The children inadvertently cooperated in providing this. They had been unusually lively for the past few days, perhaps a consequence of my own distraction and decreased attention.

The receiving equipment compounded rather than eased the problem. The controller was small and fitted easily into my right hand, but the RV helmet, large and black with prominent silver eyes, felt heavy and looked uncomfortable. With a little juggling and much more misgivings I fitted it on over my head.

That action did not pass unobserved. I rarely regret my decision to perform minor genetic modification of my darlings, giving each of them increased stamina, better health, higher intelligence, abundant energy, and lessened need for sleep. Notice, however, the adverb rarely.

When I was ready to test the helmet it was early evening for Seth, but past midnight for us in Ireland. Crystal and Lucy-Mary were perhaps the liveliest and most inquisitive, not to say troublesome, of the seven-year-olds, and they should have been in bed hours ago. But they entered my study just as I donned the helmet and moved the controller to a midrange setting. I saw Seth’s offices, located at the Argos Group headquarters in Houston, Texas. I also saw, overlaid on that image, two gray ghostlike outlines. When I adjusted to receive a heavier component of the local scene, the gray figures turned into Crystal and Lucy-Mary. They walked over to me and stood giggling and nudging each other.

“Can you see me?” said Seth’s voice.

“Yes. But wait one moment. I must attend to something here.” I turned off the audio feed. “Girls, you are not a part of this activity. Please leave.”

“What activity?” Lucy-Mary said.

Crystal added, “If there is any activity, we must be part of it because there’s no one else here. Do you know what you look like? You look like a human being with a fly’s head.”

“That particular conceit lost its novelty long before you or even I was born. This helmet provides a communication capability, and I am in fact engaged in a meeting. Or I will be, as soon as you leave.”

“Can’t we stay and listen?” asked Crystal.

“You may not. Please leave-now.”

They did so, reluctantly. I saw Lucy-Mary’s curious final glance at the RV helmet, and I made a mental note to hide it safely away when it was not in use. I could imagine Seth receiving a call from one of my darlings, and enthusiasm was not on the candidate list of his reactions.

“What was all that about?” he asked as soon as we were once more in contact.

“A little local interference. We can anticipate such things from time to time.”

“You really got eighteen of ’em in that castle?” Seth’s ability to infer what he could neither see nor hear was uncanny. “All them young girls. I don’t know how you stand it. They’d drive me dotty in a week. But I guess it don’t matter for you, you were crazy before.”

“Far be it from me to interrupt your valuable insights into my past and present mental condition, but may we return to the subject of the equipment test? I am restoring a full visual feed to you and minimizing my local inputs.”

“All right. What do you see?”

I was rapidly adapting to the quarter-second delay between each statement that we made. However, illogical as it sounds, it had not occurred to me that the visual feeds would be subject to the same hiatus. I found myself waiting impatiently for the field of view to change.

“I see an office wall,” I said.

“So do I. I’m standin’ right in front of it.”

“It’s light green.”

“It sure is. So far so good. Tell me where to go and what to do next, an’ if it won’t kill me, I’ll try an’ do it.”

“Turn around, slowly.”

I felt as though I myself were turning. The green wall vanished, to be replaced by a mural of some kind of jungle scene framed by real potted plants. That gave way in turn to a wall-wide picture window, seven or eight meters away, that showed a blue sky beyond.

“Walk over toward the window,” I said.

There was a silence-rather longer, it seemed, than the planned electronic delay. “All right. If you say so.” Seth had an odd tone in his voice. For the first time I wished that I could see the expression on his face.

My field of view moved steadily across the room, and I counted the paces. The window came closer. I was looking up and out, to a high layer of scattered cloud. And then I was looking down.

Down, down, down. Far below lay dwarfed fields, towers, and highways, and beyond them the dull, distant glint of water.

I stepped back convulsively. My legs moved, but I did not move. I stepped again, and again. Nothing. I was rooted to the spot, running backward in a nightmare. Finally I realized what I had to do and squeezed the hand controller. The video field switched at once to full local.

“You all right?” Seth must have heard my panting.

I stared at the familiar fixtures of my study: the old elephant-foot umbrella stand, the carved bone flute on the wall, the delicate glass globe on my desk that had survived a hundred close encounters with my darlings. Slowly they soothed me. “I am … all right. You should have warned me.”

“Wrong.” Seth was cheerfully unrepentant. “This was a practical test, right? You think when I’m wandering Sky City I’ll be able to give you a running commentary about where we’re goin’? If you think that, you’re blowin’ bubbles. I’ll be wearin’ what looks like a normal jacket, an’ people who talk to their clothes get put away. You have to figure out for yourself how much input you can take.”

He was, of course, absolutely right, but that made his casual callousness no easier to take. Slowly I allowed the remote scene to bleed back into my visual feed. Superimposed on the furnishings of my study appeared a faint black-and-white outline of the window. Seth must still have been standing in front of it.

“How high is the place where you are standing?” I asked.

“Don’t know exactly. I’m up near the top of The Flaunt, so I’d guess over thirty-five hundred feet.”

“Don’t move. I wish to try an experiment.”

As long as my sense of presence was firmly rooted in the castle, the fact that the other view emanated near the vertiginously high summit of The Flaunt had no more effect on me than a photograph taken from a mountaintop. The question was, at what point was the remote scene mistaken for reality?

Gradually I strengthened the feed. The sky beyond the window turned from pale gray to blue. Dark lines lower down in the image strengthened and changed. Once again I saw roads and buildings.

I had reached the point where the image was drawn equally from my own and Seth’s perspective. Still I felt no discomfort.

“You havin’ fun there?” Seth, I realized, had little idea what I was doing. His only input was the sound of my breathing.

I told him of my actions, and added, “Wait a little longer. I propose to see how far I can go with this.”

“Take your time. Don’t worry about me, I can stand around here all day.” Sarcasm should not be confused with wit, and Seth’s use of it suggested more tension than he would admit.

I continued to change the balance of images presented to me, gradually increasing the contribution from Houston. All went well until the scenes of my study began to lose color and appear only as a set of gray edges. At that point I felt a prickling in the palms of my hands and a sweaty clamminess on my forehead and cheeks.

Others might tell themselves that they were still in control, that they could handle the fear seeping like iced water up the spinal column and into the brain. I held no such delusions. I have known, for far too many years, that I am not in control of myself.

I decreased slightly the contribution from Seth. As the image of my study strengthened, once more I could breathe easy. I locked the setting of my controller and studied the scene presented by the RV helmet.