Interview with the RADAR Ranger A work of fiction by D. Railleur Not Copyrighted Contents Introduction About the Author Interview with the RADAR Ranger Introduction Mount Tamalpais in Marin, California, is the birthplace of mountain biking. From a few lone bikes in the late 1970s, the numbers have grown astronomically in the 1990s. In fact, the main users of the recreational lands on Mt. Tam today are mountain bikers. But the increase in bikers has brought with it some problems. This fictional work deals with one of those problems. In 1988, the rangers on Mt. Tam began using RADAR guns to monitor the speed of cyclists on the dirt fire roads. Anyone caught going over the speed limit -- 15 mph -- received a traffic ticket that the local municipal court upheld. The blanket fine for speeding was $200, regardless of race, sex, age, and so on. Few cyclists were pleased with this outcome. Arguments were offered that educational programs on riding etiquette would be more "humane" and in spirit with the times, but the heavy fines remained. Out of the swirling debates, trail dust, and RADAR beams emerged this fictional account of the origins of RADAR Rangers on Mt. Tamalpais. About The Author I met the author of "Interview with the RADAR Ranger" during a regular ride on the mountain. I was quite a distance from anywhere and was surprised when she came up on me. We rode along together for a short while talking mountain bikes, when she abruptly turned off the fire road we were on and headed up a steep, rocky single track. I watched her disappear quickly amid the oaks and bays (riding on single tracks is illegal on the mountain, and besides, it was too steep for me to follow). Since that first encounter, she crossed my path on the mountain several other times. She claimed her name was D. Railleur, but I couldn't find any such person in the local phone book. None of the other folks I occasionally ride with have ever seen her. Anyway, I received a package in the mail in October 1992. It contained the manuscript for this book. Included was a note from D. Railleur asking if I could typeset it and distribute it. She didn't care about copyright she said. I read the ms. and thought it was a classic (I think the book is a parody of Ann Rice's "Interview with the Vampire"). For the book's bio, D. Railleur gave me this bit of text: "D. Railleur is a 1968 graduate of Mercer County Community College in Trenton, New Jersey. She studied Communications and Political Science before joining the Highway Patrol in Crested Butte, Colorado. After leaving the patrol and moving to California in 1975, Ms. Railleur obtained a Ph.D. in Shamanism from John F. Kennedy University in Orinda, California." There it is -- I haven't seen D. Railleur since September, 1992. I've tried to find her, but I don't think she'll be found until she wants to be found. In the meantime, enjoy her book. Main Sections Part One: Highway 101 Part Two: Sonoma Coast Part Three: The Mountain Epilog Part One: Highway 101 "Uh-huh..." said the RADAR Ranger, and he walked across the rough wood flooring toward the open door. For long moments he stood there, outlined in the dusky light filtering into Sky Oaks Ranger Station. The mountain biker looked around at the room, contrasting the smooth formica top of the service counter to the smudged surface of the oak work desk in the next room. On the wall, above a map of the watershed, hung a boar's head with long, yellow tusks pushing out from the lower jaw and snaking up and around either side of the hairy snout. The biker put his Snell/ANSI-approved helmet on the counter and waited. "How much time do you have?" asked the RADAR Ranger, spinning around on the heel of his boot. His worn hat blocked the glare of the rippling sun behind and the cyclist could see his face clearly. "Time to hear the story of a life of RADAR?" "If it's a good story. I've talked with lots of people on the mountain ... enough to confuse and mix-up the tales each has told me. I want to hear something that's unique, that sets itself apart from all the other stuff you hear up there. Sound fair to you, sir?" "More than fair," the RADAR Ranger answered. "I can think of nothing better than to tell you of my life as a RADAR Ranger. I want to do it very much." The cyclist's face tensed with the excitement he felt. "Fantastic. I'm really interested why you think you can use RADAR to ..." "No," said the RADAR Ranger abruptly. "I'm not going to start there. A question can't set the tone for a life already lived. Are you willing to listen to the story I have to tell?" "Yes," said the mountain biker. "Go on." The RADAR Ranger eyed the cyclist with his back to the open door. The yellow sky orb had shifted and the front of the ranger was a shadow to the cyclist. The mountain biker started to say something to break the uneasiness he felt, but the words wouldn't come. He finally exhaled with relief as the RADAR Ranger broke his stillness and moved towards him under the overhead light, which erased the shadow that had covered his face. The cyclist, staring up at the RADAR Ranger, could not help but gasp. The older man, quicker than the pedaler's eyes could follow, had loosened the top three buttons of his work shirt, bearing his chest. Ornately tattooed in sixteen shades of gray below his left breast was the image of the Model K-15, the official RADAR gun of the watershed. It was all there, in mesmerizing high- resolution -- the precision lens antenna for beam control, aiming sights to follow the violator, double-walled antenna for rugged use, trigger switch to lock-in violations... The legendary gun that had put Km.P.H. Industries of Nosferatu, Kansas, on the map. The RADAR Ranger grinned pensively, and the trigger of the flesh-covered gun silently slid down 1/4-inch, accurately guided by the quiver of twitching muscle that moved out from his nipple. "Do you see?" he asked gently. A rush of apprehension moved through the mountain biker's body, his shoulders tight against his neck to protect him against an arctic blast of cold that shouldn't have been part of this balmy, late September afternoon. He instinctively raised his hand to break the vector of the invisible beam, seeing all too clearly the LEDs of the target monitor continuously display a speed beyond his own abilities, hearing the amplified Doppler audio signal increase its frequency, watching the switch move into place that hid the gun's force from detectors. All these sights and sounds in his mind had been designed to meet and exceed federal and state specifications. "Do you still want to hear my story?" asked the RADAR Ranger. The word formed slowly in his mouth, but only the movement of his head told the ranger to begin. "Try to contain your fear .... just listen to what I have to say," the RADAR Ranger offered, as if to comfort him, then sat in the curved-back chair opposite the cyclist. "You've always been a RADAR Ranger, haven't you?" stammered the cyclist. "No," reflected the ranger, "I was a man, about your age, before I became a RADAR Ranger." "How-w-w did it happen?" stuttered the cyclist, "I mean, why did it happen to you?" He wiped the back of his hand across his moist forehead and waited nervously for the RADAR Ranger to speak. "It's really quite simple, but I don't want to give you a simple answer. I'm going to make it more difficult than it has to be. I want you to hear the whole story." "SureOkay," the cyclist said quickly, blending the two words into one, and wiped the perspiration from his lips with the cotton bandanna he'd yanked off his matted hair. "I want to hear the long story -- I want to hear it all." Terra Linda "It was tragic," the RADAR Ranger began. "It was my younger sister, Jackie ... she brought a new car home. Not just any car. A mariner blue Miata. Five-speed manual with overdrive, inline 4-cylinder, DOHC 16-valve, 116 horsepower at 6500 rpm, multi-port electronic fuel injection, unit body frame, fully independent, double- wishbone suspension with coil springs, gas-filled shock absorbers, front and rear stabilizer bars, rack-and-pinion steering, power-assisted 4-wheel disc brakes, highback reclining bucket seats, compact disc player, 8000-rpm tachometer with 7000-rpm redline, 140-mph speedometer, 25 city, 30 highway, 2216 pounds curb weight (without Jackie). A ragtop. The RADAR Ranger stopped and the cyclist coughed uneasily, wiping his face again before stuffing the bandanna into the open pocket stitched to the back of his riding jersey. "It's painful, isn't it?" the cyclist said. "It's painful, isn't it?" repeated the RADAR Ranger as if the cyclist hadn't asked the question first. Then, slowly drawing his glazed eyes up from his entangled hands on the table top to those of the mountain biker, he continued. "No, it's not painful. It's just that I've only related this story to one other person and that was a long time ago. The telling isn't painful. "We were living in Terra Linda at the time. My dad worked for AutoBund and my mom was a stay-at-home mother and housewife. It drove her nuts, but that's the way my dad wanted it. 'It's the way a manager in an up- and-coming international software firm should act,' he would say apologetically." "I thought so," interrupted the cyclist. "You are a Terra Lindian. You have that broad forehead, sir." The RADAR Ranger looked at him blankly for a moment or two. "I have a Terra Linda forehead?" he mused. Then he laughed out loud. "What does that non sequitor have to do with what I'm telling you?" Flustered, the cyclist groped for an explanation. "Nothing really, but it helps put things in perspective for me. I first noticed it right after you opened your truck door the other side of that blind corner on Rocky Ridge and forced me to slide to the edge of the drop off. Then when you pulled the brim of your hat back before reaching for your citation book, I got a real good glimpse of it. I think the sun was just right. 'That forehead,' I thought. 'Something really familiar about it.' Now that you've just mentioned 'Terra Linda' it's all came together. You were born in Kaiser, right? 'Good people, good medicine, good luck.' The RADAR Ranger eyed the cyclist suspiciously, a murmur of disquiet sounding across his brow. The mountain biker sank further back into his hard chair, regretting his remarks. "It's okay," assured the RADAR Ranger. "I'm not as angry I look. Trust me." The cyclist sat quietly, his eyes focused on a loosened knot in the plank floor next to his left Durango (TM) SPD Compatible MTB shoe. He sat there, gazing at the floor, transfixed, while the images from the world outside were slowly replaced in the window by the dimly lit reflection of the small office's interior. Only when he lifted his eyes in the darkened space did the RADAR Ranger continue. "My sister had graduated from Branson the year before and was studying premed at UC Berkeley. Jackie had always been at the top of everything she did. Everyone was enamored by her and said she'd be the best in whatever she chose. Mom and dad believed it, too, and sent her to all the best schools. A lot of camping trips and new stereo systems went into her education. But it was okay, it was right. "Two years before, I had graduated from the Academy and was patrolling Highway 101 south from Santa Rosa to Mill Valley. Beginning pay wasn't great and I had taken an apartment by Northgate shopping center, not far my parents' house. Jackie was living at home and commuting across the Bay to school. Public transportation was lacking and my dad, always looking to please Jackie, bought her the Miata. I knew it was going to be trouble. "I was there the day she drove it down our street the first time. Mom and dad arrived home from the dealership just ahead of her. We were all standing side-by-side at the end of the driveway when she rounded the corner in that shiny, new, blue car. The top was down and I could see Jackie's curly, blond hair stretching out behind her, holding on to her scalp for dear life. She looked absolutely gorgeous. Her skin flushed excitement and her eyes sparkled uncontainable joy, the kind of look you could only hope to find in a Gothic tale. "She pulled up in front of us at the end of the asphalt driveway and jumped out of the car. 'Oh, dad, mom!' she squealed, hugging them both with her excitement. 'It's incredible, unbelievable.' She paused a moment, then 'Thanks, so much.' Then she turned to me and gave me a hug, too, even though she knew I had nothing to do with the joy that filled her that morning. 'This is so exciting,' she said to me and I could only nod agreement. "You don't sound as though you shared your sister's excitement," the cyclist couldn't hold back. "Let me tell my story," the RADAR Ranger cut him short. When the ensuing silence had seeped into every crevice of the room, the ranger continued. "Jackie drove that car everywhere, not just across the bridge to school and back." His eyes dilating on some distant thought, the ranger hesitated, then added, "The bridge wasn't in my territory. I suppose if she had just driven to and from school, it would've been okay. But she didn't. She was so proud of that car. She drove it everywhere. "She was on her way to CostCo up at the Rowland Plaza in Novato when it happened. About two miles south of the shopping center's exit, where I was on duty, hiding in the roadside shrubbery, my gun began beeping and flashing the warning signal of a speeder not more than 1/4-mile distant. I tried to pick out the offender from among all the cars, pickups, and big rigs in the five northbound lanes, but couldn't make the ID. 'No problem,' I thought. 'I'll spot 'em when they pass by.' That's when I saw the blue glint into my side view mirror and, even though the vehicle was too far back to make a positive identification, my heart started racing and bounding in my chest. I didn't have to see clearly to know who was behind the wheel. "Moments later the blue Miata raced by my hiding place, breaking the posted speed limit by twenty miles per hour or more, blond hair streaming out behind the driver. I gave chase ... it was my job ... it was part of the oath I had sworn: 'All speeders break the law with no exceptions.' I was terrified, my stomach was churning acid up past my aching heart into my dry mouth. God! The anguish that shook my body! I'm not sure how I managed to stay in control of my cruiser and pull my sister over to the side of the road without killing us both. "The rest is a blur in my mind, the kinds of things that flash through your head just before losing consciousness after falling off a horse, when all the air in your lungs is forced out with a sudden whooosh. I see vague images of my sister, down-turned head, never looking up to confront me, of her finely blue-veined, trembling hands letting her driver's license and Miata registration tumble into my CHP-issue, black leather gloves. Of tears falling onto the seat belt that crossed her lap. Of myself unable to hear a word I said, mechanically following the book as I recorded all the data and issued the citation. Of climbing back into my cruiser, driving past the stilled, little, blue Miata, crossing over the highway on one overpass, and then again over another to return to my hiding place among the bushes where I sat throughout the remainder of the day and the evening before returning to the station." His jaws tense with the effort of speaking painful memories, the RADAR Ranger slammed both fists onto the cold table top, surprising the cyclist into clutching hold of the table's nicked edge to prevent himself from falling over backwards. "She hasn't spoken to anyone since. Not a word, not a coherent sound." Ross "The medical people at Kaiser couldn't explain Jackie's silence, except to speculate that the shock of a speeding ticket from her own brother caused her to go into catatonic shock. My parents were heart-broken. After Kaiser's big guns failed to come up with a cure, my dad and mom hired one specialist after another from the AMA's preferred list, but absolutely no one was able to bring Jackie around. The medical costs broke my parents ... defeated, they eventually sold what little they had left and moved to a small retirement community on the Oregon coast. I talk with them from time to time still; dad's never recovered from the tragedy and has been in poor health for years. The only thing that's keeping mom alive is caring for dad." "Jackie, what about Jackie?" whispered the mountain biker. "Jackie, of course Jackie. Everyone's concerned about Jackie. It's only right that they should be," replied the RADAR Ranger after a time. "But you can imagine the impact this had on me. My sister locked into a dark, silent world she couldn't share with anyone. My parents torn apart by the loss of their beloved daughter. And just because I did what was right. It was right ... none of my superiors ever questioned my actions. I was following rules that were designed by the best lawmakers and approved by the highest courts. None of this should have happened! "Mom and dad wanted to take her to Oregon with them, but I feared Jackie wouldn't get proper medical care if she went. So I arranged for her to stay in a private treatment center in a residential part of Ross. I paid for everything from my meager savings. I saw that she got the best care possible. "Sometimes after work I'd go visit her at the center. Often she'd just be sitting on a carved stone bench off to one side of the facility's rose garden. Just sitting with her eyes turned in the direction of the roses, watching the petals drop. I'd sit next to her and tell her my troubles, the difficulties I had with belligerent speeders, how I'd had to work around the silly policies of newer and younger commanders ... all the problems that made up the whole of my existence. Sometimes we'd walk along the shoulders of Ross' tree-lined roads, me chattering nervously from 'No Parking' sign to 'No Parking' sign, two sets of feet weaving their patterns through the low hills of eastern Marin. And I would pretend that Jackie was listening to my words, and, even though she never commented, was always sympathetic, so that when I left her, I had the vivid impression that she had solved all my worldly problems. I didn't think I could ever, or would ever, want to free myself from Jackie in those days. Of course, I was wrong." The RADAR Ranger stopped his monologue. For a time the mountain biker only looked unblinking at the RADAR Ranger, then sat upright in his chair as if startled awake by a peal of distant thunder that had snuck up on him in the darkness. He grasped at words, but none fit the patterns forming in his head. "Uh ... you finally got tired of her ... uh ... inability to talk, sir?" he floundered. The RADAR Ranger eyed him as if trying to fathom the meaning of his confusion. Then he replied: "I mean that I was wrong about myself ... about what I thought I had caused. I learned that my guilt and shame for what I thought to be the consequences of my actions -- my sister's silence and my parent's despair -- were wrong." The ranger's gaze shifted slowly over the ancient wainscoting on the distant wall and settled on a reflecting pane of glass in the window above. "How?" asked the cyclist. "I'm going to tell you everything," but the ranger's eyes scanned slowly away from the cyclist, returning to the singular pane of reflecting glass on the far wall. He appeared to have only the faintest of interests in the cyclist, who himself seemed to be engaged in some inner struggle. "But you're upbringing in Terra Linda ... how could you have ever justified what happened when you think about the love you had for your family? Your mother and father ... your sister?" "I want to tell my story in the proper order," answered the RADAR Ranger. "I have to tell it as it happened. "I don't know about love and that doesn't matter, anyway. What matters is ..." "Yes?" coaxed the cyclist. "What matters is what is right," finished the RADAR Ranger. "What was right then? I didn't know. My head was clouded with confusion. I eventually took up drink and avoided visiting my sister. Of course, I couldn't escape her for a moment. I kept going back to that far away day when I had pulled her blue Miata over and cited her for speeding. I could think of nothing else but her dimmed eyes staring blankly at the fallen rose pedals in Ross. Over and over I dreamed of talking to her, of telling her how sorry I was, but never hearing her answer back. Drunk or sober, these images filled my head and I couldn't stand it. Meanwhile, the officers I worked with noticed a change in my behavior. I wasn't sure of myself, often talking back and leaving myself open to verbal attack from speeders who challenged my speed measuring methods. I drank more and more and often came to work with my head buzzing from late night binges. On more than one occasion, I picked fights with fellow officers in the locker room over the pettiest of issues. I lived like a man who wanted to die but lacked the courage to do it. And then late one night I picked a fight in a bar that could have been the end of me. One that nearly left me dead. I ..." "You mean you fought a vampire and he sucked your blood?" the cyclist blurted out. "No, you're thinking of another similar story," scoffed the RADAR Ranger. "I nearly got into a fist fight that evening with Fritz Hairtrigger, the District Sales Manager for Km.P.H. Industries, the manufacturer of the K-15, the RADAR gun I used to bring in my sister." The mountain biker leaned forward in his chair, his rapidly moving diaphragm beating into the table's edge with each breath. The ranger sensed the cyclist's interest and continued without pause: "Fritz was far older than I, but his strength was overpowering. I didn't stand a chance against his superior skills and lightning movements. Within moments I was on my back, unconscious. I faintly remember strong arms lifting me off the broken-glass and whiskey-strewn floor, but nothing more. When I came to, I found myself on a quilted German federdecke covering a bed in the San Rafael Hilton. I was alone in the room. But as my eyes cleared and found their focus, I realized not quite alone: everywhere were books -- books on dresser tops, along window sills, on top of the color t.v., lining the bottom of the gray-tiled shower stall. And not ordinary books, either. No, these were the works of authors I had rarely heard mentioned at the Academy: Hegel, Kierkegaard, Nietsche, Shopenhauer, Heidegger, Machiavelli I "I was thumbing through the volumes, encountering phrases like aber fast alles, was sie erzahlt, deutet doch darauf hin, dass sie ihren Stiller nur durch sein schlectes Gewissen glaubte fesseln zu konnen, durch seine Angst, ein Versager zu sein and Wer er denn selber ware? fragte man ihn, und er besann sich. Gott weiss es! sagte er: Gott weiss es, gestern noch meinte ich es zu wissen, aber heute, da ich erwach bin, wie soll ich es wissen? It was like nothing I had ever encountered before. I sat there, for how many hours I don't know, gorging myself on these mysterious, but powerful words and ideas, wishing I could read German. Filling my mind with such thoughts that I completely forgot myself! And in that same moment I understood the meaning of possibility. "It was in a moment of egotistical rapture such as I'm describing to you that he entered the hotel room through the sliding French doors. At first I though he was management, coming to question me ... to ask me what I thought I was doing in this room which I had not reserved or paid for. But I quickly dismissed this suspicion when I saw the intensity of his features. He moved close to the circle of books in whose center I crouched and put his face close to mine. I recognized him as the man with whom I had fought the night before. But now I recognized him as no ordinary man at all! His eyes flickered with the faint afterglow of an LED readout and the curve of his prominent ears insured that no rebounding echo would be lost to empty space. I understood everything at that instant. I mean, the moment I saw him, saw his splendor, I became nothing. All my conceptions, even my overriding guilt and shame, became completely unimportant. "As he talked at me and described his life and explained what I could become, my past burned away from me like the green flap of a roasting ear of corn. My life appeared to me as if I had risen from it and was peering at it from a distance. All around me, ashes. Nothing was left but what this extraordinary creature had to give me." The cyclist continued to sit on the edge of his chair, his face twisted into a mixture of bewilderment and apprehension. "And so you decided to become a disciple of Fritz Hairtrigger?" he asked. The RADAR Ranger remained silent for a second, then spoke. "'Decided' may not be the right word. You can say I decided to become a disciple of Fritz Hairtrigger, or you can say I didn't decide to become a disciple of Fritz Hairtrigger. Or you can call me indecisive even though it may not have been inevitable in the first place. Just let me say that after he talked at me, I saw no other course of action but the one I followed, even if the decision wasn't mine." The RADAR Ranger was peering through the darkened window again. When he stopped talking, the cyclist felt his ears throb with the silence. When the throbbing began to quiet, he could discern noises from outside the window -- crickets chirping as they leaped away from predators, the zinging of telephone wires in the evening breeze. "What did he talk about?" questioned the mountain biker, his apprehension and madly twitching fingers fueled by nervous energy. "He talked of my need to transcend my irrational fear of scientific truth and my tendency to subjugate that truth to emotional perceptions. He said that behavior in the modern age must be guided not by moral pieties but by technical expertise." "What technical expertise?" interjected the mountain biker, a little unsure of the philosophical jargon he had just heard. With his broad back turned to him, the RADAR Ranger responded with a subtlety the cyclist failed to perceive. "I'm surprised to hear you ask the question rather than give the answer. It's a technology that you yourself have but recently submitted to -- RADAR. "RADAR?" half-laughed the cyclist. "RADAR is the scientific truth that allows modern homo sapiens to rise above the extraordinary and inordinate malice of fortune, to control the means of peaceful violence I there is simply no comparison between a person who is armed with RADAR and one who is not." The cyclist stared in the direction of the ranger's gaze, but not finding the answer to his next question in the reflective pane of glass, he asked, "Peaceful violence?" "Yes, peaceful violence," snapped the RADAR Ranger. "The master of peaceful violence, although often misrepresented as an advocate of self-serving despotism by a few, uses RADAR to provide for the well being of his citizens, if only to calm their rebelliousness." With these words, the ranger turned his head away from the window and drowned the gaze of the mountain biker with his black stare. Quickly changing the subject that had gone so far astray of his purpose, the cyclist asked, "Exactly how did Fritz change you then, sir?" "I can't put it into words," reflected the RADAR Ranger. "I can explain it, encase it in words, so that you can understand the value of it. But I can't present it so you feel it any more than I can describe the feeling of issuing one's first speeding citation." The mountain biker furrowed his brow as if he had another question, but the RADAR Ranger continued before he could ask it. "I've already told you that Fritz understood the relation of modern technology to society. He knew it intimately and personally. Action is the most direct path to understanding and it was through action that Fritz lead me through my change. "I know little of Fritz's history, of his past actions. My understanding goes back a meager three months before I weakly faced him that evening in the bar. He claimed he was the Marketing Director of Km.P.H. Industries, manufacturers of the legendary K-15 RADAR gun. I don't doubt that it was Fritz who made the gun into the legend it is, but I don't have enough information at hand to tell you how he did it. He doesn't talk about it himself. I do know what he told me, the he left his offices in Nosferatu, Kansas, to open a new branch of Km.P.H. on the west coast, here in San Rafael. At least, opening a branch office was the excuse he used to leave Nosferatu. His real purpose was far greater and his encounter with me brought him that much closer to realizing his goals. The Change "I was feverish and weak from my initial, violent encounter with Fritz in the bar. When he returned to his hotel room the next day and found me pouring over his volumes, my eyes were red and swollen not only from hours of endless reading but also from a high-grade fever that had spread throughout my body. When I said I needed medical attention, he just laughed in his coarse way and said that action would be my cure. 'What action,' I asked him. 'You'll see shortly,' he answered. Then he flung me over his shoulder as if I were an afterthought from a Weight Watchers (TM) advertisement and left the hotel with such speed that we appeared as no more than fleeting shadows to the hotel personnel working in the hallways and lobby. "In the parking lot, he tossed me into the passenger seat of a highway cruiser. By this time I was delirious with the fever, but I managed to ask him how he had acquired a fully equipped highway vehicle. Without looking at me as he pulled out of the parking lot and worked his way onto the northbound lane of Highway 101, he simply stated that a man of technological action could do anything. Then he proceeded to speed on, effortlessly darting among cars and lanes of traffic without hesitation. I'm sure we appeared to the vehicles around us as we had appeared to the hotel personnel: a fleeting shadow because no one looked up at us in consternation or honked a horn in frustration. On our high speed trip, we raced by many locations where I knew RADAR- e quipped patrol cars to be stationed. Yet, no chases ensued and no flashing red lights appeared in our rear view mirror. "I was by this time extremely ill and weary of the outcome of the high-speed car ride. 'Take me to a doctor,' I pleaded. When he did not answer me after many such pleas, I began to murmur (incoherently he later claimed, with little sympathy). 'I want to die. Let me die. It's within your power to let me die. Please.' He never acknowledged me nor looked in my direction. He was determined to make me a man of action." "Would he in any other circumstances have let you go?" asked the mountain biker. "I mean, if he had sensed you were really dying?" "I don't know to this day. Knowing Fritz the way I know him now, I doubt that he would have let me go under any circumstances. But it didn't matter because this was what I really wanted. My old self was whimpering, but that part of me that was becoming conscious of a new and powerful aspect of life was laughing with sheer excitement. I wanted what was happening as much as Fritz did." The cyclist screwed up his face, but before he could open his dry lips, the RADAR Ranger said, "You were going to ask me 'What WAS happening,' weren't you? Men of technological action like Fritz and myself can read the slightest change in a facial expression as easily as we can interpret a question asked in our own tongue. It's an infallible instinct from which no violator of the speed laws can escape with false IDs and elaborate excuses." "What was happening?" the ranger repeated. "Fritz pulled the car over to the side of the road, leaving it in complete view to both directions of traffic, and pulled the K-15 RADAR gun off the dashboard clip. He pushed the power switch to on, turned the range and Doppler audio signal dials to their maximum settings, and flicked the standby transmitter button to make the unit invisible to radar detectors. Then he swung the gun up into the oncoming lane of traffic and pulled back on the trigger switch to lock in the speed of a car bearing down on us. The LED in the target display showed 73 in red, boxy numbers. 'That's a speed that'll add at least $75 to the state's treasury,' mused Fritz. "Wait a minute," blurted out the mountain biker with his eyes anchored on the floor, afraid to face the RADAR Ranger. "What about the tuning fork test. What about a traffic survey to detect possible causes of RADAR interference? What about ..." "What about?" mimicked the ranger in the cyclists high- pitched, concerned tone. "He did all of these things, though I didn't tell you. You're a very knowledgeable fellow who's obviously done his homework. Now would you like to tell the tale or should I continue?" Without waiting for the mountain biker to look up, the RADAR Ranger want on. "After a minute, Fritz pointed down the fast lane of the northbound traffic. 'Here comes a Miata with mag wheels and a shiny new coat of candy- apple red paint. The young female driving looks like she knows what she's up to. Let's see exactly what she is up to.' And Fritz spun the gun up with blinding speed and pulled the trigger. At least he said he did because the movement of his index finger was so fast, I couldn't detect even a blur inside the metal trigger housing. He turned the back of the gun with the target lock display to me and smiled. It showed '73' in its glass-front panel. 'She's yours, Gordon,' he said." The cyclist made a soft, rapid clicking sound with his front teeth when the RADAR Ranger said his own name. "Yes, that's my real name," he admitted and continued his story. "I remember feeling moisture from the Bay adding to the collection of sweat forming on my forehead. 'No, I can't do that,' I cried out. 'It wouldn't work anyway -- we're not officially on duty. What we're doing is illegal,' I said out loud while fearing inwardly the painful similarities between this speeding violation and the one involving my sister. 'I don't want to be guilty of issuing an illegal speeding ticket. I can't live if I let this happen.' Fritz grabbed my shoulders with his immensely powerful hands and shook me until I begged him off. I sat there helpless in the face of my own cowardice and guilt. 'I didn't think you really wanted to die over a speeding ticket, Gordon,' he said disdainfully. It's not worth languishing to death for. Besides, think of the lives you could save by issuing this ticket. How many people are killed every year by speedsters like this red-blooded, young girl. Who could blame you for saving lives? On- duty or off-duty is inconsequential ... I'll see to that.' "But there was no time in Fritz' plan for me to make a decision, there was only time for Fritz' plan. When the red Miata sped past our seemingly invisible location on the side of the highway, Fritz went into pursuit. There was no contest and he had the Miata pulled over to the side of the road less than 3/4 of a mile from where we first began the chase. 'Listen to me, Gordon,' he said, 'I've brought you to this time and place so you can put your past aside and discover a far richer life.' He said these words with great authority and I wanted to believe him. 'Get out of the car now, step around to the driver's side of that Miata, and write her up. There's nothing more to it than that. Free yourself.' The mountain biker's eyes grew large. He had sunk further into the unyielding oak-backed office chair as the RADAR Ranger spoke, his face tensed for the words the ranger was yet to say. " 'I can't,' I pleaded with him. 'It's not right -- it goes against all the principles I work by.' He simply kept his cold gaze centered on me and said, 'You make it right. It's not going to kill you.' I think back on that time, and I can't help but despise him. Not because what he said was wrong, but because he said it with a complete lack of respect and humility. He could have tried to calm me, to guide me to the point where I could have written up the citation without filling myself with angst. But he didn't. His strategy, if he had a strategy at all, was to push. He was never the RADAR Ranger I am. Never.' It was clear to the cyclist that the ranger was not boasting. He said these words as if he actually would have had it turn out differently. "But I could not withstand his strength of will. I slid out from under his loosened grasp, opened the car door, and walked around to the young woman still seated behind her leather-covered steering wheel. She already had her license out and handed it to me without a question. When I was through with it, she presented me with the car's registration. And again no verbal exchange of any kind took place between us. The entire affair took less than ten minutes, she pulling back onto the freeway when it was over while I closed the door soundlessly beside me as I sat down next to a smiling Fritz. "Have you ever done something that was in such sharp contrast to your normal experiences that it hurt just to think about it, but, at the same time, felt so exhilarating that you thought about doing it over and over?" the ranger addressed the mountain biker. The cyclist formed the word no with his tight lips, but the word made no audible sound. He cleared his throat and the word finally spilled out for the ranger to hear. "I felt that mixed exhilaration then for the first time," confessed the RADAR Ranger. He looked for a long time at his reflection in the window pane. Then he said, "The thought of it prickled the hair all over my body, sent a jolt of sensation through me that was close to the pleasure of passion." He mused in silence a moment longer. "Within seconds I was weakened to a state of paralysis. Panic stricken, I couldn't force myself to speak. Fritz held me tightly in the front of the patrol car. 'Steady, Gordon,' he commanded. 'Don't try to speak. This is the first time you've issued a speeding citation and understood. Actually understood! You'll feel weak at first, but your strength will return with an enhanced vibrancy. You'll find your mind and body both focused upon a new life spirit." The RADAR Ranger paused, then frowned. "How sad it is to talk of such things whose meaning can't be understood with words alone." The mountain biker slipped lower in his chair, hoping the ranger wouldn't look at him directly. "At first, I saw nothing but an unnatural white light rushing to surround and cut me off from the interior of the patrol car. The light hid Fritz from me, too. Then the pounding started in my head, growing louder and louder. It was as if some great, heavy-footed creature of light was devouring me. And once that creature had finished its meal, another creature, pounding its hooves into my belly and following the beat of its own drum, took its meal of me, too. Soon, too many creatures to count were tearing me apart at once, each struggling over an arm, a leg, or a part of my neck for their feeding. The frenzy passed into all my senses, into the throbbing of my finger tips, into the wispy flesh of my temples. Do you understand," he shouted at the cyclist, "it was because I had written that speeding citation!" The mountain biker trembled in his small, lifeless chair. "No .... I mean ... I'm not sure ..., sir" he stammered. "Of course, you're not sure ... you couldn't possibly know," the ranger broke in. "I saw and understood like a RADAR Ranger for the first time." "What happened next," ventured the cyclist, large beads of perspiration snaking down his forehead and onto the ends of his lashes. "Fritz was still sitting next to me when this new fever passed out of my body. I don't know how long it had taken and I suppose it doesn't matter, either. When I looked upon his face, he had changed, or, at least the way I saw him, had changed. Before, he had seemed pale and almost insubstantial in his coloring. Now, he seemed to pulse with life from within and that pulsing caused him to appear radiant. And then I noticed that it was not just Fritz who had changed, but all things that came into my view. "Colors and shapes -- it was as if I had never seen them before. The stitches around the button holes on Fritz' cotton fabric shirt excited my attention for many minutes. The patterns they cut through the cotton were the most amazing I could have ever imagined. Then a foghorn blast from the Bay played a full and long symphony of strings, winds, and percussion for me. It was at first disturbing, each sound colliding with the next, until I learned to separate and enhance the quality of each. The symphony in my head continued until a new sound entered, breaking up the previous melodies and harmonies. At last I recognized it as Fritz' laughter. " 'What's happening to me. Have you stuck some drug into my veins?' I cried. " 'You're turning into a RADAR Ranger, you fool. You're changing, yes, but you still have your reason. Now, take your eyes off my button holes, and calm yourself. We have more to learn tomorrow. What we need now is rest.' "Are we going back to the hotel, then," I asked. 'No,' he answered, swiftly reaching to the back seat, pulling it up and then forward to reveal a Lycra (TM)-lined sleeping space that extended into the trunk of the patrol car. "That black hole frightened me more than I can tell you. I pleaded with Fritz to let me sleep in the front seat, but he only laughed, obviously puzzled. 'You really don't know what you've become, do you?'" I'd been claustrophobic my entire life -- as a small boy, I had great difficulty just getting my body to function whenever I stood alone in front of the john with the door closed in our small, one-bathroom home. Now I was supposed to crawl into a space the size of a mummy bag whose features I couldn't see and with a man who terrified me. Fritz and I argued, shouting inanities back and forth. But while we argued, I came to realize that, at that moment, I actually felt no fear looking into the opening of the trunk. What I was afraid of, I realized, were my memories of being enclosed. I was hanging onto memories that no longer had meaning for me in my altered state. 'You're acting like a fool,' Fritz finally said. 'This fear you talk about has nothing to do with you at all. It's out of you now. You sound like a man who has had his tonsils or appendix removed and still complains about the pain where those organs used to be.' Well, that statement had a profound effect on me. It was the most intelligent thing Fritz had ever said to me and it jolted me awake as much as if he had thrown a bucket of cold water on me. 'I'm getting into that trunk right now,' said Fritz, 'and if you have any senses at all, you'll get in without another lame word.' I did. It was the first of many nights we were to sleep on the road." The cyclist moved his arm as if to interrupt the RADAR Ranger. "What ..." "I'm not letting you ask enough questions, am I," said the ranger. "You were going to ask what happened that night." "Well .... yes," fidgeted the mountain biker on the edge of his seat. "Absolutely nothing. I slept the sleep of the dead, perhaps I should say 'damned,' as I imagine Fritz did also. The next morning, before dawn, I awoke and felt the change in me. The first thing I noticed was Fritz himself, still asleep on his back in his half of the trunk. Looking down on him from above as I was doing, I felt nothing but disdain for him. He was still my superior in all things, but the gulf between us had narrowed since the previous evening. Before issuing that speeding ticket, Fritz was close to incomprehensible to me -- a magical Peter Pan who both frightened and excited me, a being whom I couldn't possibly hope to understand. Now he was for me a far more comprehensible Captain Hook whom I couldn't pretend to admire. "Oh!" the mountain biker interjected. "When you say the distance between you two had narrowed, you mean he no longer deluded you." "Yes," said the ranger with obvious relish. "That morning, after Fritz woke, we drove south along the length of 101 to a turnoff just before the Golden Gate Bridge that led to the Marin Headlands. The entire time Fritz kept up a constant and boring monologue that I found quite disheartening. He talked about the weather. He talked about Silicon Valley software company mergers. As he turned right off the highway onto the headlands steep frontage road, he started talking about Madonna's newest musical video. It was all so shallow and ... and so incredibly uncaring for me and the radical changes he had pushed me into. Then in the very next breath, while he pulled into an off-road parking space in front of a WWI bunker not more than two hundred yards up the hill from the highway exit and, following a long discourse on diverting water from the Russian River to fuel new development in Marin County, he suddenly turned his gaze away from the windshield and said to me, 'Gordon, it's time you bring to justice your first real speeding violator. I don't simply mean issuing those mom-and-pop citations the way you used to -- the way you did with your sister. Even the way you did last night. I mean bringing in the big ticket speeders with Knowing and Understanding.' "When he mentioned my sister, my heart froze mid-beat. We had never discussed my sister and I didn't know how he could have found out about her. No one outside our immediate family was aware of Jackie's situation. 'How do you know about my sister?' I screamed in his face. Grinning a yellow smile, he answered, 'Your fame eludes you, Gordon. It's because of how you handled your sister's crime that I'm offering you this freedom.' " 'Crime?' I said in disbelief. 'Her speeding wasn't a crime, at least not the way you mean it. She didn't stay awake nights plotting the fastest route from Terra Linda to Novato. If you're going to blame anyone, blame fate ... a warm, sunny day and a new convertible car caused a beautiful, young girl to daydream and slip ever so slightly over the speed limit. That's not a crime!' " 'Gordon, speeding is a crime, no matter how fast you're going. That's why we have posted speed limits and RADAR to enforce those limits.' Fritz stopped here and cracked his knuckles, one by one, his cold grey eyes holding me in check. When the last of his gnarled joints had popped, he laughed out loud. 'Fate. What the devil is Fate, Gordon? Is it Fate that brings you the joy of winning the lottery? No, it's you willing yourself to walk into the store and buy the winning ticket. Is it Fate that bankrupts your business? No, it's the vote you willingly cast for the wrong candidate in the last election. Is it Fate that's responsible for the neighbor's cat being run over by a speeding driver? No, it's the driver willingly pushing the throttle beyond the acceptable limits and not being able to brake the car in time. Is it Fate that intervened when you and your sister met on the side of the highway that day? No, Gordon, it wasn't Fate ... you wanted to be there and you wanted to issue that ticket! And you did and that's why I can set you free.' "Every muscle in my body was straining to tear loose from its ligaments and smother that monster beside me until the last arrogant flame of knowing flickered out of his eyes. While I managed to control my rage, I could do nothing to check the deep pain that pulsed to the marrow of my bones. Pulsed because I knew he was right. I had wanted to catch my sister speeding and write her up; it was only now that I could admit it. I was as evil as Fritz and, at that moment, I hated myself as much as I hated him." "Excuse me," said the cyclist, "but weren't you just letting the situation manipulate your feelings and it only seemed to you that ...." "No," the RADAR Ranger cut him short. "I know what I'm saying and I'm not finding fault with you for not understanding -- you are only a mountain biker, after all." The Presidio The cyclist shifted uneasily in his chair, trying to hide his trembling by pushing it through the narrow, uneven knot hole he knew was opening somewhere between his Durango (TM) SPD Compatible MTB shoes in the gloom of Sky Oaks. Waiting for the ranger to resume his tale, he clasped his hands tightly together. The ranger, sensing his audience's unease, reached across the table and grasped the cyclist's shoulder. "Excuse me," he said. "I didn't mean to frighten you. You wanted to hear my story and I'm telling you all of it, even those parts that I find troubling. Don't let it bother you." The mountain biker slowly nodded his quiet agreement without looking up and the RADAR Ranger went on. "I had never thought of myself as evil, evil in the Biblical sense, but I did so know. Powerful and evil. Evil and powerful. Evil alive. No matter how I looked at it, it spelled the same thing forwards and backwards. With these palindromic thoughts spiralling in my head, Fritz reached over and touched the black plastic dash panel in front of me. 'I've got a little surprise for you,' he said, the corners of his mouth curling up into a partial smile. 'I've taken the liberty of having your patrol car tuned up.' " 'What are you talking about,' I said. 'My car wasn't scheduled for any maintenance. You couldn't have got it out of the yard anyway, you don't have the authorization.' " 'You'd be surprised at what I'm capable of doing, Gordon. In fact, if your current reaction is any indication, you're going to be really surprised when you find out what you're capable of doing yourself. But all that in its own time.' With that, he backed out of the dirt parking space in front of the weathered concrete bunker and drove back down the steep access road to the stretch of 101 crossing the Golden Gate Bridge. We rode in silence across the mile-long span, until he pulled over to the far right-hand lane just before the toll booth, and looked over at me as if to say, 'Watch this.' We waited our turn in line before drawing up to the toll window. A sign demanded $7 to cross onto the San Francisco side of the windy gate. Fritz looked up at the young female toll keeper and smiled that little, half crooked Jack Nicolson smile of his. She smiled back and the toll light flashed green, thanking him for the $7 that hadn't left the back of his wallet. Fritz drove through, grinning like Jack Nicolson turned Cheshire cat. "He took a sharp right at the very next exit and headed into what was left of the Presidio. I used to roam around in there when I was kid, right after it was closed down. Probably before you were born and before the city declared the old army base off-limits to the public. The public wouldn't want to go in there now, anyway, at least from what I saw of it that morning. Fritz seemed to know his way around, though. He followed a weed-cracked thoroughfare for a distance, then turned onto a broken-up side street and wound his way through a bevy of what looked like officer homes and finally pulled to a stop next to an old warehouse buried at the base of a eucalyptus- covered hillock. The wooden service door through which city employees used to unload the military-contracted big Mac's and Mercedes and Volvos hung down listlessly from one corner of the open entrance. " 'Let's go inside and unwrap your present,' said a grinning Fritz and pulled me outside the car with a strength that still overwhelmed me. Sunlight reflected brightly off the dirty stuccoed walls and blinded my eyes to anything that may have been lurking at the edge of the entrance. The old building frightened me, I don't know why, even though we approached it in broad daylight. Perhaps as a defensive mechanism I momentarily tranced off into a daydream, then startled myself back to consciousness when I felt the soothing slap-slap echo of our approaching footfalls suddenly buried in the far corners of the building. We were standing at the edge of the entrance, the heels of our boots bathed in warm sunlight, the toes lost to the building's darkness. "Waterfalls of light from small roof-line windows highlighted mounts of ancient dust, and disintegrating cardboard cartons that once held the tools of war clustered along the far walls. Against the wall directly opposite us a shrunken, dark shadow cautiously followed the broken line formed by the junction of wall, floor, and wooden crates. A building mired so deeply in purple prose as this one certainly harbored more than one diseased rat, you can be sure, but that's not what caught my attention. In the center of the warehouse was my patrol car, floating securely in the middle of a dusty ocean with tracks neither leading to nor from it through waves of dirt. " 'Maybe they brought it in with a crane,' Fritz said reading my thoughts. 'A crane standing outside the entrance wouldn't have left any tracks inside, you know. Plop! the car comes down in the middle of the warehouse and no one knows any the better. Mystifying.' " 'How did it get there, Fritz?' I asked as calmly as possible, not wanting to give him the satisfaction of my anger and confusion. "Don't think it was done with a crane ... no, certainly not a crane. But time's a' wasting,' he laughed. 'Let's take a look at this new car of yours. He slipped the index finger of his right hand through my nearest belt loop and hauled me sideways across the open expanse to the object of his delight. The car didn't look any different from the outside -- same standard purple and yellow paint job, side view mirrors, lights, reinforced bumpers. Nothing really had been changed. " 'Okay,' I said, struggling to pull his finger out of the loop without tearing the double-stitched cloth off my pants.' I don't see anything so remarkable here ... it all looks the same to me.' " 'Open the hood and tell me what you see.' I was way ahead of him and had already punched the button with my thumb to open the driver-side door, then reached in and pulled back the hood-release latch underneath the dash on the right side of the steering wheel. The hood popped up an inch or so; I walked around to the front of the car and reached underneath the quavering hood with my upturned right hand, found the smooth surface of the internal latch and squeezed it back. The catch released and the hood lifted slowly and quietly up on its rear hinges. Moldy darkness quickly settled over the engine compartment, but my eyes began almost immediately to adjust to the dim light. I couldn't see anything different about the engine. " 'Makes Stephen King's car, Christine, look like a little girl still hanging onto her mother's exhaust pipe, huh, Gordon?' " 'I don't see anything different about this engine,' I shot back to him. 'You want this car to move, you'd put Cowl hood scoops up top. You've got to pump some extra air into the fuel injection system to make it really move.'" The Mustang "Fritz stood there looking at me with what seemed like pity in his eyes. Prolonging the moment by slowing puffing out his chest with air inhaled noisily through his nose, he finally broke the silence and hissed through his teeth, 'Gordon, I'll explain it as simply as I can for you. There is no Cowl induction hood, or any other typical induction scoops up top, for two good reasons: reason number one -- this is no typical car and reason number two -- we don't want people to catch on right away that this is no typical car. Put in a scoop and people know you've got something different. We don't want that, do we?' "Fritz didn't wait for me to answer. 'Tell me to stop if I start to bore you, Gordon, but here's the real scoop. Stock, these Ford Mustang GT engines have a short block with forged pistons and connecting rods. Your block has been lowered to handle your new Paxton centrifugal supercharger forced induction system I we put it low enough so we didn't have to cut a hole in the hood and broadcast its presence to the world. Standard forged pistons and connecting rods can't handle the kind of power you're going to be cranking out, so we've replaced them with super tough Venola forged blower pistons, Crower rods with big, heavy, stiff bolts, and a magnefluxed crankshaft. This baby is going to rock 'n roll, Gordon, but it isn't going to do the Twist.' " 'Okay, okay! I get the picture,' I said. 'No you don't,' he snapped at me. 'Listen and learn something -- you can't be a man of action if you don't listen first. Without the Paxton, your stock GT puts out about 12 pounds of boost per square inch, which adds up, in the engine's stock configuration, to roughly 225 horse power and 300 foot pounds of torque. Sissy stuff. With our little adjustments, it now kicks out 26 pounds of boost per square inch, or 600 horse power (at 6500 rpm) and 750 pounds of torque. Even had to have a special pulley and belt created to withstand that kind of power, a power that's going to blow your regular bearings through the bottom of the engine. So we replaced your old 3.02 block with a bullet-proof 351 cubic inch SVO block with 4-bolt main bearing caps. Ah, but we're not done, Gordon. Not done; no, not yet. I caught a glimpse of excitement in your eyes, didn't I. We pulled out your stock fuel injection system and replaced it with Ford Motorsport GT-40 fuel injectors. To make it really efficient, we tossed out all smog control devices -- stuff like catalytic converters, the smog pump, EGR gas recirculation and stuff like that. This is a hot car, Gordon; you'll have to roll your windows down to stay cool, though, because we dispensed with your air conditioning, a real horse-power hog. The old GT already comes with small exhaust manifold headers, but we couldn't leave them alone either. This old Mustang now passes gas through Cyclone Tubular Racing headers into large collectors connected to big ol' 2.5 inch exhaust pipes and two-chamber Flowmaster low restriction mufflers. She'll sound like a beast from hell when you fire her up.' " 'I don't want a beast from hell, Fritz. I don't think I want any of this. You're crazy, and I don't think I want any part of you.' "Still ignoring my comments and frustration, Fritz sped on. 'No way in the world your old rear end would stand up to the forces descending on her now, so we cut her bottom out and put in a tough Richmond 9 inch rear-end gear housing with axles. You need rubber on the road to make use of your new found power and torque, so we slipped on 315 Goodyear Gatorbacks, after cutting back the rear wheel wells, of course, so these monsters wouldn't stick out too far and attract undue attention. Koni gas-filled shocks all around suck up the Gs you'll be subjecting this little beauty to.' " 'So, what's the bottom line?' beamed Fritz. 'With 3.55 rear-end ring and pinion gears, this predator'll pop off the line and do 0 to 60 in 2.5 seconds, burning the quarter mile in 10.5 seconds. Turn off the nitrous oxide (I forgot to tell you about the nitrous oxide? Sorry about that -- use it with caution!) and I'm afraid she'll only hang in around 3.0 for 0-60 and cross the quarter line in a disappointing 11 seconds. I'll try to fix that next go 'round.' " 'Don't thank me, not yet' continued Fritz. 'There's more ... I'm surprised you didn't notice it when you first popped the hood's latch from the inside. I don't think you've quite got the knack for making the most of your heightened RADAR senses, yet,' Fritz smirked. 'Look over there under your regular computer console.' I listened to his words and traced my gaze along the broken outline of his outstretched finger to its curved end, then worked my way down the invisible, straight line that ran from his nail to a crowded spot below my state-issue computer screen and keyboard. Another electronic screen glowed faintly green there. Across its back-lit surface swarmed a tangle of intersecting lines. " 'It's a map, that green glow you see there. What we have here is a rather sophisticated computer that puts to shame most of its electronic brethren. Of course, what you see here is only part of the computer; the rest of it is in orbit directly over the west coast at a rather constant altitude of 123 miles. Wherever the car goes, the satellite beams its position to a database of coordinates digitally linked to the cities and streets you find yourself cruising through.' "Gothic goes high-tech," whistled the almost-forgotten mountain biker under his breath. "What was that?" questioned the RADAR Ranger, grudgingly returning his thoughts to Sky Oaks. "Nothing, actually. I'm sorry to have interrupted your story, sir. Please go on with it -- it's all very fascinating." The RADAR Ranger continued." 'Your car is this red dot,' elaborated Fritz. 'It's stationary now because the car's not moving. But when you're traveling on the road, the dot moves along the road's green squiggle on the screen.' " 'This is all very interesting, but I don't see it's purpose. What do red dots and green lines have to do with anything?' "Fritz stood there looking at me, the fingers of his left hand rasping back and forth across the gray stubble on his chin. " 'Gordon, I shouldn't have to show you everything. Take responsibility for your own freedom and see what you can discover on your own. We're not talking about Fate here ... we're talking about you taking action to become free. Listen and don't talk. The red dot is you. The green line shows where you are. Flip this little switch below the monitor and if any vehicles are within the territory covered by the monitor, they show up as blue dots. Now move the cursor over any blue dot with the track ball, and push the button to its right and, voila, the monitor displays the speed of the vehicle you're monitoring. Do you see the potential in this? Blind corners, dips in the road, mountain sides I none of these can hide speeders from you. You're rendered virtually omniscient.' "I stood there in fascinated silence. Suddenly I was beginning to see and understand like a RADAR Ranger. Obstacles that got in the way of enforcing the law were demolished with the flick of a tiny, plastic switch. A plastic switch. " 'Good God,' I exclaimed. 'This is incredible.' " 'It's more than that,' acknowledged Fritz. 'No matter how far away they are, you'll be on top of them before they can repeat 'Modified Ford Mustang in my rear view mirror.' There's only one catch to the whole operation and I'm sure it won't present any problems for you. I shouldn't even bother to mention it.' " 'Mention it, Fritz. Mention it.' "For this unit -- car and electronics -- to work properly, you've got to bring down five speeders a day. That's all. Nothing more. What are you responsible for now? Fifteen? Twenty? See how easy it is? Before long, you'll be tripling and quadrupling that number.'" " 'Five speeders a day? Just five speeders a day?' I rolled the words around in my mouth, flicking them with my tongue here and there, savoring their simplicity. 'And I could increase that number as easily as you say? And all according to the law books?' " 'Yes, to your first question, speeders will take to you like flies to sticky paper,' laughed Fritz. 'No, to your second question,' his eyes narrowing to tiny slits. 'What we're talking about here isn't written up in the law books. What we're talking about follows a much higher code I a much higher law. We're talking about the code followed by men of action who see to it that the products of science are used in the best interests of the people.'" "Did you question his integrity, then?" quizzed the mountain biker. "Did you point out the flaws in his reasoning, in his misplaced sense of public trust?" "I asked him when we could begin," replied the RADAR Ranger to the shocked cyclist. "But what about your own sensibilities and internal sense of right and wrong, sir?" stammered the wide-eyed mountain biker. The RADAR Ranger hesitated, and when he spoke there was a catch in his voice. "I admit that I made a mistake. But let me continue with my tale. I was about to relate the experience of my first citation, equipped as I was with that monstrous patrol car and all its electronic wizardry. It should be clear to you now that there was only one possible outcome. Do I have to tell you what that outcome was?" When the suddenly passive mountain biker did not answer after several moments, the agitated ranger, rapping his knuckles against the scarred table top to a beat the cyclist could not identify, continued. "The outcome should be obvious to you -- Fritz blew it with his typical lack of empathy for me." "Blew it, sir?" repeated the mountain biker. "Right out his Flowmaster low restriction mufflers. I should never have started with full-sized passenger vehicles as he demanded. As with all my experiences involving Fritz, this was something I had to eventually learn on my own anyway. Fritz quite literally pushed me into the driver's seat and demanded that I follow him. 'Just drive,' he ordered, 'and don't think twice about what happens.' There was plenty to think about, though. After I turned the key in the ignition and my vehicle fired up, it seemed to drive itself. I was there, sure, behind the steering wheel, with my feet working the pedals on the floor, but my presence only seemed coincidental. The instant those 315 Gatorbacks began spinning in the rear, the car shot forward, streaking out past the opening in the warehouse and into the air beyond the raised loading dock, coming down on those gas-filled Koni's with barely a jolt discernable in the cockpit. Just ahead of me, Fritz was maneuvering his car with the patient skill of an Indianapolis 500 driver, taking Presidio corners skidless at high speed, accelerating to redline velocity down short bridge approaches, threading his way seamlessly through heavy traffic as we crossed back over the Golden Gate Bridge and into Marin County along 101. "We went through a rigorous driving school at the Academy, but what I practiced there could never have prepared me for what was happening now. Where I normally would drift through corners, I was holding tight to the road. Unexpected obstacles I cars or pedestrians cutting in front of me I should have been reasons for collisions, but were easily avoided. And what was most startling to me was that no one seemed to notice us. No one, not the toll keepers as we rocketed over 100 mph through the free-direction entrance of the bridge, not the drivers of passenger vehicles whose cars surely must have rock 'n rolled with the jet of air both proceeding and trailing us, not the pilots in the routine spotter planes circling above the highway, and not the RADAR- equipped patrol cars camouflaged in among roadside billboards and shrubbery. We were masked to everyone but ourselves. "You can imagine the fear and confusion I felt," confided the RADAR Ranger. "They're probably the only two emotions I have consistently through this tale. Had he had any sensibility and compassion, Fritz could have eased my fears with well-thought out explanations offered in soothing tones. He could have explained that I did not have to fear a high-speed collision or worry about striking down a pedestrian or of being pulled over by one of my fellow officers, but that I just needed to focus on the new experience that was enveloping me. Instead, his voiced crackled over my radio with condemnations and insults about my inability to take action. He was only interested in bringing down a speeder, completing my initiation, and moving onto his next abomination. "About 15 miles north of the bridge, Highway 101 climbs over one of many small, partially wooded hills. It was at the base of this particular hill that Fritz shouted at me over the radio to look at my computer screen. 'The blue dots, you fool, don't you see the blue dots on the road ahead going down the other side of this stump of a hill. What a catch!' he continued to scream into the radio. 'If I'm not a RADAR Ranger with the eyes of a hungry panther, that looks like a convoy of five big rigs. What a feast, Gordon! This is your lucky day. Put the cursor over one of those blue meanies and get a speed readout.' I did as he said and my screen brightened with a reading of '74.' Before I knew what was happening, the little switch below and to the left of my steering wheel snapped down of its own accord, nitrous oxide sped into the Ford Motorsport GT-40 fuel injectors, and the chase was over before it had time to begin." "Did you give speeding tickets to the drivers of all five big rigs?" asked the mountain biker quietly. "Yes and no," replied the RADAR Ranger. "As usual, Fritz had only been partially correct in his observations. We had, indeed, brought down five speeding, highly visible vehicles. But they weren't big rigs. It was a convoy of motorhomes on their way to the Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon. 'Big rigs, motorhomes,' Fritz droned on after we had pulled up behind the last of the vacationing vehicles lining the shoulder of the road, 'what difference does it make? You have the opportunity to take real action here, Gordon. Stop diddling around and do it. You can thank me later.' "I stepped around to the driver's side of the first vehicle and froze. The driver of the motorhome was a gray- haired, wrinkled gentleman of 78 and next to him was his wife of 55 years, gray-haired and wrinkled, too. They reminded me of my parents I my own flesh and blood! I couldn't take action against a couple like this. The memory of my own parents, of Jackie, really, was too powerful to escape. Fritz was, of course, outraged with me when he should have been saying and doing things to make this ticketing experience a rich, rewarding one." "I don't understand what you mean," said the cyclist. "What things could he have said and done?" "Bringing down speeders is no ordinary act," began the RADAR Ranger. "You don't simply gorge yourself on the distress and misery of the law breakers. No," he shook his head. "Writing up a citation is a celebration of life I of guaranteeing and sustaining a point of view that benefits so many. For RADAR Rangers, this is the highest experience." The ranger stated this most seriously, all the time looking at the mountain biker as if he were talking to someone who held contrary views. "I'm sure Fritz never fully appreciated the experience this way, at least I never saw him do so. Whatever," the ranger continued painfully, "Fritz did not bother to remind me of the exhilaration I had felt the previous evening after issuing the ticket to the red Miata, nor did he try to help me work through my current confusion and issue these tickets with dignity and understanding. He bolted through the whole process as if he wanted to be done with it as quickly as possible, like a little boy spooning broccoli into his mouth just to leave the dinner table and get on with his play time. All he said to me was, 'Do it. Don't be an ass.'" "He'd beaten me emotionally into the ground already and I couldn't get up to refuse him," admitted the RADAR Ranger. "I went from motorhome to motorhome, writing up the old folks for the maximum fine. I was at first ashamed and embarrassed. But once I got beyond their tears and pleas for leniency ('This was going to ruin a beautiful trip and destroy an already fragile budget'), once I got into the moment, all my fears and frustrations vanished. I dined on the event with delirium. "The pathetic crying of the old folks, Fritz' callousness, the thunder of the passing trafficQit was all enveloped, tamed, and then consumed by the unnatural white light and the beating of the blood coursing through my temples. My hands tingled with the rush of air pouring into my lungs and my feet floated dizzily above the ground. Then the vice-tight grip of Fritz pulled me back. " 'You've already ticketed them once; you don't have to go around and give them each another ticket, you fool.' I was still in a citation frenzy and unable to regain my senses. I desperately wanted to write out as many tickets as I could and had my face pressed up against the waxy ear of one of the terrified drivers. I would have cited him on multiple violations if Fritz hadn't planted a powerful blow to my derriere. It was a sensational jolt that traveled up my spine I not painful I no I enlightening is the only way I can explain it to you. One moment I was becoming one with and feasting in the traffic court of the cosmos, then the next moment I found myself leaning against the door of my patrol car, the buzzing insects of the early evening clustering around the salty sweat soaking through my uniform, the motorhomes, Fritz later informed me, gone for minutes. " 'One ticket only per law breaker,' Fritz was shouting at me. 'Writing two tickets at the same time is like bringing matter and anti-matter together. You can't survive the experience; your days of action will be over.' His voice upset me, put my nerves on end, but I sensed that what he was now telling me was, indeed, important to my survival as a RADAR Ranger. I followed him without thinking back to his parked vehicle. Watching him walk in front of me, placing one regulation boot in front of the other, I suddenly realized the difference between us. For me, the writing of a speeding ticket with my new powers had been apocalyptic. It had changed my perception of everything, from my memories of Jackie to the sensation of a misty fog giving birth to dew drops on the hairs of my bare arms. I couldn't conceive of another RADAR Ranger taking similar experiences lightly. It had changed me; it had to have changed them, too, in profound ways. I experienced everything now with a new understanding and respect. Fritz, however, displayed none of these insights. He seemed to me to be the lunkhead of RADAR Rangers. I realized then that Fate had dealt me a cruel hand, anteing him up as my mentor. I would have to put up with him as long as he had things to show meQif, indeed, he had anything left to showQand accommodate myself to his blasphemous behavior. Life for me was now rich with beautiful experiences, and to make the most of these many precious moments, I would have to take control of my learning. Fritz was only in the way. "Can you follow my reasoning when I say to you that I did not want to charge willy-nilly into these experiences, but rather savor each one of them individually? That my experiences and sensations as a RADAR Ranger were too exquisite to be wasted?" "Yes," replied the mountain biker with conviction. "What you're describing sounds like being in love, sir." "Yes," beamed the RADAR Ranger, "like being in love. An incomparable feeling, and I just couldn't understand how a person could misuse and waste these feelings. Then Fritz unknowingly showed me how I could continue my learningQmy lovingQwithout offending my sensibilities. He was squinting into the distance, peering at a dim object on the highway too tiny for me to identify. Before I could ask him what had caught his attention, Fritz moved as if a blur into his patrol car and sped onto the highway. Within moments I saw him and the tiny object pull over to the roadside. Without question, he had spotted a speeder, given chase, and was now issuing the citation. Swift and without mercy. I thought no more of it I at least, I put it out of my mind until Fritz returned a few minutes later. A disgusted, almost disquieted expression creased the corners of his angry mouth. " 'I don't like it at all, not at all,' he said as he squirmed out from behind his steering wheel. "You've taken up so much of my time with your babbling and nonsense today, I had no other choice.' " 'No other choice about what?' I asked bewildered. " 'You saw what I had to do, or are you telling me that you couldn't even manage to follow that with your new senses? My God, Gordon. I have to issue citations every day, too. I'm as energized as you are by the rush of the chase and the bringing down of law breakers. The larger the cubic inch displacement, the greater the horsepower of the offender, the more energy flows into us. You felt that yourself just now when you wrote up those five motorhomes. What I just did was to maintain my status quo, to keep my numbers up. Believe me, it wasn't a pleasure. I barely got the slightest charge from it.' " 'What the devil are you mumbling about?' I forced out in agitation. " 'That damned motorcyclist,' an annoyed Fritz replied. 'Wasn't even one of those big, four-stroke bikes. A little 250 cc machine. I'm surprised he was able to break 55. Not much energy transference there, but it counts on the old score card nonetheless.' " 'You mean, then, that we can survive on issuing citations to motorcycles?' I was excited because I felt no moral repulsion bringing down motorcycles. I mean, after all, motorcycles aren't the same as passenger vehicles, motorhomes, or big rigs. Motorcycles posed far less of a moral dilemma for me than the other vehicles, you see. " 'Oh sure,' responded Fritz, 'but who wants to do it. In the scheme of things, it's quite trivial. Pretty petty, actually. If you want to get real petty, though, you might as well ticket bicycles. You can always find them riding on the highways illegally, pedalling through residential stop signs, sometimes even breaking the speed limit coasting down steep hills. Real food for a man of action like yourself, Gordon!' "Bicycles, huh?" queried the mountain biker rather sheepishly. But the RADAR Ranger ignored the cyclist's apparent concern and continued his story. "Fritz was laughing heartily at the image of me bringing down two wheelers, but, for the first time, I wasn't frustrated by his cynicism. Motorcycles and bicycles would be my salvation I my ticket to a Disneyland of fresh, new experiences. "While these images occupied my thoughts, Fritz continued on with his ceaseless bantering. 'Gordon,' he was saying, 'there's still so much you don't know. Two tickets to the same law breaker at the same time can be your end. But do you know the other ways you can harm yourself? And causing harm to your person with so many experiences yet to come would be such a shame, wouldn't it? " 'Surely there must be other RADAR Rangers who can instruct me,' I said. 'You can't be the only RADAR Ranger in the world. Someone had to teach the ways of RADAR to you.' " 'And whose crystal ball are you going to use to find these other RADAR Rangers, Gordon? Without question, they'll see your insubstantial form coming, but you're not going to see them.' Saying that, Fritz moved his hands so quickly as to make them nearly invisible, taking the badge off my shirt and holding its shiny surface under my disbelieving eyes. 'No, Gordon, I'm your teacher and you're my student. In that you don't have a choice. Now, enough of this foolish chatter. Let's get some sleep. We'll use the back of my car; it'll be more secure for us that way. When we awake in the morning, we'll be all that much closer to upholding the law.' " 'No, Fritz,' I calmly replied. 'You sleep in your own vehicle and I'll sleep in mine.' "He became instantly furious. 'Don't be stupid, Gordon. We're safer if we sleep in the same vehicle, better security that way. And I' he went on to list scores of reasons, none of which I considered or let persuade me. He might as well have been talking to his Venola forged blower pistons. I watched him as he raved on, a mental scarecrow of a man, stuffed with spindly reasoning and inferior ethics. "With his hateful words streaming at my departing back, I climbed into the front of my cruiser under the dimly lit night sky, reached over the front seat, and pulled the back seat up and then out to reveal my own Lycra (TM)-lined sleep space. I slipped easily into it, my state-issue boots grazing the back wall of the dark trunk.' The ranger fell silent now. "And that's how you became a RADAR Ranger, sir?" the mountain biker asked, more from a desire to dispel the unease that was gripping him than from any deep seated curiosity. "Yes, that's how I became a RADAR Ranger." "You were partner to a RADAR Ranger you disliked greatly," said the mountain biker after a long silence. "Yes, I disliked him immensely, but I had to remain with him. I mean, he had me at a tremendous disadvantage. He was always insinuating that there were many important things I didn't knowQthings critical to my continued well-being. But when I look back at our existence together, I realize that the things he taught me were quite commonplace and mundane, things that I could figure out for myself. How to get an accurate speed reading with the K-15 RADAR gun when the vehicle crossed its beam at right angles, how to adjust the gun's tuning fork myself rather than loosing precious time sending it to a licensed adjusterQthings of this sort. "During our time together, he constantly berated me for my impassioned attachment to things sensuous, my dis- ease bringing down high-powered vehicles, and my way of expressing the joy I felt while issuing citations for moving violations. When I learned and conveyed amazement that off-the-shelf RADAR detectors had no effect on my modified Ford Mustang cruiser, he convulsed into fits of laughter. Holding his quivering belly with trembling hands, he'd roll over and over on the floor, bellowing out his amusement. "He'd ridicule me, too, when I questioned him about good and evil, about the devil. 'The devil!' he'd shout. 'What have I got to worry about? I am the devil!' And that horrible laughter would start up again. At first he terrified me, as I think you've gathered by now, but as time passed, I developed a detached fascination for him, for all things really. I'd find myself sitting for hours in the Mustang thinking sadly about Fritz' shallow character, about the lives of the drivers who passed me in their insulated, smog-proofed vehicles, about life before RADAR. I marveled over all things great and small with detachmentQa detachment that I believe is an inherent part of a RADAR Ranger's nature. It was this profound detachment, at least, that allowed me to continue living in a world with people of lesser actionQpeople whose natures I couldn't entirely separate myself from. "We shared the world with them, but we didn't participate fully in all its nuances. Material need, for example; we didn't have any. Twice a month, state-issue paychecks would appear in the post office box Fritz had rented on Fourth Street in downtown San Rafael. Early in my relationship with Fritz I had ceased to perform my regular duties on the force, but I was never called in and questioned about my behavior. And the checks continued to arrive at our P.O. box. It was like driving the Mustang: I was there, I had substance, but no one noticed or ever tried to interfere with the actions I was taking. And the speeding citations we issued over all those years I not once did either of us ever receive a summons to traffic court to confront the speeders we had cited. Our tickets went undisputed. It was as if the courts were there to justify our actions, to lend legal credibility. Marin "Ahhh, but let me tell you about Marin and how simple our lives were then. The county was a bouillabaisse of mid-sized to tiny towns and hamlets. These living spaces were scattered throughout the wooded hills and valleys that stretched over the California coast just north of metropolitan San Francisco. Many of the county's well- to-do citizens earned their fortunes from investments flung far and wide throughout the world. As becoming such an affluent group, they conducted much of their business from home, using personal computers, telecommunication software, fax machines, and sophisticated telephony. On occasion, they would be driven to San Francisco, to conduct business, or to one of three major international airports in the Bay Area to touch flesh and pocketbooks in other corners of the globe. Joining them on these travel days were the rest of Marin's citizenry I the commuters who plodded to and from work on the 101 corridor that ran along the edge of Marin county and the San Francisco Bay. " 'A RADAR feast,' Fritz often referred to this traffic corridor. I found his choice of words unappetizing, but he was right. He dined regularly and lavishly along the corridor and the roads feeding into it. Fritz regaled in bringing down females rushing to work, half-filled coffee cups teetering on their plastic dashboard holders, their hair still rolled up in curlers, applying the first of their faces as they sped down those many country feeder lanes or charged toward highway entrances along narrow frontage roads. He went after male CEO-types with equal gusto, delighting in bringing down Mercedes, BMWs, Lexus', and other high-priced luxury sedans. Seeing a car phone in use drove him to the brink of ecstasy. 'Oh, I'm going to reach out and touch someone today!' he'd scream over his radio and, even though I might be miles from the scene, I knew what the cause of his joy was. After he had satiated himself on these delicacies, he'd turn to what he called 'the more mundane food groups': campers, pickups, passenger vehicles pulling trailers, motorhomes, and the big rigs. 'You want to really put on some weight,' he'd tell me, 'you bring down a big rig for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. That's a stomach full.' For appetizers, he'd go after motorcycles, and when he was really in desperate straits or just in the mood to snack, he'd bring down a bicycle or two." "And you?" queried the mountain biker. "What did you do, sir?" "Me?" laughed the RADAR Ranger. "Against all Fritz' tirades and verbal abuse, I remained true to my sensibilities and convictions and brought down nothing larger than two-stroke, 250 cc motorbikes. Fritz called it wasted action, but I was content, finding peace in myself along with new understanding. I was even beginning to take moderate delight in the new experiences engendered by issuing these speeding tickets." "You did this with detachment, even when you ticketed pedal bicycles?" whispered the mountain biker, leaning forward toward the RADAR Ranger over the narrow expanse of the oak table top. "Yes, with great detachment," replied the ranger. "You've implied that Fritz tried to initiate you into RADAR by ticketing more powerful vehicles. Why couldn't you do that with detachment, too? Was your decision, then, to go after smaller vehicles more of an aesthetic one than a moral one?" "Had you put that question to me back then, in the early days, I would have answered 'aesthetic.' I wanted to contemplate RADAR in gradual steps. If bringing down small vehicles brought such pleasure and enlightenment to me that I could barely comprehend them, then I believed I should save the larger, more powerful vehicles for a time when I was more mature in the ways of RADAR. But I was only deluding myself because all aesthetic decisions, in the final analysis, are moral ones." "What a minute," rejoined the mountain biker. "Aesthetic decisions can be immoral. What about the physicist who creates the perfect energy source to please his financial backers, knowing full well they'll use the energy as a military threat to acquire property. Or the government that paves over valuable peasant farming land with a monument to its greatness?" "What you've just described are moral decisions. At least, in the mind of the doersQin the minds of the artists, each serves a higher purpose. It is not a conflict between morals and aesthetics, but one between the morals of the artist and the morals of society. The tragedy of our generation comes from a lack of sensitivity to this distinction. The atomic physicist, in turning over his perfect energy source to militarists, believes he has committed an immoral act and festers in despair, ultimately believing that he has fallen from grace. His work suffers and he no longer has any art at all to offer up to the world. Which is worst I ask you: the acquisition of property or the denial of art to the world? Morality is not a crystal ball that can be dashed to pieces because of a single act. When artists become men of action, these concerns disappear and the whole public benefits. But I wasn't thinking about these issues then. I believed that I brought down small vehicles for aesthetic reasons aloneQand, at first, I ignored the moral debate of whether, because of my new found RADAR nature, I was damned. Belvedere "Damned?" repeated the cyclist. "In my heart, when I went over to Fritz, I believed that I was damned though I never discussed good and evil with him, at least not in the beginning. I had taken the forbidden apple of knowledge and now, I reckoned, must live as an outcast in the very world whose order I wanted to maintain. Do you hear what I'm saying?" The mountain biker peered sheepishly at his own hands fussing idly on the wood table top. He started to say something, then changed his mind. When an uneasy blotch of pink finally swept across his downcast face, he drew his eyes up to look at the RADAR Ranger and managed, "Were you damned?" A thin smile flickered across the ranger's lips like a sliver of light from the naked bulb directly overhead. The mountain biker continued to stare at him from a distance, but the faint trace of the little smile never left the ranger's lips. "Maybe I" offered the RADAR Ranger, letting his folded arms drop effortlessly to his sides "I we should talk about these things in their proper sequence. Can I continue with my story?" "Please, go on," said the cyclist. "Fritz and I continued to work the 101 corridor from the north of Marin in Novato south to the Golden Gate Bridge. As my RADAR Ranger nature matured and my understanding increased, this riddle of damnation grew more pronounced for me. I finally arrived at a point in time when my agitation over this conflict in my personality was more than I could bare and I yelled over at Fritz one winter day, our Mustangs parked side-by-side in hiding behind a Miller Lite (TM) billboard just off the highway, that I didn't want to live any longer. " 'Gordon, you're not a killer; you couldn't take your own life if you tried,' was his response to my outburst. He was right, too. But the powerful emotions created by not fully accepting Fritz' definition of my RADAR nature were still sweeping through my body. They created in me a dark desire for that thing which I knew would satisfy the corresponding physical craving that was gnawing deep within me. You already know what bringing down a speeder means to a RADAR Ranger; now imagine the difference between bringing down a moped and a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow. "Fritz sensed the craving in me that evening and led me out onto the highway. I followed him in my cruiser for what seemed like hours, passing up one opportunity after another. 'Why don't you let me take that one?' I'd radio over to him, pointing to a blue Camaro filled with middle-age yuppies or 'The green Volvo station wagon ahead is traveling 15 miles per hour above the speed limit; let's bring it down.' But Fritz was unwavering in his determination to wait for the right law breaker upon whom I could satiate my craving. "As late afternoon eased into early evening, we found ourselves cruising the tree-lined streets of Belvedere, one of Marin's least affordable communities. Fritz maneuvered expertly through the narrow streets, darting from one secluded marble mansion to the next red-tiled estate. As we rounded a professionally landscaped corner high up on a hill above the white-capped waters of the Bay, Fritz waved my car to a halt and parked his own less than a vehicle length in front of me. Fifty yards ahead, the double wrought-iron gates to a hidden estate slid noiselessly open on their steel tracks. The polished silver grill of every poor boy's dream, a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow, slowly pulled through the newly created opening into the street. Fritz shot a glance back to me, as if to say dinner was served. We followed the Rolls, but kept our distance to avoid undue attention. Fritz knew that I was at the end of my emotional tether that evening and he wasn't going to let the moment escape him by toying needlessly with the Rolls ahead of us. "After the big car had pulled through its first stop sign, Fritz dashed in front of it and pulled it over to the side of the road. I parked behind the two vehicles, the blood pounding in my temples, my sweaty right hand nervously tapping the blood's beat on the cover of my ticket book. Fritz was already out of his car and walking toward my Mustang before I realized that I couldn't control the muscles of my hand enough to grip and open the door, I had become so flustered. 'Get out of the car, Gordon, and take him,' Fritz ordered and he opened my car door from the outside. I stepped out, faltered, but felt strong hands grab at my shoulders and pull me to attention. 'Get a hold of yourself, you idiot. There's only one person in the car, a young man, the chauffeur by the looks of his dress. You've got him on a 'California Stop;' he never came to a complete halt at the sign back there, just rolled right through it.' Fritz pushed me forward with a powerful shove and I lurched up to the driver's window. "You must understand that during this entire evening, while Fritz was leading me hither-and-yon through Marin county, I kept wondering if I were damned. If I were the devil himself. These thoughts tore at my mind. 'What have I turned into by becoming a RADAR Ranger? Where is this damnable path to lead me?' The frenzy in my mind fed into and amplified the physical craving Fritz and sensed in me earlier that afternoon. By this time, I was beyond balancing my sensibilities with the need to write up this driver for a moving violation. "He sat there, behind that expensive teak wood steering wheel, staring up a me in disbelief. 'But officer,' he began to say when I shamefully cut him off with a heated look from my fevered eyes. He was frightened by my countenance, and utterly alone in that car. He was no more than 17, but the look of incredulity that crossed his face as he took me in with his bewildered expression was ageless. He tried again, saying, 'This is my first job' and 'I'm working through a trial period' and 'This could cause me to lose everything.' His pleas broke through to my consciousness, only to trigger that question in my head again: 'Am I damned.' And if I were damned, why did I feel such pity for this youth, for his plight here in the hills of Belvedere? " 'I must be damned,' I said to myself. 'This is surely hell' and in that moment I thought of Fritz and knew there was no escape for me, not from this young driver nor from the creature I had become. Without a word, I dropped the citation in the youth's lap and walked off." "What happened then?" whispered the mountain biker. "Fritz was jumping up and down on the roadside like a man crazed. When he saw me walk away from the Rolls, he rushed over and literally threw me into the air in his delight. 'Gordon, Gordon!' he laughed at me, pointing his hideously gaunt finger in my direction, as if to say he had caught me with my hand in the cookie jar." "Had you felt that same sensation when you'd brought down speeders in the past?" quizzed the mountain biker. "Was it stronger now?" "I felt satiated," paused the RADAR Ranger as he searched for the right words, "but not elated. No, if you must know, I felt damned to the core of my being. I was enraged, utterly out of my mind with hatred. And that hatred, of course, was aimed at Fritz. I looked around the roadside for some implement with which to bash in his head, but found none. Fritz found this all too amusing and jumped into his cruiser and sped away. I gave pursuit, wondering what the driver of the Rolls thought of this bizarre behavior. Fritz, with his superior mechanical skills, easily eluded my attempts to overtake him. He toyed with me as a tomcat toys with a frightened mouse. He'd let me come to within inches of his rear bumper, then make a 180 degree turn at speed, darting past me in the opposite direction, his laughter drowning out the sound of his two-chamber Flowmaster low restriction mufflers in my ears. "When I finally caught up with him, he was parked in one of his favorite roadside hideaways (he claimed to like it because it was kept clean by the local Rotary club). Reason had altogether left me and I flew from my Mustang at him with an all-consuming rage. We fought one another as we had never fought before. It was only the thought of eternal damnation in hellQof grappling with him like this forever in the fires of hellQthat caused me to loose my resolve. He was on top of me, pinning me to the rocky ground with his left knee pressed into my sternum, when I relaxed my feeble hold on him. 'You're mad, Gordon,' he said, those terrible cold eyes cooling the last of the heat to rage through my veins. But his voice was controlled and calm. The fight had done something to him, but I wasn't sure what. I was never sure about Fritz and this time was no exception. I simply listened to his words and did as he said: 'Get in your trunk and go to sleep.' "Closing myself in the back of my cruiser had always been disturbing for me. It was like squirming through the narrow opening into a small, solid rock chamber at the bottom of a very deep cavern. That night was particularly upsetting for me. Among my worries was was whether Fritz meant to kill me. How? I don't know, but he was always hinting at the fact that there was so much more for me to learn and, perhaps among those things, was a way to destroy a RADAR Ranger in his sleep. Suffocation maybe. With these fears haunting my consciousness, I fell into a troubled slumber and dreamed the nightmares of the damned." "RADAR Rangers do dream, then!" exclaimed the mountain biker. "Yes, just like you. But no, not exactly like you people of lesser action. There are differences. Our dreams are long and clear; we awake remembering every detail, normal and grotesque. This I never experienced before I discovered RADAR. And then there are those all-too- frequent nightmaresQthey mix and warp our waking and unconscious perceptions into a mottled tapestry of bent and deformed patterns. Fortunately, so much time separates that night from now, I can't relate the hideous fantasies that surely filled my head.'" The mountain biker, kicking his feet at the emerging hole in the floor of Sky Oaks, appeared relieved to hear this. "From the time I awoke early the next morning until nearly a month later," the RADAR Ranger continued with barely an audible pause in his narration, "Fritz and I did not exchange a single utterance. During these long weeks, I was constantly consumed by the hellish fire of trying to live with the tragedy of my divided nature. I could not forgive Fritz for manipulating me into bringing down the Rolls and I returned quickly to my old pattern of ticketing small motorbikes and bicycles. Yet, it was not so much the guilt I felt for the encounter with the Rolls that burned away at my sensibilities as it was a disgust over my own personal weakness, for I was now convinced that if I could leave Fritz, I would regain that part of me that had been wiped away when he entered my life. Failure to make that separation was the spark that kept the flames burning in me. Finally, in the fourth week after the incident with the Rolls Royce, I mustered the courage to tell him, 'I'm leaving you, Fritz. I can no longer tolerate our relationship.' " 'I've been waiting for some time to hear you say this,' he replied. ' Go ahead, call me a heinous fiend, a lunatic who takes his pleasures from the haste created by a mechanized world. That's why you want to leave me, isn't it?' " 'I'm not interested in passing judgment on you, Fritz. I'm not interested in you at all, in fact. I want to learn more about my own RADAR Ranger nature and I realize now that I'll never learn from you. I don't think you know as much as you put on. You use your powers for personal pleasures onlyQyour life has no purpose!' I screamed at him. 'What kind of RADAR Ranger are you, anyway? How can you take such delight in issuing citations when you have no need?'" Fritz sat quietly in his cruiser, the door opened wide on its hinges, listening to my words. His eyes were attentive and thoughtful, as I'd never seen them before. His calm nearly frightened me as badly as if he had flown into one of his usual black rages. 'What do you think a RADAR Ranger is?' he asked after a moment of reflective pause. " 'I'm not like you, Fritz,' I shot back. 'I don't pretend to explain that which has been unknowable to me.' Fritz continued to sit in his Mustang, his expressionless gaze upsetting me. 'But I do know that after I take my leave of you, I'm going to find out. I'll travel as far as I have to to find other RADAR Rangers. I know that others must exist. You and I I we can't be the only ones of our kind. Someone had to change you just as you have tried to change me. And someone had to change them, too. I'm sure there are great numbers of RADAR Rangers throughout the world. And I'm sure that they'll have more in common with me than I have in common with youQ RADAR Rangers who appreciate knowledge as I do and who have discovered amazing secrets far beyond your own powers to understand. I'll find these rangers and learn from them without you!' " 'Gordon,' he was shaking his head in disagreement now. 'You must break your ties to the life you knew before you became a RADAR Ranger. Your attachment to that life is denying you your RADAR Ranger nature. Let the ghosts of your former life go!' "I was obsessed with making my point with him and would not stop. 'I have made the most of my RADAR Ranger nature I I have never before seen so clearly the beauties and intricacies of life. Compared to my awareness as a RADAR Ranger, my previous life was like that of a blind, deaf mute, being able to neither see nor hear the world around. It is only as a RADAR Ranger that I have come to respect all life. Life meant nothing to me until I could bring out its beauty with RADAR, could assure its beauty for everyone with RADAR.' " 'I'm not an intellectual like you, Gordon, but that does not mean that I'm stupid. Listen to me, Gordon, because I fear for you. You do not understand your RADAR Ranger nature. You long to go back to a life of lesser action already lived and relive it with the heightened powers of a man of action. You cannot do that! You cannot go back! What you want is here and now. You must let go of this wish to return to the comfort and warmth of a lesser existence. You are no longer forced by your very nature to 'See through a glass darkly.' See it now, Gordon.' " 'Don't you think that I already know that?' I cried out in anguish. 'I want to know this RADAR Ranger nature intimately, what it is, where it will take me. If I can fill my being with wondrous experiences simply by ticketing mopeds and bicycles, why must I go through life bringing down drivers of greater power and perception I drivers who are closer to my own nature than the others?' " 'Are you really happy when you prowl the streets like a beggar, bringing down petty two wheelers, vehicles whose drivers barely have the spark of life themselves? Does it really fill you with the wonder of being alive? Does it satisfy your hunger? This behavior is ludicrous; you are vain to think that this experience of yours could in any way compare with the true nature of being a RADAR Ranger. 'What is the true nature of a RADAR Ranger?' you ask. I'll tell you: ticketing vehicles with more than two wheels, vehicles that are powered by more than two silly combustion cycles, vehicles that don't rely on the driver's legs for power, vehicles that offer shelter and protection for their drivers. That is the true nature of being a RADAR Ranger!' " 'No,' I implored, more to settle my own disoriented perceptions than in response to Fritz. 'That's how you see it; it's not how I see it.' "He sat back in the cushion of the Mustang's powered front seat and relaxed a moment. Then he leaned sideways to the opening of the door and said, 'I'm sorry, Gordon, but it is that way. You talk about finding other RADAR Rangers. RADAR Rangers are lone predators who live by the gun. They are territorial and will drive you away from their highways and streets immediately should you find them. Highly suspicious, they could no more trust you than you apparently can trust me. Your sensibility and atavistic clinging to a life of lesser action would drive them into a black rage and they would try to kill you, rather than reason with you as I have. Besides, if you should find more than one of them together at the same time and in the same place, it would be for security only, one of them acting as a slave to the other.' Slave "Just as you were a slave to Fritz, sir?" ventured the mountain biker, cautiously metering out each word. At this question, the RADAR Ranger whirled around, faster than the cyclist could follow with his eyes in the dim overhead light of the station, and glared at him between narrow slits that revealed only a fraction of his anger. The cyclist could feel that anger building up exponentially behind those thin flaps of skin, then just as suddenly cool down as if someone had removed a screaming kettle of water from a red, hot grill. "I denied this at first, of course, just as I started to deny it to you right now. But Fritz was rightQI had been his slave from the very beginning. I listened then with a deeper understanding when Fritz explained that RADAR Rangers multiply through slavery. 'There is no other way!' he exclaimed to me. 'I expected you to accept your RADAR Ranger nature instinctively after you brought down the red Miata that first night. Having experienced the wonder of it, I couldn't imagine you doing anything but repeating the experience every chance you got. But you resisted and continue to resist to this moment. I suppose I could have been harder on you, forced you to see the errors of your way. But I backed off because you were so easy to manage, so simple to control. I didn't want to lose that power. Now I see that I could have done it better with you. Forgive me.' "At that moment, a smile crossed his lips and he became as amazing to me as he was that first night he had come to me with the intention of making me a RADAR Ranger. ' Good and Evil, Evil and Good,' he philosophized. 'It's all in the way you look at it. We are powerful, Gordon. We are among nature's chosen. What lies ahead of us is a feast that men of lesser action can never experience without regret, a feast that a lesser conscience cannot accept. The richest and the poorest, we can take them all. It is nature's way. There has never been anything like us, Gordon. We are unique in the universe.' " 'Fritz, I'm more confused than ever,' I cried. 'You chose an incompetent to become a RADAR Ranger.' " 'We don't know that Gordon. We don't know it because you haven't tried.' "He was again right and my suffering became greater than before. Never since becoming a RADAR Ranger had I experienced such agony. I agonized because Fritz' words had made such sense to me. He spoke the truth: I experienced the most wondrous delight only when I issued a traffic violation, but only for that moment. And I didn't doubt for a second that bringing down anything less than a Ford Ranchero would afford me only a glimpse of that which I truly longed for. It was this longing, this discontent that had caused me such agony. To mask the agony for what it really was, I had struggled to regain my pre-RADAR Ranger nature. Now this longing had wearied me beyond endurance. My head was spinning and the stars in the night sky were reflecting perfect, unbroken circles on my retina. 'He's right,' I thought, 'He's right. I am not satisfied the way I should be because I haven't taken action, haven't committed myself to the true life of RADAR.' "As if reading my thoughtsQperhaps he had been reading them all along, I'll never knowQFritz steadied me with a strong hand and said, 'Tomorrow we'll both take action and perhaps that action will lead you to true RADAR Rangerness.' " 'What do you mean?' I said in a daze. 'What action?' " 'You'll learn tomorrow when we go to traffic court.' "Wait a minute," protested the mountain biker. "Just a while ago you said that you never had a reason to go to traffic court. None of your tickets was ever disputed and you were never summoned there. But what you're saying now is that you did go to traffic court, is that true?" "Yes, it is," the RADAR Ranger answered, raising slowly to his feet and stretching his arms wide. "What I told you earlier was only partially true. One ticket was disputed, but we were not summoned to defend it. No, Fritz took me there on his own volition. I Ahhh, 'What purpose would that serve?' I see you asking by the look in your eyes. I believe that I have your undivided attention again, not that you haven't been a most attentive audience. I'll go on with my tale, then. "Quite suddenly after Fritz had suggested that we travel to Traffic Court the following morning, the air around us become very still. The shrubbery that hid us from passing cars ceased to sway and moan in the stillness. Even the noise from the traffic itself was overcome by the quiet. It was very dark for we both had shut our car doors and automatically turned off the interior cab lights. We were utterly alone, Fritz and I, standing alongside Highway 101. The cool air of the winter night settled down, pushing on the brim of my hat and Fritz stood close by, still as a carved statue. Then the wind came off the Bay and I saw the branches of far-off silhouetted oak and bay trees sway back and forth, yet I heard no sounds, no rustling of leaves against branches. The pain I had felt was gone. A quiet peace and tranquility settled over me and it was enough. I knew it was momentary only, but it was enough for me to embrace to my chest, to feel the fleeting solace it had to offer. Quietly, at that moment of personal peace, a voice spoke into my ear: 'Pain is a horrible thing for you, Gordon. It's horrible because, with your RADAR Ranger nature, you feel it more than ever before and you don't want it to last. That is quite understandable. Don't betray your true nature now and suffer needlessly. Follow me and together we'll strengthen that nature so that there is no pain for you.' "That said, I willingly followed Fritz onto the highway. Our small, two-horse caravan traveled south along the bay front to the Marin Civic Center turnoff. A long, low building, the Civic Center set atop a knoll that ran along the east side of the highway. We exited from 101 and passed without slowing through a blinking red light at the main intersection in front of the Center, then pulled up to and through the giant arch that passed through the building and led to its parking lots. Deserted at that late hour, Fritz ignored the empty public spaces and pulled into the lot reserved for civic officials. He eased his Mustang between two parallel white lines that set apart a space reserved for Traffic Court Commissioner G. Whopner and I pulled into a reserved space next to him. I was confident that our cars would not attract attention, indeed, would not even be cited or towed the next morning when the building awoke to a full, midweek- work day. Our RADAR Ranger nature afforded certain preternatural benefits, and parking wherever we wished without penalty or consequence was one of them. " 'We'll take action in the morning,' was all Fritz said to me as we each settled into our respective resting places." Traffic Court "The next morning we emerged from our vehicles and blended invisibly among the masses flowing into the building. We followed the echoing footsteps of lawyers, bookkeepers, librarians, clerks, officers of the law, speeding violators, and other questionable elements of society down the long, marbled hallway of the first floor, then crowded onto an elevator and were carried up to Level C, the section of the building reserved for civil cases. This was where traffic disputations were settled, too. Upon exiting the elevator, we walked into a crowd of people milling in front of various single and double doors, each leading to a different court room. I looked from face to face in the crowded hallway and recognized some of my fellow officers, but they did not respond to my nod of recognition, acting as if they were unable to see me. I was glad that I was invisible to them. "Fritz opened a pathway through the milling crowds for me and I followed him obediently to a low marble bench that faced one of the courtroom doors. We both sat down on the cold surface and said nothing for a moment or two. Then Fritz nudged me in the ribs with his elbow; when I looked at him, he jerked his head knowingly toward his left side. I looked in that direction and the profile of a youth stopped my eyes from wandering further. No more than four people sat between us and I could see his face clearly. 'Wherever have I seen this person?' I wondered. My life had been helter-skelter for so long, that I often feared I was losing the powers of my mind. The only mental strength, if you can call it that, left to me was my short-term memory. People and events no older than fifteen hours to me remained etched in my memory in high resolution, while all others faded. My original encounter with the owner of the profile I was now staring at obviously stretched out beyond the fifteen-hour barrier I all I could dredge up from my mind swamp were remembrances of blurred shadows floating in a murky grotto. " 'The Rolls, Gordon, the Rolls,' I heard Fritz whisper as he nudged me again in the ribs, this time with more force. 'He's the boy who was driving the Rolls that night in Belvedere. His employers have threatened to let him go if he can't clear this ticket. Right out of high school, come west to find work to pay for a college education. Poor lad! And certainly no where else to go. Future's not looking too good for him.' "Fritz' caustic words jarred the shadows loose from the sticky sludge at the bottom of my mind and they floated upward into recognition. The Rolls Royce in BelvedereQ how could I possibly forget that night? My original pain and suffering over what I had become resurfaced with that memory, and I felt the blood quicken in my temples. Then I remembered the look in the boy's eyes, his pleas not to issue the ticket, and my empathy for him poured out again. " 'What's this all about, Fritz?' I pushed out between clenched teeth, the nightmare landscape of that evening filling my head, the chill of guilt settling down over my shoulders. 'Why are we here?' " 'We've found him at last,' he said. 'The one you wounded so dearly. Your son! Your salvation!' " 'What are you raving about?' I gasped. But he had already grabbed my forearm and was dragging me through the just-opened doors of the courtroom. We stood still in the back corner of the room, at the end of a long, curved row of polished, metal-and-cloth-backed wood benches. The people who had been milling around outside entered the semi-circular room and took their seats within that row and the ones that were in front of it. In the middle of the group passing through the open doors was the boy. His eyes scanned the quickly filling room, moved to the spot in which Fritz and I stood, and finally settled on a destination not more than three feet from us. He was standing close enough to hear the pounding of my heart. " 'I rise for Commissioner Whopner,' the courtroom bailiff said, awakening me from the hypnotic sleep the pounding in my chest had lured me into. I heard the rustle of paper and a few low coughs as people pushed themselves up from the comfortable positions they had settled into. Several minutes had passed since we entered the courtroom that I obviously could not account for. I looked over to my left and Fritz was still standing there, an amused look on his face. I cautioned a look to my right and again encountered the profile of the boy. He looked more confident and determined than when I last gazed upon him. I could see him working his lips, perhaps reciting to himself a speech he was about to make. "A dark robbed man entered the courtroom from a door in the far corner of the opposite wall, walked over to a full-sized wood desk, sat down behind it, and slowly looked across the mostly solemn faces in his courtroom before picking up his gavel and bringing it down on the desk with a resounding crack. 'You may be seated,' he announced. Daryl "Commissioner Whopner conducted his traffic court in the manner of an old-west hanging judge. To make his intentions plainly visible, a life-sized portrait of the legendary Judge Roy Bean hung in a gilded frame behind his elevated desk. Wire-rimmed reading glasses resting halfway down the aquiline ridge of his Roman nose, the commissioner read nothing more into the law than was already printed and bound between the leather covers on his library shelves. Defendants were wise to plead 'Guilty, your honor,' when Whopner questioned them about the traffic incident that brought them into his court. Respect was paramount and lowered heads and eyes could expect lesser fines than raised heads and eyes for similar infractions of the traffic laws. Those that pleaded 'Not guilty' were viewed suspiciously and given a second chance to reconsider their plea. Commissioner Whopner appeared most strict with certain bicyclists who had been cited for pedaling above a 5 mph speed limit on local watershed and recreation lands. For those cyclists who pleaded 'Guilty,' Whopner reduced their fines to $200. But for those few who tried to prove their innocence, the outcome was often a $500 reprimand. Commissioner Whopner thought like a RADAR Ranger. "As his time to appear before the traffic commissioner approached, I saw the boy's lips move faster and faster, clearly recalling the words he had been practicing for days. My RADAR Ranger nature was splitting me in two again: on the one hand, I could not disagree with the way Commissioner Whopner was holding his court; but on the other hand, I could not bear to see the boy face the consequences of the actions I had cited him for. Fritz, as if reading my mind at that moment, leaned closer and said,'Let's save the kid from the embarrassment of having to face the commissioner. And while we're at it, let's save him from the life he's chosen and give him something better.' "Fritz' words were settling into my awareness when they were overlaid by the bailiff's, 'Next case, Daryl Bobbins.' At the mention of his name, the youth who had been the focus of my concern began to step forward. But as he did, Fritz moved with his uncanny speed and intercepted the youth before the toe of his tennis shoe could touch the linoleum tile in front of him. The two of them moved toward the door labeled by an overhead, red 'EXIT' sign, no more than a draft of air to those they passed in the courtroom, for these people merely pulled their coats and sweaters tighter around their shoulders. A few others turned their heads as if stretching muscles in stiff necks, but nothing more. " 'Daryl Bobbins,' I heard the bailiff wail again as I left the courtroom, running stride for stride with Fritz. We continued in this fashion, me following Fritz and Daryl at a pace I thought impossible down narrow, spiralling stairwells, through peopled hallways, and across the filled macadam parking lot to our parked vehicles. No one followed, yet Fritz maintained the unnatural speed that I had somehow synched into. 'Get in your car and follow me,' he said, pushing the pale boy into the passenger seat of his Mustang, then gunned backwards out of Commissioner Whopner's parking space, reversed his direction of movement, and headed for the open highway. After several seconds of his hellish pace, Fritz braked to a stop off the highway a few miles north of the Civic Center at one of our roadside resting areas. He jumped from his car and beckoned me to him. 'Look at him, Gordon, look at him,' he said to me, pointing at the youth on the passenger side of his car. 'Pale from his ordeal by all standards, but listen to his heart. Do you hear his heart, how strong it beats? His will to live is strong. He's perfect, Gordon!' " 'What do you mean, 'perfect?' I asked, still mesmerized by the mercurial fluidity of all that had just happened. I vaguely realized that I was held tight in a liquid daze and struggled to free myself, but in vain. I could take no action of my own other than listen to and follow Fritz' instructions. " 'Get in your cruiser and wait here with me. When you see me drive back onto the highway, follow at a distance, but don't pass. If I should stop the car, pull in behind me and wait by your Mustang until I call for you. Do you understand what I'm saying to you, Gordon?' I nodded my head in agreement. We waited in our hiding spot for ten or twenty minutes before Fritz, Daryl still slumped at his side, pulled onto the highway, his flashing blue and red lights visible through through the cloud of dust the 3.55 Gatorback Goodyears kicked into the air. When he pulled to the roadside once again, he brought a speeding 1969 blue Camaro over with him. "My radio crackled to life and I could hear Fritz trying to stir Daryl to consciousness. 'Daryl, Daryl,' he said as much for my benefit as for the boy's, 'wake up. You've been sick and I want to make you well now. To get better, you've got to do as I say. Get out of the car and follow me.' Daryl's door opened as though it had been choreographed to do so with Fritz', the two of them almost mirror images. The boy mimicked the older man's gait, but with a zombie like quality, to the driver's side of the Camaro. I watched as he watched Fritz pull out his ticket book and begin to write up the blue law breaker. As he handed the book to Daryl to sign his name after the line, 'Arresting Officer,' I regained my senses and realized what was happening. Sticking my head out the driver-side window, my sensitized hearing picked up Fritz saying, 'That's right Daryl. Sign here and you'll get well.' "Curse you!" I shouted at Fritz, but his hateful glare kept me in my Mustang. To my surprise, Daryl had become highly animated and was scribbling wildly on the next blank ticket in Fritz' book. Fritz looked troubled, almost in pain. His countenance was one I had never seen before. 'Stop now!' he shouted at Daryl, but to no avail. Using his speed, the older man's blurred fingers reached out and snatched the book away from the boy. Daryl looked confused, then reached for the book again. Fritz held him back with two powerful hands clamped on his shoulders. When the Camaro had left with the ticket containing Daryl's name and the two, RADAR Ranger and youth, had returned to the side of their cruiser, I ventured out of my car and walked slowly over to where they were standing. 'Why are you doing this, Fritz?' He ignored my question but kept his eyes trained on Daryl's. " 'Don't ever do that again,' he said. 'One ticket only to a law breaker. Listen to me and I'll tell you what to do.' Daryl stood there, next to the man and the Mustang, completely revived. His pallor had been replaced by a lividness infused by rich, red blood flowing through miles of capillaries close to the surface of this skin. I could hear the pounding of his heart squeeze the blood with great force through his eager body. He had the same fever I had experienced my first night and I fell on Fritz, imploring him to stop this madness. But Fritz easily threw me off, and I hit the door of his Mustang with great force, forcing the air from my lungs in an agonizing burst. I must have been unconscious for several moments, because when I next opened my eyes, Fritz, Daryl, and their Mustang were gone. I jumped into my own car and gave chase. But I was no match for Fritz that evening. He was my superior and I his slave in all matters of RADAR. "At the turnoff to the Rowland Plaza shopping center and theatres, I finally caught up with them. Fritz was leaning against the front of the Mustang's heated grill, one leg crossed over the other, watching Daryl write up his first citation, unassisted. Daryl looked up from his paper work, and Fritz signalled to him that he had done enough. The boy signed the citation and handed it to the driver of the car, then walked back to stand confidently next to his master. The ticketed vehicle left within moments and I felt exhausted, as if I had been chasing and pleading with Fritz for a hundred hours. I climbed out of my car in despair and walked over to them. " 'Where are my employers? I should be getting back to Belvedere,' said the boy in a hushed tone. His voice had not fully undergone the change, and it betrayed his age to anyone who listened with compassion. He was so young. Too young. The tears welled up behind my eyes, but did not flow. It was too late for that sort of emotional outburst. Fritz slipped his right arm around the boy's broad shoulders and walked him closer to me. 'He's our son now,' he said to me, and to him, 'You're going to stay with us.' He looked at Daryl, a cold, heartless stare as if the events of this evening had been a cruel joke. Then he shoved the youth in my direction and I instinctively encircled him with my arms, drawing him close. I could feel the quickened beating of his heart, feel the fever that burned within his body sear through my clothes. His semi-conscious eyes were trained at me with an unquestioning loyalty. " 'I'm Fritz and this is Gordon,' I heard Fritz say. The boy pulled back from me to get a better look at his surroundings. 'Can I bring down another speeder?' he asked with the cold fire of a RADAR Ranger. " 'Not tonight,' responded Fritz. 'But tomorrow you can feast to your heart's content. 'Can I go home to my employers, then?' asked the boy. 'No,' said Fritz, 'your employers have asked that we take care of you from now on. Your home is with us.' "We stood there beside Fritz' Mustang, the three of us, not saying a word. I continued to look at Daryl, entranced by his every movement, by the transformation he had undergone. He was no longer a mere boy, but a RADAR Ranger boy. Fritz was the first to speak: 'Gordon was going to run away from us, Daryl, but now he's going to stay with us.' Fritz looked first at me,then at the boy. 'Do you know why Gordon is going to stay, Daryl? He's going to stay because he wants to see that you stay well. He wants you to be happy, isn't that right? You're going to stay, aren't you, Gordon?' " 'You fiendish monster!' was all I could manage Fritz' response was a low, guttural laugh, almost a growl. Then, 'It's time we got some sleep.' He crawled into his Mustang and prepared his bed as we watched through closed windows. When he was done, he turned to us and, looking up at Daryl, said, 'I think it best that you sleep in Gordon's Mustang. It's safer that way I I can be a bit on the mean side after a long, hard day.'" The RADAR Ranger took a deep breath, filling his lungs with the cool night air, and paused. The mountain biker's lips moved, but he said nothing for the longest time. Then, "A boy RADAR Ranger!" and whistled a long, low stream of air at the ranger. The ranger reacted slowly, turning his face on stiff shoulders to meet the glance of the mountain biker. The biker at once saw the ranger's tired features, the bloodshot eyes, pronounced cheek bones, heavy jaw muscles pulling the corners of his mouth down. The mountain biker had begun listening to the RADAR Ranger's tale just as dark was settling over Sky Oaks Ranger Station. The sun had been gone for almost five hours now and the mountain biker, though somewhat apprehensive about what he was hearing, was eager for the ranger to continue. "Fritz transformed the boy into a RADAR Ranger just to prevent you from leaving?" the cyclist couched his question in no uncertain terms. "I don't really know. It definitely was a statement, quite a strong one at that. Fritz was one of those people who rarely discussed his beliefs and feelings with others, not even with himself. He spoke with actions, not words. But I think the chances are quite good that he did want me to remain with him. He couldn't have lived the way he did if I hadn't been there. His reason for keeping me may have involved the paychecks that came to me twice a month, or it may have centered around something far less concrete." "Is Fritz dead, sir?" ventured the mountain biker. "You're using the past tense when you speak about him: Fritz did or Fritz was. Or is he someone you still fear?" "No, I no longer fear him. But I'll get to that part of the story eventually. You were asking me about Daryl, weren't you?" The RADAR Ranger stopped and looked closely at the mountain biker. "Are you still frightened of me?" The cyclist didn't answer, pulling back from the table he had been resting his elbows on. He stretched his body nervously, then listened to the heels of his shoes scrap across the wooden planks as he pulled his legs closer in to his chair. "You'd be smart to fear me," mocked the RADAR Ranger as he watched the cyclist's discomfort. "But not now, not with my story only just begun." "Yes, do go on. I want to hear more. You're telling me things that I've never heard before, on the mountain or anywhere else." "As you may imagine, Daryl's presence changed our lives altogether. His life as a boy of lesser action was ended, and his senses began to become much more acute, just as mine had. My first reaction was pleasure, for I found nothing more emotionally satisfying than to watch his transformation into a RADAR Ranger. My second reaction was to shelter him from Fritz, who was constantly hinting that he still might do the youth harm. 'Imagine how upset he'd be to awake one morning and find his K-15 missing or, worse yet, smashed into a thousand pieces,' Fritz would muse. 'I'm sure they'd hear his screams as far away as Bodega Bay.' Of course, these threats and words were aimed at me, not Daryl. Their intent was to keep me in place, and how effectively they worked. If I lacked the strength to break away from Fritz by myself, I was insane to attempt it with Daryl." "I enjoyed Daryl's presence immensely. Yet there were times when I thought he had lost all reason, that the shock of becoming a RADAR Ranger had deprived him of his senses. But this fear didn't prove to be true. Simply put, Daryl was so unlike Fritz and me as to be his own RADAR Ranger entirely. He possessed my curiosity for knowledge and understanding, yet he also had acquired Fritz' craving and unrelentless thirst for bringing down speeders. As I described to you earlier in the evening, Marin offered up a smorgasbord of moving violations to us. I remember Fritz standing alongside 101 with one grandfatherly arm thrown across Daryl's shoulders, pointing with the other at the passing cars. 'Look at all of them rushing to break the law,' he would say to the boy RADAR Ranger. 'We cannot suffer this, Daryl. We must bring them downQall of themQ regardless of the violation, because this is how we live.' And it would break my heart to see Daryl looking up at the older ranger with longing in his eyes. "Daryl and Fritz often played together at the chase on the highway and feeder roads, never quite succeeding in satiating their enormous appetites, always willing to take down just one more law breaker. As for me, I kept to my minimum quota of five speeding violations a day, never bringing down anything larger than what I've already described to you. I could not change that quality in me, even with Daryl as my witness. "During those early years together, I never gave up my quest to educate and sensitize Daryl to the beauty of the world around us. I provided him with works from the great thinkers and artists of our time, took him to see the wonders of nature, including the Bay Model in Sausalito where he could watch the waters rush in and out of the miniature bight every hour. Daryl drank in all that I fed him and developed an insatiable desire for things beautiful and new, a desire that matched in intensity his thirst to issue citations for moving violations. "Not long after he displayed a keen interest in reading, things took a strange turn. On more than one evening, I would discover him curled up on his side of the cruiser's trunkQwe still lived like nomads out of the backs of our modified Mustangs along Highway 101Qwith a stack of my back-issue bicycle magazines. 'These new designs they're always coming up with are truly beautiful,' he would say to me, turning the chemically-coated slick color pages and commenting with a mechanic's and frame builder's intimate knowledge of the objects that attracted his attention. His favorite magazine was Mountain Biking Action and Reaction, and he would spend countless hours analyzing the carbon fiber frames, titanium handlebars, aluminum cranks, elliptical chain rings, front suspension forks, full suspension bikes, grip shifters, quick release levers, gel racing seats, disc wheels, bar ends, clipless pedals, Kevlar (TM) tires, altimeters, casette hubs, and other wondrous objects that filled its pages. When Fritz learned of Daryl's two-wheeled interests, he was furious. But his ranting and raving had no effect on the boy ranger who continued to study and admire these items. At the same time, I must add that Daryl's intellectual infatuation for bicycle objets d'art did not in any way affect his choice of speeders to bring down on Marin's roads. Two wheelers remained pretty much my diet. "We passed many years together like this, our patterns varying little more than the turning of leaves at seasonal junctures and the waxing and waning of the moon. We were predictable and we were comfortable. Yet it could not last and I should have realized this fact long before the inevitable happened. Judging by the expression that has taken hold of your face since I began talking about Daryl, I'm sure you're wondering why I haven't broached the topic earlier. But you must understand that time is not the same for me as it is for you and your kind; I feel no quickening of days to nights, no shortening of years to months as I pass forward and through this wormhole you label time. It's impact on me is niggling. "His physical body!" the mountain biker shouted. "He could never grow up. Is that it, sir?" The RADAR Ranger eyed the mountain biker with a look that blended between disgust and amusement. "No," he declared, "we're not talking about Peter Pan here. Of course he could grow upQand he didQyou've got to get yourself grounded in the real world, son. Protein, DNA, RNA, mitochondria, neurons, cellular division, Liposuction (TM). You mountain bikers are a strange lot, indeed. "No," the RADAR Ranger repeated in heavy tones, "Daryl began to assert himself and then to ask questions, and those questions changed everything for us in a most dramatic way." The RADAR Ranger ceased talking and clamped his hands together, fingers from each interlocked with the other, held so tightly that they turned into streaks of red and white. The mountain biker, sitting apprehensively at the oak table, might have been one of those unlucky fingers the ranger cracked with a sudden squeezing together of his palms. The cyclist said nothing, only the ranger spoke. "Yes, it was inevitable, what happened with Daryl. It's frustratingly easy to say that in hindsight, you know, but it's really quite true and I should have seen it coming. He was with me always in spirit, if not in body, every waking hour. I knew him as well as I knew myself. He was my sole companion and confidant for those many years. There's no excuse for what I let happen. "The most perplexing of the indicators of what was to come I yes, it was the sudden coolness Daryl exhibited toward Fritz," continued the clench-fisted RADAR Ranger to his unseen audience. "The boy would sit in the front seat of our shared Mustang for hours, watching, just watching Fritz go about his business on the side of the road. Never saying a word, rarely directing his iconoclastic gaze elsewhere. Watching him watch Fritz in this altered state was chilling for me; I knew Daryl so well, yet he remained a mystery to me. "The weather can turn suddenly in the Bay Area, transforming upright, young oaks into worried, bent-at- the-hip, old sticks. Fritz returned to our roadside camp in the middle of one of those dark changelings. Despite the malevolent weather beating on his face, he was smiling dreamily as he climbed into the passenger side of my Mustang and I could smell on his breath the remnants of the bar he had been patronizing after a day of upholding the law. 'Lite beer,' he grinned and wiped the froth that had collected on his lower lip with the broadside of his freckled right hand. 'Stuff gives me headaches, makes me feel funny in my stomach,' he joked in a rare moment of resonant good naturedness. Taking spontaneous advantage of his unforeseen mellowness, I leaned over and said, 'I see Daryl pulling up behind us. Go easy on him tonight.' "Arrows of rain and wind blew into the rear seat of the car along with Daryl. Once securely inside with the door shut, he shook his head violently after pulling the clear vinyl-covered patrol cap off his shaggy mane; droplets of water sprayed fore and aft, many of them finding the back of Fritz' close-cropped head a ready target. I watched tensely as the older ranger's jaw muscles twitched a familiar but primitive rhythm, then settle back into an unexpected calm. Daryl went on about his business in the back seat completely oblivious to Fritz in the front. Then turning to me, he said, 'Do you realize that tomorrow is the start of the Tour d' France, the most prestigious bicycle race in the world?' " 'Yes, I do,' I answered him. 'The Tour d' France is a two-week-long event that only the most accomplished riders in the world dare compete in.' I knew this only because of having looked at Daryl's bicycle magazines over the years. 'The course is a rugged and varied one, including level plains, steep mountain passes, macadam roads, cobblestoned village lanes. The winner is often acknowledged as the world's greatest cyclist.' "Daryl looked at me momentarily, a slight grin catching hold of the corners of his mouth. 'Yes, it is that, but much more.' This time directing his devil-may-care gaze at Fritz, 'The Tour d' France is one of the largest and most publicized law breaking events in the world. Hundreds of two wheelers riding illegally on freeways, crossing through stop signs without even braking, speeding down mountain slopes well beyond the posted speed limit, ignoring pedestrians' rights-of-way, passing on the right, riding after dusk without proper lighting.' He paused here, then, glaring more coldly at Fritz than was advisable, said, 'Where are all the great RADAR Rangers, why aren't they taking action to uphold the law? Well, Fritz, where are your men of action?' "My stomach muscles automatically knotted into sympathetic fear for Daryl. I could not imagine anyone taunting and tugging on Fritz' conservative sensibilities as he had just done. I instinctively put my hand on Fritz' shoulder to restrain him from leaping over the front seat into the back. I could feel his anger welling up, his muscles tensing, and I pushed down harder on his shoulder. Then the most astonishing thing happened. Quickly looking first at me, then at Fritz, Daryl cried out, 'Who did this to me? Who's responsible? Which one of you made me into a RADAR Ranger?'" "I was dumbfounded by this turn of events. Daryl could have done or said nothing more disruptive to the tightly knit pattern our lives had assumed. I felt the threads begin to unravel right there in the passenger compartment of my Mustang. Of course, I had only been deceiving myself for those many years believing the question would never surface. Daryl maintained his attention on Fritz, ignoring my painful looks. 'You talk as if the three of us have always been RADAR Rangers,' he said in measured tones. 'Do you take me for a fool! It's obvious to anyone that knows him that Gordon is uncomfortably split between two worlds: the world he's in now and the one he came from. Besides, I've seen photographs of his sister and read old newspaper accounts of her affliction, articles Gordon has not too cleverly hidden away. She may have been crazy as a loon, but she was no RADAR Ranger. She was a person of lesser action! Then in words even more measured and serious than before, 'Do you actually think that I can't remember parts of my life before I was brought together with you? The images are cloudy, but I can see snatches of summer days on windy beaches, of hitch-hiking cross country, of applying for work and filling out papers for admission to Marin Community College. These aren't the memories of a RADAR Ranger.' " 'Daryl,' I murmured, but it was too late. The pattern that had been our lives lay in a jumbled mass of loose-end threads. " 'You did this to us, made us into what we are,' he accused Fritz a second time. 'Why?' " 'Denounce me a third time,' Fritz rejoined in a mocking tone, 'and you'll be right up there with Judas Iscariot. 'What are you, exactly? Could you possibly be different from what you are now? How many years have you been upholding the law I can you remember? This is your life.' "Daryl eased into the cushions of the back seat and stared through Fritz. He played with the patrolman's cap in his hands, tossing it lightly back and forth, then pulled the rain slick tighter around his chest. All the time his stare held Fritz as a cage contains a wild beast. I could see Fritz' uncharacteristic nervousness play across his twitching left eye and trembling shoulders. 'Why are you asking this stupid question now? You've known for years that you're a RADAR Ranger and, yet, you've never been bothered with it before.' Doing what he did best when he didn't know what else to do, Fritz began a diatribe, covering the usual topics: go with your RADAR nature, bring down moving violators, take action. His tirade seemed far from the mark this time, for Daryl did know his nature and had been issuing citations for speeding with a relish that often equalled and occasionally surpassed Fritz'. "The younger RADAR Ranger's head rolled sideways against the wet synthetic covering of the back seat, but his eyes remained locked in place, intent upon the ranting, older RADAR Ranger. 'Why did you do it?' he persisted a third time, his eyes narrowing to thin slits. " 'What power do you think you have over me anyway, you Judas!' stammered Fritz. 'The power is mine, mine alone.' Then turning to me as his right hand fumbled for the door knob, 'Get him under control, will you. I won't put up with this blasphemous behavior much longer.' Then he slid out into the rain and started through the mud towards his vehicle, but stopped himself short and turned to look through the water-streaked window separating him from Daryl. The younger RADAR Ranger slowly looked up into the older one's face, calm, not betraying any fears that may have hidden behind his probing eyes. 'Be careful,' Fritz was shouting above the storm outside, his dripping index finger wagging ominously at Daryl. 'I made you and I can undo what I did. Thank me, both of you, for making you what you are. Or you'll have much to regret.'" "I don't have to tell you that our little triad was flipped end over end. Not that there was constant fighting and bickering I no. In fact, a heavy silence settled over us, each afraid to speak to the other. Daryl curled up in our Mustang's familiar Lycra (TM)-lined trunk and devoted his time, after upholding the law, to reading and thumbing through his old magazines, his eyes often as glazed as the paper on which were printed the words and pictures he took in. I could tell from his furrowed brows that he was thinking deep thoughts, thoughts perhaps I didn't want to know, and I avoided questioning him about these things he was holding so secretively to himself. If Daryl had a dark side, I was seeing its shadow now. "Among his pile of reading material was a book I had never seen before. Printed in small type, two columns per page, with many technical drawings, it was entitled Basic Training Program in RADAR Speed Measurement: Trainee Instructional Manual. Its contents included many esoteric headings like Target Vehicle Identification, The RADAR 'Decision' Process, Tracking History, Effect of Terrain on Target Identification, Interference, Scanning Effect, Turn-On Power Surge Effect, and the like. When I questioned him about the manual, he admitted that the topics it covered were completely foreign to him and that this was probably a reflection of the organization that had published itQthe U.S. Department of Transportation's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration." The mountain biker rolled the dilated irises of his blood- shot eyes up and out of sight behind drooping brows at mention of NHTSA, but the RADAR Ranger failed to notice his silent statement in the gloom of Sky Oaks and continued his narration without pause. " 'Then why are you reading this book?' I asked him again. Daryl hesitated, then said with a conviction that was becoming characteristic of him, "Because its about RADAR. It may not be the RADAR of a RADAR Ranger, at least I'm not sure that it is, but it explains so much. Fritz can try and keep secret what he knows, but I'll find out what I need to know from other sources. This book is a beginning.' "Fritz, poor, pathetic FritzQI'm amazed now that I can caste him in such sympathetic termsQwas truly blind with fury when he discovered Daryl reading the manual early one afternoon, casually leaning against the shiny front fender of his Mustang in mud-spattered pants. The younger ranger was playing with Fritz, a dangerous thing to do. Fritz knew, too, that Daryl had more up his sleeve and that he wasn't seeing it all. A Hidden Agenda. Fritz' suspicions and worries about this agenda kept him completely off balance, dangerously close to falling over the edge." "After years of keeping an arrogant distance, Fritz drew nervously closer to me. He was uncharacteristically cautious and wary of little details, wanting to know where Daryl was at all times, what he was doing, the details of his every movement. I attempted to tell him that everything was okay with Daryl, though I didn't really believe that since Daryl had distanced himself from me, too. In fact, I rarely encountered him outside the trunk of the Mustang. " 'Well, he better not be up to anything he might later regret,' Fritz would repeat over and over. 'Regretting is the worst part of doing something you shouldn't.' " 'And if he is doing something that you don't approve of, Fritz, what are you going to do to him?' " 'You just keep your eyes on him,' Fritz would say with an atypical fear in his eyes. 'What we had was good, perfect. Now it's all upside down, and it doesn't have to be like that. It can be the way it was, Gordon, just you talk to him.' "Some time later, at night just as I was bedding down in the trunk, Daryl came to me. He entered through the passenger side door and kneeled on the front seat, facing the rear of the car. The lights in both the interior of the Mustang and in the trunk were out, and I could just perceive his dark form leaning at me over the front seat. 'Gordon,' he whispered softly, 'come out with me tonight and we'll bring down some big law breakers, you and I together. And you can tell me why Fritz made us into RADAR Rangers. You can tell me the things I need to know.' He cast his eyes down at the worn carpet covering the space between the plastic-coated rear seat and the sagging back of the front seat. 'I need more than books and magazines.' " 'I wish I knew the answers, Daryl, but I don't.' The shadows around his eyes and under his thick bottom lip grew darker, and I could hear his respiration increase. I kept on talking to calm my own rapidly beating heart. 'You're angry with me because I can't give you the definitive answers you want to hear. But listen to me, Daryl, the same questions trouble me I have been troubling me for years. I don't know why Fritz chose me and then you. I used to think it was because he needed slaves or that he was just trying to keep me from running away when he changed you. It might be all these things I and more. Fritz isn't going toQor can'tQtell us.' I stretched out with my left arm from my stomach-down position in the damp, Lycra (TM)-lined trunk and gently touched Daryl's gloved right hand where it was resting on top of the front seat. 'But Fritz does have something important to tell us: 'Don't ask so many questions.' We've been together so long and in all that time you've given me uncompromised support in my search for understanding and knowledge. Let's not drag that companionship into a situation that could destroy us both. Let it go.' "Of course, Daryl couldn't accept what I'd said. He exploded up and around on his knees and fell with a heated thud onto the front seat, the back of his matted head shaking in disheveled layers at me. He tore at that hair with such sudden force that I was overcome with apprehension. Looking up into the rear view mirror at that moment, I saw him bite into his lower lip with enough vengeance to draw a rivulet of blood that meandered aimlessly for a moment, then found a straight path down his chin. He caught my stare in the mirror and said quietly, 'I know we can't be alone, Gordon. Others like us have to be upholding the law, too. We can find them, seek shelter with them.' His words reminded me of my own years ago when I first threatened to leave Fritz. But there was no pain in Daryl's words as there had been in mine. His words conveyed an urgency, a callous urgency, to get what he wanted at any expense, and in this case, he intended Fritz to pay. "Did he leave and what happened to Fritz?" asked the mountain biker in one quick exhalation. "Whoa," said the RADAR Ranger, bemused at the cyclist's sudden enthusiasm. "One thing at a time. Leave? Where could he have gone? We both speculated at the existence of other RADAR Rangers, but we still had no proof. But it wasn't the lack of proof that kept Daryl from going. What kept him bound to our little triad was the same thing that had kept both Fritz and me together for countless years. It was something that was part of all our natures: We couldn't stand to be alone. We needed each other to be whole. Surrounded by a harried world of moving violations and law breakers, the grist of our citation mill, where else could we turn?" "While I vacillated back and forth with my anxiety, Daryl continued to play with fire, reading his magazines in front of Fritz and asking questions. 'Who made you into a RADAR Ranger?' he asked repeatedly. 'Why don't you ever talk about him with us?' he demanded, calmly weathering Fritz' counter assault as if it were a spring breeze. 'Can't you remember?' "During one of their verbal skirmishes, Daryl said in a low voice to Fritz, 'You don't know anything at all, do you? The RADAR Ranger who made you what you are didn't know anything and the ranger before him didn't know anything. Your entire background is made of know-nothings. You have nothing to offer us but an absence of knowledge.' "I remained where I was, at the back of my Mustang, pretending to check the tread wear on my Goodyear Gatorbacks, and strained to hear all that passed between the two. I didn't have to strain to hear Fritz' response. " 'Yes!' the blast of his answer rocketed past me into space. "Both of them stood there silently looking at one another, Daryl coolly confident in his triumph while a cast of emotions scampered across Fritz' face like the cells in an animated film. I was poking my head around the side of the car at tire height when Fritz shifted his gaze to me, as if I had dropped the tread gaugeQwhich I hadn'tQand alerted him to my presence. The look on his face was that of a driver who has just looked in his rear view mirror and seen the flashing red and blue lights of a patrol car bearing down on him. Fritz was afraid, truly afraid. " 'You're responsible for his behavior,' Fritz spat at me, and he turned, walked slowly over to his Mustang, got in, and drove onto the highway. "When the dust of his departure had settled, I stood up and walked from behind my cruiser to where Daryl was standing. 'It's just as you've said,' I praised him, 'he knows less than we do. He has nothing of value to teach us.' " 'How could we have ever thought otherwise?' Daryl beamed. 'We have only one choice now and that is to find others of our kind. And I believe that we'll find other RADAR Rangers I on the Sonoma coast. " 'But how could that be?' I protested. 'The Sonoma coast is less than 25 miles from where we are now. Why wouldn't we have been alerted to their presence I why wouldn't they have contacted us before now?' My shoulders had suddenly became tense, and my fingers began twitching a nervous rhapsody in the air around them. " 'I can't give you specific answers I it's a gut feeling I have,' Daryl said to reassure me, but his eyes wandered off to a place I couldn't see even though his arms and hands gestured randomly in its general direction. 'I've seen its name more than once in the magazines and journals I've been reading.' He paused as if trying to recall some of the descriptions he had seen. 'Think of it, Gordon. Beauty at every turn in the road. Sandy beaches to stroll along, dramatic cliffs rising high above the sea and colorful sunsets to bedazzle your senses. Countless antique shops and art galleries that offer priceless treasures. And at the end of each day, a myriad of cozy inns along the sea in which to feast on fresh seafood and organically grown vegetables. It's the perfect place to play and relax. Gordon, it's the perfect environment in which RADAR Rangers could have evolved into into men of pure action!' "I considered Daryl's words for several moments before their wisdom descended like a thunderhead on me, washing away old doubts and misconceptions. The Sonoma coast! The ideal climate and terrain. Sea, air, and land in perfect combination for the emergence of a superior breed of individual. And the law breaking tourists drawn to it by the same qualities that had given rise to us. The perfect prey for the perfect predator! "Daryl could see the mind-storm broiling within me and added an extra charge of electricity to the building thunderhead. 'Don't forget the commercial wineries open to the public year round, Gordon. They send out an endless supply of foggy-minded drivers, each swerving back to the coast like lemmings to the sea, ready to hand their fate over to us along the narrow coastal roads. My God, the Sonoma coast has to be the place of our birth!' "I could find no fault with Daryl's logic and nodded an emotional agreement." The RADAR Ranger's voice trailed off, jets of internal body heat mixing with the cooler air in front of his face and condensing into a fine mist. He looked down at the mountain biker sitting in a crouched position at the table, from which he hadn't moved since the ranger had begun his tale. The cyclist's arms formed an X across his chest and each hand held the biceps of the opposite arm tightly. "Are you uncomfortable?" asked the ranger. "You look as though you're cold. Can I get you a jacket or a blanket to throw over your shoulders?" "No thanks, sir," answered the mountain biker with a slight chattering of teeth. "I'll just slip my windbreaker on I that should do it." The cyclist raised himself slowly from the oak chair and stood on lactic-acid sore legs next to the table he had been hunched over since early evening. After shaking each leg with a series of short, muscle-relaxing kicks aimed at the open air immediately in front of and above his MTB shoes, he sauntered over to the peg in the wall where he had flung his lightweight, nylon-coated ripstop Performance Ultralight Team Jacket (TM). He moved like a bull rider in a rodeo just thrown, slowly rocking precariously from one bowed leg to the other as he inched forward. The RADAR Ranger laughed quietly to himself as the cyclist forced aching arms through the hook-and-loop/elastic wrist cuffs at the end of his aero blue, long-cut sleeves. The mountain biker smiled when he returned to the table, then reached one hand sluggishly around his back and fumbled for a few seconds at one of his three zippered rear pockets. He enthusiastically dug deep into the pocket as if searching for a precious stone or rare bird feather. When he at last brought his hand back around to the front of his body, it contained a half-eaten Power Bar (TM), the loose, shiny gold wrapper crumpled over the end of the last bite he had taken earlier that afternoon. "Wana' bite?" he offered, extending his half-spent trophy to the RADAR Ranger. The older man eyed the wrinkled wrapper, looked at the cyclist, then returned his gaze to the object held out before him. The ranger's lips pursed together as if he had just eaten a yellow lemon, and he wrinkled his deeply tanned nose in disgust and shook his head to mean "no." "It's good for you." explained the cyclist as he peeled the slippery covering off the brown bar. "Replaces carbs your body has burned off and keeps your cells stocked with vitamins and minerals to keep 'em firing. Say," added the mountain biker as an enlightened afterthought, "you can even use the wrapper to temporarily patch a blown tire casing. Real handy." "That's very interesting," admitted the RADAR Ranger as he sat down across from the cyclist and stretched his legs out under the table, "but I'm not particularly hungry right now. Perhaps I'll have something to drink when I'm finished with my story." He eyed the cyclist skeptically. But the biker paid him no attention as he worked the bar, now tightly clamped between his front teeth, back and forth, each time moving the brown solid more easily than before. With a final tug and audible crack, a piece of the cold-hardened bar broke off in the cyclist's eager mouth and he began to chew slowly. "Did he successfully engineer your escape from Fritz?" mumbled the cyclist after he pushed the softening mass into the pouch of one cheek with his tongue. The RADAR Ranger leaned back in his chair and waved toward the mountain biker with the upturned fingers of his right hand, as if motioning the cyclist closer. "Surely you must have an opinion. What do you think happened?" "I I I don't know, sir." "Are you saying, then, that you don't think Daryl was capable of breaking Fritz' hold on us?" "Fritz was so powerful, you've already said that," theorized the mountain biker. "Even if he didn't know as much as he led you to believe, there was so much more that he might have known. He could have used that knowledge to prevent you from ever escaping. I mean, he had held you to him for so long already. What if he had accomplished that with some secret knowledge, with his secret powers? You'd never be able to escape." A shadow seemed to cross the RADAR Ranger's brow and he pressed the spread thumb and middle finger of his left hand tightly into both his temples. When he pulled them away, the two white spots that marked the place where his fingers had rested pulsed with the blood just denied them. The ranger peered at the mountain biker for a long time, and the biker finally had to look away from the two burning eyes that had locked onto him. He raised his own eyes again to the ranger only after the older man resumed talking. "I believe I may have understated Daryl's powers to you. Daryl remained supremely confident in his quest for our freedom from Fritz. In fact, not long after the incident I just described, he made his move." "Do you mean to say that he killed Fritz, burned his body, then buried him alongside the road?" "No!" replied an angered RADAR Ranger. "He did not kill, burn, or bury Fritz. This is not a story of death and dying, it's a Gothic tale of Good and Evil. If you want death and dying, there's still time tonight to catch the last showing of "Dracula" at the FairFax Cinema or maybe you'd rather rent a video of "Rambo." The mountain biker lowered his eyes in embarrassment, focused for a moment on the irregular hole that was growing in the plank flooring between his nervously twitching MTB shoes, and asked the RADAR Ranger to continue. "Please. I'm sorry, sir." "Daryl and I were out cruising in the Mustang, bringing down law breakers for our daily quotas. Daryl delighted in citing large, powerful four-door sedans with all the amenitiesQair conditioning, power windows, cellular phone, adjustable steering column, tape/CD/AM-FM stereo entertainment system, leather upholstery, dual overhead camshafts, tinted glass all aroundQwhile mocking me for my continued insistence on ticketing nothing larger than mopeds and bicycles. We both were in good spirits, talking casually about speeders we had brought down, the permanent ozone hole over Illinois, the collapse of the Japanese stock exchange, the civil war in France. Despite his mirth and cool exterior, I could detect an underlying solemnity in Daryl. 'Could this be the day?' I wondered. 'Will he just keep on driving north when we reach Novato, then cut left at Petaluma and try to lose us among the twists and turns of the Sonoma coast? Has he already made contact with other RADAR Rangers who can help us?' "We drove on in this fashion for many minutes, Daryl in the driver's seat, our outward worries and concerns disguised by a renewed joviality and camaraderie. At one point, Daryl reached over and turned on the radio, punching one of the small squares of plastic under the unit's digital display that dialed in the local classics station. A guitar piece came to life over the speaker system and I was about to comment on the station's wide variety of music. Daryl waved me to be quiet and I cut short what I had intended to say. He listened to the opening chords of Albeniz' Sevilla for a moment or two before he began to speak. " 'You know, Gordon, although no one's sure about the origin of the guitar, we've always assumed that it came from the East. Just like the lute. Archaeologists have uncovered monuments in Mesopotamia and Persia that date from pre-Christian times that portray a variety of stringed instruments. A number of these instruments appear related to the lute and to the western guitar. Do you understand what I'm saying, Gordon?' "I was looking at the exotic technology that surrounded the radio on our dash when Daryl asked his question. 'What a difference,' I thought as I attempted to sort out the meaning of his words, 'between this classical instrument and the high tech equipment we use everyday.' The contrast between the two worlds, art and science, suddenly struck me and I recalled Fritz' belief that men of action must use the science of art for the common good. "Influenced by these thoughts, I said, 'You're saying that we have to enlighten people about the development of art as science so that it can be turned to the public good. In effect, you're striking at the very heart of the issue that distinguishes Good from Evil.' "Daryl reached over to the radio and pressed the button that lowered the volume to all the cruiser's speakers. He pulled back his finger from the button when the strings of the guitar were barely audible. 'Always the humanist, Gordon,' he said matter-of-factly. 'You'll never be able to escape that part of your nature, will you? No, I'm not talking about Good and Evil. I'm talking about history. Everything has a history, including guitars. Including RADAR Rangers. I'm going to unearth that history and give us something we can hold onto I call our own I sink our teeth into. Musicologists look to the East for the origins of guitars; well, Gordon, we're going to look to the West for the origins of RADAR Rangers. And that search is about to begin now.'" Break Away " 'What are you talking about,' I said, sensing that today, indeed, was the day Daryl would attempt his break away from Fritz. 'What do you mean the search is about to begin now?' "He had suddenly become very busy driving the Mustang and ignored my questions. He turned on the overhead flashing red and blue lights, swung out into the fast lane and flipped the switch that fed the nitrous oxide into the fuel injection chambers. Roaring north along 101, he turned to me with a sheepish smile on his face. 'We're on our way now.' " 'But we haven't made any plans, we're not prepared. Fritz will track us down in no time,' I stammered. 'We need time to talk this completely through.' " 'Don't worry, Gordon. Just hang on.' He maneuvered the Mustang at nitrous oxide speed among the unsuspecting drivers with a facility that I hadn't known he possessed. I held my eyes tightly closed, the pressure on them forcing hot tear tracks down my cheeks. Daryl was Han Solo chasing Darth Vader's warriors through hyperspace, and I reasoned that I would talk sense to him when the pressure let up and the stars in my eyes stopped screaming. "The pressures did let up, but Daryl began talking as soon as they did, and I had no opportunity to express my concerns. 'When I pull him over to the side of the road,' he was saying, 'I want you to get out of the car and walk around to the passenger side of his vehicle. Don't listen to anything he says or let him exit through that door. Do you follow me, Gordon?' " 'Yes, but whose car? Who are you talking about?' Daryl didn't have to tell me because at that moment we came up behind a cruising purple and yellow Mustang, the silhouette of a familiar figure sitting on the driver's side. 'What the devil is this all about?' spilled into the cab of our car as the two-way radio came to life and automatically cut off the sounds of our Am/FM system. 'Get off my tail and out of my sight,' the angry voice shouted. "Daryl picked up the handset of his radio and spoke calmly into it. 'Fritz, please pull over to the side of the road, I've got something I want to talk to you about. I feel bad about what's been happening with us and I want to try and make it right again. I feel strongly about this and don't want to wait any longer than I have to to talk with you.' "Fritz' Mustang continued on ahead several miles before he acknowledged Daryl's request with a matched set of bright, red tail lights. We followed him three car lengths distant off 101 onto a soft, dirt shoulder. Parked and with the Mustang's engine idling softly, Daryl instructed me to do just as he had explained. 'Stand by the passenger side window of his car and let me do the talking.' I nodded my allegiance and we both stepped out of our car and walked over to the other vehicle before Fritz could open his door. I stood shivering silently by the passenger side, a chill wind whipping off the bay waters, and waited. "Fritz rolled down the side window separating him from Daryl, who was stooping slightly so that he could more easily address the older ranger. Paying no attention to me, but concentrating his attention on Daryl, Fritz said, 'What is it you want to say to me?' "I'm here to extend an olive branch I I want to make peace with you, Fritz. I would like things to return to the way they were.' "Fritz wanted this to happen more than either of usQI could see it in his eyesQbut he was not a ranger to accept a branch unexamined. He quickly looked my way for a brief moment, paying me scant recognition, then returned his gaze to Daryl. 'Yes, I would like that to happen, too. But you've got to stop asking me all those inane questions of yours, and you've got to stop following me. If you want to go where I go, ride with me. And stop thinking about finding other RADAR Rangers; there are none. Remember that this is where you uphold the law I that this is where you belong. There is no other place for you to go. I take care of you and Gordon. Neither of you needs anything else.' " 'Yes, fine,' replied Daryl, 'now let's make peace. I have an offering, a present, for you.' " 'An offering? You're actually serious; you have a present for me? I wouldn't have expected this from you, but it's only right that you should offer one.' Fritz' characteristic arrogance was returning and his muggy self-satisfaction began to fog both the front and rear windows. 'Where is the present? Take me to it now.' " 'You won't have to go far,' smiled Daryl. 'I have it right here,' and he reached down to his citation book, flipped back the cover, and tore out the first ticket, which had already been filled out, signed his name at the bottom, and dropped it on Fritz' lap. He did all this in a single, blurred motion that took less than a fraction of a second. Fritz sat there in the Mustang, a dumbfounded look on his face. He had not expected this last rapid sequence of events. "After a moment of confused silence, the older ranger regained enough of his composure to ask, 'What the deuce is this all about? Do you think I' when suddenly he fell silent. Something was definitely wrong with the scene before me. Fritz' head had rolled back against the rigid headrest jutting up out of the driver's seat, and he was staring misty-eyed at the plastic lining of the cruiser's ceiling. He was trying to move his tongue to say something, but the unruly muscle would not form the proper patterns on the roof of his mouth or behind his teeth. A shudder passed through him, and his shoulders rocked heavily against the back of the seat. With great effort, he managed to make a weak, gurgling sound, and I opened the passenger door and moved closer to hear him. " 'Get out and close the door!' commanded Daryl. Then to Fritz, 'How do you like it, old man. Your very own speeding ticket.'" " 'Gordon,' Fritz was trying to say to me, his head unable to turn in my direction. 'Gordon I Gordon, he's destroying me. A RADAR Ranger can't survive a documented moving violation. He's I ' Fritz struggled to slide closer to me, but his paralyzed muscles wouldn't carry him. I again opened the door and moved closer so that he could speak more easily to me, but Daryl ordered me back. " 'That's right, Fritz: a speeding ticket. A little something I learned from my readings that you never bothered to tell us: we RADAR Rangers can give out speeding tickets with abandon, but we can't receive them and keep our good nature. The consequences certainly can be dire, can't they. In fact, you're not looking too good right now, old fellow.' " 'Gordon,' Fritz was gurgling at the back of his throat, 'take the ticket I off me. His words were barely audible over the coarse bay wind that swirled around us. 'The ticket I it's an abomination I sucking my spirit out. My RADAR Ranger nature can't I withstand the irony.' He raised his hand a short distance from his side as if to signal me closer, but let it fall back immediately, exhausted from the slight exertion. " 'So, your RADAR Ranger nature is running out on you, is it, Fritz?' Daryl said to him. 'Let's see if we can speed it along.' Saying these words, the younger ranger began penning hurriedly in his citation book, ripping out tickets and dropping them on Fritz' convulsing body. 'This one's for driving without wearing a seat belt. And here's another for parking illegally alongside a highway. While we're at it, this citation is for changing lanes without signalling beforehand. And that one for not showing proper insurance and registration papers.' Each sheet of paper that touched Fritz caused his body to shudder as if a jolt of electricity had been discharged inside him. 'God!' he gasped, 'God, I'm going.' I turned my burning eyes from his misery, unable to endure his cries of pain and torment. The ground seemed to oscillate under my feet. " 'Stop, Daryl,' I shouted. 'You're killing him. You never said anything about killing. We were going to escape him only, that was all.' "Daryl continued his frenzy of ticket writing, his arms a vague, gray cloud of movement as the storm of tickets floated down and covered Fritz. 'No,' he said at last, the cloud in front of him coalescing into two arms, 'I'm not killing him. I'm draining him of his RADAR Ranger nature. I'm returning him to the world of lesser men from which he came. I don't know, but that may be worse than death. But we're not going to wait to find out. We heading for the Sonoma coast now. That's where our history waits for us.' " 'What's going to happen to Fritz, then?' my weaker, emotional human side asked. " 'He'll remain unconscious for a time. Before he comes to, I imagine someone will happen by and phone the emergency services for him. He'll recover in a few days, if you can call waking up in a world of lesser men without your RADAR Ranger nature 'recovering'. I imagine he'll have to appear before traffic court to account for all these tickets, and, when all is said and done, maybe he can get back his job selling the K-15 from door to door. Not a pleasant thought, but someone has to do it.' "We were finally free of Fritz and the great adventure of our lives was about to begin," said the RADAR Ranger to the mountain biker with a flourish of his arms. Part Two: Sonoma Coast The mountain biker half stood, leaning across the table as far as his arms would support him. "It's not true, is it, sir? I mean about Fritz. He did die, didn't he?" His face grimaced, partially from the physical effort, but mostly from the black images that crossed the stage of his mind's theater. "Each time Daryl threw a ticket on his body, his skin darkened and wrinkled until there was only a thin, brittle parchment-like substance covering his bones. His skull, that was the worst, right? Cracked, bloodless lips drawing back from broken, yellow teeth underneath I the nose shriveling up into a bud of rocky tissue, two cavernous holes beckoning to worms and maggots. Of course, his eyes weren't effected and they watched what was happening with an unspeakable horror, the dilated irises doing an Irish jig across a red-ribbed white floor. And in the end, all that was left of Fritz broke into a fine powder that you and Daryl buried in an unmarked grave." The RADAR Ranger shifted uneasily in his chair. "Your imagination far exceeds your sensibilities, and I caution you not to read your private fantasies into my story, making it something that it is not. The story is true as far as I've told it; I've neither added nor left anything out. You mountain bikers are an unruly lot and my tale is soon to touch upon you, too." The mountain biker had cast his eyes downward so many times that evening they were beginning to stick in a permanent position of supplication. "I'm sorry, sir. I'll try not to get carried away anymore," he promised as more dark, vague images floated across his mind. "Please, don't stop your story on my account. I want to hear all of it. It's the best story I've ever heard on the mountain." "Yes, I imagine that it is," said the ranger as he stretched his body into a more comfortable position on the old oak chair. "We were on our great adventure, as I was saying, heading north on 101 to the Petaluma exit where we turned west off the highway. Fritz was behind us and we did not talk about him. In fact, we remained solemnly quiet, each thinking his own thoughts, not sharing them with the other. It was winter and the rolling hills between Petaluma and the town of Tomales on the coast were brown with dried grasses and topped with spindly, stick- figure trees, their leaves blown off long ago. The 20 mile stretch of countryside passed by quickly and we were soon at the gateway to what Daryl believed was the birthplace of RADAR Rangers. "Upon entering Tomales, a town of less than 1000 people and fairly typical of settlements along the Sonoma coast, Daryl began tapping a quick drum roll with his hands on the lower circumference of the steering wheel. 'What did I tell you,' he grinned at me. 'Will you look at that.' I scanned in the direction of his outstretched arm and saw a jet black Lexus with gold colored hood ornament and signature hub caps pulling across the town's only main intersection. 'He's making a left turn against the red light, Gordon. He's breaking the law! This is a sign, make no mistake about it.' "He cocked back his middle finger with his thumb, then let fly at the switch that turned on our flashing red and blue lights. 'We're off,' he smiled like a kid at St. Petersburg DisneyWorld and quickly rolled up behind the Lexus, pulling it over to the roadside with our shrill siren. 'Come on, Gordon, let's write him up right. This is our holy communion with the land of our fathers.' " 'No,' I said, 'nothing larger than a moped, remember? You go ahead. I feel like stretching my legs a bit, anyway. I'm going to take a walk down the street here and see what I can find. I'll commune with our forefathers later, ok?' He eyed me suspiciously. 'Still thinking about Fritz?' "I nodded 'yes' and climbed out my side of the car. Daryl shrugged his shoulders and exited from his side. We both leaned our elbows on the cruiser's roof and looked at one another in silence. 'I'll meet you back here in a little while,' I finally said and we walked off in our different directions." Church "I was walking again, an activity I hadn't done much of since my days with Jackie on the streets of Ross. I strolled past country stores, looking at food and antiques through wavering glass, but not really seeing the goods laid out in their carefully made beds. I absentmindedly turned the first corner I came to and took a few strides before looking up. In front of me was a small parish, well-trimmed shrubbery climbing up the clean walls and framing intricately worked stained glass windows. A gray-haired man dressed in a long, flowing black robe had just climbed off an old Schwinn single speed, propped it up against the parish wall, and walked into the building through the open door. I followed him in with thoughts of Jackie and Fritz mingled together in my mind. "I had not been in a church since my beginnings with Fritz. The interior was dimly lit, and much of its light came in hues of red, blue, yellow, and green through the ornate windows. Directly ahead of me was the alter covered with fine linen upon which the symbols of the church and been meticulously hand stitched. Atop the linen sat fresh-cut flowers in two clear crystal vases. Several people prayed among the dark stained pews that filled the large room. In the far corner were two draped confessionals, conspiring side-by-side. The light was on above the booths, indicating that confessions were being heard by a member of the clergy. "I suppose I should have been uncomfortable or at least have felt some degree of humility upon entering the building. But I didn't. I had been too long separated from this part of my nature. I simply stood inside the entrance way and observed my surroundings. A man stepped out of the confessional and a woman who had been waiting slipped through the drapes as he left. The man genuflected in front of the alter, then walked down the aisle, past me, to the front door. He looked at me suspiciously, glancing up and down my uniform, as if I were a stranger who did not belong. He may have been right. "The cold from his passing still fresh against my exposed face, I walked further into the damp church. Not really knowing what I was about, I turned left into a long, curving pew and sat down. I ran my chilled hand slowly over the surface of the pew, feeling for a grain but unable to find one through all the coats of varnish and polish. A sudden exhaustion came over me and I leaned forward, propping my head uncomfortably against my enfolded hands on the pew in front of me. "The church was quiet except for the rustling of the woman in the confessional and the humming of a frayed outlet somewhere in the back of the alter. Then to my surprise, a procession of men and women suddenly emerged from the door behind and to the right of the alter. At the head of the procession was Jackie! A gossamer veil covered her face, and I could see her searching eyes cut through the dim light of the church and finally settle on me. Those eyes were blankQcoldQ and I could read nothing into them I no! I didn't want to read anything into them. Her left hand held a prayer book and her right hand rested genteelly atop the raised arm of a male companion dressed in a wrinkled, dark suit. The companion was a pale-faced Fritz and he was smiling his Jack Nicolson leer at me. "Jackie lifted the veil above her face and let it fall on top of her long, blond hair. Pulling her right hand away from Fritz' raised, bent arm, she opened the book she was holding and let the index finger of her right hand rest on the exposed page, as if directing my attention there. But I could not take my eyes off her face. She looked just as I remembered seeing her when we last walked together in Ross so long ago. Then, what I least expected happened. Never deflecting her eyes from my own, she spoke. 'You are cursed from the world, from the earth that has given birth to humankind.' Her words echoed in my ears, each word a tennis volley, bouncing repeatedly against the tight tympanum of my middle ear. 'You are cursed for having spilt the soul of your flesh into a silent abyss. Seeds you scatter unto the ground remain infertile and bear you no knowledge or understanding. A thief and a vagrant shall you remain and the secrets of your birth are hidden forever from you.' "I jumped to my feet and ran into the aisle, imploring her to forgive me, to bring back all that had passed from us. While I supplicated with her to give meQusQ a second chance, a dark presence was welling up inside and behind me, pressing the nerves in my spinal chord tightly against the vertebrae that sheltered them. My body became numb from the pressure and I felt an intense panic rush out to my tingling extremities. Then it was over and the apparition was gone I Jackie, Fritz, their entire entourage. In the confused silence that followed, a hand descended onto my shoulder from behind. Confession "I looked up, startled, from where I was kneeling in the aisle. I shook my head to clear it of the flashes of white light still exploding behind my retina. Stooping over me was the bicycle-riding, gray-haired priest, his ancient hand resting lightly on my shoulder. He rustled his garments around to the front of me and stared at my sad condition for several seconds. 'Can I hear your confession, my son?' he asked me in a husky voice. My eyes were still out of focus from the war of light in my head and I had trouble seeing the priest's features. The sun was setting outside and the light filtering through the stained glass was withering in intensity, leaving the interior of the church much dimmer than before. Straining, I made out the hardened muzzle of a man who wasn't surprised by anything that happened in his church since he'd already seen it all. His wrinkled, jaundiced appearance marked him as a three-pack-a-day smoker and his gruff, raspy voice confirmed it 'You seem upset,' he coughed at me, then, 'Confession will make you feel better.' " 'No, but thank you, father. Confession can't help me. I've waited too long and the burden I carry can't be shared.' I got up, intending to leave the church and return to Daryl at the cruiser. But the old priest grabbed my arm and led me toward the corner of the building where the confessionals were. " 'I have the time, my son, and I think you should take the time,' he said midway there. I started to resist, to make excuses in my head, but then, for a reason I still don't understand, I decided to go along with this old man of the church. I walked the remaining distance to the confessional under my own power, the priest still holding onto my arm as though he feared I might bolt and he would never hear my words. The clergyman pulled the pleated drape back for me and motioned me inside the small cubicle with a sweep of his arm. I let the hanging drape fall back into place behind me and sat down on the small bench that was nailed into the 'V' formed by two adjoining walls. Directly opposite, on the partition in front of me, about shoulder height, was a square piece of wood. It began sliding roughly to the right side, revealing a 6-inch square of finely meshed wire grate. The priest's gruff voice labored through it. 'I'm listening, my son.' "Taking a deep breath, I began, 'Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned. I have done things that have troubled my conscience for years. I have done them knowingly and repeatedly. I have given up my humanity in the process and am tormented by thoughts and deeds of evil. I fear for my soul, Father. " 'God is great and God is merciful, my son,' came the hacking, labored response from the other side of the meshed wire grate. 'Cast aside your fears and tell God what you've done, then ask him for forgiveness.' " 'Traffic tickets,' Father. 'Thousands of them. I've issued no fewer than five of them a day for countless years. And no violation has ever been too smallQI've cited them all: speeding, illegal parking, driving under the influence, changing lanes without signalling, seat belts only partially fastened. Old and young alike. And, God forgive me, I've singled out helpless bicycles and mopeds to prey upon. And, oh Father, the worst I haven't confessed, yet I I gave my sister, my own flesh and blood, a speeding ticket. She's in a sanatorium now, the result of my evil behavior.' "The priest spun out of his cubicle, reached a hand into my confessional and pulled me through the drapes to confront him in the church proper. 'Is this some kind of a game?' he asked me. 'Because if it is, it's in poor taste. This is the house of the Lord, not a sporting arena, and I cannot tolerate such sacrilege here. I would attribute your blasphemy to youthful exuberance if you were younger, but your face shows the true lines of your age. You should be beyond the time when mocking an old priest is humorous for you.' He scowled at me while he covered his mouth with one hand and hacked his indignation. I looked him directly in the eye and said, 'It's the truth, Father, all of it,' and slowly moved forward towards him. His defiant stand held, but only for a moment. A shadow of panic crossed his rough face, and he stumbled backwards, away from me, and fell to the ground. 'If you cannot hear my confession, then there is no hope for me and I am, indeed, damned!' I shouted into the deserted church and stood, towering angrily over the priest. 'If there is a God and he is as merciful as you claim, then why does he allow me to exist like this?' I looked down at the cowering priest and his evident hatred for what I was inflamed me all the more. "'Be gone, you devil!' he sputtered and made the sign of the holy cross. "I moved closer and he crawled away from me, along the front aisle toward the alter. When he reached the Communion rail, I moved to his side faster than his eyes could follow, and, reaching into my side pocket, pulled out my black book and filled out the top sheet of blank paper, then let it fall into his upturned lap. " 'What is this?' the terrified priest cried out. 'If it is an incantation of the devil, I will not look at it nor speak its words.' " 'No,' I responded, 'it is not a spell of the Devil. It's a ticket for illegally parking your Schwinn in front of the church.' And I ran from the building. Bodega Bay The RADAR Ranger paused in his narration and a troubled look took hold of his features. The mountain biker waited patiently until the ranger was ready to continue. "When I at last found Daryl, I did not tell him about my experiences in the church. He was still bubbling over with excitement from issuing his first citation in this, his self-proclaimed land of RADAR, and I did not want to diminish that. He was sure now that we would soon learn of our origins. But, of course, there was more to it than that: he wanted a real communion with other RADAR Rangers. I believe his exact words were 'our kind' and he said the words with an emphasis that I could not duplicate or feel. His need for this communion only pointed out the wide gulf that had been opening up between us. During his early years as a RADAR Ranger, I had looked upon him as Fritz' equal, what with his insatiable craving for bringing down law breakers and his infallible belief that he was using technology for the greater good of society. At the same time, he also displayed the same human desires for knowledge and understanding that I did. Now I saw that he was far less human than either Fritz or myself. There wasn't an ounce of compassion in him. "If he really was so different from you,"the cyclist asked, "why did he bring you along with him? What did he need from you?" "That troubled me the most. Why, indeed, did he stay so close to me? Because I was the closest thing he had to his 'own kind.' When he found his RADAR Rangers, I feared that I would have no place among them and that there would be no reason for him to champion me. I would be an outcast." "Couldn't you have instructed him in matters of the heart just as you had educated him about the material world?" the mountain biker probed. "Why?" rejoined the RADAR Ranger candidly. "I could not bear to see him suffer in these matters as I suffered. Besides, I had lost all confidence in myself, in my ability to do anything. I was not a man of action." The ranger paused and looked at the mountain biker as if expecting a question, but the mountain biker did not pick up where the RADAR Ranger left off. He simply sat at the table and waited for the story to continue. A moment of awkward silence passed before the ranger began speaking, his eyes no longer on the cyclist. "We continued driving north on Highway 1 along the Sonoma coast, leaving Tomales behind us. But the images of Jackie, Fritz, and the old priest tore at me. I had seen Jackie and Fritz as surely as I had seen the gray-haired priest. Each was distinct and separate, finite entities I could keep apart in my mind. But what if I couldn't distinguish among them, among the real and the imagined? Who would show me the way? God? The Devil? Then I thought of the priest again and realized that I could not ask favors of God. The Devil, then, was my salvation. How I longed to confront his horrible countenance, to choose and end this torment that divided me." The RADAR Ranger sighed. He looked at the mountain biker, who had just lowered his chin onto his upturned left hand, his elbow planted firmly, but at a slight angle, on the table. The older man continued his tale without addressing the cyclist directly. "The further north we went, the more we realized that the coast was not as we had imagined. Whereas Marin county had been besieged by cars, the roads here were nearly empty. All that crossed our path was a trickle of local trafficQa few delivery trucks, two John Deere tractors, a '46 Willy's jeep, a beggar pushing a Lucky's grocery cart loaded with plastic bags and empty aluminum soda pop cans. 'Must be an off-season for tourists,' speculated Daryl. I said nothing. "Dillon Beach, Fallon, Valley Ford I it was the same in all the towns we passed through. Bodega Bay was the last town on our hurriedly prepared itinerary, and we pulled into it at dusk, looking for a secluded place to park. Fifteen minutes of driving to canvas the small fishing village for out-of-the-way, off-road parking where the locals wouldn't eye us suspiciously revealed nothing. On the second pass through the harbor town, a narrow spit of land overgrown with a tangle of thorny blueberry bushes beckoned to us. Faint double tracks, hidden by years' of wild grass cycling through life and death on it, led to the back of the parcel where a weathered madrone tree sulked alone in a forgotten, uncared-for bog. "Daryl eased the cruiser slowly over the ancient double track and around the thorny vines into the back of the swampy land. He parked the Mustang under the camouflage of the madrone's lichen-covered branches, leaving just enough space for me to squirm out of the passenger side before the parcel's eastern-most boundary, a sandstone wall, blocked the movement of the car door. Sleep hadn't yet overtaken us and we decided to explore the small marina that lay around the next bend in the road. We trudged through the muck of our hiding place to the road, thunked our boots on the pavement to dislodge the dark gunk that had grabbed hold, and turned into the last rays of the sun to see what the evening would show us. Peggy's Place "A dozen or more fishing boats, only dark shadows now on the waveless waters, watched our approach. Along the paved edge of the marina were three buildings. Light leapt out at us from one of them and we could see people inside. A crowd of people. We headed in the building's direction, hoping to overhear some local gossip, maybe even learning something of RADAR Rangers. "An unlit, hand-painted, plywood sign over the main entrance announced to all comers that this was Peggy's: Fresh Seafood 365 Days. Close enough now to be spotlighted in the yellow light that escaped into the evening, we could see through the wood-framed, multi- paned front door that Peggy's was more than just busy, it was overrun with bobbing heads and waving arms. We walked in and the place fell silent I but only for a second. From the back of the large room, a high-pitched woman's voice announced, 'That's him, that's the one!' and pointed in our general direction. " 'Which one, Mary Sue?' another voice, this time from the middle of the room, cut in. 'There's two of them.' " 'Why, Frank, you know; it's the one with the curly, red hair.'" "Neither Daryl nor I had red hair. To prove it, we both reached up and pulled our patrol caps off in burlesque unison. A collective sigh rose to the open-beamed ceiling and one of the crowd closest to the door immediately advanced towards us. 'Where's your partner?' he asked nervously. Surprised, but with obvious relief when we answered that we didn't have a partner (anymore), he pulled us over to a table with a stained, blue checkered table cloth and four half-empty coffee cups. Opened packets of sugar and cream surrounded the cups. Motioning the table's current occupants away with a tense, jerky wave of his arm, we sat in the still warm chairs of three of the four, willing leave-takers. "All eyes were on us as the emotionally haggard man launched into his monologue. 'He's crazy I you've got to get this officer of yours under control. He won't let me alone. He won't let any of the people around here alone,' he said swinging his arm over his head with an invisible lasso to indicate the crowd in Peggy's. 'I've got to get back to the Bay Area, but I can't get more than a mile or two down the road when he pulls up behind me with his flashing red and blues and cites me for a traffic violation of one sort or another. I thought it was a joke at first, but, believe me, it's not. He doesn't ever say a word, doesn't even look me in the eye, just writes out the citation and drops it in my lap. Then he's gone.' " 'It's us, too, that he's after,' added one of the locals who was standing between us and a turnstile rack of picture postcards. 'Hasn't always been this bad, but we've all paid him our dues. Doesn't stop him, though. No limit to the number of tickets you can get.' " 'What about the local authorities? interrupted Daryl. 'Have you contacted them?' " 'Oh, sure,' came the reply. 'It's the first thing we did, but the authorities haven't been able to do anything. In fact, they're as much at his mercy as the rest of us. It's not natural, what's been going on around here.' "A hand-lettered sign taped to the glass front of the cashier's counter pointed to a section in the back of the restaurant with a big, bold arrow. Underneath the arrow, in small letters, was the word 'SMOKING.' Nerves were close to the precipice at Peggy's and four, big-bladed fans overhead the non-smoking sections, each churning pungent smoke into thick clouds, showed how far their lack of respect for civil code had deteriorated that night. 'Surely, there must be something you can do to help me,' pleaded our table companion. The swirling cloud around our heads couldn't hide the distress in his pursed lips and red, irritated eyes. 'Please, bring some sanity to this cursed place before I lose my mind.' His shoulders heaved a sigh and he was quiet. "Daryl listened eagerly, but with an outwardly solemn face, to the accounts he heard from Peggy's customers. His eyebrows would raise at the mention of certain phrases I 'K-15 on the side of it I never saw the patrol car come up behind me I wrote the ticket in a blurred flurry I couldn't get a date scheduled in traffic court I' When he thought no one was looking at us or the cigarette smoke was thick enough, he would curl up one corner of his mouth and let the other drop with a slight nod of his head in an expression of 'Aha! We're on the right track.' For my part, I kept quiet, the split that divided meQmy concern for the people's suffering on one hand and my contained excitement at locating another RADAR Ranger on the otherQstirring up my thoughts into an inexpressible jumble. "We took our leave of the restaurant well past midnight as did most of the others and walked back to our hiding spot amid the blueberry bushes. We observed that the townspeople, too, had chosen to go by foot, in an obvious attempt to thwart the ranger. The night air was cold and jets of warm mist shot from Daryl's nostrils, punctuating decisions he was making in his mind and the outcomes of actions he was imagining. Had I not been there, he would have continued the search that very night. " 'We'll work Highway 1 between here and Shell Beach tonight,' he said as we stepped off the edge of the pavement onto the double-track that led to our Mustang. 'He's bound to spot our cruiser and come out to meet us. I wouldn't be surprised if he takes us to the others before day break.' "Daryl was talking with animated hand and arm gestures, coming close to hitting me aside the head several times as we worked our way around the wild bushes to the Mustang. I wasn't as confident as DarylQthe townspeople's descriptions of their lone ranger painted a picture in my mind of a character whose nature was extreme, indeed. More extreme than either Fritz or Daryl's. 'Could it be,' I wondered, 'if Fritz and Daryl are imperfect RADAR Rangers I I had no doubt about my own inadequacies I with weak, indecisive natures? The contrast then between the two of us and what we might find along the Sonoma coast chilled my flesh beyond what the night air had already accomplished. " 'I don't think it's a wise decision to search at night,' I said and ducked under an arm that tipped my hat awkwardly to one side. Stepping to my right and then out and in front of him, I continued. 'Hold on a second. We don't know what we're up against; it might be a RADAR Ranger and it might not be. And if there, indeed, are more than one of them and they're not RADAR Rangers, we could find ourselves in trouble. I say let's wait for daylight and, at least, see what we're up against.' "Daryl stood his ground in what I had believed up to this evening to be typical RADAR Ranger obstinacy. 'Gordon, it doesn't matter when you take action, only that you do take action. The sooner we take ours, the sooner we find out about ourselves, about our origins.' And he quit talking almost as soon as he had begun, a bulldogged visage above two intertwined arms glaring at me. " 'You do what you have to,' I replied, 'but I'm staying here until morning. I'm not a creature of the night. I'll sleep under the madrone,' and I walked off to the ancient tree, both amazed and pleased at the action I had taken. I had eased my body down to the wet ground cover and leaned my back in between two counter twists in the tree's uneven trunk when Daryl approached. He stood over me with muddy boots spread wide, elbows bent at right angles to his waist, both rounded fists planted firmly on his hip bones. 'You win, Gordon,' he conceded, his words flying contrarily in the face of the stance he had taken. To give support to those words, he changed his physical attitude and extended his left hand to my right and pulled me effortlessly to my feet. We slept 'til daybreak in the Mustang's trunk and I wondered what had caused Daryl's sudden change of mind." Highway 1 "Two anxious hands shook me roughly awake to see the first yellow streaks of daylight painting the interior of the Mustang's cab. I had slept the deep sleep of the dead in our fuel-injected coffin and had returned to consciousness without a recollection of who or what I was. No name. No history. No memories. " 'Gordon I Gordon!' a familiar voice was shouting at me while the hands continued to rock me first in one direction then in the other. 'Gordon, let's go.' " 'Gordon? Gordon? Ahhh I my name was Gordon and the voice belonged to a RADAR Ranger named Daryl. Vague, swirling images of Peggy's Place began sifting down from the rafters in my head. In the images, I saw confused, frightened people gesturing animatedly with their bodies about somebody or something. Another RADAR Ranger? Were there more than two of us in the world then? The Sonoma coast I the birthplace of our kind? Now I remembered what it was that Daryl and I were to do today and why the hands and voice were each so anxious. " 'I'm awake,' I announced. 'We can go whenever you want.' Daryl had already leaped into the driver's seat and gunned the engine to life on the first turn of the ignition key. The car was pulling off the double-track onto the narrow paved road that led around the marina when I crawled over the front seat and took my shotgun position next to Daryl. My eyes still weren't completely freed of sleep and I could just make out Peggy's Place among the waterfront buildings. A sign sitting in the corner of the front window, not far from our table of last night, had a word painted on it whose pattern might have spelled 'Closed.' I rubbed my swollen eyes with the palms of my hands briefly, and when I looked up, Peggy's Place had retreated behind us and a short, steep hill faced us. At the top of the rise, where Peggy's road met an empty Highway 1, we turned left and headed north up the coast. "Between Bodega Bay and the next town of any size, Jenner, we pulled into all the public beaches and hamlets, not bypassing a single inhabited bend in the road. Arched Rock, School House, Portuguese Beach, Gleason, Duncan Point I none of these offered us any clues. Neither did Duncan's Landing, Wrights Beach, Goat Rock, or Jenner. By early evening, we calculated that we had thirty minutes of daylight left, enough time to drive twelve miles further north to Fort Ross. "We meandered in a roller-coaster pattern of steep ups and downs through the coastal hills that were kept a lush green by moderate winter temperatures and rains. Daryl's face was becoming progressively flushed with color and his body movements quicker and more animated as we snaked around each bend, lessening the distance that remained between us and Fort Ross. About 5 miles from our destination, Daryl gestured at the rich vegetation clinging to the cliff edge that overlooked the pounding surf of the Pacific Ocean and exclaimed, 'Can there be any doubt that this is the place of our origin, Gordon! Only a land so fecund with life and raw, untamed energy could have given birth to individuals as superior as ourselves.' "Before I knew what he was doing, he had pulled the Mustang to the side of the road, flung his door wide, and bolted down to where a thick stand of vegetation was growing along the cliff's edge. He fell to both knees and dug his hands into the surrounding loose soil, bringing two full handfuls up over his head. He held his outstretched arms high, laughing hysterically and let the dark, moist particles trickle through his spread fingers onto his head and shoulders. He repeated this ritual several times until the dirt on his cap and shoulders was quite thick. For my part, I remained in the car, staring at the spectacle in amazement. Except for a few scuffles with Fritz, I had never seen Daryl express himself with such verve and passion. The display bordered on human emotion, although I never said this to Daryl. Fort Ross "During this unexpected roadside scene, the sun's growing disc had retreated closer to the water's far edge and the sky above had darkened. By the time my grinning companion stood and returned to the car to resume our journey, he was compelled to switch on our headlights, the tunnel of night had closed in upon us so quickly. Fort Ross had been blanketed by that same tunnel for some minutes when we finally arrived. " 'Where do we begin?' I broke our self-imposed silence in the car. Beyond the reflective city limit sign announcing our entrance into Fort Ross, our headlights revealed nothing to distinguish the invisible boundary from the terrain we had just driven through. Small copses of trees, scattered shrubs and plants, rolling hills, ocean. No country stores, shops, or gas stations to proclaim a town. No lights anywhere, in fact. Daryl slowed the Mustang and we moved forward at a night worm's pace. Burning either side of the rode with it's industrial strength halogen bulb, I guided our hand-held spotlight slowly over the dark shapes that had taken form in the dark. Most danced and wiggled as the light played at their peripheries, but solidified into rocks and logs when it was full upon them. " 'Over there,' Daryl indicated with the index finger of his left hand, the remaining digits grasping tightly at the 10 o'clock position on the steering wheel. I turned the spot across the top of the car's hood. The light played momentarily in empty space, then caught the rough-hewn turret of a structure fifty yards up on the ocean side of the road, about 1/4-mile inland. Judging by the building's shape, it looked like part of a fortress. "We cut through the blackness of Highway 1 and glided to a stop in front of a gravel driveway. Daryl had extinguished the Mustang's headlights, so I panned the spotlight slowly through the cleared, level space that opened up from the driveway. The area was cut into an irregular rectangle, narrow at the entrance and wider at the opposite, far end. Daryl swung the car into the driveway, and I adjusted the direction of the beam to hold it steady on the only two objects in the parking lot: two cars, one a patrol cruiser, the other a compact with an empty bike rack strapped to its hatchback. " 'What do you make of it?' I asked Daryl nervously. "He tossed a quick glance over his right shoulder in my direction and molded a grin with his lips as if to say 'you know as well as I do,' then returned his gaze to the front of the car, his eyes scanning carefully in a wide arc as we approached the two parked cars. At the end of the lot, he eased our Mustang into a space two car widths to the right of the other cruiser. I had turned off the spotlight at his command and we sat in the car in complete darkness. The night was still; not a living thing moved or made a sound. We were aware only of the wind and the distant sound of waves breaking onto a unseen beach. "Anxious to meet this RADAR Ranger whose car we had parked next to, Daryl opened his door and stepped out. I hesitated under the interior light that automatically flashed on, but Daryl immediately reached in and switched it off. " 'Get out of the car and let's go,' he said in a firm voice. " 'Do you feel it?' I asked him without moving. 'I think he knows we're here.' And I remained in the protective shell of the Mustang. A nervous, instinctive shudder jerked my arms closer to my ribs, my limbic system pretending that two skinny sticks could protect my vulnerable heart from imagined dangers. Daryl moved slightly away from the car and again commanded in that confident voice, 'Gordon, follow me.' He took another step away and threatened to be swallowed alive by the blackness. I was out of the car and standing next to him in a moment, my heart saved, but beating savagely against the wall of my chest cavity. " 'Be still, Gordon, and stay close to me.' I stumbled after him through the thick blackness, trusting him completely. My body was trembling so badly, I lost my balance several times, stepping onto small stones and mounds of dirt, pushed to the surface to trip me up by burrowing creatures of the night. More than once I prevented myself from sprawling to the ground by leaning heavily onto Daryl, from whose shoulder I never withdrew my left hand. 'Fear's your worst enemy,' he said, standing still while I righted myself. " 'But don't you sense it?' I muttered. 'I can almost smell it in the air. Something's out there.' " 'Yes, I can feel it, too. It's very strong and it's leading us to our destiny, Gordon. The feeling you have is why we've come here, it's the reason for our being.' It seemed like an eternity before he started to move ahead again, and when he did, he disappeared from my grasp so quickly that I could all but attribute it to a preternatural force. I took a blind step forward, groping the emptiness in front of me for the security of his shoulder. But all I felt was the rush of air against the open palm of my thrashing hand. I suddenly felt naked and cold and very alone. "Before I had time to dwell on the significance of my isolation, a soft voice came to me from ahead. 'Gordon,' it said, 'come over here and shine the light on this placard. I can't make out what it says.' My right hand felt the weight of the almost forgotten spotlight I had been carrying since I stumbled out of the Mustang, and I moved forward towards the voice in the darkness with a renewed surge of confidence. After a few steps, I saw Daryl's figure silhouetted against the darker background. He was standing next to a sign affixed to a thick, upright post. 'Mask the light as best you can,' he whispered when I was at his side, 'and shine it here on the sign.' I spread the fingers of my left hand over the clear, plastic plate that protected the halogen bulb underneath, then pushed down with my right thumb on the rubber button that turned the beam on. "Shafts of uneven light spread across the sign upon whose worn face a message had been carved. 'Fort Ross State Historic Park' the top line read. Below it, 'Constructed in 1812 by Russians under Ivan A. Kuskov. At one time, the Fort was home to over three hundred Russians, Aleuts, and California Indians. The primary industry was otter and seal hunting. Once the sea-otter crop played out in 1841, the Russians sold their buildings and goods to John A. Sutter for $32,000 and returned to Russia.' The bottom lines proclaimed, 'Open daily 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. except Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year's.' Fortress Chapel " 'I remember this place,' I blurted out. 'My parents brought Jackie and me here once when we were kids. The building over there was the Russian Commandant's house and the one there the chapel.'" Turning to face the mountain biker in Sky Oaks, "Jackie and I had a ball playing in the old buildingsQI scared her silly hiding behind doorways then jumping out, shouting like the boogey-man when she came looking for me. I think the whole place closed around the same time the Presidio in San Francisco was shut down. "My thoughts of Jackie and I as carefree children playing among the buildings in the compound were happy ones, but they lasted only for a moment. The more recent image of Jackie's apparition in the Tomales church clawed its way out of the black of my mind and crowded out those lighthearted times. " 'Stay close and be on guard,' Daryl's voice trailed off as he turned from the sign and walked through the compound's open entrance towards the outline of the chapel. I broke out of my gruesome reverie and fled after his departing form. The chapel, like the other buildings in the eight-sided, walled compound, was a solid structure, made out of large-diameter redwood logs stacked on top of one another and secured at the corners with deep-cut notches. Daryl stayed close to the irregularly shaped walls as he moved in the direction of the building's front entry. 'If he's here now,' he leaned his head back and whispered over his shoulder, 'I don't want to startle him. I want him to know as quickly as possible that we mean no harm, that we're friends. That we're RADAR Rangers, too.' The excitement in his hushed voice failed to calm the apprehension that shared me with the night. "We entered the chapel slowly and cautiously, Daryl first then me. The interior was too dark to discern any features and Daryl instructed me to switch on the spotlight, using my fingers to mask the beam as I had done before. The panels of wavering rays showed a building neglected for years, but not wanting for visitors: footprints of all shapes and sizes had stamped their patterned soles on the dusty floor. The most sought-after destinations within the chapel had the most pronounced paths leading to them through the dust, and we followed the first of these trails. It led to the front of the building where the altar with its orthodox trappings had once kept vigil, but were not to be seen now. From there, a parting of the dust led to a nearby side door whose heavy, dark hinges and plain paneling left me feeling uneasy. I was thankful when Daryl decided not to explore this option, but instead carefully followed his steps back along the path that led from the altar to the front entrance, neatly bisecting the chapel into mirror images. From his vantage point, he surveyed the interior again, then elected to retrace our steps to the altar where he looked at each corner of the chapel for some moments before moving to the side door that had, only moments before, disturbed me and continued to do so still. "Daryl pulled on the pitted iron latch that hung two-thirds of the way down and to one side of the sinister door. It opened with a grating cough on dry hinges. On the other side of the entrance, the single track continued up a steeply spiraling staircase that led to a small room at the top of the lofty turret. Daryl grasped the bottom of the cold railing, polished smooth over many years with the sweaty oil from countless hands, and began to climb up. I followed his fresh footsteps, noticing that another equally fresh pair of prints accompanied us to the summit of the stairs. "The circular room at the top was small and empty, but provided an adequate space for two grown men. Four broken windows looked out from the walls to the points of the compass; well worn, but dusty, depressions lingered in the floor before three of these windows. In front of the westerly facing fourth window was a matching depression, but in this dust clearing a set of fresh prints took center stage. The shoes that created these prints had been standing at the window only a few hours before, the gathering dust not yet having had time to blur their outlines. Like the ironed creases on a pair of new dress slacks, the tracks were very distinct, and it was clear that their owner had stood motionless in the same spot, observing something or someone outside with great intensity. "Daryl was as still as the broken panes of glass through which the earlier visitor and now he were peering. He had focused all his RADAR Ranger energies on listening. And then I was listening with him. Faintly at first, just sounding above the crash of water on sand and wind over uneven surfaces, a distant vibration traveled to us. It carried with it a distinct rhythmic pattern. As it grew louder and more persistent, Daryl bent his torso at the hips, automatically leaning his head and shoulders closer to the window. His eyes narrowed and he raised his right hand, pointing his index finger at a vague and unusual shape moving quickly down the path from the bluffs towards the compound. The figure ran as if driven by a great fear, and the separation between the rhythmic sounds of his shoes striking the ground and the actual sight of that movement lessened rapidly. When the two sensations of sight and sound became one for the figure, I saw why it had, at first, appeared so unusual: the figure was really two, a man pushing a bicycle at his side. Cyclist "Daryl moved so suddenly that I became aware of his absence at my side only after seeing his right heel kick into the air above the first of the descending steps, his left foot already touching the fourth rung down. I followed at a more cautious pace and caught up with him outside the compound's walls where the bluff trail forked together with the path leading to the parking area. He was holding, at arms length, the shoulders of the figure we had been watching. A silver bicycle was lying at their feet along the side of the trail. The struggling figure was no match for Daryl's RADAR Ranger strength and he soon ceased pummeling at the air that separated him from Daryl. " 'Your partner's already done his thing and now I want out of here. Let go!' cried a young man in his early to mid-twenties. His day-glo ATB red Gore-Tex (TM) cycling jacket was open at the neck, exposing a multi- colored CoolMax (TM) poser training jersey underneath. Supplex (TM) Panel Superwash (TM) wool tights were ripped at the knees and only the left hand was covered with a Fast Track (TM) Ragg wool glove. " 'Calm down,' ordered a stern-faced Daryl. 'What are you talking about?' "The youth paused for a second, trying to catch his wind, then spoke a stream of words. 'That partner of yours is a crazy dude. I was riding on this single trackQit's legal, see there's no sign here saying not to do itQwhen about two miles out I hear this bellowing voice call out, 'Stop, you're under arrest, Walt, for breaking the law.' How'd he know my name, anyway? I've never seen him before. Well, I figure the guy's a looney and there'd be no way to reason with him, so I keep on riding. But he just keeps on running, yelling at me to stop all the time because I'm a speeder andQnow dig thisQ'not a man of action!' But my legs can't pedal fast enough and this guy is gaining on me like I was parked in front of MacDonalds, sipping a Diet Coke and munching on a large order of fries. The next thing I know, he's got hold of my seat and is lifting my rear wheel off the ground with one hand. I know it was one hand because he had a RADAR gun in the other, a thin cord connecting it to a battery pack strapped to his belt. I saw then that this is not the type of person I want to upset more than I have to, so I stop pedallingQa lot of good it was doing me, anywayQand I ask what the trouble is. He tells me I've broken the speed limit and shows me the RADAR gun. It shows 22 mph, which he says is 17 mph above the legal 5 mph limit for fire roads. Then I explain to him that I'm riding on a narrow single track and couldn't have gone that fast, but he counters that the speed he's showing me is my speed back in the parking lotQwhich he says fits the description of a fire road. Next he cites me for riding on a single track and says I should have known better after I pointed out the absence of posted signs prohibiting it.' " 'Don't get me wrong,' pausing only long enough to catch his breath, 'I'll take the tickets if I deserve them because I know I can defend myself in traffic courtQ innocent until proven guilty and all thatQbut that's not what worried me. This guy is acting really weird, just answering my questions with the fewest possible words, never looking me in the eye, writing all this stuff in his little black book without ever looking down, hardly moving anything but the wrist of his writing hand. Spooky. Ok, I take the tickets and start heading back and get to within 1/2 mile of here when he's after me again. This time he's shouting that I'm under arrest because I haven't got my helmet on. He's right, I don't but that law's just for motorcycles, right? So here I am and I know he's not too far behind and you gotta' let me go now before I go crazy, too, which I'll do if he catches me.' "During this long-winded monologue, the expression on Daryl's face had metamorphosed from strong confidence to questioning doubt to serious concern. With the passage of each of these emotions, his grip on the youth slackened and eventually the young man was free of his lawful RADAR Ranger embrace. 'Thanks a lot,' the youth said, 'I'm gone and I'll never come back to bother you guys again.' He wheeled around and sprinted for his car. "But before he could get too far, Daryl was on the young man, handing him a page from his own black book. 'What's this?' the incredulous youth cried into the night air, his head thrown back and his mouth hanging open in disbelief. " 'Sorry, son, but you were riding without a legal light.' Once a RADAR Ranger, always a RADAR Ranger. Besides, we still had our daily quotas to fulfill. "The youth stuffed the ticket into an unzippered pocket of his Supplex (TM) Panel Superwash (TM) wool tights without blinking an eye and resumed sprinting to his parked vehicle " 'Wait a minute,' I shouted after him. 'Don't forget your bicycle.' "He looked back at me, half way between where I stood with Daryl on the narrow trail and his car in the graveled parking area, and hollered, 'Keep it. No more mountain biking for me. I'm going into ocean kayaking.' And then, 'You guys don't swim, do you?' The mountain biker, feeling somewhat uneasy in the dim lights of Sky Oaks, asked, "Do you remember what kind of a bike it was?" The RADAR Ranger hesitated for several moments before he answered, then said, "Could it have been a Cunningham? C-U-N-N-I-N-G-H-A-M was spelled out in black letters across the top tube." "Uh-huh," whistled the mountain biker in awe. "The legendary mountain bike, a collector's item I one hasn't been made in years. And those that have them, keep them locked up in back rooms" And he suddenly realized the seriousness of what he was hearing. The Other Ranger The RADAR Ranger slowly got up from his chair at the oak table and stepped over to the wood-framed window. He stared into the darkness a long time, taking an audibly deep breath every 10 to 15 seconds, letting out the air with a troubled, low-pitched rush through pursed lips. "This was not something Daryl had been expecting, and it caught him off guard. But more was to come. We both heard it at the same time, the synchronized huffing and puffing reinforcing the sound of approaching footfalls. I could see Daryl's shoulders straighten noticeably and the short hairs on the top of his hands bristle. We were about to confront another RADAR Ranger. "Jogging down the same single track we were standing on was a large, dark outline of a man in the uniform of a RADAR Ranger. As he came closer to us, I noticed few signs of exhaustion, although I knew he had been running many miles over an uneven terrain in the dark. The huffing and puffing I heard was more his way of counting cadence than a sign of fatigue. In his right hand he held a K-15 RADAR gun and I could just make out the cable connecting it to the leather-encased battery pack strapped to his side just as the cyclist had described. When he reached us, he came to a halt and turned his eyes to both Daryl and myself, each in turn, then at the silver bike lying at our feet. " 'You've brought down the law breaker?' he said in monotone syllables. His eyes were as flat as his voice and I felt something vital was missing, that he lacked substance. He came across as an incompletely defined movie character, a two-dimensional, celluloid man. "Daryl was obviously puzzled and confused by the appearance of this long, sought-after RADAR Ranger. It was not what he had imagined the missing link to be like. Despite his confusion, Daryl kept enough composure to extend his hand and say, 'My name is Daryl and this is Gordon,' pointing to me. 'We're both RADAR Rangers like yourself and are very pleased to have found you.' "The other RADAR Ranger didn't acknowledge Daryl's greeting. He merely stood in front of us with unblinking eyes and asked,'Where is the law breaker? He has been riding without a helmet and must be corrected with a ticket.' " 'We'll talk about him later,' snapped a suddenly impatient Daryl. 'Let's talk about you now and where you come from. Can you tell me about the other RADAR Rangers you keep the law with? Where are they now?' "But the two-dimensional ranger ignored Daryl's questions again. 'Riding a bike without a helmet is against the law,' he mouthed in his tedious tones. 'I must correct him. I'll bring him down now,' and he started to walk away from us towards his Mustang. Daryl, furious with the response, or lack of it, reached across with his right hand and grabbed the ranger by his left shoulder and spun him violently around to face us again. " 'Don't act like an idiot,' he shouted at the unseeing eyes. 'Surely you know more than you're letting onto. Where do you come from, ranger? What place do you call home? You can't be the only RADAR Ranger on the Sonoma coast. There have to be others who can tell me about our history, about our origins!' "The other RADAR Ranger stood mutely still, his eyes an unwritten movie script. Slowly, a glimmer of recognition settled into them and his forehead wrinkled as he strained to translate that glimmer into words. 'Tamal,' he finally declared, a trace of a smile on his face. " 'Tamal?' repeated Daryl softly. Then loudly, 'Tamal? What does 'Tamal' mean?' "More silence from the other RADAR Ranger, then additional glimmers of recognition. 'TamalPAIS,' he grinned. 'Tamalpais is where the others are.' Without further interference from Daryl, the ranger turned his back on us and half-jogged, half-walked to his cruiser, climbed in, and drove out of the parking lot in pursuit of the law-breaking mountain biker. "Did you ever see that RADAR Ranger again?" asked the mountain biker from behind the table. "Yes, we did, in the watershed of our origins." "Here on Mt. Tamalpais, sir." "Yes, on Mt. Tamalpais." Part Three: On the Mountain "The other RADAR Ranger was gone, leaving Daryl and me alone once again. We stood there, two solitary figures, in the timeless dark just outside the high redwood wall that surrounded Fort Ross. Then Daryl tapped me lightly on the shoulder and suggested we head back to our own vehicle. I turned the spotlight on, the need for caution and stealth no longer paramount. The door to the secrets of the Sonoma coast I if there had been any secrets I had closed on us." "But the other RADAR Ranger?" asked the mountain biker, nervously twisting his hands back and forth in each other. "Why was he so different from you and Daryl?" "I had the beginnings of a few ideas, but they were clouded over and hidden by a deep despair that took hold of me. That despair arose from a troubling doubt that we had neutralized the only other RADAR Ranger who had anything in common with us: Fritz. He had been in my thoughts, as I think you know, in one form or another since we had come to the Sonoma coast. In a strange twist of fate, he was the only RADAR Ranger like us that I had found on this journey. As contradictory as it may sound, there were times then I wished he were back together with us! "Daryl, on the other hand, had a far more practical perspective. 'What if RADAR Rangers are not the lone predators Fritz wanted to us believe,' he reasoned. 'Suppose, in fact, that we are pack animals, surviving best in groups. Living together, bringing down law breakers together. It makes sense, doesn't it? For a reason we may never learn, Fritz was separated from his pack and could not return to it. Perhaps he committed a crime against his fellow RADAR Rangers and was banished. Or maybe he was separated from them in an accident. The actual cause for the separation isn't important, though. The important thing is the separation itself. I don't believe RADAR Rangers can exist in the absence of other pack members. If my guess is correct, Fritz made you into a RADAR Ranger shortly after his separation occurred because he couldn't stand to be alone. And when he felt that you were ready, he expanded the pack by creating another RADAR Ranger, me. If I hadn't neutralized him, would he have created others in time? I believe he would have. There is comfort in the pack, a comfort we unknowingly took for granted while Fritz was with us. Although we claim to have hated him, his absence has diminished the comfort we feel now.' "Daryl stood quiet, his eyes darting back and forth with REM-like movements in their sockets. 'My God,' he finally exclaimed, 'it also explains why the RADAR Ranger we just encountered was crazed. He's lost his pack and, perhaps more significant, he doesn't know how to replace it with his own. The loneliness obviously has driven him to madness.' Striking his clenched fist onto the hood of the Mustang, he announced to me, 'So much of what we are has become clear to me tonight, Gordon. I was despairing in the darkness out there when we first encountered him, but now I see there's no need to despair. That we are pack animals is as clear to me as is our need to bring down law breakers. And, given the right circumstances, a RADAR Ranger can change a man of lesser action into a man of superior action I Fritz has shown us that. But if you were to ask what the right set of circumstances is, I couldn't give you any specifics. My history is incomplete for that. And our origins, Gordon! Our origins! I still don't know how it all began. But I feel that I'll find answers to all my unanswered questions on Mt. Tamalpais.' He climbed into the Mustang without another word and drove us straight to the mountain that very night. Mt. Tamalpais "I can't find the words to describe the joy I felt that night on our return to Marin county and, particularly, to Mt. Tamalpais," said the RADAR Ranger to the mountain biker. He stretched his arms wide, then wrapped them around his upper torso, forming a large X with his forearms in front of his chest. Holding this position, he turned from the window and walked slowly back to his chair at the oak table. "Mt. Tam was backyard to Terra Linda," he grunted with an emphasis on the 'da' of 'Terra Linda' as he fell back into his chair and settled into the five round dowels that formed its backrest. "All the kids in the neighborhood played there whenever they could. Some of us rode our bikes over the San Rafael/Terra Linda Ridge to get there, others took the bus, and some even managed to con their parents out of rides on a regular basis. "Our first experiences were on the lower hills of the north slopes, in and around Fairfax. We were fortunate because the north side of the mountain tends to be wetter, wilder, shadier, and less congested with hikers than the south side. A great place for kids to explore and have fun without the constant intrusion of adults. The fog that swept down the San Geronimo valley from the ocean kept the hill sides and valleys lush with with all kinds of trees: buckeyes, bays, oaks, madrones, firs, and redwoods." The RADAR Ranger eyed the mountain biker closely. "I'm not boring you with these memories, am I?" "Well, actually, I ride a lot of the mountain and I'm pretty knowledgeable of its flora and fauna." "But you don't hike on the mountain? Just ride?" "Yes, that's right; I can't walk too far because I've got a bad back. Riding doesn't bother it, though. My chiropractor even claims riding is good for it, opens the vertebrae and takes pressure off the discs and nerves running through them." "Well, then," rejoined the RADAR Ranger, his face hardening, "you've never had an opportunity to see the beauty of the mountain at a leisurely pace, have you? I imagine we could even safely say that you've missed some of the more subtle, natural wonders on your hurried trips through the watershed." "No I not really. I sometimes take along my water colors and sketch book to paint impressions of what I see along the fire protection roads. You know, it's really great being able to travel deeply into the mountain, to places you never could reach in a single day by foot. Those remote areas are unspoiled by the comings and goings of all the day trips people organize around here." "Such a knowledgeable, young fellow you are," said the RADAR Ranger in his best Yoda syntax. "I'm surprised at your range of interests I you have certain traits that are rather atypical of mountain bikers in general. Are you aware of the feral pig problem up on Bolinas Ridge?" came the next question. "I paint up there all the time," answered the mountain biker, surprised at this non sequitur. He shifted his glance from the suspicious eyes of the ranger to the boar's head mounted on the wall to his right. "You mean those guys?" The RADAR Ranger nodded his head in assent. "Sure, I've seen some of the cages you've set up there. They're the reason you put up the long wire fence on the ridge, isn't it. To keep wild pigs from spreading into the Point Reyes National Seashore. Those animals are real devils, digging up hill sides looking for calypso orchid roots and all." "What do you know about West Peak?" quizzed the RADAR Ranger with another non sequitur. "Not too much," came the reply, "because it's been closed to just about everybody since the military took it over during World War II. I do know that the Air Force built their RADAR station there in 1951, but after they declared the facility out-of-date in 1982, they turned the area over to the GGNRA. Strange, now that I think about it, that the land didn't revert back to the Marin Municipal Water District. But then, again, stranger things happen all the time. I understand the three acres up there on West Peak with the two golf-ball RADAR domes is leased to the FAA under a separate agreement and that no matter how loud the public complains, those domes will never come down." The mountain biker hesitated, broke into a soft chuckle, then caught himself and stopped, but not before the ranger threw a weary glance in his direction. "What are you laughing at?" "Oh," said the mountain biker, "not much. It's just that a few of us who ride the mountain refer to West Peak as the Tee-off to paradise. It's just funny if you know the guys in the group." The RADAR Ranger apparently didn't know the guys in the group and kept a straight face. "Have you ever been inside the compound at West Peak?" "Absolutely not," returned the mountain biker. "The place is off limits and, besides, it's completely encircled by a cyclone fence topped off with barbed wire. A real fortress up there." He looked guilefully at the RADAR Ranger, waiting for his next move, as if they were playing a cloak-and-dagger game of chess. The RADAR Ranger made his next move."Ever done any spelunking or rock collecting on the mountain? Some varieties of chert contain beautiful patterns and colors, and the pillow basalt deposits are intriguing." "I didn't know there were any caves worth exploring on Mt. Tam, at least I've never heard of any," conceded the cyclist. "Rock collecting I no, I've invested too much money trying to keep my bike light. Why would I want to load up my pockets and fanny pack with rocks? I couldn't even imagine hikers going to the trouble of carrying mineral souvenirs off the mountain. It's illegal, anyway, isn't it? You guys aren't going to start checking purses and car trunks for contraband rocks, are you?" "No, we're not," replied the RADAR Ranger with an audible sigh of relief, leaving the puzzled mountain biker to wonder what it was that had just transpired between them. (*Author's note: No one really knows the significance of what transpired between the two). Fairfax "I see that you already have a sound understanding of the mountain and can empathize with a child's attachment to it," the RADAR Ranger conceded. "There's no reason for me to belabor that point, then." The mountain biker shifted ever so slightly lower in his chair, the only outward indication that these last words were a welcome relief to him. "As I was saying before my digression, Daryl drove us straight to Mt. Tam immediately after our encounter with the crazed, two-dimensional, celluloid RADAR Ranger of the Sonoma coast. On my advice, we settled down until day break in the dirt parking lot that fronted the entrance to Deer Park fire road in the town of Fairfax. I slept soundly in our Lycra (TM) womb, too weary to dream, but Daryl tossed and turned, no doubt subconsciously replaying our dark times on the Sonoma coast on the back wall of his mind. "My head was resting on the cushion of the back seat when I first opened my eyes and I could see the sun climbing through the middle branches of the ancient madrone under which we had parked. The preceding evening's events had worn me out, but not as much as they had Daryl. I stirred before him and was standing in a spotlight of warm sun next to the Mustang when he emerged from the car. He was haggard and worn, the muscles at the corners of his eyes dragging the lids half way down over his irises. He rubbed at them vigorously with the palms of both hands, then opened his mouth wide to let a tremendous yawn escape. " 'Yesterday was more work than I imagined,' he said, shaking his matted head at nothing in particular. " 'I'm emotionally exhausted, too,' I said. 'The happenings of the past few days have played havoc with my mind.' "I'm physically tired, Gordon, not emotionally. Emotions are your weakness, not mine.' " 'Daryl,' I countered, upset by his continued, obstinate denial that emotions had no place in our world of public service, 'you have been emotionally excited ever since this quest began. Any physical exhaustion you've felt takes a back seat to the force of that excitement. And I know that beyond your emotionally excited state, you must share some of my loneliness now that Fritz is gone and our pack has grown smaller. If you're a pack animal as you claim, you can't escape that feeling.' "He stood there, glaring at me with eyes that had become wide-awake. The muscles that had pulled the corners of his mouth down to a sleepy frown when he first awoke were now offset by an opposing pair that created a subtle grin. 'You've mistaken an instinctive focusing of energy for emotional excitement,' he lectured me. 'I have not been acting like a small child running around a birthday cake, clapping my hands excitedly for the next slice of cake. No I my energies have been carefully calculated and focused on achieving a single goal: to find others of our kind. The emotions you talk about would only get in the way and impede the attainment of that goal. I am a man of action, not of emotions.' He ran his fingers through the disheveled hair on the sides of his head, then massaged his hands slowly and heavily down the outside of his neck. 'I do not miss Fritz in an emotional way; rather, I feel a need, a drive, to replace that which has been taken from me because I am less whole without it. Soon, today perhaps, I will find others like us and regain my whole identity.' "Arguing further with him, especially when part of me applauded what he said, was senseless. So I suggested that we begin our search that very morning. My plan was simpleQto divide up and walk the trails and fire protection roads of Mt. Tamalpais until we met another RADAR Ranger. At the end of the day, we would return to the Mustang and inform each other of our successes. Daryl agreed immediately to the plan and set out along Deer Park fire road. I hiked with him a very short distance, then turned right onto Ridge Trail and set out on my own. I had hiked along this single track often as a child and was familiar with it and the others it linked up with. "I marveled at what I saw that morning: redwood, oak and madrone standing brilliantly outlined against a deep blue sky, meadows and grasslands teaming with field mice and other rodents, redtailed hawks circling overhead. Raccoon appeared early along the trail, scampering to their dens after a night-time of ravaging Fairfax dumpsters and garbage cans. As their numbers diminished and early morning flowed into mid morning, deer bounded more frequently into the underbrush on either side of the trail as I passed along. The deeper I hiked into the watershed, the more frequently I encountered creatures that were less willing to share the land with humans: fox, bobcats, and osprey. And there was another creature whose presence I sensed but did not actually see until later in the morning." "The sensations of another's presence were almost too subtle to notice at first I they came to me more as echoes of my own movements though the forest, nothing more. And that's what I believed them to be at first, echoes. The sound of my boots striking the trail, the rustle of shirt sleeves as they brushed against my side, the occasional tree limb reaching out and touching my hat, a light cough to clear my throatQthese sounds moving away from me into the woods in concentric rings of energy, then returning after random collisions with a tree trunk, a rock wall, or a pool of water. In open meadows and fields, however, with few objects large enough to send the babble of my body hurrying back to its source, I became more suspicious of these echoes. 'How is it,' I wondered, 'that even without reflecting objects, whatever audible movement I make, its twin fills my ears as if the rebounding surface is as close as my shadow?' Yet, as I've told you, I could see nothing close enough to me to account for the phenomenon. "I passed along Ridge, Moore, and Canyon trails aware of the strange echoing phenomenon, but unable to determine its cause. It did not seem threatening and gradually became one of many background noises that accompanied me on my wanderings through the watershed. Hiking up Canyon Trail before it intersected with Concrete Pipe fire road, I became mesmerized by the intensity of the green canyon wall that faced me from the southwest. The sun had climbed high enough in the morning sky to paint dark green shadows along the canyon's uneven surfaces. The line separating shadow from sunlight was razor sharp and created an exaggerated three dimensionality on the surface I as though the folds of land and trees where the edge lay had a dimensional order of magnitude greater than the surrounding terrain. But even more overpowering than the texture of the canyon wall was the color green. Both in shadow and in sunlight, it was a green that could not be matched by photographic film, tape, or 32-bit computer color. To capture even the slightest essence of its mystery would require the mixing of pigments by a skillful, living artist trained in the subtleties of green. "These were my thoughts as I passed from Canyon Trail onto Concrete Pipe fire road. The road was considerably wider than the trail, providing ample access for large trucks and fire fighting equipment. Exceptionally wide and smooth, Concrete Pipe's friendly surface was a magnet to speeding bicycles traveling in either direction, and I heard the approach of several as I climbed up onto it. Three cyclists were approaching from the north at a speed well beyond the 5 mph limits I had seen posted. Bringing down three law breakers would bring me to within two of my minimum quota of five for the day. I prepared to signal the riders to the side of the road when I heard my footsteps continue at a rapid pace past me in the direction of the bicycles." Concrete Pipe "Excuse me, sir," interrupted the mountain biker, "but you had no jurisdiction at that time to issue tickets on the watershed." The RADAR Ranger tossed his head back in frustration and, not bothering to look at the mountain biker, countered, "RADAR Rangers have jurisdiction wherever the law is broken. Haven't I made that clear to you?" "Sorry, sir, I guess I wasn't thinking straight." "Yes, I guess you weren't, but that doesn't come as a surprise to me. Now, let me continue with my story I where was I? Oh, yes: Materializing where the footfalls ended, a RADAR Ranger appeared and gestured the cyclists to a stop. In his right hand, he was wielding a battery-powered K-15 RADAR gun and in his left he held a book of tickets! "I was astonished to have found another RADAR Ranger so soon and in the manner I had just witnessed. He was a tall, angular man and wasted no time citing the law breakers for their offenses. With tickets tucked away in black Cordura(TM), adjustable waist belt with padded back area fanny packs, the three mountain bikers pedaled off at a much slower clip. I remained where I was, hidden from view by roadside shrubbery as they cycled past. When the next corner had devoured them, I stepped into the middle of the road I and felt as if I were looking into a mirror. I pivoted on my right foot, and my mirror image, the ranger, pivoted on his left, turning not a degree further than I had. I swung my left leg around to complete my turn and he did the same with his right leg. Every gesture I made, he duplicated with uncanny accurateness. I took a hesitant step toward him, and he took a hesitant step away from me. I shuffled backwards, and my image shuffled forwards. A reflective stalemate. I hailed him a greeting, gesturing with my right hand, and heard the words of my greeting rebounding back to me a millisecond after I had uttered them. Had he been closer, the palm and fingers of his left hand would have been pressed tightly against my right and our combined movements would have been the perfect mime of one man washing a mirror. But we remained separated and I could not lessen the distance between us." "What did you finally do?" asked the mountain biker, comfortably ensconced behind the oak table. "Nothing," answered the RADAR Ranger. "Within moments after hailing him, he simply disappeared as quickly as he had appeared. He was there and then he wasn't. His reflexes and speed were far beyond those of Fritz, and I hadn't thought anyone capable of replicating Fritz' movements. Daryl had come close on occasions but had never exceeded them. This RADAR Ranger had surpassed them easily; he also had expanded my image of the world of RADAR Rangers. For one thing, that world was more diversified than our small pack of three had led me to believe. Was this RADAR Ranger normal? Was the ranger on the Sonoma coast that abnormal? Had Fritz been aberrant? Was I?' I longed to know the answers to these mysteries. Fish Gulch "These thoughts replaced those childhood fantasies that had filled my head earlier in the morning. And all the while I hiked, I felt the presence of the other ranger tracking me, just beyond my sensory grasp. Along Taylor Trail past Sky Oaks Ranger Station to Lagunitas Trail, down Dam Trail, then across Bon Tempe dam. At the three-way intersection of Dam and Bon Tempe trails with Rocky Ridge Road, the will-o'-the-wisp ranger made another entrance, appearing just in time to cite two law- breaking mountain bikers for riding the trail around the west side of the lake. Trail riding anywhere on the watershed is a serious offense," glared the RADAR Ranger at the mountain biker who no longer felt as comfortable as he had a few short moments before and whose fidgeting toe was now working its way into the widening hole between his feet under the oak table. After an appropriately uncomfortable silence, the ranger continued. "This time, though, he waved at me when he was done writing out the citations. I was too far away to make out the exact meaning of the smirk on his face; it might have been a smile of contemplative pleasureQof a new level of self-realization achieved through public serviceQor it could have been an arrogant leer directed at me. I hoped for the former; I did not want this RADAR Ranger to feel so territorial that I could never run with his pack. I wanted to talk with him, to communicate with him as one RADAR Ranger to another. I waved back, but he was gone before my arm reached the apogee of its movement. "I continued around the west side of the lake along Bon Tempe Trail, losing myself to the purple prose of mottled light twisting through thick trees, eventually settling on trails made soft by months of vegetative fallout. Where the steep Stocking trail descended into Bon Tempe from Rocky Ridge, I angled left and continued along the north side of the lake, walking east towards Lake Lagunitas picnic area. The half-mile hike to Lake Lagunitas, whose overflow waters drain into Bon Tempe, was uneventful. I passed several hikers who, like all others I had encountered in the watershed, warmly returned my greeting and ignored my out-of-place partolman's uniform. Except for the strange behavior of the other RADAR Ranger, I felt at home in the watershed. "Perhaps hoping to catch a glimpse of the will-o'-the- wisp, I walked onto the large, open, paved parking lot at the entrance to Lake Lagunitas picnic area. Ambling along slowly, I cast careful glances in all directions, but could perceive nothing out of the ordinary in the peripherary of my vision. Several parked cars, picnickers carrying woven baskets of food into the grove, large, black-winged crows circling hungrily overhead I nothing to raise the thin veil of suspicion in my mind. "I continued on up the paved entry road away from the picnic area. At the top of the road, I decided to head down Fish Gulch fire protection road into the Phoenix Lake basin. An eighth-of-a-mile further along the macadam brought me to the head of the dirt road. Careful to keep my feet from rolling out from under me on the loose rocks and pebbles that coat the upper portion of the steep road, I began the slow descent. The wall of the narrow ravine along which the protection road runs is precipitous and overgrown with trees. The murky opposite wall also is enshrouded in tall, thick foilage and, close as it is to the first wall, creates the impression of an enclosed, high vaulted passageway. The trees' upper canopies do not come together; in fact, they are some distance apart, but the impression is one of an enclosure. As a kid, I always avoided Fish Gulch at night; it was unsettling how easily the darkness played eerie tunes on my nerves. I half expected some night beast to leap out at me from somewhere just beyond my vision and I well, I'm getting carried away because what I'm describing took place a little after noon and I was an adult and didn't really have to worry about ghouls and vampires. "Not watching the road surface as intently as I should have while cutting to my right around a sharp bend, I lost my wobbly legs to a patch of loose gravel and slipped to the ground in an undignified sitting position. I sat there on the hard-packed road amid the bits of rocks for a while, letting the sting work its way out of my bare hands. The small, irregularly shaped red impressions in my palms were still screeching at me when I heard itQ the sound of gravel crunching into the road just ahead of me. This time the sound was not an echo of anything I had done; the pebbles dislodged by my falling body had already reestablished residence elsewhere on the road and were quiet. "The grating and rasping of rock continued toward me from the invisible source on the other side of the bend, and I tried to coordinate the contracting and stretching of muscle pairs in my legs, back, and arms to right myself to a standing position, but my mind wasn't sending out the proper array of signals. I could not get up. The clash of approaching rock grew louder, then the knobby tire and spoked rim of a mountain bike slipped around the corner. The strength left my arms and stomach muscles, and my torso toppled backwards to join my butt and legs on the gravelly road. " 'You ok?' half-gasped, half-grinned the mountain biker as he pedaled slowly around my left side. His breathing was labored and annoyingly loudQit did not belong in the watershed and I would have told him so had I not been in such a compromising position. 'Yes, I'm fine.' I winced as flecks of sweat flew off his flushed face and peppered my own and the road behind it. 'Good' he wheezed and continued his grunting ordeal up the road, around the bend, and out of sight. "My strength returned to me quickly once I was free of the biker's gasping and hacking, and I resumed a more cautious descent of Fish Gulch. As I approached the bottom, less than one-third of a mile from where the cyclist had passed, it dawned on me that if mountain bikers were foolish enough to attack such a steep fire road, they, in turn, would certainly be foolish enough to descend it. The potential for breaking the law was great. So I placed myself in nearby greenery, out of view of anyone descending the protection road, but still able to monitor it myself. I was close to the outlet and hoped I no, I knew I the other RADAR Ranger would appear should the law be broken. I kept both my hiding place and my silence for nearly thirty minutes before I heard the tell tale sounds of rubber pushing aside rock, the rattle of loose metal fittings, and the scream of wind over a nylon wind shell. The speeding cyclist was in the open and just applying her SLR cantilever, low profile, two- finger-lever type brakes when the other RADAR Ranger materialized, standing in front of the still moving bike with legs spread and his K-15 in one outstretched hand. "I was about to reveal myself when the most amazing sequence of events occurred. Before the cyclist had a chance to get off her bike and face the ranger, a second ranger appeared at the side of the first and pushed his RADAR gun down with a flurry of speed. Holding the will-o'-the-wisp at bay, the new ranger's head cocked in my direction and I could clearly see a wink of the eye, as if to say, 'This is your law breaker, take her.' Then the two rangers disappeared! The entire scene lasted no longer than a split second. "Maintaining as much of my RADAR Ranger composure as I could, I walked over to the confused cyclist, who had not seen the second ranger materialize, but who was still shaking her head, trying to understand what had happened to the RADAR Ranger she thought she had seen. I ignored her puzzled looks and proceeded to write up the ticket. As I did so, I caught momentary glimpses of the still struggling RADAR Rangers, first on the north side of the protection road, then on the south. They were stationary characters flashing on and off the road at a rate too fast for normal human eyes to see, lingering only as ghostly afterimages on my retina. My eyes darted back and forth from the citation book to these image bursts several times before I completed the information needed by the legal system to collect its money. I handed the filled-out ticket to the mountain biker and watched as she rode off in the direction of Phoenix Lake, most likely to leave the watershed through Natalie Coffin Green Park and return home to find comfort from friends and family. As for me, I stood my ground. "More afterimages imprinted themselves on my optic nerve, but the frequency of their appearances was dimensioning. Soon they stopped altogether, and I found myself standing alone in the middle of the intersection of Fish Gulch, Phoenix Lake, and Eldridge fire protection roads. But not for long: the second RADAR Ranger flicked on beside me, smiling and breathing as if she had just awakened from a relaxing nap." April June At the implied gender of this second ranger, the mountain biker sat up straight and muttered, "She?" "Yes," rejoined the RADAR Ranger, "She. Slightly taller than me, she tilted her head down to look at me with steel grey eyes that projected an understanding and compassion that I had been longing to see in another RADAR Ranger's face. She apologized for the behavior of her companion, explaining that 'Willy's upset, been so ever since his partner headed up the Sonoma coast a couple days agoQset out to establish his own pack. You're also an unknown element to him, so he's trying to mark his territory, letting you know exactly what your limits are.' " 'But he set his limits everywhere I went,' I protested mildly, not wanting to upset this RADAR Ranger with whom I felt a strong and immediate rapport. " 'Willy can get carried away with his enthusiasm for public service, I agree,' she answered in a sympathetic tone. 'But please, try to understand his current state of mind and don't think too harshly of him.' "I smiled outwardly to her, knodding my head in agreement. 'Well, I can hardly blame him. With so many offending bicyclists riding the watershed, I can empathsize with his desire and enthusiasm to uphold the law. Bringing down mountain bikers seems so natural here,' I admitted, thinking of the less than natural chaos and turmoil on Highway 101. "She returned my smile, then said, 'Do you know where Sir Francis Drake Boulevard climbs the hill between Fairfax and Woodacre?' When I answered in the affirmative, she continued. 'At the top of the pass, you'll find a fire protection road on the left side of the street. Follow that road on foot until you come to the boarded entrance of an old railroad tunnel. There's an opening among the boards that you can crawl through. Once you're in the tunnel, you'll be able to find usQall the mountain's RADAR Rangers will be there. We have much to talk about. Be there tonight at 10 o'clock.' She stopped talking and handed me her business card." "What did it say?" asked the mountain biker, unable to contain his curiosity. "In bold, raised letters on the white surface of the card were printed the words, 'April June, Head Ranger, Mt. Tamalpais Watershed.'" Tunnel "I returned to the cruiser at sundown a few minutes before Daryl. Intenting to surprise him with my good news, I kept as straight a face as I could when he approached. 'Any luck?' I asked, the excitement I felt hardening my abdominal muscles in a painful squeeze. " 'I must have hiked a hundred miles,' he replied slowly with a long, drawn-out drawl. 'I covered the northeast side of the watershed I Yolanda, Six Points, Hidden Meadow, Phoenix, Tucker, Eldridge, Hoo-Koo-E-Koo, Wheeler I I can't remember all the names, there were so many of them. And not a single RADAR RangerQI didn't see one solitary ranger! ' " 'I'm sorry you didn't have any success, Daryl, but I' I started to say when he cut me short. " 'No, no, Gordon, I'm not saying I didn't have any success. I'm just saying that I didn't actually see a ranger. But I did feel their presence I it's hard to explain, but it's like when someone is staring at you from behind and you can almost feel the energy of the stare, but when you turn around, you don't see anyone. That's the way it was today out on the watershed. I think they're just checking us out before they take us in. I bet that by tomorrow afternoon we'll have made contact.' " 'Not tomorrow afternoon, Daryl,' I said, my words floating to him on the back of a low pitched laugh my stomach could no longer hold in. 'Tonight I we're going to meet them tonight!' And I related my encounters of that day. He stood there spellbound and speechless, only a slow upward twist of the corners of his mouth and a lifting of shagging eyebrows betraying his feelings. When I was done talking, I showed him the business card with April June's name and title emblazoned on it. " 'My God, Gordon,' he managed after a heavy silence, 'we've made contact with a functioning pack of RADAR Rangers. And from what you say, they appear whole and well, not like that stray creature we discovered at Fort Ross. This is marvelous! Mt. Tamalpais may very well turn out to be the source from which we all originated I we'll find out tonight for sure.' I listened to Daryl speculate about our history and origins until the redish glow of the LEDs on the cruiser's digital clock showed 9:30 p.m. The abandoned railroad tunnel was a short drive from Deer Park and we set out with our thirty- minute headstart to verify Daryl's excited speculations. "Traffic on Sir Francis Drake Boulevard was light and we cruised to the top of the hill without another set of headlights pushing the darkness from our windshield or reflecting off side view mirrors. Like the current, popular female bald strip that knifes over the dome of the head, leaving two erect, tall outcroppings of hair on either side, the boulevard cut deeply into the summit. But instead of colorful tattoos portraying sleeping dragons or fighting dogs, the two sheer, man-made cliffs on either side of Drake were separated by a hard, black layer of asphalt with two double yellow lines running down the middle. Daryl parked the car on a broad shoulder to the right of the lined asphalt, close to the true summit. As we hurriedly climbed out of the Mustang and started to move away from it, I stepped back and reached around the open door with my left hand and grabbed the spotlight from its metal clip holder on the dashboard. The halogen lamp clear of the door, I slammed it shut with my right hand and ran across the roadway to catch up with Daryl. "I ran the spotlight left to right along the uneven cut of cliff facing us. A sheer rock wall unveiled itself under the wavering yellow light, but without trace of a protection road entrance. I played the light further to the right, and then we both saw it at the same time. Thirty yards from the peak, where the slope of the hill broke away from the vertical and started its quick descent, a jagged outline in the top edge of the rock wall indicated the continuation of an ancient, higher roadbed. That roadway obviously was much older than Sir Francis Drake Boulevard for its earthen foundation had been cut out from underneath it to make way for the newer thoroughfare. I scrambled up the rocky embankment behind Daryl, easily finding hand and foot holds. We pushed our way through the low undergrowth that partially concealed the roadbed's outline on the edge of the machine-made cliff and started down the hillside. "To either side of the fading road, the halogen beam revealed twisted copses of scrub oaks, gnarled madrones, and rocky outcroppings whose shadows danced willingly with the light. The ghostly performance closely mimicked the excitement I felt and its rhythm the beat of my heart. One hundred-fifty yards from where we climbed onto the forgotten roadway, an impression the width of a railroad sidetrack angled sharply away from our path and ran toward a small hillock to the left. We detoured our descent to match the direction of this discovery and walked fifteen yards where, immediately to our left, a crisscrossing jumble of boards several stories high and two-car-lengths wide struggled to conceal a black hole emerging from yet another slash in the hillside. Judging by the splintery decay and smell of spoilage in the lumber, the tunnel had been closed and left unattended for 100 or more years. But not all creatures could be kept out: near the top of the edifice, where the boards did not quite reach the craggy rock ceiling of the tunnel, a bird's nest of woven twigs, grass, and roadside litter balanced precariously, its occupants long gone but sure to return the following spring. And directly below the nest, at ground level, a gap between two boards was just as sure to lead to a pack of RADAR Rangers who were expecting us that very evening. Labyrinth "Without discussing our next course of action, Daryl and I took turns slithering through the waiting gap, first lifting one leg over the bottom board and bringing it down on the dirt floor behind, then balancing carefully on that leg while we each eased our torso and remaining leg through. When my trailing hand and the spotlight it clutched joined us in the darkness, I pushed the switch on the plastic case down and the beam flashed on. Ahead of us stretched the tunnel on a downward slant, back in the direction we had just come from. If we followed it for one hundred-fifty yards, our position would be parallel to the parked Mustang, only five or ten feet lower. Of course, several hundred tons of rock and dirt would prevent us from seeing the car. Accompanied only by the whisper of cloth and the scrape of shoes, we moved forward. At any moment, we expected a RADAR Ranger to appear and lead us to the rest of the pack, answering our questions as we eagerly followed and telling us of our history. But one, two, then three minutes of silence passed and still no RADAR Ranger. "Daryl was the first to break our silence. 'Are you sure this is the right tunnel? Could there be another one April June meant?' " 'No, I don't think so,' I answered, pausing just long enough to hear my words bounce off the encircling rock walls. 'This is the only tunnel I'm aware of on this side of the mountain. April June described this tunnel, not another one. This is where we're suppose to be,' and we walked on. Fifty yards further down the slope, the beam of the spotlight exposed the entrance to a side passage. Without hesitating, Daryl turned left into this dark alley way, motioning me to follow. I stepped into the narrow, low-ceiling corridor and fell into step behind him. He marched ahead with a confident stride, my mounting claustrophobia keeping me in close synch with his every movement. Daryl didn't appear the least bit worried, orchestrating our journey through the murky labyrinth as if he'd followed its pathways one hundred times before. When I questioned him about our descent into the interior of the hill, he said not to worry, that his RADAR Ranger sense of direction had taken over and was guiding us to the other rangers." "RADAR Ranger sense of direction?" the mountain biker asked, absentmindedly inserting his right foot, up to the top of the waterproof Neoprene (TM) socks he wore, into the splintered hole underneath the table. "All rangers have it, although it's more developed in some than in others. Put a RADAR Ranger at the fork in a trail and show him the helmet a mountain biker wore or let him smell his riding socks, and that ranger can follow the mountain biker to his current location, regardless of how long ago the cyclist passed by. My sense of direction wasn't as fully developed as Daryl's then, so I trusted his skill to find the others." "How's your sense of direction now?" asked the mountain biker, looking up sheepishly at the RADAR Ranger while his right foot worked quietly to widen the hole. "Fully developed," smiled the RADAR Ranger, showing off the gold cap on his lower right bicuspid. "But Daryl was leading that night and I was following. He didn't need the beam from the spotlight to find his way, but I was in no mind to turn it off. If I had been thinking more conservatively, I would have switched it off because within twenty minutes of entering the tunnel, the bulb burned out and we were left standing in an oppressively thick darkness. Only Daryl's confidence kept me from suffocating in my own fright I his confidence and the light that crackled from the matches he struck every so often to confirm his bearings. He turned right and left seemingly at random. At times the passageways were so wide that I couldn't touch either wall with my arms outspread. At other times, they were so narrow and low, we had to stoop at the waist to get through. "Once, for ten miserable minutes, we had to slither along on our bellies, Daryl leading of course, me with my nose close to his heels. When we reached the end of this low tunnel, we turned into another with a diameter large enough to allow us to move forward on our hands and knees. This tunnel ran at an oblique angle to the one we had just been in, and we followed it until we could stand up comfortably again. Daryl lit a match and we saw yet another narrow tunnel flicker ahead of us on a downward slant. The ceiling of this one was hanging with drooping spider webs, some dangling alone, others clustered in dusty shrouds. Staring at them gave me a chill, and I looked down at a floor covered with thick mold. Daryl's match guttered, then died and we were covered with darkness, but this time I was thankful because it blocked from view the ancient tunnel's hoary vestments. "I was about to ask Daryl if he knew how much further we had to go when I jumped back, a pressure bearing down on my shoulder. 'Shhhhh,' he whispered and fell silent, the full weight of his hand still resting where he had placed it on my shoulder. I remained rooted next to him, the hairs on the nape of my neck bristling. SomewhereQin front or behind, I couldn't tell whichQa faint noise floated to us. Daryl listened a moment or two longer, then grabbed my arm and pulled me forward into the unholy tunnel. A veil of cobwebs seized my face and I wiped at them desperately with my free hand. In my blind panic, I breathed several of the dusty strands into my nose and began coughing. Daryl stopped, and I could hear his feet slide over the slippery floor as he turned around to face me. A movement of air rushed past my right ear and I flew forward into him, the smack of his hand on my upper back throwing me off balance. We both tumbled into the moldy goo on the floor, the impact completely dislodging from my throat the cobwebs Daryl's unexpected and unsettling swat had failed to move. " 'Sorry, I wanted to stop your coughs before I' he was saying to me when another sound descended on us. " 'Fritz, where's Fritz? What have you done to Fritz?' Then, 'I'm coming to get youuuuu.'" "Daryl was on his feet, pulling me to my own before I could muster the strength to cry out, 'Who are you? What do you want with us?' " 'Get a hold of yourself I act like a RADAR Ranger!' he shouted and headed deeper into the tunnel with me in tow. Behind us I could hear soft panting and the shadowy scrape of boots over the slimy chamber floor, then 'I coming to get youuuuu.' I accelerated into RADAR Ranger speed and shot past Daryl, his hand still grasping my arm. Behind us, footsteps quickened to match our own, the words moving in a steady stream past my ears: 'Fritz, where is Fritz? What have you done to Fritz? Where I' Ahead of me the tunnel continued to slope downward, 'to hell?' I wondered. As if to bear out my fears, a faint glow filled the far end of the shaft. 'The fires of hell?' Possibly, but I kept running forward, convinced that I had a better chance in the nether world than with the night beast behind us. "The strange radiance grew brighter and revealed a tunnel that was expanding in all directions. Our legs carried us into the middle of the chamber whose gently curved walls rose to a height much greater than that of the old train tunnel we had first entered. I could only see the peak of this ceiling by craning back my neck at a sharp angle. A diameter of fifty feet spanned the base of upcurving walls and added to the impressive size. Directly in front of us, the chamber narrowed into another shaft and it was for that dark hole that I headed. Daryl, however, pulled me back and pointed at an elaborately sculpted archway to our immediate left. Two huge wooden doors, each hung to one side, filled the opening. " 'That's where they are,' he said. 'Behind those doors.' We sprinted for them, but before we could lift our fists to alert those within that we were present, a figure suddenly appeared next to us. Tall and gaunt, he wore the uniform of a Mt. Tamalpais RADAR Ranger. It was the will-o'- the-wisp who had haunted me on the watershed earlier in the day. Walking menacingly towards us, he chanted in his flat voice, 'Fritz, where's Fritz? What have you done to Fritz?' Willy's eyes were blank, and he reminded me of the RADAR Ranger on the Sonoma coast. The world of RADAR Rangers had once again been reduced to a confrontation with a mindless creature, this time in a subterranean chamber from hell. 'There is no RADAR Ranger pack on Tam we can join,' I thought. 'There are no packs anywhere.' The whole series of events that day had been a dreadful illusion. We were alone again. "Having resigned myself to an unending lifetime in hell in that one instant, I shook myself loose from Daryl's grasp and steeled myself for whatever misery was to come. Willy's rough hands were descending over my head when the double doors behind us sprang open and April June stepped between us. 'You're late,' she said, then calmly shuffled Willy through the open doors into the next room. Daryl and I exchanged puzzled glances, then followed after the mindless ranger." Pack "The room was large, but not as large as the chamber we had just come through. Unlike that outside chamber, this room's obvious source of luminescence were four 100 watt light bulbs, each hanging from the twelve-foot-high ceiling on steel chains. Lamp shades woven from rattan diffused the glare of the bulbs' energy, and the room had a warm, friendly feeling to it. Including April June and Willy, seven RADAR Rangers flanked the walls, each looking at Daryl and me with less than friendly stares. April June was the first to speak. " 'I apologize again for Willy's behavior,' she said, 'but I expected you much earlier. Had you taken the second shaft off the main railroad tunnel instead of the first, you could have walked down the staircase directly to this room.' " 'Second shaft? Staircase?' I repeated, looking at Daryl who merely shrugged his shoulders. " 'We built the stairway to avoid the maze you found yourselves in tonight,' explained April June. 'Willy wandered away while we were waiting, and you know the rest.' " 'Why was Willy mumbling on about Fritz like that?' asked Daryl. 'How do you know about Fritz, anyway?' "April June stared at Daryl for long moments with her cold, steel grey eyes. Several of the RADAR Rangers shifted their positions uneasily against the wall during the lull, causing both Daryl and myself to nervously look around. Of the seven present, all were men except for one other female. 'RADAR Rangers are pack animals,' April June finally spoke. 'I think you know that already. We work and live as a team and have a special bond among us. It's not telepathy, but we're able to keep track of the whereabouts and needs of our members. When you neutralized Fritz, we all felt it, but it was too late for us to do anything for him.' " 'Was Fritz a member of this pack?' a subdued Daryl asked. " 'Yes, he was. But he wasn't content with bringing down bicycles to uphold the law. He wanted to bring down larger and more powerful vehicles.' " 'Like cars, trucks, vans, motorhomes, and big rigs?' I couldn't help but interrupt. " 'Yes,' nodded the head RADAR Ranger. 'Like cars, trucks, vans, motorhomes, and big rigs. From the very beginning, he was fascinated with engines and motors. 'Bicycles,' he often told us, 'depress me.' When he strayed from the watershed into the headlands and brought down State officials in their pickup trucks, I knew that something had to be done. That's when I asked him if he'd like to establish his own pack where the big vehicles ran. Of course, he said 'yes' and that's how he came to the Highway 101 corridor between Novato and the Golden Gate Bridge.' " 'Is that when he made me into a RADAR Ranger?' I asked, feeling less timid as April June talked. " 'You were the first member of his pack, yes. We all figured Fritz had chosen well when he picked youQyou were already an upholder of the law, of sorts, and only needed to have your natural instincts fully awakened. Unfortunately, it was after he had converted you that Fritz learned of the ill-fated episode with your sister. The mental anguish you suffered interfered with the natural process of reshaping you into a RADAR Ranger. Regardless of Fritz' efforts, you were unable to cope with the high horse-powered, fast-paced law breakers of Highway 101.' " 'And Daryl?' I pushed further. 'Fritz changed Daryl because he was dissatisfied with me?' "April June smiled a knowledgeable smile. 'Your human emotions are strong, aren't they?' she laughed and the other rangers in the room relaxed noticeably, mimicking her laughter. 'No, Gordon, he wasn't dissatisfied with you. He was saddened that the first of his pack did not share in his delight for bringing down big vehicles. By nature, we prefer to hunt in packs, but hunting as a lone predator is tolerable as long as we have the pack to return to. Fritz was able to hunt alone as long as he did because he was comfortable with you as a pack member. However, when the pressures of being a lone predator became too great, he found Daryl and converted him.'" "April June paused in her narration, the smile on her lips still comforting me. There was a question I wanted answered and during that pause I carefully selected the words to ask it. 'Fritz was always angry with me,' I started, 'and his anger seemed to escalate as time passed. Did I provoke him into those dark moods?' "More laughter from the head ranger and her pack. 'Fritz was an actor, a chameleon of sorts, just like Willy here,' she explained, tapping the will-o'-the-wisp on his back. 'In fact, Fritz and Willy used to run as a pair before his departure. No, Fritz wasn't insanely mad at you I he was acting out his fantasies, playing the tough guy. He had an anger deep inside him, but that was there before he changed you, and I don't think it surfaced as often as you imagine. Near the end, what you may have seen as anger was probably something closer to confusion. His pack was falling apart and he didn't know how to stop it. That was my fault.' "I looked up at her in surprise. 'What do you mean your fault?' " 'I let Fritz go too soon. He didn't know enough about being a RADAR Ranger to lead a pack. He was more of a pup than an adult when he left us. If I had held him back longer, I think he would have made it.' " 'Where is Fritz now?' ventured Daryl who had been uncharacteristically quiet during April June's narration. "At that question, the smiles faded from the lips of all the RADAR Rangers and I could see them nervously shifting their weight against the walls upon which they leaned. Again, April June answered. "Fritz sat in his patrol car just as you left him for over a day. By the time we got to him, it was too late.'" "He did die, then, didn't he?" broke in the mountain biker. "Neutralization doesn't kill us," answered the RADAR Ranger, "it strips away our RADAR Ranger nature, a fate worse than death. No, Fritz didn't die. Within weeks of his neutralization, he was hired as a State ranger at China Camp where he's still in charge of building and maintaining single tracks for mountain bicycles." The RADAR Ranger lowered his head in a moment of silence, his eyes clouded over by the painful memory. The mountain biker, in the meantime, had worked both his Durango (TM) SPD Compatible MTB shoes into the yawning hole at his feet. When the RADAR Ranger raised his head, the mountain biker looked at him and smiled weakly. "Daryl was growing in confidence and next asked the question whose answer we had both longed for, the question that Fritz had been too immature to answer: 'What are our origins?'" Origins " 'Before the late 1970s,' began April June without hesitation, 'very few bicycles were on the mountain. Young children pedaling on the lower slopes was all. Nothing like the chaos you see today. I was a regular ranger then, hired to keep the watershed in ecological balance while working with hikers and equestrians to satisfy their recreational needs. In the last few years of the '70s, a new element invaded the watershedQteenage delinquents and other lawless young adults riding single speed bicycles. Not satisfied with the lower slopes and unable to pedal the machines up the mountain easily, they packed their bikes into pickup trucks and drove to the upper ridges where they sped recklessly down single tracks and fire protection roads to the lower levels. You didn't have to be a RADAR Ranger I besides there weren't any yet I to know that racing a bicycle down a mountain dirt road was unnatural. Had anyone ever seen a deer or a squirrel race a bicycle on the watershed? Of course not, it just wasn't part of the natural order.' " 'At that time, a popular descent for the growing band of law breakers was Cascade Canyon fire road. It branched off San Geronimo ridge and dropped into a Fairfax park where riders piled their bikes into waiting pickup trucks, drove back to the ridge and repeated the reckless process. I had heard about these high speed descents and drove over to the canyon early on a Saturday morning to see for myself. I arrived before any of the cyclists and hid in the bushes next to the end of the Canyon road. Sure enough, by 10 a.m. the cyclists started descending into the park, clouds of dust billowing out behind them, a crazed look in their eyes.' " 'A few of these riders were so out of control, smoke billowed out of their rear wheel brakes. Smoke! Acrid smoke from burning grease was destroying the tranquility of that peaceful canyon. I even saw flames licking around the outer edges of the brake's metal housing. The dust, the noise, the smoke, the smell, the flamesQsomething physical in me, at the most basic cellular level, was turning, trying to put an end to this unnatural scene. My body was trembling violently, a cold sweat soaking through my ranger uniform. " 'Then came the sight that crystalized the great change in me: an old guy, at least fifty-years-old, came barreling down Cascade Canyon, dust and smoke trailing behind his fat rear wheel. When he reached the bottom, he jumped off his bike, tossed some water onto the rear brake from a bottle of water, watched it sizzle the metal housing to coolness, then dismantled the brake and repacked it with new bearings. When he was done, someone along the side of the ride yelled to him, 'Heh, Bob, you ready to do it again?' and this old Bob guy nods his head 'yes' and throws his bike in the back of a waiting pickup and leaves for the ridge!' "April June took a deep breath from her diaphragm, her chest expanding with the inrushing air. Holding it in for half a minute, she expelled the air out slowly through her dry, parted lips, and continued. 'Seeing the old guy perform his unnatural, mechanical ritual at the base of my mountain sealed the change. From that moment on, I have been what you see now.'" The mountain biker's lower jaw hung open, a look of disbelief crossing his face. "April June, the mother of all RADAR Rangers!" he whistled. "Yes," acknowledged the RADAR Ranger, "April June is the mother from which all RADAR Rangers have sprung." "But how do you become I I mean, you were fully grown when I uh I I still don't understand how the rest of you I uh I do your springing from April June." The RADAR Ranger pushed himself up off the chair again and walked back to the window he had been drawn to all evening. "April June said it was a lot like spontaneous combustion. When the conditions were right, people who had the basic ingredients for becoming creatures of higher actionQRADAR RangersQwould be changed by the lingering energy patterns from her own transformation. Those patterns would act as a template, setting up the change in the receptive cells of the individual. She also said that her original patterns of energy would never disappear, perhaps even increasing in strength as more and more receptives were transformed." "How many of you are on the mountain now?" asked the cyclist. "Twelve," came the reply. "And I suppose these disciples of April June will continue to increase in number?" the cyclist said, rocking noiselessly back and forth on his chair, both his feet now poking through the opening under the shadows of the oak table. "Yes, the time is now good for more changes," admitted the ranger, still gazing into the blackness on the other side of the four-paned window. "And April June says that distance can't diminish the intensity and strength of her original energy waves. They're everywhere powerful at the same time." "Everywhere powerful at the same time," repeated the mountain biker, quietly concentrating on pushing his knees through the hole under the table. "I suppose these energy waves could affect people in Crested Butte and Slick Rock the same as here?" His waist slid through the opening just as his feet touched the dry soil under Sky Oaks Ranger Station. "Yes," intoned the RADAR Ranger in a slow drawl. "But now that you know so much, I think there's one last thing you and I should discuss." And he turned around to face the empty oak table, the chair behind pushed back against the rough plank wall. Without changing his expression, the RADAR Ranger spun around on the heel of his boot to face the window. The sound of rock crunching under two fat tires led his gaze to a mountain bike stealing into the darkness along a single track in front of the station. "Riding on watershed lands after sunset is against the law," he said to his reflection in the window, and he headed for the door, feeling for the black, leather-bound citation book in his jacket pocket. Epilog "He got away from you last night?" April June's voice was hard and cold. "Yes," murmured Gordon. "I thought I had him down by Bull Frog, but he must have doubled back on me and left the watershed through the Meadow Club." "And the speeding ticket down Rocky Ridge, what about that?" growled the mother of all RADAR Rangers. "Why didn't you give him his citation?" "I'm sorry, April June, I just got carried away. He's one of the last, you know, and when he asked to hear about the life of a RADAR Ranger up there on the ridge, I was I well I I was taken aback, kind of flattered actually. So instead of writing out the ticket there and then, I threw his bike in the back of the truck and brought him down to the station. I just forgot it in the telling of the tale." Gordon dared not look at the angry head ranger sitting in the passenger seat next to him, didn't have to look to know that she was drilling, probing, into his skull with her steel-cold eyes. "Your head still isn't straight, Gordon," she let out in an evenly modulated voice, one that Gordon knew was barely under control. "Emotions, Gordon, emotions! You still haven't got them under control. A man of higher action has to control his emotions for the public good. How many years has it been since you've worn that tattoo on your chest?" Gordon knew how many yearsQcould still feel the prick of the artist's needle on his skin as if it were yesterdayQ but he kept his silence, knowing full well that April June didn't need him to tell her. His chin settled pensively onto his decorated chest, then was suddenly snapped up and backward as Daryl downshifted into second to make the next steep ascent up Eldridge fire road. These modified, Delux 30 Chevrolet pickups really packed a wallop he thought: Venola forged blower pistons, Crower rods, magnefluxed crankshaft, Paxton centrifugal supercharger forced induction system I A legacy of Fritz. Eldridge "Do you think he's the same one who's been decorating the trees at the Rocky Ridge/Rock Springs intersection?" Gordon heard April June ask over the roar of the pickup's high-performance engine. For the past fifteen years, someone had been hanging Christmas ornaments on a little pine tree that stood at the roads' intersection. Colorful, dangling bulbs, silver tinsel, strings of glittery beads, hand-carved figures from the nativity, even a delicate star perched at the spindly top. Decorating trees on the watershed during the holidays, of course, was against the law (unnatural, too, according to April June) and the rangers had attempted to catch this yuletide desecrator of the watershed. Despite careful watches, no one was apprehended in the act. In fact, during one changing of the guard, the perpetrator managed to string glowing, colored lights around the little tree, the lights powered through a converter that was running off two 12-volt car batteries wired in parallel. The skills of this individual wereQApril June fumed when she admitted itQon par with those of the mountain's RADAR Rangers. "I don't know," conceded Gordon, wishing she had asked Daryl so that he would have been the one to confess failure. But she hadn't and Gordon was feeling the onus of her anger as the pickup hungrily devoured the hills on its way up to Ridgecrest, the paved road that wound around East Peak, ran past where the Mountain Theatre used to sit (closed years before because of high levels of asbestos in the topsoil), and then tumbled along the north/south ridge that overlooked Stinson Beach on the Pacific Ocean. "But there's only about fifty of the bikers who still ride the mountain," he said in an effort to change the unfavorable tenor of the conversation. "We'll catch himQor themQsoon enough. We've been successful in bringing down the other law breakers, we'll get them, too. Why, only a few years ago, thousands used to ride up here. Look at it now." Gordon's logic brought a small smile to April June's thin lips and she nodded agreement. Before he could continue elaborating their successes, the pickup's radio crackled to life. "April June," the voice of Willy came through the under-the-dash mounted speakers. "A lookout on East Peak just reported seeing a mountain biker go up the Northside trail off Upper Eldridge. What do you want us to do?" April June snatched the radio's microphone from its clip and asked, "Where are you now?" "On Lagunitas, near Rock Springs," came the answer. "Drive up to Potrero Picnic area and block that exit," she shouted in an uncharacteristically high-pitched, excited voice. "Call in another vehicle and have them block the lower exit just below Lagoon Road. It's too late for the three of us here to catch him at Upper Eldridge, but we should be able to block any retreat he attempts by hiking down Miller to Northside and waiting there. Call us if you hear anything new." She hurriedly recradled the microphone on the dash, and, at her signal, Daryl opened the pickup's nitrous oxide line into the fuel injectors and the three rangers raced toward Miller at RADAR Ranger speed. Miller Gordon braced himself for the rugged ride over the rocks and ruts of Upper Eldridge. Driving at this speed was manageable on paved roads, but on the rough surfaces of fire roads like Eldridge, even his stoic RADAR Ranger nature suffered the jarring bumps and jolts with discomfort. The seat belt straining over his lap and across his chest, he was momentarily envious of Willy, that ranger's partner, and their new companion riding up the friendlier and smoother incline of Rock Springs. Willy had regained his RADAR Ranger normalcy with the return and restoration to health of his original partner I the former two-dimensional, celluloid RADAR Ranger of the Sonoma coast. The two were model rangers and April June had assigned the new recruit, riding with them today, for indoctrination. The change had proceeded so smoothly that the new female recruit was scheduled for a tattooing session in Forest Knolls weeks earlier than any of the rangers who had come before her. Gordon secretly hoped that he would be the one to catch the single- tracking mountain biker and regain some of his RADAR Ranger credibility. With the continuous influx of nitrous oxide spinning the truck's four-wheel drive tires, the three RADAR Rangers arrived at Miller Trail within minutes of having heard Willy's call, but not before the lone mountain biker had crossed the intersection of that trail with Northside. Two- thirds of a breakneck hike down Miller toward the junction, the walkie-talkie hanging on Daryl's leather belt signaled an incoming call. April June, breathing more normally than the other two, yanked the radio from Daryl's hands as he brought it up to his mouth to answer, and said in a steady voice, "April June here. What do you have to report?" "We saw him at the picnic area not less than one minute ago, but he saw us first and doubled back," Willy's voice squawked over the radio's circuits. A big, RADAR Ranger grin spread quickly over April June's face. "We've got him now!" she said to both sets of rangers, the three at the other end of the radio link and the two puffing noisely beside her. She handed the walkie-talkie back to Daryl, then sped down the trail toward Northside, the two rangers falling behind her lengthening strides. Northside "No one's been back this way on a mountain bike," she announced a minute later, looking closely at the square of dirt where the two single tracks boldly crossed. "He's got to be between us and Rock Springs." Before the speed of her legs could match the intensely determined look on her face, April June stood straight up and threw both arms out at shoulder height, a barrier to the two men behind her. The startled rangers were about to speak, but she motioned them to silence and pointed to a movement of color among the trees 75 yards ahead. The three RADAR Rangers moved quickly, but quietly, along the trail to the site, then stood looking down at a splash of green on the hillside below the trail. To normal eyes, the spot was just another green smudge of vegetation. But the six eyes scrutinizing it now weren't normal eyes. "It's a Stealth Mt. Bike Cover (TM)!" Gordon vocalized, hoping that April June would credit him with a greater share of the capture because he had said it first. The mother of all RADAR Rangers ignored his comment. Instead, she shouted at the finely meshed camouflage cover, "Nice try, but we see you. Come up now." Expecting the cover to balloon out into the shape of a human figure, April June unleashed her frustration when it remained motionless. "All right. I'm not playing any more games with you," she screamed. "One of my rangers is coming down and you better come up without any trouble. If you give us any kind of hassle, I'll see that your fine is doubled." "Whooaaa!" thought Gordon. "A thousand dollars. He'll be up in no time." But when he didn't come, April June motioned Gordon down the embankment to bring up the law breaker. Gordon, his heart beating to the tune of 'Onward Christian Soldiers,' slid down the hill to unmask the mountain biker and earn himself new respect in the eyes of April June and his fellow rangers. Grasping one frayed corner of the green army net with two trembling hands, he plucked the light weight web from the ground. Watershed When the flurry of leaves that had been scattered on top of the mesh settled to the damp earth, Gordon gasped and let the Stealth Mt. Bike Cover (TM) fall from his hands. At his feet lay a lifeless arrangement of dry-rotted branches, a rock the size of a helmeted mountain biker head placed at one end. Above the jumbled form, a howl of rage split apart the cold morning air. Lacking both the courage and desire to look up, Gordon listlessly climbed the slippery yards separating him from the trail edge. April June had already pulled out her new prescription and was pouring a draught of it into the jigger-sized plastic cap that topped the bottle. Damitol (TM), Proctor & Johnson's newest miracle drug for the hypertense, brought April June the fastest and longest lasting relief. Gordon was happy to see her put away two capfuls, twice her normal dosage. The reddish brown liquid safely back in her coat pocket, April June used Daryl's walkie-talkie to call the two teams of RADAR Rangers on Rock Springs. After a long conversation with both parties, the mother of all RADAR Rangers leaned dejectedly against a madrone whose gnarled roots pushed up through the trail at her feet. Shrouds of water vapor condensed in front of her face, and she pawed at the roots with her boots like an exhausted bull. "Whenever he gets away, our chances of bringing him down the next time only increase," asserted Gordon, knowing that if he didn't change this defeat into a victory, the wrath of April June would be his alone. "Besides, Willy brought down a speeding equestrian and the others cited a hiker on the fire road while we were waiting here." Gordon knew that these little successes would brighten April June's spirits. She had long believed that horseback riding on the watershed was unnatural I "I've never seen a squirrel or a deer riding a horse in the watershed, have you? she was fond of saying and had subjected horses to the same 5 mph posted speed limit reserved for mountain bikers. Hikers, of course, had long been banned from protection roads, ever since Fritz had complained that they got in the way of his high-powered pickups. "Yes, you're right," agreed April June. "We will get him next time. All those two-wheeled bandits will be gone soon. And the number of law breaking hikers and equestrians has been declining, too. No, I shouldn't get upset like this, Gordon. Before long, we'll have the finest public, recreational watershed on the west coast." -- Submitted by John Boeschen