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headphones, and a moment later replaced the flowers with a contorted, vaguely modem bronze sculpture with one long protuberance.
    "Two dogs in a moment of passion?" Valerie guessed. "Or a couple of horses fighting over a feedbag. Or one horse and a dog, mismated."
    The cameraman was laughing. "A student made it. Dropped it off this morning so you could show it when you talk about the exhibit at the art center. I like it; ifs got a certain something."
    "It's got a lot of bronze," Valerie said. "But ifs better than dying flowers. Fm ready if everyone else is."
    The spotlights came on, flooding the set in a white wash that bleached and flattened everything beneath it. Nick understood why Valerie had worn makeup, especially on her eyes and cheeks, with bright-red lipstick, and a vivid dress of coral silk: under those lights, what was exaggerated seemed natural. As a cameraman focused the single camera on her, she read through the script twice from the Tele-PrompTer, once for practice, another time for an engineer in the control room to check the voice level of her microphone. Then the woman with the headphones gave a signal and the taping began.
    This time, as Valerie read the script, Nick alternately watched her in front of him, and on a television set to his right, fascinated by the effect of the lights and the camera: on the screen, she looked heavier; a slight difference between her right and left eyelids became apparent; shadows from the downlighting made her shoulders seem rounded. It was all new to Nick, and he reached for the pad of paper in his jacket pocket and scribbled some notes to be stored with dozens of others he had written at various times about things that interested him. Someday he'd have time to go through them and think about all the intriguing tidbits of information he'd collected.
    The lights went down, Valerie undipped the microphone and pulled the cord down beneath her sweater. She came to Nick. "What did you think?"
    "It was unreal." He looked from her to the camera. "You sat there and talked to a lens that's like a black hole swallowing everything up, but on the screen you looked like you were talking to me and I was your best friend. How the hell do you do that?"
    "I don't know. Some people are better at it than others. I'm one of the good ones."
    "You must have done something," he insisted, "Imagined a face in

    front of you, a real person inside the lens... How else could you be so damned sincere?"
    She laughed. "You can fake sincerity, Nick. It's called making love to the camera and it isn't all that hard, at least not for me. If you're on top of what you're saying, and if you know what people want from you, you can make them believe almost anything. Oh, here's Sybille. Have you two met?"
    "No." He held out his hand.
    "Sybille Morgen, Nicholas Fielding," said Valerie. "Sybille's at Stanford, too; she works here part time."
    "A good place to work," Nick said, feeling the strong grip of Sybille's hand.
    "The best, at least while I'm in college." She looked up at him with the most astonishing pale-blue eyes he had ever seen; it was as if she were memorizing everything about him. "It's a good place to learn. It won't make my reputation, but it can't break it, either."
    "I hope you find a place to make it," he said.
    "I intend to." She turned to Valerie. "I checked the tape; ifs fine."
    "Good, we can go to dinner." Valerie took Nick's arm. "I'll see you next month; isn't that when you're doing the antique-car show?"
    "Two months. I'll send you a note." She looked at Nick. "Come again, whenever you like. We love to show off."
    "I'd like that." He watched the cameraman roll the camera to another platform where a long curved desk stood before a world map and a smaller map of Palo Alto with weather arrows on it. "I don't know anything about television and I'd like to."
    "Call me; we'll do a tour. Both of you, if you like," she added to Valerie. "Though you'd probably be bored."
    "I'm never bored in a