"Observe the scalloped capitals," said the guide. "In their primitive fluting they anticipated what was later to become a common motif...."

"Faugh!" said Render-softly though, because he was in a group inside a church.

"Shh'" said Jill (Fotlock-that was her real last name) DeVille.

But Render was impressed as well as distressed.

Hating JiU's hobby though, had become so much of a reflex with him that he would sooner have taken his rest seated beneath an oriental device which dripped water onto his head than to admit he occasionally en- Joyed walking through the arcades and the galleries, the passages and the tunnels, and getting ail out of breath climbing up the high twisty stairways of towers.

So he ran his eyes over everything, burned everything down by shutting them, then built the place up again out

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of the still smouldering ashes of memory, all so that at a later date he would be able to repeat the performance, offering the vision to his one patient who could see only in this manner. This building he disliked less than most.

Yes, he would take it back to her.

The camera in his mind photographing the surround- ings, Render walked with the others, overcoat over his arm, his fingers anxious to reach after a cigarette. He kept busy ignoring his guide, realizing this to be the nadir of all forms of human protest. As he walked through Winchester he thought of his last two sessions with Eileen Shallot. He recalled his almost unwilling Adam-attitude as he had named all the animals passing before them, led of course by the one she had wanted to see, colored fearsome by his own unease. He had felt pleasantly bucolic after boning up on an old Botany text and then proceeding to Shape and name the flowers of the fields.

So far they had stayed out of the cides, far away from the machines. Her emotions were still too powerful at the sight of the simple, carefully introduced objects to risk plunging her into so complicated and chaotic a wilderness yet; he would build her city slowly.

Something passed rapidly, high above the cathedral, uttering a sonic boom. Render took Jill's hand in his for a moment and smiled as she looked up at him. Knowing she verged upon beauty, Jill normally took great pains to achieve it. But today her hair was simply drawn back and knotted behind her head, and her Ups' and her eyes were pale; and her exposed ears were tiny and white and somewhat pointed.

"Observe the scalloped capitals," he whispered. "In their primitive fluting they anticipated what was later to become a common motif."

"Faugh!" said she.

"Shh!" said a sunburned little woman nearby, whose face seemed to crack and fall back together again as she pursed and unpursed her lips.

Later as they strolled back toward their hotel. Render said, "Okay on Winchester?"

"Ofcay on Winchester."

"Happy?"

"Happy."

"Good, then we can leave this afternoon."

70 .

"All right."

"For Switzerland...."

She stopped and toyed with a button on his coat.

"Couldn't we just spend a day or two looking at some old chateaux first? After all, they're just across the chan- nel, and you could be sampling all the local wines while I looked . . ."

"Okay," he said.

She looked up-a trifle surprised.

"What? No argument?" she smiled. "Where is your fighting spirit?-to let me push you around like this?"

She took his arm then and they walked on as he said, "Yesterday, while we were galloping about in the in- nards of that oid castle, I heard a weak moan, and then a voice cried out, 'For the love of God, Montresor!'

I think it was my fighting spirit, because I'm certain it was my voice. I've given up der geist der stets verneint.

Pax vobiscum! Let us be gone to France. Alors!"

"Dear Rendy, it'll only be another day or two...."

"Amen," he said. "though my skis that were waxed are already waning."

So they did that, and on the morn of the third day, when she spoke to him of castles in Spain, be reflected aloud that while psychologists drink and only grow angry, psychiatrists have been known to drink, grow angry and break things. Construing this as a veiled threat aimed at the Wedgewoods she had collected, she acquiesced to his desire to go skiing.

Free! Render almost screamed it.

His heart was pounding inside his head. He leaned hard. He cut to the left. The wind strapped at his face; a showed of ice crystals, like bullets of emery, fled by him, scraped against his cheek.

He was moving. Aye-the world had ended as Weissflujoch, and Dorftali led down and away from this portal.

His feet were two gleaming rivers which raced across the stark, curving plains; they could not be frozen in their course. Downward. He flowed. Away from all the rooms of the world. Away from the stifling lack of in- tensity, from the day's hundred spoon-fed welfares, from the killing pace of the forced amusements that hacked at the Hydra, leisure; away.

71.

And as he fled down the run he felt a strong desire to look back over his shoulder, as though to see whether the world he had left behind and above had set one fear- some embodiment of itself, like a shadow, to trail along after him, hunt him down and drag him back to a warm and well-lit coffin in the sky, there to be laid to rest with a spike of aluminum driven through his will and a garland of alternating currents smothering his spirit.

"I hate you," he breathed between clenched teeth, and the wind carried the words back; and he laughed then, for he always analyzed his emotions, as a matter of re- flex; and he added, "Exit Orestes, mad, pursued by the Furies .. ."

After a time the slope leveled out and he reached the bottom of the run and had to stop.

He smoked one cigarette then and rode back up to the top so that he could come down it again lor non- therapeutic reasons.

That night he sat before a fire is the big lodge, feeling its warmth soaking into his tired muscles. Jill massaged his shoulders as he played Rorschach with the flames, and he came upon a blazing goblet which was snatched away from him in the same instant by the sound of his name being spoken somewhere* across the Hall of the Nine Hearths.

"Charles Render!" said the voice (only it sounded more like "Shariz Runder"), and his head instantly jerked in that direction, but his eyes danced with too many afterimages for him to isolate the source of the call- ing.

"Maurice?" he queried after a moment, "Bartelmetz?"

"Aye," came the reply, and then Render saw the fa- miliar grizzled visage, set neckless and balding above the red and blue shag sweater that was stretched merci- lessly about the wine-keg rotundity of the man who now picked his way in their direction, deftly avoiding the strewn crutches and the stacked skis and the people who, like Jill and Render, disdained sitting in chairs.

Render stood, stretching, and shook hands as he came upon them.

"You've put on more weight," Render observed.

"That's unhealthy."

"Nonsense, it's alt muscle. How have you been, and

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