Hanging there, tensing and untensing my muscles to counteract the pendulum effect of the long, knotted line, I examined the penny on which Lincoln faced to the left. It looked precisely the way a penny would look if I were regarding it in a mirror, reversed lettering and all. Only I was holding it in the palm of my hand.

Beside/below me, where I dangled but a couple of feet above the floor, hummed the Rhennius machine: three jet-black housings set in a line on a circular platform that rotated slowly in a counterclockwise direction, the end units each extruding a shaft-one vertical, one horizontal-about which passed what appeared to be a Moebius strip of a belt almost a meter in width, one strand half running through a tunnel in the curved and striated central unit, which faintly resembled a wide hand cupped as in the act of scratching.

Pumping my knees, feet braced against the terminal knot, I set up a gentle swaying that bore me, moments later, back above the ingoing aperture of the middle component. Lowering myself, extending my arm, I dropped the penny onto the belt, was halted at the end of my arc, began the return swing. Still crouched and reaching, I snared the penny as it emerged.

Not what I had expected. Not at all, and no indeed.

In that its first journey through the innards of the thing had reversed the coin, I had assumed that running it through the works again would return it to normal. Instead, I now held a metal disk on which the design was properly oriented but was incised, intaglio-like, rather than raised. This applied to both sides, and in the place of the milling the edges were step-recessed, like a train wheel.

Curiouser and curiouser. I would simply have to do it again to see what happened next. I straightened, gripped the line with my knees, began to redirect my errant arc.

For a moment I glanced up into the gloom where my thirty-foot puppet string reached to its shadowy bar. An I-beam, too near the ceiling to mount, I had traversed it aardvark-style-ankles locked above, letting my fingers do the walking. I wore a dark sweater and trousers and had on thin-soled suede boots. I had carried the line coiled about my left shoulder until I had reached a point as near to being directly above the apparatus as was possible.

I had made my way in through a skylight I had had to jimmy after cutting away some grillwork and jump-wiring three alarms in a fashion that produced a small nostalgia for my abandoned major in electrical engineering. The hall below was dim, the only illumination provided by a series of floor-level spots that encircled the display and concentrated their beams upward upon it. A low guardrail enclosed the machine, and concealed electric eyes fenced it invisibly. Sensor plates within the floor and the platform would betray a footstep. There was a television camera bolted to my beam. I had turned it slowly, slightly, so that it was still focused on the display-only farther southward, as I planned to descend on the north side where the belt was flattest just before it reached the central unit-a guesstimate, from those four courses in TV production. There were guards in the building, but one had just made his rounds and I planned to be quick. All plans have their limits and hazards, which is why insurance companies get rich.

The night was cloudy and a very cold wind went around in it. My breath flapped ghostly wings and flew away. The only witness to my finger-numbing exercises on the roof was a tired-looking cat crouched in the scuttleway. The chill had been about when I had arrived in town the night before, a journey resulting from a decision I had reached on Hal's couch the previous day.

After Charv and Ragma had, at my request, set me down about fifty miles out of town during the dark of the moon, I had hitched rides and gotten back to my neighborhood well after midnight. And a good thing it was that I had.

There is a side street that dead-ends into my own, and my building is right across the way from it. As you proceed along that side street the windows of my apartment are in plain sight. More naturally in night's dark and quiet than they would by day, my eyes sought them. Dark, as they should be. Blank. Vacant.

But then, half a minute later, as I neared the corner, came a small flare, a tiny flickering, blackness again.

Any other time and I would have dismissed it if I had noted it at all. It could very easily have been a reflection or an imagining. Yet ...

Yes. But recently recuperated and still full of warnings, I would be a fool to be anything but wary. Neither a fool nor a raisin be, I told myself as I put on my waries, turned right and headed away.

I walked a pair of blocks to and a couple from, coming at last up the alley behind my building. There was a rear entranceway, but I avoided it, making my way to a place where I could go from pipe to sill to ledge to fire escape, which I did.

In a very brief while I was on the roof and moving across it. Then down the pipe to the place I had stood when talking with Paul Byler. I edged forward from there and peered in my bedroom window. Too dark to tell anything for certain. It was the other window, though, that had framed what might have been the lighting of a cigarette.

I rested my fingertips on the window, pressed firmly, then exerted a steady pressure upward. It slid open without a sound, the reward of consideration. Being an erratic sleeper and fond of my nighttime gambols, I kept the running grooves heavily waxed so as not to disturb my roommate.

Leaving my shoes behind on the ledge, I entered and stood still, ready to flee.

I waited a minute, breathing slowly, through my mouth. Quieter that way. Another minute ...

A creak from my uneasy easy chair reached me, an effect it always manages when its occupant uncrosses and recrosses his legs.

That would place a person to the right of the desk in the front room, in a position near to the window.

"Is there any coffee in that thing?" a harsh voice managed softly.

"I think so" came the reply.

"Then pour me some."

Sounds of a thermos being unstoppered. Pouring. A few scrapes and bumps. A muttered "Thanks." They placed the other fellow at the desk itself.

A slurp. A sigh. The scratch of a match. More silence.

Then: "Wouldn't it be funny if he'd gotten himself killed?"

A snort.

"Yeah. Not bloody likely, though."

"How can you say that?"

"He stinks of luck, or something like it. And he's such an odd one to begin with."

"That I'll buy. Wish he'd hurry up and find his way home."

"That makes for two of us."

The one in the easy chair got to his feet and moved to the window. After a time he sighed. "How long, how long, 0 Lord?"

"It will be worth the wait."

"I'm not denying it. But the sooner we catch hold of him the better."

"Of course. I'll drink to that."

"Hear! What've you got there?"

"A bit of brandy."

"You've had that all along and you've been giving me this black mud?"

"You kept asking for coffee. Besides, I just found it a while back."

"Pass it here."

"There's another glass. Let's be genteel. It's good stuff."

"Pour!"

I heard the cork come out of my Christmas bottle. A few clinks followed and footfalls.

"Here you are."

"Smells good."

"Doesn't it?"

"To the Queen!"

A shuffling of feet. A single clink.

"God save ‘er!"

They reseated themselves after that and grew silent once again. I stood there for perhaps a quarter of an hour, but nothing more was said.

So I edged my way to the corner rack, found some money I had left behind still in its place in the boot, removed it, pocketed it, removed myself back to the ledge.

I closed the window as carefully as I had opened it, retreated to the roof, cut across the path of a black cat who arched his back and spat-doubtless superstitious, not that I blamed him-and made my way away.