Steve Johnson

1618 Caroline St. 51,000 Words

Fredericksburg, VA 22401 Copyright 1994 by Steve Johnson

(703) 371-0615

GENERAL'S GREEN

by

Steve Johnson

Chapter One

"I Didn't Say Anything About a Hundred Times"

Andromeda Fallon's head jerked up as though curbed by a bit. Her green eyes were wide with alarm, her lips pressed tight. A hiss escaped them. The pearlescent stone on her bosom bounced once, reflecting her eyes in a deeper, harder green.

Her companion for the last few months, Scoop Smythe, turned from his contemplation of a waitress' backside to put his hand on hers.

"Andi? Jesus, what's the matter? You look like you seen a ghost."

Andromeda's upper lip began to quake.

"Oh, bloody hell -- waitress! Uh, waitress, can we have some water over here?" Scoop said, turning away.

"Not her," Andromeda pleaded. "Don't talk to her."

"I don't even know 'er, luv," Scoop protested.

"That doesn't matter," she insisted, clutching his arm tightly. "You know her well enough to want to -- "

She choked off, her words a sob.

"Here, now --"

The waitress arrived and Andromeda put her head in Scoop's shoulder, sniffling audibly. He looked up, vexed, and waved the girl away.

"No, thank you, everything's fine here. Bit of a family tragedy, is all, isn't it?"

The waitress retreated doubtfully, casting a glance over her shoulder at the couple. The cursive stitching over one great breast said her name was "Cerise", and her eyes were the most attractive shade of amber, Scoop noted.

Andromeda wailed against his chest and clutched him tighter.

"There, there, luv," Scoop said weakly. He wasn't at all used to this sort of problem and felt himself seriously out of his depth. What did people say when their tarts broke down in public? Surely something stronger than "there, there." Someone had surely invented the appropriate saying eons ago. He knew he'd seen it in a movie somewhere.

But for the life of him, he couldn't think of what it was.

"Come on, girl. We're going, eh? Let's not make a fuss."

He got his feet under him, left some bills on the table, and steered her toward the door. Though she was not a short woman by any means, Andromeda was fashionably thin -- emaciated, a doctor would have called it. Scoop was able to direct her hundred and twenty pounds easily through the late-night diners, many of whom were staring now.

"S'an emotional moment, innit? Give us some room, then," he demanded. Finally they were on the street.

"You could have said you loved me," Andromeda said quietly, brokenly.

"What?" said Scoop, all at sea.

"When you wanted to calm me down, in there. You could have said you loved me. That's all a girl wants to hear, darling."

Scoop rolled his eyes. If he'd known that, he'd have memorized the phrase for later use. He'd tell her a hundred times a day if that's what she wanted.

"Yes, I'd like that," Andromeda murmured.

What was one phrase over another, anyway? Trouble was, each girl had a different magic word they liked to hear ...

Scoop shook his head. He didn't think he'd been drinking enough to make him stupid, but he was surely getting a bit slow.

"You'd like what, luv?" he demanded.

"You know. Say it a hundred times," she said.

Scoop stopped walking. He ducked Andromeda's head off his shoulder and held her away from him, a little. She curled up a bit and leaned back toward him, but he kept her eyes in view.

"I didn't say anything about a hundred times," he said, watching her.

"Yes you did. And I said it would be nice."

Scoop closed his mouth over his cigarette. It had gone out.

What number am I thinking of, right now? he thought to himself.

"You're not. You're thinking about getting another cigarette, and putting me to bed before your arms get tired. But that's all right with me," she said.

My middle name is Shackleford, he thought, being quite certain he was not moving his lips.

"Is it? You never told me," she said, brightening. "Is there some special reason you're telling me now?"

Andromeda, look at me. This is serious.

"Yes, Andrew. Andrew Shackleford."

Bloody hell, sober up!

"I'm not drunk, not the least little bit. I'm happy, Scoop. So happy I could fly."

Andromeda, look at my mouth.

"Gladly."

Do you see my lips moving?

"No. How are you doing that?"

What did I do before I started carrying the Mirror?

"S-sold drugs in Birmingham to the dolees ... you did? What kind of drugs?"

Andromeda?

"What?"

How did you know that?

"You told me. Just now."

I'm quite sure I never told you. It's an offence, and more to the point, I knew you wouldn't approve.

"Oh, Scoop -- I won't let your past come between us."

For God's sake, woman, concentrate! Don't you realize what's happening?

"I know what's important, Scoop. My Andrew Shackleford Smythe, who sold drugs in the slums and wrote lies for the Daily Mirror. I know you've changed since then, just as I know that you truly love me ...?" Andromeda trailed off, her face falling.

Bloody hell, Scoop thought. That's torn it.

"Scoop?" she said in a little-girl-lost voice. "Scoop, don't you --? Even a little?"

"Sure I do, luv. Sure I do. You're the best thing that ever happened t'me since me first --"

"No. You don't love me. You never did."

"Andromeda! I'm here an' I'm tellin' ya, I love ya. Why d'ya think I'm lyin'?"

She was quiet for a long moment. Then she drew back from him, to arm's length.

"Because I'm reading your mind. Aren't I?" she said softly, wonderingly.

"Looks that way, girl," he said.

Can you read mine? she thought.

Clear as a bell, he assured her. Christ, this is bloody weird.

Oh, I don't know. It seems perfectly natural to me.

Have you always been able to do it, then?

No, she thought, and paused as she realized why she'd been so sensitive, so unbearably moody, the last few days.

It had started in the garden of that bed and breakfast, an old bleached-out brick structure in the middle of silent fields of green leaves. She had slipped out early, while Scoop was asleep, and the cannons at the gate and the cars in the lot had sung to her, and she grew afraid. They had checked out before breakfast.

"No," she repeated aloud. "I haven't been reading minds all my life. I've been doing it since we left the Woolsey place."

"Back where we tore outta there so sudden? Monday last?"

She nodded, unable to speak. Her teeth were clenched.

Scoop, what's happening to me?

What he said was, "Don't worry, luv. We'll see it right."

What he thought was, Beats the hell out of me.

"Scoop!"

"Orright! Geez, Andi, it's not that bad, is it? We'll get back to the hotel, and then ... yeah, we're not too far from Chapel Hill, are we? We'll start driving as soon as you're packed."

"Where are we going, Scoop?

"Duke University, luv. I know a man there maybe can help us."

By the time they walked the six blocks to their hotel, Andromeda had calmed down. She tried not to read the minds of passersby; fortunately, at the late hour they found themselves in, Richmond's streets were all but deserted. She didn't have to screen out too much.

Scoop packed with his usual efficiency, throwing everything into one large duffel and stealing just one ashtray from the bathroom. Most hotels didn't have ashtrays in the bathroom, and Scoop always liked to be prepared. His cameras went into the specially padded case, but they were different. Cameras mattered.

Her own packing took considerable care, since she really needed another suitcase to carry her clothes and books. The books were the hardest to pack correctly, because when an aqua chiffon dress got wrinkled, there was always someone to iron it out. If the covers of a paperback were crumpled, they stayed that way forever.

She lingered over a copy of BLOOD DEBT, Scoop's latest effort. It had a picture of him on the inside cover. How proud he would be if he ever made it to hardback!

She glanced over at the real Scoop, hoisting his duffel out to the car. Though it was black and white, she almost preferred the picture.

They drove through the night, stopping twice to fill up on black coffee and burgers. Actually, Scoop filled up, Andromeda slept. She had always needed much more sleep than Scoop.

Once she awoke to blue lights flashing across the windshield. They hurt her eyes. A tall cop in a motorcycle helmet was leaning in through the window to talk to Scoop.

"Yew know how fast you were goin', sir?"

"Eighty, eighty-five, around there. Ay, you got a radar gun on that bike, there's no point in denyin' it. What's the damage?"

Andromeda looked at the cop's face, half-hidden by dark sunglasses. At night? she thought.

"Ah only wear 'em to cut the glare. From the flashers," he said, pointing to his motorcycle a few yards away.

"Listen, mate, just gimme the ticket and let me get goin', orright? I got a sick woman in the car here."

"Well, here you are, then. That's a hundred and sixty dollar," the cop said.

"For a speeding ticket? I didn't bloody kill anyone! " Scoop exclaimed.

"Gettin' tough on speeders, sir. Yew wanna contest it, there's a court date at the bottom."

"That's all my bleedin' cash!"

"Well, sir, you don't pay me anyhow. But in the future, you might wanna be a sight more careful out here. Yuh never know where we'll be waitin'," said the cop with a grin.

His nameplate read COFFEY.

"Officer Coffey," Andromeda said sleepily, "can you turn off your lights? They're in my eyes ..."

Coffey darted over and killed the lights. He moved with surprising speed for a big man.

"Anythin' else, ma'am?"

"Oh," she laughed, "don't call me 'ma'am.' My name's Andromeda."

"Right pleased to meet yuh, Miss Andromeda. Yew all take care now," he said, and gave her a two-finger salute off the visor of his helmet. Then he got on his bike and roared away.

"What was all that about, then?" Scoop demanded.

"Oh, hush, Scoop. He forgot about the ticket, didn't he?"

* * *

Tom Mayfair had known Scoop Smythe socially for several years, or as Mayfair reckoned time, several semesters. The transplanted Londoner, wanting to write horror stories, had audited one of Mayfair's classes at Duke, the only school in the country with an accredited department of parapsychology. Mayfair didn't count the University of California, which had awarded degrees in magic and demonology in the past, but whose requirements were so flexible as to allow one to major in virtually anything. They'd be the first to admit that their faculty weren't serious students of the paranormal.

Frauds were endemic in Mayfair's field, more so than in any department on campus except, perhaps, English literature. Despite the tradition, started by J.B Rhine, of an experimental, quantitative approach to psychic phenomena, parapsych was still a fertile ground for the kind of charlatans that have always preyed on the credulous, the romantic, the dreamers with dusty pocketbooks full of loose change.

Accordingly, he was reluctant to commit himself when Scoop and Andromeda phoned one August morning. His summer schedule was light, but scattered thoughout the day, so he arranged to meet them for dinner at a steakhouse in one of the local malls. Only after he hung up the phone did he remember that payday was tomorrow, and his ready cash amounted to the price of a Big Mac.

He did, however, bring a deck of Rhine cards in his pocket. Blank on one side, they bore a simple symbol on the other, either a star, a square, a circle, three wavy lines, or a cross. After ordering their drinks (Mayfair ostentateously ordered water, hoping it would ease the sting when he stuck Scoop with the check), he spread them on the placemat in front of him.

"I hold a card facing me, so you can't see the marked side. I concentrate on the symbol; you try to read my mind and see the image of the card there, and tell me what it is. A simple telepathy test. There are five cards of each suit, twenty-five cards in all. Twenty percent right is average; that's five out of twenty-five, what you would get if you guessed randomly, or guessed the same thing each time. A score of fifty percent or higher isn't significant on one run; but if you guess a thousand cards, and still get fifty percent right, that starts to indicate something's happening."

Scoop sipped his Bloody Mary, his cigarette smoldering in his off-hand.

"Look 'ere, Tom, why couldn't it be a clairvoyance test, too? I mean, if you can see the other side of the card, you could call it off that way, couldn't you?"

"Yes, I suppose so. The ideal would be to have the sender -- that's me -- imagine the card in his mind, without looking at a physical card at all. Clairvoyance wouldn't help you much in that case. But we don't do it that way at Duke. There's no objective proof that the sender is reporting what actually happens. People do lie, you know."

Scoop snorted smoke through his nose.

"Ay, you don't 'ave to tell an old newsman that, Tom. I used to lie for a livin', till I took up novel-writin'."

"Isn't that lying for a living, in a way?"

"Dr. Mayfair," Andromeda broke in, "I can see you're anxious to get on with the test. Why don't we run through a deck or two of your cards before our dinner gets here? Then we can enjoy the rest of the evening."

Mayfair shrugged. "Suits me."

He shuffled the cards in front of him. Cutting the deck, he brought a card up to eye level. A square looked back at him.

"Square," Andromeda said.

Mayfair looked startled.

"Oops, sorry. I'm supposed to wait until you say, 'go.' Shall we begin again?"

"No, that's all right," Mayfair said. He made a mark on his notepad. "That's one 'hit.' I'll put the used card down in front of me, here, and draw another. Ready?"

"Ready."

"Go!"

"Star."

"Okay --" he made another tic mark. "Go!"

"Circle."

"Go!"

"Circle."

"Go!"

"Wavy lines."

"Go!"

"Star."

"Go!"

"Square again."

"Go!"

"Plus sign."

"We call that a cross. Go!"

"Cross. Thank you, doctor."

"You don't have to call me doctor. You're nine for nine. Go!"

"Square."

A waiter brought salads and a platter of bread. Mayfair flicked through the cards, ignoring his food. Scoop ate his salad while he shuffled and re-dealt.

By the time the steaks came, Mayfair was flicking the cards in front of his eyes for a split-second, hearing Andromeda's answer and flicking the next one. After every set, he made a forest of tic marks on his pad.

"Gettin' the hang of it, luv?" Scoop inquired innocently.

"I'm getting a little bored, actually," Andromeda admitted. "But Dr. Mayfair's excited enough for all three of us!"

Mayfair gathered the Rhine cards in his large hands.

"Three hundred for three hundred. Impossible!"

He craned his neck backwards, looking over the top of the booth.

"What's up, mate?" Scoop said.

"I'm looking for a mirror, or a shiny surface behind me," said Mayfair. "Nobody gets a hundred percent. Well, they do, but there's always some trick."

"Are you calling me dishonest, Mr. Mayfair?" Andromeda said.

"My dear, I hardly know you. But knowing you are a friend of Scoop's, it would take a very great deal for me to believe you were trustworthy."

"But you do," she demurred.

She speared a morsel of steak, popping it into her impish smile.

"Yes, I do," he admitted. "But you could tell that from any number of subtle cues. We don't need telepathy as an explanation."

"Come on, Tom," Scoop jibed. "What clues would those be?

"I don't know," said Mayfair testily. "I'm not a woman and I'm not a diplomat. I'm not very subtle, Scoop, okay? But I know a lot of people can read moods. I don't have to know how they do it to see that they can, in fact, do it."

"Geez, orright, mate. Get a grip on y'self. Waiter!"

"Sir?" said the young man, who had been watching the card game, or maybe Andromeda, with fascination.

"Get the professor a bourbon and water. An' not so much water, unnerstand?"

"Yes, sir." The young man departed.

"Did you get the waiter's name?" Andromeda asked him.

"Eh? Not me, luv. You're the mind reader."

"I thought not," she said.

It was on his name tag, she thought.

I didn't notice.

I'm not surprised.

What, and you did notice? I'm a bit surprised myself. What was his name, then?

Alex. Alexander Oldford.

You didn't read that. You're reading his mind right now. Aren't you?

Well, what of it? His tag only had the first name.

Why are you so interested in the boy's bloody name?

You should be able to figure that out, Scoop.

"Excuse me, Tom. What was that?" said Scoop, suddenly aware Mayfair was speaking.

"I said we might want to repeat the experiment under controlled conditions. In the lab."

"What, tonight? You've a wild idea of fun, Tom."

Andromeda spared Scoop a sideways glance, then turned her attention full on Mayfair. He blinked.

"I think it'd be fun, Doctor. When shall we begin?"

"Well," said Mayfair, watching Scoop bristle, "tonight's probably not a good idea. We may not be dealing with anything reproducible here, after all. But I'm free this weekend, if you'd like to stay a few days ..."

A policeman in full uniform threaded the tables to stand beside Mayfair. He wore dark sunglasses and held a bright white helmet in his left hand. His right hand rested on a jingling belt supporting baton, pistol, tear gas, handcuffs and a radio, among other things.

His silver nameplate read COFFEY.

"Oh, my God," breathed Andromeda.

"S'ere a problem, constable?" Scoop wanted to know.

Scoop, it's him, Andromeda thought frantically. The man with the ticket.

"Ay, look 'ere, mate. We're just finishin' supper. If you've changed your mind about givin' us a ticket, you're too bloody late, ay?"

The cop looked down on Scoop as though he were a disease. He took the sunglasses off and stared with eyes sunken into gristly pits.

"Who you think you're talking tuh, boy?" Coffey said, in a quiet tone of menace. "You tellin' me whut tuh do?"

"Hey, I know the law, copper. Now peel off before I --"

"Before you whut? Sounds like menacing threats tuh me," Coffey rejoindered. "You know there's a law against thet in this state?"

His radio squawked loudly, like static turned up to top volume.

"Unit Sixty-One, call the station," came a female voice that sounded irked. "Come on, Mickey, where you at?"

Coffey silenced the radio by twisting a button on top.

"Aren't you going to answer that?" Andromeda wanted to know.

"You think I should?" Coffey said.

"Uh ... oh, my," said Andromeda. Coffey stood waiting for her next words.

"No, not just yet," she conceded. "Are you here to give us a ticket?"

"No, ma'am. Just thought this jasper might be botherin' yuh." He pointed at Scoop with a gloved forefinger.

"Not at all. He's with me," Andromeda assured him.

"Well, then, d'yuh need an escort on your way home? Cain't be too careful these days, ma'am."

"Naw, we don't need no bleedin' escort. Piss off," said Scoop, by now thoroughly riled.

"Hang on there, Scoop," said Mayfair, putting a hand on his arm. "Don't get yourself in trouble."

"No trouble, sir," said Coffey to Mayfair. "This gentleman is with Miss Andromeda here. In my book, that makes him all right. Ain't that right, sir?"

Scoop wasn't sure the 'sir' was addressed to him, but what the hell.

"That's right, mate."

An idea struck him.

"Hey, Coffey. Gimme your gun."

"Scoop!" said Mayfair.

But Coffey just looked thoughtful. He chewed his lip a second.

"Miss Andromeda? You think I should?"

"Scoop, what do you want his gun for?" Andromeda said.

It's an experiment, luv, he thought. I'll give it right back.

Okay, then.

Aloud she said, "Go ahead, officer. It's all right."

Coffey unsnapped his holster strap and handed the heavy revolver to Scoop, butt first. As soon as Scoop took it, Coffey let go.

The heavy gun fell forward, hitting the table. The waiter, bringing Mayfair's bourbon, stopped dead in his tracks.

Coffey handed Scoop three round objects, like clusters of brassy bullets.

"These here are your speed-loaders," Coffey explained. "Then I got twelve loose on the belt," he said, and began to strip the shells out of his belt loops.

"Stop!" said Andromeda. Coffey froze like a statue.

Scoop put the gun gingerly in the exact center of the table, facing away from everyone.

"Andromeda," he said slowly, while Coffey stood there, "you're going to make us very rich."

"Radical, man!" said the waiter, looking at the stock-still policeman. "How'd you pull that off?"

Naturally they had to bring him along too. He agreed to come, once Andromeda asked him, but first Scoop wanted him to bring along a bottle of bourbon. And an extra steak, too.

* * *

Andromeda scored five hundred for five hundred in Mayfair's testing cubicle. Coffey and Alex Oldford, the waiter, played cards with Scoop, losing heavily.

"Well!" said Mayfair, getting up from the table to stretch his back. "I think we're on to something here, all right. Certainly worth further study."

"But, Doctor, what about -- well -- them?" Andromeda said, pointing to the corner where the men played cards.

"Yes, that is strange. It's not beyond possibility that Officer Coffey is a strong receiver. Your signals may be so strong in his mind as to override his free will."

"Oh, no!"

"Don't worry; he seems to have free will except where you're concerned. I wonder if -- hmm!"

If Coffey's psi talent was enhanced by his encounter with me? Andromeda sent.

"Yes, that's just what I was -- stop that!"

"Why? What's the matter with sending instead of talking?"

"I don't know. It may be that everyone you send to is -- affected, somehow. "

"You mean 'damaged', don't you, Doctor?" she said quietly.

"I have to keep a clear head," he insisted. "I'm sorry."

"But I don't want them to hear that they might be affected," she said even more quietly. "Doctor --"

"Tom."

"Tom, what can we do? For them, I mean?"

Mayfair put his chin in his hand.

"Hmm. That's a very good question, and one I'm not qualified to answer. Not that I'm sure who is -- we'll need to find out what's happened to them, first. If they've been hypnotized, or suffered brain damage -- sorry! -- if their brains have been altered, or if they've had a sort of instant affective disorder imposed on their psychological make-up. But whatever we find, I'm neither a hypnotist, a brain surgeon, nor a psychiatrist. We're going to have to call in help."

Andromeda composed herself and sent a thought to Scoop.

Scoop!

Ay, here I am, darling. You don't have to shout.

Sorry. Look, do we want to keep this a secret, or what? I thought I noticed some intention of keeping telepathy as our private monopoly, when I was in your mind last time.

Christ, you don't miss much, do you?

I'm sorry. I didn't mean to pry. But it was right there in the open!

Orright, no harm done. Let's see -- yeah, I'd like to play it close to the vest for a while, if that's what you mean. Let's make a little hay with your talent before the science johnnies get hold of us.

Of me, you mean.

Of us. We're in this together, luv.

I don't know just how you mean that, but never mind. Dr. Mayfair wants to bring in some specialists to check the boys -- Coffey and Alex.

Thinks they've cracked up, does he?

They might be in trouble, Scoop! You might, too, if everyone I send to develops -- problems. I think we'd better do it.

Well, if you're that sold on the idea, I guess we could take the risk. Only--

What?

You want to watch this guy Mayfair, Andi. Like as not he'll bring half the bloody campus in on this deal.

Andromeda faced Mayfair with a smile. The whole exchange had taken less than a second.

"Tom, anyone you want to bring in is all right with Scoop and me."

"Scoop and you?" Mayfair said, but he didn't press.

In his mind was, Is this guy your keeper, or what?

Andromeda blushed. She didn't think she had it in her to get mad.

* * *

By Saturday Mayfair had assembled everyone he wanted.

There was Kurt Vollert, known by his stage name as the Amazing Ishkatar and one of the keenest skeptics of the age. Ishkatar had posted a $5,000 reward for anyone displaying psychic powers in the laboratory, and was among the founding members of PSICOP; the acronym stood for Professionals Scientifically Investigating Claims Of the Paranormal, but its literal meaning was also true: they acted as psi-cops, whistleblowers, policing the psychic community. Mayfair was glad they existed, even if the professional suspicion with which they greeted genuine psychic researchers, like himself, was a little grating.

Also present was J.M.H. Armistead, the grand old man of Duke's comparative religions circle. An anthrobotanist by training, contemporary of Campbell and follower of Frazer, Armistead had pioneered the theory that each culture found and rejected drugs that reinforced their occult traditions. What hair he possessed was snow-white, and the toll of years was removing what little remained, but the mind underneath that snowy pate was a vast cardfile of facts on cultures all over the planet.

Armistead leaned on his chair arm to get closer to Rowena Moran, a scholarship student from the hills of West Virginia. Petite and pretty, with hair as white as Doc Armistead's and bronze-tinted skin as tanned as Coffey's weatherbeaten hide, she wore black or gray ankle-length dresses even at the height of the Carolina summer and boots that buttoned up the sides. Rowena had been offered a teaching fellowship on the strength of her knowledge of witchcraft, both as historically practiced and as it survived in the folk beliefs of the Kanawha Valley. But she had declined, saying she couldn't be a teacher until she'd learned all she came to learn.

Mayfair shook his head. That was the first time any teaching assistant ever said that!

Whatever Rowena was saying brought a frown to the face of the Reverend J. Gordon Gill, but it was a frown of concentration, not disapproval. Gill, a Chapel Hill minister, had a wide, strong-jawed Puritan face whose natural lines of repose resembled a hangman's. He seemed most dour and reproachful when he was most interested in something. Mayfair wasn't sure what Gill would look like if he actually condemned something; he didn't think, in the few years Gill had been around, he had ever seen him unhappy.

Gill knew his scriptures and was a jackleg psychotherapist of impressive proportions. He didn't have to agree with his patients' religion, or anything else; part of the secret of his success with them, Mayfair guessed, was that he thought of the people he counseled not as patients, but as troubled friends.

Behind him, Galena Terechkova distributed xeroxed abstracts now that the coffee was served. An exchange student from the Kiev in the fledgling Ukrainian nation, Galena was used to working at night and studying by day, then doing the housework for her mother and brothers. Mayfair had accepted her as a teaching assistant with reservations, but she seemed to be avoiding the twin pitfalls of the workaholic, perfectionism and burnout. Galena was related to the first woman into space, a Russian, and was an immense help in accessing the voluminous archives on psychic research conducted by the USSR in the Sixties and Seventies. Many of their protocols belonged to the Soviet space program, whose filing methods were as arcane as any of Doc Armistead's Celtic myth-cycles or Caribbean drug rituals. And many of the Soviet findings were as intensely tantalyzing as the eternal life Gill believed in, at least to Mayfair's eyes.

Ranged along the long, narrow table with Coffey, Scoop, Alex Oldford and Andromeda, they filled the seminar room nearly to bursting. A blackboard was divided squarely in half by Gill's massive, football-trained shoulders. Mayfair decided to use the overhead projector instead.

"You've all got copies of my results in your hands," he said. Over Scoop's objections, he had left out any mention of Coffey and Oldford's experiences, confining himself to the numerical raw scores of his Rhine tests, which were, of course, all 100%.

"What I'd like is suggestions on how to proceed next," he added. "I think we can see further Rhine card testing would be superfluous?"

"That depends on the surrounding conditions," said Ishkatar. "For example, I have a deck of playing cards in my pocket, young lady. Can you tell me which card is on top?"

"Naturally not," Andromeda retorted, "since you yourself don't know."

"Ah," said Ishkatar. "All right, I'm looking at the top card."

He hunched down under the table, bringing a card out of his inner coat pocket.

"That wasn't the top card," Andromeda replied. "It was the bottom."

Ishkatar looked nonplussed.

"Well, what was it?" Gill demanded.

"The trey of clubs."

Gill looked pointed at Ishkatar.

"She's right," the magician confessed. He displayed the card. "It was on the bottom, too. I thought that bit of misdirection would shed some light on the young lady's methods."

"Seems t'me it is doing that," Rowena commented. "She is indeed having such powers she claims to have."

"That's a lot to assume from one card trick," Ishkatar demurred.

"But, suh, that is precisely the issue," said J.M.H. Armistead distinctly above the murmur of the others. "Miss Fallon has performed not one card trick, but hundreds, if Dr. Mayfair is to be believed. And knowing his reputation," he said with a bow toward Mayfair's end of the table, "I see no reason why we should not believe what he says. On the issue of playing cards, at least, I would say Miss Fallon's ability is established beyond a reasonable doubt."

"The question is, how does it work?" Gill rumbled.

"The question is, what do we do with it?" Scoop replied.

"The question is, where did it come from?" Andromeda said, bringing a sudden hush to the table. "And why do I have this power now, and not a week ago? What happened to me?"

She looked around the table for an answer.

"Miss Fallon," Dr. Armistead said after a pause, "that is what we mean to discover. Do I understand correctly that you and Mr. Smythe have been traveling together for the last few weeks?"

"Vacationing ..." she said. "Yes."

"And at any time, did you seem to understand Mr. Smythe's thoughts, or apprehend his meaning before he acted?" Armistead went on.

"No ... I just all of a sudden knew."

"When was this?"

"Sunday night. We were at a bar in Richmond."

"Richmond, Virginia?"

"Of course."

"Was that the very first time you had an unusual feeling?"

"Yes ... wait a minute, no, it wasn't. I remember being scared by the bed and breakfast in Tidewater ... it terrified me. That was Sunday morning."

Rowena took up the questioning.

"The house gave you terror, Miss Fallon? You're sure it was the house, and not someone in it?"

"Yes -- isn't that what I said?"

Rowena nodded, as if a suspicion of hers was confirmed.

"And Mr. Smythe did not percieve anything out of the ordinary?" Dr. Armistead asked.

"No. He slept like a log."

"I don't go in for all this spooky stuff," Scoop added pointedly.

"Hunh!" said Ishkatar. "The stuff you write, that's hard to believe."

"I don't believe the bloody stuff, mate. I just write it! D'you think you're really doin' magic when you saw some tart in half?"

Ishkatar folded his arms and favored Scoop with a sour look. Scoop shot him the finger and lit a cigarette.

"So whatever it was," continued Armistead implacably, "whatever event awakened your psychic power, or bestowed it upon you, was an event you experienced, but Mr. Smythe did not."

Gill nodded. "Makes sense," he said. Mayfair took notes on a blue legal pad.

"What did you do at this bed and breakfast that Mr. Smythe did not do?" Armistead wanted to know.

"I bought a setting for this," she said, holding up the lenticular green stone on its silver chain. "It cost quite a bit, but they did such excellent work .."

"This was in the hotel?" Mayfair interjected.

"No, the little town nearby. I don't remember the name," she said helplessly.

"We can look that up, my dear," said Mayfair.

"What stone is that? Do you know?" said Rowena, squinting across the table.

"No. It's not an emerald, I know that."

"May I see it for a moment, milady?" Rowena asked with exaggerated respect.

"Sure," said Andromeda and handed it over.

Rowena's small brown hand closed over the little stone tenderly. Her great eyes shot open and she sat bolt upright.

"Rowena!" said Gill in alarm.

"Nothing is harming me," she said quickly. "Swift, now, milady, tell me -- what is Doctor Armistead thinking about right now?"

Andromeda concentrated. She felt suddenly foolish, as if she'd left her credit card at home.

"I don't know," she said. "I have no idea. It's gone."

"He is thinking of the veneration shown in Siam for bits of malachite," Rowena intoned. "They are said to be the fragments of the bones of the Serpent, whose flesh is the world and whose bones hold up the sky."

"May I ask how you heard of this Siamese belief?" Armistead asked.

"It is written in letters of fire," Rowena said slowly. "Milady, your power is not gone. It is here. Here, in this stone!"

She opened her hand. The green crystal flashed in the fluorescent light.

"This is the key that unlocks the mind to you, milady. It is not mine," she said. She handed it back to Andromeda.

The room exploded in babble. Only Coffey and Scoop were quiet.

Gill stood up, crowding the table back, and waved his great arms for silence.

"Miss Fallon," he said, "where did you get that stone?"

"From the Woolsey house," she said. "In the back, where it's roped off."

"Are there more?"

"I don't know."

Armistead breathed a deep sigh. Mayfair held up his pad.

"Well, we'd better get down every scrap of information we can about what happened and how that stone works," he said. "And then, when that's done, we can go see if there are any more."

The room broke up into excited conversations.

"Wonderful," said Scoop, stubbing out his smoke. "There goes the exclusive!"

Chapter Two

"A Geiger Counter is Like a Gun"

Andromeda didn't have time to get tired of one set of tests before someone else would devise another set.

It took until late Tuesday night to establish that she could read anything that was firmly fixed in someone's mind, such as an image they were looking at. She had trouble with more abstract concepts, such as the theme of Dr. Armistead's next monograph, which turned out to be far less concretely fixed in his mind than he thought it was. And she could not see the backs of cards, through walls, or around corners.

She could, however, read minds through walls and around corners. Mayfair tried setting up a Faraday cage around her: a meshwork of charged wires that would block all electromagnetic transmission. Andromeda read through it as easily as an open door.

Moreover, sometimes when she tried especially hard, the cards would jiggle slightly, as though brushed by a wind.

"The PET scan and MRI show unprecedented levels of brain activity," Mayfair told the team at the end the fourth week. "It peaks when she uses the power, but doesn't fade away altogether when she's not. I'd like to take a PET scan every day for a while to see if there's any long-term change."

"You mean she's using parts of her brain thet no one else does?" Coffey wanted to know.

"Not exactly," Mayfair said. "We used to think that because you could take a chunk out of a man's brain and not impair his thinking in the slightest, that there were parts of the brain that didn't do anything. Now we know that memories and other higher functions are more like holograms; they're stored in many locations, as a function of the relations between constituent elements of the brain. From a fragment of a hologram, you can reconstruct the original image; so too with consciousness.
"No, what Andromeda is doing is creating more and denser interconnections between diverse parts of her brain. More than anyone ever has, except perhaps some unfortunates addicted to amphetamines. It's like the way a baby learns: more and more connections are made between experiences, until the whole becomes more than the sum of the parts and a new ability appears where none was before. It's how we learn to walk, to talk, and eventually to think."

"So she's growing up." Rowena stated flatly.

"If she is, we're all still children," Mayfair replied. "As I said, no one sustains this depth and complexity of brain activity for long. Not that I've ever heard of."

"Uri Geller lasted for years!" Alex interjected.

"Uri Geller was a fake," Ishkatar said. "He used the same carny tricks over and over. I doubt his mind was strained much."

"Yeah, but, Doc," said Alex, "when kids learn, they learn slowly. Bit by bit."

"Sure. Your point being?"

"She doesn't know how the stone works or what she's doing. And she's reading minds. What's she gonna be doing when she gets GOOD at it?"

* * *

Mayfair was also eager for Rowena to experiment with the stone, but she held back. Unless Andromeda specifically wanted to give away her magic token, Rowena said, she wouldn't ask for it.

"She's willing to go along," said Mayfair in exasperation. "Ask her! She'll tell you."

"Willin' to go along is not the same as wanting to," was all Rowena said.

"Of course it is. It amounts to the same thing in the end."

"I am not in such a hurry to get to the end as thee," Rowena said.

"What does that mean? I'm not even sure what the hell that means," Mayfair said. "Are you afraid to touch it? Is that it?"

To his surprise, Rowena nodded gravely.

"Yes I am, Doctor. If you had any wit about the unknown, you'd fear it too."

Mayfair kept his face appropriately respectful, but inside he was smiling. The unknown was merely a part of the world he hadn't reached yet with his charts and graphs and instruments.

* * *

The lab day provided another piece of data: Andromeda could read Dr. Armistead's mind from his office across the sprawling campus, and she could pick up Scoop where he was hunting for paperbacks in the strip malls in Durham, fifty miles away.

"As far as I can measure, your thoughts seem to propagate at infinite speed, my dear," he told Andromeda during a break. "Now, it could just be the speed of light, which to our instruments is also effectively infinite. If we had a radio, we could perhaps measure it closer, but the baseline would have to be -- oh! From here to the moon, at least. Pity there's no one on the moon right now. We could find out what they're thinking."

Andromeda thought for a moment.

"You're right," she said. "There isn't anyone up there."

Mayfair looked out the window. No moon.

"Which way are you looking, Andromeda? The moon would be, let me see, um ..."

He consulted a map with time zones, which didn't help much.

"No one way, Tom," she answered easily. "I'm just tuning out all the chatter and looking beyond the Earth. It's easy; here it's noisy as a catfight, and then just a little distance further -- zap! Quiet as a mouse."

"How much further?" Mayfair wanted to know.

"I don't really know," she confessed. "There's no way to judge distance. Thoughts don't get quieter or less distinct the further off they are, you know."

"They don't -- what an idiot I am! That's data, too!"

He commenced to scribble furiously on his blue legal pad. Andromeda sighed.

After dinner, the participants in Mayfair's study group gathered in the seminar room again. Oldford and Coffey were still there, having hung around for two days now. Andromeda was worried they would lose their jobs.

"Well, then, dammit, Andi," said Scoop when she raised the subject, "just tell 'em to go back to their jobs!"

Andromeda called the two men over with Scoop while the others presented their findings.

"Listen, boys," she said confidentially. "Will you get in trouble if you go back to your jobs?"

"Waiters come and go all the time," said Alex Oldford. "They expect it. I'm probably fired, but hell, I'll just get another gig somewhere else. People gotta eat and someone's gotta feed 'em. I'll be all right."

"Wonderful," she said with relief. "And you, Officer?"

"My people probably think ah'm lyin' dead in some woods somewhere," he replied immediately. "Ah ain't checked in for two days an' I'm supposed to be on duty raght now. Onliest way they can figure I'd be out of touch thet long is I was dead or wounded. An' they'd have checked all a the hospitals fust thing. No, if I turn up without a hole in mah head or something, I'm goan be in a world a trouble. They'll have me up on charges."

"Oh, no." Andromeda groaned, her hand on her brow. "There's no way out?"

Coffey considered, chewing his lip.

"Ah could just give 'em back all a my gear, lock it in the bike's saddlebox and mail 'em the key. Long's Ah doan ever use my name or social s'curity numbah again, why, I doan think they'll be able tuh find me. 'Course I'll have to move out the state. Where'd you say you was from again, Miss Andromeda?"

"Boston," she said helplessly. Coffey grinned.

"Why, thet's fine! They won't be lookin' for me way up there. When you fixin' tuh head North again?"

"Scoooop!" said Andromeda desperately. "We've got a real problem here!"

"I know, luv. Hey, Coffey. Spose the lady says to go to California an' settle down. Would ya do it?"

"Sure 'nuff," replied the trooper seriously. "Whereabouts in California?"

"Hell and damnation," Scoop said earnestly. "This boy's hooked."

"Who you callin' a boy?" Coffey huffed.

"It's all right, Officer. Settle down," Andromeda said.

Coffey brought over a chair and sat.

"Damn," said Alex Oldford. "I wish I could get a cop to eat out of my hand that way."

"You watch your mouth," Coffey said instantly. "I swear, the younger generation --"

"Officer," said Andromeda, shushing him with her hands.

"Yes-ma'am." He subsided at once.

No one had anything to say after that. Mayfair's voice broke in from the other side of the room.

"What I'm saying is that the speed of thought appears to be very high. There was no perceptible lag in transmission --"

"Which you weren't set up to test," Ishkatar put in.

"-- nor any subjective difficulty in picking up thoughts over a large distance. To me, this says thought may not be propagated in an inverse-square ratio. It may not be a form of radiant energy."

"Well, you already know that," Reverend Gill said reasonably. "She worked right through that Faraday cage."

"That's not precisely what I mean," Mayfair said. "Dr. Armistead, can you help me out here?"

"I regret, Dr. Mayfair, that I am not a scientist. I had some physics in college, quite some years ago, but they tell me that's all ancient history now. All I recall is that light spreads out in a sphere from its origin," said Armistead, gesturing with his hands, "so the further way you are, the less light falls on you. And it decreases pretty quick with distance, as I recall."

"That's right," Mayfair picked up. "All radiant energy works that way -- light, heat, radio waves. And so far as we can tell, gravity works that way too, am I right?"

Ishkatar nodded. "Far as I know."

"Now, Andromeda reports thought doesn't get weaker with distance. If true, that would mean it isn't a radiant form of energy, but something else altogether. Maybe it's like a laser, confined to a single direction with very little signal loss."

"Or like a telephone," Gill suggested. "It might be she has to create a carrier between here and there, and the signal just flows along the beam. I remind you she can't do anything without that crystal. Maybe it takes the place of the phone in the circuit."

"Then what, in your analogy, is the wire made of?" Armistead asked. "It cannot be made of energy, or Dr. Mayfair's ingenious cage would have disrupted it."

"Gravity, maybe?" said Mayfair, shrugging.

"But you said gravity decreases with distance," Gill reminded him.

"Gentlemen, I don't know," Mayfair confessed. "Perhaps it's some fifth force we don't even know how to detect."

Gill sketched on the blackboard. "No drop-off after fifty miles ... what about a hundred miles? Or a thousand?"

"We haven't devised any experiments to cover that yet."

"I see no insuperable difficulty. Just put Scoop on a plane with a cellular phone and have him read numbers to us from the financial page. We'll have Andromeda in another room reading his mind. If the two messages come in at the same time, thought moves at the speed of light. If thought comes in slower, we can get an idea of how much slower. And if it comes in faster, why, we ought to be prepared for that possibility, too."

"Bunkum," said Ishkatar flatly. "Nothing goes faster than light."

"Is impossible," Galena agreed. "Law of nature."

"But can we be sure the laws of nature are the same for all phenomena?" Gill countered. "Do light and sound move at the same speed, act in the same way? Will we confidently assert that because light cannot penetrate a wall, a radio wave cannot? Analogy is only useful so far, sirs, and I think you are assuming far too much. All we know is what we have proved."

Ishkatar looked at Gill strangely.

"That's a pretty secular-humanist thing for you to say, Reverend," he said. "All we know is what we see? What about revealed truth?"

"In this instance, there is no revealed truth," Gill shot back. "The Bible says nothing about the speed of thought waves."

"You're sure about that?" Mayfair jibed.

"I am," said Gill with bottomless confidence. "Let me say one thing more. I don't see why you should be surprised at my embrace of scientific method, Mr. Ishkatar. God has provided us with two windows into His mind: the Word and the World. We interpret the Word with scholarship, rhetoric, a knowledge of the cultures that recieved it," he said with a bow to Armistead, "and direct inspiration. We interpret the World according to the time-tested methods of scientific rigor. It is the only rational way to look at the physical creations of the Lord. Otherwise, we deny the world, which is surely a graver affront to Him than any I can conceive of coming from the laboratory."

Armistead nodded to Gill in a congratulatory fashion. Rowena was smiling at Gill, a hand on his arm. Even Ishkatar seemed reluctant to bring up his next point.

"And how about when the Word disagrees with science?" he said.

"It cannot. When such a contradiction arises, it is the fault of our understanding of the Word, or a hasty conclusion by scientists."

Mayfair straightened his blue legal pad on the table.

"Mm-hmm. Well, I think that's an excellent experiment, and one we should undertake as soon as possible. I don't know if we have the resources for a round-the-world plane ticket, though. Is there anything else we can do on a shoestring while we raise funds for Rev. Gill's experiment?"

"Of course there is," said Ishkatar.

"What is your proposal, suh?" Armistead prompted.

"Let me hold the stone for a minute."

Rowena leaned over the table to see past Gill's bulk.

"You are letting the thirst for power tempt thee, sir," she cautioned.

"Buswah. I want to see for myself this isn't some kinda elaborate gag," he said in his flat Jersey accent. "How do I know you didn't cook this up between yourselves? You say," he said, pointing at Rowena, "you can read minds when you touch this thing. Okay, touch me with it. Prove what you say."

"Thou knowest not the temptations of --" Rowena began, visibly upset.

"Tie a string to it," Ishkatar said sourly. "If I start going gaga, yank it outta my hand. Mr. Gill can take care of that, am I right?"

Gill looked down at Ishkatar, whose five feet seven inches topped the scales at a neat one-thirty. He nodded.

"I figure maybe I could give it a try," he said modestly.

"You'd take my arm off if you felt like it," Ishkatar said. "Now how about it? Put up or shut up."

Mayfair swiveled his chair to face Andromeda and the others.

"It's up to you, my dear," he said formally. "After all, the stone is your property, no one else's. I assume Ishkatar will only hold it for a minute?"

"Sixty seconds," Ishkatar confirmed. "Thirty, if you want."

"Why, surely, Doctor," she said, handing the pendant over. "In fact, I wouldn't mind if everybody held it for a little while. I surely don't want anyone thinking I'm hoaxing them."

"I'd like to hold it," said Alex Oldford at once. "How about you, Officer?"

"Naw. Unless you want me too, ma'am --"

"That won't be necessary, luv," said Scoop quickly. "I'm sure Ishkatar's the only skeptic 'ere, what?"

Mayfair looked around the table.

"Yes, that might be best. Let's just take it one step at a time," he said. Andromeda slipped the silver chain over her head and handed it to Mayfair. Holding the chain so that the stone came nowhere near his body, Mayfair passed it to Ishkatar.

Ishkatar placed his hand over the stone, palm down, and pressed it to the tabletop. There he held it, eyes closed tightly, for the space of a dozen heartbeats.

Suddenly he slapped the tabletop and jerked his hand away.

"Jesus, Mary an' Joseph!" he said. "That thing's pure dynamite!"

"Convinced?" said Scoop dryly.

Ishkatar shook his head to clear it.

"And how! Tom, you've gotta figure out how it does that thing."

Mayfair grimaced.

"We haven't even begun to explore the physical end of it, Ishkatar. I was hoping one of you could suggest a medical man who would go along with us; I can't think of one."

"Medical doctors tend to be skeptical about psi phenomena," Galena observed. "In this country, too, it is."

"I do not think there is a doctor in Chapel Hill I would trust with this enterprise," said Dr. Armistead. "But surely, Dr. Mayfair, this is all beside the point."

"In what way?"

"We have but the single stone to study, which Miss Fallon is understandably reluctant to relinquish. But in the course of a reasonable investigation, we will have to examine its composition in detail."

"I don't mind giving it up for a couple of days," said Andromeda helpfully.

"I think you underrate the inconvenience we intend to your property," said Armistead with a twinkle in his eye. "We will of necessity have to chip pieces off the stone; to shine lasers through it, from all angles; to grind it up into a powder for analysis; to roast it in an oven; to subject it to acids and chemicals of every description; and so on. This is but the beginning of what we mean to do to your decorative bauble, Miss Andromeda. Do you really want us to carry our fiendish plans to completion?"

"Well ... you don't have to be a mind reader to know what my answer is, Professor."

"Indeed I do not. Therefore, gentlemen, I submit that our next move should be to study the terrain where this stone was acquired. Let us determine where it came from, and if there are more, and take possession of them while we may. Then we can conduct our investigation more thoroughly, without detaining the young lady further than she may find convenient, or threatening the destruction of her property."

Armistead handed the stone back to Andromeda. Like Mayfair, he did not touch the green crystal, only the chain.

"All right --" said Mayfair. "That makes sense to me. Who should go?"

A clamor arose from every point in the room.

"I'm goin'," Ishkatar declared. "You gotta have someone along who's not up in the clouds."

"And I," said Galena. "I have course work in geology."

"That makes good sense," said Mayfair to both of them. He wrote their names on the pad. "Now, Andromeda, you'll have to come to show us where you got the stone, and what your feelings were, and, uh, you, too, Mr. Smythe, of course."

"'Course." Scoop was unimpressed.

"Must I?" Andromeda said. "I mean, with all those voices crying at me -- I'd really rather not."

"Don't worry, little lady," Coffey said. "Ah'll be raght beside yuh."

"I don't see that we need a police escort .." Mayfair began.

Coffey silenced him with a pointing finger.

"Listen, perfesser -- I'm goin'. Thet's all there is to it."

"Uh, right." Mayfair wrote down Coffey's name.

"And me, too, sir," said Alex Oldford brightly.

"Better do as he says, Tom," said Andromeda. "You know why."

Mayfair scribbled in Alex's name below Coffey's.

"Okay, that's one, two, three -- hmm, seven of us. Anybody else?"

Rowena raised her hand. Mayfair wrote her down.

"I'd like to come," said Gill. "I can be back by Sunday, right?"

"Probably. Glad to have you, Reverend." Mayfair looked up from his list.

"That's everybody except Dr. Armistead," he said, grinning. "Why don't you come too, sir?"

"I fear the trip would be more taxing on me than I could stand," said Armistead sadly. "But really, there is no reason why I need be present. It might be best if I were to stay within reach of a telephone here, to funnel you such aid as you may require. Besides, I intend to search my library for references to green stones granting telepathic powers -- this cannot be the first time in history such an accident has occurred."

"Very well, sir," said Mayfair. "That still leaves nine of us. Shall we take two cars, or maybe the department van?"

"Two cars makes it that much easier to get lost," Ishkatar put in. "Is this van in good shape?"

"I believe so," said Mayfair. "Does anyone need more than a day or so to settle his affairs?"

"Look, we dropped everything to come out here, Doc," said Ishkatar, talking with both hands. "Let's sleep up and get going first thing tomorrow morning. Okay?"

Everyone agreed except Scoop and Andromeda. Only Mayfair noticed that they were silent.

"Is that okay with you two?" he said.

Scoop narrowed his eyes in irritation.

"Orright, I guess. If everybody's got to go, I'm goin' too. An' so's Andi."

"My dear?" Mayfair pressed.

Andromeda looked up, but Scoop spoke first.

"I said she's goin', Tom. Case closed."

Mayfair looked sidelong at Scoop, his face a mask.

"Okay," he said. "See you in the morning."

* * *

The Parapsychology Department van was borrowed from the basketball team, which was not yet in session. An extra-long Ford with four rows of bench seats, it had cargo space in the back for suitcases and practice equipment.

It was also exceptionally slow. The drive through Richmond and east into the Caledon countryside took most of the day, and seemed to take longer. The sun was starting to taint the quiet rows of trees with orange when Mayfair ground to a halt outside the Woolsey plantation.

"This is it?" he demanded.

"Oh, yeah," said Scoop, lighting a cigarette. "I'd not forget this place."

A brick wall surrounded perhaps an acre of ground. Twin fifteen-inch Woolsey rifles, like huge bottle-shaped black tusks, projected over the brick gatework, dominating the road. The gate itself was gone, leaving only rust-stained pivot holes to mark its passage.

Beyond, a brick walk bristling with low weeds led up to a brick veranda that ran around the main house on both sides. The house was five stories high, patterned with narrow lintels of white sandstone between the courses of faded brick. Two wings, shaped rather like bricks themselves, stuck out twin courses of shuttered windows almost to the edge of the property. Between the outer wall and the end of the wing, dark foliage filled the gap.

Mayfair and Gill went inside to reserve rooms and get permission to wander in the back part of the house where Andromeda had found the green stone. Rowena and Andromeda got out of the van, grateful for the chance to stretch their legs and backs. Scoop stayed inside, smoking until the buildup drove Ishkatar, Oldford and Coffey out in the open. Only Galena stayed inside.

Rowena sat on the grassy bricks, stretching her booted legs out in front of her.

"Is your young man from Carolina?" she asked Andromeda. "Seems he's as loyal to the tobacco as anyone I can remember."

Andromeda smiled at the smaller girl's quaint phrase.

"My young man," she said, "is from England. And he's always smoked like that. I think it's why he needs so little sleep."

"Which must be difficult for thee, is it not?" Rowena said.

This time Andromeda's smile was deeper, and not concealed.

"Not really. Although sometimes I wonder where he is all night ..."

Rowena's laughter was high and musical. Alex Oldford poked his head around the side of the van to see what was funny.

"That's been the lot of woman ever since the race began," Rowena commented. "Be easy in your mind, Andromeda. Your young man will not stray."

Andromeda's cheek curved inward. "He'd like to."

"Mercy, so he would!" Rowena agreed. "But he'll not, I warrant. Men want to play, but they will not hurt you to get it. More's the problem when they are not seeing that it's harm they're doing. But this matter is simple enough even for a England man to see."

Now Andromeda laughed.

"You make it sound so obvious."

"Men are obvious, is't not so?" Rowena said. "And so are women," she added, "but to those who look, only."

Coffey appeared, shaking a thermos.

"Not much coffee left -- cept me, and you've heard that one already, ain't yew? Miss Andromeda, care for a cup?"

"Yes, please," she said gratefully. "I never knew the countryside could put me to sleep so fast."

Coffey poured steaming liquid into a plastic cup.

"And yew, Miss Rowena?"

"Thank you, no. I feel the night coming on, and better to relax, I think. Please do finish the pot yourself, sir."

"Raght good idee, Miss Rowena! Don't mind if I do." He held the thermos to his lips and drank for a moment.

"Hm! Not worth wasting a cup on, jest like Ah figured."

He waited till Andromeda handed her cup back, then headed back to the van, shaking the last few drops from her cup onto the bricks.

Rowena watched him go.

"Is there something between you and the policeman?" she said softly. "Is that why you worry about your young man's faith?"

"N-no," said Andromeda. "Well, yes, but nothing like that. I told him not to give us a ticket, and, well, he's been following us around ever since. It's spooky!"

"He is bound to you, Andromeda," Rowena said. She dusted her skirt and stood up.

"You have touched his heart, and that's a rare thing for a woman to do to a man. Now he follows you around, hoping you'll touch it again. I've seen it before."

"But I didn't mean it!" Andromeda protested.

"What is that to him? He does not know you were not meaning what he felt. He does not even know that is why he follows you, I am thinking. But he does."

"If I were you, Andromeda, I would tell him to forget you. Tell him through the green, through your magic amulet. And make it be so, however much he fights it. Otherwise, you will have to tell him in words, and his heart will break."

"But I can't!" Andromeda said, then softer: "I won't go messing around in his mind again. I don't know what I'm doing."

"Last time, you did not know. This time you do," Rowena insisted.

Gill came out of the house and down the steps in one bound. His brown leather shoes clicked over the brick walk to where they stood.

"We got six rooms, which is all they have. Miss Fallon, you'll be with your fiance ..."

"Reverend!" said Rowena, mock-shocked.

"And both of you will behave, that goes without saying," said Gill quickly. "I'll be in the same room with Ishkatar, and I doubt I'll get any sleep -- we've been keeping the philosophical discussions quiet on the trip up, so we didn't bore everyone, but I'm itching to get back to the problem of evil."

"And will you behave yourselves, or does that go without saying?" said Andromeda seriously. Rowena stifled a giggle.

"Uh, yes," said Gill. "I was thinking of putting Alex and Officer Coffey in the room next to yours, unless you object. What do you think?"

Andromeda thought. That could get sticky!

Okay, I'll put 'em at the other end, Gill thought back.

He nodded and walked around the two women, back to the van.

Andromeda looked at Rowena, blushing slightly.

"I did it again, Rowena."

"The Reverend can take it. He's a good man," Rowena said.

The Woolsey house was apparently run by an older couple and their grown daughter. They did not serve dinner, so Scoop and Alex took the van back to Caledon for take-out while everyone else settled in.

Coffey had changed out of his Tarheels t-shirt into a blue button-up shirt with a black tie, but he draped his black leather motorcycle jacket over the shirt, making a strange effect.

"How come you're doing the Hell's Angels thing, Mick?" said Alex.

Coffey shot him a look, but he knew by now Alex wasn't baiting him. He talked that way to everybody.

"Cover up this," he said shortly, and hiked the jacket's lower edge up. Riding about mid-stomach was his equipment belt, handcuffs, gun and all.

"Oh, hey, expecting trouble or what?" Alex said.

"Yuh never know, boy," said Coffey. "Yuh just never do know."

* * *

When Scoop got back, the nine of them gathered in a TV room on the right side of the lobby, between Scoop and Andromeda's, Ishkatar and Gill's, and Rowena's rooms. Though tight, it was more comfortably furnished and carpeted than the seminar hall at Duke. Galena passed around napkins and collected trash.

"I've been talking to the Moultons, who own the place," Mayfair said, waving a forgotten hamburger in his hand. "Apparently this Colonel Woolsey was some kind of steel baron, on a Southern scale of course. When the war came, he cast those great big guns out there for the C.S.S. Alabama. But the Yankee -- sorry, I mean the Union -- blockade was so tight, he couldn't get the guns to England, where the Alabama was built. So the first two he made just sat here, and the next few went to defend Richmond during the Seven Days. Seems most of 'em burst when they fired 'em."

"Anyway, the house had been in the family for generations, but Colonel Woolsey died at Petersburg and his sons were all dead or missing. The house fell into the hands of some Northern speculators who never saw the place, never fixed anything up, and finally sold out to someone else. The Moultons came along ten years ago and set up the b&b, but they haven't touched the main house back of the first staircase, or the left wing either. They're still the way the war left them."

"Now, they said we can go anywhere we want, but we have to be careful about how sound the walls are. The floors are pretty good, they said, except at the end of the left wing where someone left a broken window unrepaired for about ten years. The floor's all rotted out back that way."

"Miss Andromeda, you found that stone over in the main house, didn't you?" Gill said.

"Yes. I saw that staircase they mentioned, but I didn't take it. There was another one further on -- you know, this house goes back and back forever, it seems like."

"Okay. We'll all go that way come morning. Anybody have anything else to add before tomorrow?"

"I don't like it here," Andromeda said. "Something's not right."

"Yew got all a us fine strong men around you, ma'am," Coffey said. "Yew'll be all right."

"Hey, I got something," Alex Oldford said. "How 'bout we go in right now?"

"We're all tired, Alex," said Andromeda reasonably. "The house will still be here in the morning."
* * *

Thursday morning was hard to tell from Wednesday night. Clouds rolled over the flat Caledon plains and began raining well before sunrise, which of course never came.

Breakfast as served by the Moultons boasted scrambled, fried and boiled eggs, bacon, ham, fried and boiled sausage, grits, toast, corn muffins, waffles, hotcakes and syrup, washed down with mug after mug of sweet, strong coffee. After the day-long drive in the cramped van, it was exactly what Andromeda needed. It restored the spirits that the rain had stolen.

Coffey appeared for breakfast in a white shirt with leather jacket. He clinked and rattled when he sat down, causing Alex to roll his eyes.

"We're like ready for anything, man," he told his fellow breakfasters.

No one asked him for details.

* * *

Early after breakfast they started past the long staircase in the center of the main house. Coffey and Gill led off, with Andromeda close behind to point the way. Mayfair trailed, making a map on his blue legal pad while Galena swept the walls with a hand-held Geiger counter.

"Do you think that's really necessary?" Ishkatar asked her.

Galena pointed the wand of the counter at the opposite wall.

"Geiger counter is like a gun, sir," she said soberly. "You hardly ever need one, but when you do, you really need one."

"Mm."

After several twists and turns, they came to a door like a narrow closet.

"There's a spiral staircase past there," Andromeda said. "It leads into the attic. Oh, but I don't want to go in there --"

"We'll check it out, ma'am," said Coffey. He gathered up Gill by eye and opened the door, heading up.

Gill clumped down the stairs a moment later.

"We need some more light," he said. Mayfair handed him a halogen flashlight that lit up all along one side, as well as in front.

"Thanks," Gill said. He vanished noisily.

A moment later, all but Galena heard a low whistle from Gill and an exclamation from Coffey. Gill came thumping down the stairs and stuck his head out.

"Come up here. You got to see this!" he exclaimed.

Scoop took Andromeda's arm. "Nothing bad, luv. E's a man a God, in't 'e?"

Andromeda swallowed her unease and cast a thought up the stairs. She read Coffey's admiration, Gill's excitement, and nothing else. Except for a low undertone of dread, and that was constant throughout the house anyway, no worse upstairs than down.

Up they went. The lights from Gill's flashlight washed across dusty cases standing amid piles of chairs and tables. Coffey was wiping the dust from the glass facing.

"Look at this! A Browning A6 in perfect condition! And that's -- yeah, an M14E2, the light machinegun based on the old M-14. They sure didn't make many of them -- this collection's gotta be worth some serious bucks!"

"I've got more guns over here," said Gill from another cabinet. "Rifles and revolvers, looks like. Cowboy stuff."

"I didn't look at any of that before," Andromeda said. "All I saw was the furniture. The other staircase is back here."

"Hey, look!" Coffey cried. "A KPV antitank rifle!"

"Christ, Southern men an' guns, eh?" Scoop said, shouldering his way past. "Come on, then. We'll never get them outta here."

Gill paused by a standing set of armor. Behind it, spread out like the plumes of a steel peacock, were more halberds and spears than he had ever seen in one place. There seemed to be dozens.

"I'm coming," he said. "Officer, how about you?"

"Oh," said Coffey, realizing he was now the back of the line. "Coming."

He worked his way forward, moving the men out of his way with a light touch backed by the authority of a policeman, and waiting for the women to notice him with an "excuse me" and a smile. Still, he was third in line to go down the steep stairs on the other end of the attic, behind Gill and Scoop.

The walls changed from wood to brick as they reached the outer edge of the house. Then he noticed something about the mortar between the bricks; it was yellowish and coarse-seeming instead of gray and smooth. Impulsively, Coffey poked a finger into the mortar, and it crumbled like wet sand.

"We must be below ground level," he said to no one in particular. His voice rang flatly on the brick walls.

"That's right," said Andromeda. "Over here."

Coffey picked his way around barrels and squarish lumps covered by dusty sheets. The harsh white light of Gill's flashlight diffused fast against the cluttered basement walls; he wasn't sure exactly where they were until he rounded a stack of wooden crates and got the light directly in his eyes.

"Hey there," he said instead of swearing. There were ladies present, after all, one of them the incomparable Miss Andromeda.

She was leaning on a piece of furniture like a rolltop desk, but with additional shelves sticking up from the desk part. They were faced with glass, but several panes were missing.

"It was right about here," she told Gill and Scoop. "On the floor next to this desk. It didn't look like it belonged to anyone; it's not a cut stone, after all, nor even semi-precious."

"Must have belonged to someone," said Gill reasonably.

"What you mean is, you figured nobody'd miss it," Coffey added.

The minister looked at the policeman with new respect.

"Of course, that's what happened," Coffey said. "Them Moultons din't complain about their jewels being stolen, did they?"

"Not at all," said Gill. "Not that I asked them specifically."

"Well there you are, then."

Andromeda peered around at the dirt floor. Then she gasped.

"Oh, my. Scoop!"

"What? What?" Scoop cried. "What's wrong?"

"Here's some more!"

The men gathered around, even as the rest of their group caught up with them in the cluttered basement. Gill swept the light across the dirt where Andromeda had pointed. Sure enough, it glittered back deep green from a dozen separate spots.

"Strewth, there's enough for everybody!" was Scoop's first reaction.

The green glints came from a slightly higher mound of dry dirt near an overturned, round-topped table. Gill set the table upright and set the flashlight on it, turned toward the green rocks.

Mayfair ducked around Gill's back and looked where everyone's eyes were fastened. Without a blink, he pulled a ziplock bag from his pocket.

"Great," he said clearly. "Looks like there'll be plenty to experiment with. Now, if these things work the same way Andromeda's did ..."

His hand hovered over the pile of stones. Something was bothering him intensely, all of a sudden. It felt as bad as his fear of wasps, which was the worst fear he knew. It was suffocating, paralyzing, threatening to drown him. His hand trembled like a tuning fork.

But Mayfair had faced his fear of wasps, one summer, and he knew how to beat paralyzing fear. Confront the source of it, not aggressively, but firmly. The fear always went away.

So he swallowed, and firmly he reached out and took up an handful of green stones from the pile. He grinned.

Then a horrible frission swept over him, as though every nerve were tingling and going dead at once. Vertigo struck him.

He wanted things he didn't understand. He wanted to challenge that haughty fellow, Azaz, and show him up on the field of honorable combat. Not that it would be entirely up to the One who emerged with the laurels upon his crown. He had a new strategy to use, one that had been bubbling to fruition for years in the very back of his mind, where Azaz could not have penetrated without he, Tom Mayfair, noticing ...

That was not his name! His name was ...

Was what?

Tom Mayfair, wasn't it?

No, no, that wasn't it at all. This shell of meat was not the essential, the individual HE. He had more limbs than this fleshy biped, more range and scope than these bone-bound limbs could afford, infinitely more fluid and pliable thoughts. His wattled integument slid smoothly over a single, rippling muscle of infinitely plastic helium. Didn't it?

It did, it told himself firmly. He was not Tom Mayfair. It was Advancer-of-Pawns.

Mayfair rebelled against the voice in his mind, not in his ear but actually inside his own mind, its alien thoughts seeming to come from his own volition, in his own voice. But they were not his, he maintained stubbornly. He was not Advancer-of-Pawns!

He fought as he had fought the fear a moment before. He fought, and he triumphed. And again his courage was for naught.

Advancer-of-Pawns retreated. Its mind disengaged a hundred subtle tendrils from the depths of what Mayfair was. It fled, impossibly far and fast, into the depths.

Then the thing that had been waiting behind Advancer-of-Pawns, that thing that Advancer feared above all else, saw Mayfair and struck.

DISSOLVE, it commanded irresistably. BECOME MYSELF TO INCREASE MYSELF.

Mayfair screamed.

A voice as large as the sky screamed back. DISSOLVE! Somehow he was inside the scream, almost a part of it. It drowned his voice like a wave crashing over a teacup.

He remembered, as though he'd always known, what the voice came from. A galaxy, not unlike his own, but riddled with fine, flickering thoughts, knitting the whole into an enormous tooth-studded maw...

Tom Mayfair arched his back, dust and gemstones scattering from his white-knuckled fist, and collapsed in a heap on the basement floor.

Chapter Three

"Those are not stars"

Coffey caught Mayfair's head on the top of his motorcycle boot, a hard surface, but much softer than the hard-packed dirt.

"Oof!" he exclaimed. Mayfair was not a light man, nor a small one.

"What happened?" said Ishkatar, just now arriving.

"He picked up the crystals and fainted," said Andromeda. "Oh, but what a scream!"

"I heard it," said Ishkatar curtly. "Anybody have medical training?"

When no one volunteered, Coffey stripped off his gloves.

"Some," he ventured. "I seen my share a accidents."

"Keep his head up," Ishkatar commanded. "Here, son, put your hands under his head. Got him?"

Alex Oldford bent down. He touched one of the spilled crystals with his fingertip. His eyes convulsed, tight enough to sting, then wide open.

"Come on!" Ishkatar said. "Get your hands under him. Don't jerk him, but get him off Coffey's foot. Let me help you."

Ishkatar took Alex's hands and guided them to Mayfair's curly head.

"Okay, Coffey," Ishkatar grunted.

Coffey slid his foot back and got out his flashlight.

"Turn that light away, would yuh?" he asked Gill. The shadows swung around them.

Coffey flashed the light into Mayfair's eyes, peeling back the lids. The pupils were expanded to pea-size.

"No reaction," he said. "That ain't good."

"But what happened?" Andromeda insisted.

"He picked up the bloody stones, that's what happened," Scoop said. "Nobody better touch 'em again, hear? In fact, luv, you might want to get rid of yours --"

"A while ago you were hot to get one yourself, man," Alex chided him.

"That was before it blew his bloody head off, wasn't it? Act your age!" Scoop snorted. "Or are you?"

"I ain't senile yet, Dad," Alex retorted.

"Stow it, you two," Ishkatar commanded. "Coffey? Should we move him?"

"I dunno," Coffey said slowly. "He didn't hit his head -- my toes'll swear to thet. He didn't just faint, or else his pupils woulda responded. Might could be --"

"Oh no!" Andromeda gasped.

"-- he's had a stroke," Coffey concluded, for the benefit of those among them without telepathy. "Cept I'd expect one eye or the other to be all right, then. Maybe a double stroke? I don' know."

"Bummer," said Alex with feeling.

"Is that all you can say?" Scoop bristled.

"I mean it," Alex protested. "Bummer."

"If it's a stroke," said Gill. "You can move him. You'd best be doin' it quick, too. The longer they go, the worse it's going to get."

"Yeah," said Ishkatar, as though that was all he needed to hear. "Okay, Alex, you take the feet. Coffey, you take the heavy end. I'll clear a path -- Reverend, you wanna give me a hand?"

"Most certainly," Gill said. He stepped over the fallen body and shouldered an armoire out of the way. Ishkatar took Coffey's flashlight and scanned the area behind them.

"Come on," he urged. "Gently, gently, and for God's sake sing out if you're about to drop him."

They lifted Mayfair straight up from both ends. He sagged in the middle like a sack of laundry, totally limp.

"Oh, man," Alex said again. He followed Coffey as the policeman walked backward, Ishkatar's hand on his shoulder for guidance. "He is gone."

"He's still breathing," Coffey insisted.

"I mean, you know -- upstairs," said Alex, shaking his head. His black rat-tail flicked his shoulders like a cat about to pounce. "He's heavy, too. How come I gotta carry him instead of the Rev?"

"You wanna clear a path through this junk? Be my guest. Some of this stuff's heavier than he is," said Ishkatar over Coffey's shoulder.

"That's crap, man," Alex said as they reached the stairs. He huffed and puffed, unable to catch his breath.

"What is?" Gill said, heading up the stairs.

"You," Alex answered. "You just want me out of the way 'cause Scoop was givin' me a hard time, an' you don't want to hear it. Right?"

To his surprise, Ishkatar grinned.

"Right the first time, Oldford. You're a sharp man."

"So how come Scoop doesn't have to do the deed?"

"'Cause he's a wimp, and you're not. He couldn't carry a full pack of cigarettes from here to the door," Ishkatar said.

Alex blinked.

"Okay now?" Ishkatar prodded him.

"Yeah. I never thought of it that way," Alex said.

"Don't think. Walk," said Coffey. "One, two, three, LIFT!"

Alex lifted. Ishkatar helped Coffey with the arms, once they got out of the basement. They got him up the stairs, his head bouncing on his chest.

"Soon as we're out of here, I'll call for an ambulance," Ishkatar said. "We're gonna need it."

* * *

Rowena had reached the corner by the tall desk about the same time that Mayfair was being carried out. Andromeda leaned on Scoop's shoulder, her breath racing away from her.

"What happened? Rowena demanded, from Scoop more than Andromeda. Galena, behind Rowena, watched the procession leave.

"Aw, Doc Tom picked up a bunch a these green rocks we was so hot about," Scoop said. "Just about blew the poor bastard's mind."

Rowena drew back. "Doctor Mayfair's parents are decent people, sir."

Scoop gestured impatiently. "Well, anyway, they got 'im. I say we oughta get outta here."

Galena bent to examine the stones. She took out a small magnifying glass with its own electric light in the frame.

"You bloody cow, din'tcha hear what I said?" Scoop stormed. "Leave 'em out!"

"I am not touching them," Galena answered shortly. "Stand back -- you are being in the light."

"Ker-ist, yer all mad," he mumbled. "Bloody college tarts."

Rowena touched Andromeda on the shoulder. She jerked, then turned her head slowly up.

"Andromeda," Rowena said carefully, "what didst thou feel?"

"What?" Scoop said.

"She has the stone," Rowena pointed out, "around her neck. When Doctor Mayfair was stricken, she felt what happened to him. Not so?"

Andromeda nodded, her mouth as dry as her cheeks were wet.

"What was it, Andromeda? You need not speak. Just let me remember what you remember, through the stone."

At the mention of the stone, Andromeda's hand fled to her neck. But Rowena insisted, and Andromeda relaxed enough to open her mind. Rowena looked through Mayfair's experience quickly, feeling sympathy but not pain as she scanned over the worst bits. Andromeda, on the other hand, had experienced his pain almost as intensely as he did.

"He was invaded by someone called Advancer-of-Pawns," said Rowena after a moment to steady herself. "Someone who plays games, and fights duels. He fought him off, but then someone else wanted to eat Dr. Mayfair, and said so very loudly indeed. No wonder he was taken aback, poor man!"

Andromeda nodded tearfully. "That's right," she said. "That's what happened. And I couldn't do anything!"

"No one could, I suspicion," said Rowena. "Dr. Mayfair has a powerful mind. Best you did not become involved, else you would be lain low, as he was."

"Do -- do you think he'll be all right?" Andromeda said.

"I think it so. What happened to him happened in his mind, not to his body. It can be no worse than the worst of nightmares, and as we know, nightmares go away."

"The bloody atom bomb ain't gone away," Scoop muttered.

"Be grateful for that," said Galena without looking up. "Without atomic weapons, the Chinese would be in Moscow in six months. And your Germans would be all over France and Poland again."

"Did I bleedin' ask you? Did I?"

Galena shrugged. She held up a wooden slat, on which six stones were placed.

"I have found nine of these. They are undamaged and seem identical, though there are subtle flaws. I would need more light to be certain."

Scoop backed up, causing Andromeda to stumble. Rowena placed a hand on her waist to straighten the taller girl up.

"There, now," she soothed. "Don't be worrying."

"Keep those things away from me!" Scoop said.

Galena blinked at him. She put the slat down and sifted through the dirt again.

"Perhaps there are more," she said, intent on her work.

"So what if there are?" Scoop demanded. "Let's blow."

"There should be sixteen in all," Galena replied calmly.

Rowena squinted. "How do you figure that, girl?"

"Because there are sixteen holes in this plate," she said. She pointed to a circle of greenish brass, about a yard wide.

Rowena bent her knees, squatting down to peer at the brass object. It was thick, perhaps ten pounds weight in all. The edge was raised more than an inch, forming a flange decorated with raised brass markings. They resembled an unknown alphabet more than any kind of pictures Rowena had seen.

Dotted around the inner rim of the plate, like the numbers of a clock, were sixteen circular depressions. At the base of each was a hole, just barely smaller than the green stones themselves. A stone dropped into the depression, Rowena saw at once, would settle into the hole and be fixed there.

The bottom of the brass plate was tarnished in a different way from the rim, she also noted. Around the rim the plate was greenish-bronze, with a trace of the original brassy shine. In the wide bottom, it was solid green, like moss.

"Where did you find this, Galena?" she said softly.

"Here," said the Russian girl, pointing negligently at a heap of loose dirt by the base of an old iron stove.

"May I?" Rowena said, and moved as if to take the plate.

Galena waved again, indicating she had no claim on it.

Rowena picked up the plate in her hands. Diffuse highlights washed over her sharp features as the flashlight beam struck full on the tarnished brass. Despite himself, Scoop leaned forward.

The solid verdigris stopped a little short of the rim, on the inside edge.

"What, they polished up the outside an' forgot the middle?" Scoop said.

Rowena studied the line intensely. There was something familiar about it, though she had no brass at home, that was sure.

Andromeda did, though. She looked up, her hand on her locket, and said, "Water!"

"Water," said Rowena, and she understood in a flash. The plate had been filled with an inch of water, submerging the crystals, for a very long time, long enough for verdegris to stain the brass green.

Andromeda nodded, though the elfin little blond hadn't spoken. "But why?" she asked. "Why ruin a brass tabletop with water?"

"Tabletop!" said Rowena. "I think you're right. Look under here, where those little tube things are attached. Could you not put legs inside, and make a proper table?"

"That's right," said Scoop. "Like a TV tray."

Rowena shot him a doubtful look. Television was not a part of her world.

"Or whatever," Scoop asserted defiantly.

"But where are the legs?" Andromeda wondered. "Galena, did you find any table legs down there?"

"No." She dropped another green stone from her tweezers onto the board.

"I think it didn't have any," Rowena decided. "If you lay the plate down on top of this Franklin stove --"

She did so. It fit, sticking out a bit on the side opposite the flue.

"There!"

"And it must have fallen off, one day, making this gouge in the dirt," Rowena continued.

"And the stones went all over, and one wound up under here, where I first saw it," Andromeda finished Rowena's thought. "That clears up everything!"

"Like fun it does," Scoop insisted. "Where'd they come from in the first place? Who cut 'em to size? What the bleeding hell was this brass thing supposed to be for, anyway? Can ya answer any a that?"

Andromeda looked dashed. Galena spoke up in her defense.

"Does not matter," she said firmly. "Whoever got stones brought them here. Put them in plate. Filled plate with water. For a purpose," she stressed.

"No one does things for no reason. They expected something to be happening. Something good. If we do this, that something will happen again."

"Yeah, but will it be good? I mean, the bloke who set this up might have been seriously weird," Scoop said.

"Yes," Galena agreed unexpectedly. "We may not want to be testing the plate until we know what it is supposed to be doing."

"Good," Scoop said.

"On the other hand --" Andromeda began.

"Andi, will you leave it out? The stuff's poison, I'm telling ya!"

Rowena squinted at Andromeda curiously. Then she bent at the knees again, snatched up a green stone and stood up.

"Hey!" said Scoop.

"On the other hand," Rowena said, finishing the thought Andromeda was too cowed to finish, "we won't just grab up all the crystals. We'll probe, carefully, as Dr. Mayfair should have done. And if anything goes wrong, we will stop at once."

"Something has bloody gone wrong. Did you see 'is face?"

"I'm holding a crystal, and you don't see me fainting," Rowena said.

"Well," said Scoop, turning away.

"Galena, will you pick one up?" Rowena said.

"Just one," Andromeda added.

Galena pursed her lips. She looked from one girl to the other.

"I must admit, I am being curious," she said. She separated one stone from the others with her tweezers, then dropped it in her palm.

Rowena and Andromeda felt the Russian girl touch their minds, diffidently but firmly.

"Is nice," she decided. "I feel like I am being home with my sisters."

"Thank you," Andromeda said.

Of course, my sisters do not look like you, Galena sent.

Who do they look like? Andromeda asked.

More like Scoop.

All three of them laughed a little, making Scoop distinctly edgy.

"Come on, that's enough. You're all going barmy," he sputtered.

Rowena raised a pale eyebrow, and they all tittered again to a silent joke.

"I'm not bein' left out a this," said Scoop, and reached for a stone of his own.

Which was the whole point, after all, thought Rowena to the others.

"I heard that," Scoop said.

No, that was the whole point, Andromeda added.

Pipe down, the lot of you.

Let them send as they will.

Who was that?

Is that you, Scoop? Who said that?

I did.

Well, then, who art thou, sir?

I am not a sir. I am Advancer-of-Pawns.

"Bloody hell --" said Scoop, and made to fling his stone to the floor.

Stop, said the voice calling itself Advancer-of-Pawns. Scoop froze like a tailor's dummy.

Let him go!

Andromeda? He's all right. Are you not, sir?

Fine, except I can't move a bleeding muscle. How'd you do that?

My will is strong.

Let him go, I said.

I will in time.

When?

When you have explained the meaning of the attack on my selfhood. I perceive you were not a party to Tom Mayfair's move. I perceive further that you count yourselves Mayfair's allies. But whom do you serve?

Rowena spoke for them all. "We are not servants, Mister Advancer-of-Pawns."

"Although we have governments whom we obey", Galena added.

Advancer-of-Pawns seemed to dismiss the idea of government altogether.

That is not what I meant by service. Who tells you what moves to make, against which tools of which Sih?

"We don't understand," Rowena assured the voice.

Too right, Scoop added, unable to move his mouth. Hey, lemme go, hear? I won't run.

You are sincere. It is so.

"Strewth!" Scoop exclaimed, and shook himself. "I gotta sit down." He did, and lit a cigarette. He thought of throwing the stone away, but thought better of it, and stuck it in a pocket.

"Better keep your hand on it, Scoop, " Andromeda warned. "It only works by skin contact."

"How d'ya figure that?" he said, but he kept his hand in his pocket.

"Advancer told me," she said confidently.

"Well, look, Advancer," said Scoop, blowing smoke. "We didn't put Tom up to attacking you, or whatever you say he did. Matter of fact, I don't beleive he did any such thing. He just picked up a load of these green trinkets you got here, grabbed his head, and went out like a light. I saw the whole thing, mate."

"I was in his mind," Andromeda confirmed. "It's true. He thought you were trying to take over."

"What were you doing in his mind, then?" said Scoop. He thought, audibly to all, Just how much has been going on behind my back, since you got hold of that rock?

That I cannot tell you, Advancer-of-Pawns sent. I was not monitoring Andromeda Mai Fallon then.

"Didn't ask you, chum."

"Advancer?" said Galena aloud. "There are many words in your speech I am not understanding. Are you thinking in a different form of English?"

I am not thinking in English. You perceive my thoughts directly.

"But then, what is an 'actor', if not a man on television? You expected that we serve one, if I am remembering."

"Yes," said Rowena. "Are actors the rulers where you come from?"

"And just where is that, anyway?" said Andromeda. "I mean, if it's not being too personal ..."

My selfhood is not in danger, Advancer-of-Pawns sent. I will show you where I am.

"Oh, could you? Great!"

"Yeah, show us, Bob ol' buddy," Scoop mocked. "You in there with all the green flaws, then?"

No. I am not. I am here.

Suddenly, the four of them were elsewhere. Scoop's cigarette exploded in a flurry of hot ashes as a short, very sharp wind slapped across them like a knife and was gone. He patted his raincoat, grimacing.

"Bloody thing's more black than tan, now. I ought to be in Ireland."

The springy green turf under his shoes made him smile -- it was more like Ireland, or what he imagined Ireland to be, than he thought.

Then he looked up.

The three women and he stood in a gently sloping bowl, covered with grass and a flat, disc-shaped clover. Trees and bushes blocked the view here and there, but by and large he could see unobstructed to the very rim, about a mile away. He seemed to be near, but not at, the exact center.

The rim was black and hard, shining like a floodlit pair of sunglasses. It mated with a pellucid dome, almost invisible except for the glints that flickered off it. The dome enclosed the whole of the green, bathed in the light of a few large, fuzzy stars. There was no sun, but each of the stars seemed to give off enough light to add up to false dawn, if not full daylight.

Beyond the dome lay humps and irregular jagged spires of bottle-green glass, the same color as the psychic stones that had stolen Mayfair's mind. Everything was made of the glass; hills, shallow valleys, meandering tracks like raised pipelines, even the spiky objects crowding the edge of the dome.

One of the spiky things in the middle distance moved.

Scoop's perception clicked; the spiky, teardrop-shaped objects all over the landscape jumped into relief. They were all moving, slowly but surely, here and there upon the little raised paths. Some of them carried delicate crystalline objects balanced upon their spines; others moved in pairs or triples, fused together top to top.

The effect was similar to watching an ant colony, or a ceremony from an alien culture. Scoop wasn't sure which description applied, though he wasn't really in doubt. He'd never heard of ants making brass teleportation plates, after all.

Around the edge of the dome, crowded up against it, were quite a number of the creatures.

They were long and round in shape, like tear-drops. A myriad of limbs bristled from beneath a carapace not unlike a toad's, but the skin seemed to cover only the outer edge of the creature, like a rubbery skirt overhanging the limbs on all sides. On top, they had a bulbous blue-black protrusion that varied with each individual; some were round, like copies of the dome itself, while others were long wavering tentacles, or lenticular growths angled this way and that, or tufts of spiky black cilia arranged in neat rows along the creature's long axis.

He blinked. As he watched, one of the beetle-slugs' top parts revolved, changing shape like a blob of treacle, from a tentacle into a lens. The lens adhered itself to the dome, clinging like a lamprey's sucker, and adjusted its shape until an image of Scoop himself, upside-down and distorted at the edges but recognizable, sprang into clarity.

"Oh, Christ," he said, unable to frame his thoughts better. It was looking back at him.

Scoop dropped his butt, automatically stepping on it and rubbing his toe against the turf. It felt like regular soil, heightening the sense of unreality. Here, everything was normal, homelike, even comforting. But across that sharp line, it was anything but.

Rowena knelt to touch the earth, feeling the blades of fine, soft grass. Galena was fixed on her feet, looking up at the stars. Andromeda looked around, at the trees in the distance, at a hillside, determinedly.

"Advancer? Where are you?" she called out. She tried again, using the green crystal.

Use the pawn in future, for clarity as well as privacy, came Advancer-of-Pawns's answering thought. I am here. See, I am moving my crown in the horizontal plane, beyond the dome.

She saw the creatures for the first time. A scream burst from her chest, but choked off before she uttered it.

Do not show alarm, sent Advancer-of-Pawns. My colleagues will hear, and be distraught.

"B-b-but, but," she sputtered, as he released control of her body, "what are you?"

We are the Sih. There are many more of us than you see, of course. But all are Sih here.

This time she spotted the one whose pencil-thin tendril was waving back and forth, like a dog's tail wagging in ponderous slow motion. She seemed to recognize him, even though she had never seen him before. It was, she thought, like meeting someone in person she had known only over the phone before.

"Can I come closer?"

If you prefer. We cannot approach, however. The temperature in your enclosure would be instantly fatal to us.

"Then it's hot out there?" she said. Perhaps moving closer to the dome wouldn't be a good idea, she thought, if it were as hot as a stove!

Advancer-of-Pawns recoiled involuntarily at the image in her mind. His crown splashed down into his body like falling oil, and churned inchoately.

The inner surface of the dome is a safe temperature for you, he sent when he had composed himself, literally. Outside it is not hot. It is just right. But you would find it less hot than you prefer.

"So it's cold? To me, I mean."

It is not hot. There is nothing less hot than the outside of the dome.

"That's pretty cold."

We do not use your symbol 'cold.' It has meaning only in hot places.

"Well, you can use it when you talk to me, all right?"

Yes.

Andromeda looked around at her companions, feeling that she'd accomplished something. Scoop was looking around for a way out, and finding none. Rowena pulled a twist of grass and bit it, tasting its sap. She made a face and put it down.

"That's not grass," she said. "Tastes like rotten pennies."

"How can pennies rot?" Andromeda said.

"Taste this and you'll see. On second thought, better not. It's vile."

Galena was still transfixed, neck craned all the way back.

"Some view of the stars, isn't it?" Andromeda said by way of making conversation. "Can you tell where we are?"

Galena looked down, her face rapt with attention far beyond the girl she spoke to.

"Those are not stars," she said wonderingly. "They are too big, too far apart. No stars look like those."

"Those are galaxies," she said.

"Yes." Advancer shuffled his lower legs. "We are between the two major clusters in this region, one centered around your Milky Way and the other centered around the Andromeda Galaxy. Here, the influences of the many separate galaxies are minimal, and tend to cancel each other."

"An' you just happened to have a nice meadow under glass in case we should happen by?" Scoop said. "What else have you got up your sleeve -- dust for the Martians?"

"There are no Martians. Mars is unsuited for organic life, and too hot for our sort as well," Advancer said. His liquid crown rose up, divided down the center, and continued to divide into branch after branch, which pawed and wavered at the air, if there was air.

"Hey, what are you doing? Leave off," Scoop shouted. The Sih paid him no attention.

Another Sih extruded its crown and copied Advancer's shape, picking up the intricate tentacle-dance without a hitch. Advancer's crown resumed its featureless roundness.

"We created the Green," said Advancer as if he had never been interrupted, "to maintain beings from Earth. As you have deduced, there are other Greens on other parts of this planet. You would not enjoy them; they are for other worlds' inhabitants."

"How many?" asked Galena eagerly.

"Two to the sixth power," the Sih said.

"Two, four, eight, uh, sixteen," Scoop said, ticking off his fingers.

"Sixty-four?" Galena said. "There are sixty-three other races in the Galaxy?"

"By no means. There are millions, of course. But our synthetic planetoid is only so big and no bigger. We were required to choose only those species that seemed most promising."

"Promising for what?" said Rowena. In her mind were visions of harnesses and bridles, and the ax behind the woodshed.

"Our purpose," Advancer said blandly. "We are interested in your galaxy. It is the only galaxy we know of that is not amalgamated."

"You gonna make us ask?" Scoop bristled. "I need a fag."

He lit a cigarette and blew deeply.

"Orright," he said, refreshed, "what's this about us being amalgamated?"
"Your galaxy is not amalgamated. It has not yet become the property of a single galactic life-form. In this, so far as we are able to determine, it is unique. We have fended off the encroachment of other galactic beings, so as to afford us more time to understand why your galaxy should be so different."

"You do not know, as we do, that the dominant form of life in this corner of the universe, and probably the entirety of existence, is that class of life-forms that are able to ingest base matter into themselves most efficiently. Viruses are the closest earthly analog; either they, or cancers. Some of the Outer Gods are organic life; others are machines, or organizations of crystals. But they share a common psychology, an overriding need to ingest and expand. They grow and grow and grow without pause, without purpose. They eat what they can. They kill and consume their competitors. And usually, eventually, one of them succeeds.

"Some are limited to the consumption of entire planets, turning them into isolated cells in a galactic brain. Others of the Outer Gods are more efficient still, and have incorporated the stars themselves into their living flesh. Only the most potent of the Outer Gods, such as Sandoral of M33, are able to ingest the black hole that sits at the center of spiral galaxies such as your own, and metabolize it. Those are mighty indeed."

"But if they eat black hole, they must go inside it. How could they affect outside universe?" Galena wanted to know. "Nothing can escape black hole's pull."

"Gravity can," Advancer said simply.

"Yes, but --"

"Modulated gravity waves can carry information, such as I am doing now. Telepathy is a means of imposing your brain states in succession on a carrier gravity wave, such as the one emitted by the green pawns you found. Naturally, then, the raw telepathic power of a creature is a function of the intensity of gravity at its disposal; in other words, its total mass. The more an Outer God eats, the stronger its mind becomes. Thus the more likely it will be able to paralyze its competitors' minds, command them to lie still and be eaten."

"That's -- it's worse than anything I ever heard of!" Andromeda exclaimed.

"You never read Lovecraft, did you?" Scoop said quietly.

"And these Outer Gods are everywhere, just waiting to pounce on us?" Andromeda demanded. "Why doesn't somebody do something?"
"We are," was the calm reply. "You are fortunate in two respects; that the galaxies are so far apart, making telepathy the only feasible form of contact; and that there are many Outer Gods, several of whom are roughly equidistant from your galaxy. When one makes a determined effort to conquer your realm, we block it. Soon another will attack the first, hoping to gain some temporary advantage, and the Outer God will break off its assault. Occasionally two will be probing at the same time, but their competition is nearly perfect; they can never maintain their efforts long. By definition, any organism that has consumed a galaxy has an unquenchable drive to expand. They are adept beyond description at exploiting weakness."

"Since their minds are spread over a galactic, and in some cases inter-galactic, volume, the Outer Gods tend to think very slowly. Gravity is faster than light, but not infinitely fast, by any means. We here on Sihome live at a temperature close to the negative limit; our bodies are superconductors, allowing the electrical impulses of our brains to move with nearly perfect efficiency. We think very fast indeed, compared to the ponderous Outer Gods."

"Good for you," said Andromeda shakily.

"Sit down," said Rowena, taking her arm. She steered Andromeda to the shade of a tree.

"What I don't get is," Scoop said, "what these green stones are for. Did they just happen, or did you lot leave them lying around for us to discover?"

"In the early stages of our custody of your galaxy, we lost many promising species," Advancer said. "An Outer God would slip past our mental defenses, by means of any number of cunning strategems, and dominate the minds of a planet, or some faction thereof. That world's inhabitants would have their personalities and memories erased, replaced by the driving will of the Outer God in question. Usually, we were able to destroy them before they were able to make copies of the Outer God's form and distribute them, but if the species was already on the cusp of space travel, they were difficult to cauterize. Usually a century or two was all the time we had."

"Are we 'on the cusp of space travel'?" Galena asked.

"Yes. Your knowledge of basic physics makes stardrive potentially attainable within a few decades, although we cannot permit you to actually develop the technology."

Everyone heard the hope flower and die in Galena's breast, all in the space of Advancer's single sentence. She stood with fists clenched, arms out behind her, peering into the brilliant darkness beyond the dome.

"Why not?" she demanded.

"Your culture would interact with others. We desire that you be preserved in your pristine state, for study. We still do not understand why your galaxy should have escaped becoming an Outer God's catspaw ..."

"But if Earth gets stardrive, we can help you!" she said desperately. "We have scientists, too, and there are many of us. We can bring new outlooks to bear on your problem."

"Your minds are already at our disposal," Advancer said firmly.

"Whatever human being touches the disk (and thank you for repairing it, by the way) is transmitted instantly to General's Green. The circular shape of your enclosure is not accidental; it is difficult to predict exactly where you will arrive on the receiving array beneath the soil. That is why the entire array is topped with an Earthlike environment."

Scoop grimaced. "How many others you got set up like this? How many other races?"

"It is neither necessary nor desirable that you know that," Advancer admonished. "To proceed: the mind is sent here, but the body, of course, remains behind. A Sih mind can inhabit these bodies, provided they remain within a certain radius of the disk. Through them, we are learning about your world, though for now our existence must remain secret."

"So the Earth isn't to know you all exist, Outer Gods and whatnot," Scoop drawled. "Orright, then. What happens to us?"

Advancer shuffled around the dome, drawing figures in the air.

"You will continue to develop along lines we select for you, so as to avoid the danger of stardrive and ..."

"Time out, mate. I mean, what happens to the FOUR of US?"

He gestured at Galena, Andromeda and Rowena.

The Sih did not answer immediately.

"Is it to be medical experiments, then? Or some kinda Adam and the three faces of Eve deal?"

"Mister SMYTHE!" Rowena declared indignantly.

"No," said Advancer. "You will not be required to reproduce. Though it would simplify matters if you did so. We would not need to import as many human beings as would otherwise be the case."

It seemed to shrug mentally, to dismiss the matter.

"As may be -- humans need sex. Lacking a means of contraception, we can assume there will be offspring eventually. The Green can be expanded at need. If your species thrives in isolation --"

"Captivity, y'mean!" Scoop snarled.

"-- in isolation, then in time a suitable planet can be found and your offspring teleported there. But that is a matter for the future, not the present."

"I'm not listening to any more of this salacious talk," Rowena declared, and stood up. Brushing the grass from her long skirt, she turned her back deliberately on the creatures beyond the dome and walked around the tree Andromeda sat against, disappearing into a thicket that lay beyond.

Galena watched her go with puzzlement. Had the alien said they would be forced to have sex? she thought. She didn't see the problem.

"A reasonable attitude," Advancer congratulated her. "You will be a valuable ally to us."

"In what capacity?" she asked before Scoop could interrupt.

"Your world requires intensive management. Its technology is reaching the point where it will have to be curbed, guided away from space and contact with other races. This will be easier than pruning undesirable discoveries once they are made.

"We must have human allies in this enterprise. No Sih has devoted its entire life to studying the Earth, and even if we had, there are more minds working simultaneously than we can hope to monitor. You will be able to find the human minds that are developing proscribed concepts, and steer them plausibly into other avenues. Wars will have to be developed, and managed, to suppress surplus population and provide a means of disposal for those minds not likely to be influenced by our control. And, of course, the fighting of these wars will give you experience for the next planet you take over. We have managed such conflicts as your American Civil War, and the struggle between the Soviet Union and the Western powers, but our methods are crude and the results sometimes not what we expected. You, as natural-born humans, will of course acheive better results with your wars."

Galena's face was empty of expression.

"But we cannot reach Earth minds from here," she said. "We do not even know which galaxy is ours."

"That one," said Advancer, and indicated a particular patch of wan light in the sky. Scoop looked up, and felt like he was falling; suddenly, that was HOME, and here was somewhere unimaginably far from where he felt he belonged. The homesickness he had felt at boarding school returned, doubled and tripled by the jarring familiarity of the Green hard by the alienness of the dark planet outside.

Galena's reaction was the same, but qualified: without the Sih, she knew there was no way they would ever get back.

"How do we help you?" she said. "I will cooperate."

"Here, now --" Scoop said.

"And so will you," she said curtly. "If you ever want to see home again. Yes?"

"Yes," said the alien.

"That's not fair!" Andromeda said, standing up. "We didn't ask to be brought here. We don't want any part of your war or your project! Just send us home."

"We cannot. You would inform the Earth of our existence."

"Who'd bleedin' believe us, mate?" Scoop sneered. "We read UFO stories all the time. Nobody takes 'em serious, believe you me. I used to write the stuff."

"Is this true?" Advancer queried the others.

Galena always read the Western press carefully, but she knew from Pravda days not to believe what she read. She nodded.

Andromeda always thought the tabloid UFO stories showed a severe lack of imagination, so she agreed too.

"Perhaps you may be returned safely after all," Advancer conceded. "Human society is not my strong point. However, in each of your minds I see the certainty that liars, those who report events that have not occured, are commonplace on Earth. That would tend to make the population less credulous than on worlds I am used to dealing with."
"So you'll let us go?" Andromeda said.

"By no means. I must confer with my fellows before taking such a drastic step," Advancer demurred. "But the possibility exists. If you would agree to monitor the Earth for us, however, I would not need to raise the question, as it would be moot."

Galena was ready to agree, but this time Scoop was faster.

"You gotta think about it, we gotta think about it," he said. "Have your people call mine and we'll do lunch."

"Your meaning is unclear," Advancer complained.

"Take a hike! We'll talk it over and let you know."

Advancer's crown wobbled, the alien equivalent of a nod, or a sigh of exasperation?

"Very well. I will inform you when we have reached a decision."

"Aces. We'll have a gob and sort it out ourselves. See ya."

Advancer moved away from the dome on a myriad of tiny legs. Scoop gathered up the two women by eye and flicked his thumb toward a stand of trees nearby.

"C'mon," he said, "I feel the need for a little privacy."

"They can read minds, Scoop," Andromeda said.

"But they're gonna be distracted while they're up to their little chin-wag, aren't they?" he said, holding out his hand to her. "Come on."

"Come on, Andromeda," Galena urged her breathlessly. "We must go now, at once."

"What?" Andromeda said. But she allowed Scoop and Galena to steer her into the trees, where a narrow gully ran choked with weeds down toward the center of the Green.

"This way," Galena hissed urgently. She got down on hands and knees and slithered under the brambles that blocked the gully. Scoop followed her without a moment's hesitation. Andromeda sighed, hiked up her skirt, and followed.

The gully ended at a high dirt cliff, eroded in the middle to form a notch reaching halfway down. Cliffs ringed a deep blue lake, more of a pond except for its obvious depth. A waterfall fed it from the other side of the cliffs, glittering green where it fell into the blue.

"Over there," Galena said. "Hurry!"

She picked her way carefully along the cliff's edge, gripping the boles of stunted trees whenever the clods under her feet seemed in danger of crumbling. Scoop watched her slow, careful progress for several seconds, then brushed aside an overhanging branch and stood up.

"Sod that," he declared, and unbelted his trench coat. He set his cameras atop the wadded-up canvas, then slid out down the steep dirt slope into the notch, slipping and sliding down until he reached the water.

"Bloody hell," he gasped, "it's cold!" But he swam out into the blue pond anyway. It held him up better than water, as though he were wearing a life preserver. Swimming was easier than he'd ever found it before.

Lighter gravity, no doubt.

He looked up. "C'mon down," he called to Andromeda. "It's plenty deep!"

Looking down at him from the height of a four-story building, she knew it was the craziest idea he'd ever uttered in a lifetime of off-center utterances. But somehow, that didn't seem to matter any more. The idea had taken hold of her with a sudden excitement that defied reason. She felt as though she were drunk, but she'd never been this out of control before.

She kicked off her high-heeled shoes, transferred them to her left hand, and jumped. Her skirt ballooned around her, flapping in her face, and her nyloned feet felt cold in the draft, and then she hit the ice-cold water with a shock that slapped her back to full awareness. Scoop had been less than eloquent when he called the water 'cold'; it couldn't have been more than a degree or two above freezing.

But Scoop wasn't even looking at her. Turning his head as soon as she jumped, he was swimming toward the waterfall with swift, urgent strokes.

"Scoop!" she called out, but he kept on stroking. Biting her lip to keep from swearing, Andromeda followed suit.

Galena had reached the top of the waterfall by the time they swam up to the bottom. She wasn't wet yet, but there was no way to get under the spray without getting drenched. She put her hands together in front of her face and dove in, narrowly missing Scoop.

Andromeda was the first out of the water. She offered Scoop a hand, not without resentment at his earlier callousness. If he had arrived first, would he have helped her up?

Perhaps not, said a voice in her head. But you still must behave civilly toward him. It's any civilized person's duty.

Rowena? Andromeda sent.

Aye. Come inside, behind the water.

But they'll still hear us thinking --

There is more than concealment here, Rowena sent. Come.

Andromeda noticed her interest in getting behind the waterfall redouble at Rowena's command. Is this what it felt like, then, when she told Coffey something? She trusted Rowena okay, but she sure didn't like the feeling of being in someone else's power.

I release you, Rowena sent at once. But hurry!

All three of them reached the waterfall at about the same time. A small rock ledge stuck out behind it, the floor of a little cave cut out from the rock by erosion.

Rowena sat there, cross-legged, soaked through. Her white hair was matted into a spike over her eye from which a steady trickle of water flowed over her cheek. Her charcoal-gray dress clung to her form, revealing a more interesting figure than Scoop had assumed from her demeanor. Here, out of the cold water, the wool steamed slightly from her body heat.

Scoop stepped into the shadow and was instantly shivering with cold. He stuck a hand out into the light; it seemed not only to warm him, but to relieve a deep-seated panic, as though he'd re-established an air supply when he was drowning.

He'd never thought of himself as claustrophobic; growing up in London didn't allow it. But he definitely didn't want to go in the cave.

Nothing wrong with looking, though. Long as we're not goin' in.

In front of Rowena was an outcropping of rock a bit higher than the surrounding basalt. It was black and glassy, with lumpy veins of green running through it. Its shape was a rough cone, tilted to one side. Rowena's eyes were fixed on it.

Her eyes suddenly widened as if in surprise. The veins of green glowed like coals in a fireplace, brightening from within. Scoop felt a rush of nostalgic heat on his face, like the paraffin heaters his family used to take to the seashore. When it rained, as it often did, Mum would find him a comic book or a newspaper, put the heater on and fill up the room with dry, smothering warmth like a nice thick blanket while she went to the kitchen to brew them some tea. It was the nicest feeling on a rainy day.

Scoop was surprised to feel tears well up in his eyes. Then he blinked; the little cave was filling with steam, and with heat.

He touched his shirt, his jeans. They were stiff and dry.

He walked in, stooping to avoid the roof. His mouth watered with the scent of strong dark tea.

Rowena's concentration faded, and so did the brilliance of the green veins. Scoop shuddered. She placed her hand on the stone, and green light rose again to paint the walls like the emerald city of Oz.

She looked at her companions, now dried off like Scoop.

"I'm sorry to bring you here by compulsion, but we haven't much time," she declared. "Scoop was right -- while the Sih are talking, they can't listen in. If they're smart, they'l have set one of their number to watch over us, but they may not be smart. We'll see."

Andromeda pointed to the green veins.

"Is that more of the same stuff -- like this?" she said, holding out her medallion.

"Not yet quarried or carved into pawns, but aye, it's the same stone," Rowena said. "And though it hums with the pulse of the Sih's thoughts, they haven't yet awakened this lode."

"Oh." Scoop patted his wet hair back from his face. "So you can listen in on 'em? How're we doing?"

"I have not tried to spy," Rowena replied. "If they noticed me, it could go hard for us all. But I have spied something else of note ... "

She held out her hands so the green radiance washed them from below. As she cupped her fingers, the green became a vibrant golden glow, coming apart into discrete shapes. The shapes solidified into diamond-sharp images in yellow and green: trees, grass, a starlit sky.

And a body lying in a clearing, one hand reaching for the trees.

"I don't need this," Andromeda protested. "Rowena, Rowena, I really ... I just ..."

"Hush." Galena placed a hand on Andromeda's arm.

Scoop got up and shifted his position, coming closer to make out details.

"Is that Doc Mayfair?"

Rowena shook her head. Short white locks fluttered in the verdant glow.

"I don't know. Whoever he is, he's dead," she said with finality.

Scoop squinted. The body was covered with thick green growth, like coarse hair.

"Izzat stuff really green?"

"I think so." Rowena flexed her hands slightly, wobbling the image. "I'm using green light because it's all I have. But the Sih don't see colors ... maybe it's black."

"But you just said it was green. You got a feeling it's green?"

"Well ... "

Scoop smiled.

"Come on, luv. I know you get feelings. Maybe it's time I trusted 'em."

Rowena blushed slightly, her complexion darkening.

"All right, then, yes. I somehow know it's green. And it's alive."

"Does it taste like that grass outside?"

"Why .. yes! How did you know?"

"Stands ta reason. What else is gonna grow over a stiff in this place?"

Andromeda gagged.

"Scoop! That was Dr. Mayfair! He's not just a ... a stiff."

Scoop rubbed his hand over his face.

"Look, I don't need this crap right now. I'm tryin' ta think of what happened --"

"What crap? What am I doing that's so bad, Scoop?"

"At ease, both of you," Galena husked. "This isn't the time --"

"####!" Scoop flung water off his hand into the green image, where it sizzled. He jabbed his finger in Andromeda's direction.

"I have had enough out of you, Andi. Understand? Just SHUT UP!"

Andromeda paled. Rowena's image blurred and faded out.

"Now you better get this right." Scoop's voice was low and hoarse. "You better paste this right in your tin hat. We have got to suck it up and deal with this #### or we are not going home. Ever. If any one of us slips, those bugs are gonna know everything we're thinking like that!"

He snapped his fingers.

"Scoop --"

"Shut up, Galena! I'm almost finished."

Galena blinked, her face unreadable.

"Now listen. Doc Mayfair's dead. Y'gotta face it. An' if his body can give us a clue, help us get outta here, then we have got to look at it like we'd look at a crime scene. Any little thing we notice could be crucial, see?