"True. It might be fun to reverse it someday-try me on the EEG, while you vanish." Edwin scribbled notes on a pad of paper. "Do something else. Uh, no, not the remote control bit, that gives me the creeps. Something else."

Rob watched the colored lines wiggle and change on the computer screen as he dropped the tarnhelm. So many of his tricks involved influencing another person-there weren't that many that he did to himself. Ah, but how about a little voyage to inner space? "Watch," he told Edwin. "This should be different." And he let himself drop.

To his astonishment he found himself on the barren plain again. He had never come to the same place twice, but even though it was night he recognized his surroundings. It was very cold, the black wind cutting like a razor blade and kicking up irritating powdery grit. He looked up and recognized the stars, Orion and the Big Dipper. So this was an Earthly place! But a dull one. "What is this," Rob grumbled, "a trailer before the main feature?" He reached, to tear the fake landscape away.

Right overhead out of the clear night sky came a crack of lightning. For one strobe-like second, the sizzle of light drove the darkness back. The thunderclap sent Rob diving flat into the dust, his hands over his ears.

Still his ears rang with it, and in the ringing were words: You had a hint, and you didn't take it. Now you get an order. Come to Aqebin!

Rob felt the command pierce into him like a blade. This is what it's like when I do it, he realized. Someone's doing it to me. Instinctively he fought back. Pulling an unwitting puppet's string is one thing, he thought grimly. But I have teeth. This is my place, my head. Nobody's bossing me here. Dust was thick on his tongue as he struggled against the intrusion.

Then he was out, free, on his feet again. The enforcing order was gone.

This is some automatic system, he thought. Somebody left me an e-mail message here. Somebody had the power to do that, to invade my sphere and hang up a paper landscape with a note on it. The realization stunned him.

He had to get back, back to ordinary life, to think about it. He blinked and he was there.

Not, disconcertingly, in Edwin's desk chair, but on the floor. His feet were painfully cramped under the instrument cart, and his head was jammed up against a bookcase. A small dark face hung over his, frowning. "Dr.

Lal?" Rob asked, surprised.

"Good, you recognize me." Her English was clipped, with a heavy Hindu accent. She folded up her stethoscope and sat back on her heels.

Behind her Edwin hovered holding a glass of water. "Here, bud, drink this.

Is that okay?" he asked the doctor.

She nodded, and they both watched like hawks as Rob sat up and sipped. His hands were trembling, and he wiped something thick off his mouth. He had thought it was dust, but red showed on his sleeve-blood. He had bitten through his tongue.

"A seizure of some kind, not a typical grand mal," Dr. Lal said. "I am M.D., but not a neurologist. Your friend must see a good one, very soon.

Show him or her that." She nodded at the computer screen, where the colored lines now stood motionless. The electrodes had been jerked off his scalp and hung forlornly from their cables over the arm of the desk chair. "From the brain scan they can diagnose, you understand? Brain tumor, epilepsy-"

She held her tiny hands wide, to show she didn't know.

"You got it," Edwin said fervently. "I'll set up an appointment ASAP."

"No!" Rob protested, alarmed.

Dr. Lal rolled her dark eyes eloquently and got up. "I'll deal with him,"

Edwin promised. "Thank the Lord you were here!" He went out with her. Rob hauled himself to his feet and dropped into the desk chair again. He hurt all over. It had never hit him like this before. A gray gritty haze seemed to overlay the world.

Edwin came hurrying back. "I thought I was electrocuting you! But Dr. Lal said it wasn't the apparatus. You have to see a doctor, Rob. Epilepsy is no joke. They've got the best in the world here-"

"I am not sick, Ed," Rob said tiredly.

"I don't want to debate this with you, Rob. I saw what I saw. There's something definitely wrong, completely aside from the weirdness. You know we were all set to call 911 just now?"

Rob closed his eyes, sorely tempted to just command him to lay off. It would be so much easier than explaining, arguing, persuading. But the sharpened blade that had almost impaled him just now made him think. It was very unpleasant to be muscled like that, to be the bug on the dissection tray. Maybe he should just pull down the invisibility, walk out of Edwin's life forever? But friends didn't do that to each other . . . He opened his eyes. Edwin was picking his telephone receiver up. "Hey, don't do that! I was just thinking!"

Edwin put the phone down. "You looked like you were zoning out on me again!

Tell me the truth, Rob, please-how do you feel?"

"A little logy, but all right, okay? There's nothing wrong with me physically, I'm sure of it. It was ... a message."

"You're receiving messages. From UFOs, maybe."

Irrational anger seized him. "Damn it, Ed, you do not have to participate in this. I only need one thing from you and then you can bail out."

"And that is?"

"That antique archaeological report, about the dig at Aqebin."

Edwin slowly leaned forward and banged his forehead, gently, against the file cabinet. "Now that is so bizarre, it's just like you. So it must make sense somehow. All right. You're not ill. Explain it all to me."

Rob rubbed a hand down his face, feeling the sticky blood in his short beard. "Let me wash first. And could we go have coffee or something? I need ballast."

"Food! You're right, that's exactly what you need, nutrition!" Edwin leaped out of his chair. "Come on!"

It was close enough to dinner time that Edwin insisted they eat a proper meal at the cafeteria. "You can pull the wool over everyone else, but you can't lie to me," Edwin said. "You looked like hell warmed over before, but would you admit it? Noooo."

Cleaned and fed, Rob had to agree. "It's never been like that before."

"What hasn't?"

"The . . . the places I go. I can't explain the basic experience to you, Ed. It's like it's not meant to be put into words. All I can tell you is how this time it was real different. In fact," he added, struck by the thought, "what did the EEG show?"

"I didn't look," Edwin confessed. "You began to convulse, and I forgot all about it. But it's captured on disk."

Rob sighed. "I went-in, to where I go when I do this, and there was a message waiting for me. It was like-like logging on to a computer net, and finding an e-mail in your box."

Edwin nodded vehemently. "Stick with the net and the e-mail, and you got me. Let's keep away from in, and the places you go, and the basic experience. You got an e-mail. What did it say?"

"It was in the same place that I got that inscription."

"I remember you said back then that it was a message, too."

"It was a hint," Rob said grimly. "Today I got the message. It was, 'Come to Aqebin.' And it had muscle behind it."

"Muscle? You mean-wait a minute . . ."

Rob sat back and waited to see what Edwin would conclude. He imagined the gears and precision wheels spinning in Edwin's head, the trained intelligence, so different from his own thought processes, swinging around to bear on the problem.

"If someone can enforce a command like you can-and if they can use your bulletin board system-holy mike, Rob! There's another specimen!"

Rob burst out laughing, rocking back in his chair and slapping his knee.

"And maybe this one won't be so pernickety about dissection, huh?"

Edwin grinned. "You better make that will before you go. Are you going? Do you have to?"

"Whoever it was isn't making me do it, if that's what you mean. But I think I have to go find out. If there's somebody else, someone who's been through this before, I could learn so much, Ed. They'd be my equal in power, and with a lot more experience. Maybe they've figured out the control question.

Maybe they know where it comes from. Even if I could learn the name of the weirdness, that would be progress."

"You wouldn't be alone any more," Edwin said.