Fraffin glanced at the disembodied face projected above the traffic control selector, returned his attention to Lutt. "Yes, the female. You'll take her into custody and return her here. She's our property. We'll have an understanding with this Kelexel. No nonsense, you hear?

Bring her to me."

"If I can, honored director."

"You had better find a way," Fraffin said.

18.

Thurlow awoke at the first click of the alarm clock, turned it off before it rang. He sat up in bed, fighting a deep reluctance to face this day. It'd be h.e.l.lish at the hospital, he knew. Whelye was putting on the pressure and would keep it up until . . . Thurlow took a deep sighing breath. When it got bad enough, he knew he'd quit

The community was helping him to this decision -- crank letters, vicious phone calls. He was a pariah.

The professionals were an odd contrast -- Paret and old Judge Victor Venning Grimm among them. What they did in court and what they did outside of court appeared to be held in separate, carefully insulated compartments.

"It'll blow over," Grimm had said. "Give it time."

And Paret: "Well, Andy, you win some, you lose some."

Thurlow wondered if they had any but detached emotions about Murphey's death. Paret had been invited to the execution, and the courthouse grapevine had said he debated going. Good sense had prevailed, though. His advisors had warned against his appearing vindictive.

Why did I go? Thurlow asked himself. Did I want to extract the last measure of personal pain from this?

But he knew why he'd gone, meekly accepting the condemned man's wry invitation to "Watch me die." It'd been the lure of his own personal hallucination: Would the watchers be there, too, in their hovering craft?

They . . . or the illusion had been there.

Are they real? Are they real? his mind pleaded. Then: Ruth, where are you? He felt that if she could only return with a reasonable explanation for her disappearance, the hallucinations would go.

His thoughts veered back to the execution. It would take more than one long weekend to erase that memory. Recollection of the sounds bothered him -- the clang of metal against metal, the whisper-shuffling of feet as the guards came into the execution area with Murphey.

The memory of the condemned man's glazed eyes lay across Thurlow's vision. Murphey had lost some of his dumpiness. The prison suit hung slackly on him. He walked with a heavy, dragging limp. Ahead of him walked a black-robed priest chanting in a sonorous voice that concealed an underlying whine.

In his mind, Thurlow watched them pa.s.s, feeling all the spectators caught up abruptly in a spasm of silence. Every eye turned then to the executioner. He looked like a drygoods clerk, tall, bland-faced, efficient -- standing there beside the rubber-sealed door into the little green room with its eyeless portholes.

The executioner took one of Murphey's arms, helped him over the hatch sill. One guard and the priest followed. Thurlow was in a line to look directly through the hatchway and hear their conversation.

The guard pa.s.sed a strap over Murphey's left arm, told him to sit farther back in the chair. "Put your hand here, Joe. A little farther this way." The guard cinched the strap. "Does that strap hurt?"

Murphey shook his head. His eyes remained glazed, a trapped animal look in them.

The executioner looked at the guard, said: "Al, why don't you stay in here and hold his hand?"

In that instant, Murphey came out of the depths to shatter Thurlow, forcing him to turn away. "You best stay with the mules and wagon," Murphey said.

It was a phrase Thurlow had heard Ruth use . . . many times, one of those odd family expressions that meant something special to the inner circle of intimates. Hearing Murphey use it then had forged a link between father and daughter that nothing could break.

All else was anticlimax.

Remembering that moment, Thurlow sighed, swung his feet out of the bed onto the cold floor. He pulled on his slippers, donned a robe and crossed to the window. There, he stood staring at the view which had brought his father to buy this house twenty-five years before.

The morning light hurt his eyes and they began to water. Thurlow took up his dark gla.s.ses from the bedstand, slipped them on, lightened the setting to just below the pain threshold.

The valley had its usual morning overcast, the redwood fog that would burn off sometime around eleven. Two ravens sat perched in the branches of a live oak below him calling to unseen companions. A drop of condensation spilled from an acacia leaf directly beneath the window.

Beyond the tree there was motion. Thurlow turned toward it, saw a cigar-shaped object about thirty feet long lift into view. It drifted across the top of the oak, scattering the ravens. They flapped away, croaking with harsh dissonance.

They see it! Thurlow told himself. It's real!

Abruptly, the thing launched itself across the sky to his left, lanced into the overcast. Behind it came a covey of spheres and discs.

All were swallowed by the clouds.

Into the shocked stillness with which Thurlow enveloped himself there came a rasping voice: "You are the native, Thurlow."

Thurlow whirled to see an apparition in his bedroom doorway -- a squat, bowlegged figure in a green cape and leotards, square face, dark hair, silvery skin, a wide gash of mouth. The creature's eyes burned feverishly under p.r.o.nounced brows.

The mouth moved, and again came that harsh, resonant voice: "I am Kelexel." The English was clear, clipped.

Thurlow stared. A dwarf? he asked himself. A lunatic? He found his mind jammed with questions.

Kelexel glanced out the window behind Thurlow. It had been faintly amusing to watch Fraffin's pack go hounding after the empty needleship. The programmed automatic course couldn't elude the pursuers forever, of course, but by the time they caught it, all would have been accomplished here. There'd be no bringing back the dead.

Fraffin would have to face that . . . and his crime.

Resurgent pride firmed Kelexel's will. He frowned at Thurlow, thinking: I know my duty. Ruth would waken soon, he knew, and come to their voices. When she did, she could watch a supreme triumph. She'll be proud that a Chem smiled upon her, he thought.

"I have watched you, witchdoctor," Kelexel said.

A thought flickered through Thurlow's mind: Is this some weird psychotic come to kill me because of my testimony?

"How did you get into my house?" Thurlow demanded.

"For a Chem it was simplicity," Kelexel said.

Thurlow had the sudden nightmare feeling that this creature might be connected with the objects that had flown into the clouds, with the watchers who . . . What is a Chem? he wondered.

"How have you watched me?" Thurlow asked.

"Your antics have been captured in . . . in a . . ." Kelexel waved a k.n.o.b-knuckled hand in exasperation. It was so difficult to communicate with these creatures. ". . . in a thing like your movies," he concluded. "It's much more, of course -- a sensation transcript that works directly on the audience by empathic stimulation."

Thurlow cleared his throat. The words made only the vaguest sense, but his feelings of disquiet increased. His voice came out hoa.r.s.ely: "Something new, no doubt."

"New?" Kelexel chuckled. "Older than your galaxy."

He must be a crank, Thurlow rea.s.sured himself. Why do they always pick on psychologists?