, holding his breath for the answer. Had the demon kept its word? Was it there already? Was Janine lost to him, too?

            "Ghostbuster Central." He heard her gum crack before she started in on the spiel of the month. "No ghost too dangerous! No threat too--"

            Peter had dreamed up some of her promotional answers. Egon couldn't bear to hear this one. He collected himself and spoke with preternatural calm. "Janine, this is Egon. I want you to set in place every single lock and barrier, and ectoplasmic protection field around headquarters that we possess. A powerful demon is heading your way. That will keep it out until I arrive. Hurry, Janine."

            As she listened, he could almost hear her breathless uneasiness. He should have known that she wouldn't let it go. She could read him far too well, even over a phone line. All of his friends could--had been able to. "Egon? Egon, you sound terrible. Are you hurt? Are the guys? What's wrong?" Her voice rang with panic, but Egon could not find the words to tell her what had happened to the other three, what he had done. Although it was unfair to her, he cut her off.

            "It's urgent, Janine. Do it now. I will return soon and explain." He broke the connection, knowing she would do what needed doing to protect herself and the rest of the city. Egon already knew how to capture the demon once he got home--his mind had reasoned it out without conscious planning--but he had been unable to protect his friends.

            Climbing wearily out of Ecto, he tried a P.K.E. meter first, setting it hastily to pick up biorhythms, hoping against hope that the demon had lied, that his friends were nearby. Only faint, fading residuals lingered, quickly gone. With a defeated sigh, Egon began to gather up his equipment and toss it into the back of Ecto. He had to hurry.

            The demon had vanished in the blink of an eye but it had been fast from the beginning, so fast they had been unable to hit it easily when they first arrived on the scene. They would have caught it eventually as they picked up its rhythm and anticipated its next movement--Peter was particularly good at that--or shepherded it into an unexpected trap. They were accustomed to discerning the pattern of an entity's movements and wearing down its resistence until they could foresee its trajectory. Today, there had not been time for that. The demon's agenda didn't call for posturing and roaring while it destroyed anything in its path. Instead, a transparent barrier sprang up, surrounding the other three Ghostbusters, leaving Egon free. As they whirled in surprise to try to find a way out, their proton packs oozed through the clear wall and thudded to the ground near Egon's feet.

            He had glanced up at his friends, noting automatically that they were held a fraction of an inch above the ground, struggling frantically to break through the invisible walls of their unexpected prison. Their feet just missed touching the pavement beneath them. Ray gripped a meter in his hand as he took readings, his face full of fascination. New experiences always thrilled him, no matter how dangerous. There wasn't a shred of fear on his face.

            Peter was angry. He hated it when entities got the drop on him. As he struggled against the invisible walls of his prison, his eyes caught Egon's through the 'glass' and he made a wide gesture, to include the city street. It was utterly deserted as if the demon had created an even wider barrier when it set the stage for the game it meant to play. From the expression on Peter's face, he knew they couldn't expect any outside assistance and he wanted to warn Egon that he was on his own. Spengler could see a combination of confidence and worry for his friend in the psychologist's face. Punching at the invisible barricade with a hasty fist, Peter grimaced when his hand rebounded back at him. They couldn't break free on their own.

            It was Egon's game.

            The demon was tall and very bulky for an entity that could move as wildly as a hurricane wind. It looked uncomfortably like images of the Biblical Satan, hooved and horned--Egon half expected it to clasp a trident and possess a forked tail--except that it was incongruously pink. Egon didn't believe he had ever seen a pink demon before. The first thing Peter had done when he'd spotted the entity that was terrorizing Tribeca was to crack up laughing. All through the brief chase he'd mocked the entity.

            Now Peter was seething, a crafty look on his face that suggested he was plotting revenge.

            "That's what happens when you make fun, Peter," Ray kidded him as he adjusted his P.K.E. meter.

            Peter banged on the barrier with his fists, creating a deep and near-subliminal vibration in the air. Like Ray's, his voice was distant and echoing. "What kind of place is this? Egon, get us out of here before Pinkie decides he wants us for munchies. Remind him that there's no such thing as a free lunch."

            "If I blast it, Peter, it might well blast you in the process," he called back, checking his own readings. The demon's construct didn't register specifically on the meter. He could pick up the hum of a diffuse field of energy between himself and the other Ghostbusters, surrounding his friends, but nothing concrete, nothing clear enough to allow him to attack with any certainty of success.

            "You undoubtedly will," called Pinkie, his lips peeling back in a wicked grin that exposed six-inch fangs. "What you see is not a barrier as you know it. It is a...protection of my own devising, and it is an excellent conductor of heat. Try to blast them free and their blood will boil in their veins before they die in great torment."

            "Uh, let's pass on that one, okay?" called Winston. He prowled around, testing the edges of his prison, fingers exploring it for hidden weaknesses and, at the same time, providing Egon with its dimensions. The container that held them was roughly rectangular with defined corners and edges. It also sat between them and the street, as Peter realized when he noticed a manhole cover near his feet. He gave a cry of triumph and flung himself at it only to be repelled by the field. He straightened, an expression of ludicrous chagrin on his face.

            "If you blast me," the demon continued as if Winston had not spoken and Peter had not attempted escape, "they will be trapped forever. They will have air to breathe, as they do now, but they will have no water, and I believe your human species will die without it. Food, too, will be absent, but I believe the need for water is greater. I will make a bargain with you."

            "Gosh, Egon, be careful," called Ray, eyes wide with alarm. "Bargains with demons are tricky. Think about it. Don't assume you know what he means."

            "Yeah, big guy," Peter agreed, concern pushing the anger out of his green eyes. He or Ray would have been better choices to work out a deal with a demon. Ray's occult skills had taught him what to expect from such beings, and Peter had learned all about crooked bargains at the knee of his con man father. "Demons are like scam artists. If you don't do it exact, you leave a loophole."

            "And we don't like loopholes," Winston called. He gave Egon a quick, encouraging thumbs' up sign.

            His three friends lined up against the nearest 'wall' watching him expectantly, prepared to coach him through the 'bargain' the demon meant to make. Egon knew about demon bargains; they were letter-of-the-law things, very exact. If the demon agreed to a condition, he would keep it, but it had to be airtight or it wouldn't hold. Demons were worse than lawyers at weaseling out of covenant that left a 'back door'.

            Frowning at his useless thrower--was it useless, or was that simply another deception?--Egon lifted his eyes to the gigantic pink entity that towered over him by a good four feet. "State your terms," he demanded.

            "It is very simple. You have thirty minutes to free your friends, using your scientific abilities, technical equipment, and your power of reason. I am told you consider yourself of a superior intellect."

            "Yeah, and you're not the first scaly monster to think he could beat him," Peter challenged. "The others couldn't hack it. What makes you think you can do any better?"

            The demon glared at Peter. "Because I know I can." Turning its back on its hostage, it eyed the physicist expectantly.

            Spengler suspected it had just decided it would toy with Peter first. Don't bait it, Peter, he thought, catching and holding Peter's eyes in warning. Venkman gave him a cocky grin.

            The demon ignored the exchange of looks. Did it fail to notice? Didn't it care? Was it that confident? Overconfidence could be a weakness. How to exploit it?

            "If you trap me, you lose all chance of freeing them. I put up the wall and only I can take it down. Perhaps you might free them eventually, long after they had starved to death. Perhaps you might do it in five minutes. My bargain is this; if, after thirty minutes, you have failed to open the barrier, I will send your friends...far away." The teeth gleamed in the early afternoon sunlight as the demon savored the last two words. "They will not like that, and neither will you. It will also leave you as sole protector of your...containment unit. Should you fail to open the barrier, I will open it and free all the spirits that linger within. They will be subservient unto me. I would...enjoy that."

            Egon frowned. He knew he could use the phone in Ecto and instruct Janine to seal up headquarters so tightly with so many protection grids and barricades that it would take fifty demons to break through. Unless the demon meant to transport itself there instantly when the thirty minutes were up--or even before--Egon would have time for that.

            "I will not agree without conditions of my own," he challenged.

            "You may have one. What is it?"

            "That you remain here while I break down your field, and, after the thirty minutes have expired, give me time to return to headquarters before you attack the containment unit," Egon replied. Inside the field, Ray clapped Peter on the shoulder and beamed encouragingly at Egon.

            "I will give you an additional thirty minutes to reach your home after your friends vanish," the demon vowed. "Then I will come and destroy you and free the spirits you have contained. When they swear homage to me, I will be so powerful your world will have no chance at all."

            "You and what Starfleet?" Peter challenged, his bottom lip jutting out.

            Ray snapped his fingers. "Egon, wait," he warned.

            "No hints," growled the demon and waved a hand at the barrier. It thickened slightly, distorting the images of the guys and making their voices no more than faint, distant mutters that he couldn't understand.

            "Is it even possible to break down your barricade?" Egon asked. "I will not consent to perform an impossibility."

            "Yes. I give you my word. There are two ways to take the barrier down." Before Egon's astonished eyes, the demon stepped right through the barrier and grabbed Peter and Ray by the shoulders. Although they struggled, it didn't appear to be hurting them. After a moment, it emerged again. The other three Ghostbusters beat against the boundary and yelled, but no sound emerged. "I told them how you could take the barrier down," the demon explained with a smirk. "Now they will try to tell you, but you will not hear them."

            Perhaps he did not need to. As he stared at his friends, Ray jerked in realization and snapped his fingers. Even through the distorted transparency, Egon could see the delighted smile illuminate his face. Raising his hands, he started to sign to Egon in ASL.

            The panel opaqued from the neck down, allowing only their faces to remain visible. Before Egon could get much more than, "Try..." from Ray's hands, he could no longer see them clearly.

            "No communication," the demon muttered. "Remember, two means of taking down the barrier. Thirty minutes from...now."

            Egon glanced at his wristwatch, fixing the time, then he raced for Ecto, hauling out every detection device he possessed.

            The readings were inconsistent, confusing. He studied them for the first ten minutes, getting as good an understanding of them as possible with the tools he possessed, trying to reason out what would be the most likely procedure so he could try that first. A force field like the one Dr. Destructo had placed around headquarters? That might explain what blocked his friends. If so, the right frequency would bring it down, but the readings didn't support the possibility and gave off nothing to indicate a frequency to match. Shifting that possibility to the end of his list, Egon pondered what to try next.

            Ectoplasmic barriers were not always solid. Egon attempted the simplest solution first, reaching into it to pull his friends free. He could penetrate it for perhaps three inches, feeling it wrap itself around his fingers. On the other side, Peter tried, too. Egon could see him brought up short within a quarter inch of the physicist's grip. No matter how hard he flung himself at the barrier, he couldn't get any further. His fingers and Peter's were so close, yet impossibly far apart. Their eyes met through the distorted field and Egon saw the encouragement and trust in Peter's green ones. His friends believed in him, that was clear in their faces. They knew he could find a solution. Egon couldn't let any of them down.

            Heat wouldn't work, so what about cold? He altered the particle stream, reversing the polarity, adjusting the temperature, trying out each option carefully, ready to jerk the stream away in a heartbeat if the guys reacted adversely. Reversing the polarity did nothing. Cold didn't work either. It merely made the three men shiver, wrapping their arms around themselves for warmth, their breath shooting out in little puffs, but the barricade did not falter. Egon shut down the thrower instantly, relieved to see them uncurl themselves and wave to let him know that no permanent damage had been done.

            Ray tried wider, more expansive gestures, but the demon blurred that, too, until he could only see the faces of his three friends, staring at him, watching him as time ran down. They spoke with exaggerated lip movements, but the opacity blocked that, too. He could see they were speaking, hear the faint mutters of their voices, but he could not comprehend the message they struggled so fiercely to convey.

            Egon tried every tool and theory at his disposal. None of them worked. None of them came close to working. Each time he started to develop a working hypothesis, he realized it would fail, or else he would try it, it would begin to work, and then it would lose efficacy. The readings he took led to promising leads that trickled away into futile efforts. Just as he believed some new effort would succeed, cold reason would hit and prove to him why it would fail. Exasperated, he tried firing at the demon, who stood there and let him do it, arms folded against its scaly chest, not remotely alarmed as the stream enclosed him. One stream had never been enough to stop a Class-7 but he had to try.

            The guys called silent encouragement to him. With a delighted cry that rang faintly in Egon's ears, Peter snatched his walkie talkie off his belt and keyed it on, but the sound didn't carry--Egon only detected the crackling of static when he tried to receive. Eventually, the demon grew impatient with that and waved a hand that made his three teammates stand quite still, arms at their sides as if at attention in a military revue. He could see alarm in their blurred expressions and knew that they had realized he would not succeed.

            Until that moment, failure had not been an option. Now, with the useless tools of his trade spread out before him on the deserted street, he realized that all his science, his learning, his brilliance, would not be enough to save Peter, Ray, and Winston. He had failed them. The demon would send them far away--did that mean death? A far place from which no traveler ever returned? Shuddering, he snatched up his thrower again and fired at the demon with reversed polarity. It laughed at him.

            Egon's watch ticked down to the final seconds. He saw the three of them watching him; now that it was too late, their faces were clear, although the rest of their bodies were blurred behind the impossible wall that separated him from his friends. In their eyes was the realization that he was unable to save them--and with it came absolution. They forgave him for his failure. They didn't blame him at all. Peter's eyes caught his and held his gaze, all the years of friendship spilling out in the look they shared because they could not speak their goodbyes. Ray's eyes were huge and, even through the blurring, Egon could see that he held his P.K.E. meter raised and ready to check the settings when the demon did its thing. Winston lifted a hand to Egon, a wave that should have been casual but wasn't. He nodded at Peter and Ray to let Egon know he would look after them for him, then he moved to stand between him and draped an arm around their shoulders. Peter and Ray slung their arms around him in turn. Thus united, they waited with Egon as the last moments passed. They looked apprehensive, but they didn't want him to think they blamed him. It dawned on Egon that their main concern was for him, because he now had to face the demon on his own. Peter tried to talk but the sound didn't carry, and Ray's expression attempted a wordless message. Winston shook his head.

            The knowledge of his fiasco tore Egon apart. The only good thing he could think of was that, wherever they went, they would be together, even if it were to the Netherworld. And if it were the Netherworld, Egon would find them there and bring them home. No matter where they were sent, he would never give up until he rescued them.

            "Time is up," the demon announced. "And you have not succeeded. I confess to some disappointment, Egon Spengler. And now, as I promised you..." It waved its hands in a complex series of passes and the other three Ghostbusters disappeared. Egon saw their faces twist in pain at the moment they vanished and his scalp tightened with icy apprehension. Had they been annihilated as they stood? Had they been cast into the furthest reaches of the Netherworld? Teleported into the heart of a volcano?

            The demon chortled gleefully. "Ah, you have just watched your friends' deaths," it purred, eyes glittering with amusement. Egon froze. That hadn't been the bargain, had it? Had the demon lied? He had said he would send them far away--but death was as far as it was possible to get. All he knew was that they were gone.

            So was the demon. With a chuckle, it vanished, too, his voice lingering like the Cheshire cat's smile as it informed Egon that he was not good enough, that he had failed to save his friends, that they were dead. "Thirty minutes at your headquarters," it called, the threat ominous in its voice and then it faded, too.

            Once Egon had phoned Janine, he wasted the first five minutes trying to track their readings. The barrier vanished when the demon did. People started appearing at either end of the street, police cars first, pulling to a stop beside him.

            "Spengler? Spengler! Spengler!" The increase in the speaker's volume finally made him notice the uniformed officer who stood at his side, gripping his arm to pull him out of his frantic research. "Where are the rest of the Ghostbusters?"

            "Gone," Egon said flatly, his voice as cold as his insides. "They're gone... I couldn't stop it. I couldn't save them." He was scarcely aware of the protective arm the officer dropped around his shoulders. "There's a demon--it's going to attack headquarters and try to open the containment unit. I have to get back there now!" He started picking up their proton packs and the officer helped him load them into the back of Ecto-1 with the other equipment he'd tossed in so haphazardly.

            "I'll clear the way for you," the young policeman offered, wide blue eyes full of sympathy for Egon's loss and understanding of the urgency of the crisis that still existed. "I'm Steve Daly. Follow me. I'll have you there in ten minutes."

            Egon jumped into Ecto. Saving Janine, saving the containment unit, saving the city, were all that was left to him. He had not saved his friends but he dared not fail again. Once the demon was trapped, he had the whole pan-dimensional infrastructure to search for his missing companions. Maybe he could force the demon to reveal its location when he trapped it. And he would trap it.

            As he followed the speeding police car, he called Janine again and gave her carefully detailed instructions. Trapping the demon at headquarters would be far easier than taking down the barrier. "Don't ask questions, Janine," he instructed her, his voice harsh and tight. He had to focus on stopping the demon. If he didn't, the overwhelming nature of his loss would bludgeon him until he lost all ability to function. Once Janine knew what had happened, her sympathy would be too much to endure. "There simply isn't time. I want you to..."

            She listened obediently. He could feel her questions brimming over but she held them back, telling him to slow down twice as he spoke. "I'm writing as fast as I can."

            When he had finished his instructions, she said, "I've got it, Egon. I'll have everything ready for you."

            "Thank you, Janine." She didn't know what had happened, she didn't understand more than the fact that a demon was coming, but she would obey him to the letter. He suspected she could tell that something had happened to the guys just from the sound of his voice. Whatever she did, she wouldn't make it any harder for him than it was already. She would stand at his side against the pink demon and help him fight it. When that was over, he would have to tell her that he had killed his three best friends. Would she turn away from him in disgust? He wouldn't have blamed her if she did, but he did not believe she would do that. The ties that bound the Ghostbusters together had always reached out to include Janine. She would grieve for them, but she would offer Egon her unconditional support.

            He didn't have the luxury of wallowing in pain and guilt. He had to save the city first. That it would be so much easier than saving his friends felt wrong, but that didn't matter. Nothing mattered except stopping the pink demon. Focus, Egon, he told himself. You can do this. The guys will expect it of you.

            The police officer parked his squad car near the firehall. Knowing the psi barricades Janine had set into place would not allow him to drive in, Egon parked in front of the door, watching the man walk back to join him, settling his hat into place automatically. "Do you need help, Dr. Spengler?" he asked. "I never handled one of your proton packs, but I'm a marksman. I'll wear one if you need it."

            Egon hesitated, unwilling to involve an untrained man, or anyone, in the danger he still faced. Yes, another thrower would be helpful, and it was the man's duty to protect the city, just as it was Egon's. He and Janine might need help. The pink demon was devious and clever, and its power might be beyond Egon's ability to handle it on his own. "Thank you," he said as he took out his own pack and shrugged it onto his shoulders. The officer grabbed up Peter's pack and put it on.

            When Janine appeared in the doorway, Egon said, "Shut it all down, put on your pack--oh, I see you have it on. We're going to the basement."

            "Shut all the protection grids down? When there's a demon coming?" Her eyes moved to Ecto and narrowed when she realized the other three weren't in the car or anywhere in sight. He saw alarm flash across her face, but she bit her bottom lip to hold back her hasty questions and waited for Egon to speak.

            "Yes, because it's the only way to stop it." Egon waited until the power flickered, then he led the policeman into the garage. "Janine, this is Officer Daly. He has volunteered to help us."

            "Hi there," Janine said, peering past Egon one more time in hopes of seeing the rest of the team. When she didn't spot them, her shoulders slumped and she pulled herself together sternly. "Come this way, and don't dawdle," she instructed the hapless officer. His bushy, blond eyebrows lifted but he didn't protest her instruction.

            Egon led the way to the cellar, grateful to see that Janine had done everything he asked. His equipment was in place, and the secretary had stuck Post-it notes stuck to the various monitors with hasty scribbles to explain what she had already done.

            Thanks to Janine, it would take less than five minutes to ready everything. Snatching up the tools she had put in place, he set to work, calling instructions to Janine, who stood at the instrument panel, obeying his every command. Steve Daly pulled the thrower in response to a hasty instruction and stood clutching it awkwardly, his feet planted on the floor, prepared to stand up against the demon the way he would a street gang or a serial killer.

            They had just finished the necessary adjustments when the pink demon popped in, hovering near the ceiling, a smug and savage smile on its devilish visage.

            With a yelp, the policeman jumped backward against the washing machine, then he collected himself and aimed his thrower at the demon the way he would a high power rifle.

            "Like this," Janine coached him in a hasty undertone, demonstrating the proper hold. She could scarcely take her eyes off the demon. "Egon, you didn't say he was hot pink," she muttered. "I have a dress that color." That won her a baleful glare from the powerful entity.

            Egon scarcely noticed. He lifted his eyes to the demon and waited, the control trigger held in his hands behind his back. "What have you done with my friends?" he demanded in an icy voice.

            "Open the containment unit and I will tell you where to find their bodies," the demon countered, lingering with relish on the last word, delighted when Egon flinched. "Humans put much stock in...proper burial, I am told. You would not want the carrion birds to eat out their eyeballs." It smiled, exposing all those teeth.

            Janine gasped in horror, her eyes leaving the demon long enough to gaze at Egon in shocked understanding. She must have expected that, but hearing it spoken drained every shred of color from her face. Edging closer to Egon, she patted his arm. There was no time to speak.

            "I can't do that," Egon replied. "If I did, my friends would not be the only ones among the dead. I won’t allow their deaths to be in vain."

            "True, but the others would be strangers. Ah well, if they matter so little to you that you would leave them for vermin to devour, so be it."

            "Listen, buster, you watch what you're saying," Janine hollered furiously. "We're gonna bust you so hard you bounce."

            Egon flinched. He couldn't let himself dwell on the ghastly images that flooded his mind. No matter what happened, he couldn't give in to the demon. Allow victory to the creature who had killed his friends? Impossible. But he must seem to accept. "No," he begged. It took remarkably little effort for his voice to falter. "Please, I can't let that happen. I'll do anything you say. Just tell me where they are."

            Janine cast a hasty, knowing look in his direction and didn't dare to look at him again for fear she would give him away. She must have heard the core of strength that bolstered his words. "You can't treat him like that!" she hollered, waving her thrower at the demon.

            "Ah, the sweetheart," the demon purred, cocking its head and studying Janine the way a human might let his eyes linger over a delicious pastry. "I relish human females--for a time. Eventually they bore me, but it is so enjoyable to possess them as they scream and fight and beg for mercy. I will take this one and use her for my pleasure. I like them feisty."

            "Try it and die, buster," Janine challenged, gesturing peremptorily with the thrower. If looks could kill, the entity would incinerate on the spot.

            Staring at the demon with unbelieving eyes, the cop seemed scarcely aware of the weapon he held. He'd been strictly ordered not to fire without permission, but Egon realized he was fighting conditioning to keep from doing so.

            There was too little time. Egon said hastily, "Not now, Janine," before turning to the demon. "Please, tell me where to find their bodies. I will open the containment unit for you. I can't endure the thought of leaving them out there like that."

            "I thought you might not, a failure like you." He smirked. "Open the containment unit now and I will let you and your woman live."

            "Yes, anything, I'll do anything. Don't hurt Janine. Tell me where the guys are. Please... Opening--now!" Egon pushed the button behind his back while the demon stared down at him and gloated.

            His last two words were the signal for Janine and Steve to grab for support. The second they did so the suction from the venting containment unit nearly knocked Egon from his feet, barely allowing him time to grab the railing to stop the pull. He braced himself with his entire strength, watching Steve nearly climb into the washing machine in his attempt to hold his position. Janine wrapped her arms around the pole that supported the steps and clung to it with all her strength.

            "It's not working," Egon cried. The only option he had, and it wasn't working! A sense of utter failure crept over him like a huge, heavy blanket. If he failed again now...

            "Yes, it is," Janine shrieked. "It's working, Egon. He's fighting it, but it's working. Look! He's going into the unit."

            Egon stared at her in disbelief, certain she was wrong, but her voice rang with conviction. Doubtfully, Egon stared at the demon, positive it would break free of the suction. Halfway ectoplasmic, the demon couldn't fight the suction of the unit when it operated as a gigantic ghost trap. Egon knew that. How could he have doubted? The plan was working. Had the demon found a way to tamper with his mind to make him doubt himself? Had it done that earlier, when he attempted to free his friends? Once this was over and the demon incarcerated he would have to ponder that. With his free hand he hefted his thrower, prepared to take the creature on should it suddenly break free.

            The pink being let out a shriek that started as a bass and ran all the way to the upper soprano registers. "What have you done?" it wailed, turning furious and desperate eyes upon Egon. "How dare you! What have you done?"

            "Trapped you beyond redemption," Egon cried, clinging to the rail. Suddenly, his confidence returned. It wasn't enough to overcome the hollow emptiness in the pit of his stomach and the ache of loss that permeated his being, but he straightened his shoulders to confront the demon with new resolve. "The trouble with smart demons is that they believe all other beings are inferior. You may have tricked me earlier but you can't trick me here on my home ground. You tried an elaborate ruse and you meant to use me, but you're the one who has failed." He saw Janine's eyes blaze with love and respect for him as he spoke and it warmed a part of the icy misery in his soul. He sent her a small, sad smile.

            "Your friends will rot, unfound," screeched the demon as it elongated and twisted out of shape in its efforts to fight the deadly suction. "You will never be able to lay them to rest."

            "But he saved the city and you'll never hurt anybody else," Janine cried hotly, aligning herself at Egon's side figuratively, if she couldn't let go of her support to stand beside him in fact. "You lost, sucker. You weren't as clever as you thought you were."

            "Commit a crime, do the time," Steve challenged. "This is your sentence, life imprisonment. Enjoy it, sucker!"

            "No! NO! NO! I will not go in," screeched Pinkie. "I won't go. You can't. You can't. I control you. I control them. Let me go and I'll tell you where they are. You can..." The last word trailed off into agonizing moans as the demon thinned out like wire and slurped into the containment unit in one long stream of energy. The second it vanished, Egon shut the unit down and Janine raced over to slap her hand on the control that halted the venting process. The button beside the entry grid flashed green. Pinkie was trapped.

            Closing his eyes, Egon let the railing support his weight, his head hanging down between his shoulders. Suddenly, he felt a hundred years old. There was no triumph in the demon’s defeat. If there were answers for his friends, they were trapped with the demon, and Egon could not free such a powerful entity, even to find their final resting place.

            Steve slid down in front of the washing machine in an exhausted heap, then he gathered himself up and leaped to his feet. "Listen, Dr. Spengler," he said, "You don't know any of what it said was true."

            "You sure don't." Janine went to Egon and wrapped her arms around him, holding him tightly. "I never met a demon that didn't lie. Just because he says the guys are dead somewhere doesn't mean they are. Don't give up on them."

            That was true. The demon's initial bargain had not mentioned death. Instead, it had claimed it would send them far away. Of course death was as far away as it was possible to go. The pain of imagining his friends lying somewhere in a remote field with buzzards and small animals-- No! The demon had manipulated him because it wanted the containment unit open. Finding Egon, Janine, and the police officer waiting with weapons had made it decide use trickery. In the enclosed space, it might have been possible to trap it conventionally, and Pinkie must have guessed that. It wanted to succeed but it also wanted to demoralize Egon enough to stop him, enough to cause him to suffer, to make its victory over him a total victory. It hadn't expected Egon to have the strength to fight.

            Now that it was gone, Egon felt as if a sudden and unexpected pressure had left his brain. Detaching Janine's comforting grip, he snatched up a P.K.E. meter, adjusted it and turned it on himself, studying it thoughtfully.

            Janine’s eyes were wide with doubt. "What are you doing?"

            "I suspect it influenced me. It should not have been so impossible to break the guys out of the trap. These readings support that. How could I have been such an utter fool?" He hadn't even noticed the demon's influence over him. He had failed, although it was not the failure of his science that had doomed the guys to death in a remote, unreachable location. It was the failure to realize his mind had been tampered with. For Egon Spengler, that was the greatest failure of all.

            As Janine watched him, he saw a degree of sympathy and understanding in her eyes. While he could not forgive himself, she forgave him. Maybe she would not continue to do so once he explained, but she didn't force him to explain. Instead she asked a more practical question. "What do you mean, break them out of the trap?"

            Quickly Egon filled her in. She listened without asking questions, but her eyes grew rounder and rounder and, when he told her how the team had vanished, she raised a hand and pressed it against her mouth, her eyes glistening with unshed tears.

            "Okay, so the demon did a number on you," she said. "Big deal. You still got him. His original bargain didn't say a thing about killing Ray and Winston and Dr. Venkman." When he flinched at the mention of their names, she stiffened her spine. "They're not here, but that doesn't mean they're dead, and you know it doesn't. If you won't believe that, maybe that pink thing is still playing with your mind. Think, Egon. You have no proof that they are dead."

            "I know that, Janine," he said through stiff lips. Wanting them to be alive didn't make them alive, either. Even if they hadn't died, they might be in the Netherworld, in another time, somewhere extremely remote such as a deserted island, or the middle of the Sahara desert. If they were alive and mobile, they would find a way to contact him--assuming they were on Earth in the present day. If they were further afield, it would simply take Egon longer to find them.

            Egon gathered in his iron control. "We don't know where they are. I can't assume they are alive--but I dare not fail to assume it. If they are out there, I’ll find them."

            "You will, Egon," Janine promised him. "I know you will." She grabbed him again, tightened her embrace, holding him as close as she could, then she backed away, worried eyes lingering on his face as if what she saw there distressed her terribly.

            Egon squashed down the pain, squashed down the thought of his failure to free them, squashed down the image of their bodies attacked by small scavengers. He could deal with his self-indulgent guilt later on. Somewhere out there in the universe, his friends might still need him. Hang on, guys, he projected frantically in an attempt to reach out across the miles that separated them and let them know he meant to bring them home.

            "What can I do to help?" Steve Daly asked with practical sympathy.

            Egon looked him in the eye. "I will need to research the demon, to learn more about it. I have books that will help me. Once I learn its identity, I will know more. Janine is right. The demon may have lied about their deaths. What I would appreciate from the police is a search of the city. They may be trapped in an abandoned building near the scene of the confrontation. They may be hurt and unable to find their way out. The demon moved them somewhere. Alive or dead, it could be no more than fifty feet from the scene of the confrontation." He caught himself. He was too shaken to think clearly--and clear thinking was essential to him now. "No, further than that, or I would have been able to detect their biorhythms."

            "We'll start from there and spread out, Dr. Spengler," Steve promised. "You Ghostbusters have saved the city more than once. There isn't a man on the force who wouldn't do anything he could to help you now." He grabbed Egon's hand and pumped it, patted him sympathetically on the back, then went out to set the plan in motion, unfastening the proton pack as he went.

            Janine waited until the sound of his footsteps faded. "Oh, Egon, it's been awful for you." When Egon flinched and bit his bottom lip, she caught herself immediately. Sympathy wasn't what Egon needed and she knew it. In a much more bracing voice, she said, "I'll help you look through the references for that pink demon."

            "I must check the Netherworld as well," Egon replied, already compiling a mental list of everything he needed to do. "That would be the safest place for it to have disposed of the guys." The image of the three of them, lined up in the transparent trap watching him, passed before his eyes. They had believed he would free them. When they realized he had failed, they had forgiven him for it and worried about his safety rather than their own lives. His much-vaunted intellect had not stood the test and, as a result, his friends might now be dead.

            Peter...his first real friend, his oldest friend, the man who understood him so thoroughly that, if he were here right now, he would know exactly what to say to help Egon face the pain of his failure. If he never heard Peter make a smart remark again, or kid him about his vocabulary, or try to sleep in, there would be a huge hole in his life. All that understanding, gone? It couldn't be.

            Ray, so bright, so eager, so full of life. He had brought delight into Egon's existence, sharing his fascination with the supernatural, understanding his science enough to share the pure joy of learning and discovery. A humble soul and an honest one, Ray was the touchstone against which lesser men could measure themselves. Even the thrill of a complex scientific puzzle would pall without Ray to share it.

            Then there was Winston, who had come to them late and who had fit in so quickly and so well that, at times, Egon believed it predestined. Winston had a mind as quick as lightning, the ability to soak up information like a sponge and remember it all. Perhaps even a photographic memory, although they had never tested him for it. Even more important was his strength, common sense, and loyalty.

            The three of them rounded out Egon's life, making it complete. Now it lay in jagged shards around him, shattered by an improbable pink demon with an ego problem. There had to be a way to rescue them.

            Janine's eyes lingered on his face. She would be able to see his pain of loss, his self-disgust. She wouldn't play up to it either, although the urge to comfort him was vividly etched across her features. "Let's get to work," was all she said. "The police will search the city; they'll put out an APB on the guys. Leave that part to them. It's what they are best at. I don't know why that demon thought it could ever beat you."

            "Because it did, Janine," Egon returned levelly dragging out the painful words and laying them before her to prove his disgrace. "He trapped the guys, gave me thirty minutes to free them. He called it a test of my intellect. It wasn't that I couldn't do the science, because I realize now that he cheated and reinforced everything even as I took it down. What I did wrong was to assume that my mind was sacrosanct. I was so smug, so certain of my abilities. It influenced me so easily and I didn't even notice. That is how I failed."

            "Sure, like he played fair?" She grabbed his arm and tugged him toward the stairs. "You know he stacked the deck, Egon. You're an honorable, ethical man. Demons don't know what those words mean. He cheated. Who knows how he influenced you? It doesn't mean you failed. It means you're human."

            "Ray said he would stick to the exact words of the agreement," Egon objected.

            "Oh, sure, and did you have it in the contract that he wouldn't cheat? That he wouldn't try to manipulate you? I thought not. No, Egon, it's not your fault." She paused at her desk and shed the proton pack she wore next to Peter's that Steve had left there. Egon copied her. "If science could have freed them, you'd have done it. Maybe it needed magic. Okay, he influenced you but he didn't totally control you or you wouldn't have thought of anything to try. Maybe you just had to say 'open sesame'."

            Egon had never thought of that. He saw Janine's point but that still proved he had failed, because he had only considered the possibilities granted by his equipment, that and trying to pull them out physically. Had he blocked away useful solutions because he thought too rigidly? Had the demon's control made him miss an obvious answer? The demon was right. It was his own intellectual snobbery that had prevented him from freeing them.

            He remembered the way their faces had twisted in agony as they vanished. I'm sorry, guys, he thought miserably. Peter... Ray... Winston... I tried. And I'll go on trying. I'll find you, you have my solemn oath on it.

            Janine took hold of his arm and pulled it over her shoulders, wrapping her own arm around his waist. "Come on, Egon, let's go up and figure out where that pink creep might have sent the guys. Once we know that, we can go and bring them home."

*****

            "Don't bother him, Samuel," called a woman's voice, cutting through the fog in Ray Stantz's brain. He didn't recognize the voice and he didn't know anyone called Samuel, either. His head pounded too painfully for him to think. All he could do was lie there on the very soft bed, warmed by the quilt that covered him, grateful that the light that flickered against his eyelids was soft and forgiving, dancing like candle-light.

            "I'm not bothering him." The boy's voice was close by, at the foot of his bed. "I'm just watching him."

            Curious, Ray opened his eyes. The light came from a lantern positioned on a stand beside the bed, and from the fading daylight of the window, illuminating the boy. He was about fourteen and he was dressed like one of the Amish, in a black suit and white shirt. In his hand, he clutched a black hat. He had brown hair and wide eyes, and he stared in utter fascination.

            When he saw Ray watching him, he half turned and called, "Mama, the English is awake." Gripping the footboard of the bed, he asked, "Are you a policeman?"

            "No, I'm a Ghostbuster," Ray replied automatically. "What makes you think I'm a policeman? I don't have a gun."

            "My mother and grandfather would not want a gun of the hand in this house," the boy explained. "A policeman was here once, when I was little. I saw a man murdered in the city. Bad men came here and tried to kill us all but John Book helped us."

            "Who..." Ray felt like he'd stepped into another world, one that was full of things he knew nothing about, as if he were in a play without a script.

            "He is a policeman. He lives in Philadelphia. He sends us things at Christmas time. Cards with pictures. Packages of food and cheese. Are bad men after you?"

            Ray shook his head. He didn't know where he was or how he got here. "Where am I?"

            "You are on the Lapp farm. I am Samuel Lapp. My grandfather, Eli found you in the cornfield this afternoon. You were unconscious."

            A woman entered behind the boy, wiping floury hands on a towel, the scent of fresh bread baking wafting in with her through the door. She wore a white cap on her head and a crisp white apron over the black of her dress. On her face shone a hard-won serenity to suggest that she was at peace with her life and her surroundings but that, maybe, she had not always been. Smiling kindly, she reached out and touched his forehead to test for fever. Her palm felt cool against his skin.

            "Hi, I'm Ray Stantz." The pain that drummed through his skull eased a little and he tried to sit up.

            "No, lie still. You have no wounds but you have bumped your head."

            Ray put up his hand and felt for the lump just above his left ear. It was very tender to the touch. "How did I get here? I mean in the field? Samuel told me I was found there."

            The woman laid the towel over the back of a chair next to Ray's neatly folded jumpsuit. "We do not know," she said simply. "I am Rachel Lapp, and Samuel is my son. You may stay here until you are on your feet. The Elders think that will be tomorrow. Then, you must go. We have had an English here before, and...it did not go well. Tomorrow, you go."

            "He is not a policeman," Samuel objected, disappointment in his eyes. "He says he has no gun of the hand."

            "The Elders say he must go--tomorrow."

            "That's okay, I have to get home," Ray assured her. "I don't want to make any trouble. I know you probably don't want outsiders in your life, but I'll try to respect your customs." He hesitated. "I should call home though. Maybe my friends could come and get me tonight."

            "We are Amish. We do not have telephones in our homes, Ray Stantz."

            "But they'll worry..." He settled himself against his pillow, alarm filling him as his memory returned. "I don't know how I got here but there was a de--" Somehow he had an idea that it would be a bad thing to talk about demons in front of Rachel and her son. "My friends will think I'm dead." He remembered Egon's face, seen through the grid that sealed him, Peter, and Winston away. At first, Egon had believed he could take the grid down, but as time passed, he realized it might be impossible. When the time was up, his eyes had held utter devastation. Oh, no, he'll think I'm dead, and he'll blame himself, Ray mourned. It's not his fault and he'll blame himself. Instead he was here, in Amish country, probably in Pennsylvania, since Samuel had mentioned Philadelphia. The demon must have dumped him in another state to get him out of the way long enough to deal with the containment unit. What about Peter and Winston? If he were alive, they must have survived, too. "Was anybody with me?" he asked hopefully.

            "No, you were alone."

            Ray's stomach knotted, but he pushed away the worry. He was alive. There was no reason why Peter and Winston couldn't be alive, too. No one said the demon had to send them all to the same place. On the other hand... "There were two friends with me. Could you ask...uh, ask Eli to go and look and see if he missed them?"

            "I will go, Mother," Samuel cried eagerly and raced out of the room. Ray could hear his booted feet thudding on the stairs.

            "For him, this is a big excitement in a life that has only small excitements," Rachel Lapp said, leaning against the armchair. Momentary pain showed in her eyes. "Once before, an English disrupted our lives. For a time, I feared that Samuel would grow up and go away, beyond our lives here. I know he remembers that time. He was very young and prone to hero worship. Now you are come and you remind him of that time. That is why the Elders say you must go. Tomorrow Eli will drive you into town, where you can use a telephone. Tonight, you must rest."

            "But..." Ray's voice trailed off. It was true. He was still dizzy and he knew if he tried to get up, his stomach would betray him. He'd suffered a concussion before and was sure he had this time, too, but it couldn't be too bad because he was alert and not very dizzy. He wasn't seeing double either.

            He didn't want to wait. Egon would think he had killed his friends by failing to take down the barricade. What the demon had not told Egon was that he continually reinforced the trap. When Egon tried something that worked, the demon simply built it up again as fast as it came down. The demon had influenced Egon's mind, too, Ray could tell. Although it hadn't admitted the fact to them, Ray had seen what Egon had attempted. Within the construct, he could take readings and had known several of Egon's plans would have worked. At least twice, Egon had stopped before implementing them, shaking his head in disgust. That had to have been caused by the entity. The test had been unfair, but Egon had no way of knowing that.

            Ray wanted to ask the boy, Samuel, to go into town and call Egon for him, but he could not do that. Rachel's hands twisted with tension. Ray could not push the boy to go beyond the wishes of his people, not after an earlier disruption that was so strong that now, apparently years later, the presence of a new 'English' among them had caused such distress. Ray was alive and all right, and tomorrow he could call his friends.

            But he felt really bad about Egon.

*****

            The floor was rocking. Sprawled uncomfortably on the uncompromising wooden surface, Peter felt it moving back and forth, up and down, until his stomach twisted with nausea. He didn't know where it was but he had landed hard enough to drive the breath from his body and his first moments had been an agony of trying to draw air into his lungs. Once he was breathing normally the bruises from his hard landing demanded attention and only then did he realize he was gently flung from side to side, not enough to shift him but enough for him to feel it. Earthquake?

            Opening his eyes, he squinted at the small room where he lay. Not a prison for the door was ajar, moving gently in the rocking, pitching movement. Above him was a built-in bed, with a small railing along its side, presumably to keep any occupants from landing on the unsteady floor. The window over the bed was round and fitted with brass--he was on a boat!

            Once he made the connection, Peter found the rocking movement soothing. He'd never suffered from motion sickness on small boats like Winston or on small planes like Ray. The only thing that bothered him was the fact that he had no memory of boarding a boat. It was as if he had dropped here from the sky. What the heck was going on here?

            The demon! His memory came back in a rush; the bust, Egon's desperate fight against the entity that cheated by reinforcing the transparent prison by building it up again as Egon took it down. Even though he couldn't take readings of the physicist through the containment wall, Ray had been sure Egon was under the demon's influence. They couldn't even let the physicist know what was happening; every attempt to pass the word was blocked. The demon had told Egon there were two ways to break down the guys' ectoplasmic prison, but it hadn't told them what they were. It had been smug enough to boast to the guys, though. One means was simply to trap the demon, something Egon couldn't possibly do with just one thrower. So, right away, the demon had conned his friend. Egon hadn't asked if it were possible for him to succeed in both of his efforts. That was what Ray had meant when he tried to warn him.

            The other means of opening the barrier was just the demon being a smartass. Egon had to say to the wall, "Open up," and it would give way. Unfortunately, Spengler wasn't the kind of man to reason that way. He would look for a complex, scientific solution. Alarmed, they watched him try, give up on a promising lead, try again, fail.

            They'd talked about it, within the bubble, positive Egon would break through the self-repairing barrier. If there was anyone in the known universe Peter trusted thoroughly, it was Egon Spengler. Should Egon fail to free them, it wouldn't be because he hadn't given his all. Every one of them trusted him, none of them blamed him. When it had come into the construct, the demon had gloated. "After he fails, I will tell him you are dead, but I will not kill you. You are unimportant in the scheme of things. I will simply move you out of his reach--until I breach your containment unit. Then I will bring you back so you can witness his demoralization before I kill you all--together."

            Peter lifted his arm and checked on his wristwatch. At least an hour had passed since Egon's time had run out. If the demon hadn't breached the containment unit by now, it wasn't going to. Egon must have stopped it, a far easier task at headquarters with all the equipment to hand. That meant the demon wouldn't bring him back--and Egon must think they were dead. Taking on the entity alone, even at headquarters was tough. Egon could be in danger right now. He could be dead.

            Peter started to jump up, only to sit back on his heels as woman appeared in the doorway, a spear gun in her hand, the pointed tip of the spear aimed directly at Peter's chest.

            "Don't move!"

            "Believe me, I'll be a statue," he vowed, gazing up at her in appreciation. She was young, mid-twenties at the latest, as tall as Peter, clad in a skimpy two piece bathing suit in emerald green and matching rubber thongs. Her dark brown hair was damp, suggesting she'd just been in the sea, and she handled the spear gun like a pro.

            "David," she hollered without turning. "Get down here. There's a stowaway."

            "I'm not a stowaway," Peter objected, careful not to move.

            "It's our boat and we didn't invite you. That makes you a stowaway in my book." Her eyes narrowed. "You're wearing a Ghostbuster outfit? I recognize it. I live in Manhattan."

            "Don't you recognize me?" Peter challenged. "I'm Peter Venkman. I'm famous."

            She squinted at him more closely. "Omigod, you are a Ghostbuster. What on earth are you doing on the Undine?"

            Running footsteps announced David's arrival. A skinny guy at least as tall as Egon in a bathing suit with a light shirt worn open over it and white cream on his prominent nose to prevent a sunburn, he jerked to a stop at the woman's side, slung one arm protectively over her shoulders, and took the spear gun from her with the other hand. "How can we have a stowaway?" he demanded, blinking at Peter in astonishment. "I went over the whole boat before we sailed." He flung an accusing glare at the psychologist.

            "He's Peter Venkman," the woman said. "I don't know why he's here."

            "He's Peter who?" The guy stared, then his mouth dropped open. "Son of a bitch," he blurted. "A Ghostbuster. That's crazy. The Undine's not haunted."

            "Can I get up now?" Peter ventured tentatively.

            Frowning, David lowered the spear gun. "This is crazy. I saw you on the Carson show last week. So what did you do, pop in out of midair?" He motioned Peter up.

            Scrambling to his feet, Peter explained hastily, "It was a demon. He tried to get into our containment unit. There were three of us he grabbed." The coalescing memory panicked him and he yelled, "Winston? Ray?" at the top of his lungs.

            No one answered.

            God, he was on a boat, and from the way it moved beneath his feet, they were at sea. "Where are we?" he demanded, fear churning inside. He had landed safely in the Undine. Suppose Ray and Winston had missed?

            "We're about a day out of the Hamptons," David explained. "We're on our honeymoon." He beamed fatuously at the woman, who met the look with a warm smile.

            "I bet I'm the last person you want to see, then," Peter muttered. "Look, there were three of us. If he put me here... I've gotta go look for my buddies."

            "I've got a sea anchor down," David explained, picking up on the alarm Peter couldn't hide. "Connie's been diving with the spear gun. If your friends...missed the boat, we haven't changed position since you got here. Let's head for the deck."

            The raced topside. Peter didn't know much about boats, but it was pretty clear that this one represented money. A small yacht, it had an inboard motor and probably four or five cabins below, though all on one deck. The wheelhouse was set forward, and several deck chairs filled the space behind it. A creak of rope marked the place where the sea anchor hung, and Peter saw that the wheel was tied off. At the back of the boat, the stern, a platform had been lowered; Connie must have been diving from there because a couple of air tanks sat in a rack on it. Tied to the platform was a small rubber dinghy with an outboard motor.

            In all directions there was nothing but ocean. The lowering sun told Peter which way was west, the way home. The place where Egon probably believed he'd killed his friends, the place where he might be dead. Why was Peter here alone? Had the demon sent them all to separate places?

            Scooping up a pair of binoculars from a small table, David scanned the water while Connie headed for the rubber boat. Peter grabbed the rail and yelled his friends' names at the top of his lungs.

            "I'll take the dinghy out and look," Connie called back. "Let me know if you see anything." Snatching up a couple of lifesavers, she hopped down onto the platform and tossed them into the boat. When the engine roared to life, Peter said, "I should go, too."

            "Are you used to boats?" David demanded, grabbing his arm to stop him.

            "No. But--"

            "Then stay here. Connie's part mermaid. Could swim before she could walk, and she's been around boats her whole life. The Undine is hers. She knows what she's doing."

            Peter watched the boat speed out to start a search pattern on the empty ocean that looked like it would take her around the Undine in gradually widening circles. "Do you have a radio?" he asked. "I should get in touch with Egon, let him know I'm okay." Ray and Winston might have already sunk beneath the waves, and Egon might be trashed. New York could be hip deep in the ghosts from the containment unit, and here was Peter, a day away from shore. He had to contact Egon. He had to do something.

            David heaved a sigh. "It's broken. We didn't even notice at first." A wry grin. "It is our honeymoon. But we thought we'd send a message to Connie's dad and let him know how we were doing. And the blasted thing doesn't work. I can probably fix it; I'm good with things like that. I work for a cable TV company in Manhattan. But--" he spread his hands, grinning. "It's our honeymoon. I just haven't bothered."

            The demon's handiwork, or just bad luck? Peter watched Connie racing her little dinghy in ever-widening circles and explained to David what had been happening, how he had wound up here, in mid-Atlantic. "Even Egon found a way to break us out, he'd still have the demon to face. With us gone, the demon's still there and he can't take it on by himself, or even with Janine. Demons usually take all four of us." His fingers tightened on the wooden railing nearly tight enough to gouge out holes. I'm alive, he thought bitterly. You guys better be alive, too.

*****

            Winston Zeddemore was alive, but he sure wasn't enjoying it. The mosquitoes were feasting on every centimeter of his unprotected flesh and he'd nearly had a close encounter with a mama bear when he walked around a tree and came face to snout with the cutest little bear cub he'd ever seen. Realizing that this was one of the times when discretion was by far the better part of valor, Winston had backed away until he was out of sight of the ursine threat, then he'd turned and run like crazy. Finally convinced there was no pursuit, he stopped for breath and tried to get his bearings.

            For all he knew, this was the forest primeval, untouched since the virgin forest had blanketed much of North America. He might have even been shifted back in time when there had still been virgin forest. No, because there was the red and white of a cigarette package crumpled up under a tree. "Winston," it read. He grinned at the irony. Modern times, and people came here. No one was here now though. Winston sucked in a deep breath and yelled, "Hello!" at the top of his lungs.

            There was no reply. The birds and insects went quiet, and after a breathless moment while Winston listened for any distant sounds of civilization, they started chirping and humming again.

            Well, this was lousy. One minute a prisoner of a demon, the next lost in the woods. On the other hand, Winston's survival skills were right up there in the top bracket. He'd been in country long enough to have learned how to deal with a hostile environment. Bears excluded, he didn't think this one could be as unfriendly as Nam. At least there wouldn't be Charlie lurking in the jungle to ambush him.

            "Pete! Ray!" They'd been with him in that giant fishbowl of a trap the demon had dreamed up. They ought to be with him now. He stared at the wooded terrain, the sloping landscape. Probably in the mountains somewhere. That empty pack of Winstons might not prove he was still in the States but it was a pretty good indication that he wasn't impossibly beyond the reach of civilization. He was in a forest. So maybe he could find a friendly forest ranger or a campground. These days, campers were starting to carry cell phones. That was all he needed to let Egon know he was alive, to start a search for Peter and Ray. If they were somewhere in the forest, too, at least Ray had been a boy scout. Peter might be the quintessential city kid, but his survival instincts were about as well-honed as it was possible to get. They'd make it.

            "Okay, Zeddemore," he said aloud. "Which way from here? How about downhill. That might lead to water, and once you find a stream, you can follow it." He knew he needed to find water. It had been hot in the demon's energy cage, and he was thirsty. At least he hadn't landed in the middle of the Sahara desert. That would have been tougher, but this was survivable. All he had to do was get to civilization, even remote civilization.

            Remembering the disbelieving horror on Egon's face when the time expired, Winston set himself at a steady pace that would cover the ground as fast as possible without risking a fall. A broken leg, or even a turned ankle, would make it tough to get out of here. Hang in there, Egon, he thought to the absent physicist. I'm coming.

*****

            Fingers pressed against the glass, Egon stared out the window of the lab at the darkening street below. He couldn't remember ever having been so miserable in his entire life, not even when he was stranded in the dungeon beneath Tolay's keep, believing himself imprisoned forever. Then, at least, he'd known his friends were safe and well. This time, he didn't have that comfort, just the demon's insistence that they were dead through his fiasco, that their bodies lay unprotected somewhere far away. Try as he might, he couldn't hold off the image of their battered forms, sprawled and abandoned, prey to small predators. Years from now, someone might find their skeletal remains and identify them from the tattered remnants of their jumpsuits. Egon could go the rest of his life and never know what had happened to them.

            "And it's all my fault."

            "Crap!"

            Whirling, Egon found Janine frowning at him, her arms folded across her chest, one foot tapping the floor. As he stared in disbelief, she stabbed a finger at him, fierce determination in her face. "It is not your fault. Okay, you got those weird readings in your biorhythms but they're back to normal now, so start acting normal. You don't know that they are dead and you sure don't know it was your fault any more than it's the fault of a building when a tornado hits it. It was all the demon's fault. I won't let you do this to yourself."

            "The demon said they were dead because I failed them." The words were hard to force out through his stiff lips. As long as he held to the blame, he could work, could reason, could try solutions. Once he let go, he would be down for the count. "Don't you see, Janine. I have to keep trying. The knowledge of my incompetence is what pushes me."

            "Crap," she said again. She approached and gazed up at him, but she didn't touch him. Maybe she knew he would crumple at a kindness. "What should push you is the fact that the guys need you. Think, Egon." She did touch him then, grasping his forearm and digging in with her fingers. "The demon said it was going to send them far away. It didn't mention dead until after the fact--and that was when it thought it could sneak in here while you were demoralized and open the containment unit. It didn't have to bother killing them. It only had to keep them out of the way for a few hours."

            He saw the logic of her argument, but it didn't help. "It's been more than a few hours," he pointed out.

            "So the demon overcompensated." Janine suddenly grabbed both his arms and shook him lightly. "Egon, listen to me. You know those three characters better than anyone else in the world. You have to trust them. They'll get back. Peter'll show up any minute complaining that he'll have to pay me overtime. Ray's going to be so fascinated to know he was teleported like on Star Trek. And they're probably right here on our world in our dimension. I listen when you spout your theories and I know you believe that if they were sent to the Netherworld, they'd be near the place where you went before. Eddies and currents in the dimensional stream, you said. You looked over there for hours. If they'd been there, you would have got readings when you were searching for them."

            In her expression he could see the not-yet-dissipated fear she had felt when he had used Ray's molecular phase amplifier to go over there on his own, his pocket full of bracelets, to bring them back. She'd had no guarantee he would ever return from a place that dangerous. He'd had none himself.

            "Do you listen to all my theories?" Egon asked, grateful for her support. Janine might not play the role of an intellectual, but she was actually very knowledgeable. Like Peter, she covered up her smarts with clever talk but she could sneak past a man's guard and produce brilliant reasoning with the best of them.

            "All the ones that make sense," she responded with a wicked twinkle in her eye. She wasn't claiming knowledge of higher physics but setting herself up in judgment of the logic of his claims. She could do it, too. More than once, Egon had come downstairs and caught Janine with her nose in a weighty science textbook, reading away and scribbling notes. She studied all their equipment and was up on the job enough to do containment unit maintenance. Once, in the middle of a frantic overflow of busts, she'd pitched in and helped with proton pack recharging without blinking an eye--though she claimed extra pay for it from Peter. "Not in my job description, Dr. V," she'd insisted. "Time and a half, and I mean it." Peter, who had weaseled out of overtime claims in the past, knew when he was licked and had granted it. For awhile after that, he'd been very diligent around the firehall so he wouldn't have to give her time and a half again.

            Egon smiled sadly. Peter was such a contradiction, so many different men in one self-important and utterly reliable package, and every one of them was Egon's friend. Wherever Peter was at the moment, he was sure to be working top speed to get home.

            "All my theories make sense," Egon insisted. Janine was a contradiction, too, and he understood her far less than he did Peter. "Just because not all of them stand up to proof doesn't make them less than worthy efforts."

            Janine beamed, but he could see the concern in her eyes. Still holding on, she dragged him to the nearest chair. "Sit. I'm going to call for take-out pretty soon. You need it."

            "I'm not hungry, Janine."

            "Oh, that's good. Starve yourself. What's gonna happen if Pinkie had buddies? You need to be up to full strength until the guys get home."

            Egon let himself be pushed into the chair, but he lifted his eyes to Janine and regarded her blurrily over the top of his glasses. "We both know they might not come home," he said. "Even if the demon lied to me--which I acknowledge it well could--they may not be able to return. The Netherworld is not the only alternate dimension out there, and I did not have time to search enough of it to eliminate it as a possibility."

            "Why should it waste energy to send them that far away? All it had to do was get them out of the way for a little while. I just know they'll be back any minute." She paused, listening. Somewhere out there in the distance, a police siren wailed.

            Somewhere out there, his friends might be dead.

            Egon didn't have her hope. He found it less than rational, less than believable. The demon hated the Ghostbusters. Why leave any of them alive? If it hadn't been so smug, it could have trapped them all and gone to the firehall without allowing a chance to warn Janine. So, for all its much vaunted intellect, it was stupid. That meant it might have been stupid enough to have simply shifted his friends out of reach, planning to deal with them at its leisure. Perhaps there was hope after all. As he sat staring unseeingly at Janine, he realized why Peter was such a cynic. Betrayed so often by his father, Peter had long ago learned that hope wasn't safe. Yet when the chips were down, Peter always risked it for his friends. He flung his battered heart into the breach again and again when the others of the team needed him. Could Egon do no less?

            The siren drew nearer. Janine cocked her head, listening. It was stopping out in front. Could it be... The sound cut off abruptly, but by then Egon was racing for the nearest firepole. He flung himself at it and whisked down to the ground floor just as the front door opened and Peter burst in, gazing around anxiously.

            "EGON!" Spotting the physicist, he screeched to a stop and stared at him, wild-eyed. Venkman looked unhurt and he was moving under his own steam, no trace remaining of the pain that had been in his face when he vanished. The sight of him was such a miracle that for the first second of realization, Egon found it impossible to move or speak. He looked past Peter to see Ray and Winston, but they weren't there. What did that mean? The relief at seeing one of his friends back was overwhelming, but he had to know about the others, too.

            Then Janine landed behind him, smothering a gasp. Egon shook off his paralysis, took three giant, elated strides across the garage, and grabbing the psychologist, pulling him in against his chest and hugging him with all his strength. "I thought you were dead, Peter. I thought all three of you were." He bent his head against Peter's hair and closed his eyes against the sting of tears. Peter was alive and, if he had survived, the others must be alive, too. It felt like the venerable firehall hiked up its skirts and did a crazy dance as Egon's world turned right side up The tension ran out of him like water, and his knees buckled. Automatically, Peter tightened his grip until Egon found his balance. He would understand without a word exactly what painful tangle of emotions bludgeoned the physicist. He chanted softly in Egon's ear, "It's okay. Come on, Egon, it's okay. If I made it, Ray and Winston will, too. We just didn't get sent off together. I'm fine. See?"

            "You're alive," Egon insisted, determined to make the point. He couldn't find any other words to express his utter joy. It wasn't every day that someone did a Lazarus and came back from the dead. Lacing his fingers through the too-long hair on the back of Peter's neck, Egon held on tight. Now if only Ray and Winston would come bursting in...

            There was a stunned, realizing silence, then Peter shook his head and spoke hastily. "Come on, Spengs, old Pinkie only said he'd dump us far away. I think he stuck us all over creation but that's not the point here. He didn't say anything about making us bite the big one, or I would have been yelling a heck of a