Lately, he'd taken to avoiding looking at his mother: her
infra-red signature was like a landing-strip for a coronary, and she wouldn't
let him take her to one of the bugout clinics for nanosurgery.

Mrs. Abromowicz leaned across the table and whacked him upside the head with one
hand, her big rings clicking against the temple of his half-rim specs. Had it
been anyone else, he would have caught her hand mid-slap, or at least dodged in
a superfast blur, quicker than any human eye. But his Mama had let him know what
she thought of _that_ sass before his third birthday. Raising super-infants
requires strict, _loving_ discipline. "Hey, wake up! Hey! I'm talking to you!
What was that mess on television last night?"

"It was a demonstration, Mama. We were protesting. We want to dismantle the
machines of war -- it's in the Torah, Mama. Isaiah: they shall beat their swords
into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Tot would have approved."

Mrs. Abromowicz sucked air between her teeth. "Your father never would have
approved of _that_."

_That_ was the Action last night. It had been his idea, and he'd tossed it
around with the Movement people who'd planned the demo: they'd gone to an
army-surplus store and purchased hundreds of decommissioned rifles, their bores
filled with lead, their firing pins defanged. He'd flown above and ahead of the
demonstration, in his traditional tights and cape, dragging a cargo net full of
rifles from his belt. He pulled them out one at a time, and bent them into
balloon-animals -- fanciful giraffes, wiener-dogs, bumble-bees, poodles -- and
passed them out the crowds lining Yonge Street. It had been a boffo smash hit.
And it made great TV.

Hershie Abromowicz, Man from the Stars, took his mother's hands between his own
and looked into her eyes. "Mama, I'm a grown man. I have a job to do. It's like
. . . like a calling. The world's still a big place, bugouts or no bugouts, and
there's lots of people here who are crazy, wicked, with their fingers on the
triggers. I care about this planet, and I can't sit by when it's in danger."

"But why all of a sudden do you have to be off with these _meshuggenahs_? How
come you didn't _need_ to be with the crazy people until now?"

"Because there's a _chance_ now. The world is ready to rethink itself. Because
--" The waiter saved him by appearing with the cheque. His mother started to
open her purse, but he had his debitcard on the table faster th