4 Shandra

Shandra pulled up a chair at the edge of the shattered glass overhang and watched as the operatives in the helicopter hovering over the Worldwide Tower fished for a purchase on The Pig Man's body.

The winds that had wafted him over to the side of the pyramid were causing the crew some concern. Every time it looked like they had position and were ready to jerk the hook into the catch, the wind moved the helicopter and the fish was lost.

Eventually, in total frustration, the helicopter pilot made a run on the body dead center, the hook aimed right between The Pig Man's legs and, splat, he was lifted ass end over teakettle, the hook finding its way clear through his fat midsection.

Shandra breathed a sigh, but not of relief. Her first assignment for The Chairman had, to say the least, been a catastrophe.

She watched as The Pig Man swung into oblivion.

She hoped out of sight, out of mind would stop what she had come to realize was a constant punch into her solar plexus by the fist of her mind.

She smoothed the crease on the pantsuit the bellman had brought up from her room and took out her computer. She traced Block's last communications. He had made a number of contacts including both American and British Operations, and a trace on Sidney St. Remain. She knew Sidney to be the missing monetary functionary.

Judging from the credit card activity, Sidney was in Acapulco.

What concerned Shandra at the moment was Block's open contact with B.O.

British Operations was certainly unlikely to be in any way in-volved with the latest attempt on Block's life, but she wouldn't put it past them either to be supportive or, finding that the attempt had failed which his open call signaled them, instigate a new attempt.

The Chairman had briefed her on Block's new assignment. She was a student of "the way things are" school of learning. She did-n't spend much time on historical arguments. She viewed the world the way she found it.

There weren't three sides to a chessboard or three colors of pieces. When you came right down to any conflict, there were al-ways only two players. There may well be a number of pieces and the black bishops may not always agree with the black knights, in fact the black knights may not always agree with each other, but there is only one king. If the black king can control the white bishop, well, that's what made the game interesting, and if the black king can control the white bishop without the white king knowing about it, then that's even better.

It didn't take a genius to see that the war was for empire and the contestants were the old empire against the new, the old world and the new, the British Empire and its former colonies against survival.

The former colonies had forsaken the historical empire. Being an amalgam of the old and the new, they had emerged not as nations at the core of a new emerging empire, but as a part of the emerging empire that was not really an empire but rather the logical culmi-nation of an historical movement toward unity.

Elements of the old empire would never be submerged in the new, just as the new empire would not be seated in a particular nation, although the former colonies had lent their prestige and power to the formation of the new.

The United States had defeated the British Empire after over two centuries of on-again off-again war, some of it quite fierce and some of it with the who and what of the parties to the battle dis-tinctly blurred.

The United States may have defeated the British Empire, but the United States would not emerge as an empire itself. Rather the un-defeated elements of the British Empire would emerge with the victorious elements in the United States, together with the victori-ous elements in virtually every nation in the world, to form a world empire based on the dictates of individual freedom that emerged when the colonies were still under British rule.

Shandra could divine this, not from voluminous readings of his-tory books or tedious and tendentious arguments by pedantics, but simply from seeing the British ownership of people and lands in the late 19th century and its lack of the same ownership, or indeed any ownership at all, as the 20th century came to a close. She could see this clearly when she noted that the ownership was not replaced with a corresponding ownership by the supposed victor, the com-batant that entered the contest with England several centuries be-fore and remained intact at the end of the conflict.

She knew the sweep of history was invisible to the vision of the participants who for the most part could see clearly only the exi-gencies movement to the next square of the board entailed.

When you're part of the storm, it's impossible to plot its course!

Shandra was the type who could, perhaps partially because she did not consider herself a part of the storm, but primarily because she had not chosen to become a trained historian and therefore be subjected to the strictures of that profession, ignore the require-ment that history must be written for history.

Shandra had, instead, been attracted to becoming a technocrat, that broad, amorphous group emerging from the educational system whose job was to keep the world running.

She had, of course, been grateful for an educational system that had allowed her any number of choices. Her ability to educate her-self in history as a hobby was an example.

But she was even more grateful for an educational system that offered her the opportunity to move from the greater amorphous group of the generally educated to the technocratic group where she could use the combination of her innate intelligence combined with training to perform actions that benefited society and provided her with satisfaction.

She was the daughter of parents whose family had multiplied faster than its ability to produce the income to support it, a situa-tion uncommon in the bubble that occurred in the latter half of the 20th Century.

She had seven brothers, none of who had moved into the techno-cratic ranks. She, however, had chosen to take advantage of her grades in high school, and combining them with the wide range of financial help vehicles available to provide upward mobility to mo-tivated students, gained entrance into an institution of higher learning and thus an entrance into the opportunity to train her mind as she saw fit.

With her ability to see the historical sweep of reality, she could easily analogize society to her high school classrooms, with the content of the courses being chosen by forces outside the walls of the school being conveyed by the teachers, and with the vast ma-jority of the occupants performing the tasks necessary to keep the school operating.

If the production of goods and services could be substituted for education, the policy of the society was decided by a combination of historical currents and individual input, and the vast majority of society was engaged in the production of the goods and services.

There were, however, a small group of policymakers at the center of the process with the vast majority, consumers producing the goods they themselves consumed.

The technocrats were dispersed throughout the system to en-sure the production, movement, and disposition of the goods.

If the survival of a plant species, being fixed at a certain point on the planet, was subject to the whims of nature, legs and fins and wings provided species with the mobility to flee changes in the en-vironment caused by the planet's rotation and orbiting in space. This ability increased species' chances of survival.

If mobility allowed only flight to survive, the mind provided animate species with sentience and therefore the ability to alter the environment of the planet further increasing its ability to survive.

However, having the ability to alter its environment, sentient species can alter it to the extent that it no longer supports the spe-cies, sentient or not.

Thus, Shandra could early see that, while it was a beneficial goal to have the most goods, including commodities and services, available to the widest number of people, policies had to be made to ensure that the number of people didn't outstrip the ability of the planet to provide the maxim number of goods and services.

This was a policymaking function she was not attracted to al-though she supposed it was just as open as the paths to the techno-cratic fields.

No. She was attracted to the technocratic fields because it was here that her intelligence, her sentience, could be applied so that the amount of goods and services available could be increased with-out affecting the environment that was host to the species. By ac-complishing this, she and her fellow technocrats could produce a world in which there was no need for policy to limit the number of people because of the limitation of goods and services.

Of course, this left ninety percent of society as workers and consumers, which was all right. That in itself ensured the survival of the species.

It was only important that those with the ability be able to move into the technocratic areas.

Shandra had chosen mechanical engineering, then computer sci-ence, and then computer engineering. The fast moving technological world in which she was learning, and in which her learning was subject to obsolescence almost before she had learned it, had caused her to study more how something was learned rather than the learning itself.

Once she had mastered this, she had found it was not so much what she learned that was important, but rather how she applied her thought processes to the problems she was asked to solve.

By the time she graduated, she discovered her real talent lay in problem solving, taking a problem and eliminating it.

This realization, in turn, had attracted her to the area where all of the seemingly insoluble problems were, in the space sciences, the cooperative effort by the sentient beings of the planet to test their survivability in space. By doing so, they could remove the dependence of their species on the very planet, thereby providing it with the ultimate survival, survival in the universe.

Shandra believed that because she could perceive the universe, she was required to work for the survival of this ability to per-ceive, to answer the question, why is it we are the way we are, that we can perceive both the universe and ourselves perceiving the universe.

It wasn't a philosophical question because it went to the basis of how it was that she could think, and how that thinking process oc-curred.

Such thoughts ran through Shandra's mind, but as she graduated into the technocratic work environment, the problems she had to solve were what occupied her attention because they put food on the table.

At the time of her graduation, her programming skills were the most marketable and she applied for and was accepted as analyst on the space station.

She soon found the work in the technocratic sector was no dif-ferent than the work of dishing up hamburgers at the local fast food restaurants that had provided supplemental funds for her education.

However, she believed that any work was what the worker made of it and she applied herself to the seemingly boring and ap-parently endless task of keeping the space station's orbit stabilized.

She soon discovered that, before Sputnik, rocket scientists fig-ured, using Newtonian trajectories, they could shoot an object into an orbit around the Earth and because there was no atmosphere in space, the momentum would keep the object moving around the Earth forever just like the planets seemed to move around the sun in their orbits forever.

These early technocrats had to disabuse themselves of this no-tion early on when they found the orbits of their satellites decaying at an alarming rate. In no time, the unthinkable was occurring. From believing they would never be able to send up a satellite that would come down, they were coming down all over the place.

Many were burning up in the atmosphere, of course, but many more were just falling off the charts. Once one was lost, it was not known whether it had entered the atmosphere or was just simply whizzing around in some unknown orbit.

What should, under Newtonian Mechanics, have been an orderly system of satellites became a disorderly nonsystem of space de-bris. The Iridium Communications System had been named for the ideal number of satellites, but to maintain the system in place, there were never less than a hundred satellites, leading wags to call it the plutonium system, Pluto being the place where all of the lost satellites would be found.

At first, the scientists theorized that the satellites were run-ning into molecules of air. Because they were traveling at thou-sands of miles an hour, it was thought they were running into a heck of a lot of molecules of air.

It was soon discovered, however, that the bigger the satellite, the faster its orbit deteriorated. If molecules of air were slowing these things down, then according to Newtonian Mechanics, the big-ger the object, the less it should be slowed down by the same mole-cule of air.

If a theory doesn't work in a world that believes the only good theory is one that can't be disproven, come up with another theory. Sooner or later, a theory will emerge that survives the test of time by not being subjected to disproof, at which point a new fact will be created.

The new fact, the one that Shandra had to deal with when she took over the job of correcting the space station's orbit because of its decay, was based on size. The space station was the largest object in orbit. It was also the most expensive. Its orbit therefore could not be allowed to decay.

If size was what caused the orbit's decay, whatever was acting on the space station must be acting on it because of its size.

The analogy to comets was not long in coming. A comet's tail always pointed away from the sun thereby proving the existence of the solar wind. Therefore, the bigger an object was, so the fact went, the more subject it was to being affected by wind.

Thus, the solar wind was what was causing the orbits to decay.

The solar wind soon became solar radiation, and because solar radiation was due in part to sunspots, there was a testable hy-pothesis: If the decay was due to solar radiation, the decay would increase with the increase in sunspot activity.

The operation of shooting gas jets into space in various direc-tions to correct for this decay had been an integral part of the space station's computer program from the beginning.

A quick retrieval of the history of activity under the program, which had been stored in memory, showed that it correlated with sunspot activity.

The hypothesis had been proven and the cause of orbital decay accepted as fact. The solar wind caused satellites to burn up in the atmosphere.

The computer program that stabilized the orbit of the space station used a combination of fourteen stars as reference points for the corrections needed. As the orbit decayed, the position of these stars with respect to the space station changed and Shandra had to make the calculations necessary to bring the satellite back into its correct position.

Why, she reasoned, couldn't she take the sunspot activity re-ports, which were readily available from the astronomical satel-lites, and create a program that would keep the space station in orbit rather than having to replace it in orbit every time it got out of orbit?

She might end up eliminating her job, but there was no end to other problems that had to be solved.

The program had been relatively simple to write. The problem was, it didn't work. Oh, it worked as far as adjusting the space station was concerned. The problem was it didn't adjust it in accor-dance to theory and therefore it didn't produce a self-adjusting or-bit.

She had entered the conditions just as the facts dictated. Solar radiation caused the orbit to decay. An increase due to sunspots caused the decay to increase. Sunspots affected the space station when it was between the Earth and the sun. Thus, fifty percent of the allocable increase in decay was attributed to any increase in sunspot activity.

However, she found if she added another fifty percent of the in-crease as a condition in the program, the program worked per-fectly.

Which raised the point, if the space station was on the dark side of the planet, there was no way that the solar wind could be causing its orbit to decay. Why did the solar wind affect the orbit as much when the satellite was out of the solar wind on the other side of the planet as it did when it was on the sunny side of the planet?

Either the condition was wrong or the decay was wrong.

Whether she just happened to be at the right place at the right time, or she was bright, she was toying with this problem at the same time that the paradigm shift was beginning to permeate throughout the technocratic community.

The proposition that gravity was caused not by mass, but by what matter was doing, combusting, was intriguing. The proposition didn't appear to solve her problem, however, it seemed to confound it.

If the attractive mechanism were a part of the sunlight, the so-lar radiation that was thought to cause the decay by pressure, it would seem at first blush to cause the orbit to increase. It would seem if the attractive mechanism were in sunlight, it would lift the space station away from the Earth. Her problem was it was being pulled toward the Earth more than it should be by Newtonian Me-chanics.

It didn't help if she considered the pulling to be occurring when the space station was on the dark side of the planet. She would still be faced with the fifty-percent problem, not to mention the fact that the pulling when it was on the sunny side would be greater than when it was on the dark side.

The paradigm shift didn't seem to help her problem. It left a very large concept triangle floating around in her neuronic storage bins, however, with one side of the triangle glaringly open and thus surfacing with the normal flow of her thoughts.

One of these thoughts had been about an elite group of techno-crats who were given special assignments. They were dispatched as problems occurred and their only job was to solve the problem.

She was floating weightless in the observation hub one evening, looking at the blue Earth hanging in directionless space outside the observation window thinking how nice it would be to belong to such an elite corps.

The Earth completed the open side of the triangle. One side of the triangle was the space station decay. A second side was the solar activity on the surface of the sun.

The third side she had been using to try to complete the triangle had been the new paradigm, relating the decay to a variable attrac-tive force rather than a static attractive force.

Every time she tried to complete the triangle, she was stuck with the fact that the solar activity was not readily relatable to the decay.

It came to her, however, watching the cool blue and greenness of the Earth, that a hundred miles below that cool blue and green-ness was a white-hot cauldron of molten matter.

In a flash, she could visualize the Earth and sun alone in space. Both were combusting. When the sun heated up a little due to a change of some sort in its rate of combustion, it was the most natural thing in the world for the Earth to heat up a little.

As her mind shifted from the construction of a white hot Earth, which existed scarcely below the surface and returned to the cool green and blue Earth that existed in reality before her eyes, she could see why she couldn't see the third side of the triangle.

But it was there. The solar radiation caused the Earth itself to heat up.

The increase in the rate of combustion caused an increase in the Earth's gravity.

The increase in gravity acted on every particle of the space station and did so whether it was on the sunny side or the night side of the Earth.

Thus, the bigger the satellite was, the more matter there would be for the attractive force to act on, in effect, slow down and the greater the decay. The decay would occur one hundred percent of the time.

Problem solved.

Shandra programmed the space station and even devised a way to directly input the data from the solar observation platform.

The space station's orbit was corrected on a real time basis and she was out of a job.

She hadn't set foot on Earth, however, before she was on a StratoJet to Seattle. She had never been to Seattle and she had never been on a StratoJet.

She had heard of the person she was going to meet. She had seen his name off and on all her life but had never connected it with anything specific and had never heard him referred to as The Chairman.

In the penthouse of the Skytop Suites in downtown Seattle, she learned that The Chairman, among other things, was involved with the group that she hazily thought of as the policymakers. He told her that between the policymaking function in society and the tech-nocratic function, there was a hazy area in which trained techno-crats in the field had to actually act as policymakers and would she be interested, and if so would she be capable of undergoing the rig-orous training, more rigorous than the astronaut training she had already undergone, and if so when could she start?

After a year's training, which because of her astronaut's train-ing she was able to complete in four months including the martial arts sections, she had sallied forth on her first assignment, the remnants of which were the swinging body of The Pig Man disap-pearing from sight, swaying underneath the disappearing helicopter.

Oh well, she thought as the phone rang. Easy come, easy go.

That would be The Chairman to tell her where she could pick up her severance pay.

She picked up the phone.

"Good work," she heard The Chairman say.

"Good work? You didn't see the morning news?" He obviously had, otherwise why would he be calling.

"There were a lot more bodies in the room than draped over the rooftops of New York!" The man knew everything, she thought. "I'd say that's a good start."

"I still can't believe that the one ended up where it did!"

"With Block, anything is possible. I just want to emphasize that we can't lose sight of the objective. This project Block is on to protect the money supply is not only the most important project he has ever been on, it's the most important project going. It has to be completed successfully and it has to be completed quickly."

She thought about this as she left the hotel and walked toward Rockefeller Plaza. The Chairman told her about Block's mission but she had been putting the emphasis on the protective nature of the mission, protecting Block from making public spectacles of his ad-versaries rather than the technical nature of the mission.

Maybe there was something to Block's Perceptionism. She liked the idealization part of it, at least the way Block taught her how to practice it. It was something she could use all her life with a great deal of pleasure. The corollary, that she could only keep one thing in her perceptor at a time, was valid here. Any job had a number of aspects and the ones she focused on were the ones molding the out-come.

Analyzing the job was more important than doing it. What did she want to accomplish? She wanted to keep the currency from be-ing debased. Block was trying to accomplish the same thing. She wanted to help him accomplish this goal without it being made pub-lic.

Block had the easier job. He only had one. She had two.

She entered the Plaza. She opened her computer and punched up the Plaza's layout. American Operations was immediately to her left. British Operations was on the opposite side.

She tried to match the actual buildings with the layout she had transferred to her mind. She located the building Block would be in with his friend if he had finished his meeting with A.O. She won-dered who he had talked to at A.O.

She scanned A.O. schedules and found nothing. She scanned B.O. schedules and found nothing.

She scanned the Plaza and saw two nondescript black cars stop. Six people, four men and two women, got out of them. They each carried two cases. They might as well have put signs on their backs: Operatives! Have weapons, will kill.

This was turning into a long morning, she thought. The computer time intruded and she saw that it was well into the afternoon. She had been waiting for The Pig Man's removal longer than she real-ized. More bad perception.

She watched the six break into three teams. There was little doubt in her mind what they were there for. It was inconceivable that British Operations would deploy their troops so obviously in a foreign country if the prize was not worth the taking. The Chairman was already in San Francisco, so it wasn't him.

The prize was Block!

The process of removing The Pig Man from the pyramid top of the Worldwide Tower had been public enough for the instigators to know their attempt had failed. British Operations had an open in-coming scan which would pinpoint Block's location. They simply conjured up another team to finish off what The Pig Man had started and failed to accomplish.

Well, American Operations was right next-door, so she would make short work of the six.

Something about the way that the six started to deploy, how-ever, caught her attention.

As they glanced around for points of purchase, their eyes fell many times on the building that housed American Operations, and then up at the windows.

They looked at the building housing British Operations only with reference to picking a point of ambush. They never once looked up at the windows.

They were in the Plaza to carry out a B.O. operation, they were being very obvious about it, so they weren't concerned about sur-veillance and they seemed to be more concerned about American Operations headquarters than British Operations headquarters.

She started to punch in the emergency call number to summon American Operations. They were setting up in a classic three-angle ambuscade. When Block emerged from the building, they would have him left, right, and directly from the front.

She got into American Operations and aborted. They knew where Block was, so someone must have shadowed him from A.O. She raised her security communications code and punched in a scan to monitor A.O. transmissions for the last three hours.

She waited patiently as the dizzying display of figures scrolled down her screen. If she didn't get on with the task of eliminating the three teams, she was going to be the only person on the monetary project because these fucks were going to blow Block away.

The codes continued to slide past the screen. They showed nor-mal traffic, coded traffic, high security traffic, and Iridium Net-work Burst traffic.

And then she saw it. A blank. No traffic.

That was what she had been looking for.

The absence of something was more important, many times more important than the existence of something.

Somebody in American Operations had shut the communications system down for a billionth of a second and in that billionth of a second had, in all likelihood, sent out a burst transmission, lineal information encoded in a single electronic impulse, that had sum-moned the six operatives she was now faced with.

The order for Block's assassination was coming from American Operations Headquarters rather than from B.O. If she had called for help from A.O., the three teams taking up positions would have gotten the help, not her.

Both she and Block would have been history.

This was shit.

What to do? That was obvious. Eliminate the three teams. How long did she have? She saw a limousine drive up and position itself at the curb.

Not long. That had to be Block's transportation. It didn't have to be, but she was willing to bet it was. Or rather, she was unwilling to bet it wasn't.

She began to move across the Plaza behind the three teams. She knew they would be in communication. She also knew they would be concentrating on looking for their target.

She checked what she had on her to do the job. Not much. A small nine-millimeter. Each team was probably armed with auto-matic weapons and perhaps even grenades of some sort. Who knew what fit into a briefcase these days?

As she moved, a plan began to form. She could take out the cen-ter team. If she broke one communications link, the attempt to re-establish it by the other two teams might distract them long enough to allow her time to take them each out.

That was going to be tricky, though. Each was stationed on oppo-site sides of the Plaza.

Maybe she should have taken them out left, center, right. That option was no longer open. Actions define time, not the reverse. If she made a mistake, she would simply fail, perhaps die. Block surely would.

And damn! There he was. Just as oblivious as a Monk in a bor-dello. Shit. She moved into the first nest. She clicked off the si-lencer on the nine-millimeter. Loss of communications would not serve as a distraction. She hoped her shots would send a message that the first team shot too soon. They might have. She saw the girl in the left team look her way. The two men in the center team were dead before they could react in any way.

That didn't mean anything. The woman in the right team was al-ready standing to take a shot. This was starting to evidence all the earmarks of a botched job. Shandra didn't like to botch anything. She saw both members of the team on the left hunch down. If the team on the right didn't get him, the team on the left would get him with impunity. She was helpless. Block was walking unconcerned right into the middle of all this shit and she refused to be helpless. She didn't raise herself to be helpless.

She pulled out her computer and rapidly entered the destruct code, giving it a plus two seconds. The team on the right was open-ing fire. Block didn't even react. He didn't even hear it. He was not in the world of reality. He was wrapped up in goodness knows what thought process.

Shandra moved out of the center nest, aiming with her right hand and squeezing off the nine-millimeter. At the same time she flipped the computer like a Frisbee in the direction of the nest on the left. As it arced toward them, the two snipers began to rise up to take their shot. Simultaneously, the woman in the nest to the right went down, followed in rapid order by the man.

Shandra turned to take out the two in the nest on the left. She saw Block sink into the limousine as the bullets from the nest on the left shattered its windows.

Glass? The question registered in her mind.

Just as she squeezed off a shot at the remaining nest, the com-puter hit its mark with pieces of arms and legs, briefcases and dark glasses flying out of the nest, first in one small explosion and then in a deafening explosion as the computer charge touched off a cache of grenades.

Shandra hit the ground rolling and looked over toward the limou-sine. The chauffeur was frantically helping Block into the back seat. Block was wiping the glass off his shoulder. The limousine was driving off.

A crowd was gathering.

Block hadn't made a public spectacle.

She hadn't prevented him from making a public spectacle.

She had made a public spectacle.

She looked around. The Plaza was a shambles, with bodies and body parts seemingly everywhere.

The spectators shuffling around the mayhem looked like they were seeing reality a frame at a time. If they had been in a movie, the frames would have flowed from image to image, providing re-ality.

However, what was real in the movies was disjointed in reality. Reality didn't flow from frame to frame. It just sat there and stared the spectators in the eyes. The spectators could do nothing but stare back. Having nothing to compare it to, reality became un-reality.

To Shandra the reality was very real. She had started out with the concept of what she wanted to happen in her mind, formed in-stantly as a result of the reality she faced.

And she had made it happen. The bodies were precisely what she wanted. But like actors in movies who only get to see the bits and pieces that deal with each of their parts, she did not have a clear concept of how she got from the opening scene, the deployment of the teams in the Plaza, to all the blood and body parts.

She had been wrapped up in her imagination, one step ahead of the reality that was occurring because of the action triangles she was forming and acting on as a result of her imagination.

Reality was occurring, she was making it occur, but she was not a witness to its occurrence.

Thus, the scene was just as unreal to her as it was to the spec-tators.

Unlike the other spectators, however, she could not just stop and record the frames for future recall. She reached for her com-puter. She came up empty, feeling vulnerable for an instant. The computer was second nature to her.

She looked at her gun and at the building that housed the head-quarters of American Operations. She began to walk rapidly toward the latter, jamming new cartridges into the former.

She weighed her options. She could get back on Block's trail. Or she could eliminate the problem at American Operations and get back on Block's trail.

If she marched into American Operations, she could get herself killed. Who would kill her? Not the scum that ordered Block's assas-sination. That took them a good hour or more to set up. What were they going to do? Detain her while they brought in another team? Borrow someone from British Operations who might have more guts than they do?

Block's trail would have to wait. She pushed through the re-volving door. The guard's eyes opened as wide as the opening of the security desk he manned. He started to go for his gun. Shandra lifted hers imperceptibly. He froze.

She reached over the desk and punched in her highest security code.

The guard's eyes opened even wider. He sat down slowly, hold-ing his hands out in a gesture of complete surrender. Shandra didn't know what verbal message the code raised in the A.O. program-ming, but she knew it was something to the affect that if everyone didn't cater to her every whim, what remained of their lives would be extraordinarily long and unbelievably painful.

She also knew the message appeared simultaneously on every computer screen in the American Operations building, including the Station Chief's, and that her progress to his office would be unhin-dered.

It was the first time she ever had cause to use this power and it gave her a definite sexual thrill. She stopped to savor it.

"Please," the guard said, starting to rise, ruining her budding pleasure.

She waived him down. "What floor's the Station Chief on?"

"Seventy-seventh."

She put her gun hand down by her side and walked over to the elevator bank. The employees were coming and going in a normal fashion, not having noticed the drama at the security desk. She got on with a group at the upper-floors bank and pushed seventy-seven. She joined the crowd watching the light dance across the numbers, repositioning as the door opened and closed at the appropriate floors. At seventy-seven, her anger returned.

The elevator door opened onto the reception area, a symphony of plush gold carpeting and burgundy trimming. A secretary was standing at the security desk, hands up, palms out, his nose pointing in the direction of the Station Chief's office.

"I don't know what's happening," he cried. "I can't get him to come out. Usually he would be all smiles."

Shandra waived him into his chair and strode into the office.

A large man was sitting at the desk behind a huge nameplate that said, ANGULAR. A forty-five colt rested in front of the nameplate.

Angular was in his early forties. Shandra was impressed with his looks. He was dark and extremely handsome, the ruggedness that gave her, and she assumed all women, a gentle tug on the clit, causing a little mental blackout. He was sort of like superman, handsome as hell when he was flying around in the right places but when he left, the memory of his face left with him.

Shandra knew if she closed her eyes, she wouldn't remember what he looked like. She would only remember he was very hand-some.

Even though he didn't get up, she could tell that he was fit and muscular, the kind that would feel good in bed.

Well, she thought as she centered the muzzle of the nine-millimeter between his eyes, a handsome face and a good body did not guarantee a good lay.

He looked at her with his languid brown eyes.

She picked up the colt and pushed it across the desk at him, butt first.

"Would you like to talk a little? Or would you like to use this right away?"

The nine-millimeter was unwavering. Angular remained motion-less. Shandra's gaze remained level, looking directly into his eyes.

Moments passed.

Shandra moved the nine-millimeter slightly. Angular's eyes did-n't follow it. They looked unfocused. She squeezed the trigger. His left ear lobe disappeared. His eyes became focused.

"Do you want to use your gun?"

"For , , , what?" He seemed confused, uncentered. Tears started rolling down his cheeks.

"On yourself, asshole. What do you think?" She moved the gun so that the muzzle pointed toward his other ear. This time his eyes followed. "What the fuck were you up to, trying to kill Block? Don't you know he's protected? Don't you know you can't go around killing somebody like that? He's working for The Representative World Government, for crying out loud. And even if he weren't, he's working for your interests. I don't understand it."

"He's an antinationalist pig."

"Antinationalistic pig?" Shandra let the words roll off her tongue in cadence. The last nationalist she ran into today actually looked like a pig. Now this nationalist was calling Block, and by im-plication, herself, a pig.

It was absolutely amazing how one person always ended up call-ing another person what the first person was.

It was more amazing that the Manhattan Station Chief for American Operations could be a nationalist. Not amazing. Unheard of.

Shandra signaled with her hand. "Give me the colt." This guy wasn't going to kill himself. Angular slid the gun back across the desk. "Give me your computer." Angular pulled it out of his pocket and slid it behind the gun.

"You going to turn me in?" He was smiling. He was regaining his composure.

"To who? For what?" She laid the nine-millimeter on the desk in front of her and settled into the overstuffed chair facing the desk, a chair, she surmised, designed to make the occupant shrink in front of the glory of the Station Chief's power. "What exactly have you done?"

"Failed. You know," he said, his hand nursing his injured ear, "you're pretty good. I watched it all from the window. Have you ever thought of joining the cause?"

"The cause?"

"The battle against the slavery that will follow the establish-ment of The Representative World Government."

"Why would slavery follow the establishment of The Represen-tative World Government?" Shandra was genuinely puzzled.

"Because we would lose our national sovereignty."

"A loss of national sovereignty leads to slavery?"

"Every nation has traditionally fought on the basis of national-ism, the protection of its people and the ground its people occupies. The losers in the game become slaves to the winners, either pri-marily, in bodily servitude, or secondarily, in economic servitude.

"The only protection between a people and slavery is the na-tional tie that protects those people from servitude to other na-tions."

"But our own country is an example of the fallacy of that view-point. We started out as thirteen states, banding together in an en-tity that was greater than any one of the states. In less than three centuries, we have expanded into fifty-seven states. Did the peo-ples of the forty-four groups that became a part of the United States rather than become separate nations lose their freedom? Did they become slaves?

"Of course not. Why then, would you fight against, become a traitor to a nation that was seeking to do on a worldwide basis what the nation itself was founded on, the integration of peoples into a representative whole?"

"If that's the case, then the world can be conglomerated simply by the United States taking it over a nation at a time, integrating each nation as a new state."

"Other than the fact that nations might be so diverse as not to want to integrate into the United States, other than the fact that the United States might not want to integrate, take on the responsi-bility, there just isn't time.

"The latest explosion over the Capitol demonstrates clearly we can no longer count on the complex technology associated with the production of nuclear weapons to be a bar to narrow interests ob-taining the ability to produce them and thus terrorize the world with them.

"The rapid expansion of the understanding of the paradigm shift threatens to bring the capability of delivery to those weapons sys-tems independent of energy supplies.

"The combination of the two threatens to balkanize the world in a way that it has never been balkanized before, with the power to destroy the world obtainable by anybody who can collect dues from a thousand followers.

"Do you honestly think the world will survive without some mechanism that will result in the central control of its technology and resources?"

"But we can't allow the control to fall under alien influence!"

"Alien influence?" Shandra shook her head, incredulous, her tightly woven red locks bouncing vigorously. "Alien influence?

"I know the paradigm shift does away with the conceptual block that led us to believe that interstellar travel was impossible be-cause nothing could go faster than the speed of light. But give me a break."

"I mean influence by foreigners!"

"What are foreigners? People you don't know? Are you afraid of people you don't know?"

"I'm talking about foreign control!"

"What do you know about control? What do you care about con-trol? Ah! I'm beginning to see. It's okay as long as you control."

"You could be a part of that control if you joined us. You'll never be more than a lackey working for the internationalists. They'll suck you dry and spit out your skin. With us, you'd have real power."

Shandra got up, picking up the forty-five. "I have power right now, at least in your terms. If I were acting as an individual, I would have the power to either pull this trigger or not pull this trigger. If I were to consider my actions as individual actions, your life would be my option.

"That's the type of power that will destroy the world. If The Representative World Government does not come into existence before individuals obtain the physical means to exercise that type of power to the detriment of the entire world, it will be individuals acting with individual power that will end the existence of life on this planet as we know it.

"On an historical basis, groups of people have worked together to accomplish goals beneficial to the group. The United States is a prime example of cooperation.

"What do you think has occurred in history that would change this fact? History is the process of group judgment overcoming individual power. It has not always been successful. It has some-times been catastrophic, but the process has always been ongoing.

"I can exercise my individuality by being part of the process. Why would I want to obtain some sort of fleeting power that would oppose the process?"

"Because power is pleasure!"

Shandra thought back to the guard's desk. She had punched in her code number and had felt pleasure.

What was going on? Block had talked about Perceptionism the night before. That had been about idealization. She had blocked out the things she didn't like about Block, the sights, the sounds, the smells, by concentrating on the things she did like.

What did she do at the desk? Did she block out everything that made her human for a moment and see herself as she really wished she could be, a goddess with all eyes looking at her with admiration.

Was she seeing herself as she wanted to see herself, idealizing herself? Did the coincidence of the two images create a situation in her body that mimicked sexual pleasure?

Cynosure popped into her mind for some reason. She apparently knew more about Perceptionism than she realized. Idealization clearly demonstrated the validity of the proposition that you could only hold one thought in your mind at a time.

The simple act of reinforcing that thought, to see yourself as you wished to see yourself, didn't seem to be a strong enough moti-vation to turn people into mass murderers, the sort that pursued power so fanatically the mounds of bodies growing behind them were invisible to their perception.

There had to be another reason.

Angular's demeanor was changing as she walked around the desk.

"It's not fair," he cried, his voice suddenly becoming a whine.

"What's not fair?" Shandra asked.

"You're protected. I can't hurt you." His tears began to flow freely once again as she came closer.

She stuck the muzzle of the colt in his mouth. "Why would you want to hurt me?" she purred.

"To give you pleasure. It would give me pleasure to give you pleasure. I'm addicted to pleasure."

Shandra squeezed the trigger, the hammer fell, she flinched at the unaccustomed loudness of the forty-five, its massive bullet blowing the back of Angular's head all over the window, marring its glorious view.

She walked back to the chair and sat down. Her hand shook slightly as she replaced the forty-five in front of the nameplate. She took a deep breath.

Angular's death didn't concern her. He had violated the rules. If she hadn't eliminated him, someone from American Operations would have had to. She hadn't been exercising power, the type of power he was referring to. The system had simply removed him. She had only been an instrument of the system.

If she had chosen not to be the instrument, she wouldn't have taken the job. She did, after all, have a choice.

However, it was removing people like Angular that saved others from being ground up in the gears of history.

History ground up enough innocent people just in its inexorable movement toward some equilibrium with life. She didn't want to leave anyone around that would give the gears a wider swath.

Clearly, Angular's absence was a positive. That was not what was causing her physical reaction.

The physical reaction was more from a realization that had been at the edge of her thought process all morning. She had been awak-ened by the commotion of The Pig Man trying to off Block and she was faced with the picture of him spread-eagled on the pyramid of the Worldwide Tower almost before she was consciously awake.

Until The Chairman had absolved her by his comment that if it weren't for her, there might have been more bodies flying around, she had lived with an extremely unpleasant feeling in the pit of her stomach.

The feeling was not just a feeling. It was a direct assault by her mind on her stomach.

It was not just a physical discomfort. If she calmed down and forgot about The Pig Man, her body was at rest.

However, because he was right out the window, his existence would come flooding back into her mind.

The effect on her stomach was instant.

It was like she was being punched, only it was from the inside rather than from the outside and there was no one doing the punch-ing. She was punching herself.

It was like a mental boxing match. Every time she thought of The Pig Man, she took one in the gut.

It was the effect of the statement about being addicted to power that was making her hands now tremble slightly. She would proba-bly have left him to his own people to eliminate if he hadn't made that comment. There was something about those words that was inherently evil, something, when combined with the concept of per-sonal power over another individual, that gave her the creeps.

The thought passed because she had to get on with her primary task and it was certainly true that she couldn't occupy her mind with two things at once.

The first question was, was Block off to Acapulco? Her fingers regained their coordination as she picked up Angular's computer.

Sidney St. Remain was in Acapulco. Who might Angular know in Acapulco?

She started printing out the file structure. Addresses were lo-cated in both an open and a reserved file. She didn't have time to screw around with trying to gain entry into the reserved file and the open file had no Acapulco addresses.

The phone log was, however, open. It even contained an entry for the override that had resulted in the burst message. It was as-tounding how easily security procedures could be lapsed. Yet if everyone protected everything they did from all possible breaches, there wouldn't be anything to protect because nobody would get anything done.

On both sides of the burst message there were identical num-bers. She entered the number on a search and find basis command and found the number had been called both the night before and the prior afternoon.

She dialed the number but it flashed back the request for a PIN number. She didn't know what it was and didn't want to run the PIN program that would automatically trigger it through universal se-lection. Too much time.

On a hunch, she punched up the reserve directory for Acapulco. She then punched in the number and a name. Lano D'Lazo popped up with an address.

She put them in a reserve file and punched up the StratoJet res-ervations number. The screen came up allowing her to punch in a seat reservation on the next flight to Acapulco.

The notation came back that the flight was booked.

Shandra felt a jolt of anger shoot through her. She already had herself pictured on the flight and here she was being forced to adopt an opposing picture of her not being on the flight. She felt the same punch to the solar plexus she had felt earlier at the sight of The Pig Man draped across the pyramid of the Worldwide Tower.

"Bump!!!" she typed back.

"You don't have the clearance to bump." The letters appeared impersonally on the computer screen. Shandra was enraged. The punch to the solar plexus became a paralyzing anger.

"The shit I don't!!!!" she typed back.

"Your rating," the quiet message printed out, "is TOP 1, AOK. American Operations does not have the power to bump without Rep-resentative World Authorization."

Shandra stared at the screen. The realization slowly dawned that she was not using her own computer. She realized sheepishly she was beating her body to death over a factual misconception. The computer had sent Angular's ID when she had gone on-line with StratoJet reservations. What else could they think?

She punched in her Laissez Faire Passer number and added the appropriate PIN when requested. Reservation Confirmed printed silently on the screen. Limousine? She typed in her location. She then went back to the reserve file and punched in her code. Head-quarters would provide Angular with no information on Lano D'Lazo and there was no way to identify herself through Angular's com-puter into the high security areas.

She sat back once again and looked at Angular. He was a facade, his head back, his face looking somewhat normal in death, the back of his head sprayed all over the window.

He, at least, no longer had a mind that could send electrical im-pulses to cause bodily reactions. His mind could no longer drive his muscles to seek pleasure in physical reality that would be dupli-cated in his mind that would in turn drive him to . . .

She couldn't grasp the thought. It was just beyond her range of understanding. She couldn't even get the proper questions orga-nized.

Oh well. She got up and went into the outer office. The secretary had already ordered up security. They were waiting silently. She passed them without comment. The security guard stated to open her mouth. Shandra just pointed to the office and stepped into the elevator.

She wasn't thinking of Angular, but of the parallel of Block leaving a meeting with a representative from British Operations to take a limousine and running into a hit squad from American Opera-tions. She wondered if B.O. had a hit squad waiting for her as she left American Operations for a limousine.

The elevator picked up a full load on the way down and she ex-ited in the middle of the crowd, stopping outside the door so she could separate herself.

She obtained her bearings and walked toward the entrance oppo-site the one she had entered. Through the revolving glass doors, she glimpsed the limousine, the chauffeur waiting beside it. Except for the absence of the Plaza, it was a scene strangely reminiscent of the one scarcely an hour before. They were probably just beginning to clean up the mess. Well, Angular's office was convenient to the clean-up operations.

The chauffeur opened the door. She slid in, knocking the glass with her knuckles. It was bullet proof.

The chauffeur was in and they were on the way to Kennedy In-ternational.

"Do all the limousines have bullet proof glass?" she asked the chauffeur.

"You're referring to the business with Block! Yes they all do. They're ordered that way. They're tested when they come. There was no procedure to keep on testing them. There will be now."

"How do you think it got exchanged?"

The driver glanced at her in his TV screen. "Don't know. Least not yet. Have to have been someone in dispatch. We all speak the same language. We all grew up in the same country. It's kind of hard to weed out all potential terrorists."

"Could it have been done some time ago?"

"Probably was. We found two others. They were probably planted and just waiting for an assignment."

Shandra tapped the window again. She would have to work at it if she were to understand the situation. Reality existed and it ex-isted quite independent of the observer.

It also existed for the observer, but because the observer had to reconstruct reality in her mind, her perceptor, the recon-structed reality could never match reality.

She knew how the eye collected pictures of reality. Objects in reality provided physical surfaces. Light bounced off those sur-faces.

At any point on a physical object being observed by the eye, the light traveling between its source and the point, and then between the point and a nerve ending of the eye, formed an angle.

Because there were an infinite number of angles at any one point, depending on the positioning of the source of the light and the eye, the mind had to have a way of identifying that point by the in-formation that it received from the angles.

If she shined a light directly into a mirror and back into her eye, Shandra knew the quanta of light was high enough to cause a physi-cal reaction in the eye.

If, however, the eye was moved out from the direct return of the light, the angle increased and the eye received less quanta of light.

The greater the angle, then, the less quanta the light contained from a particular source.

Because the eye received light from an infinite number of angles as it bounced off the surfaces available to it, and the quanta of light from each point was different, it created a picture of physical re-ality from the relative strength of the individual flows from each point in reality.

The millions of nerve endings in the eye collected these quanta, each representing a point, and transmitted them through the optic nerve into the mind where they were used by the perceptor to re-construct the reality that they represented.

External reality would be represented to the mind as a bundle of disparate quanta. It reconstructed those quanta according to their relative strengths.

The validity of the reconstruction was therefore dependent on what happened to quanta of light when they left the objects but be-fore they reached the optic nerve, how efficient the optic nerve was, and how efficient the mind was doing the reconstructing.

And? Shandra groped. And how the mind could recall and con-struct similar pictures for comparison.

If the storage bins of the brain didn't have anything to compare to the reconstruction of reality, the reconstruction would just hang there.

It was the reconstruction process when compared to prior re-constructions held in memory that provided understanding.

Because all of these processes were, like any process, subject to inefficiency, the reconstruction of the same reality in one per-ceptor could drastically differ from the reconstruction of the same reality by a different perceptor.

Shandra tapped the window again.

She could reconstruct reality through the bulletproof glass, and she could reconstruct the same reality through the regular glass.

Add a bullet to that reality and the reconstructed reality would change drastically.

She couldn't simultaneously reconstruct reality with the glass being both bullet proof and not bullet proof.

There was only one reality to an individual perceptor because it could only reconstruct one picture of reality at a time.

And, she thought, as the limousine pulled up in front of the StratoJet Terminal at JFK, that picture can not only never be ex-act, it was most likely very inexact.

The movements it took her to get from the limousine to the StratoJet were the result of reconstructions of reality that al-lowed her to form action triangles so her mind could send messages to her muscles to move her through the reality that she was pass-ing through.

She was able to move unhindered because she was in the Strato-Jet terminal and it was set up to allow people, once recognized, to pass without complications.

If she had been in the regular terminal, she would have had to go through lines, security, other hindrances.

Moving freely in the StratoJet terminal allowed her to form ac-tion triangles and move with their formation. In the main terminal, delay could cause her to form a picture of herself other than the picture she would normally form to carry out her next act.

If the normal picture she formed in her mind to carry out her normal activities could be termed the primary concept of self, when she moved through the StratoJet terminal, her primary con-cept of self was never replaced.

If, however, she were in the main terminal and she ran into a security block that prevented her from acting in accordance with her primary concept of self, she would have to form a new concept of self.

This new concept of self would not agree with the primary con-cept of self moving freely in reality. Because her mind could only reconstruct one reality at a time, security would create an oppos-ing concept of self.

The thought of The Pig Man on the Worldwide Tower created a conflict with herself doing a good job for The Chairman and not do-ing a good job for The Chairman. The refusal of StratoJet reserva-tions to recognize her Laissez Faire Passer status as a result of her unrealized use of Angular's computer created a conflict with her concept of herself with that status. Both caused a physical response because reality and expectations were attempting to form two pic-tures of her self in a perceptor that can hold only a single picture. Security delays in the main terminal would result in the same physical reaction.

That was why she was accorded a status that permitted unhin-dered movement whenever possible. Her job was to work on prob-lems that affected her boss, not on problems that were extraneous to the task at hand.

As she approached the ramp to the StratoJet, she fantasized the guard stepping in front of her and halting her.

The first impact would be physical, the guard barring her way.

The second impact would also be physical, but not visible. Being forced to stop would conflict with her reconstruction of reality that had her moving onto the plane.

The second impact would be a flow of electricity from her brain into her physical body.

In the real world, the guard might not even touch her. There might be no physical contact and no physical sensation.

However, in the world of her mind, and the body it controlled, there would be a real impact: The electricity that operated her mind, with her mind stopped by opposing images, would flow into her physical subsystems and cause any number of reactions, real physical reactions, heart beat increase, perspiration, stomach tightening, muscle tensing. If her picture of reality were strong enough, if it meant freedom from a lifetime of slavery, the guard's movement might unleash a conflict so great as her mind tried to accommodate the two realities that the resulting turmoil would cause her bladder to release and her bowels to vacate.

As it was, the skin on her spine only tingled as she passed the smiling guard and took her seat. The successful movement didn't eliminate the realization that she could create, just by the use of her mind alone, without reference to physical reality, situations that would cause conflicts having the same result.

She tapped the window as she refused the offer of a drink from the stewardess. The door had closed behind her and the StratoJet was already taxiing out onto the runway.

There's reality, the external existence of matter that has noth-ing to do with the perception of reality. There's the mind's recon-struction of reality without any understanding of that reality. And there is the recall process, the vast storehouse of reconstructed reality that the mind has to draw on as it attempts to understand the reality it has reconstructed.

External reality would exist whether she was there to recon-struct it or not.

Reality itself had no meaning. It just existed.

Then along came the physical Shandra.

She herself was a part external reality. She was made up of the same atoms external reality was made up of. However, she had a chemical function that was able to reconstruct external reality.

The ability to reconstruct external reality allowed her to deal with external reality on an efficient basis.

Not on a perfectly efficient basis, though.

Just because she possessed a mechanism that allowed her to re-construct reality so she could manipulate it didn't mean the mecha-nism had developed to the point of perfection.

Shandra toyed with the idea.

She knew any mechanism that developed in an organism had to develop to accommodate the survival of the organism. Lichen devel-oped to equalize the differences in potentials that resulted from the temperature changes occurring from a planet spinning in front of the sun, producing alternating periods of hot and cold, day and night. Developing roots and leaves extended the range of surviv-ability for insentient inanimate life, but still left it subject to the local environment.

The development of animate functions in insentient matter freed it from the environment of the locale thereby extending its range of survival. The development of sentience, however, the ability to reconstruct a picture of the environment, allowed matter to react to the environment rather than to just act within it.

The development of the ability to construct realities that did not exist provided the ultimate tool for survival for an organism that would otherwise just reconstruct reality and react to it.

The difference between the ability to merely reconstruct reality and a sentience able to create pictures of reality that didn't exist in reality was as great as the difference between inanimate and ani-mate matter.

The ability to create reality, sentience, allowed the mind to visualize nonexistence in a manner that permitted it to make non-existence a reality.

Sentience provided the organism with the ability to reconstruct reality, take bits and pieces of that reality, reconstruct a new re-ality, and use the reconstruction of the new reality to change ex-isting reality.

Through this process, sentient animate matter moved itself be-yond subjection to the whims of the local environment. It was no longer limited to moving from one environment to another. It was able to actually alter the environment so the environment was suit-able to its existence.

Sentience freed the organism from the survival of the planetary locale and removed its survival to a question of survival in the uni-verse.

Shandra wasn't yet ready to tackle the question of whether, or rather how sentient animate matter could survive in the universe without a planet. She just knew that she would rather be dependent on fashioning the environment for survival rather than merely re-lying on the whims of a planet. One had only to look at the asteroid belt to see how ephemeral the survival of planets was, or more horrifying, at a nova, the remnants of an exploding star, whose planets were no more than cinders in a cataclysm.

She could, she realized as she accepted a mineral water and felt the power of the StratoJet surge beneath her, easily create a uni-verse that didn't exist. This was not the byproduct, and not the drawback of the development of her mind, the ability to reconstruct external reality. It was the very purpose of its development.

If there was anything bad about reconstructing external reality imperfectly, it would seem to be a necessary evil. If she were able to reconstruct external reality perfectly, she would be able to re-call prior reconstructions of reality perfectly and she would end up with no understanding.

She felt that the imperfect reconstruction of reality allowed the organism to alter external reality. If there were no difference be-tween what she reconstructed and what she recalled, existence would be nothing but a series of fragmented pictures. She would be no different than animate matter that reacted by moving from envi-ronment to environment in order to ensure immediate survival.

There must be something else at play.

If the planet stopped rotating, the lichen would burn up.

If lichen found itself burning up, the physical reaction would be to move if it could.

If lichen were ambulatory, capable of moving, then it would need something to warn it to move if it were going to avoid burning up.

It doesn't have anything to warn it and it doesn't move anyway.

Ambulatory matter does. Birds fly south, Monarch Butterflies migrate, Mayflies mate and Grunion run.

How do they know when to move to avoid adverse environmental changes and take advantage of favorable environmental conditions?

Ah ha, Shandra thought as she took a large sip of the mineral water to get the effect of the effervescence into her brain. They move because of sensory input, the same input that could produce a real physical reaction to being blocked by an imaginary security guard.

The only way animate life can know about external reality is if it develops systems that allow it to distinguish the various condi-tions of external reality.

She thought about the childhood game that disclosed an inability to distinguish between something that was very cold and something that was very hot. If someone closed their eyes and let someone else strike a match and then touch them with a piece of ice, it felt just like a burn.

She realized now it didn't matter what it felt like. Both exces-sive cold and excessive heat were to be avoided. The same sensory signal would allow the animate matter to avoid either.

It was an important point. Sensory recognition was efficient. Hot and cold were absolute opposites as far as the external world was concerned. Hot was the movement of matter. Cold was the ab-sence of the movement of matter. Hot was the result of combus-tion, the operation that caused matter to break down into its com-ponent parts. Combustion produced the electromagnetic fields that in turn caused other matter to combust. Cold, the absence of com-bustion, was the absence of matter or matter in the absence of a field.

Two more opposite conditions did not exist in external physical reality.

Hot and cold. Cold and hot.

Yet, physically, the perception of the two was identical.

Of course, when applied to environmental changes, animate matter could sense the ranges of hot and cold.

That's where, she realized, sentience came into the equation. Animate matter was distinguished from inanimate matter by elec-trical balances. The magnetic and electrical balances in the inani-mate matter were fixed by its atomic construction. Animate matter was a molecular construction that allowed its balances to change in accordance with the environment.

A rock sitting on a planet could be exposed to the sun, to heat, by day and the absence of the sun, to cold by night.

Because the rock's internal balances were fixed, the constant change in the environment would eventually cause the rock to split.

A physical structure that cannot adapt to changes in the envi-ronment will eventually succumb to the environment.

Thus, a single rock on a planet rotating under a burning sun would be subject to changing periods of hot and cold. The internal stresses caused by the change in the rock's environment from hot to cold to hot would eventually destroy the rock.

However, what if there was a rock that was adapted to the heat, a day rock, and another adapted to the cold, a night rock. While each rock might not survive individually in a continually changing environment, together they might be able to establish a mutual molecular organism that would allow both to survive.

Thus, the magnetic and electrical stresses that built up in the night rock during the day might be transferred to the day rock that was designed to handle them. During the night, the electrical and magnetic stresses that built up in the day rock might be transferred to the night rock whose atomic structure was designed to withstand them.

To transfer the stressful forces, however, a molecular path between the rocks had to develop. The electrical forces would con-tinually move over this path to equalize the stresses between the day and night rocks as the planet rotated under the sun.

This way, both rocks, each of which were inanimate matter, would be able to survive the changing environment, from hot to cold to hot, because the electrical stresses could move back and forth between the two rocks through the molecular path. The molecular path would be animate because the movement of the electrical forces created external changes that were measurable.

This was what Shandra viewed as Originism. The inanimate rock surface of the planet developed animate lichen as the planet moved from day to night as it rotated under the combusting sun.

Originism held that animate matter formed spontaneously to satisfy the conditions needed for its formation.

If lichen developed on a hunk of rock that rotated under a com-busting sun, and the hunk of rock stopped rotating, then the lichen on the dayside of the rock would burn up and the lichen on the night-side would be destroyed by the cold.

Hot and cold again.

It wouldn't make any difference because neither the day rocks nor the night rocks would be subject to an environmental change leading to stress and thus would not need the lichen to equalize the non-existent stress.

The next step on a planet that is not about to stop rotating under the sun, moving closer and further, or even tilting on its axis so that different areas received different doses of sun at different times, was for the animate matter to become ambulatory so that it could extend its range of survivability.

After all, there would be little point in inanimate matter forming in the first place if the process didn't lead to the formation of mat-ter that could comprehend its own existence.

It was remotely conceivable that non-ambulatory sentient mat-ter could exist. However, it was stretching the imagination to be-lieve that sentient matter could develop without being ambulatory. The ability to move in the environment was what required the evo-lution of a detector that would keep the matter doing the moving from running into trees or falling off cliffs. The evolution of a de-tector was the first evolutionary step to the development of sen-tience, the ability to produce a picture that did not exist in reality.

The ability to become ambulatory allowed animate matter to survive independent of its environment. It no longer simply pro-vided a path between which inanimate matter with different envi-ronmental stresses could transfer those stresses to other matter more capable of containing them.

When animate matter became ambulatory, it literally took the first step towards ensuring its own survival independent of the en-vironment. In doing so, it crossed the line from existing to satisfy the stresses in inanimate matter to existing to first comprehend the existence of that matter, and then to understand that existence.

Shandra realized external sensory capability allowed ambula-tory matter to move within the environment in a manner that maximized its potential for survival.

Ambulatory animate matter will flee the forest fire.

Sentient ambulatory animate matter will try to put it out. It can create a forest fire where no fire exists.

And put it out at will!

If the mind developed to allow animate matter to alter the envi-ronment in order to ensure the mind's survival so that it could eventually comprehend the existence of matter itself, it had to de-velop in a way that it could create a reality that did not exist in reality.

Ambulatory animate matter can burrow into the Earth as the winter descends but it cannot protect itself against the bulldozer.

Nor could it draw the relationship between a bulldozer and its nest even if it constantly saw its nest destroyed by the bulldozer. Its only recourse would be to relocate

Sentient matter, on the other hand, can see a blob in space and conclude that it was a star exploding. It can then look at its own star and visualize the results of it exploding. It can conclude that if it wants to survive, it had better make arrangements against the possibility of that star exploding.

It had better become ambulatory in space.

However, and it is a big however, the very ability to create a world that doesn't exist creates a conflict.

The reality that is created in the mind, that the mind recon-structs, will always, to one degree or another, conflict with the physical reality that actually exists.

The lichen either survives or it doesn't survive. If it survives, it is needed. If it doesn't survive, it is not needed. If the planet stops rotating, the rocks will survive without the lichen. It's only when the rocks need the lichen that the lichen will survive.

The comprehension of matter itself is an independent pursuit. It will survive as long as there is matter to comprehend.

Thus, the further sentience removes itself from reality, the further it removes itself from the purpose of its existence.

The further sentience removes itself from the purpose of its existence, the closer it comes to extinction.

The mechanism that developed to comprehend matter, the exis-tence of matter in the nothingness that is the universe, the per-ceptor, the mind, the detector, whatever it is called, exists in a body that was designed to be ambulatory.

To be ambulatory, there has to be a whole range of molecular structures that allow it to move safely within the environment.

There is no longer just hot or cold. There are a multitude of systems necessary to guide it safely through its existence.

A whole system of interchanges, not unlike the simple inter-change that develops lichen, has to come into existence to perform specific tasks. Sweat glands have to be developed to cool the skin that house organs that will be heated up by the very fact the matter is ambulatory.

Subsystems have to be developed to ensure that the overall system obtains its energy, eliminates its wastes, and is driven to perpetuate itself.

By the time an adequate structure develops to provide all of the subsystems necessary to allow the mind a reasonable time to com-prehend its own existence, the structure is a mass of molecular sub-structures all integrated into a whole. These structures com-municate with one another through electrical messages controlled by the very mechanism that developed to comprehend its own ex-istence.

The mechanism has the ability to comprehend the environment in which it exists, construct a nonexistent environment which may better ensure its survival, and the physical ability to develop the tools that can make that non-existent environment a reality.

Shandra could visualize the complex system that had built up simply by having animate matter become capable of reacting to en-vironmental changes.

She also could visualize the complex operating in a normal fash-ion, all of its functions being performed without conscious knowl-edge of the mind that acts as the coordinator for its multiple func-tions.

When the organism got low on energy, chemical switches would send electric signals that would create the need for food. If the need was ignored, the signals would be increased until the need was ful-filled.

Once fulfilled, signals would be sent to digest the food, remove the energy. Other signals would be sent to get rid of the waste, the portion of the food that was not convertible to energy.

As long as nothing interferes with the process, the system would operate without stress.

Interfere with the normal operation and the stresses would be-gin to affect the system just as the alternating periods of day and night would crack the rocks apart if it had no lichen to equalize the stresses.

This might not cause much of a problem if the animate matter were merely ambulatory and not sentient. It would move around until it got food. If anything got in the way of it and the food, it might become food or, in the alternative, it might add what got in the way to the menu.

In either case, the ambulatory animate matter would either eat or be eaten. If it didn't, or it wasn't, it would starve, in which case it would cease to be animate, although its subsystems might still be animate and subject to the eat or be eaten dictate.

Fortunately, sentience allows the mind to visualize vast farms that produce food allowing the basic processes to be satisfied.

This is the very process that gives sentience the ability to alter the environment in order to ensure its survival.

Shandra always attempted to match her mental process with re-ality because the more accurately she perceived reality, the more her actions would match reality and the greater her chance of sur-vival.

However, the two processes were definitely two processes. The process that went about ensuring she could move within the envi-ronment, the cumulative operation of her subsystems, was quite distinct from her conscious process of comprehending reality.

She could contemplate a problem such as the degradation of the orbit of the space station only if her subsystems were operating in a normal fashion.

If her subsystems got out of whack, the deficit in their opera-tion would affect the way her mind reconstructed reality.

If she contemplated so long that she used up all of the energy available to her body, she would soon begin thinking about the de-grading orbit of pizzas rather than space stations. If she became too tired, she would simply cease to think and doze off.

Thus, she not only had to deal with the fact that her mind could only reconstruct reality imperfectly. She not only had to deal with the limitation of experience, that her reconstruction of reality was limited to whatever she had placed in her neuronic storage bins. The physical balance of her subsystems with respect to each other and the environment also affected her mind.

The simple environmental stimulus could thus effect how she perceived the world. The simple mechanism that developed to keep animate matter from roasting or freezing could affect how she re-constructed reality.

How she reconstructed reality determined how she acted.

Another large sip of the mineral water brought the StratoJet cabin back into perspective.

The ability to move through the StratoJet terminal free of re-straint was similar to having her subsystems operate free of any deficit that might infringe upon her ability to comprehend reality.

Being restrained from that free movement would have the same affect on her subsystems as being deprived of food.

Both provided a shock to her subsystems and detracted from her ability to perceive and reconstruct and comprehend reality.

If her subsystems were deprived of their normal operation, they would send out signals that would be appropriate to the re-establishment of the normal balance.

If the signals went unanswered, the subsystems would increase the intensity of the signals.

The signals would definitely disrupt the operation of the overall system and affect the way the mind perceived reality.

If her progress though the StratoJet terminal were hindered, the way her mind perceived reality would be altered.

She would be forced to perceive reality as it actually was rather than as she was reconstructing it.

All of a sudden, it would make no difference how inadequate her ability to reconstruct reality was, how little experience she had to recall in order to comprehend it, or what the status of her subsys-tems was.

All of a sudden, she would be faced with reality. She would be forced to adapt her concept of self to reality.

In short, it wouldn't make any difference what she thought. She would have to adapt to what was what.

So the conflict between what she perceived as reality and real-ity itself could cause serious problems to her physical subsystems.

A car crash was no different. First there was the impact of the physical cars against each other. Then there was the physical crash of the occupants with the physical matter of the cars.

Here, there was first the impact of reality with the perception of reality. That impact set up a flow of unrequested messages into the subsystems similar to the movement of the occupants of the car. The second impact occurred when the messages hit the sub-systems. Not knowing the messages did not result from normal stimuli, the subsystems reacted by either turning on or turning off. This reaction in turn sent out other messages that confused the situation further.

Unlike the car crash, however, there was a third impact, the alteration of the mind's ability to reconstruct reality by the dis-ruption of the subsystems.

Because actions follow the perception of reality, the fourth im-pact might be a chop to the neck of the person impeding her pro-gress.

Shandra had no doubt that was the way the system worked. She had just blown the back of the head off someone who had created a disruption in her subsystems that was so great she could only form a picture of him dead. Having the physical means to alter physical reality to match the reality she created, she had made that created reality an actual reality.

Angular had not even refused to provide her with information. She had not even asked for information. He had not impeded her progress in any way.

He would have to have been removed because he might have be-come an impediment to the progress of the establishment of The Representative World Government. That, however, wasn't the rea-son she removed him. She would have preferred to leave him to his own.

What had she sensed in him?

What else would cause a mental conflict?

Anything that would create opposing concepts of reality in her mind.

Did opposing concepts of reality always have to be created by others?

A mental conflict produced worse pain than a physical blow. After a physical blow, the damage was done and that was that.

A mental conflict was not physical. It could be invoked over and over, inflicting the same amount of pain each time.

The conflict hurt just as much as a physical impact, probably more. It turned the subsystems into jelly and it could continue to do so every time the picture of the conflict was formed in the mind.

That was the key.

Someone else could create an opposing concept of self in her by creating a picture for her that disagreed with the positive picture she had of herself.

It may take a million cycles of day and night to crack a rock. It may take a million opposing concepts of reality to destroy the or-ganism.

While the pain that results from having opposing images of self produces an immediate impact, because the picture painted can be recalled and create the conflict anew, the cumulative effect may span a lifetime.

It's the perfect weapon. It takes only one shot, but that one shot could turn into a million impacts, each with no apparent external damage, but together as deadly as a real bullet between the eyes.

Each impact created an invisible wound that altered the injured's viewpoint, an alteration that was generally permanent.

It was the weapon Angular used on himself.

That's what Shandra had detected, had sensed. Angular had spent a lifetime firing an invisible bullet into his body. She had only pulled the trigger one last time, with a physical, rather than a mental bullet.

Angular had come up in American Operations to a position of leadership. To do so, Shandra was beginning to realize, he had to be the type of person who lived on the edge. He had to have his sub-systems disrupted in order to reinforce his perception of reality.

He didn't want his reconstruction of reality to match reality. He wanted it to oppose reality so that he could have his subsystems subjected to electrical impacts from self-inflicted mental conflicts. He constantly exposed himself to a reality that could alter his own reality at any time.

The image of a compulsive gambler flashed through Shandra's mind. The compulsive gambler does not want to win the bet. He wants to fix a perception of reality in his mind. The money is only the external reality of his internal perception.

Once his internal perception is fixed, he has dictated how the outcome will be and any outcome will cause the electricity to flow.

If he bets on a horse and the horse trails the entire race, he will be in a constant state of physical excitement. His subsystems will be disrupted throughout the entire race.

If he bets on a horse and the horse leads all the way, he will constantly fear loosing the lead.

Without the bet, there will be no disruption and no pleasure.

And no pleasure!

Shandra was startled at the thought.

Could a person become addicted to the electrical disruptions of the subsystems created by opposing concepts of reality?

Angular had reached the pinnacle for an agent in American Op-erations. American Operations was committed to The Representa-tive World Government.

If he had become addicted to the pleasure of pain that had been a way of life in his twilight world as an agent, what better way to continue the pleasure than to oppose his own organization?

That still wouldn't explain his statement that he wanted to give her pleasure but couldn't because she was protected. Nobody was protected against pleasure.

Could he have subjected himself to pain for so long, to the im-pacts that disrupted his subsystems, that the constant disruption had altered his sense of reality so that he thought causing pain was actually giving pleasure?

Was the perception of the internal impacts similar to the per-ception of hot or cold? The opposite of pain was pleasure. If the perception of pain couldn't be differentiated from the perception of pleasure, would that make the addiction to pain and pleasure identi-cal, both satisfied by the creation of excess electrical flows that would crash into the subsystems, the sexual profligate's cry: It matters not what I feel, only that I feel!

Because the disruption of the subsystems in turn distorts per-ception, the way the world is perceived by the mind, does the ad-dicted's misperceptions carry over to the providing of pleasure, where the sounds from inflicting pain are perceived as cries of pleasure?

Angular's comment that he couldn't provide her with pleasure because she was protected would certainly seem to give some va-lidity to the thought.

If that was true, there was a major defect in the evolutionary process. The mind developed to formulate a reality that did not ex-ist in order to alter physical reality to ensure its own survival. However, it could also create realities that activated the message system of the subsystems developed to allow the organism carry-ing the mind to successfully navigate within the existing environ-ment.

The same evolutionary process that advanced humanity drove it to destroy itself.

That meant, she realized, there definitely were objective defi-nitions of good and evil.

Block's use of idealization, the conscious limitation on the per-ception of reality in order to heighten the effect of sensory mes-sages was good. The use of mental, or for that matter, physical pain to inflict sensory effects on yourself or others was bad.

The former was good simply because it promoted survival of the species, while the latter, allowing an addiction to the conflict im-pacts of the mind, was evil, very evil, because it led to a dead end, to the extinction of the species. It was only through the creation and survival of sentient animate matter that matter in nothingness could be comprehended.

The thought was so startling, it brought Shandra back to a real-ity that showed Acapulco appearing through the clouds as the Stra-toJet glided in for landing. She handed her glass back to the stew-ardess.

Block would be after Sidney because he held the key to Block's project. Sidney had to be reclaimed to prevent him from injecting excess liquidity into the monetary system.

If Sidney was under the control of this Lano D'Lazo, both of them would have to be exterminated, a task, she was sure, that Block had already accomplished.

She tried querying Angular's computer to see if anything had come through on D'Lazo.

To her surprise, D'Lazo was on the top of an all-points bulletin.

"URGENT Lano D'Lazo, a Nationalist reactionary, is extremely dangerous and should be hunted down and eliminated without con-tact, no questions asked. A1A assigned job but has been out of con-tact several hours. mr."

If D'Lazo was so dangerous, why hadn't she received an imme-diate response earlier? Headquarters didn't have his name three hours earlier and now he was extremely dangerous? She could guess what D'Lazo had to do with Block's project, but did this mean Block, A1A, had been successful with Sidney?

Shandra entered "Command Structure? mr?" to find out who was minding the store.

"mr" the message revealed was Mary Renon, an assistant to The Chairman who was familiar with Block's assignment and who would be handling it in The Chairman's absence.

Shandra signaled her presence in Acapulco and her intention of helping Block in his project, but received no acknowledgement.

Mary Renon, she thought as she said her goodbyes to the Stra-toJet crew, apparently had moved on to other concerns, reason to think Block had wrapped everything up in a neat little ball. Shandra located a map of Acapulco and then located D'Lazo address on the map. Given Renon's last message, she was not about to drive up in a limousine, Block or no Block. Nor, given her experience in Manhat-tan, did she want help from the local office of American Operations.

She walked through reverse security into the main terminal.

She didn't want to rent a car, and a cab might set off alarms. Was she being too cautious? She doubted it. However, she wasn't going to hitchhike.

She looked around, her mind a blank. She saw posters with hang gliders, bicyclists, jet skies, small pipe planes, even one with the space station on it.

She still stood there. She hated being indecisive.

"Anything you want." It was a statement. She turned and looked down at the smiling eyes of a young boy, perhaps ten.

"Transportation."

"Follow me." He turned, motioning over his shoulder with his hand. "I can get you anything. What type of transportation you want?"

"A motorbike."

"A motorbike is a big problem. Cost you plenty."

"Money is no problem."

"Then motorbike is no problem. I get you anything you want."

She followed the boy out a side entrance of the main terminal. He whistled, waved, and then whistled again. A girl on a motorbike separated herself from the jumble of traffic and putted over.

The boy talked to her for a short time and she got off the bike. The boy brought it over and held out his hand. Shandra put a twenty in it. The boy continued to hold his hand out. Shandra put another twenty in it. The boy didn't take his hand away until it held a five more twenties.

She looked at the girl. The boy put the money in his pocket. The girl shrugged her shoulders. Shandra got on the bike, tested it for balance and operating controls, and putted away.

She followed the traffic out of the airport and stopped at the tangle of signs to get her bearings. All she had to do was get on the road going up behind the city proper. She decided to get on the road to the city and just stay to the right.

That settled, she began to wonder how to go about getting into D'Lazo's. She assumed that security would be heavy. But physical security, just like computer security, was only as good as the peo-ple that manned the system.

She wondered about Block being out of touch with headquarters. That probably wasn't a problem. Breaching security systems was second nature to him. He had probably gotten in and out and was somewhere in the lights dropping away on her left practicing ideali-zation with another partner. Sidney St. Remain was probably only a memory. The project was probably completed. There were no heli-copters buzzing around the hillside up there so there couldn't be many bodies splattered around it.

Was she kidding herself? Something as important as currency combination to a country that once ruled the world would demand the most diligent attention. If there were a faction within the coun-try that opposed it, their opposition would call forth the most con-centrated effort to effectively defeat it.

Why, however, would anybody oppose something that was so obviously a benefit to all? To turn it around, why would anyone support it if it would lead to the submergence, to some extent, of the national identity?

She hadn't been exposed to politics in training school. Being more interested in doing what interested her, she had not developed her own political acumen.

She did know wars were fought out of economic necessity. If there were enough for everyone, there wouldn't be a need for someone to want what someone else had. She knew it wasn't that simple in operation, yet that's what it came down to.

If there were two factions on currency combination within the dwindling empire, one must be better off economically under the present system and the other must feel it would be better off eco-nomically under the new system.

That's why she had to puzzle out Angular's situation. Everybody would obviously be better off under the new system, The Repre-sentative World Government, than under the old system because under the old system no one would ever be safe.

Angular had felt The Representative World Government would enslave humanity. Why would anyone think a unified government would lead to less freedom than people already had? An individual's freedom had always been limited by his ability to sustain life.

If she had learned nothing else in training school, it was that the basic purpose of The Representative World Government was to sta-bilize markets. It was only by stabilizing markets that production could be undertaken with confidence, whether it be apples or baby carriages.

If the production and movement of goods to consumers was the goal of a Representative World Government, it was foolish to be-lieve it would enslave the very people it was facilitating production for, that it would price its production out of the reach of the people consuming it.

The only way to achieve an orderly marketplace was to regulate it on a global basis. While the free flow of goods was essential to an orderly marketplace, unbridled competition could only lead to the disruption of markets.

It was not the global regulation of the marketplace that would lead to slavery. It was the nationalization of labor by individual na-tions to artificially cheapen that nation's products in order to un-dercut the marketplace price that would, and in the past had, cre-ated slavery.

Stable markets dictated that production move into the distribu-tion system in accordance with available resources and local needs.

She had no idea who this Lano D'Lazo was, but she was sure whoever he was, he was out to protect his own interests first. She had come to learn that nationalism was merely a euphemism for personal profit. There was nothing wrong with personal profit. Profits were how resources were allocated, with money lent only to those who could produce efficiently enough to return a profit, and thus the interest on the loan. However, personal profit as a goal could not be allowed to interfere with the orderly distribution of goods and services.

The motorbike had started to slow down on the hill, bringing Shandra's attention back to reality. She found herself in the middle of an impromptu parking lot with cars taking up the available space on both sides of the road.

She could see light pollution to her left and further over, the moon reflecting off the bay.

She stopped the bike and backed it down the grade looking for an address. She didn't expect to find one, but then . . .

Not only an address, but also a name. Headquarters had no knowledge of this guy when she punched in his name and here he was on the mailbox?

She wondered if someone had suppressed his identity in the re-cords, and if so why, and if they had, why had they all of a sudden unsuppressed it? He certainly wasn't trying to hide.

Having found the place, she now needed a way to get in. She looked up and down the hill. Not the front gate. They were probably expending their resources getting rid of gatecrashers.

She turned the bike around and went slowly down the hill. The cars were closely parked, but she noticed a driveway behind one of them.

This was what she was looking for. She guided the bike between two cars and angled into the driveway. There was a huge garbage dumpster on the downhill side of the driveway. She leaned the bike against it. She followed the driveway on foot down beside a grey retainer wall. It ended at a loading dock. A catering truck was open-ended against the dock, serving its function for the waiters and busboys catering what must be a large party.

Shandra stopped dead and tried to sort out the noises. She could-n't come up with a tentative layout. There must be living quarters between her and the party. Well, she would find out. She moved swiftly up the far side of the loading dock, through the light of the opening and lost herself in the clutter beyond. The waiters had no reason to expect her to be there and therefore wouldn't have seen her if they had looked right at her.

There were no guards.

Interesting.

She ignored the door the caterers were using and looked around for another one. The garage must be entered from above, but there was always an entrance out the back. She spotted it at the end of a long staging table. She quickly moved to it, turned the handle, found it open, and was in a room, not a garage, but a sort of hallway. Doors led off in all directions.

She tried the one on her right and found the garage. The one on the left provided a set of stairs going up. Another door on her left was locked.

Still no guards.

She reached back under her think red hair and took a clip out from just above the nape of her neck, opening it into a lock pick. She inserted it, moving one tumbler at a time until she could move the handle and open the door.

She did so very slowly.

The room had a strange bluish green cast to its light. The door opened onto a long corridor. She couldn't see what was at the end of the corridor, in the room where the light was coming from, but she could see a door on the corridor.

Where were the guards?

She moved down to the door and tried it. It was open. She looked toward the end of the corridor. Should she find out what was there first or should she cover this room?

She decided to look into the room first. She pushed open the door and moved in.

The room was filled with shelves. The shelves were filled with compact discs, in clear containers, on end, side by side, stretching perhaps a hundred feet. Each bank of shelves contained ten rows with the banks about four feet apart. She couldn't see all the banks, but judging from the fact that the room appeared as wide as it was long, there must have been at least twenty, with shelves on both sides.

The amount of information contained in the room astounded her. You could store everything contained in the Library of Congress in just one bank. What in the world was this place?

And no guards?

She moved down the row in front of the door she had entered. At the end, she found a series of disk players. She heard a click behind her and instinctively ducked. An arm with a disk sailed over her head. She had failed to see the retrieval mechanism for the multi-tude of disk's. She should have realized. The mechanism traveled over tracks on the ceiling. Hinged arms carrying disks moved on the tracks, their customized hands retrieving and returning disks to their assigned places.

Somehow, Shandra didn't think this was an elaborate film li-brary. She resisted the temptation to stop and play, find out ex-actly what she was dealing with. It didn't look like a threat. She retreated back to the corridor and shut the door.

No guards there. None here. She moved cautiously down to the end of the corridor. She peeked around the wall. She saw the source of the light, the underside of a huge transparent swimming pool. It looked to be Olympic size, with an adjacent diving well.

The room was huge, with a ceiling about twenty feet high and dimensions to match the Olympian dimensions of the pool, which took up maybe a tenth of the available space.

She moved to her left, away from the underside of the pool, looking for guards, familiarizing herself with the layout. The con-tents, tables, chairs, cabinets were elective at best. The place re-sembled a huge open laboratory with space being converted to whatever use the moment demanded.

She found one set of stairs going up to what must be the house above. She created a memory triangle with the location, the door, and any noise to retrieve it. She moved past it and found another door into a room that looked like a sound booth. Lights were flick-ering off the glass. There must be a bank of monitors on the other side of the wall beneath her line of sight, she reasoned.

She peered through and, not seeing any occupants, pushed the door open.

The room was filled with recorders and monitors, close to a hundred. One bank of six contained different shots of, she looked closer, Block, for heaven sakes.

He was in some sort of transparent contraption, without any clothes, his head screwed to the left like he was engaged in holding up the building. His eyes were shut tight.

She looked at the monitors one at a time, trying to make sense out of what she was seeing. They all had the same blue green light as the outside room so he must be right outside the door some-where.

She flicked her eyes over the monitors again, looking at the shading of the light. They were all being taken from above. He had to be facing the pool. He had to be close to the pool.

She noticed other recorders running. She flicked on several. More pictures of Block. They were really doing a job. One was taken from behind him, with the back of his head framed by the diving well of the pool. A stunning brunette, naked, was doing lan-guid somersaults in the deep end.

Shandra wondered what that was about, but returned to her primary concern, could she get out there without being observed? She knew she would be on tape, but did the tape end here or was it piped elsewhere.

She began turning on monitors, one after another. Some were attached to operating recorders, others to recorders that waited silently, perhaps to be activated by an opening door or a loud sigh.

She located the security monitors to the area she was in. She watched as they swept the room. Block was the only other person in the area.

She found the one that covered the stairs next to the control booth. The one next to it showed the top of the stairs, empty. Secu-rity had to be someplace.

She checked the feeds. There were no feeds out. She would just have to take her chances on any independent observation.

Well, she thought, I'm alone. She paused. She felt a small thrill go through her body.

Call it intuition, she shrugged. She didn't normally get that feel-ing, the little electric thrill, when she was being observed. She hadn't been caught on it yet, so she would go with it.

She moved out into the room. The pool was directly in front of her, down a corridor made up of two rows of filing cabinets.

When she reached the end of the row, she looked around the base of the pool.

She couldn't spot Block or his transparent motorcycle. Motorcy-cle? she thought. He was in it, not on it.

The back shot of his head had shown the diving well, so she moved in that direction. As she rounded the end, she saw the bru-nette swim into focus. Her eyes were open, staring directly at her through the bottom of the pool. They moved with her arc. She was unfocused. She couldn't see through the bottom.

The transparent contraption came into view as she rounded the end of the diving well. The bottom of the well was shoulder high. She had a momentary sensation of falling up into the water.

Block looked like he was straining at stool. She didn't want to disturb him until she figured out just what his situation was.

She could see him through the plastic. She could see a wire run-ning between his legs. She could see he was positioned to avoid contact with the wire. She could also see what he would contact the wire with first.

Interesting. She looked at the wire and then at the brunette swimming nude just above her head.

She wondered if it was some sort of sex aversion therapy.

She looked at the control panel but didn't want to mess with it because nothing was labeled. There certainly was no ignition to worry about. This motorcycle wasn't going anywhere, although the occupant might be.

She followed the wires out of the control panel and saw an electric cord going over to a floor-mounted outlet. The wire cer-tainly had something going through it. She walked over and pulled the plug. She took the two prongs and placed them simultaneously against the plug's metal base to discharge any residual current left in the wire.

Satisfied, she walked back over to Block. She leaned over and without touching him anywhere else, stuck the tip of her tongue in his ear, wiggling it gently.

"Ahhheeeeaaaa...." he screamed. Not feeling the expected pain between his legs, he opened his eyes. "Oh, it's you. Get me the hell out of here, will you?"

Shandra had already psyched out the closing mechanism and Block was sprawled on the floor in front of her before he could fin-ish his sentence.

He lay there for a long moment and then tried to move a leg. It worked, as did the other one and both arms.

"I was just getting ready to switch back to position A-1, with my weight on my left knee and my right elbow. What time is it? How long have I been in that damned thing?"

He put his arms out in front of him, lifting himself up on his arms and legs like a spider.

"It's about ten. When did you check in?"

"Ha. It felt like I was in there ten years. That thing is designed to make you as uncomfortable as can be. Time literally stops. But we have to get upstairs. I think they're holding St. Remain. We have to get him and the Diskcard."

"You're sure you're able. I mean . . ."

Block was up, jumping up and down in little warm-up exercises.

"Nothing more than a little isometric exercise. Let's find out what's what. Do you know your way out of here?" He paused, look-ing at the brunette as she made another pass. "Damn fine looking girl. I've run into her somewhere." He looked down. "Oh. I could use some clothes."

They walked back around the diving well and attacked the cabi-nets. Shandra found some yellow and green outfits in one. She handed one to Block.

"These are the outfits their security people wear," he said. He pulled the pants on. "Pretty cute, eh?" They were a little tight. He left the top open. "Where is the way up to the rooms in this place?"

Shandra motioned to follow her. She led him back through the row of cabinets to the staircase.

"Just a second," she said as she ducked her head into the control booth. "The top of the stairs is still unguarded."

"Be careful. The guards were all over when I came in."

He climbed the stairs, found no resistance from the door, and pushed it an inch without opening it.

"We have to be on the north side in D'Lazo's living quarters," he whispered. "The pool is in the center with rooms off both sides. They took me through the floor of one of the rooms on the north side. We must be at the far north edge of the villa."

He started to open the door, freezing instantly. A horrible scream filtered through the crack. They listened for a second. The scream was unceasing, hardly allowing for the breath to keep it going. It sent chills down both of their spines.

It didn't change in either pitch or intensity, although it was bro-ken by hysterical sobs. Block pushed the door open further. A dark-ened corridor stretched out in front of them. Light was coming through a window halfway down the corridor. The screams ap-peared to be coming from the lighted window.

Block quickly moved down the corridor and peered around the edge of the window. Alix was spread eagled, tied face up on the bed, her face hardly recognizable over D'Lazo's shoulder. He was methodically masturbating in her vagina while he played her broken ribs like a human bagpipe.

"Fucking shit!" Shandra said quietly, looking over his shoulder. "What's he doing to her?"

Block reacted immediately. "Where's the door in?" he whispered fiercely through his teeth. "I'm going to kill the bastard once and forever."

Shandra backed away from the door, having no way of knowing what was going on between the girl's rib cage and her mind. She looked left to right. Block, having seen no door moving to the win-dow, continued on down the corridor.

"Here it is. Help me through it." He tried turning the knob. It wouldn't turn. He tried kicking it. He hurt his bare foot. Shandra joined him, at first with her shoulder and then trying to kick it in herself. The screams went on with undiminished intensity.

"Hurry," Block cried, "this is horrible."

Shandra retrieved the lock pick from the nape of her neck and went to work on the tumblers.

"Why's she screaming like that? Is he wearing something?"

"He broke her fucking ribs. He's insane. Get the door open. I want to kill him. This is horrible."

The tumblers gave under Shandra's expertise. "Why would he break her ribs?" she asked. The last tumbler gave way and the han-dle turned.

Block exploded over her through the door.

"Shit," was all she heard as she picked herself up off the floor. "Shit! Shit! And more shit!"

She could see Block's back, encased in the green and yellow misfitting jacket, and beyond, the girl tied on the bed. There was no D'Lazo. The incessant screams were not coming out of the girl's mouth, which was frozen open under unseeing eyes.

Shandra looked to her right, where the window was. The two miniature figures were suspended in space, a holographic night-mare.

She reached over, shutting her eyes tightly, and pushed the off switch.