All science fiction writers know that reality is more fantastic
than any publishable fiction. Here is one proof. The story you
are about to read was tied on the first ballot with Brian W.
Aldiss's "The Saliva Tree." We accordingly  held a second
ballot. The result? Another tie.
Feeling that it would be fruitless to pursue this any further (as
well as illegalthe rules made no provision for a third ballot),
we gladly awarded Nebulas to both authors.
Here is another story only Zelazny could have written: an
intricate  and subtle  marriage  of reality  and hallucination,
delicate eroticism, horror,  all turning around a brilliantly
imagined new kind of psychialrist

Nebula Award, Best Novella 1965 (tied with "The
Saliva Tree," by Brian W. Aldiss)

HE WHO SHAPES

Roger Zeiazny

Lovely as it was, with the blood and all, Render could sense
that it was about to end.
Therefore, each microsecond would be better off as a minute,
he decidedand perhaps the temperature should be increased
. . . Somewhere, just at the periphery of everything, the dark-
ness halted its constriction.
Something, like a crescendo of subliminal thunders, was
arrested at one raging note. That note was a distillate of shame
and pain, and fear.
The Forum was stifling.
Caesar cowered outside the frantic circle. His 'forearm
covered his eyes but it could not stop the seeing, not this time.
The senators had no faces and their garments were spattered
with blood. All their voices were like the cries of birds. With an
inhuman frenzy they plunged their daggers into the fallen
figure.
All, that is, but Render.
The pool of blood in which he stood continued to widen. His
arm seemed to be rising and falling with a mechanical
regularity and his throat might have been shaping bird-cries,
but he was simultaneously apart from and a part of the scene.
For he was Render, the Shaper.
Crouched,  anguished and envious,  Caesar wailed his
protests.
"You have slain him! You have murdered Marcus Antonius
a blameless, useless fellow!"
Render turned to him, and the dagger in his hand was quite
enormous and quite gory.
"Aye," said be.
The blade moved from side to side. Caesar, fascinated by the
sharpened steel, swayed to the same rhythm.
"Why?" he cried. "Why?"
"Because," answered Render, "he was a far nobler Roman
than yourself."
"You lie! It is not so!"
Render shrugged and returned to the stabbing.
"It is not true!" screamed Caesar. "Not true!"
Render turned to him again and waved the dagger.
Puppetlike, Caesar mimicked the pendulum of the blade.
"Not true?" smiled Render. "And who are you to question an
assassination such as this? You are no one! You detract from
the dignity of this occasion! Begone!"
Jerkily,  the  pink-faced  man  rose  to  his  feet,  his  hair
half-wispy, half-wetplastered, a disarray of cotton. He turned,
moved away; and as he walked, he looked back over his
shoulder.
He had moved far from the circle of assassins, but the scene
did not diminish in size. It retained an electric clarity. It made
him feel even further removed, ever more alone and apart.
Render rounded a previously unnoticed corner and stood
before him, a blind beggar.
Caesar grasped the front of his garment.
"Have you an ill omen for me this day?"
"Beware!" jeered Render.
"Yes! Yes!" cried Caesar. " 'Beware!' That is good! Beware
what?"
"The ides-"
"Yes? The ides"
"-of Octember."
He released the garment.
"What is that you say? What is Octember?"
"A month."
"You lie! There is no month of Octember!"
"And that is the date noble Caesar need fearthe non-
existent time, the never-to-be-calendared occasion."
Render vanished around another sudden corner.
"Wait! Come back!"
Render laughed, and the Forum laughed with him. The bird-
cries became a chorus of inhuman jeers.
"You mock me!" wept Caesar.
The Forum was an oven, and the perspiration formed like a
glassy mask over Caesar's narrow forehead, sharp nose, chinless
jaw.
"I want to be assassinated too!" he sobbed. "It isn't fair!"
And Render tore the Forum and the senators and the
grinning corpse of Antony to pieces and stuffed them into a
black sackwith the unseen movement of a single fingerand
last of all went Caesar.
Charles Render sat before the ninety white buttons and the
two red ones, not really looking at any of them. His right arm
moved in its soundless sling, across the lap-level surface of the
consolepushing some of the buttons, skipping over others,
moving on, retracing its path to press the next in the order of
the Recall Series.
Sensations throttled, emotions reduced to nothing. Repre-
sentative Erikson knew the oblivion of the womb.
There was a soft click.
Render's hand had glided to the end of the bottom row of
buttons. An act of conscious intentwill, if you likewas
required to push the red button.
Render freed his arm and lifted off his crown of Medusa-hair
leads and microminiature circuitry. He slid from behind his
desk-couch and raised the hood. He walked to the window and
transpared it, fingering forth a jgjfg~e.
One minute in the ro-womb, he decided. No more. This is a
crucial one . . . Hope it doesn't mow till laterthose clouds look
mean...
It was smooth yellow trellises and high towers, glassy and
gray, all smouldering into evening under a shale-colored sky;
the city was squared volcanic islands, glowing in the end-of-
day light, rumbling deep down under the earth; it was fat,
incessant rivers of traffic, rushing.
Render turned away from the window and approached the
great egg that lay beside his desk, smooth and glittering. It
threw back a reflection that smashed all aquilinity from bis
nose, turned his eyes to gray saucers, transformed his hair into a
light-streaked skyline; his reddish necktie became the wide
tongue of a ghoul.
He smiled, reached across the desk. He pressed the second
red button.
With a sigh, the egg lost its dazzling opacity and a horizontal
crack appeared about its middle. Through the now-transparent
shell. Render could see Erikson grimacing, squeezing his eyes
tight, fighting against a return to consciousness and the thing it
would contain. The upper half of the egg rose vertical to the
base, exposing him knobby and pink on half-shell. When his
eyes opened he did not look at Render. He rose to his feet and
began dressing. Render used this time to check the ro-womb.
He leaned back across his desk and pressed the buttons:
temperature control, full range, check; exotic soundshe raised
the earphone check, on bells, on buzzes, on violin notes and
whistles, on squeals and moans, on traffic noises and the sound
of surf; check, on the feedback circuitholding the patient's
own voice, trapped earlier in analysis; check, on the sound
blanket, the moisture spray, the odor banks; check, on the
couch agitator and the colored lights, the taste stimulants . . .
Render closed the egg and shut off its power. He pushed the
unit into the closet, palmed shut the door. The tapes had
registered a valid sequence.
"Sit down," he directed Erikson.
The man did so, fidgeting with his collar.
"You have full recall," said Render, "so there is no need for
me to summarize what occurred. Nothing can be hidden from
me. I was there."
Erikson nodded.
"The significance of the episode should be apparent to you."
Erikson nodded again, finally finding his voice. "But was it
valid?" he asked. "I mean, you constructed the dream and you
controlled it, all the way. I didn't really dream itin the way I
would normally dream. Your ability to make things happen
stacks the deck for whatever you're going to saydoesn't it?"
Render shook his head slowly, flicked an ash into the
southern hemisphere of his globe-made-ashtray, and met
Erikson's eyes.
"It is true that I supplied the format and modified the forms.
You, however, filled them with an emotional significance,
promoted them to the status of symbols corresponding to your
problem. If the dream was not a valid analogue it would not
have provoked the reactions it did. It would have been devoid
of the anxiety-patterns which were registered on the tapes.
"You have been in analysis for many months now," he
continued, "and everything I have learned thus far serves to
convince me that your fears of assassination are without any
basis in fact."
Erikson glared.
"Then why the hell do I have them?"
"Because," said Render, "you would like very much to be the
subject of an assassination."
Erikson smiled then, his composure beginning to return.
"I assure you, doctor, I have never contemplated suicide, nor
have I any desire to stop living."
He produced a cigar and applied a flame to it. His hand
shook.
"When you came to me this summer," said Render, "you
stated that you were in fear of an attempt on your life. You were
quite vague as to why anyone should want to kill you"
"My position! You can't be a Representative as long as I
have and make no enemies!"
"Yet," replied Render, "it appears that you have managed it.
When you permitted me to discuss this with your detectives I
was informed that they could unearth nothing to indicate that
your fears might have any real foundation. Nothing."
"They haven't looked far enoughor in the right places.
They'll turn up something."
"I'm afraid not."
"Why?"
"Because, I repeat, your feelings are without any objective
basis.Be honest with me. Have you any information whatso-
ever indicating that someone hates you enough to want to kill
you?"
"I receive many threatening letters . . ."
"As do all Representativesand all of those directed to you
during the past year have been investigated and found to be the
work of cranks. Can you offer me one piece of evidence to
substantiate your claims?"
Erikson studied the tip of his cigar.
"I came to you on the advice of a colleague," he said, "came
to you to have you poke around inside my mind to find me
something of that sort, to give my detectives something to work
with.Someone I've injured severely perhapsor some damag-
ing piece of legislation I've dealt with . . ."
"And I found nothing," said Render, "nothing, that is, but
the cause of your discontent. Now, of course, you are afraid to
hear it, and you are attempting to divert me from explaining my
diagnosis"
"I am not!"
"Then listen. You can comment afterwards if you want, but
you've poked and dawdled around here for months, unwilling
to accept what I presented to you in a dozen different forms.
Now I am going to tell you outright what it is, and you can do
what you want about it."
"Fine."
"First," he said, "you would like very much to have an enemy
or enemies"
"Ridiculous!"
"Because it is the only alternative to having friends"
"I have lots of friends!"
"Because nobody wants to be completely ignored, to be an
object for whom no one has really strong feelings. Hatred and
love are the ultimate forms of human regard. Lacking one, and
unable to achieve it, you sought the other. You wanted it so
badly that you succeeded in convincing yourself it existed. But
there is always a psychic pricetag on these things. Answering a
genuine emotional need with a body of desire-surrogates does
not produce real satisfaction, but anxiety, discomfort-because
in these matters the psyche should be an open system. You did
not seek outside yourself for human regard. You were closed off.
You created that which you needed from the stuff of your own
being. You are a man very much in need of strong relationships
with other people."
"Manure!"
"Take it or leave it," said Render. "I suggest you take it."
"I've been paying you for half a year to help find out who
wants to kill me. Now you sit there and tell me I made the
whole thing up to satisfy a desire to have someone hate me."
"Hate you, or love you. That's right."
"It's absurd! I meet so many people that I carry a pocket
recorder and a lapel-camera, just so I can recall them all . . ."
"Meeting quantities of people is hardly what I was speaking
of.Tell me, did that dream sequence have a strong meaning
for you?"
Erikson was silent for several tickings of the huge wallclock.
"Yes," he finally conceded, "it did. But your interpretation of
the matter is still absurd. Granting though, just for the sake of
argument, that what you say is correctwhat would I do to get
out of this bind?"
Render leaned back in his chair.
"Rechannel the energies that went into producing the thing.
Meet some people as yourself, Joe Erikson, rather than
Representative Erikson. Take up something you can do with
other peoplesomething non-political, and perhaps somewhat
competitiveand make some real friends or enemies, preferably
the former. I've encouraged you to do this all along."
"Then tell me something else."
"Gladly."
"Assuming you are right, why is it that I am neither liked nor
hated, and never have been? I have a responsible position in
the Legislature. I meet people all the time. Why am I so neutral
a-thing?"
Highly familiar now with Erikson's career. Render had to
push aside his true thoughts on the matter, as they were of no
operational value. He wanted to cite him Dante's observations
concerning the trimmersthose souls who, denied heaven for
their lack of virtue, were also denied entrance to hell for a lack
of significant vicesin short, the ones who trimmed their sails to
move them with every wind of the times, who lacked direction,
who were not really concerned toward which ports they were
pushed. Such was Erikson's long and colorless career of
migrant loyalties, of political reversals.
Render said:
"More and more people find themselves in such circum-
stances these days. It is due largely to the increasing complexity
of society and the depersonalization of the individual into a
sociometric unit. Even the act of cathecting toward other per-
sons has grown more forced as a result. There are so many of
us these days."
Erikson nodded, and Render smiled inwardly.
Sometimes the gruff line, and then the lecture . . .
"I've got the feeling you could be right," said Erikson.
"Sometimes I do feel like what you describeda unit, something
depersonalized..."
Render glanced at the clock.
"What you choose to do about it from here is, of course, your
own decision to make. I think you'd be wasting your time to
remain in analysis any longer. We are now both aware of the
cause of your complaint. I can't take you by the hand and show
you how to lead your life. I can indicate, I can commiserate-but
no more deep probing. Make an appointment as soon as you
feel a need to discuss your activities and relate them to my
diagnosis."
"I will," nodded Erikson., "anddamn that dream! It got to
me. You can make them seem as vivid as waking lifemore
vivid . . . It may be a long while before I can forget it."
"I hope so."
"Okay, doctor." He rose to his feet, extended a hand. "I'll
probably be back in a couple weeks. I'll give this socializing a
fair try." He grinned at the word he normally frowned upon.
"In fact, I'll start now. May I buy you a drink around the
corner, downstairs?"
Render met the moist palm which seemed as weary of the
performance as a lead actor in too successful a play. He felt
almost  sorry  as he  said,  "Thank you,  but I have an
engagement."
Render helped him on with his coat then, handed him his
hat, saw him to the door.
"Well, good night."
"Good night."
As the door closed soundlessly behind him, Render recrossed
the dark Astrakhan to his mahogany fortress and flipped his
cigarette into the southern hemisphere. He leaned back in his
chair, hands behind his head, eyes closed.
"Of course it was more real than life," be informed no one in
particular. "I shaped it."
Smiling, he reviewed the dream sequence step by step,
wishing some of his former instructors could have witnessed it.
It had been well-constructed and powerfully executed, as weU
as being precisely appropriate for the case at hand. But then, he
was Render, the Shaperone of the two hundred or so special
analysts whose own psychic makeup permitted them to enter
into neurotic patterns without carrying away more than an
esthetic gratification from the mimesis of aberrancea Sane
Hatter. '
Render stirred his recollections. He had been analyzed
himself,  analyzed  and  passed  upon  as  a  granite-willed,
ultrastable outsidertough enough to weather the basilisk gaze
of a fixation, walk unscathed amidst the chimaerae of
perversions, force dark Mother Medusa to close her eyes before
the caducous of his art. His own analysis had not been difficult.
Nine years before (it seemed much longer) he had suffered a
willing injection of novocain into the most painful area of his
spirit. It was after the auto wreck, after the death of Ruth, and
of Miranda their daughter, that he had begun to feel detached.
Perhaps he did not want to recover certain empathies; perhaps
his own world was now based upon a certain rigidity of feeling.
If this was true, he was wise enough in the ways of the mind to
realize it, and perhaps he had decided that such a world had its
own compensations.
His son Peter was now ten years old. He was attending a
school of quality, and he penned his father a letter every week.
The letters were becoming progressively literate, showing signs
of a precociousness of which Render could not but approve. He
would take the boy with him to Europe in the summer.
As for JillJill DeVille (what a luscious, ridiculous name!he
loved her for it)she was growing, if anything, more interesting
to him. (He wondered if this was an indication of early middle
age.) He was vastly taken by her unmusical nasal voice, her
sudden interest in architecture, her concern with the unremov-
able mole on the right side of her otherwise well-designed nose.
He should really call her immediately and go in search of a new
restaurant. For some reason though, he did not feel like it.
It had been several weeks since he had visited his club. The
Partridge and Scalpel, and he felt a strong desire to eat from an
oaken table, alone, in the split-level dining room with the three
fireplaces, beneath the artificial torches and the boars' heads
like gin ads. So he pushed his perforated membership card into
the phone-slot on his desk and there were two buzzes behind
the voice-screen.
"Hello, Partridge and Scalpel," said the voice. "May I help
you?"
"Charles Render," he said. "I'd like a table in about half an
hour."
"How many will there be?"
"Just me."
"Very good, sif. Half an hour, then.That's 'Render'?
R-e-n-d-e-rl"
"Right."
"Thank you."
He broke the connection, rose from his desk. Outside, the
day had vanished.
The monoliths and the towers gave forth their own light
now. A soft snow, like sugar, was sifting down through the
shadows and transforming itself into beads on the windowpane.
Render shrugged into his overcoat, turned off the lights,
locked the inner office. There was a note on Mrs. Hedges'
blotter.
Miss DeVille called, it said.
He crumpled the note and tossed it into the waste-chute. He
would call her tomorrow and say he had been working until late
on his lecture.
He switched off the final light, clapped his hat onto his head,
and passed through the outer door, locking it as he went. The
drop took him to the sub-subcellar where his auto was parked.
It was chilly in the sub-sub, and his footsteps seemed loud on
the concrete as he passed among the parked vehicles. Beneath
the glare of the naked lights, his S-7 Spinner was a sleek gray
cocoon from which it seemed turbulent wings might at any
moment emerge. The double row of antennae which fanned
forward from the slope of its hood added to this feeling. Render
thumbed open the door.
He touched the ignition and there was the sound of a lone
bee awakening in a great hive. The door swung soundlessly
shut as he raised thesteering wheel and locked it into place. He
spun up the spiral ramp and came to a rolling stop before the
big overhead.
As the door rattled upward he lighted his destination screen
and turned the knob that shifted the broadcast map.Left to
right, top to bottom, section by section he shifted it, until he
located the portion  of Carnegie Avenue he desired.  He
punched out its coordinates and lowered the wheel. The car
switched over to monitor and moved out onto the highway
marginal. Render lit a cigarette.
Pushing his seat back into the centerspace, he left all the
windows transparent. It was pleasant to half-recline and watch
the oncoming cars drift past him like swarms of fireflies. He
pushed his hat back on his head and stared upward.
He could remember a time when he had loved snow, when it
had reminded him of novels by Thomas Mann and music by
Scandinavian composers. In his mind now, though, there was
another element from which it could never be wholly dis-
sociated. He could visualize so clearly the eddies of milk-
white coldness that swirled about his old manual-steer auto,
flowing into its fire-charred interior to rewhiten that which had
been blackened; so clearlyas though he had walked toward it
across a chalky lakebottomit, the sunken wreck, and he, the
diverunable to open his mouth to speak, for fear of drowning;
and he knew, whenever he looked upon falling snow, that
somewhere skulls were whitening. But nine years had washed
away much of the pain, and he also knew that the night was
lovely.
He was sped along the wide, wide roads, shot across high
bridges, their surfaces slick and gloaming beneath his lights,
was woven through frantic cloverleafs and plunged into a
tunnel whose dimly glowing walls blurred by him like a mirage.
Finally, he switched the windows to opaque and closed his
eyes.
He could not remember whether he bad dozed for a moment
or not, which meant he probably had. He felt the car slowing,
and he moved the seat forward and turned on the windows
again. Almost simultaneously, the cutoff buzzer sounded. He
raised the steering wheel and pulled into the parking dome,
stepped out onto the ramp, and left the car to the parking unit,
receiving his ticket from that box-headed robot which took its
solemn revenge on mankind by sticking forth a cardboard
tongue at everyone it served.
As always, the noises were as subdued as the lighting. The
place seemed to absorb sound and convert it into warmth, to
lull the tongue with aromas strong enough to be tasted, to
hypnotize the ear with the vivid crackle of the triple hearths.
Render was pleased to see that his favorite table, in the
corner off to the right of the smaller fireplace, had been held for
him. He knew the menu from memory, but he studied it with
zeal as he sipped a Manhattan and worked up an order to
match his appetite. Shaping sessions always left him ravenously
hungry.
"Doctor Render . . . ?"
"Yes?" He looked up.
"Doctor Shallot would like to speak with you," said the
waiter.
"I don't know anyone named Shallot," he said. "Are you sure
he doesn't want Bender? He's a surgeon from Metro who
sometimes eats here . . ."
The waiter shook his head.
"No sir'Render.' See here?" He extended a three-by-five
card on which Render's full name was typed in capital letters.
"Doctor Shallot has dined here nearly every night for the past
two weeks," he explained, "and on each occasion has asked to
be notified if you came in."
"Hm?" mused Render. "That's odd. Why didn't he just call
me at my office?"
The waiter smiled and made a vague gesture.
"Well, tell him to come on over," he said, gulping his
Manhattan, "and bring me another of these."
"Unfortunately, Doctor Shallot is blind," explained the
waiter. "It would be easier if you"
"All right, sure." Render stood up, relinquishing his favorite
table with a strong premonition that he would not be returning
to it that evening.
"Lead on."
They threaded their way among the diners, heading up to
the next level. A familiar face said "hello" from a table set back
against the wall, and Render nodded a greeting to a former
seminar pupil whose name was Jurgens or Jirkans or something
like that.
He moved on, into the smaller dining room wherein only two
tables were occupied. No, three. There was .one set in the
corner at the far end of the darkened bar, partly masked by an
ancient suit of armor. The waiter was heading him in that
direction.
They stopped before the table and Render stared down into
the darkened glasses that had tilled upward as they approached.
Doctor Shallot was a woman, somewhere in the vicinity of
her early thirties. Her low bronze bangs did not fully conceal
the spot of silver which she wore on her forehead like a caste-
mark. Render inhaled, and her head jerked slightly as the
tip of his cigarette flared. She appeared to be staring straight up
into his eyes. It was an uncomfortable feeling, even knowing
that all- she could distinguish of him was that which her minute
photo-electric cell transmitted to her visual cortex over the hair-
fine wire implants attached to that oscillator-convertor:  in
short, the glow of his cigarette.
"Doctor Shallot, this is Doctor Render," the waiter was
saying.
"Good evening," said Render.
"Good evening," she said. "My name is Eileen and I've
wanted very badly to meet you." He thought he detected a
slight quaver in her voice. "Will you join me for dinner?"
"My pleasure," he acknowledged, and the waiter drew out
the chair.
Render sat down, noting that the woman across from him
already had a drink. He reminded the waiter of his second
Manhattan.
"Have you ordered yet?" he inquired.
"No."
". . . And two menus" he started to say, then bit his tongue.
"Only one," she smiled.
"Make it none," he amended, and recited the menu.
They ordered. Then:
"Do you always do that?"
"What?"
"Carry menus in your head."
"Only a few," he said, "for awkward occasions. What was it
you wanted to seetalk to me about?"
"You're a neuroparticipant therapist," she stated, "a Shaper."
"And you are?"
"a resident in psychiatry at State Psych. I have a year
remaining."
"You knew Sam Riscomb then."
"Yes, he helped me get my appointment. He was my
adviser."
"He was a very good friend of mine. We studied together at
Menninger."
She nodded.
"I'd often heard him speak of youthat's one of the reasons
I wanted to meet you. He's responsible for encouraging me to
go ahead with my plans, despite my handicap."
Render stared at her. She was wearing a dark green dress
which appeared to be made of velvet. About three inches to the
left of the bodice was a pin which might have been gold. It
displayed a red stone which could have been a ruby, around
which the outline of a goblet was cast. Or was it really two
profiles that were outlined, staring through the stone at one
another? It seemed vaguely familiar to him, but he could not
place it at the moment. It glittered expensively in the dim light.
Render accepted his drink from the waiter.
"I want to become a neuroparticipant therapist," she told
him.
And if she had possessed vision Render would have thought
she was staring at him, hoping for some response in his expres-
sion. He could not quite calculate what she wanted him to say.
"I commend your choice," he said, "and I respect your
ambition." He tried to put his smile into his voice. "It is not an
easy thing, of course, not all of the requirements being
academic ones."
"I know," she said. "But then, I have been blind since birth
and it was not an easy thing to come this far."
"Since birth?" he repeated. "I thought you might have lost
your sight recently. You did your undergrad work then, and
went on through med school without eyes . . . That'srather
impressive."
"Thank you," she said, "but it isn't. Not really. I heard about
the first neuroparticipantsBartelmetz and the restwhen I was
a child, and I decided then that I wanted to be one. My life
ever since has been governed by that desire."
"What did you do in the labs?" he inquired. "-Not being
able to see a specimen, look through a microscope . . . ? Or all
that reading?"
"I hired people to read my assignments to me. I taped
everything. The school understood that I wanted to go into
psychiatry, and they permitted a special arrangement for labs.
I've been guided through the dissection of- cadavers by lab
assistants, and I've had everything described to me. I can tell
things by touch . . . and I have a memory like yours with the
menu," she smiled. " "The quality of psychoparticipation
phenomena can only be gauged by the therapist himself, at that
moment outside of time and space as we normally know it,
when he stands in the midst of a world erected from the stuff of
another man's  dreams, recognizes there the non-Euclidian
architecture of aberrance, and then takes his patient by the
hand and tours the landscape . . . If he can lead him back to the
common earth, then his judgments were sound, his actions
valid.' "
"From Why No Psychometrics in This Place," reflected
Render.
'-by Charles Render, M.D."
"Our dinner is already moving in this direction," he noted,
picking up his drink as the speed-cooked meal was pushed
toward them in the kitchen-buoy.
"That's one of the reasons I wanted to meet you," she
continued, raising her glass as the dishes rattled before her. "I
want you to help me become a Shaper."
Her shaded eyes, as vacant as a statue's, sought him again.
"Yours is a completely unique situation," he commented.
"There has never been a congenitally blind neuroparticipant
for obvious reasons. I'd have to consider all the aspects of the
situation before I could advise you. Let's eat now, though. I'm
starved."
"All right. But my blindness does not mean that I have never
seen."
He did not ask her what she meant by that, because prime
ribs were standing in front of him now and there was a bottle of
Chambertin at his elbow. He did pause long enough to notice
though, as she raised her left hand from beneath the table, that
she wore no rings.
"I wonder if it's still snowing," he commented as they drank
their coffee. "It was coming down pretty hard when I pulled
into the dome."
"I hope so," she said, "even though it diffuses the light and I
can't 'see' anything at all through it. I like to feel it falling about
me and blowing against my face."
"How do you get about?"
"My dog, Sigmund1 gave him the night off," she smiled,
"he can guide me anywhere. He's a mutie Shepherd."
"Oh?" Render grew curious. "Can he talk much?"
She nodded.
"That operation wasn't as successful on him as on some of
them, though. He has a vocabulary of about four hundred
words, but I think it causes him pain to speak. He's quite
intelligent. You'll have to meet him sometime."
Render began speculating immediately. He had spoken with
such animals at recent medical conferences, and had been
startled by their combination of reasoning ability and their
devotion to their handlers. Much chromosome tinkering,
followed by delicate embryo-surgery, was required" to give a
dog a brain capacity greater than a chimpanzee's. Several
followup operations were necessary to produce vocal abilities.
Most such experiments ended in failure, and the dozen or so
puppies a year on which they succeeded were valued in the
neighborhood of a hundred thousand dollars each. He realized
then, as he lit a cigarette and held the light for a moment, that
the stone in Miss Shallot's medallion was a genuine ruby. He
began to suspect that her admission to a medical school might,
in addition to her academic record, have been based upon a
sizeable endowment to the college of her choice. Perhaps he
was being unfair though, he chided himself.
"Yes," he said, "we might do a paper on canine neuroses.
Does he ever refer to his father ag 'that son of a female
Shepherd?"
"He never met his father," she said, quite soberly. "He was
raised apart from other dogs. His attitude could hardly be
typical. I don't think you'll ever learn the functional psychology
of the dog from a mutie."
"I imagine you're right," he dismissed it. "More coffee?"
"No, thanks."
Deciding it was time to continue the discussion, he said, "So
you want to be a Shaper . . ."
"Yes."
"I hate to be the one to destroy anybody's high ambitions,"
he told her. "Like poison, I hate it. Unless they have no
foundation at all in reality. Then I can be ruthless. Sohonestly,
frankly, and in all sincerity, I do not see how it could ever be
managed. Perhaps you're a fine psychiatristbut in my opinion,
it is a physical and mental impossibility for you ever to become
a neuroparticipant. As for my reasons"
"Wait," she said. "Not here, please. Humor me. I'm tired of
this stuffy placetake me somewhere else to talk. I think I might
be able to convince you there is a way."
"Why not?" he shrugged. "I have plenty of time. Sureyou
call it. Where?"
"Blindspin?"
He suppressed an unwilling chuckle at the expression, but
she laughed aloud.
"Fine," he said, "but I'm still thirsty."
A bottle of champagne was tallied and he signed the check
despite her protests. It arrived in a colorful "Drink While You
Drive" basket, and they stood then, and she was tall, but he
was taller.
Blindspin.
A single name of a multitude of practices centered about the
auto-driven auto. Flashing across the country in the sure hands
of an invisible chauffeur, windows all opaque, night dark, sky
high,  tires  assailing  the  road  below  like  four  phantom
buzzsawsand starting from scratch and ending in the same
place, and never knowing where you are going or where you
have beenit is possible, for a moment, to kindle some feeling
of individuality in  the  coldest brainpan,  to  produce  a
momentary awareness of self by virtue of an apartness from all
but a sense of motion. This is because movement through
darkness is the ultimate abstraction of life itselfat least that's
what one of the Vital Comedians said, and everybody in the
place laughed.
Actually now, the phenomenon known as blindspin first
became prevalent (as might be suspected) among certain
younger members of the community, when monitored high-
ways deprived them of the means to exercise their automobiles
in some of the more individualistic ways which had come to
be frowned upon by the National Traffic Control Authority.
Something had to be done.
It was.
The first, disastrous reaction involved the simple engineering
feat of disconnecting the broadcast control unit after one had
entered onto a monitored highway. This resulted in the car's
vanishing from the ken of the monitor and passing back into the
control of its occupants. Jealous as a deity, a monitor will not
tolerate that which denies its programmed omniscience; it will
thunder and lightning in the Highway Control Station nearest
the point of last contact, sending winged seraphs in search of
that which has slipped from sight.
Often, however, this was too late in happening, for the roads
are many and well-paved. Escape from detection was, at first,
relatively easy to achieve.
Other vehicles, though, necessarily behave as if a rebel has
no actual existence. Its presence cannot be allowed for.
Boxed-in, on a heavily-traveled section of roadway, the
offender is subject to immediate annihilation in the event of any
overall speedup or shift in traffic pattern which involves
movement through his theoretically vacant position. This, in
the early days of monitor-controls, caused a rapid series of
collisions. Monitoring devices later became far more 'sophisti-
cated, and mechanized 'cutoffs reduced the collision incidence
subsequent to such an action. The quality of the pulpefactions
and contusions which did occur, however, remained unaltered.
The next reaction was based on a thing which had been
overlooked because it was obvious. The monitors took people
where they wanted to go only because people told them they
wanted to go there. A person pressing a random series of co-
ordinates, without reference to any map, would either be left
with a stalled automobile and a "RECHECK YOUR CO-
ORDINATES" light, or would suddenly be whisked away
in any direction. The latter possesses a certain romantic appeal
in that it offers speed, unexpected sights, and free hands. Also,
it is perfectly legal; and it is possible to navigate all over two
continents in this manner, if one is possessed of sufficient
wherewithal and gluteal stamina.
As is the case in all such matters, the practice diffused
upwards through the age brackets. Schoolteachers who only
drove on Sundays fell into disrepute as selling points for used
autos. Such is the way a world ends, said the entertainer.
End or no, the car designed to move on monitored highways
is a mobile efficiency unit, complete with latrine, cupboard,
refrigerator compartment, and gaming table. It also sleeps two
with ease and four with some crowding. On occasion, three can
be a real crowd.
Render drove out of the dome and into the marginal aisle. He
halted the car.
"Want to jab some coordinates?" he asked.
"You do it. My fingers know too many."
Render punched random buttons. The Spinner moved onto
the highway. Render asked speed of the vehicle then, and it
moved into the high-acceleration lane.
The Spinner's lights burnt holes in the darkness. The city
backed away fast; it was a smouldering bonfire on both sides of
the road, stirred by sudden gusts of wind, hidden by white
swirlings, obscured by the steady fall of gray ash. Render knew
his speed was only about sixty percent of what it would have
been on a clear, dry night.
He did not blank the windows, but leaned back and stared
out through them. Eileen "looked" ahead into what light there
was. Neither of them said anything for ten or fifteen minutes.
The city shrank to sub-city as they sped on. After a time,
short sections of open road began to appear.
"Tell me what it looks like outside," she said.
"Why didn't you ask me to describe your dinner, or the suit
of armor beside our table?"
"Because I tasted one and felt the other. This is different."
"There is snow falling outside. Take it away and what you
have left is black."
"What else?"
"There is slush on the road. When it starts to freeze, traffic
will drop to a crawl unless we outrun this storm.The slush looks
like an old, dark syrup, just starting to get sugary on top."
"Anything else?"
"That's it, lady."
"Is it snowing harder or less hard than when we left the
club?"
"Harder, I should say."
"Would you pour me a drink?" she asked him.
"Certainly."
They turned their seats inward and Render raised the table.
He fetched two glasses from the cupboard.
"Your health," said Render, after he had poured.
"Here's looking at you."
Render downed his drink. She sipped hers. He waited for
her next comment. He knew that two cannot play at the
Socratic game, and he expected more questions before she
said what she wanted to say.
She said: "What is the most beautiful thing you have ever
seen?"
Yes, he decided, he had guessed correctly.
He replied without hesitation: "The sinking of Atlantis."
"I was serious."
"So was 1."
"Would you care to elaborate?"
"I sank Atlantis," he said, "personally.
"It was about three years ago. And God! it was lovely! It
was all ivory towers and golden minarets and silver balconies.
There were bridges of opal, and crimson pennants and a
milk-white river flowing between lemon-colored banks. There
were jade steeples, and trees as old as the world tickling the
bellies of clouds, and ships in the great sea-harbor of Xanadu,
as delicately constructed as musical instruments, all swaying
with the tides. The twelve princes of the realm held court in the
dozen-pillared Coliseum of the Zodiac, to listen to a Greek
tenor sax play at sunset.
"The Greek, of course, was a patient of mineparanoiac.
The etiology of the thing is rather complicated, but that's what
I wandered into inside his mind. I gave him free rein for awhile,
and in the end I had to split Atlantis in half and sink it full
fathom five. He's playing again and you've doubtless heard his
sounds, if you like such sounds at all. He's good. I still see him
periodically, but he is no longer the last descendant of the
greatest minstrel of Atlantis. He's just a fine, late twentieth-
century saxman.
"Sometimes though, as I look back on the apocalypse I
worked within his vision of grandeur, I experience a fleeting
sense  of lost beautybecause, for  a single moment, his
abnormally intense feelings were my feelings, and he felt that
his dream was the most beautiful thing in the world."
He refilled their glasses.
"That wasn't exactly what I meant," she said.
"I know."
"I meant something real."
"It was more real than real, I assure you."
"I don't doubt it, but . . ."
"But I destroyed the foundation you were laying for your
argument. Okay, I apologize. I'll hand it back to you. Here's
something that could be real:
"We are moving along the edge of a great bowl of sand," he
said. "Into it, the snow is gently drifting. In the spring the snow
will melt, the waters will run down into the earth,  or be
evaporated away by the heat of the sun. Then only the sand
will remain.  Nothing grows in the sand,  except  for  an
occasional cactus. Nothing lives here but snakes, a few birds,
insects, burrowing things, and a wandering coyote or two. In
the afternoon these things will look for shade. Any place where
there's an old fence post or a rock or a skull or a cactus to block
out the sun, there you will witness life cowering before the
elements. But the colors are beyond belief, and the elements
are more lovely, almost, than the things they destroy."
"There is no such place near here," she said.
"If I say it, then there is. Isn't there? I've seen it."
"Yes . . . You're right."
"And it doesn't matter if it's a painting by a woman named
O'Keefe, or something right outside our window, does it? If
I've seen it?"
"I acknowledge the truth of the diagnosis," she said. "Do
you want to speak it for me?"
"No, go ahead."
He refilled the small glasses once more.
"The damage is in my eyes," she told him, "not my brain."
He lit her cigarette.
"I can see with other eyes if I can enter other brains."
He lit his own cigarette.
"Neuroparticipation is based upon the fact that two nervous
systems can share the same impulses, the same fantasies . . ."
"Controlled fantasies."
"I could perform therapy and at the same time experience
genuine visual impressions."
"No," said Render.
"You don't know what it's like to be cut off from a whole area
of stimuli! To know that a Mongoloid idiot can experience
something you can never knowand that he cannot appreciate
it because, like you, he was condemned before birth in a court
of biological happenstance, in a place where there is no justice
only fortuity, pure and simple."
"The universe did not invent justice. Man did. Unfortunately,
man must reside in the universe."
"I'm not asking the universe to help meI'm asking you."
"I'm sorry," said Render.
"Why won't you help me?"
"At this moment you are demonstrating my main reason."
"Which is . . . ?"
"Emotion. This thing means far too much to you. When the
therapist is in-phase with a patient he is narco-electrically
removed from most of his own bodily sensations. "This is
necessarybecause his mind must be completely absorbed by
the task at hand. It is also necessary that his emotions undergo
a similar suspension. This, of course, is impossible in the one
sense that a person always emotes to some degree. But the
therapist's emotions are sublimated into a generalized feeling of
exhilarationor, as in my own case, into an artistic reverie. With
you, however, the 'seeing' would be too much. You would be
in constant danger of losing control of the dream."
"I disagree with you."
"Of course you do. But the fact remains that you would be
dealing, and dealing constantly, with the abnormal. The power
of a neurosis is unimaginable to ninety-nine point etcetera
percent of the population, because we can never adequately
judge the intensity of our ownlet alone those of others, when
we only see them from the outside. That is why no
neuroparticipant will ever undertake to treat a full-blown
psychotic. The few' pioneers in that area are all themselves in
therapy today. It would be like diving into a maelstrom. If the
therapist loses the upper hand in an intense session he becomes
the Shaped rather than the Shaper. The synapses respond like a
fission reaction when nervous impulses are artificially aug-
mented. The transference effect is almost instantaneous.
"I did an awful lot of skiing five years ago. This is because I
was a claustrophobe. I had to run and it took me six months to
beat the thingall because of one tiny lapse that occurred in a
measureless fraction of an instant. I had to refer the patient to
another therapist. And this was only a minor repercussion.If
you were to go ga-ga over the scenery, girl, you could wind up
in a rest home for life."
She finished her drink and Render refilled the glass. The
night raced by. They had left the city far behind them, and the
road was open and clear. The darkness eased more and more of
itself between the falling flakes. The Spinner picked up speed.
"All right," she admitted, "maybe you're right. Still, though,
I think you can help me."
"How?" he asked.
"Accustom me to seeing, so that the images will lose their
novelty, the emotions wear off. Accept me as a patient and rid
me of my sight-anxiety. Then what you have said so far will
cease to apply. I will be able to undertake the training then,
and give my full attention to therapy. I'll be able to sublimate
the sight-pleasure into something else."
Render wondered.
Perhaps it could be done. It would be a difficult undertaking,
though.
It might also make therapeutic history.
No one was really qualified to try it, because no one had ever
tried it before.
But Eileen Shallot was a rarityno, a unique itemfor it was
likely she was the only person in the world who combined the
necessary technical background with the unique problem.
He drained his glass, refilled it, refilled hers.
He was still considering the problem as the "RE-COOR-
DINATE" light came on and the car pulled into a cutoff and
stood there. He switched off the buzzer and sat there for a long
while, thinking.
It was not often that other persons heard him acknowledge
his feelings regarding his skill. His colleagues considered him
modest. Offhand, though, it might be noted that he was aware
that the day a better neuroparticipant began practicing would
be the day that a troubled homo sapiens was to be treated by
something but immeasurably less than angels.
Two drinks remained. Then he tossed the emptied bottle into
the backbin.
"You know something?" he finally said.
"What?"
"It might be worth a try."
He swiveled about then and leaned forward to re-coordinate,
but she was there first. As he pressed the buttons and the S-7
swung around, she kissed him. Below her dark glasses her
cheeks were moist.
II
The suicide bothered him more than it should have, and Mrs.
Lambert had called the day before to cancel her appointment.
So Render decided to spend the morning being pensive.
Accordingly, he entered the office wearing a cigar and a frown.
"Did you see . . .?" asked Mrs. Hedges.
"Yes." He pitched his coat onto the table that stood in the far
corner of the room. He crossed to the window, stared down.
"Yes," he repeated, "I was driving by with my windows clear.
They were still cleaning up when I passed."
"Did you know him?"
"I don't even know the name yet. How could I?"
"Priss Tully just called meshe's a receptionist for that
engineering outfit up on the eighty-sixth. She says it was James
Irizarry, an ad designer who had offices down the hall from
them.That's a long way to fall. He must have been
unconscious when be hit, hub? He bounced off the building. If
you open the window and lean out you can seeoff to the left
there where . . ."
"Never mind, BennieYour friend have any idea why he did
it?"
"Not really. His secretary came running up the hall,
screaming. Seems she went in his office to see him about some
drawings, just as he was getting up over the sill. There was a
note on his board. I've had everything I wanted,' it said. 'Why
wait around?' Sort of funny, hub? I don't mean funny . . ."
"Yeah.Know anything about his personal affairs?"
"Married. Coupla kids. Good professional rep. Lots of
business. Sober as anybody.He could afford an office in this
building."
"Good Lord!" Render turned. "Have you got a case file
there or something?"
"You know," she shrugged her thick shoulders, "I've got
friends all over this hive. We always talk when things go slow.
Prissy's my sister-in-law anyhow"
"You mean that if I dived through this window right now,
my current biography would make the rounds in the next five
minutes?"
"Probably," she twisted her bright lips into a smile, "give or
take a couple. But don't do it today, hub?You know, it would
be kind of anticlimactic, and it wouldn't get the same coverage
as a solus.
"Anyhow," she continued, "you're a mind-mixer. You
wouldn't do it."
"You're betting against statistics," he observed. "The medical
profession, along with attorneys, manages about three times as
many as most other work areas."
"Hey!" She looked worried. "Go 'way from my window!
"I'd have to go to work for Doctor Hanson then," she added,
"and he's a slob."
He moved to her desk.
"I never know when to take you seriously," she decided.
"I appreciate your concern," he nodded, "indeed I do. As a
matter of fact, I have never been statistic-prone1 should have
repercussed out of the neuropy game four years ago."
"You'd be a headline, though," she mused. "All those
reporters asking me about you . . . Hey, why do they do it,
hub?"
"Who?"
"Anybody."
. "How should I know, Bennie? I'm only a humble
psychestirrer.  If  I  could  pinpoint  a  general  underlying
causeand then maybe figure a way to anticipate the
thingwhy, it might even be better than my jumping, for
newscopy. But I can't do it, because there is no single, simple
reason1 don't think."
"Oh."
"About thirty-five years ago it was the ninth leading cause of
death in the United States. Now it's number six for North and
South America. I think it's seventh in Europe."
 "And nobody will ever really know why Irizarry jumped?"
Render swung a chair backwards and seated himself. He
knocked an ash into her petite and gloaming tray. She emptied
it  into  the  waste-chute,  hastily,  and  coughed  a  significant
cough.
"Oh, one can always speculate," he said, "and one in my
profession will. The first thing to consider would be the
personality traits which might predispose a man to periods of
depression.  People who keep their emotions under rigid
control, people who are conscientious and rather compulsively
concerned with small matters . . ." He knocked another fleck of
ash into her tray and watched as she reached out to dump it,
then quickly drew her hand back again. He grinned an evil
grin. "In short," he finished, "some of the characteristics of
people in professions which require individual, rather than
group performancemedicine, law, the arts."
She regarded him speculatively.
"Don't worry though," he chuckled, "I'm pleased as hell with
life."
"You're kind of down in the mouth this morning."
"Pete called me. He broke his ankle yesterday in gym class.
They ought to supervise those things more closely. I'm thinking
of changing his school."
"Again?"
"Maybe. I'll see. The headmaster is going to call me this
afternoon. I don't like to keep shuffling him, but I do want him
to finish school in one piece."
"A kid can't grow up without an accident or two.
Ifs-statistics."
"Statistics  aren't  the  same  thing  as  destiny,  Bennie.
Everybody makes his own."
"Statistics or destiny?"
"Both, I guess."
"I think that if something's going to happen, it's going to
happen."
"I don't. I happen to think that the human will, backed by a
sane mind can exercise some measure of control over events. If
I didn't think so, I wouldn't be in the racket I'm in."
"The world's a machineyou knowcause, effect. Statistics
do imply the prob"
"The human mind is not a machine, and I do not know cause
and effect. Nobody does."
"You have a degree in chemistry, as I recall. You're a
scientist, Doc."
"So I'm a Trotskyite deviationist," he smiled, stretching,
"and you were once a ballet teacher." He got to his feet and
picked up his coat.
"By the way, Miss DeVille called, left a message, She said:
'How about St. Moritz?' "
"Too ritzy," he decided aloud. "It's going to be Davos."
Because the suicide bothered him more than it should have,
Render closed the door to his office and turned off the windows
and turned on the phonograph. He put on the desk light only.
How has the quality of human life been changed, he wrote,
since the beginnings of the industrial revolution?
He picked up the paper and re-read the sentence. It was the
topic he had been asked to discuss that coming Saturday. As
was typical in such cases he did not know what to say because
he had too much to say, and only an hour to say it in.
He got up and began to pace the office, now filled with
Beethoven's Eighth Symphony.
"The power to hurt," he said, snapping on a lapel
microphone and activating his recorder, "has evolved in a
direct relationship to technological advancement." His imagi-
nary audience grew quiet. He smiled. "Man's potential for
working simple mayhem has been multiplied by mass-produc-
tion; his capacity for injuring the psyche through personal con-
tacts has expanded in an exact ratio to improved communica-
tion facilities. But these are all matters of common knowledge,
and are not the things I wish to consider tonight. Rather, I
should like to discuss what I choose to call autopsychomimesis
the self-generated anxiety complexes which on first scrutiny
appear quite similar to classic patterns, but which actually rep-
resent radical dispersions of psychic energy. They are peculiar
to our times . . ."
He paused to dispose of his cigar and formulate his next
words.
"Autopsychomimesis," he thought aloud, "a self-perpetuated
imitation  complexalmost  an  attention-getting  affair.A
jazzman, for example, who acted hopped-up half the time, even
though he had never used an addictive narcotic and only dimly
remembered anyone who hadbecause all the stimulants and
tranquilizers of today are quite benign. Like Quixote, he
aspired after a legend when his music alone should have been
sufficient outlet for his tensions.
"Or my Korean War Orphan, alive today by virtue of the Red
Cross and UNICEF and foster parents whom he never met. He
wanted a family so badly that he made one up. And what then?
He hated his imaginary father and he loved his imaginary
mother quite dearlyfor he was a highly intelligent boy, and he
too longed after the half-true complexes of tradition. Why?
"Today, everyone is sophisticated enough to understand the
time-honored patterns of psychic disturbance. Today, many of
the reasons for those disturbances have been removednot as
radically as my now-adult war orphan's, but with as remarkable
an effect. We are living in a neurotic past.Again, why? Be-
cause our present times are geared to physical health, security,
and well-being. We have abolished hunger, though the back-
woods orphan would still rather receive a package of food
concentrates from a human being who cares for him than to
obtain a warm meal from an automat unit in the middle of the
jungle.
"Physical welfare is now every man's right, in excess. The
reaction to this has occurred in the area of mental health.
Thanks to technology, the reasons for many of the old social
problems have passed, and along with them went many of the
reasons for psychic distress. But between the black of yesterday
and the white of tomorrow is the great gray of today, filled with
nostalgia, and fear of the future, which cannot be expressed on a
purely material plane, is now being represented by a willful
seeking after historical anxiety-modes . . ."
The phone-box buzzed briefly. Render did not hear it over
the Eighth.
"We are afraid of what we do not know," he continued, "and
tomorrow is a very great unknown. My own specialized area of
psychiatry did not even exist thirty years ago. Science is
capable of, advancing itself so rapidly now that there is a
genuine public uneasiness1 might even say 'distress'as to the
logical outcome: the total mechanization of everything in the
world..."
He passed near the desk as the phone buzzed again. He
switched off his microphone and softened the Eighth.
"Hello?"
"Saint Moritz," she said.
"Davos," he replied firmly.
"Charlie, you are most exasperating!"
"Jill, dearso are you."
"Shall we discuss it tonight?"
"There is nothing to discuss!"
"You'll pick me up at five, though?"
He hesitated, then:
"Yes, at five. How come the screen is blank?"
"I've had my hair fixed. I'm going to surprise you again."
He suppressed an idiot chuckle, said, "Pleasantly, I hope.
Okay, see you then," waited for her "goodbye," and broke the
connection.
He transpared the windows, turned off the light on his desk,
and looked outside.
Gray again overhead, and many slow flakes of snowwan-
dering, not being blown about muchmoving downwards and
then losing themselves in the tumult . . .
He also saw, when he opened the window and leaned out,
the place off to the left where Irizarry had left his next-to-last
mark on the world.
He closed the window and listened to the rest of the
symphony. It had been a week since he had gone blindspinning
with Eileen. Her appointment was for one o'clock.
He remembered her fingertips brushing over his face, like
leaves, or the bodies of insects, learning his appearance in the
ancient manner of the blind. The memory was not altogether
pleasant. He wondered why.
Far below, a patch of hosed pavement was blank once again;
under a thin, fresh shroud of white, it was slippery as glass. A
building custodian hurried outside and spread salt on it, before
someone slipped and hurt himself.
Sigmund was the myth of Fenris come alive. After Render
had instructed Mrs. Hedges, "Show them in," the door had
begun to open, was suddenly pushed wider, and a pair of
smoky-yellow eyes stared in at him. The eyes were set in a
strangely inisshapen dog-skull.
Sigmund's was not a low canine brow, slanting up slightly
from the muzzle; it was a high, shaggy cranium, making the
eyes appear even more deep-set than they actually were.
Render shivered slightly at the size and aspect of that head.
The muties he had seen had all been puppies. Sigmund was full
grown, and his gray-black fur had a tendency to bristle, which
made him appear somewhat larger than a normal specimen of
the breed.
He stared in at Render in a very un-doglike way and made a
growling noise which sounded too much like; "Hello, doctor,"
to have been an accident.
Render nodded and stood.
"Hello, Sigmund," he said. "Come in."
The dog turned his head, sniffing the air of the roomas
though deciding whether or not to trust his ward within its
confines. Then he returned his stare to Render, dipped his head
in an affirmative, and shouldered the door open. Perhaps the
entire encounter had taken only one disconcerting second.
Eileen followed him, holding lightly to the double-leashed
harness. The dog padded soundlessly across the thick rughead
low, as though he was stalking something. His eyes never left
Render's.
"So this is Sigmund . . . ? How are you, Eileen?"
"Fine.Yes, he wanted very badly to come along, and /
wanted you to meet him."
Render led her to a chair and seated her. She unsnapped the
double guide from the dog's harness and placed it on the floor.
Sigmund sat down beside it and continued to stare at Render.
"How is everything at State Psych?"
"Same as always.May I bum a cigarette, doctor? I forgot
mine."
He placed it between her fingers, furnished a light. She was
wearing a dark blue suit and her glasses were flame blue. The
silver spot on her forehead reflected the glow of his lighter; she
continued to stare at that point in space after he had
withdrawn his hand. Her shoulder-length hair appeared a trifle
lighter than it had seemed on the night they met; today it was
like a fresh-minted copper coin.
Render seated himself on the corner of his desk, drawing up
his world-ashtray with his toe.
"You told me before that being blind did not mean that you
had never seen. I didn't ask you to explain it then. But I'd like
to ask you now."
"I had a neuroparticipation session with Doctor Riscomb,"
she told him, "before he had his accident. He wanted to
accommodate my mind to visual impressions. Unfortunately,
there was never a second session."
"I see. What did you do in that session?"
She crossed her anides and Render noted they were well-
turned.
"Colors, mostly. The experience was quite overwhelming."
"How well do you remember them? How long ago was it?"
"About six months agoand I shall never forget them. I have
even dreamt in color patterns since then."
"How often?"
"Several times a week."
"What sort of associations do they carry?"
"Nothing special. They just come into my mind along with
other stimuli nowin a pretty haphazard way."
"How?"
"Well, for instance, when you ask me a question it's a sort of
yellowish-orangish pattern that I 'see.' Your greeting was a kind
of silvery thing. Now that you're just sitting there listening to
me, saying nothing, I associate you with a deep, almost violet,
blue."
Sigmund shifted his gaze to the desk and stared at the side
panel.
Can he hear the recorder spinning inside? wondered Render.
And if he can, can he guess what it is and what if's doing?
If so, the dog would doubtless tell Bileennot that she was
unaware of what was now an accepted practiceand she might
not like being reminded that he considered her case as therapy,
rather than a mere mechanical adaptation process. If he
thought it would do any good (he smiled inwardly at the
notion), he would talk to the dog in private about it.
Inwardly, he shrugged.
"I'll construct a rather elementary fantasy world then," he
said finally, "and introduce you to some basic forms today."
She smiled; and Render looked down at the myth who
crouched by her side, its tongue a piece of beefsteak hanging
over a picket fence.
Is he smiling too?
"Thank you," she said.
Sigmund wagged his tail.
"Well then," Render disposed of his cigarette near Mada-
gascar, "I'll fetch out the 'egg' now and test it. In the meantime,"
he pressed an unobtrusive button, "perhaps some music would
prove relaxing."
She started to reply, but a Wagnerian overture snuffed out
the words. Render jammed the button again, and there was a
moment of silence during which he said, "Heh heh. Thought
Respighi was next."
It took two more pushes for him to locate some Roman pines.
"You could have left him on," she observed: "I'm quite fond
of Wagner."
"No thanks," he said, opening the closet, "I'd keep stepping
in all those piles of leitmotifs."
The great egg drifted out into the office, soundless as a cloud.
Render heard a soft growl behind as he drew it toward the
desk. He turned quickly.
Like the shadow of a bird, Sigmund had gotten to his feet,
crossed the room, and was already circling the machine and
sniffing at ittail taut, ears flat, teeth bared.
"Easy, Sig," said Render. "It's an Omnichannel Neural T & R
Unit. It won't bite or anything like that. It's just a machine, like
a car, or a teevee, or a dishwasher. That's what we're going to
use today to show Eileen what some things look like."
"Don't like it," rumbled the dog.
"Why?"
Sigmund had no reply, so he stalked back to Eileen and laid
his head in her lap.
"Don't like it," he repeated, looking up at her.
"Why?"
"No words," he decided. "We go home now?"
"No," she answered him. "You're going to curl up in the
corner and take a nap, and I'm going to curl up in that machine
and do the same thingsort of."
"No good," he said, tail drooping.
"Go on now," she pushed him, "lie down and behave
yourself."
He acquiesced, but he whined when Render blanked the
windows and touched the button which transformed his desk
into the operator's seat.
He whined once morewhen the egg, connected now to an
outlet, broke in the middle and the top slid back and up,
revealing the interior.
Render seated himself. His chair became a contour couch
and moved in halfway beneath the console. He sat upright and
it moved back again, becoming a chair. He touched a part of
the desk and half the ceiling disengaged itself, reshaped itself,
and lowered to hover overhead like a huge bell. He stood and
moved around to the side of the ro-womb. Respighi spoke of
pines and such, and Render disengaged an earphone from
beneath the egg and leaned back across his desk. Blocking one
ear with his shoulder and pressing the microphone to the other,
he played upon the buttons with his free hand. Leagues of surf
drowned the tone poem; miles of traffic overrode it; a great
clanging bell sent fracture lines running through it; and the
feedback said: ". . . Now that you are just sitting there listening
to me, saying nothing, I associate you with a deep, almost
violet, blue . . ."
He switched to the face mask and monitored, onecinnamon,
two leaf mold, three deep reptilian musk . . . and down
through thirst, and the tastes of honey and vinegar and salt,
and back on up through lilacs and wet concrete, a before-the-
storm whiff of ozone, and all the basic olfactory and gustatory
cues for morning, afternoon, and evening in the town.
The couch floated normally in its pool of mercury,
magnetically stabilized by the walls of the egg. He set the
tapes.
The ro-womb was in perfect condition.
"Okay," said Render, turning, "everything checks."
She was just placing her glasses atop her folded garments.
She had undressed while Render was testing the machine. He
was perturbed by her narrow waist, her large, dark-pointed
breasts, her long legs. She was too well-formed for a woman her
height, he decided.
He realized though, as he stared at her, that his main
annoyance was, of course, the fact that she was his patient.
"Ready here," she said, and he moved to her side.
He took her elbow and guided her to the machine. Her
fingers explored its interior. As he helped her enter the unit, he
saw that her eyes were a vivid seagreen. Of this, too, he
disapproved.
"Comfortable?"
"Yes."
"Okay then, we're set. I'm going to close it now. Sweet
dreams."
The upper shell dropped slowly. Closed, it grew opaque,
then dazzling. Render was staring down at his own distorted
reflection.
He moved back in the direction of his desk.
Sigmund was on his feet, blocking the way.
Render reached down to pat his head, but the dog jerked it
aside.
"Take me, with," he growled.
"I'm afraid that can't be done, old fellow," said Render.
"Besides, we're not really going anywhere. We'll just be dozing
right here, in this room."
The dog did not seem mollified.
"Why?"
Render sighed. An argument with a dog was about the most
ludicrous thing he could imagine when sober.
"Sig," he said, "I'm trying to help her learn what things look
like. You doubtless do a fine job guiding her around in this
world which she cannot seebut she needs to know what it
looks like now, and I'm going to show her."
"Then she, will not, need me."
"Of course she will." Render almost laughed. "The pathetic
thing was here bound so closely to the absurd thing that he
could not help it. "I can't restore her sight," he explained. "I'm
just going to transfer her some sight-abstractionssort of lend
her my eyes for a short time. Savvy?"
"No," said the dog. "Take mine."
Render turned off the music.
The whole mutie-master relationship might be worth six
volumes, he decided, in German.
He pointed to the far corner.
"Lie down, over there, like Eileen told you. This isn't going
to take long, and when it's all over you're going to leave the
same way you cameyou leading. Okay?"
Sigmund did not answer, but he turned and moved off to the
corner, tail drooping again.
Render seated himself and lowered the hood, the operator's
modified version of the ro-womb. He was alone before the
ninety white buttons and the two red ones. The world ended in
the blackness beyond the console. He loosened his necktie and
unbuttoned his collar.
He removed the helmet from its receptacle and checked its
leads. Donning it then, he swung the halfmask up over his
lower face and dropped the darksheet down to meet with it. He
rested his right arm in the sling, and with a single tapping
gesture, he eliminated his patient's consciousness.
A Shaper does not press white buttons consciously. He wills
conditions. Then deeply-implanted muscular reflexes exert an
almost imperceptible pressure against the sensitive arm-sling,
which glides into the proper position and encourages an
extended finger to move forward. A button is pressed. The sling
moves on.
Render felt a tingling at the base of his skull; he smelled
fresh-cut grass.
Suddenly he was moving up the great gray alley between the
worlds.
After what seemed a long time, Render felt that he was
footed on a strange Earth. He could see nothing; it was only a
sense of presence that informed him he had arrived. It was the
darkest of all the dark nights he had ever known.
He willed that the darkness disperse. Nothing happened.
A part of his mind came awake again, a part he had not
realized was sleeping; he recalled whose world he had entered.
He listened for her presence. He heard fear and anticipation.
He willed color. First, red . . .
He felt a correspondence. Then there was an echo.
Everything became red; he inhabited the center of an infinite
ruby.
Orange. Yellow . . .
He was caught in a piece of amber.
Green now, and he added the exhalations of a sultry sea.
Blue, and the coolness of evening.
He stretched his mind then, producing all the colors at once.
They came in great swirling plumes.
Then he tore them apart and forced a form upon them.
An incandescent rainbow arched across the black sky.
He fought for browns and grays below him. Self-luminescent,
they appearedin shimmering, shifting patches.
Somewhere, a sense of awe. There was no trace of hysteria
though, so he continued with the Shaping.
He managed a horizon, and the blackness drained away
beyond it. The sky grew faintly blue, and he ventured a herd
of dark clouds. There was resistance to his efforts at creating
distance and depth, so he reinforced the tableau with a very
faint sound of surf. A transference from an auditory concept of
distance came on slowly then, as he pushed the clouds about.
Quickly, he threw up a high forest to offset a rising wave of
acrophobia.
The panic vanished.
Render focused his attention on tall treesoaks and pines,
poplars and sycamores. He buried them about like spears, in
ragged arrays of greens and browns and yellows, unrolled a
thick mat of morning-moist grass, dropped a series of gray
boulders and greenish logs at irregular intervals, and tangled
and twined the branches overhead, casting a uniform shade
throughout the glen.                      '
The effect was staggering. It seemed as if the entire world
was shaken with a sob, then silent.
Through the stillness he felt her presence. He had decided it
would be best to lay the groundwork quickly, to set up a tan-
gible headquarters, to prepare a field for operations. He could
backtrack later, he could repair and amend the results of the
trauma in the sessions yet to come; but this much, at least, was
necessary for a beginning.
With a start, he realized that the silence was not a
withdrawal. Eileen had made herself immanent in the trees and
the grass, the stones and the bushes; she was personalizing
their forms, relating them to tactile sensations, sounds, tem-
peratures, aromas.
With a soft breeze, he stirred the branches of the trees. Just
beyond the bounds of seeing he worked out the splashing
sounds of a brook.
There was a feeling of joy. He shared it.
She was bearing it extremely well, so he decided to extend
the scope of the exercise. He let his mind wander among the
trees, experiencing a momentary doubling of vision, during
which time he saw an enormous hand riding in an aluminum
carriage toward a circle of white.
He was beside the brook now and he was seeking her,
carefully.
He drifted with the water. He had not yet taken on a form.
The splashes became a gurgling as he pushed the brook through
shallow places and over rocks. At his insistence, the waters
became more articulate.
"Where are you?" asked the brook.
Here! Here!
Here!
. . . and here! replied the trees, the bushes, the stones, the
grass.
"Choose one," said the brook, as it widened, rounded a mass
of rock, then bent its way toward a slope, heading toward a
blue pool.
/ cannot, was the answer from the wind.
"You must." The brook widened and poured itself into the
pool, swirled about the surface, then stilled itself and reflected
branches and dark clouds. "Now!"
Very -well, echoed the wood, in a moment.
The mist rose above the lake and drifted to the bank of the
pool.
"Now," tinkled the mist.
Here, then...
She had chosen a small willow. It swayed in the wind; it
trailed its branches in the water.
"Eileen Shallot," he said, "regard the lake."
The breezes shifted; the willow bent.
It was not difficult for him to recall her face, her body. The
tree spun as though rootless. Eileen stood in the midst of a quiet
explosion of leaves; she stared, frightened, into the deep blue
mirror of Render's mmd, the lake.
She covered her face with her hands, but it could not stop the
seeing.
"Behold yourself," said Render.
She lowered her hands and peered downwards. Then she
turned in every direction, slowly; she studied herself. Finally:
"I feel I am quite lovely," she said. "Do I feel so because you
want me to, or is it true?"
She looked all about as she spoke, seeking the Shaper.
"It is true," said Render, from everywhere.
"Thank you."
There was a swirl of white and she was wearing a belted
garment of damask. The light in the distance brightened almost
imperceptibly. A faint touch of pink began at the base of the
lowest cloudbank.
"What is happening there?" she asked, facing that direction.
"I am going to show you a sunrise," said Render, "and I shall
probably botch it a bitbut then, it's my first professional
sunrise under these circumstances."
"Where are you?" she asked.
"Everywhere," he replied.
"Please take on a form so that I can see you."
"All right."
"Your natural form."
He willed that he be beside her on the bank, and he was.
Startled by a metallic flash, he looked downward. The world
receded for an instant, then grew stable once again. He
laughed, and the laugh froze as he thought of something.
He was wearing the suit of armor which had stood beside
their table in The Partridge and Scalpel on the night they met.
She reached out and touched it.
"The suit of armor by our table," she acknowledged, running
her fingertips over the plates and the junctures. "I associated it
with you that night."
".  .  . And you stuffed me into it just now," he commented.
"You're a strong-willed woman."
The armor vanished and he was wearing his graybrown suit
and looseknit bloodclot necktie and a professional expression.
"Behold the real me," he smiled faintly. "Now, to the sunset.
I'm going to use all the colors. Watch!"
They seated themselves on the green park bench which had
appeared behind them, and Render pointed in the direction he
had decided upon as east.
Slowly, the sun worked through its morning attitudes. For
the first time in this particular world it shone down like a god,
and reflected off the lake, and broke the clouds, and set the
landscape to smouldering beneath the mist that arose from the
moist wood.
Watching,  watching  intently,  staring directly into the
ascending bonfire, Eileen did not move for a long while, nor
speak. Render could sense her fascination.
She was staring at the source of all light; it reflected back
from the gleaming coin on her brow, like a single drop of blood.
Render said, "That is the sun, and those are clouds," and he
clapped his hands and the clouds covered the sun and there
was a soft rumble overhead, "and that is thunder," he finished.
The rain fell then, shattering the lake and tickling their
faces, making sharp striking sounds on the leaves, then soft
tapping sounds, dripping down from the branches overhead,
soaking their garments and plastering their hair, running down
their necks and falling into their eyes, turning patches of brown
earth to mud.
A splash of lightning covered the sky, and a second later
there was another peal of thunder.
". . . And this is a summer storm," he lectured. "You see how
the rain affects the foliage, and ourselves. What you just saw in
the sky before the thunderclap was lightning."
". . . Too much," she said. "Let up on it for a moment,
please."
The rain stopped instantly and the sun broke through the
clouds.
"I have the damnedest desire for a cigarette," she said, "but I
left mine in another world."
As she said it one appeared, already lighted, between her
fingers.
"It's going to taste rather flat," said Render strangely.
He watched her for a moment, then:
"I didn't give you that cigarette," he noted. "You picked it
from my mind."
The smoke laddered and spiraled upward, was swept away.
". . . Which means that, for the second time today, I have
underestimated the pull of that vacuum in your mindin the
place where sight ought to be. You are assimilating these new
impressions very rapidly. You're even going to the extent of
groping after new ones. Be careful. Try to contain that
impulse."
"It's like a hunger," she said.
"Perhaps we had best conclude this session now."
Their clothing was dry again. A bird began to sing.
"No, wait! Please! I'll be careful. I want to see more things."
"There is always the next visit," said Render. "But I suppose
we can manage one more. Is there something you want very
badly to see?"
"Yes. Winter. Snow."
"Okay," smiled the Shaper, "then wrap yourself in that
furpiece..."
The afternoon slipped by rapidly after the departure of his
patient. Render was in a good mood. He felt emptied and filled
again. He had come through the first trial without suffering any
repercussions. He decided that he was going to succeed. His
satisfaction was greater than his fear. It was with a sense of
exhilaration that he returned to working on his speech.
". . . And what is the power to hurt?" he inquired of the
microphone.
"We live by pleasure and we live by pain," he answered
himself. "Either can frustrate and either can encourage. But
while pleasure and pain are rooted in biology, they are
conditioned by society: thus are values to be derived. Because
of the enormous masses of humanity, hectically changing
positions in space every day throughout the cities of the world,
there has come into necessary being a series of totally inhuman
controls upon these movements. Every day they nibble their
way into new areasdriving our cars, flying our planes,
interviewing us, diagnosing our diseasesand I cannot even
venture a moral judgment upon these intrusions. They have
become necessary. Ultimately, they may prove salutary.
"The point I wish to make, however; is that we are often
unaware of our own values. We cannot honestly tell what a
thing means to us until it is removed from our life-situation. If
an object of value ceases to exist, then the psychic energies
which were bound up in it are released. We seek after new
objects of value in which to invest thismana, if you like, or
libido, if you don't. And no one thing which has vanished
during the past three or four or five decades was, in itself,
massively significant; and no new thing which came into being
during that time is massively malicious toward the people it has
replaced or the people it in some manner controls. A society,
though, is made up of many things, and when these things are
changed too rapidly the results are unpredictable. An intense
study of mental illness is often quite revealing as to the nature
of the stresses in the society where the illness was made. If
anxiety-patterns fall into special groups and classes, then
something of the discontent of society can be learned from
them. Carl Jung pointed out that when consciousness is
repeatedly frustrated in a quest for values it will turn its search
to the unconscious; failing there, it will proceed to quarry its
way into the hypothetical collective unconscious. He noted, in
the postwar analyses of ex-Nazis, that the longer they searched
for something to erect from the ruins of their liveshaving lived
through a period of classical iconoclasm, and then seen their
new ideals topple as wellthe longer they searched, the further
back they seemed to reach into the collective unconscious of
their people. Their dreams themselves came to take on patterns
out of the Teutonic mythos.
"This, in a much less dramatic sense, is happening today.
There are historical periods when the group tendency for the
mind to turn in upon itself, to turn back, is greater than at other
times. We are living in such a period of Quixotism, in the
original sense of the term. This is because the power to hurt, in
our time, is the power to ignore, to baffleand it is no longer the
exclusive property of human beings"
A buzz interrupted him then. He switched off the recorder,
touched the phone-box.
"Charles Render speaking," he told it;.
"This is Paul Charter," lisped the box. "I am headmaster at
Billing."
"Yes?"
The picture cleared. Render saw a man whose eyes were set
close together beneath a high forehead. The forehead was
heavily creased; the mouth twitched as it spoke.
"Well, I want to apologize again for what happened. It was a
faulty piece of equipment that caused"
"Can't you afford proper facilities? Your fees are high
enough."
"It was a new piece of equipment. It was a factory defect"
"Wasn't there anybody in charge of the class?"
"Yes, but-"
"Why didn't he inspect the equipment? Why wasn't he on
hand to prevent the fall?"
"He was on hand, but it happened too fast for him to do
anything. As for inspecting the equipment for factory defects,
that isn't his job. Look, I'm very sorry. I'm quite fond of your
boy. I can assure you nothing like this will ever happen again."
"You're right, there. But that's because I'm picking him up
tomorrow morning and enrolling him in a school that exercises
proper safety precautions."
Render ended the conversation with a flick of his finger.
After several minutes had passed he stood and crossed the
room to his small wall safe, which was partly masked, though
not concealed, by a shelf of books. It took only a moment for
him to open it and withdraw a jewel box containing a cheap
necklace and a framed photograph of a man resembling
himself, though somewhat younger, and a woman whose
upswept hair was dark and whose chin was small, and two
youngsters between themthe girl holding the baby in her arms
and forcing her bright bored smile on ahead. Render always
stared for only a few seconds on such occasions, fondling the
necklace, and then he shut the box and locked it away again for
many months.
Whamp! Whump! went the bass. Tchg-tchg-tchga-tchg, the
gourds.
The gelatins splayed reds, greens, blues, and godawful
yellows about the amazing metal dancers.
HUMAN? asked the marquee.
ROBOTS? (immediately below).
COME SEE FOR YOURSELF! (across the bottom, cryptically).
So they did.
Render and Jill were sitting at a microscopic table,
thankfully set back against a wall, beneath charcoal caricatures
of personalities largely unknown  (there being so  many
personalities among the subcultures of a city of 14 million
people). Nose crinkled with pleasure, -Till stared at the present
focal point of this particular subculture, occasionally raising her
shoulders to ear level to add emphasis to a silent laugh or a
small squeal, because the performers were just too humanthe
way the ebon robot ran his fingers along the silver robot's
forearm as they parted and passed . . .
Render alternated his attention between Jill and the dancers
and a wicked-looking decoction that resembled nothing so
much as a small bucket of whisky sours strewn with seaweed
(through which the Kraken might at any moment arise to drag
some hapless ship down to its doom).
"Charlie, I think they're really people!"
Render disentangled his gaze from her hair and bouncing
earrings.
He studied the dancers down on the floor, somewhat below
the table area, surrounded by music.
There could be humans within those metal shells. If so, their
dance was a thing of extreme skill. Though the manufacture of
sufficiently light alloys was no problem, it would be some trick
for a dancer to cavort so freelyand for so long a period of time,
and with such effortless-seeming easewithin a head-to-toe suit
of armor, without so much as a grate or a click or a clank.
Soundless...
They glided like two gulls; the larger, the color of polished
anthracite, and the other, like a moonbeam falling through a
window upon a silk-wrapped manikin.
Even when they touched there was no soundor if there was,
it was wholly masked by the rhythms of the band.
Whump-whump! Tchga-tchgl
Render took another drink.
Slowly, it turned into an apache-dance. Render checked his
watch. Too long for normal entertainers, he decided. They
must be robots. As he looked up again the black robot buried
the silver robot perhaps ten feet and turned his back on her.
There was no sound of striking metal.
Wonder what a setup like that costs? he mused.
"Charlie! There was no sound! How do they do that?"
"Really?" asked Render.
The gelatins were yellow again, then red, then blue, then green.
"You'd think it would damage their mechanisms, wouldn't
you?"
The white robot crawled back and the other swiveled his
wrist around and around, a lighted cigarette between the
fingers. There was laughter as he pressed it mechanically to his
lipless faceless face. The silver robot confronted him. He turned
away again, dropped the cigarette, ground it out slowly,
soundlessly, then suddenly turned back to his partner. Would
he throw her again? No . . .
Slowly then, like the great-legged birds of the East, they re-
commenced their movement, slowly, and with many turnings
away.
Something deep within Render was amused, but he was too
far gone to ask it what was funny. So he went looking for the
Kraken in the bottom of the glass instead.
Jill was clutching his bicep then, drawing his attention back
to the floor.
As the spotlight tortured the spectrum, the black robot raised
the silver one high above his head, slowly, slowly, and then
commenced spinning with her in that positionarms out-
stretched, back arched, legs scissoredvery slowly, at first.
Then faster.
Suddenly they were whirling with an unbelievable speed,
and the gelatins rotated faster and faster.
Render shook his head to clear it.
They were moving so rapidly that they had to fallhuman or
robot. But they didn't. They were a mandala. They were a gray-
form uniformity. Render looked down.
Then slowing, and slower, slower. Stopped.
The music stopped.
Blackness followed. Applause filled it.
When the lights came on again the two robots were standing
statue-like, facing the audience. Very, very slowly, they bowed.
The applause increased.
Then they turned and were gone.
Then the music came on and the light was clear again. A
babble of voices arose. Render slew the Kraken.
"What d'you think of that?" she asked him.
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 observed 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, hub?
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 Render'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 ugly!"
"Silly. I mean his mistress."
"You know I never discuss cases, Jill."
"You told me about her being blind and about the dog. All 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."
"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 a 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? I 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 their drinks and smoked their cigarettes 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 whampl
Tchga-tchga!
"Oh, Charlie! Here they come again!"
The sky was clear as crystal. The roads were clean. "The snow
had stopped.
.Till's  breathing  was  the  breathing  of  a  sleeper.  The  S-7
arced 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 universe began to dance about
him. As it did so, he imagined 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 instant and he was
awake again, and unsmiling.
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 worldlike a swimmer, as
unable to speakhe 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 reflect something of the spirit of William the
Conqueror. Its disdain of mere elaboration and its passionate
dedication to the love of another world would make it seem,
too, an appropriate setting for some tale out of Mallory . . ."
"Observe the scalloped capitals," said the guide. "In their
primitive fluting they anticipated what was later to become a
common motif . . ."
"Faugh!" said Rendersoftly though, because he was in a
group inside a church.
"Shh!" said JiU (Fotlockthat was her real last name)
DeVille.
But Render was impressed as well as distressed.
Hating Jill'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 on his head
than to admit he occasionally enjoyed walking through the
arcades and the galleries, the passages and the tunnels, and
getting all out of breath climbing up the high twisty stairways
of towers.
So he ran his eyes over everything, burnt everything down by
shutting them, then built the place up again out 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 surroundings,
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 honing 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 cities, 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 iri 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 lips 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 sunburnt 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?"
"Okay on Winchester."
"Happy?"
"Happy."
"Good, then we can leave this afternoon."
"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 Channel, and
you could be sampling all the local wines while I looked. . ."
"Okay," he said.
She looked upa 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 innards of
that old 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 vobiscumi 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, he 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 Wedgwoods 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 shower of ice
crystals, like bullets of emery, fired by him, scraped against his
cheek.
He was moving. Ayethe world had ended at 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 intensity, from the day's hundred
spoon-fed welfares, from the killing pace of the forced
amusements that hacked at the Hydra, leisure; away.
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 fearsome embodiment of
itself, like a shadow, to trail along after him, hunt him down,
and to 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 reflex; and be
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 for non-therapeutic reasons.
That night he sat before a fire in 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 calling.
"Maurice?" he queried after a moment, "Bartelmetz?"
"Aye," came the reply, and then Render saw the familiar
grizzled visage, set neckless and balding above the red and
blue shag sweater that was stretched mercilessly 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 all muscle. How have you been, and what are
you up to these days?" He looked down at Jill and she smiled
back at him.
"This is Miss DeVille," said Render.
"Jill," she acknowledged.
He bowed slightly, finally releasing Render's aching hand.
". . . And this is Professor Maurice Bartelmetz of Vienna,"
finished Render, "a benighted disciple of all forms of dialectical
pessimism, and a very distinguished pioneer in neuroparticipa-
tion although you'd never guess it to look at him. I had the
good fortune to be his pupil for over a year."
Bartelmetz nodded and agreed with him, taking in the
Schnappsflasche Render brought forth from a small plastic bag,
and accepting the collapsible cup which he filled to the brim.
"Ah, you are a good doctor still," he sighed. "You have
diagnosed the case in an instant and you make the proper
prescription. Nozdrovia!"
"Seven years in a gulp," Render acknowledged, refilling their
glasses.
"Then we shall make time more malleable by sipping it."
They seated themselves on the floor, and the fire roared up
through the great brick chimney as the logs burnt themselves
back to branches, to twigs, to thin sticks, ring by yearly ring.
Render replenished the fire.
"I read your last book," said Bartelmetz finally, casually,
"about four years ago."
Render reckoned that to be correct.
"Are you doing any research work these days?"
Render poked lazily at the fire.
"Yes," he answered, "sort of."
He glanced at Jill, who was dozing with her cheek against
the arm of the huge leather chair that held his emergency bag,
the planes of her face all crimson and flickering shadow.
"I've hit upon a rather unusual subject arid started with a
piece of jobbery I eventually intend to write about."
"Unusual? In what way?"
"Blind from birth, for one thing."
"You're using the ONT&R?"
"Yes. She's going to be a Shaper."
"Verfluchter!Are you aware of the possible repercussions?"
"Of course."
"You've heard of unlucky Pierre?"
"No."
"Good, then it was successfully hushed. Pierre was a
philosophy student at the University of Paris, and he was doing
a dissertation on the evolution of consciousness. This past
summer he decided it would be necessary for him to explore the
mind of an ape, for purposes of comparing a moins-nausee
mind with his own, I suppose. At any rate, he obtained illegal
access to an ONT&R and to the mind of our hairy cousin. It was
never ascertained how far along he got in exposing the animal
to the stimuli-bank, but it is to be assumed that such items as
would not be immediately trans-subjective between man and
apetraffic sounds and so weiterwere what frightened the
creature. Pierre is still residing in a padded cell, and all his
responses are those of a frightened ape.
"So, while he did not complete his own dissertation," he
finished,  "he may provide significant material for someone
else's."
Render shook his head.
"Quite a story," he said softly, "but I have nothing that
dramatic to contend with. I've found an exceedingly stable
individuala psychiatrist, in factone who's already spent time
in ordinary analysis. She wants to go into neuroparticipation
but the fear of a sight-trauma was what was keeping her out.
I've been gradually exposing her to a full range of visual
phenomena. When I've finished she should be completely
accommodated to sight, so that she can give her full attention
to therapy and not be blinded by vision, so to speak. We've
already had four sessions."
"And?"
". . . And it's working fine."
"You are certain about it?"
"Yes, as certain as anyone can be in these matters."
"Mm-hm," said Bartelmetz. "Tell me, do you find her
excessively strong-willed? By that I mean, say,, perhaps an
obsessive-compulsive pattern concerning anything to which
she's been introduced so far?"
"No."
"Has she ever succeeded in taking over control of the
fantasy?"
"No!"
"You lie," he said simply.
Render found a cigarette. After lighting it, he smiled.
"Old father, old artificer," he conceded, "age has not
withered your perceptiveness. I may trick me, but never
you.Yes, as a matter of fact, she is very difficult to keep under
control. She is not satisfied just to see. She wants to Shape
things for herself already. It's quite understandableboth to her
and to mebut conscious apprehension and emotional accep-
tance never do seem to get together on things. She has become
dominant on several occasions, but I've succeeded in resuming
control almost immediately. After all, I am master of the
bank."
"Hm," mused Bartelmetz. "Are you familiar with a Buddhist
text Shankara's Catechism?"
"I'm afraid not."
"Then I lecture you on it now. It positsobviously not for
therapeutic purposesa true ego and a false ego. The true ego is
that part of man which is immortal and shall proceed on to
nirvana: the soul, if you like. Very good. Well, the false ego, on
the other hand, is the normal mind, bound round with the
illusionsthe consciousness of you and I and everyone we have
ever known professionally. Good?Good. Now, the stuff this
false ego is made up of they call skandhas. These include the
feelings, the perceptions, the aptitudes, consciousness itself,
and even the physical form. Very unscientific. Yes. Now they
are not the same thing as neuroses, or one of Mister Ibsen's life-
lies, or an hallucinationno, even though they are all wrong,
being parts of a false thing to begin with. Each of the five
skandhas is a part of the eccentricity that we call identitythen
on top come the neuroses and all the other messes which follow
after and keep us in business. Okay?Okay. I give you this
lecture because I need a dramatic term for what I will say,
because I wish to say something dramatic. View the skandhas
as lying at the bottom of the pond; the neuroses, they are
ripples on the top of the water; the 'true ego', if there is one, is
buried deep beneath the sand at the bottom. So. The ripples fill
up the the zwischenwelt between the object and the subject.
The skandhas are a part of the subject, basic, unique, the stuff
of his being.So far, you are with me?"
"With many reservations."
"Good. Now I have defined my term somewhat, I will use it.
You are fooling around with skandhas, not simple neuroses. You
are attempting to adjust this woman's overall conception of
herself and of the world. You are using the ONT&R to do it. It is
the same thing as fooling with a psychotic, or an ape. All may
seem to go well, butat any moment, it is possible you may do
something, show her some sight, or some way of seeing which
will break in upon her selfhood, break a skandhaand pouf!it
will be like breaking through the bottom of the pond. A
whirlpool will result, pulling youwhere? I do not want you for
a patient, young man, young artificer, so I counsel you not to
proceed with this experiment. The ONT&R should not be used
in such a manner."
Render flipped his cigarette into the fire and counted on his
fingers:
"One," he said, "you are making a mystical mountain out of a
pebble. All I am doing is adjusting her consciousness to accept
an additional area of perception. Much of it is simple trans-
ference work from the other senses.Two, her emotions were
quite intense initially because it did involve a traumabut
we've passed that stage already. Now it is only a novelty to her.
Soon it will be a commonplace.Three, Eileen is a psychiatrist
herself; she is educated in these matters and deeply aware of
the delicate nature of what we are doing.Four, her sense of
identity and her desires, or her skandhas, or whatever you want
to call them, are as firm as the Rock of Gibraltar. Do you realize
the intense application required for a blind person to obtain the
education she has obtained? It took a will of ten-point steel and
the emotional control of an ascetic as well"
"And if something that strong should break, in a timeless
moment of anxiety," smiled Bartelmetz sadly, "may the shades
of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung walk by your side in the
valley of darkness.
"And if something that strong should break, in a timeless
"Five," he ticked it off on one finger. "Is she-pretty?"
Render looked back into the fire.
"Very clever," sighed Bartelmetz, "I cannot tell whether you
are blushing or not, with the rosy glow of the flames upon your
face. I fear that you are, though, which would mean that you
are aware that you yourself could be the source of- the inciting
stimulus, I shall burn a candle tonight before a portrait of Adier
and pray that he give you the strength to compete successfully
in your duel with your patient."
Render looked at Jill, who was still sleeping. He reached out
and brushed a lock of her hair back into place.
"Still," said Bartelmetz, "if you do proceed and all goes well,
I shall look forward with great interest to the reading of your
work. Did I ever tell you that I have treated several Buddhists
and never found a 'true ego'?"
Both men laughed.
Like me but not like me, that one on a leash, smelling of fear,
small, gray, and unseeing. Rrowl and he'll choke on his collar.
His head is empty as the oven till She pushes the button and it
makes dinner. Make talk and they never understand, but they
are like me. One day I will kill onewhy? . . . Turn here.
"Three steps. Up. Glass doors. Handle to right."
Why? Ahead, drop-shaft. Gardens under, down. Smells nice,
there. Grass, wetdirt, trees, and cleanair. I see. Birds are
recorded though. I see all. 1.
"Drop-shaft. Four steps."
Down. Yes. Want to make loud noises in throat, feel silly.
Clean, smooth, many of trees. God . . . She likes sitting on
bench chewing leaves smelling smooth air. Can't see them like
me. Maybe now, some. . . ? No.
Can't Bad Sigmund me on grass, trees, here. Must hold it.
Pity. Best place . . .
"Watch for steps."
Ahead. To right, to left, to right, to left, trees and grass now.
Sigmund sees. Walking . . . Doctor with machine gives her his
eyes. Rrowl and he will not choke. No fearsmell.
Dig deep hole in ground, bury eyes. God is blind. Sigmund
to see. Her eyes now filled, and he is afraid of teeth. Will make
her to see and take her high up in the sky to see, away. Leave
me here, leave Sigmund with none to see, alone. I will dig a
deep hole in the ground . . .
It was after ten in the morning when Jill awoke. She did not
have to turn her head to know that Render was already gone.
He never slept late. She rubbed her eyes, stretched, turned onto
her side and raised herself on her elbow. She squinted at the
clock on the bedside table, simultaneously reaching for a
cigarette and her lighter.
As she inhaled, she realized there was no ashtray. Doubtless
Render had moved it to the dresser because he did not approve
of smoking in bed. With a sigh that ended in a snort she slid out
of the bed and drew on her wrap before the ash grew too long.
She hated getting up, but once she did she would permit the
day to begin and continue on without lapse through its orderly
progression of events.
"Damn him," she smiled. She had wanted her breakfast in
bed, but it was too late now.
Between thoughts as to what she would wear, she observed
an alien pair of skis standing in the corner. A sheet of paper
was impaled on one. She approached it.
"Join me?" asked the scrawl.
She shook her head in an emphatic negative and felt
somewhat sad. She had been on skis twice in her life and she
was afraid of them. She felt that she should really try again,
after his being a reasonably good sport about the chateaux, but
she could not even bear the memory of the unseemly downward
rushingwhich, on two occasions, had promptly deposited her
in a snowbankwithout wincing and feeling once again the
vertigo that had seized her during the attempts.
So she showered and dressed and went downstairs for
breakfast.
All nine fires were already roaring as she passed the big hall
and looked inside. Some red-faced skiers were holding their
hands up before the blaze of the central hearth. It was not
crowded though. The racks held only a few pairs of dripping
boots, bright caps hung on pegs, moist skis stood upright in
their place beside the door. A few people were seated in the
chairs set further back toward the center of the hall, reading
papers, smoking, or talking quietly. She saw no one she knew,
so she moved on toward the dining room.
As she passed the registration desk the old man who worked
there called out her name. She approached him and smiled.
"Letter," he explained, turning to a rack. "Here it is," he
announced, handing it to her. "Looks important."
It had been forwarded three tiroes, she noted. It was a bulky
brown envelope, and the return address was that of her
attorney.
"Thank you."
She moved off to a seat beside the big window that looked
out upon a snow garden, a skating rink, and a distant winding
trail dotted with figures carrying skis over their shoulders. She
squinted against the brightness as she tore open the envelope.
Yes, it was final. Her attorney's note was accompanied by a
copy of the divorce decree. She had only recently decided to
end her legal relationship to Mister Fotlock, whose name she
had stopped using five years earlier, when they had separated.
Now that she had the thing she wasn't sure exactly what she
was going to do with it. It would be a hell of a surprise for dear
Rendy, though, she decided. She would have to find a
reasonably innocent way of getting the information to him. She
withdrew her compact and practiced a "Well?" expression.
Well, there would be time for that later, she mused. Not too
much later, though . . . Her thirtieth birthday, like a huge black
cloud, filled an April but four months distant. Well . . . She
touched her quizzical lips with color, dusted more powder over
her mole, and locked the expression within her compact for
future use.
In the dining room she saw Doctor Bartelmetz, seated before
an enormous mound of scrambled eggs, great chains of dark
sausages, several heaps of yellow toast, and a half-emptied flask
of orange juice. A pot of coffee steamed on the warmer at his
elbow. He leaned slightly forward as he ate, wielding his fork
like a windmill blade.
"Good morning," she said.
He looked up.
"Miss DeVille Jill . . . Good morning." He nodded at the
chair across from him. "Join me, please."
She did so, and when the waiter approached she nodded and
said, "I'll have the same thing, only about ninety percent less."
She turned back to Bartelmetz.
"Have you seen Charles today?"
"Alas, I have not," he gestered, open-handed, "and I wanted
to continue our discussion while his mind was still in the early
stages of wakefulness and somewhat malleable. Unfortunate-
ly," he took a sip of coffee, "he who sleeps well enters the day
somewhere in the middle of its second act."
"Myself, I usually come in around intermission and ask
someone for a synopsis," she explained. "So why not continue
the  discussion  with  me?I'm  always  malleable,  and  my
skandhas are in good shape."
Their eyes met, and he took a bite of toast.
"Aye," he said, at length, "I had guessed as much.
Wellgood. What do you know of Render's work?"
She adjusted herself in the chair.
"Mm. He being a special specialist in a highly specialized
area, I find it difficult to appreciate the few things he does say
about it. I'd like to be able to look inside other people's minds
sometimesto see what they're thinking about me, of course
but I don't think I could stand staying there very long.
Especially," she gave a mock-shudder, "the mind of somebody
withproblems. I'm afraid I'd be too sympathetic or too
frightened  or  something.  Then,  according  to  what  I've
readpow!like sympathetic magic, it would be my problem.
"Charles never has problems though," she continued, "at
least,  none  that he  speaks  to  me  about.  Lately  I've  been
wondering, though. That blind girl and her talking dog seem to
be too much with him."
"Talking dog?"
"Yes, her seeing-eye dog is one of those surgical mutants."
"How interesting . . . Have you ever met her?"
"Never."
"So," he mused.
"Sometimes a therapist encounters a patient whose problems
are so akin to his own that the sessions become extremely
nprdant," he noted. "It has always been the case with me when
I treat a  fellow-psychiatrist.  Perhaps  Charles sees  in  this
situation a parallel to something which has been troubling him
personally. I did not administer his personal analysis. I do not
know all the ways of his mind, even though he was a pupil of
mine for a long while. He was always self-contained, somewhat
reticent; he could be quite authoritative on occasion, however.
What are some of the other things which occupy his attention
these days?"
"His son Peter is a constant concern. He's changed the boy's
school five times in five years."
Her breakfast arrived. She adjusted her napkin and drew her
chair closer to the table.
"and he has been reading case histories of suicides recently,
and talking about them, and talking about them, and talking
about them."
"To what end?"
She shrugged and began eating.
"He never mentioned why," she said, looking up again.
"Maybe he's writing something . . ."
Bartelmetz finished his eggs and poured more coffee.
"Are you afraid of this patient of his?" he inquired.
"No . . . Yes," she responded, "I am."
"Why?"
"I am afraid of sympathetic magic," she said, flushing
slightly.
"Many things could fall under that heading."
"Many indeed," she acknowledged. And, after a moment,
"We are united in our concern for his welfare and in agreement
as to what represents the threat. So, may I ask a favor?"
"You may."
"Talk to him again," she said. "Persuade him to drop the
case."
He folded his napkin.
"I intended to do that after dinner," he gtated, "because I
believe in the ritualistic value of rescue-motions. They shall be
made."
Dear Father-Image,
Yes, the school is fine, my ankle is getting that way, and
my classmates are a congenial lot. No, I am not short on cash,
undernourished, or having difficulty fitting into the new
curriculum. Okay?
The building I will not describe, as you have already seen
the macabre thing. The grounds I cannot describe, as they
are presently residing beneath cold white sheets. Brrr! I
trust yourself to be enjoying the arts wint'rish. I do not share
your enthusiasm for summer's opposite, except within
picture frames or as an emblem on ice cream bars.
The ankle inhibits my mobility and my roommate has gone
home for the weekendboth of which are really blessings
(saith Pangloss), for I now have the opportunity to catch up
on some reading. I will do so forthwith.
Prodigally,
Peter
Render reached down to pat the huge head. It accepted the
gesture stoically, then turned its gaze up to the Austrian whom
Render had asked for a light, as if to say, "Must I endure this
indignity?" The man laughed at the expression, snapping shut
the engraved lighter on which Render noted the middle initial
to be a small v.
"Thank you," he said, and to the dog: "What is your name?"
"Bismark," it growled.
Render smiled.
"You remind me of another of your kind," he told the dog.
"One Sigitiund, by name, a companion and guide to a blind
friend of mine, in America."
"My Bismark is a hunter," said the young man. "There is no
quarry that can outthink him, neither the deer nor the big
cats."
The dog's ears pricked forward and he stared up at Render
with proud, blazing eyes.
"We have hunted in Africa and the northern and south-
western parts of America. Central America, too. He never
loses the trail. He never gives up. He is a beautiful brute, and
his teeth could have been made in Solingen."
"You are indeed fortunate to have such a hunting
companion."
"I hunt," growled the dog. "I follow . . . Sometimes, I have,
the kill . . ."
"You would not know of the one called Sigmund then, or the
woman he guidesMiss Eileen Shallot?" asked Render.
The man shook his head.
"No, Bismark came to me from Massachusetts, but I was
never to the Center personally. I am not acquainted with other
mutie handlers."
"I see. Well, thank you for the light. Good afternoon."
"Good afternoon."
"Good, after, noon . . ."
Render strolled on up the narrow street, hands in his pockets.
He had excused himself and not said where he was going. This
was because he had had no destination in mind. Bartelmetz*
second essay at counseling had almost led him to say things he
would later regret. It was easier to take a walk than to continue
the conversation.
On a sudden impulse he entered a small shop and bought a
cuckoo clock which had caught his eye. He felt certain that
Bartelmetz would accept the gift in the proper spirit. He smiled
and walked on. And what was that letter to Jill which the desk
clerk had made a special trip to their table to deliver at
dinnertime? he wondered. It had been forwarded three times,
and its return address was that of a law firm. Jill had not even
opened it, but had smiled, overtipped the old man, and tucked
it into her purse. He would have to hint subtly as to its contents.
His curiosity was so aroused that she would be sure to tell him
out of pity.
"The icy pillars of the sky suddenly seemed to sway before
him as a cold wind leapt down out of the north. Render
hunched his shoulders and drew his head further below his
collar. Clutching the cuckoo clock, he hurried back up the
street.
That night the serpent which holds its tail in its mouth
belched, the Fenris Wolf made a pass at the moon, the little
clock said "cuckoo," and tomorrow came on like Manolete's last
bull, shaking the gate of horn with the bellowed promise to
tread a river of lions to sand.
Render promised himself he would lay off the gooey fondue.
Later, much later, when they skipped through the skies in a
kite-shaped cruiser, Render looked down upon the darkened
Earth dreaming its cities full of stars, looked up at the sky
where they were all reflected, looked about him at the
tapescreens watching all the people who biinked into them,
and at the coffee, tea, and mixed drink dispensers who sent
their fluids forth to explore the insides of the people they
required to push their buttons, then looked across at Jill, whom
the  old  buildings  had  compelled  to  walk  among their
wallsbecause he knew she felt he should be looking at her
thenfelt his seat's demand that he convert it into a couch, did
so, and slept.
IV
Her office was full of flowers, and she liked exotic perfumes.
Sometimes she burned incense.
She liked soaking in overheated pools, walking through
falling snow, listening to too much music, played perhaps too
loudly, drinking five or six varieties of liqueurs (usually reeking
of anise, sometimes touched with wormwood) every evening.
Her hands were soft and lightly freckled. Her fingers were long
and tapered. She wore no rings.
Her fingers traced and retraced the floral swellings on the
side of her chair as she spoke into the recording unit:
".  .  .  Patient's  chief  complaints  on  admission  were
nervousness,  insomnia,  stomach  pains,  and  a period of
depression. Patient has had a record of previous admissions for
short periods of time. He had been in this hospital in 1995 for a
manic depressive psychosis, depressed type, and he returned
here again, 2-3-96. He was in another hospital, 9-20-97.
Physical examination revealed a BP of 170/100. He was
normally developed and well-nourished on the  date of
examination, 12-11-98. On this date patient complained of
chronic backache,  and there was noted some moderate
symptoms of alcohol withdrawal. Physical examination further
revealed no pathology except that the patient's tendon reflexes
were exaggerated but equal. These symptoms were the result of
alcohol withdrawal. Upon admission he was shown to be not
psychotic, neither delusional nor hallucinated. He was well-
oriented as to place, time, and person. His psychological
condition was evaluated and he was found to be somewhat
grandiose and expansive and more than a little hostile. He was
considered a potential troublemaker. Because of his experience
as a cook, he was assigned to work in the kitchen. His general
condition then showed definite improvement. He is less tense
and is cooperative. Diagnosis: Manic depressive reaction
(external precipitating stress unknown). The degree of psychi-
atric impairment is mild. He is considered competent. To be
continued on therapy and hospitalization."
She turned off the recorder then and laughed. The sound
frightened her. Laughter is a social phenomenon and she was
alone. She played back the recording then, chewing on the
corner of her handkerchief while the soft, clipped words were
returned to her. She ceased to hear them after the first dozen or
so.
When the recorder stopped talking she turned it off. She was
alone. She was very alone. She was so damned alone that the
little pool of brightness which occurred when she stroked her
forehead and faced the windowthat little pool of brightness
suddenly became the most important thing in the world. She
wanted it to be immense. She wanted it to be an ocean of light.
Or else she wanted to grow so small herself that the effect
would be the same: she wanted to drown in it.
It had been three weeks, yesterday . . .
Too long, she decided, / should have waited. No! Impos-
sible] But what if he goes as Riscomb went? No! He won't.
He would not. Nothing can hurt him. Never. He is all strength
and armor. Butbut we should have waited till next month
to start. Three weeks . . . Sight withdrawalthat's what
it is. Are the memories fading? Are they weaker? What does a
tree look like? Or a cloud?1 can't remember! What is red?
What is green? Godi It's hysteria! I'm watching andl can't stop
it.'-Take a pill! A pill!
Her shoulders began to shake. She did not take a pill though,
but bit down harder on the handkerchief until her sharp teeth
tore through its fabric.
"Beware," she recited a personal beatitude, "those who
hunger and thirst after justice, for we will be satisfied.
"And beware the meek," she continued, "for we shall
attempt to inherit the Earth.
"And beware . . ."
There was a brief buzz from the phone-box. She put away
her handkerchief, composed her face, turned the unit on.
"Hello . . . ?"
"Eileen, I'm back. How've you been?"
"Good, quite well in fact. How was your vacation?"
"Oh, I can't complain. I had it coming for a long time. I guess
I deserve it. Listen, I brought some things back to show
youlike Winchester Cathedral. You want to come in this
week? I can make it any evening."
Tonight. No. I want it too badly. It will set me back if he
sees . . .
"How about tomorrow night?" she asked. "Or the one after?"
"Tomorrow will be fine," he said. "Meet you at the P & S,
around seven?"
"Yes, that would be pleasant. Same table?"
"Why not?-l'll reserve it."
"All right. I'll see you then."
"Goodbye."
The connection was broken.
Suddenly, then, at that moment, colors swirled again
through her head; and she saw treesoaks and pines, poplars
and sycamoresgreat, and green and brown, and iron-colored;
and she saw wads of fleecy clouds, dipped in paintpots,
swabbing a pastel sky; and a burning sun, and a small willow
tree, and a lake of a deep, almost violet, blue. She folded her
torn handkerchief and put it away.
She pushed a button beside her desk and music filled the
office: Scriabin. Then she pushed another button and replayed
the tape she had dictated, half-listening to each.
Pierre sniffed suspiciously at the food. The attendant moved
away from the tray and stepped out into the hall, locking the
door behind him. The enormous salad waited on the floor.
Pierre approached cautiously, snatched a handful of lettuce,
gulped it:
He was afraid.
// only the steel would stop crashing, and crashing against
steel, somewhere in that dark night . . . if only . . .
Sigmund rose to his feet, yawned, stretched. His hind legs
trailed out behind him for a moment, then he snapped to
attention and shook himself. She would be coming home soon.
Wagging his tail slowly, he glanced up at the human-level
clock with the raised numerals, verified his feelings, then
crossed the apartment to the teevee. He rose onto his hind legs,
rested one paw against the table, and used the other to turn on
the set.
It was nearly time for the weather report and the roads
would be icy.
"I have driven through county-wide graveyards," wrote
Render, "vast forests of stone that spread further every day.
"Why does man so zealously guard his dead? Is it because
this is the monumentally democratic way of immortalization,
the ultimate affirmation of the power to hurtthat is to say,
lifeand the desire that it continue on forever? Unamuno has
suggested that this is the case. If it is, then a greater percentage
of the population actively sought immortality last year than
ever before in history . . ."
Tch-tchg, tchga-tchg!
"Do you think they're really people?"
"Naw, they're too good."
The evening was starglint and soda over ice. Render wound
the S-7 into the cold sub-subcellar, found his parking place,
nosed into it.
There was a damp chill that emerged from the concrete to
gnaw like rats' teeth at their flesh. Render guided her toward
the lift, their breath preceding them in dissolving clouds.
"A bit of a chill in the air," he noted.
She nodded, biting her lip.
Inside the lift, he sighed, unwound his scarf, lit a cigarette.
"Give me one, please," she requested, smelling the tobacco.
He did.
They rose slowly, and Render leaned against the wall, puffing
a mixture of smoke and crystallized moisture.
"I met another mutie shep," he recalled, "in Switzerland. Big
as Sigmund. A hunter though, and as Prussian as they come,"
he grinned.
"Sigmund likes to hunt, too," she observed. "Twice every
year we go up to the North Woods and I turn him loose. He's
gone for days at a time, and he's always quite happy when he
returns. Never says what he's done, but he's never hungry.
Back when I got him I guessed that he would need vacations
from humanity to stay stable. I think I was right."
The lift stopped, the door opened, and they walked out into
the hall, Render guiding her again.
Inside his office, he poked at the thermostat and warm air
sighed through the room. He hung their coats in the inner office
and brought the great egg out from its nest behind the wall.
He connected it to an outlet and moved to convert his desk into
a control panel.
"How long do you think it will take?" she asked, running her
fingertips over the smooth, cold curves of the egg.  "The
whole thing, I mean. The entire adaptation to seeing."
He wondered.
"I have no idea," he said, "no idea whatsoever, yet. We got
off to a good start, but there's still a lot of work to be done. I
think I'll be able to make a good guess in another three
months."
She nodded wistfully, moved to his desk, explored the
controls with fingerstrokes like ten feathers.
"Careful you don't push any of those."
"I won't. How long do you think it will take me to learn to
operate one?"
"Three months to learn it. Six, to actually become proficient
enough to use it on anyone; and an additional six under close
supervision before you can be trusted on your own.About a
year altogether."
"Uh-huh." She chose a chair.
Render touched the seasons to life, and the phases of day
and night, the breath of the country, the city, the elements that
raced naked through the skies, and all the dozens of dancing
cues he used to build worlds. He smashed the clock of time and
tasted the seven or so ages of man.
"Okay," he turned, "everything is ready."
It came quickly, and with a minimum of suggestion on
Render's part. One moment there was grayness. Then a dead-
white fog. Then it broke itself apart, as though a quick wind
had arisen, although he neither heard nor felt a wind.
He stood beside the willow tree beside the lake, and she
stood half-hidden among the branches and the lattices of
shadow. The sun was slanting its way into evening.
"We have come back," she said, stepping out, leaves in her
hair. "For a time I was afraid it had never happened, but I see it
all again, and I remember now."
"Good," he said. "Behold yourself." And she looked into the
lake.
"I have not changed," she said. "I haven't changed . . ."
"No."
"But you have," she continued, looking up at him. "You are
taller, and there is something different . . ."
"No," he answered.
"I am mistaken," she said quickly, "I don't understand
everything I see yet. I will though."
"Of course."
"What are we going to do?"
"Watch," he instructed her.
Along a flat, no-colored river of road she just then noticed
beyond the trees, came the car. It came from the farthest
quarter of the sky, skipping over the mountains, buzzing down
the hills, circling through the glades, and splashing them with
the colors of its voicethe gray and the silver of synchronized
potencyand the lake shivered from its sounds, and the car
stopped a hundred feet away, masked by the shrubberies; and
it waited. It was the S-7.
"Come with me," he said, taking her hand. "We're going for
a ride."
They walked among the trees and rounded the final cluster
of bushes. She touched the sleek cocoon, its antennae, its tires,
its windowsand the windows transpared as she did so. She
stared through them at the inside of the car, and she nodded.
"It is your Spinner."
"Yes." He held the door for her. "Get in. We'll return to the
club. The time is now. The memories are fresh, and they should
be reasonably pleasant, or neutral."
"Pleasant," she said, getting in.
He closed the door, then circled the car and entered. She
watched as he punched imaginary coordinates. The car leapt
ahead and he kept a steady stream of trees flowing bythem.He
could feel the rising tension, so he did not vary the scenery. She
swiveled her seat and studied the interior of the car.
"Yes," she finally said, "I can perceive what everything is."
She stared out the window again. She looked at the rushing
trees.  Render stared out and looked upon rushing anxiety
patterns. He opaqued the windows.
"Good," she said, "Thank you. Suddenly it was too much to
seeall of it, moving past like a . . ."
"Of course," said Render, maintaining the sensations of
forward motion. "I'd anticipated that. You're getting tougher,
though."
After a moment, "Relax," he said, "relax now," and
somewhere a button was pushed, and she relaxed, and they
drove on, and on and on, and finally the car began to slow, and
Render said, "Just for one nice, slow glimpse now, look out your
window."
She did.
He drew upon every stimulus in the bank which could
promote sensations of pleasure and relaxation, and he dropped
the city around the car, and the windows became transparent,
and she looked out upon the profiles of towers and a block of
monolithic apartments, and then she saw three rapid cafeterias,
an entertainment palace, a drugstore, a medical center of
yellow brick with an aluminum caducous set above its archway,
and a glassed-in high school, now emptied of its pupils, a fifty-
pump gas station, another drugstore, and many more cars,
parked or roaring by them, and people, people moving in and
out of the doorways and walking before the buildings and
getting into the cars and getting out of the cars; and it was
summer, and the light of late afternoon filtered down upon the
colors of the city and the colors of the garments the people wore
as they moved along the boulevard, as they loafed upon the
terraces, as they crossed the balconies, leaned on balustrades
and windowsills, emerged from a corner kiosk, entered one,
stood talking to one another; a woman walking a poodle
rounded a corner; rockets went to and fro in the high sky.
The world fell apart then and Render caught the pieces.
He maintained an absolute blackness, blanketing every
sensation but that of their movement forward.
After a time a dim light occurred, and they were still seated
in the Spinner, windows blanked again, and the air as they
breathed it became a soothing unguent. 
"Lord," she said, "the world is so filled. Did I really see all of
that?"
"I wasn't going to do that tonight, but you wanted me to. You
seemed ready."
"Yes," she said, and the windows became transparent again.
She turned away quickly.
"It's gone," he said. "I only wanted to give you a glimpse."
She looked, and it was dark outside now, and they were
crossing over a high bridge. They were moving slowly. There
was no other traffic. Below them were the Flats, where an
occasional smelter flared like a tiny, drowsing volcano, spitting
showers of orange sparks skyward; and there were many stars:
they glistened on the breathing water that went beneath the
bridge; they silhouetted by pinprick the skyline that hovered
dimly below its surface. The slanting struts of the bridge
marched steadily by.
"You have done it," she said, "and I thank you." Then: "Who
are you, really?" (He must have wanted her to ask that.)
"I am Render," he laughed. And they wound their way
through a dark, now-vacant city, coming at last to their club
and entering the great parking dome.
Inside, he scrutinized all her feelings, ready to banish the
world at a moment's notice. He did not feel he would have to,
though.
They left the car, moved ahead. They passed into the club,
which he had decided would not be crowded tonight. They
were shown to their table at the foot of the bar in the small room
with the suit of armor, and they sat down and ordered the same
meal over again.
"No," he said, looking down, "it belongs over there."
The suit of armor appeared once again beside the table, and
he was once again inside his gray suit and black tie and silver
tie clasp shaped like a treelimb.
They laughed.
"I'm just not the type to wear a tin suit, so I wish you'd stop
seeing me that way."
"I'm sorry," she smiled. "I don't know how I did that, or
why."
"I do, and I decline the nomination. Also, I caution you once
again. You are conscious of the fact that this is all an illusion. I
had to do it that way for you to get the full benefit of the thing.
For most of my patients though, it is the real item while they
are experiencing it. It makes a counter-trauma or a' symbolic
sequence even more powerful. You are aware of the parameters
of the game, however, and whether you want it or not this gives
you a different sort of control over it than I normally have to
deal with. Please be careful."
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to."
"I know. Here comes the meal we just had."
"Ugh! It looks dreadful! Did we eat all that stuff?"
"Yes," he chuckled. "That's a knife, that's a fork, that's a
spoon. That's roast beef, and those are mashed potatoes, those
are peas, that's butter . . ."
"Goodness! I don't feel so well."
".  .  . And those are the salads,  and those are the salad
dressings. This is a brook troutmm! These are French fried
potatoes. This is a bottle of wine. Hmmlet's see Romanee-
Conti, since I'm not paying for itand a bottle of Yquem for the
trouHey!"
The room was wavering.
He bared the table, he banished the restaurant. They were
back in the glade. Through the transparent fabric of the world
he watched a hand moving along a panel. Buttons were being
pushed. The world grew substantial again. Their emptied table
was set beside the lake now, and it was still nighttime and
summer, and the tablecloth was very white under the glow of
the giant moon that hung overhead.
"That was stupid of me," he said. "Awfully stupid. I should
have introduced them one at a time. The actual sight of basic,
oral stimuli can be very distressing to a person seeing them for
the first time. I got so wrapped up in the Shaping that I forgot
the patient, which is just dandy! I apologize."
"I'm okay now. Really I am."
He summoned a cool breeze from the lake.
". . . And that is the moon," he added lamely.
She nodded, and she was wearing a tiny moon in the center
of her forehead; it glowed like the one above them, and her hair
and dress were all of silver.
The bottle of Romanee-Conti stood on the table, and two
glasses.
"Where did that come from?"
She shrugged. He poured out a glassful.
"It may taste kind of flat," he said.
"It doesn't. Here-" She passed it to him.
As he sipped it he realized it had a tastea fruite such as
might be quashed from the grapes grown in the Isles of the
Blest, a smooth, muscular charnu, and a capiteux centrifuged
from the fumes of a field of burning poppies. With a start, he
knew that his hand must -be traversing the route of the
perceptions, symphonizing the sensual cues of a transference
and a counter-transference which had come upon him all
unawares, there beside the lake.
"So it does," he noted, "and now it is time we returned."
"So soon? I haven't seen the cathedral yet . . ."
"So soon."
He willed the world to end, and it did.
"It is cold out there," she said as she dressed, "and dark."
"I know. I'll mix us something to drink while I clear the
unit."
"Fine."
He glanced at the tapes and shook his head. He crossed to his
bar cabinet.
"It's not exactly Romanee-Conti," he observed, reaching for
a bottle.
"So what? I don't mind."
Neither did be, at that moment. So he cleared the unit, they
drank their drinks, and he helped her into her coat and they
left.
As they rode the lift down to the sub-sub he willed the world
to end again, but it didn't.
Dad,
I hobbled from school to taxi and taxi to spaceport, for the
local Air Force ExhibitOutward, it was called. (Okay, I
exaggerated the hobble. It got me extra attention though.)
The whole bit was aimed at seducing young manhood into a
five-year hitch, as I saw it. But it worked. I wanna join up. I
wanna go Out There. Think they'll take me when I'm old
enuff? I mean take me Outnot some crummy desk job.
Think so?
I do.
There was this dam lite colonel ('scuse the French) who
saw this kid lurching around and pressing his nose 'gainst the
big windowpanes, and he decided to give him the subliminal
sell. Great! He pushed me through the gallery and showed
me all the pitchers of AP triumphs, from Moonbase to
Marsport. He lectured me on the Great Traditipns of the
Service, and marched me into a flic room where the Corps
had good clean fun on tape, wrestling one another in null-G
"where it's all skill and no brawn," and making tinted water
sculpture-work way in the middle of the air and doing
dismounted drill on the skin of a cruiser. Oh joy!
Seriously though. I'd like to be there when they hit the
Outer Fiveand On Out. Not because of the bogus balonus
in the throwaways, and suchlike crud, but because I think
someone of sensibility should be along to chronicle the thing
in the proper way. You know, raw frontier observer. Francis
Parkman. Mary Austin, like that. So I decided I'm going.
The AF boy with the chicken stuff on his shoulders wasn't
in the least way patronizing, gods bepraised. We stood on
the balcony and watched ships lift off and he told me to go
forth and study real hard and I might be riding them some
day. I did not bother to tell him that I'm hardly intellectually
deficient and that I'll have my B.A. before I'm old enough to
do anything with it, even join his Corps. I just watched the
ships lift off and said, "Ten years from now I'll be looking
down, not up." Then he told me how hard his own training
had been, so I did not ask howcum he got stuck with a lousy
dirtside assignment like this one. Glad I didn't, now I think
on it. He looked more like one of their ads than one of their
real people. Hope I never look like an ad.
Thank you for the monies and the warm sox and Mo-
zart's String Quintets, which I'm hearing right now. I
wanna put in my bid for Luna instead of Europe next sum-
mer. Maybe-. . . ? Possibly . . . ? Contingently . . . ? Huh?-
lf I can smash that new test you're designing for me . . . ?
Anyhow, please think about it.
Your son,
Pete
"Hello. State Psychiatric Institute."
"I'd like to make an appointment for an examination."
"Just a moment. I'll connect you with the Appointment
Desk."
"Hello. Appointment Desk."
"I'd like to make an appointment for an examination."
"Just a moment . . . What sort of examination?"
"I want to see Doctor Shallot, Eileen Shallot. As soon as
possible."
"Just a moment. I'll have to check her schedule.. . Could you
make it at two o'clock next Tuesday?"
"That would bejust fine."
"What is the name, please?"
"DeViUe. Jill DeVille."
"All right, Miss DeVille. That's two o'clock, Tuesday."
"Thank you."
/
The man walked beside the highway. Cars passed along the
highway. The cars in the high-acceleration lane blurred by.
Traffic was light.
It was 10:30 in the morning, and cold.
The man's fur-lined collar was turned up, his hands were in
his pockets, and he leaned into the wind. Beyond the fence, the
road was clean and dry.
The morning sun was buried in clouds. In the dirty light, the
man could see the tree a quarter mile ahead.
His pace did not change. His eyes did not leave the tree. The
small stones clicked and crunched beneath his shoes.
When he reached the tree he took off his jacket and folded it
neatly.
He placed it upon the ground and climbed the tree.
As he moved out onto the limb which extended over the
fence, he looked to see that no traffic was approaching. Then he
seized the branch with both hands, lowered himself, hung a
moment, and dropped onto the highway.
It was a hundred yards  wide,  the eastbound half of the
highway.
He glanced west, saw there was still no traffic coming his
way, then began to walk toward the center island. He knew he
would never reach it. At this time of day the cars were moving
at approximately one hundred sixty miles an hour in the high
acceleration lane. He walked on.
A car passed behind him. He did not look back. If the
windows were opaqued, as was usually the case, then the
occupants were unaware he had crossed their path. They
would hear of it later and examine the front end of their vehicle
for possible signs of such an encounter.
A car passed in front of him. Its windows were clear. A
glimpse of two faces, their mouths made into 0's, was
presented to him, then torn from his sight. His own face
remained without expression. His pace did not change. Two
more cars rushed by, windows darkened. He had crossed
perhaps twenty yards of highway.
Twenty-five...
Something in the wind, or beneath his feet, told him it was
coming. He did not look.
Something in the corner of his eye assured him it was
coming. His gait did not alter.
Cecil Green had the windows transpared because he liked it
that way. His left hand was inside her blouse and her skirt was
piled up on her lap, and his right hand was resting on the lever
which would lower the seats. Then she pulled away, making a
noise down inside her throat.
His head snapped to the left.
He saw the walking man.
He saw the profile which never turned to face him fully. He
saw that the man's gait did not alter.
Then he did not see the man.
There was a slight jar, and the windshield began cleaning
itself. Cecil Green raced on.
He opaqued the windows.
"How . . . ?" he asked after she was in his arms again, and
sobbing.
"The monitor didn't pick him up . . ."
"He must not have touched the fence . . ."
"He must have been out of his mind!"
"Still, he could have picfced an easier way."
It could have been any face . . . Mine?
Frightened, Cecil lowered the seats.
Charles Render was writing the "Necropolis" chapter for
The Missing Link Is Man, which was to be his first book in over
four years. Since his return he had set aside every Tuesday and
Thursday afternoon to work on it, isolating himself in his office,
filling pages with a chaotic longhand.
"There are many varieties of death, as opposed to dying . . ."
he was writing, just as the intercom buzzed briefly, then long,
then again briefly.
"Yes?" he asked it, pushing down on the switch.
"You have a visitor," and there was a short intake of breath
between "a" and "visitor."
He slipped a small aerosol into his side pocket, then rose and
crossed the office.
He opened the door and looked out.
"Doctor . . . Help . . ."
Render took three steps, then dropped to .one knee.
"What's the matter?"
"Come she is . . . sick," he growled.
"Sick? How? What's wrong?"
"Don't know. You come."
Render stared into the unhuman eyes.
"What kind of sick?" he insisted.
"Don't know," repeated the dog. "Won't talk. Sits. I . . . feel,
she is sick."                              "   .
"How did you get here?"
"Drove. Know the co, or, din, ates . . . Left car, outside."
"I'll call her right now." Render turned.
"No good. Won't answer."
He was right.
Render returned to his inner office for his coat and medkit. He
glanced out the window and saw where her car was parked, far
below, just inside the entrance to the marginal, where the
monitor had released it into manual control. If no one assumed
that control a car was automatically parked in neutral. The
other vehicles were passed around it.
So simple even a dog can drive one, he reflected. Better get
downstairs before a cruiser comes along. It's probably reported
itself stopped there already.  Maybe not,  though. Might still
have a few minutes grace.
He glanced at the huge clock.
"Okay, Sig," he called out. "Let's go."
They took the lift to the ground floor, left by way of the front
entrance, and hurried to the car.
Its engine was still idling.
Render opened the passenger-side door and Sigmund leapt
in. He squeezed by him into the driver's seat then, but the dog
was already pushing the primary coordinates and the address
tabs with his paw.
Looks like I'm in the wrong seat.
He lit a cigarette as the car swept ahead into a U-underpass.
It emerged on the opposite marginal, sat poised a moment, then
joined the traffic flow. The dog directed the car into the high-
acceleration lane.
"Oh," said the dog, "oh."
Render felt like patting his head at that moment, but he
looked at him, saw that his teeth were bared, and decided
against it.
"When did she start acting peculiar?" he asked:
"Came home from work. Did not eat. Would not answer me,
when I talked. Just sits."
"Has she ever been like this before?"
"No."
What could have precipitated it?But maybe she just had a
bad day. After all, he's only a dogsort of.No. He'd know.
But what, then?
"How was she yesterdayand when she left home this
morning?"
"Like always."
Render tried calling her again. There was still no answer.
"You, did it," said the dog.
"What do you mean?"
"Eyes. Seeing. You. Machine. Bad."
"No," said Render, and his hand rested on the unit of stun-
spray in his pocket.
"Yes," said the dog, turning to him again. "You will, make
her well . . . ?"
"Of course," said Render.
Sigmund stared ahead again.
Render felt physically exhilarated and mentally sluggish. He
sought the confusion factor. He had had these feelings about
the case since that first session. There was something very
unsettling  about  Eileen  Shallot:  a  combination  of  high
intelligence  and helplessness, of determination and vulner-
ability, of sensitivity and bitterness.
Do I find that especially attractive?No. it's just the counter-
transference, damn it!
"You smell afraid," said the dog.
"Then color me afraid," said Render, "and turn the page."
They slowed for a series of turns, picked up speed again,
slowed again, picked up speed again. Finally, they were
traveling along a narrow section of roadway through a semi-
residential area of town. The car turned up a side street,
proceeded about half a mile further, clicked softly beneath its
dashboard, and turned into the parking lot behind a high brick
apartment building. The click must have been a special
servomech which took over from the point where the monitor
released it, because the car crawled across the lot, headed into
its transparent parking stall, then stopped. Render turned off
the ignition.
Sigmund had already opened the door on his side. Render
followed him into the building, and they rode the elevator to
the fiftieth floor. The dog dashed on ahead up the hallway,
pressed his nose against a plate set low in a doorframe, and
waited. After a moment, the door swung several inches inward.
He pushed it open with his shoulder and entered. Render
followed, closing the door behind him.
The apartment was large, its walls pretty much unadorned,
its color combinations unnerving. A great library of tapes filled
one corner; a monstrous combination-broadcaster stood beside
it.  There  was  a  wide  bowlegged  table  set  in  front  of  the
window, and a low couch along the right-hand wall; there was
a closed door beside the couch; an archway to the left
apparently led to other rooms. Eileen sat in an overstuffed chair
in the far corner by the window. Sigmund stood beside the
chair.
Render crossed the room and extracted a cigarette from his
case. Snapping open his lighter, he held the flame until her
head turned in that direction.
"Cigarette?" he asked.
"Charles?"
"Right."
"Yes, thank you. I will."
She held out her hand, accepted the cigarette, put it to her
lips.
"Thanks.What are you doing here?"
"Social call. I happened to be in the neighborhood."
"I didn't hear a buzz, or a knock."
"You must have been dozing. Sig let me in."
"Yes, I must have." She stretched. "What time is it?"
"It's close to four-thirty."
"I've been home over two hours then . . . Must have been
very tired . . ."
"How do you feel now?"
"Fine," she declared. "Care for a cup of coffee?"
"Don't mind if I do."
"A steak to go with it?"
"No thanks."
"Bacardi in the coffee?"
"Sounds good."
"Excuse me then. It'll only take a moment."
She went through the door beside the sofa and Render
caught a glimpse of a large, shiny, automatic kitchen.
"Well?" he whispered to the dog.
Sigmund shook his head.
"Not same."
Render shook his head.
He deposited his coat on the sofa, folding it carefully about
the medkit. He sat beside it and thought.
Did I throw too big a chunk of seeing at once? Is she suffer-
ing  from depressive side-effectssay,  memory repressions,
nervous fatigue? Did I upset her sensory adaptation syndrome
somehow? Why have I been proceeding so rapidly anyway?
There's no real hurry- Am I so damned eager to write the thing
up?Or am I doing it because she wants me to? Could she be
that  strong,  consciously  or unconsciously? Or  am I  that
vulnerablesomehow?
She called him to the kitchen to carry out the tray. He set it
on the table and seated himself across from her.
"Good coffee," he said, burning his lips on the cup.
"Smart machine," she stated, facing his voice.
Sigmund stretched out on the carpet next to the table,
lowered his head between his forepaws, sighed, and closed his
eyes.
"I've been wondering," said Render, "whether or not there
were any aftereffects to that last sessionlike increased
synesthesiac  experiences,  or  dreams  involving  forms,  or
hallucinations or . . ."
"Yes," she said flatly, "dreams."
"What kind?"
"That last session. I've dreamt it over, and over."
"Beginning to end?"
"No, there's no special order to the events. We're riding
through the city, or over the bridge, or sitting at the table, or
walking toward the carjust flashes, like that. Vivid ones."
"What sort of feelings accompany theseflashes?"
"I don't know. They're all mixed up."
"What are your feelings now, as you recall them?"
"The same, all mixed up."
"Are you afraid?"
"N-no. I don't think so."
"Do you want to take a vacation from the thing? Do you feel
we've been proceeding too rapidly?"
"No. That's not it at all. It'swell, it's like learning to swim.
When you finally learn how, why then you swim and you swim
and you swim until you're all exhausted. Then you just lie there
gasping in air and remembering what it was like, while your
friends all hover and chew you out for overexerting yourself
and it's a good feeling, even though you do take a chill and
there's pins and needles inside all your muscles. At least,
that's the- way I do things. I felt that way after the first session
and after this last one. First times are always very special times
. . . The pins and the needles are gone though, and I've caught
my breath again. Lord, I don't want to stop now! I feel fine."
"Do you usually take a nap in the afternoon?"
The ten red nails of her fingernails moved across the tabletop
as she stretched.
". . . Tired," she smiled, swallowing a yawn. "Half the staffs
on vacation or sick leave and I've been beating my brains out all
week. I was about ready to fall on my face when I left work. I
feel all right now that I've rested, though."
She picked up her coffee cup with both hands, took a large
swallow.
"Uh-huh," he said. "Good. I was a bit worried about you. I'm
glad to see there was no reason."
She laughed.
"Worried? You've read Doctor Riscomb's notes on my
analysisand on the ONT&R trialand you think I'm the sort
to worry about? Ha! I have an operationally beneficent neurosis
concerning my adequacy as a human being. It focuses my
energies,  coordinates  my  efforts  toward  achievement.  It
enhances my sense of identity . . ."
"You do have one hell of a memory," he noted. "That's almost
verbatim."
"Of course."
"You had Sigmund worried today, too."
"Sig? How?"
The dog stirred uneasily, opened one eye.
"Yes," he growled, glaring up at Render. "He needs, a ride,
home."
"Have you been driving the car again?"
"Yes."
"After I told you not to?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"I was a, fraid. You would, not, answer me, when I talked."
"I was very tiredand if you ever take the car again. I'm
going to have the door fixed so you can't come and go as you
please."
"Sorry."
"There's nothing wrong with me."
-    "I, see."
"You are never to doit again."
"Sorry." His eye never left Render; it was like a burning lens.
Render looked away.
"Don't be too hard on the poor fellow," he said. "After all, he
thought you were ill and he went for the doctor. Supposing he'd
been right? You'd owe him thanks, not a scolding."
Unmollified, Sigmund glared a moment longer and closed his
eye.
"He has to be told when he does wrong," she finished.
"I suppose," he said, drinking his coffee. "No harm done,
anyhow. Since I'm here, let's talk shop. I'm writing something
and I'd like an opinion."
"Great. Give me a footnote?"
"Two or three.In your opinion, do the general underlying
motivations that lead to suicide differ in different periods of
history, or in different cultures?"
"My well-considered opinion is no, they don't," she said.
"Frustrations can lead to depressions or frenzies; and if these
are severe enough, they can lead to self-destruction. You ask me
about motivations and I think they stay pretty much the same. I
feel this is a cross-cultural, cross-temporal aspect of the human
condition. I don't think it could be changed without changing
the basic nature of man."
"Okay. Check. Now, what of the inciting element?" he
asked. "Let man be a constant, his environment is still a
variable. If he is placed in an overprotective life-situation, do
you feel it would take more or less to depress himor stimulate
him to frenzythan it would take in a not so protective
environment?"
"Hm. Being case-oriented, I'd say it would depend on the
man. But I see what you're driving at: a mass predisposition to
jump out windows at the drop of a hatthe window even
opening itself for you, because you asked it tothe revolt of the
bored masses. I don't like the notion. I hope it's wrong."
"So do I, but I was thinking of symbolic suicides
toofunctional disorders that occur for pretty flimsy reasons."
"Aha! Your lecture last month: autopsychomimesis. I have
the tape. Well-told, but I can't agree."
"Neither can I, now. I'm rewriting that whole section
"Thanatos in Cloudcuckooland,' I'm calling it. It's really the
death-instinct moved nearer the surface."
"If I get you a scalpel and a cadaver, will you cut out the
death-instinct and let me touch it?"
"Couldn't," he put the grin into his voice, "it would be all
used up in a cadaver. Find me a volunteer though, and he'll
prove my case by volunteering."
"Your logic is unassailable," she smiled. "Get us some more
coffee-, okay?"
Render went to the kitchen, spiked and filled the cups, drank
a glass of water, returned to the living room. Eileen had not
moved; neither had Sigmund.
"What do you do when you're not busy being a Shaper?" she
asked him.
"The same things most people doeat, drink, sleep, talk, visit
friends and not-friends, visit places, read . . ."
"Are you a forgiving man?"
"Sometimes. Why?"
"Then forgive me. I argued with a woman today, a woman
named DeViUe."
"What about?"
"Youand she accused me of such things it were better my
mother had not borne me. Are you going to marry her?"
"No, marriage is like alchemy. It served an important
purpose once, but I hardly feel it's here to stay."
"Good."
"What did you say to her?"
"I gave her a clinic referral card that said, 'Diagnosis: Bitch.
Prescription: Drug therapy and a tight gag.' "
"Oh," said Render, showing interest.
"She tore it up and threw it in my face."
"I wonder why?"
She shrugged, smiled, made a gridwork on the tablecloth.
" 'Fathers and elders, I ponder,' " sighed Render, " 'what is
hell?' "
" 1 maintain it is the suffering of being unable to love,' " she
finished. "Was Dostoevsky right?"
"I doubt it. I'd put him into group therapy, myself. That'd be
real hell for himwith all those people acting like his characters,
and enjoying it so."
Render put down his cup, pushed his chair away from the
table.
"I suppose you must be going now?"
"I really should," said Render.
"And I can't interest you in food?"
"No."
She stood.
"Okay, I'll get my coat."
"I could drive back myself and just set the car to return."
"No! I'm frightened by the notion of empty cars driving
around the city. I'd feel the thing was haunted for the next two
and a half weeks.
"Besides," she said, passing through the archway, "you
promised me Winchester Cathedral."
"You want to do it today?"
"If you can be persuaded."
As Render stood deciding, Sigmund rose to his feet. He stood
directly before him and stared upward into his eyes. He opened
his mouth and closed it, several times, but no sounds emerged.
Then he turned away and left the room.
"No," Eileen's voice came back, "you will stay here until I
return."
Render picked up his coat and put it on, stuffing the medkit
into the far pocket.
As they walked up the hall toward the elevator. Render
thought he heard a very faint and very distant howling sound.
In this place, of all places. Render knew he was the master of
all things.
He was at home on those alien worlds, without time, those
worlds where flowers copulate and the stars do battle in the
heavens, falling at last to the ground, bleeding, like so many
spilt  and  shattered  chalices,  and  the  seas  part  to  reveal
stairways leading down, and arms emerge from caverns,
waving torches that flame like liquid facesa midwinter night's
nightmare, summer go a-begging, Render knewfor he had
visited those worlds on a professional basis for the better part of
a decade. With the crooking of a finger he could isolate the
sorcerers, bring them to trial for treason against the realmaye,
and he could execute them, could appoint their successors.
Fortunately, this trip was only a courtesy call . . .
He moved forward through the glade, seeking her.
He could feel her awakening presence all about him.
He pushed through the branches, stood beside the lake. It
was cold, blue, and bottomless, the lake, reflecting that slender
willow which had become the station of her arrival.
"Eileen!"
The willow swayed toward him, swayed advay.
"Eileen! Come forth!"
Leaves fell, floated upon the lake, disturbed its mirror-like
placidity, distorted the reflections.
"Eileen?"
All the leaves yellowed at once then, dropped down into the
water. The tree ceased its swaying. There was a strange sound
in the darkening sky, like the humming of high wires on a cold
day.
Suddenly there was a double file of moons passing through
the heavens.
Render selected one, reached up, and pressed it. The others
vanished as he did so, and the world brightened; the humming
went out of the air.
He circled the lake to gain a subjective respite from the
rejection-action and his counter to it. He moved up along an
aisle of pines toward the place where he wanted the cathedral
to occur. Birds sang now in the trees. The wind came softly by
him. He felt her presence quite strongly.
"Here, Eileen. Here."
She walked beside him then, green silk, hair of bronze, eyes
of molten emerald; she wore an emerald in her forehead. She
walked in green slippers over the pine needles, saying: "What
happened?"
"You were afraid."
"Why?"
"Perhaps you fear the cathedral. Are you a witch?" he
smiled.
"Yes, but it's my day off."
He laughed, and he took her arm, and they rounded an
island of foliage, and there was the cathedral reconstructed on
a grassy rise, pushing its way above them and above the trees,
climbing into the middle air, breathing out organ notes,
reflecting a stray ray of sunlight from a pane of glass.
"Hold tight to the world," he said. "Here comes the guided
tour."
They moved forward and entered.
" '.  .   .  With  its  floor-to-ceiling  shafts,  like  so  many  huge
treetrunks, it achieves a ruthless control over its spaces,' " he
said.  "Got that from the  guidebook.  This is the  north
transept..."
" 'Greensleeves,' " she said, "the organ is playing 'Green-
sleeves.' "                                    
"So it is. You can't blame me for that though.Observe the
scalloped capitals"
"I want to go nearer the music."
"Very well. This way then."
Render felt that something was wrong. He could not put his
finger on it.
Everything retained its solidity . . .
Something passed rapidly then, high above the cathedral,
uttering a sonic boom. Render smiled at that, remembering
now; it was like a slip of the tongue: for a moment he had
confused Eileen with Jill yes, that was what had happened.
Why, then . . .
A burst of white was the altar. He had never seen it before,
anywhere. All the walls were dark and cold about them.
Candles flickered in corners and high niches. The organ
chorded thunder under invisible hands.
Render knew that something was wrong.
He turned to Eileen Shallot, whose hat was a green cone
towering up into the darkness, trailing wisps of green veiling.
Her throat was in shadow, but . . .
"That necklaceWhere?"
"I don't know," she smiled.
The goblet she held radiated a rosy light. It was reflected
from her emerald. It washed him like a draft of cool air.
"Drink?" she asked.
"Stand still," he ordered.
He willed the walls to fall down. They swam in shadow.
"Stand still!" he repeated urgently. "Don't do anything. Try
not even to think.
"Fall down!" he cried. And the walls were blasted in all
directions and the roof was flung over the top .of the world, and
they stood amid ruins lighted by a single taper. The night was
black as pitch.
"Why did you do that?" she asked, still holding the goblet
out toward him.
"Don't think. Don't think anything," he said. "Relax. You are
very tired. As that candle flickers and wanes so does your
consciousness. You can barely keep awake. You can hardly stay
on your feet. Your eyes are closing. There is nothing to see here
anyway."
He willed the candle to go out. It continued to burn.
"I'm not tired. Please have a drink."
He heard organ music through the night. A different tune,
one he did not recognize at first.
"I need your cooperation."
"All right. Anything."
"Look! The moon!" he pointed.
She looked upward and the moon appeared from behind an
inky cloud.
". . . And another, and another."
Moons, like strung pearls, proceeded across the blackness.
"The last one will be red," he stated.
It was.
He reached out then with his right index finger, slid his arm
sideways along his field of vision, then tried to touch the red
moon.
His arm ached, it burned. He could not move it.
"Wake up!" he screamed.
The red moon vanished, and the white ones.
"Please take a drink."
He dashed the goblet from her hand and turned away. When
he turned back she was still holding it before him.
"A drink?"
He turned and fled into the night.
It was like running through a waist-high snowdrift. It was
wrong. He was compounding the error by runninghe was
minimizing his strength, maximizing hers. It was sapping his
energies, draining him.
He stood still in the midst of the blackness.
"The world around me moves," he said. "I am its center."
"Please have a drink," she said, and he was standing in the
glade beside their table set beside the lake. The lake was black
and the moon was silver, and high, and out of his reach. A
single candle flickered on the table, making her hair as silver as
her dress. She wore the moon on her brow. A bottle of
Romanee-Conti stood on the white cloth beside a wide-
brimmed wine glass. It was filled to overflowing, that glass, and
rosy beads clung to its lip. He was very thirsty, and she was
lovelier than anyone he had ever seen before, and her necklace,
sparkled, and the breeze came cool off the lake, and there was
somethingsomething he should remember . . .
He took a step toward her and his armor clinked lightly as he
moved. He reached toward the glass and his right arm stiffened
with pain and fell back to his side.
"You are wounded!"
Slowly, he turned his head. The blood flowed from the open
wound in his bicep and ran down his arm and dripped from his
fingertips. His armor had been breached. He forced himself to
look away.
"Drink this, love. It will heal you."
She stood.
"I will hold the glass."
He stared at her as she raised it to his lips.
"Who am I?" he asked.
She did not answer him, but something repliedwithin a
splashing of waters out over the lake:
"You are Render, the Shaper."
"Yes, I remember," he said; and turning his mind to the one
lie which might break the entire illusion he forced his mouth to
say: "Eileen Shallot, I hate you."
The world shuddered and swam about him, was shaken, as
by a huge sob.
"Charles!" she screamed, and the blackness swept over
them.
"Wake up! Wake up!" he cried, and his right arm burned
and ached and bled in the darkness.
He stood alone in the midst of a white plain. It was silent, it
was endless. It sloped away toward the edges of the world. It
gave off its own light, and the sky was no sky, but was nothing
overhead. Nothing. He was alone. His own voice echoed back
to him from the end of the world: ". . . hate you," it said, ". . .
hate you."
He dropped to his knees. He was Render.
He wanted to cry.
A red moon appeared above the plain, casting a ghastly light
over the entire expanse. There was a wall of mountains to the
left of him, another to his right.
He raised his right arm. He helped it with his left hand. He
clutched his wrist, extended his index finger. He reached for
the moon.
Then there came a howl from high in the mountains, a great
wailing cryhalf-human, all challenge, all loneliness, and all
remorse. He saw it then, treading upon the mountains, its tail
brushing the snow from their highest peaks, the ultimate loup-
garou of the NorthFenris, son of Lokiraging at the heavens.
It leapt into the air. It swallowed the moon.
It landed near him, and its great eyes blazed yellow. It
stalked him on soundless pads, across the cold white fields that
lay between the mountains; and he backed away from it, up
hills and down slopes, over crevasses and rifts, through valleys,
past stalagmites and pinnaclesunder the edges of glaciers,
beside frozen river beds, and always downwardsuntil its hot
breath bathed him and its laughing mouth was opened above
him.
He turned then and his feet became two gloaming rivers
carrying him away.
The world jumped backwards. He glided over the slopes.
Downward. Speeding
Away...
He looked back over his shoulder.
In the distance, the gray shape loped after him.
He felt that it could narrow the gap if it chose. He had to
move faster.
The world reeled about him. Snow began to fall.
He raced on.
Ahead, a blur, a broken outline.
He tore through the veils of snow which now seemed to be
falling upward from off the groundlike strings of bubbles.
He approached the shattered form.
Like a swimmer he approachedunable to open his mouth to
speak, for fear of drowningof drowning and not knowing, of
never knowing.
He could not check his forward motion; he was swept
tidelike toward the wreck. He came to a stop, at last, before it.
Some things never change. They are things which have long
ceased to exist as objects and stand solely as never-to-be-
calendared occasions outside that sequence of elements called
Time.
Render stood there and did not care if Fenris leapt upon his
back and ate his brains. He had covered his eyes, but he could
not stop the seeing. Not this time. He did not care about
anything. Most of himself lay dead at his feet.
There was a howl. A gray shape swept past him.
The baleful eyes and bloody muzzle rooted within the
wrecked car, champing through the steel, the glass, groping
inside for . . .
"No! Brute! Chewer of corpses!" he cried. "The dead are
sacred! My dead are sacred!"
He had a scalpel in his hand then, and he slashed expertly at
the tendons, the bunches of muscle on the straining shoulders,
the soft belly, the ropes of the arteries.
Weeping, he dismembered the monster, limb by limb, and it
bled and it bled, fouling the vehicle and the remains within it
with its infernal animal juices, dripping and running until the
whole plain was reddened and writhing about them.
Render fell across the pulverized hood, and it was soft and
warm and dry. He wept upon it.
"Don't cry," she said.
He was hanging onto her shoulder then, holding her tightly,
there beside the black lake beneath the moon that was
Wedgwood. A single candle flickered upon their table. She
held the glass to his lips.
"Please drink it."
"Yes, give it to me!"
He gulped the wine that was all softness and lightness. It
burned within him. He felt his strength returning.
"I am . . ."
"Render, the Shaper," splashed the lake.
"No!"
He turned and ran again, looking for the wreck. He had to go
back, to return . . .
"You can't."
"I can!" he cried. "I can, if I try..."
Yellow flames coiled through the thick air. Yellow serpents.
They coiled, glowing, about his ankles. Then through the murk,
two-headed and towering, approached his Adversary.
Small stones rattled past him. An overpowering odor
corkscrewed up his nose and into his head.
"Shaper!" came the bellow from one head.
"You have returned for the reckoning!" called the other.
Render stared, remembering.
"No reckoning, Thaumiel," he said. "I beat you and I
chained you forRothman, yes, it was Rothmanthe cabalist."
He traced a pentagram in the air. "Return to Qliphoth. I banish
you."
"This place be Qliphoth."
". .  . By Khamael, the angel of blood, by the hosts of
Seraphim, in the Name of Elohim Gebor, I bid you vanish!"
"Not this time," laughed both heads.
It advanced.
Render backed slowly away, his feet bound by the yellow
serpents. He could feel the chasm opening behind him. The
world was a jigsaw puzzle coming apart. He could see the
pieces separating.
"Vanish!"
The giant roared out its double-laugh.
Render stumbled.
"This way, lovel"
She stood within a small cave to his right.
He shook his bead and backed toward the chasm.
Thaumiel reached out toward him.
Render toppled back over the edge.
"Charles!" she screamed, and the world shook itself apart
with her wailing.
"Then Vernichtung," he answered as he fell. "I join you in
darkness."
Everything came to an end.
"I want to see Doctor Charles Render."
"I'm sorry, that is impossible."
"But I skip-jetted all the way here, just to thank him. I'm a
new man! He changed my life!"
"I'm sorry. Mister Erikson. When you called this morning, I
told you it was impossible."
"Sir, I'm Representative Eriksonand Render once did me a
great service."
"Then you can do him one now. Go home."
"You can't talk to me that way!"
"I just did. Please leave. Maybe next year sometime. . ."
"But a few words can do wonders . . ."
"Save them!"
"I-I'm sorry . . ."
Lovely as it was, pinked over with the morningthe
slopping, steaming bowl of the seahe knew that it had to end.
Therefore...
He descended the high tower stairway and he entered the
courtyard. He crossed to the bower of roses and he looked down
upon the pallet set in its midst.
"Good morrow, m'lord," he said.
"To you the same," said the knight, his blood mingling with
the earth, the flowers, the grasses, flowing from his wound,
sparkling over his armor, dripping from his fingertips.
"Naught hath healed?"
The knight shook his head.
"I empty. I wait."
"Your waiting is near ended."
"What mean you?" He sat upright.
"The ship. It approacheth harbor."
The knight stood. He leaned his back against a mossy
treetrunk.  He stared  at the  huge,  bearded  servitor who
continued to speak, words harsh with barbaric accents:
"It cometh like a dark swan before the windreturning."
"Dark, say you? Dark?"
"The sails be black. Lord Tristram."
"You lie!"
"Do you wish to see? To see for yourself?Look then!"
He gestured.
The earth quaked, the wall toppled. The dust swirled and
settled. From where they stood they could see the ship moving
into the harbor on the wings of the night.
"No! You lied!-See! They are white!"
The dawn danced upon the waters. The shadows fled from
the ship's sails.
"No, you fool! Black! They must be!"
"White! Whitd-lsolde! You have kept faith! You have
returned!"
He began running toward the harbor.
"Come back!Your wound! You are ill!Stop . . ."
The sails were white beneath a sun that was a red button
which the servitor reached quickly to touch.
Night fell.