Inwardly he sighed. Hell, he was tired already, worn out by his hour-long show during which it was smile, smile, smile. “I’m on my way to Switzerland for the rest of tonight,” he said firmly, as if speaking to a hysterical child. Usually, when Marilyn was in one of her accusatory, quasi-paranoid moods it worked. But not this time, naturally.

“It’ll take you five minutes to get over here in that million dollar Rolls skyfly of yours,” Marilyn dinned in his ear. “I just want to talk to you for five seconds. I have something very important to tell you.”

She’s probably pregnant, Jason said to himself. Somewhere along the line she intentionally—or maybe unintentionally—forgot to take her pill.

“What can you tell me in five seconds that I don’t already know?” he said sharply. “Tell me now.”

“I want you here with me,” Marilyn said, with her customary total lack of consideration. “You must come. I haven’t seen you in six months and during that time I’ve done a lot of thinking about us. And in particular about that last audition.”

“Okay,” he said, feeling bitter and resentful. This was what he got for trying to manufacture for her—a no-talent—a career. He hung up the phone noisily, turned to Heather and said, “I’m glad you never ran into her; she’s really a—”

“Bullshit,” Heather said. “I didn’t ‘run into her’ because you made damn sure you saw to that.”

“Anyhow,” he said, as he made a right turn for the skyfly, “I got her not one but two auditions, and she snurfled them both. And to keep her self-respect she’s got to blame it on me. I somehow herded her into failing. You see the picture.”

“Does she have nice boobs?” Heather said.

“Actually, yes.” He grinned and Heather laughed. “You know my weakness. But I did my part of the bargain; I got her an audition—two auditions. The last one was six months ago and I know goddamn well she’s still smoldering and brooding over it. I wonder what she wants to tell me.”

He punched the control module to set up an automatic course for Marilyn’s apartment building with its small but adequate roof field.

“She’s probably in love with you,” Heather said, as he parked the skyfly on its tail, releasing then the descent stairs.

“Like forty million others,” Jason said genially.

Heather, making herself comfortable in the bucket seat of the skyfly said, “Don’t be gone very long or so help me I’m taking off without you.”

“Leaving me stuck with Marilyn?” he said. They both laughed. “I’ll be right back.” He crossed the field to the elevator, pressed the button.

When he entered Marilyn’s apartment he saw, at once, that she was out of her mind. Her entire face had pinched and constricted; her body so retracted that it looked as if she were trying to ingest herself. And her eyes. Very few things around or about women made him uneasy, but this did. Her eyes, completely round, with huge pupils, bored at him as she stood silently facing him, her arms folded, everything about her unyielding and iron rigid.

“Start talking,” Jason said, feeling around for the handle of the advantage. Usually—in fact virtually always—he could control a situation that involved a woman; it was, in point of fact, his specialty. But this … he felt uncomfortable. And still she said nothing. Her face, under layers of makeup, had become completely bloodless, as if she were an animated corpse. “You want another audition?” Jason asked. “Is that it?”

Marilyn shook her head no.

“Okay; tell me what it is,” he said wearily but uneasily. He kept the unease out of his voice, however; he was far too shrewd, far too experienced, to let her hear his uncertainty. In a confrontation with a woman it ran nearly ninety per cent bluff, on both sides. It all lay in how you did it, not what you did.

“I have something for you,” Marilyn turned, walked off out of sight into the kitchen. He strolled after her.

“You still blame me for the lack of success of both—” he began.

“Here you are,” Marilyn said. She lifted up a plastic bag from the drainboard, stood holding it a moment, her face still bloodless and stark, her eyes jutting and unblinking, and then she yanked the bag open, swung it, moved swiftly up to him.

It happened too fast. He backed away out of instinct, but too slowly and too late. The gelatinlike Callisto cuddle sponge with its fifty feeding tubes clung to him, anchored itself to his chest. Already he felt the feeding tubes dig into him, into his chest.

He leaped to the overhead kitchen cabinets, grabbed out a half-filled bottle of scotch, unscrewed the lid with flying fingers, and poured the scotch onto the gelatinlike creature. His thoughts had become lucid, even brilliant; he did not panic, but stood there pouring the scotch onto the thing.

For a moment nothing happened. He still managed to hold himself together and not flee into panic. And then the thing bubbled, shriveled, fell from his chest onto the floor. It had died.

Feeling weak, he seated himself at the kitchen table. Now he found himself fighting off unconsciousness; some of the feeding tubes remained inside him, and they were still alive. “Not bad,” he managed to say. “You almost got me, you fucking little tramp.”

“Not almost,” Marilyn Mason said flatly, emotionlessly. “Some of the feeding tubes are still in you and you know it; I can see it on your face. And a bottle of scotch isn’t going to get them out. Nothing is going to get them out.”

At that point he fainted. Dimly, he saw the green-and-gray floor rise to take him and then there was emptiness. A void without even himself in it.

Pain. He opened his eyes, reflexively touched his chest. His hand-tailored silk suit had vanished; he wore a cotton hospital robe and he was lying flat on a gurney. “God,” he said thickly as the two staff men wheeled the gurney rapidly up the hospital corridor.

Heather Hart hovered over him, anxious and in shock, but, like him, she retained full possession of her senses. “I knew something was wrong,” she said rapidly as the staff men wheeled him into a room. “I didn’t wait for you in the skyfly; I came down after you.”

“You probably thought we were in bed together,” he said weakly.

“The doctor said,” Heather said, “that in another fifteen seconds you would have succumbed to the somatic violation, as he calls it. The entrance of that thing into you.”

“I got the thing,” he said. “But I didn’t get all the feeding tubes. It was too late.”

“I know,” Heather said. “The doctor told me. They’re planning surgery for as soon as possible; they may be able to do something if the tubes haven’t penetrated too far.”

“I was good in the crisis,” Jason grated; he shut his eyes and endured the pain. “But not quite good enough. Just not quite.” Opening his eyes, he saw that Heather was crying. “Is it that bad?” he asked her; reaching up he took hold of her hand. He felt the pressure of her love as she squeezed his fingers, and then there was nothing. Except the pain. But nothing else, no Heather, no hospital, no staff men, no light. And no sound. It was an eternal moment and it absorbed him completely.