Mathieu resisted it for several minutes before deciding there would be no harm, no real danger, in shutting his eyes for a mere ten seconds. It was, after all, just a game.

There was no blackness when he closed his eyes — only a pink infinity swarming with magenta and green after-images. He reached the count of ten easily and decided to try for twenty. If I fell asleep now Carry Dallen would never be able to touch me. fm not going to sleep, of course, but it would be so good to stop running up those concrete stairs, to stop putting the trigger on the woman and child, to stop seeing them crumpling, falling, idiot eyes staring…

An angry bleeping from the control console told Mathieu important changes were taking place in the outside universe, changes he ought to know about.

But he waited another five seconds before opening his eyes, and by then it was possible to distinguish separate blades of grass on the hillside which filled the entire field of view ahead.

He had time for one flicker of gratitude over the feet that there was absolutely nothing he could do.

It was easy, he thought, in the instant of the plane becoming a bomb. Easy as…

The planning of a murder presented special difficulties, Dallen had realised.

Among them were the sheer novelty of the problem parameters and the ingrained moral objections which constantly disrupted his chains of thought. But this can't be me, the jolting recrimination would run, I just don't do this kind of thing. There was also the overriding need to make the murder look like an accidental death. An obvious homicide would trigger an investigation which was certain to reveal the circumstances which had led to Mathieu's fateful encounter with Cona and Mikel Dallen in the quietness of the north stairwell — and from there a short step in elementary police logic would lead to Carry Dallen.

The subsequent punishment would be little in itself. Dallen did not even regard a one-way trip to Orbitsville's Botany Bay as a punishment — which was partly why he could not allow Gerald Mathieu to escape along that road — but it would separate him from Cona and Mikel, thereby adding to the hurt they had already suffered. There was only one way for the issue to be resolved. Mathieu would have to the, preferably in a way he fully understood to be an execution, but which would appear like an accident to all others. And therein lay the practical difficulties.

Edgy and preoccupied, Dallen wandered into the kitchen and found Betti Knopp preparing lunch. She was a middle-aged voluntary worker who came to the house three days a week to shoulder the burden of looking after Cona, a duty she performed conscientiously and in almost total silence. Dallen was grateful to her, but had not managed to build any kind of conversational bridge. Aware of her uneasiness over his presence in the kitchen, he excused himself and went into the main room. Cona was standing at the window, looking out at the sloping perspectives of the North Hill. Her hair had been combed and neatly arranged in an adult style by Betti, and her attitude was one of wistful contemplation, just as in the period of homesickness following her arrival from Orbitsville.

Dallen was tempted to indulge in fantasy — the past weeks had been nothing more than a nightmare and Cona was her old self. He went to the window and put his arms around her. She turned and snuggled against him, making a cooing sound of pleasure and only the smell of chocolate, which the old Cona always avoided, interfered with the illusion that somehow his wife had been restored to him. He stared over her head in the direction of Madison's City Hall, unable to stop dashing his mind against the barriers of the past. If only he had not arranged to have lunch with Cona that day. If only he had been in his office. If only she had gone in by the main entrance. If only Mathieu had blanked the Department of Supply monitor a day or an hour or a minute later or earlier…

Dallen gave a low grunt of surprise as he discovered that Cona had cupped her hand on his genitals and was beginning to massage him with clumsy eagerness. For a second he almost yielded, then self-disgust plumed through him and he stepped back abruptly. Cona came after him, giggling, her gaze fixed on his groin.

"Don't do that," he snapped, holding her at arm's length. "No, Cona, no!"

She raised her eyes, reacting to the denial in his voice, and her face distorted into ugliness in a baby grimace of rage. She went for him again, strong and uninhibited, and he had to struggle to hold her in check. At that moment Betti Knopp came into the room with a tray of food. She gave Dallen a worried glance and turned to leave. "Bring it," he ordered, pushing Cona down into an armchair. The sudden force he had to use either hurt or alarmed her and she gave a loud sob which in turn drew a gasp from Betti, the first sound he had heard her make that day. She knelt by Cona and attracted her attention by noisily stirring a dish of something yellow and glutinous. Dallen stared helplessly at the two women, then strode to the other end of the room and activated the holovision set.

"Speak to me, please," he said to the solid image of a thin, silver-bearded man which appeared at the set's focus. Dallen had dropped into a chair and folded his arms across his chest before realising the image was that of Karal London. He leaned forward intently.

"…was in his early sixties," a news reader was saying, "and is understood to have refused treatment for the lung condition which led to his death. Doctor London was best known in the Madison City area as a philanthropist and creator of the Anima Mundi Foundation, an organisation devoted to promoting an exotic blend of science and religion. It was his work for the Foundation which took him to Optima Thule two years ago, and today there are unconfirmed reports that a bizarre experiment — designed by Doctor London to prove some of his theories — has been…"

"Mister Dallen!" Betti Knopp appeared directly in front of him as if by magic, hands on hips, elbows stuck out in the classic posture of exasperation. "There's something we have to get straight."

He said, "Wait a minute — I'm trying to hear what…"

"I won't wait a minute — you're going to hear me out right now!" Betti, who had been almost totally silent for weeks, was transformed into a noise-making machine. "I don't have to take all this high-and-mighty treatment from you or anybody else."

"Please let me hear this one item, and then well…"

"If you think you're too important to talk with me why don't you contact the clinic and see if they got somebody more to your taste? Why don't you?"

Dallen got to his feet, tried to placate Betti and only succeeded in attracting the attention of Cona, who added to the noise level by starting to pound on her tray with a dish. He turned and ran upstairs to his bedroom, slammed the door shut behind him and switched on another holovision. The local newscast was still running, but now the subject was hotel closures. He tried to activate the set's ten-minute memory facility and swore silently but fervently as he remembered it needed repair. Tense with frustration, he considered returning to the downstairs set, then came an abrupt shift to a more analytical mode of thought.

It had been established that Karal London was dead, so the big question troubling Dallen related to the strange experiment. Was the fact of its being mentioned at all an indication that there had been a surprising result?

The notion seemed more preposterous than ever — the idea of a deceased scientist reaching out across the light years from Orbitsville and disturbing a material object on Earth — but why were the information media interested? Would anybody connected with the Anima Mundi Foundation have been in a hurry to spread word of a negative result?