Render made his face serious and said: "Am I a man dreaming I am a robot, or a robot dreaming I am a man?"

He grinned, then added: "I don't know."

She punched his shoulder gaily at that and he ob- served that she was drunk.

"I am not." she protested. "Not much, anyhow. Not as much as you."

"Still, I think you ought to see a doctor about it Like me. Like now. Let's get out of here and go for a drive."

"Not yet, Charlie. I want to see them once more, huh?

Please?"

"If I have another drink I won't be able to see that far."

"Then order a cup of coffee."

"Yaagh!"

"Then order a beer."

"I'll suffer without."

There were people on the dance floor now, but Ren- der's feet felt like lead.

He lit a cigarette.

"So you had a dog talk to you today?"

"Yes. Something very disconcerting about that. . . .**

"Was she pretty?"

"It was a boy dog. And boy, was he uglyi"

"Silly. I mean his mistress."

"You know I never discuss cases, Jill."

"You told me about her being blind and about the dog. AH I want to know is if she's pretty."

"Well . . .Yes and no." He bumped her under the table and gestured vaguely. "Well, you know ..."

"Same thing all the way around," she told the waiter who had appeared suddenly out of an adjacent pool of darkness, nodded, and vanished as abruptly.

"There go my good intentions," sighed Render. "See how you like being examined by a drunken sot, that's all I can say."

67.

"You'll sober up fast, you always do. Hippocratics and all that."

He sniffed, glanced at his watch.

"I have to be in Connecticut tomorrow. Pulling Pete out of that damned school.. .."

She sighed, already tired of the subject.

"I think you worry too much about him. Any kid can bust an ankle. It's part of growing up. I broke my wrist when I was seven. It was an accident. It's not the school's fault, those things sometimes happen."

"Like hell," said Render, accepting his dark drink from the dark tray the dark man carried. "If they can't do a good job, I'll find someone who can."

She shrugged.

"You're the boss. All I know is what I read in the

papers.

"-And you're still set on Davos, even though you know you meet a better class of people at Saint Moritz?"

she added.

"We're going there to ski, remember? 1 like the runs better at Davos."

"I can't score any tonight, can I?"

He squeezed her hand.

"You always score with me, honey."

And they drank then- drinks and smoked their ciga- rettes and held their hands until the people left the dance floor and filed back to their microscopic tables, and the gelatins spun round and round, tinting clouds of smoke from hell to sunrise and back again, and the bass went whumpf

Tchga-tchgaf

"Oh, Charlie! Here they come again!"

The sky was clear as crystal. The roads were clean. The snow bad stopped.

Jill's breathing was the breathing of a sleeper. The S-7 raced across the bridges of the city. If Render sat very still he could convince himself that only his body was drunk; but whenever he moved his head the uni- verse began to dance about him. As it did so, he imag- ined himself within a dream, and Shaper of it all.

For one instant this was true. He turned the big clock in the sky backward, smiling as he dozed. Another in- stant and he was awake again, and unsmiling.

68 .

The universe had taken revenge for his presumption.

For one reknown moment with the helplessness which he had loved beyond helping, it had charged him the price of the lake-bottom vision once again; and as he had moved once more toward the wreck at the bottom of the world-like a swimmer, as unable to speak-he heard, from somewhere high over the Earth, and filtered down to him through the waters above the Earth, the howl of the Fenris Wolf as it prepared to devour the moon; and as this occurred, he knew that the sound was as like to the trump of a judgment as the lady by his side was unlike the moon. Every bit. In all ways. And he was afraid.

Ill

". . . The plain, the direct, and the blunt. This is Winchester Cathedral," said the guidebook. "With its floor-to-ceiling shafts, like so many huge treetrunks, it achieves a ruthless control over its spaces: the ceilings are flat; each bay, separated by those shafts, is itself a thing of certainty and stability. It seems, indeed, to re- flect something of the spirit of William the Conqueror.

Its disdain of mere elaboration and its passionate dedi- cation to the love of another world would make it seem.

too, an appropriate setting for some tale out of Mal- lory... ."