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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN:

Yo, Samson

Morning sunlight threw a strip of brightness along the linoleum floor at Canter’s, and the warm air smelled of bacon and pickles. Vickery had stopped on the way here to buy a lot of sandwiches and beer and bottled water for later in the day, but Castine, sipping her second cup of coffee, was thinking about ordering pork chops and eggs right now, in spite of Vickery’s insistence that they shouldn’t stay out of the concealment car in one place for very long. Across from her in the orange vinyl booth, Vickery was ignoring his coffee and glancing repeatedly toward the street door.

“We spread a lot of chaff last night,” she reassured him, then cleared her throat and had another gulp of coffee. The cut on her left forearm ached under the tight bandage, and she reminded herself that they had cleaned and disinfected their new self-inflicted cuts, and in any case had bigger concerns today.


After they had dropped Plowman and Santiago off at the cathedral parking structure last night, Vickery had driven to a 24-hour Target store on Firestone in South Gate, and Castine was now wearing a black leather bomber jacket, a men’s flannel shirt, a pair of bootcut blue jeans and tan hiking boots, for all of which Vickery had paid $135 in cash without complaint. Vickery had claimed that his own clothes were nearly dried out, and in any case he had more at his studio.

They had also bought a package of of paper towels, and before they had driven out of the Target parking lot, Vickery had cut his arm and blotted half a dozen paper towels with his blood, and Castine had insisted on doing the same. Vickery had paired the two sets of stained paper towels like socks, and immediately tucked one pair behind the license plate of a Target delivery truck. On the way back to his studio he had stopped several times to dispose of the other five pairs—on a couple of buses, in a gas station restroom, on the roof of a taco stand, and one pair stuffed through a slot in a manhole cover.

“It’s decoys—chaff,” he had said as he’d got back in the car after planting the first pair, “like fighter jets throwing clouds of tinfoil scraps to confuse radar, in case your man Finehouse is still monitoring those old rags.”

They were back at his studio before midnight, and Vickery brought his brief case in. While Castine heated the Beef Stroganoffs, he taped Plowman’s old newspaper pages together so that the sections of the negation symbol were lined up, tacked them to a white sheet of cardboard, then sketched in the missing corner of the symbol from Plowman’s snapshots. He pulled a six-foot by eight-foot canvas out from behind a rack of shelves and set up a projector to throw the complete negation symbol onto the upright canvas.

When he had traced the lines onto the canvas with orange chalk, and then switched off the projector and defined the pattern in black acrylic paint, he ate his cooling dinner while Castine was in the shower. He got in the shower after she was out, and by twelve-thirty they were reclining in the tilted-back seats of Galvan’s old Dodge, which Vickery parked in front of an empty lot around the corner from his studio. The nearest streetlight cast only dim highlights on the dashboard.

Vickery had brought along a battery-powered alarm clock, and he set it for 6 AM.

He pulled a blanket over himself and tried to shift to a comfortable position on the still-damp seat. “I think Galvan cracked a rib.”

“Just imagine,” came Castine’s muffled reply from the passenger seat, “what she’ll do when she sees you busted off her bamboo antenna.”

“I’ll say spacemen did it.”

For a while neither of them spoke. Long after Vickery had assumed Castine had fallen asleep, she said, “I caught a live grenade tonight!” She exhaled. “Those two under your trailer last night—that just seemed like . . . ‘You kids get out of here,’ you know? But that grenade was real.”

Vickery nodded, then said, “Yes, it was.”

She shifted around to face him. “And Santiago killed them?”

“Shot one, and that guy dropped the second grenade. That finished both of them.”

She nodded, and after a while she said, “They figure they owe something to dead people, don’t they. Plowman and Santiago.”

“Most people do.”

“But they’re really putting themselves out on the green felt table, at the mercy of the dice. Plowman especially—he found the negation symbol, but he’s too old to do this. Try to do this. And he knows the things—he knows the, the free-fall loss of identity, overlapping with one of them.”

“He’s still got one daughter he can save. Even if it’s not the one he’d have chosen.”

“And guys with grenades.” Castine lifted her right arm from beneath the blanket to touch the side of her head, and Vickery knew she was touching the scar from when she’d been shot three years ago, on an L.A. street about ten miles north of here.

“Always like this,” she said softly. Then, “It’s probably already tomorrow, isn’t it?”

“Somewhat.”

“I hate sequential time.”

She said nothing further, and soon they both slept.


As she finished her coffee and put down the cup, Castine saw Vickery’s eyes narrow, and when she looked around she saw Yoneda and Tacitus shambling past the restaurant’s bakery section by the front door. Castine thought they must have found a Target too, for Yoneda was now in black jeans and a khaki jacket with a lot of pockets, and Tacitus wore an olive-green windbreaker and brown corduroy pants and a canvas hat. His left arm was in a blue cloth sling. They both looked tired.

“The desert,” said Castine as the newcomers saw them and began walking toward the booth. “We should have bought hats too.”

Yoneda slid in beside Vickery, and Castine made room for Tacitus on her side of the booth.

Yoneda rubbed her eyes, then dropped her hands and gave Vickery a belligerent look. “You two can’t be out of your stealth car for long, right? Would you mind going and sitting in it till Tacitus and I have breakfast? I’m literally starving.” She picked up a laminated menu from the table. “You guys slept in that car? We slept in mine. I should have rented an SUV.”

Castine explained about their midnight decoy distribution, and added, “I’m going to get pork chops and eggs.”

Pierce Plowman came shambling up then, still in his jeans and leather jacket. “Who’s skinniest scoot over,” he said. He seemed to have lisp, and Castine recalled that he had lost a tooth last night when gravity re-took its hold on the Ouranos.

Yoneda pushed Vickery against the low partition at the side of the booth. “Here you go, champ.”

Castine thought Yoneda didn’t yet have a persona to fit her new status—or non-status—as an uprooted fugitive, and in the cold light of morning might be reconsidering.

“You get used to working without a net,” Castine said, and Yoneda laughed tightly.

“I’ll just have a Coors beer,” said Plowman to a waitress who had walked up to the booth.

The others ordered fairly lavish breakfasts, Tacitus ordering scrambled eggs because of his injured arm, and even Vickery asked for a Denver omelette.

Tacitus was blinking around at the already crowded and noisy restaurant, and Castine guessed that he didn’t like being up this early. “Do you,” he asked Vickery, “have some agenda, for us, today?”

“Last night,” Vickery began; he picked up his coffee and took a long sip, frowning, then set it down and went on, “last night I made a copy of Pierce’s negation symbol on a big canvas, and this morning I unstapled it from its frame and rolled it up and stuck it in the trunk. I think if I lay that out on the dirt by Giant Rock and let it sit till it extends an hour or so into the past—”

“It’s gonna move into the past?” said Yoneda flatly.

“It won’t move,” said Vickery, “it’ll become further in the past. Sheesh, everything does.” When she shrugged and nodded, he went on, “Tacitus and Ingrid and I will all go into echo-vision simultaneously, which should draw them again—and then, before we fall back into real time, while we’ve still got the attention of the things—we’ll be holding hands, I think—all three of us look at the symbol.” He leaned away from Yoneda and yawned. “Excuse me. That should imprint the symbol on all of them.”

“But they’re all over the world,” said Tacitus.

“They’re all in line-of-sight with each other,” said Plowman. “It’s a good idea. It’ll be like dropping a seed crystal in a supersaturate solution. Crrk!”

“No,” persisted Tacitus, “all over the world. Some are probably on the other side of the globe.”

“Globe!” said Plowman. “Everybody falls for that. Trust me, the columns standing up from every crop circle in the world are parallel, all aimed straight up in the same direction.”

“That apparently is how the aliens see it,” ventured Castine.

“Shit, girl, it’s how it is, excuse me. If it was a damn globe, how come you can see the north star from everywhere? And why does it take forever to ‘circumnavitate’ the south pole? Because you’ve got to go all the way around the whole rim of the world to do it! Why can you set up flags along a six-mile line and see ’em all exactly overlapped through a telescope? Why do you think—”

Yoneda clenched her fists and whispered, “I’ve thrown in my lot with lunatics.”

“No,” insisted Castine, “it’s true, I mean from the aliens’ pespective. Curvature is an optical illusion to them, all they see is surfaces, and the surfaces all appear to be parallel. I don’t think ‘the other side of the globe’ would mean anything to them, if you could even convey the idea to them.”

“Well, good,” said Vickery, “flat it is, at least for today. And then I imagine it’d be a good idea for us to get away from that whole area quick—I don’t know what it’ll be like to have the whole population of them go mummified at once, but—well, like you swim well clear of a sinking ship.”

Plowman leaned forward to peer past Yoneda at him. “Yo, Samson—you figure to get clear of the collapsing temple?”

The breakfast dishes arrived then, and the steamy smells of bacon and pork chops and brined salmon and fried onions stopped the conversation; as Castine forked an egg onto a slice of buttered toast and cut it open, and then waited impatiently for someone to pass salt and Tabasco, Plowman’s statement was ringing in her mind.

In the Biblical Book of Judges, Samson was captured by the Philistines and blinded and eventually chained between two load-bearing pillars in the Temple of Dagon, and he managed to push them apart—and in the resulting collapse Samson died along with all the Philistines.

Did Plowman know enough about all this for his apparently offhand comparison to be valid? Should we, Castine wondered, find a Catholic Church and go to Confession before we set out for the desert?

Before she could frame a queston, Yoned put down her fork and shifted around to be able to face Plowman. “So—what, they’re gonna fall on us?”

Plowman was waving his emptied beer glass toward the nearest waitress. “What? Sure, darlin’. When they die they become mass. Unless we stop for lunch, this is probably our last meal. Can somebody catch that waitress’ attention?”

Tacitus’s eyes were wide. “You seem at peace with the notion.”

“God’s holding each of our markers for death,” said Plowman with a shrug, “and a guy who pays it off this year is square for 2021. Could I have two more Coorses, please?” he called to a waitress passing nearby.

Castine caught Vickery’s eye and mouthed, Samson?

He pointed at her and then himself, and raised his eyebrows, which she took to mean, What, you and me?—and by extension, We’ve survived worse. She gave him a tight smile.

“Why are you coming along, then?” Yoneda asked Plowman. “Why am I? Am I?” She pulled out her old wrecked flip phone, opened it and laid it beside her plate of lox and bagels.

“I’d turn eighty this year,” said Plowman more quietly. “It seems I’ve been aimed at this day—this reunion—for fifty-some years. I can’t walk out on the show now.” He smiled. “And we don’t know the ending. Maybe God will have to hold our markers a little longer.”

“Huh. I may just stay here and read about you all tomorrow in the papers.” Yoneda touched her inert phone.

“You should,” said Castine seriously. “You can probably save your career, with a little creative reporting.”

Yoneda gripped her phone, and for several seconds her face had no expression. Then she scowled across the table at Castine. “Don’t patronize me! When I burn a bridge, I don’t try to swim back, okay?”

Castine raised her hands. “Fine.”

“If I decide to throw in my lot with bums, I damn well stick with the bums!”

“Was that young man going to be joining us?” asked Tacitus hurriedly.

“That boy’s got some sense,” said Plowman. “He’ll be looking out for himself.” He leaned forward to peer around Yoneda at Vickery. “You got rid of that ghost that was jerking your car around yesterday, right? If there’s only five of us, we can all fit in it. My old Ford’s on its third trip around the odometer, and it’s past due for a compression check.” He looked more closely at Yoneda and added, “You got a problem with that, girl?”

“For God’s sake,” she breathed. “Tacitus sits between us.”

Castine hoped there would be no fights in the car on the two-hour drive.

“Can I have my you-know-what back?” Yoneda asked Castine.

Castine didn’t glance at Vickery. “Yes,” she said. “It’s in the car.”

Now Castine looked at Vickery, and he gave her a wry smile and a slight shrug. Well it is her gun, she thought.

“I would ask for mine,” said Tacitus, raising his right elbow in the sling and wincing, “but the question is moot.”

It was clear that everybody had eaten as much as they intended to, and Vickery was looking at his watch. As they slid out of the booth and stood up, Plowman insisted on paying the bill.

Ten minutes later Vickery was driving south on Fairfax, with Castine in the passenger seat beside him and Plowman, Tacitus and Yoneda crowded in the back seat. The car reeked of onions and lox now, in addition to stale sea water.

The metronome on the dashboard was clicking rapidly back and forth.

Plowman reached between the front seats to point at it. “Does that mean the old ghost woman is going to come back? I’m out of here if she does.”

“No,” said Vickery, “I think it’s indicating that we’re in a big indeterminacy field, probably cast by the 10 freeway. That’s a couple of miles south of us.”

“A couple of miles!” said Castine. “That’s a broad field.”

Vickery shrugged. “Heavy weather,” he said, just as another burst of thunder rolled across the blue sky.

For several blocks none of them spoke. Then Tacitus said, “My real name is Anatoly Kazakov.”

Yoneda looked across Plowman at him. “Okay.”

“Among comrades,” Tacitus went on, “I won’t die under a false name.”

Castine turned around to shake his hand, but her attention was caught by lines of people standing on the sidewalks along both sides of Fairfax. They were all waving, apparently at the car.

Vickery had clearly noticed it too. “Look at their clothes,” he said.

And Castine noticed that some were in sweatsuits, some in tuxedos and formal gowns, some in pajamas. One hefty old fellow was naked. Thunder cracked in the clear blue sky.

“It’s like what happened at the cemetery two days ago,” Castine said.

In a hushed voice, Yoneda asked, “Why are they waving at us?”

“I believe they’re waving at Ingrid,” Vickery said. “I think the ones at the cemetery on Sunday were too.”

“What,” said Castine angrily, “likeI’m supposed to join them soon? I’ll be sure to dress better than most of these.”

“I bet it’s because you dove into one of the aliens and blew him up,” said Plowman solemnly.

“But I hadn’t done that yet, when they were waving—to me?—at the cemetery.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” agreed Plowman, “if you assume that ghosts don’t talk to each other.” Apparently getting a blank look from Yoneda or Tacitus, he went on, “Who says next month’s ghost can’t talk to last month’s ghosts, hah? You think they respect the order of days on calendars?”

“In that case,” said Tacitus, “are they waving congratulation or . . . goodbye?”

“I doubt they know.” Castine raised a hand and tentatively waved at the crowd on her side. “Poor old things,” she said.


Vilko Cendravenir had at least got a couple of hours of sleep in his room at the Holiday Inn Express, and was now fidgeting in the back seat of the SUV; but Joel Finehouse had been up all night, driving down to Huntington Beach and to the Naval Intelligence office on Wilshire and then back to the Holiday Inn.

And now he was driving again, east on the 10, just passing the Ontario Airport. The sun was in his eyes, which were already smarting from the clove-scented cigarette Cendravenir was smoking in the back seat. Behind the SUV, four Sensitive Assignment Specialists who had been flown to L.A. yesterday followed in a new Ford van.

A fireball had been reported falling into the ocean about ten miles off the Long Beach coast at a little past 8 PM last night, and at 8:37 two grenades had been detonated at a Huntington Beach marina, thirteen miles northeast of where the fireball had occurred. One of the grenades had killed two men, so far unidentified, and the other had gone off underwater and damaged two boats. One of the boats, the Ouranos, was registered to a man in Canada, but when questioned by the Harbor Patrol, the owners of nearby boats had said that it belonged to one Francis Notchett. That name was still flagged by Naval Intelligence, and Finehouse and his team of Sensitive Assignment Specialists had got down there by ten o’clock. After some minutes of explanation and verification, officers from the Harbor Patrol and the Huntington Beach Police Department had let Finehouse and his team approach the scene. Sheets of plywood had been laid over a hole blown in the dock.

The Ouranos had sunk to the gunwales, the cockpit deck awash and the cabin sumerged, but Finehouse’s team had recovered a couple of oily fingerprints from the the topside helm, and he was waiting for identification of them.

Back in his room at the Holiday Inn by dawn, Finehouse had got an email report on the fingerprints that Atkins had lifted from the William Ardmore trailer yesterday: they belonged to Agent Rayette Yoneda, Agent Ingrid Castine, a onetime Political Science professor named Andrius Kuprys, and the ex-Secret Service agent Herbert Woods, more recently known a Sebastian Vickery.

More information about Andrius Kuprys had quickly followed—he was suspected to be an illegal GRU agent who had worked for twenty years as a talent-spotter at the University of Southern California, and in 2017 had narrowly avoided arrest by the FBI. It was decidedly odd to find him again, or still, in the United States—usually illegal Soviet agents who were discovered but managed to escape arrest wound up back in Russia, never again to stir outside its borders.

And what had Mr. Kuprys been doing for the last three years? Agent Yoneda had apparently met him out at Giant Rock in the desert two days ago—he must be involved in all this Anomalous Aerial Phenomena business—and she had thought he might be persuaded to defect. Yoneda had gone offline to pursue that. Was she still pursuing it, or had she gone rogue herself? Or been killed?

Finehouse glanced to the side at the tracker screen mounted on the SUV’s dashboard. The beacon was still ahead of them, still moving east.

In the passenger seat, Atkins also looked at the screen. “That might not be the motorcycle,” he said. “The kid might have found our tracker and stuck it on a car.”

The signal from the GPS tracker that Atkins had attached to the boy’s motorcycle had shown a steady location all night, in the Bellflower area. This morning at about six it had started to move—northeast on the 91, and now steadily eastward on the 10.

“I’m sure it’s him,” said Finehouse, squinting through the faintly glittering windshield at the cars ahead of him. “And now that we’re out of the city, I bet I know where he’s going.”

“Where?” asked Atkins.

Finehouse didn’t answer, not wanting to alarm Cendravenir, who was shifting uneasily in the back seat and no doubt dropping sparks from his foolish cigarettes onto the upholstery.

The girl in the zoo cage with Galvan yesterday had said, The spacemen many times appear where they’ve appeared not long before—it’s like coming through a hole they already made, before it can close up again.

That has to be at that Giant Rock place, Finehouse thought, in the desert out past San Bernardino.

Atkins must have felt his phone vibrate, for he had it out and was swiping the screen. After a few moments he looked up and said, “They identified the prints we got off the helm of that sunk boat last night. Pierce Plowman.”

“I imagine he’ll be there too,” said Finehouse.

Atkins asked again, impatiently, “Where?”

Finehouse stretched and yawned, bracing his hands on the steering wheel. “Where the kid on the bike is evidently going.”

Finehouse was curious about Plowman. Lubitz had only told him that Plowman had worked at the Nevada Test site—Area 51—in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and that later he had been an eccentric bum, working odd jobs and joining the disorganized population of saucer-nuts in southern California. A harmless screwball, one would have supposed, like so many in the L.A. area, but the old weirdo had apparently got hold of some very sensitive information.

And it would have to be the sort that the Office of Naval Research called aberrant.

Last night Finehouse had driven to the Los Angeles Naval Intelligence office and picked up the six boxes that contained the lightweight chrome-plated aluminum spheres that Cendravenir was to telekinetically juggle, when and if an appearance of the Anomalous Aerial Phenomena could be provoked. The boxes were in the back of the SUV now, and it didn’t seem out of the question that they might be needed today.

Cendravenir clearly thought the same thing. He kept leaning forward to peer over Finehouse’s shoulder at the cars ahead, and his ridiculous pointed goatee stood out against his pale face.

“I opened a couple of these boxes back here,” Cendravenir said now. “They’re the silver balls I’m supposed to juggle, aren’t they? You didn’t have them yesterday—why have you got them now?” Finehouse heard a metallic knocking back there.

“It’s possible we’ll do Operation Pleiades today,” Finehouse told him without looking away from the freeway lane.

“You’re all making assumptions about what I can do,” Cendravenir said. “We were supposed to have time to practice. Silver balls! What if they’re—I don’t know, slippery?”

You’ll do it reflexively, thought Finehouse, if you’re scared. And if my guess is right, if Vickery and Castine and the Russian spy are planning what I think they’re planning, I imagine you’ll be adequately scared.

“I don’t want to,” Cendravenir said. “I quit.” He lunged forward and reached past Finehouse for the steering wheel; Finehouse batted his arm away at the same time that Atkins did, and Cendravenir fell forward, grabbing Finehouse’s right leg to steady himself.

The SUV leaped forward as Finehouse’s foot was briefly pressed down onto the gas pedal. He had glanced away from traffic for a moment, and when he looked up he saw that he was about to collide with the back end of a Ralph’s delivery truck, and his foot instantly sprang to the brake and tromped down hard on it.

The SUV’s front end dipped and the tires yiped and the whole vehicle began to slew around sideways. Finehouse’s view was blocked by a basket-ball-sized silver sphere that came flying from the back and bounced off the dome light onto his braced arms. The SUV ground to a halt, not quite touching the truck ahead of it, but was jolted when the following Sensitive Assignment van hit the back bumper.

And cars in every lane around Finehouse were sliding on screeching tires and banging into one another.

The Ralphs truck, untouched, rolled on down the lane, and Finehouse straightened the wheel and carefully pressed the gas pedal; the SUV moved forward after only a brief tug to free itself from bumper of the van behind it, and Finehoues sped up, leaving behind a cluster of stopped cars.

Cendravenir had slumped back in his seat, and Finehouse flung the silver ball into the back. “Is the goddamn van still with us?” he asked Atkins.

Atkins lowered his head to peer at the outside mirror. “Yes. They look okay. Unlike everybody who was around us.”

“Everybody stopped at once,” said Finehouse. He was breathing more easily than he had a moment ago, though his heart was still pounding. Belatedly his hands tingled with tension.

Atkins was now leaning forward to look at the sky. “What the hell happened?”

“Smoky Joe back there got scared when I hit the brakes,” said Finehouse. He was watching the spedometer and the truck ahead, careful not to make a mistake in the fading rush of adrenalin.

“But what—oh. Yeah.” Atkins peered warily back at Cendravenir.

Cendravenir was groping on the floor, undoubtedly for his cigarette. “If a thing does something scary sudden,” he said, and Finehouse couldn’tell if the man spoke defensively or defiantly, “other things are gonna do the same.”

“I should have you blindfolded all the time,” said Finehouse, “ with earplugs.”

“And sedated,” agreed Cendravenir, straightening up and puffing on the cigarette. “Wherever we’re going, I’m not getting out of this car.”

With four agents in the van behind us, thought Finehouse, to whose more substantial concerns you’ve now added damage to two government vehicles, I think you’ll do as you’re told.


When Anita Galvan hit the brake, the gray Cadillac CTS came to a smooth, quick stop, well short of the bumper of the car ahead, but all around her tires were screeching and cars were slamming together. The Cadillac was jolted as the car behind collided with the back bumper.

She gripped the steering wheel and blinked around angrily. All the cars she could see on the freeway lanes were stopped, many of them at odd angles. Far ahead she saw the top of a big grocery delivery truck moving away, but she was blocked in.

“That was goddamn magic!” she snarled at her nephew in the passenger seat. “Look at that new Honda, that Chevy! They’ve all got anti-lock brake systems same as we do. But we’re the only car that didn’t lock up.”

Carlos blinked at the other cars, then shrugged and nodded.

“This car is shielded,” she reminded him. “All these other cars aren’t. Somebody did this.”

Carlos as usual had nothing to say, but Arturo in the back seat said, “To stop you?”

“Nobody knew I was going to go out there today. It might be just something that happens now, like the thunder. A new phenomenon.” She waved at the cars ahead. “Get out and clear me a path out of this mess.”

“They’re jammed together, boss!” protested Arturo. “Why do you want to go there anyway?”

“I’m sure that’s where Vickery is with my ’98 Dodge.”

Thunder, she thought, snowstorms in the L.A. River, fireballs in the ocean, my relatives all pouring sugar and honey on the streets! Yesterday Abril told me, The spacemen many times appear where they’ve appeared not long before—it’s like coming through a hole they already made, before it can close up again. And everybody says they were out at this Giant Rock on Sunday. Vickery will be there.

She added, “He mathed-out my back-door tracker ghost. I bet he’s bunged up the car.”

Carlos opened the door on his side and stepped out.

“How are we supposed to get the cars out of the way?” asked Arturo, who hadn’t opened his door. “Why do we have to go there anyway? Vickery will bring your car back, even if it’s messed up. He always does.” He paused and bobbed his head. “Except when he leaves them in Hell.”

“Push ’em, get one car to push another, I don’t know, point a gun at the drivers! Just get ’em out of my way so we can keep going!”

Arturo exhaled wearily, but opened his door and got out.

Vickery’s been right in the past, Galvan thought, in his half-ass way, but he’s a fuckup. He’ll need help. And if he’s messed up my Dodge, one of you can drive it back and he can damn well hitch-hike out of the desert. Limping.

And, she thought as she watched Carlos and Arturo slouch toward the stopped cars ahead, I do want to see the spacemen.


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