Perfect Tommy took a quick gulp of his coffee and instantly choked. "What the hell is this?" he snarled, belatedly noticing that none of his fellow Cavaliers had cups of coffee before them.

"Dr. Zorba pulled KP this morning," said Pecos. "So what you've got is either kafe gleeko or kafe nero." Dr. Zorba, a neurosurgical resident studying under Drs. Banzai and Zwibel, was a fierce partisan of everything Greek.

"Mud, with or without sugar," Reno translated.

Big Norse appeared through the kitchen door, a thick blonde braid swinging off her shoulder as she leaned into the dining room. "Coffee's coming," she told them in the rising syllables of a Scandinavian accent. "ETA five minutes. It will be drinkable," she promised. She grinned and disappeared.

"A thoroughly non-melancholy Dane," observed Reno, the profound student of literature. "Rawhide must be around."

"Five minutes," said Perfect Tommy, seemingly disconsolate.

To distract him, Pecos offered a diversion. "Best and worst cup of coffee you ever had," she challenged the table. "You first, Tommy."

Perfect Tommy pushed at the cup in front of him hard enough to slosh liquid into its saucer. "This is a frontrunning candidate," he said bitterly.

"No, no, think about it seriously," Pecos said. "We'll come back to you. Reno?"

Reno grinned. "The worst cup of coffee I ever had," he said with great authority, "was in The Little Chapel of the Sweet and Sacred Heart, Las Vegas, Nevada, about two in the afternoon on Valentine's Day in 1969, on the occasion of my third wedding. We were the thirty-fourth couple to be married that day, and we were served out of a pot in which thirty-four consecutive quarts of instant coffee had been concocted without so much as a rinse in between. The only thing worse than that coffee," he reminisced, "was that marriage."

This pulled a laugh out of nearly everyone, and a grudging smile out of Perfect Tommy. Reno's endless anecdotes of his matrimonial misadventures, some of which might even have been true, were a constant source of amusement to his fellow Cavaliers, most of whom had won and lost love earlier in their lives in ways that could not, even now, be joked about.

"Best cup." This proved more of a stumper. Reno picked up his line of banter more slowly. "I do hate to say this," he reflected, "but Hanoi Xan provided the best cup of coffee I've ever had."

Reno grew even more reflective. "It was in the middle of the night following the obsequies for the Pasha of Three Tails. Pecos and myself, having freed ourselves from the lightless and rather odiferous confines of the yak's skin into which we had been stitched by the Pasha's minions, at length made our surreptitious way through the sewers of Sabah to a crawlspace above the very kitchens of Xan, which were at the time devoted to preparation of the valedictory feast for that lately-deceased factotum of the dreadful Lord of Ten Thousand Tortures. The funeral ceremonies and the attendant ritual inhumation of the Pasha's charred bones having been concluded at the appointed hour of moonset, the kitchen precincts were deserted. Pecos and I, dehydrated and famished by the rigors of our three-day internment in the luckless animal's pelt, crept forth to raid Xan's larder. We found on the stove a single precious, still-warm pan of caffeinous brew, which may not in fact have been coffee, but which nevertheless shines brightly in my memory as the finest individual cup of coffee I have ever imbibed."

An awed silence met the conclusion of this speech. "I always wondered if you worked with a Dictaphone," Perfect Tommy said. "That was really amazing, man."

"I was there," Pecos said. "That was the foulest, meanest, nastiest stuff-- 'caffeinous brew,' is that what you said? It was dishwater, maybe, if it was lucky, and I'd hate to say what was on the dishes washed in it." She met Reno's eye and grinned at him. "And we were toasting our betrothal with it."

Pecos considered. "Which means that that cup of coffee is both my best and worst cup of coffee ever." She looked across the table at the Cavaliers' auxiliary guitarist, who looked back at her from out of red-rimmed, half-closed eyes that closed completely as she watched.

"Just tell Big Norse to pump it straight into the main vein," Pinky Carruthers mumbled, sliding his left arm out among the salt and pepper shakers. A moment later, his head drooped down onto the arm.

Next to him, New Jersey reached over delicately and took the edge of Pinky's beret between two fingertips. He lifted it fractionally and regarded Pinky's reposeful countenance. "It is my considered medical opinion that this man is not fully conscious," he stated.

"I think we'll read that as an abstention," Pecos decided. She turned to the quiet man who had settled in beside her at the table. "You have any nominations, Rawhide?"

Rawhide scratched his forehead. "Let's see. Oh, Big Norse says two more minutes. Uh, best and worst, huh? Best... out in the Sahel, long time ago now, passing around some Turkish coffee out of a samovar, sitting around in a Tuareg tent and listening to traditional storytelling songs, I remember likin' that a lot. 'N, uh, one time at basecamp at 83o17' sitting out an Antarctic summer storm in what was basically a bat tent, Buckaroo and I split a thermos that I recall was pretty good."

The Cavaliers looked around at each other and found that this story was new to all of them. Naturally, Rawhide didn't tell it. He was still musing. "Worst, now, hmmm." He stared off toward the ceiling and scratched his scalp again. "Can't say that I remember a particular worst cup of coffee in my life."

"Just a lot of disagreeable ones along the way, right?" joked Reno.

Rawhide joined the others in chuckling at his own predictability. "Guess I have swallowed some bad brew in my time," he conceded.

"Jersey?" Reno turned to the long skinny figure of the newest Cavalier, who responded by pulling back from the table as if taken by surprise. "I'm still thinking," he said, waving his long fingers to indicate indecision. "The worst, that isn't hard at all." He looked up, grinning and shaking his head. "It was the morning of my first day on my very first clinical rotation, which happened to be path., pathology."

He stretched his fingers out taut. "I was so full of energy, so full of raw dedication. And I wanted coffee in the very worst way. I saw a pot of coffee and I saw a porcelain cup on a high shelf and I brought the two together and took a big swallow, all without looking." He grimaced and laughed at the same time. "There was an unlabeled specimen in that cup."

A uniformly grossed-out reaction registered around the table. New Jersey mirrored it, laughed, and curled his fingers in. "I never did find out what. For weeks, I thought I was coming down with plague, jaundice, beri-beri, anything."

"So that was definitely the worst, the very worst." New Jersey's hands came to rest, and the fingers interlinked in a steeple. "The best, well, I have to say this." He flickered his eyes around the table and then dropped them to his hands. "So far the best is the coffee I had at breakfast here on the first morning, just sitting down to breakfast with you people." He waved his hands. "Well."

"'S nice, man," Perfect Tommy said softly. "It's OK." There was a silence during which Reno reached over and gave New Jersey a small, friendly shove. New Jersey nodded and smiled, and looked up from the table at last.

"Hi, Boss," said Pecos as Buckaroo appeared. "You're just in time to contribute to our oral history of java."

"Greater Sunda?" Buckaroo was puzzled, but willing to add what knowledge he had. "I've only been there five times..." He broke off as he saw from the smiles around him that he was on the wrong track. "Coffee," he deduced. "Oh." He waited expectantly.

"Your personal best and worst," Pecos supplied. "Oh no--"

She was not in time to forestall Buckaroo, who had reached for Tommy's discarded cup and taken a long sip of its contents.

"This is quite good," Buckaroo said with pleasure. "Kafe nero, quite a treat." He had no idea what was leading his closest friends to laugh, possibly at his expense, but, being Buckaroo, was sublimely content that it should be so.

"I think you've just disqualified yourself," said Pecos. "Which leaves us..."

"Here it is," announced Big Norse, backing through the swinging door with a heavily loaded tray of filled coffee cups.

"Hah!" cried Perfect Tommy. In a single fluid motion, he rose, lifted two brimful cups off the tray, drained the one in his left hand, spun to return it to the moving tray, and settled back into his place at the table to savor the second cup at a somewhat more leisurely pace.

"Someday we'll teach this boy to say 'please,'" scolded Pecos, nevertheless marvelling as always at Tommy's unique grace. "As I was saying, you agile person you, it is now your turn."

Perfect Tommy, already beginning to feel the benefits of the presence in his system of a truly decent cup of coffee, favored his friends with a complacent smile. "Certainly," he acquiesced. "But first, Big Norse, man, this is good stuff. Infinitely approaching optimal."

"And have you ever had an optimal cup of coffee, my dear Zeno?" returned Big Norse. If Perfect Tommy really meant to invoke Zeno's paradox of the arrow which in each second covers half the distance to its target but can never reach it, the answer would have to be 'no.'

"Oh, of course," Tommy said cheerfully. "But going back to the most negatory cup first-- it came out of a machine, I regret to say, of my own design. A prototype, it's true, but something I built."

The other Cavaliers traded glances. For Perfect Tommy to dwell at any length upon -- or even to admit the existence of -- a less-than-perfect device of his own making was not merely unaccustomed, it was unheard of.

"I was working on a way to off that last little vestige of bite," Perfect Tommy continued, "in a machine that would deliver twelve cups in twenty seconds or less. The time, of course, was no problem" ("of course," Reno echoed in an undertone) "but there was a persistence of bite which, though most people couldn't've noticed it, I thought truly sucked.

"So instead of an extraction, I thought I might try an ultra-high-pressure admixture of something to catalyze out the resin, and I found myself playing with ultracool temperatures and that pushed the heating period past twenty seconds-- that is, if I was going to keep the unit down to tabletop size." Buckaroo had raised his eyes away from his concentrated enjoyment of the kafe nero and was listening intently. A small crease appeared between his brows.

"In the process, I did produce the numero uno worst bummer of a cup I have ever tasted," Perfect Tommy said. "Even worse than that grunge." He waved a hand at Buckaroo's cup.

"You're describing the Jet Car's miniaturized LOX-and-fuel injection system," Buckaroo said, his small frown easing. "The one that saturates the polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons so that they become naphthenic and non-carcinogenic." Perfect Tommy's revolutionary device had been hailed simultaneously by automotive engineers and cancer specialists as a great advance.

"You're right," Perfect Tommy told him, smiling beatifically.

"That's how you developed it? Trying to build a better Mr. Coffee?" Big Norse's voice climbed through a whole octave as she assimilated this story. Still relatively new to the Institute's routine, she had not yet become accustomed to the 'stray bullet' marvels with which the Cavaliers regaled each other over breakfast. "I love it!"

"It was pretty neat." Perfect Tommy nodded his agreement.

"... and now for the best coffee," Pecos prompted.

Tommy quirked his eyebrows. "The optimal cup." He smiled serenely. "It was Paris in the spring. The chestnut trees were in bloom, and the spring fashions that year were particularly elegant. For months, I'd been conferring with Alfonse at Maxim's, but it was an ex-Legionnaire maitre de patisserie on the Boul' Mich. who led me to my final inspiration.

"Setting the oven at precisely 525o Fahrenheit, I took thirty-five beans of French roast, twelve of an Indonesian dinner coffee colloquially known as The Parrot's Beak, fourteen of a Brazilian strain grown at precisely 8,000 feet-- but an auslese bean, from a plant known to have been slightly shaded by a liana... hey, where's everybody going?"

~ 30 ~