"So long."

"We'll be seeing you," Nadler said.

They left the door slightly ajar behind them. I did not doubt for a moment that I still lacked the entire story. But then, so did they. I had just been willing to level with them and my body had handed me a brace of roods. I found this especially frightening because in some ways it reminded me of my experience on the bus ride home. I could still see the marks of concern on the old man's brow as he asked me if I were feeling all right. Was it a similar thing that had taken me just now, a bizarre repercussion on my nervous system? An effect of the reversal? The timing was so smooth, though ... I did not like it at all. Nothing I had ever come across in my checkered study of man and his manifold ways seemed of assistance at that moment.

President Eliot, we got problems.

As the cablelike vines or tentacles seized me, thigh and shoulder, hoisting me into the air to a position where, wrenching my neck, I was afforded a view of the thing's massive trunk, down to where it emerged from the tub of slime in the center of the room, I reflected, as the enormous Venus's-flytrap type blades snapped open, revealing a reddish interior, that while it may be true that most accidents are caused by carelessness, I could in no way be held responsible this time. Since my departure from the hospital I had been a model State Department employee, totally circumspect in thought and deed.

As it paused for an instant, perhaps debating the best disposition of the alkaloids my excess nitrogen would provide, the past couple of days flashed before me. No more than that, as I was still fresh on the earlier portions of my life from the last time I had been about to die.

I don't know whether it was that certain smile or morbid curiosity that manipulated me next. Doctor Drade had wanted to keep me hospitalized for further observation, despite the prima facie evidence of my healed chest. I disappointed him, however, and checked out around five hours after Nadler and Ragma had departed. Hal picked me up and drove me home.

Declining an offer to dine with Hal and Mary, I retired early that evening, first calling Ginny, who now seemed anxious to resume life where we had been interrupted at it back in my undergraduate days. We made a date for the following afternoon, and I turned in after a brief constitutional about the neighborhood rooftops.

Troubled, my sleep? Yes. External security there was, to the extent of a pair of drowsy coplike stakeouts I had spotted from above while taking the air. Inside, though, I shuffled my deck of distresses and dealt myself bad hand after bad hand until I was cleaned out, mercifully, before six bells.

From then to morning was nine hours long for me and interspersed with short features, none of which I could get a pin through afterward, save for the smile. I awoke knowing what I had to do and immediately set about rationalizing it so that it would not seem like another compulsion. And after a time I decided that perhaps it was not. Really, anyone would be curious about the place where he almost died.

So I phoned Hal and tried to borrow his car. Mary was using it, though. However, Ralph's was available and I hiked over and picked it up.

It was a crisp, clear morning with a hint of balminess to come. Driving seaward, I thought of my new job and of Ginny and of the smile. The job was to outlast the current difficulty, Nadler had assured me, and the more I considered it the more it seemed that it might be worthwhile. If you have to do something, it is fortunate if it can be something interesting, something more than a little enjoyable. All those races out there, somewhere, concerning which we now knew next to nothing-I was going to have an opportunity to mine the unknown, hopefully to fetch forth something of understanding, to consider the exotic, to transform the familiar. I realized, suddenly, that I was excited at the prospect. I wanted to do it. I had no illusions as to why I had been hired, but now that I had my foot between door and jamb I wanted to push by the present obstructions and have a go at the real work. It seemed, just then, that alien anthropology (well, xenology, more correctly, I suppose) was really the sort of thing for which I had been preparing myself all along, in my own eclectic way. I chuckled softly. In addition to being excited, it occurred to me that I might be happy.

Having grown a bit more used to doing things in reverse, I found that driving a stereoisocar was not all that difficult. I came to a proper halt at every POTS sign, and once I got out into the country there were very few traffic distractions. In fact, the only thing that had given me any trouble at all since the reversal was shaving. My traumatized nervous system had responded to the imaged reversal of a front-back reversal by jittering my hand to a bloody halt and waiting for me to dust off the electric shaver. This done, it was still a peculiar experience, but with the removal of the hazard it, repaid me with confidence and a reasonably clean face.

And as I grinned and grimaced in the glass, I had thought of the only fragment of the night's dreaming that remained with me. There was this smile. Whose? I did not know. It was just a smile, somewhere a little over the line from the place where things begin to make sense. It remained with me, though, flickering on and off like a fluorescent tube about to call it quits; and as I drove along the route Hal had taken earlier, I tried free-associating my way around it. Doctor Marko not being handy.

Nothing but the "Mona Lisa" came to pass. It did not feel quite right, in terms of analytic correspondence. Still, it was this famous painting that had gone out in exchange for the Rhennius machine. There could be some subtle connection-at least in my subconscious-or else a red herring born of coincidence and imagination, which sounds more like a caption for a Dali or an Ernst than a Da Vinci.

I shook my head and watched the morning go by. After a time I came to the side road and took it.

Leaving the car where we had parked before, I located the path and made my way down to the cottage. I observed it discreetly for a long while, saw no signs of life. Ragma had insisted that I seek to avoid troublesome situations, but this hardly seemed to qualify as one. I approached it from the rear, advancing on the window through which Paul must have entered. Yes. The latch was broken. Peering inside, I saw a small bedroom, quite empty. Circling the building then, I glanced in the other windows, saw that the place was indeed deserted. The fractured front door was nailed shut, so I returned to the rear and entered after the fashion of my former mentor and master rockmaker.

I made my way through the bedroom and on out the door from which Paul had emerged. In the front room the signs of our struggles were unobliterated. I wondered which of the dried bloodstains might be my own.

I glanced out the window. The sea was calmer, with more to it than was the case the last time I had passed this way. It lay cleaner scud lines on the beach, where no new doorways gaped that I could see. Turning away from it then, I studied the tackle and netting which had taken Paul so neatly where he stood, upsetting the balance of power and getting me punctured that day.

Some lines and a section of mesh were still snagged by a nail in one of the rafters, loosely leashing the junk on the floor below. To my right, a series of two-by-fours nailed between wall supports made a track up to that level.

I climbed it and crossed among the rafters, pausing every few paces to strike a light and examine the dustcoated wood. On the opposite side of the disturbed area where the equipment had rested, I came across a trail of small wedge-shaped smudges, leading in from a crossbrace which in turn bore them from the top of the side frame itself. I descended then and searched the rest of the cottage quite thoroughly but came across nothing else that was of any interest. So I went back outside, smoked a cigarette while I thought about it, then headed back for the car.