CHAPTER 9The nightmares started in Beirut. Stan’s apartment was a modern one, just a block from the American University. He had opened the wood-slat Venetian blinds and had gone to bed, feeling dead tired. It was late August and things had not gone too well. Agents had disappeared. Fusion packages had disappeared from their hiding places.
But worries could not compete with physical exhaustion. He was asleep as soon as he hit the pillow.
The nightmares were terrifying. He was no longer Stanley Martin, patriotic agent for the planet Thusca. He was 17 years old once more, playing in the city streets of Chicago and fighting in a pillow fight with his older brother and running errands for his mother or watching her while she made meat loaf and took loaves of freshly baked bread from the ovens
