A Werewolf Among Us

FIVE: A Policeman and a Girl

The federal police, with the aid of their limited-response robotic helpmates, spent more than four hours going over the suite, the corpse, the balcony, and the lawn immediately below the balcony. St. Cyr was convinced, after watching them sift and analyze even the dust in Betty's room, that they were not going to turn up anything worthwhile. In the first five minutes of the investigation they had discovered four animal hairs alien to the human body — three of them in the bloody wound and one under Betty's right thumbnail. Ten minutes more, and a mobile robotic lab had definitely matched them with the wolf hairs found on the previous corpse. After that discovery, they were all wasting time. It was almost as if every possible clue had been removed by the killer — who had then planted the four hairs especially for them to find. This one thing. No more.

The Inspector Chief assigned to the case was named Otto Rainy, a plump little man whose quick, pink hands were forever pressing his hair back from his face. He looked as if he had not gotten a haircut in six months, though more because he neglected his appearance than for any reason of style. His clothes were rumpled, his shoes unpolished, the cuffs of his coat frayed badly. He was, despite his appearance, a thorough investigator, careful with his questions, probing. St. Cyr doubted that he missed much.

"Cyberdetective," he said, first thing, when he approached St. Cyr.

"That's right."

"Does it really help?"

"I think so."

"Government isn't so sure about them, though," Rainy said. "No one has issued a ban on them, of course. But if the fedgov really trusted them, the word would have come down long ago for every copper on every world to hook up soonest."

"The government usually is a couple of decades behind science — behind social change, too, for that matter."

"I suppose."

"What have you found?"

Rainy wiped at his hair, pinched the bridge of his nose, wiped at his hair again. His blue eyes were bloodshot and weary. "Nothing more than those four damn hairs."

They were standing at the end of the side corridor that lead to Betty Alderban's room. The others, huddled outside the half-open door to the death scene, had ceased to talk among themselves. No one was crying any longer, either.

St. Cyr said, "Theories?"

"Only that it must have gotten to her on the balcony."

"From the lawn?"

"Yes."

"How far is that from the lawn — thirty feet?"

"Thirty-five."

"Climb it?"

"No handholds," Rainy said. He brushed angrily at his hair now, as if he could feel it crawling purposefully toward his eyes, as if it were a separate, sentient creature. "And no hook or rope marks on the balcony rail."

"Suppose the killer didn't come over the balcony rail, though. Just suppose that he walked right in through her door."

"We've already investigated the possibility," Rainy said, hair-wiping. "Each member of the family has a vocally-coded lock to insure his privacy and, as Jubal said after one of the earlier murders, 'to increase his sense of creative solitude.' "

"Teddy can open those doors," St. Cyr pointed out.

"Oh?"

'You didn't know?"

"No."

"He uses a high-pitched sonic override to operate the mechanism."

"You think his tone could be duplicated?"

"All that anyone would need to do," St. Cyr observed, "is hang around with a tape recorder and wait for Teddy to serve someone breakfast in bed, record the tone for later use."

Rainy thrust both hands in his pockets with such measured violence that it was only good fortune that kept him from ripping his fists through the lining. He seemed to be making a conscious effort not to smooth down his hair. "You talk as if our man must be a member of the family."

"That seems most likely."

"Yes, it does. But what in the world would any of them have to gain by it?"

"Hirschel, for instance, has the entire fortune to gain — if he comes out of this as the sole survivor."

Rainy shook his head and said, "No. He is not so naive as to think that he can kill all of them without arousing suspicion, then walk away with the cash. He appears to me to be a very clever, able man, not a bungler."

"I'd guess not. Still, it's something to keep in mind."

Rainy looked toward the Alderban family, removed one hand from his pocket and wiped his hair, caught himself halfway through the nervous habit, shrugged and finished wiping. He called to Teddy, where the master unit waited with the mourners.

"Yes, sir?" Teddy asked, gliding swiftly forward on gravplates, his long rod arms hanging straight at his sides.

Rainy said, as if blocking it all out for his own benefit, "Each bedroom door — except for the guest bedrooms — is responsive to the voice of its occupant. Also, you can open all of these doors with a sonic override. Otherwise, is there any way that someone might gain entrance quickly and without making much noise?"

"Yes," Teddy said, surprising both of them. "There is an emergency master key for manual cycling of the doors, in the event of power failure."

"Who keeps the emergency key?" Rainy asked.

"I do," Teddy said.

St. Cyr: "On your person?" It sounded like a strange object for the preposition in this case, but the only one that came to mind.

Teddy said, "No, sir. I keep it in the basement workshop, in my tool cabinet, racked with other keys that I sometimes require."

"The cabinet — is it locked?" Rainy asked.

"Yes, sir."

"And where is that key?" St. Cyr asked.

Teddy slid open a small storage slot high on his right side, a tiny niche that had been invisible only a moment earlier. Twisting his shiny, double-elbowed, ball-jointed arm into a fantastic, tortured shape, he extracted the key from this slot and held it up for their inspection.

Rainy sighed rather loudly and put both hands in his pockets again. "Could anyone have made a duplicate?"

Teddy said, "Not without my knowledge. It is always kept in the recess that you have just seen."

"You've never lost it, misplaced it?"

Teddy looked the same, for his metal features were immutable, but he sounded hurt. "Never."

"And it has been with you since the house was built?"

"No, sir," Teddy said. "I have only been with the Alderban family for eight months."

"But it was with the master unit who was here before you?"

"No, sir. The Alderban family had a large number of limited-response mechanicals prior to the acquisition of a master unit. I am their first master unit."

"Well," St. Cyr said, "that means that everyone in the household could have copied the key previously, when it was in the hands of one of the limited response domos. The lesser mechanicals would have given it to any human on demand and taken it back again, once a copy had been made, without retaining a memory-bit on the incident."

Teddy said nothing.

Rainy said, "We'll progress, for the time being anyway, on the notion that no one had a copy made at that time. If someone had been intent on killing some or all of the Alderban family eight months ago, he would not have waited this long to begin, do you think?"

"Not unless he happens to be a psychotic," St. Cyr said. "If he is completely irrational, there isn't any way of saying, for certain, just what he could be expected to do."

'True. But a psychotic ought to reveal himself, in everyday life, in some bit of eccentricity. For now, let's say the killer has concrete reasons, sound — in his mind— motivations."

St. Cyr nodded agreement, relieved that the federal policeman had not mentioned the du-aga-klava.

Rainy said, "Teddy, can we have a look at this cabinet where you keep the emergency key to the bedroom doors?"

"Yes, sir. If you will follow me, please."

He floated into the main corridor and toward the elevator, his long arms hanging loosely at his sides again.

The two detectives followed.

In the elevator, going down, no one said anything. The only sound was the faint hiss of the lift's complex mechanism as they shifted from vertical to horizontal travel and then back again — and the rustle, once, of Rainy removing a hand from a coat pocket in order to brush at his thick hair.

The elevator opened onto the garage, where a number of vehicles were parked in waist-high stalls. Teddy led them across the tile floor and through an irising door into the workshop where he crafted silverware.

"The cabinet is over there," the master unit said, pointing.

The white metal storage box measured approximately three feet high by four feet long, perhaps twelve inches deep. It was bolted to the stone wall, and it appeared to be more than averagely secure.

Rainy crossed the room and climbed onto the work table below the cabinet, stood up, brushed his hands off and carefully examined the seams for chipped paint or the traces of a recent touch-up job. Satisfied that no one had forced the cabinet open, he said, "Okay, Teddy. Would you unlock it now, please."

The master unit glided forth, levitated higher on his gravplates and unlocked the storage unit Rainy swung the door open and looked inside. Two dozen keys were pegged there, all made from the same blank but with differently serrated edges.

"Which key?" Rainy asked.

Teddy pointed to the right top corner peg.

Rainy did not touch it. He said, "I'll send a man down to take prints from it later. But I don't really think we're going to have much luck with it."

St. Cyr asked, "How does the emergency key cycle the door open in the absence of electrical power?"

Teddy swiveled toward the cyberdetective and said, "It disconnects the automatic locking mechanism and reveals a wheel fronting a hydraulic jack that pumps up the door. One has only to turn the wheel half a dozen times to raise the door."

"Perhaps that would be long enough to be discovered, enough time for the intended victim to sound an alarm," St. Cyr observed.

"No, sir," Teddy said. "The hydraulic jack is essentially silent. And the intended — the intended victim might not be facing the door — or, for that matter, might not even be in the sitting room at all."

Rainy climbed down from the work bench, dusted himself off and looked around the shop at the kilns, lathes, vices, drills, and benches with permanently fixed engraving tools. He looked at Teddy and said, "What's all this for?"

Teddy explained the silver crafts that he and Jubal "collaborated" on, and he offered an example, a goblet that was only half-engraved. It was tall and slim and thus far decorated with a naked girl riding a tiger the whole way around the cup so that the tiger ended with his own tail draped through his mouth.

St. Cyr said, "Do you have the tools here to make duplicates of these keys?"

"Of course."

"You make them yourself?"

"Yes. It is highly unlikely that a key could be lost, and—"

St. Cyr interrupted him. "When was the last time you had to machine a duplicate key?"

"I've never needed to," Teddy said. "A master unit is quite efficient. It doesn't lose things."

St. Cyr looked at the federal policeman quizzically and said, "Well?"

"Nothing more for us to do here," Rainy said. "I'll send a man down to take prints from that key, but later. Let's get back upstairs and see if anything else has been turned up."

Nothing else was, of course, turned up.

The key in the workshop cabinet was as bare of fingerprints as every surface in Betty's room had been.

Finally the police machines were moved out of the house and loaded aboard the helicopter again, along with the uniformed technicians who guided most of them. The corpse was removed too, to be taken back to police headquarters where a more thorough autopsy could be performed, after which it would be cremated according to the Alderban family's wishes. The ashes would be returned in an urn, but no religious ceremony would be held; the Alderbans were non-believers.

Inspector Chief Rainy was the last of his crew to leave, and he asked for a moment of St. Cyr's time before he went. The family still lingered in the corridor outside of Betty's room. Rainy and St, Cyr moved a dozen steps away from them, where they could speak privately.

"I'm not going to leave one of my men behind," Rainy said.

St. Cyr only nodded.

"I planted a man here after Dorothea's death, and absolutely nothing happened for so long that we pulled him off. Apparently his presence gave the killer a bad case of nerves."

"And just as apparently, my presence here doesn't bother him in the least."

"Anyway, you don't deter him."

St. Cyr said, "You want me to report to you?"

"That's it."

"I will, if I find anything interesting. I would have anyway, without the request." He listened to Rainy thank him, then said, "What do you know about Hirschel?"

Rainy didn't look at all surprised by the question. "Rambler, gamesman. He's been just about anywhere that the hunt is good and done just about everything to lay his life on the line."

'Except murder?"

"You think he'd consider it the ultimate thrill? I doubt that he could be that jaded," Rainy said.

"You've no reason to suspect him?"

"No more than the others, I guess."

Then Rainy was gone, and St. Cyr realized that the responsibility for the family's safety had devolved, suddenly, to him. He looked at them, realized that everyone but Hirschel would be an easy mark when the time came for the killer to strike again — if, indeed, he intended to commit a fourth murder.

Strong possibility.

"Are there any weapons in the house?" St. Cyr asked Jubal.

"I won't permit my children to have them," he said. He was as aggressive as ever, surprisingly contained in the face of Betty's death. Even Alicia had stopped crying, though her eyes were swollen and red.

"I have a number of weapons, of course," Hirschel said. "It is my hobby."

"No," Jubal said. "I will not allow everyone to go around armed with deadly weapons. As likely as not, inexperienced as we all are in such things, we'd end up accidentally killing each other or ourselves."

"I have narcotic-dart pistols," Hirschel said. "They produce an hour of sound sleep, nothing worse."

"How many do you have?" St. Cyr asked.

"Three different types, all workable in this situation. They all fire clusters of darts, so you don't even have to aim well, just point and pull the trigger." The big, dark man seemed to be enjoying the tension.

"How about that?" St. Cyr asked Jubal.

The patriarch's white hair was in complete disarray. He tried to comb it in place with his fingers, frowned, and said, "I guess that would be all right."

"Get the guns," St. Cyr told Hirschel.

The hunter was back in five minutes and explained the operation of each piece. St. Cyr left one with Jubal and Alicia, warning them to stay close together whenever possible and never to leave each other for even a moment during the night hours. Two of the three murders had taken place late at night. The second he gave to Dane, who seemed eager to understand its workings and willing to use it.

"I doubt it's going to work, though," he said.

"Why is that?" St. Cyr asked.

"I think the du-aga-klava is only susceptible to certain substances. Drugs most likely have no effect on it."

St. Cyr looked at Hirschel to see what his reaction was to what Dane had said; he felt more comradeship with the violent man than with any of the others, even though he also had greater suspicions about him. But the hunter seemed unmoved, either way, by the theory of supernatural intervention.

The third handgun went to Tina, who quickly caught on to the proper way to hold it and take aim. Hirschel said that she would make a fine marksman. Jubal looked unhappy at that.

"I'd like to make a suggestion," Tina said when Hirschel had finished explaining the narcotic-dart pistol to her.

She had been so taciturn before that St. Cyr was surprised by this sudden turnabout. In fact, he thought it was the longest statement he had ever heard her make. "What is that?" he asked.

'That someone run a check on Walter Dannery."

Puzzled, St. Cyr said, "Who is he?"

"A man my father fired from the family business about a year and a half ago."

St. Cyr turned to Jubal. "Is he a possible enemy?"

Jubal waved the suggestion away as if it were a bothersome insect flitting about his face. "The man was a weakling, an embezzler. He would not have the nerve for something like this."

"Just the same," St. Cyr said, "I'd like to hear about him."

"My accountants came to me with proof that he'd embezzled nearly two hundred and eighty thousand credit units over a period of nine months. They had already let him go, but he seemed to blame the whole thing on me. Offered a sob story about dependent children, a sick wife, all very melodramatic. But he's been gone from Darma for quite a long time, well over a year."

"Have you told Inspector Rainy about him?"

"Yes, first thing."

"He checked Dannery out?"

"Yes. He's gone to Ionus, taken an administrative position in one of the heavy industries there. Whoever hired him is a fool, but at least he's no longer my consideration."

St. Cyr turned to Tina and said, "You think that more ought to be done about this man?"

"Yes," she said. "He was terribly bitter about losing his job, blamed it on everyone but himself — and he broke things the one time he came here."

"Broke things?"

"He smashed a vase," Jubal said, trying to minimize it "He was emotionally unstable, a weakling, as I told you. I threw him out of here myself."

"Just the same," St. Cyr said, "I'll get off a light-telegram to my contact on Ionus tomorrow morning, see what he can dig up. The last thing any detective can afford to do is ignore even the smallest lead."

As the group split up to go back to bed, St. Cyr checked the house map and found that Tina lived on the second level, the only member of the family with quarters that far down. He started after her, aware again of the gently rounded curves of her body, of the richness of her black hair; he caught up with her at the end of the corridor and took her elbow in his hand.

She looked up, eyes black, lips pursed. When he had been asking questions, she was just another subject for interrogation; the bio-computer made certain of his impartiality like that. Now, however, she was much more than a suspect.

He said, "May I see you back to your rooms?"

She looked at the gun in her hand but said, "Okay."

In the elevator, when they were alone, he asked, "Why do you have rooms so far away from the rest of the family?"

"The fourth and fifth levels are pretty much broken up into the regular suites for family and guests, a few small art galleries and music rooms. The third level is where father has his den, mother her retreat. The library is also on the third level, as well as the recreation room and the drawing room, the motion picture theater and the pool. The studio level contains the storage rooms, kitchens, dining room — and my studio. I'm a painter, you know. I need plenty of space. The second level was the only place where I could have the studio the way I wanted it. You'll see soon enough what I mean."

The elevator doors opened, and the hall lights came up in quick response.

They were alone, or seemed to be.

"This way," she said.

She led him to her door, talked it open, went into her studio.

He followed.

The chamber was impressive, especially in that the ceiling was a good fifty feet overhead, arched by stained beams that criss-crossed in a neat geometric pattern. The walls were all white, almost dazzlingly white, broken only by a dozen of her own paintings. Two doors led to other rooms in the suite, and a barred window, forty feet long, was set in the far wall, providing quite a splash of sunlight during the day. The room itself measured approximately sixty by sixty feet.

"See?" she asked, turning to face him, smiling tentatively.

"Very nice."

"I'm glad you think so."

"Your work?" he asked, walking to the nearest painting, though he knew it was hers, recognized the style from the signed paintings in the fifth floor corridor.

"Yes," she said. Her abrupt tone held no pride.

He examined the painting, saw that it was a portrait of her father, Jubal, done entirely in shades of blue and green — and as if seen through a thousand small fragments of glass, some fragments crack-webbed. "I like it very much," he said.

"Then you haven't much taste for art," she said. When he turned and looked at her, he found that she was serious, though there was a grim humor in her voice.

"Oh?"

"You like the colors, the shapes," she said. "But if you could go beyond that, if you knew some of the criteria for judging art, you'd know what a flop it is."

"And these others?"

"Flops too."

He said: "Upstairs, in the corridors—"

"Disasters," she said, chuckling, though there was little mirth in her chuckle.

"Well," he said, "I disagree. You've got a great deal of talent, so far as I can see."

"Bullshit."

He turned and looked at her and was suddenly caught up by the way the overhead lights gleamed in her black eyes and revealed unsuspected depths, by the way the same light shimmered on the long slide of her hair and turned the black to a very dark, dark blue.

Unconsciously, he let his gaze wander down her slim neck to the pert roundness of the breasts. He felt his hands coming up from his sides, driven by an urge to cup her breasts, and he wondered what she made of his movements.

Somehow he remembered the nightmare from which the bio-computer had wakened him that afternoon, and he felt that it had bearing here, though he could not say how…

His gaze traveled downward still, to the pinch of her waist, the gentle flair of hips, to the long, well-shaped legs that were now all revealed by the shorts she wore. She was barefooted. Somehow this last detail intrigued him more than any other.

Re-direct your attention.

He told the other half of the cyberdetective to go to hell.

You cannot risk physical involvement. That may lead to emotional ties, and you are aware of what that would do to your ability to function at optimum efficiency as a cyberdetective.

St. Cyr still felt the urge to reach for her, to draw her gently to him, to see if that olive skin felt as soft and smooth as it looked. At the same rime, the bio-computer had subtly influenced him, even while he recognized its influence, and he raised his eyes to look only at her face.

He said, "If you really think you're a terrible artist, why do you continue to work?"

She laughed bitterly, laughed so hard that it ended in a choking cough. When she could speak again, she said, "I haven't any choice. There's nothing else I can do but paint, draw, sculpt, watercolor, sketch…"

"Surely you have—"

"No," she interrupted. "Remember, I've undergone hypno-keying — at the age of three, at my father's direction. Do you know what that does to you?"

"Not exactly," he said. "Somehow, it makes certain that you reach your full creative potential."

"And locks you into that."

"I don't understand," he said.

"Each of us seems born with certain abilities," Tina said, turning and crossing to the window, leaning with her back against it. Her black hair and dark complexion paled the night. "Dane, for instance, has an hereditary facility with words, as did Betty and Dorothea. Mother has a solid musical ability. Father, like me, excels in the manual arts."

St. Cyr waited.

"Once you've been through psychiatric hypno-keying, once you've had them in your head nudging your creative talents, you're almost—possessed by whatever one ability you have. I have to paint. My whole world is painting, drawing; I even gain satisfaction from cleaning my brushes at the end of a day."

She walked away from the window and stood before a self-portrait done in shades of orange and yellow.

She said, "When I try to get away from it— Oh, there are times I get so goddamned disgusted with myself, with my clumsy fingers, with my limited vision, that I never want to think about painting again! But when I run away from it for a while, a few days, the anger goes. And I begin to grow nervous… I find myself anxious to be back at it again, anxious to try to do better at it. I know that I cannot do better, that my talent simply stops at a certain point of achievement, that I'm very good but not great. Yet I always go back. I always pick up the brush again. Over and over I make a fool of myself. I never manage to hold out against the urge for more than a week or two. Sometimes three."

"Maybe, with all this drive—"

She talked over him as if she had not heard him begin to speak. "Everyone who has gone through hypno-keying, unless his creative talent is enormous, supreme, lives in a gentle sort of hell ever after that. He cannot do anything but what the hypno-keying has freed him to do — and he knows he can never do it as well as it can be done. And then the drive, as you said." It was the first indication that she had heard him. "The motivation is somehow stimulated by the hypno-keying. In the end, you can do only one thing, you want to do only one thing, but you can never do it as well as you hope to."

"The others feel this way?" he asked.

"They may not vocalize it as readily, but they feel it."

"It doesn't show," St. Cyr said.

"Doesn't it?" She turned away from her portrait and faced him. She was no longer emotional, no longer angry with herself. In a level voice, she said, "Didn't it seem that the family took Betty's death with little emotion?"

"Your mother was in tears."

"A point for my argument," she said. "Mother went through hypno-training later than all the rest of us. Father was treated as a baby, as were all his children. My mother, however, did not undergo treatment until after they were married. Some vestige of normality remains in her."

"I don't see how you tie together the hypno-keying and any lack of emotional response on your family's part."

"It's easy," she said, and smiled. The smile, as before, was not a smile at all. "Each of us is driven by his particular talent, consumed by it despite the limit of his vision. It is not easy, therefore, to establish relationships with other people, to care deeply about them when your energies are concentrated in this one arena."

"You forget that two other murders have taken place here. I would think all of you justified in reacting less forcefully to this one."

"We reacted the same to the first," Tina said. "A bit of grief, a day or two of loss, then plunge back into the work at hand, create, form, build…" She looked at the paintings on the wall to her right, sighed audibly. ''What all of these hypno-keying experts seem not to understand is that you can't create classic art when you have no love life. If love of art is supreme, it's all masturbation. If life, people, places don't come first, there isn't anything for the talent to draw on, no stuffing for the sack."

Though he was not, as she had subtly observed, a man of any great sensitivity — give him bright colors, bold lines, pleasing shapes, loud and lively music any day; to hell with the proper, genteel criteria — he saw in her a deep and awful suffering that, even with the aid of her explanations, he could not clearly grasp. He supposed that, as the attainment of perfect understanding in her art would always elude her, an understanding of her pain would elude him. He had a feeling that she did not sleep well at night, any night but especially this night — and that she tore up more paintings than she kept. He said nothing, for he had nothing to say that would make her feel any better — or any differently, for that matter.

In a quieter voice, almost a whisper, she said, "How can I ever make anything lasting, get anything genuine down on paper or canvas, when I haven't any ability to care for people, for anyone?"

"You could care," he said.

"No."

"Look, you've spent most all your life among other hypno-keyed artists. But if you were living among other people, normal people, they would react strongly to you, form attachments to you and force you to react as strongly as they did. You could care."

"You really think so?"

"Yes."

Be careful.

Go to hell.

"I doubt it," she said.

The confusion of the real and the subvocal conversations forced him to say, "Doubt what?"

She looked at him curiously and said, "I doubt that I could care for anyone."

"You could," he repeated stupidly.

For a long, awkward moment, they stood facing each other. He did not know how she felt, but he seemed suddenly transformed into a blundering, heavy-handed, club-footed wonder. He could hear himself breathing, and he swore he was as loud as an air-conditioning intake fan. He waited for her to say something, for he was unable to initiate anything more on his own. Then, finally aware that she felt she had already said too much and that she wanted to be alone, he said, "Keep the pistol near you at all times."

"I will."

He said goodnight and left her there.

The elevator ride to the fifth level seemed to take forever.

In his room, he poured himself a healthy glassful of Scotch over a single ice cube — one cube so that there was more room in the tumbler for the liquor.

Liquor will dull your perceptions.

Go to hell.

He knew that he was finished for the day, that he could not go anywhere or do anything without a few hours sleep. He sat down in a chair near the patio doors and quickly worked toward the bottom of his golden drink.

In the last six hours the input of data had greatly increased. So many bits and pieces had been stored, now, that he knew the symbiote that was half him would soon begin to connect one datum with another. If the pace kept on like this, he would be able to slowly formulate a few theories in another day, maybe two days, then logically eliminate a number of the present suspects.

Then, perhaps, before too much longer, the case would be finished.

He realized as he swallowed the last of the Scotch that he did not want it to be finished.

That is an unhealthy attitude.

He wanted to apprehend the killer, of course, and before anyone else died. He wanted to pinpoint the man, get him running, corner him and break him down, thoroughly break him down. That was what he was all about, after all; that was what Baker St. Cyr did well. But once the killer was out of the way, he did not want to have to leave this house.

Get right down to it, then: He did not want to have to leave Tina Alderban.

Avoid emotional complications of this nature.

He got up and poured another glass of Scotch.

He sat down in the same chair and took a large swallow of the drink, stirred the ice with his finger.

Tina Alderban…

When he closed his eyes, he could see her on the insides of his lids, standing naked, wearing a cape of black hair, holding out her arms to him, with two shiny globes of light before her, one resting lightly on each of her flat palms…

He remembered the nightmare again: the cracked macadam roadway, the tumble-down buildings… Somehow, Tina Alderban seemed to be a part of it.

It is very late. Even if you sleep until noon, you will not get your proper rest.

To counter the stodgy half of his symbiote, he raised his glass and sipped more Scotch. Apparently, however, the bio-computer had gotten to him on a deep, motivational level, for he put the glass down when it was still half full, undressed and went to bed.