Thurlow yanked off his polarized gla.s.ses. The cloud-like cylinder disappeared. In its place was a vague, foggy shape with tiny movements in it. He could see the corner of the building through it. He replaced the gla.s.ses. Again, there was a cylinder with two figures on a lip projecting from it. The figures were now pointing their tube toward the building's entrance.

"There he comes!" It was a shout from their left.

Lee almost knocked Thurlow down pushing past Mossman to aim the camera at the building's entrance. Officers surged forward.

Thurlow stood momentarily alone as a short, stocky, partly bald man in a blue suit appeared in the spotlight glare at the street doors of the Murphey Building. The man threw one hand across his eyes as the spotlights centered on him and the strobe light flared. Thurlow blinked in the glare of light His eyes watered.

Deputies engulfed the man at the doors.

Lee darted off to one side, lifted the camera overhead, pointing it down at the milling group. "Let me see his face!" Lee called. "Open up there a little."

But the officers ignored him.

Again, the strobe flared.

Thurlow had one more glimpse of the captive -- small eyes blinking in a round florid face. How curiously intense the eyes -- unafraid. They stared out at the psychologist, recognizing him.

"Andy!" Murphey shouted. "Take care of Ruthy! You hear? Take care of Ruthy!"

Murphey became a jerking bald spot hustled along in a crowd of hats. He was pushed into a car off near the corner on the right. Lee still hovered on the outskirts firing his strobe light.

Thurlow took a shuddering breath. There was a sense of charged air around him, a pack smell mingled with exhaust ga.s.ses as the cars were started. Belatedly, he remembered the cylinder at the window, looked up in time to see it lift away from the building, fade into the sky.

There was a nightmare feeling to the vision, the noise, the shouted orders around him.

A deputy paused beside Thurlow, said: "Clint says thanks. He says you can talk to Joe in a coupla hours -- after the D.A. gets through with him, or in the morning if you'd rather."

Thurlow wet his lips with his tongue, tasted acid in his throat. He said: "I . . . in the morning, I think. I'll check the probation department for an appointment."

"Isn't going to be much pretrial nonsense about this case," the deputy said. "I'll tell Clint what you said." He got into the car beside Thurlow.

Lee came up, the camera now on a strap around his neck. He held a notebook in his left hand, a stub pencil in his right.

"Hey, Doc," he said, "is that right what Mossman said? Murphey wouldn't come out until you got here?"

Thurlow nodded, stepped aside as the patrol car backed out. The question sounded completely inane, something born of the same kind of insanity that left him standing here in the street as cars sped off around the corner in a wake of motor sounds. The smell of unburned gas was sharp and stinging in his nostrils.

Lee scribbled in the notebook.

"Weren't you pretty friendly with Murphey's daughter once?" Lee asked.

"We're friends," Thurlow said. The mouth that spoke the words seemed to belong to someone else.

"You see the body?" Lee asked.

Thurlow shook his head.

"What a sweet, b.l.o.o.d.y mess," Lee said.

Thurlow wanted to say: "You're a sweet, b.l.o.o.d.y pig!" but his voice wouldn't obey him. Adele Murphey . . . a body. Bodies in crimes of violence tended toward an ugly sameness: the sprawl, the red wetness, the dark wounds . . . the professional detachment of police as they recorded and measured and questioned. Thurlow could feel his own professional detachment deserting him. This body that Lee mentioned with such avid concern for the story, this body was a person Thurlow had known -- mother of the woman he'd loved . . . still loved.

Thurlow admitted this to himself now, remembering Adele Murphey, the calmly amused looks from eyes so like Ruth's . . . and the measuring stares that said she wondered what kind of husband he'd make for her daughter. But that was dead, too. That had died first.

"Doc, what was it you thought you saw up by that window?" Lee asked.

Thurlow looked down at the fat little man, the thick lips, the probing, wise little eyes, and thought what the reaction would be to a description of that thing hovering outside Murphey's window. Involuntarily, Thurlow glanced up at the window. The s.p.a.ce was empty now. The night had grown suddenly cold. Thurlow shivered.

"Was Murphey looking out?" Lee asked.

The man's voice carried an irritating country tw.a.n.g that rasped on Thurlow's nerves.

"No," Thurlow said. "I . . . I guess I just saw a reflection.

"I don't know how you can see anything through those gla.s.ses," Lee said.

"You're right," Thurlow said. "It was the gla.s.ses, my eyes -- a reflection."

"I've a lot more questions, Doc," Lee said. "You wanta stop up at the Turk's Nightery where we can be comfortable. We can go in my car and I'll bring . . ."

"No," Thurlow said. He shook his head, feeling the numbness pa.s.s. "No. Maybe tomorrow."

"h.e.l.l, Doc, it is tomorrow."

But Thurlow turned away, ran across the street to his car. His mind had come fully to focus on Murphey's words: "Take care of Ruthy."

Thurlow knew he had to find Ruth, offer any help he could. She was married to someone else, but that didn't end what had been between them.

6.

The audience stirred, a single organism in the anonymous darkness of the storyship's empatheater.

Kelexel, seated near the center of the giant room, felt that oddly menacing dark movement. They were all around him, the story cadre and off-duty crewmen interested in Fraffin's new production. They had seen two reels run and rerun a dozen times while the elements were refined. They waited now for another rerun of the opening scene, and still Kelexel sensed that threatening aura in this place. It was personal and direct, something to do with the story, but he couldn't define it.

He could smell now the faint bite of ozone from the sensimesh web, that offshoot from Tiggywaugh's discovery, whose invisible field linked the audience to the story projection. His chair felt strange. It was professional equipment with solid arms and keyed f.l.a.n.g.es for the editing record. Only the vast domed ceiling with its threads of pantovive force focusing down, down onto the stage far below him (and the stage itself) -- these were familiar, like any normal empatheater.

But the sounds, the clicks of editing keys, professional comments -- "Shorten that establishment and get to the closeup . . ." "Hit the olfactory harder as soon as you have light . . ." "Soften that first breeze effect . . ." "Amplify the victim's opening emotion and cut back immediately . . ."

All this continued to be discord.

Kelexel had spent two working days in here, privileged to watch the cadre at its ch.o.r.es. Still, the sounds and voices of the audience remained discord. His previous experience of empatheaters had always involved completed stories and rapt watchers.

Far off to his left in the darkness, a voice said: "Roll it."

The pantovive force lines disappeared. Utter blackness filled the room.

Someone cleared his throat. Clearing throats became a message of nervousness that wove out through the dark.