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hand, then turned away abruptly and left the room. I picked up the terrarium carefully.
    The rain had finally stopped and the house was even more still than usual as I descended first the broad stairway with the faded Persian carpeting to the front hall, and then the cast-iron spiral steps, through a low door that led to the basement. All the way down, withthe scent of drenched wisteria and honeysuckle filling my head, I couldn’t take my eyes off the
Ummidia Stellarum
.
    In the basement the whirring of filters and fans greeted me, and the hum of the lights that threw jagged shadows up the walls. I walked down the far aisle between long walnut tables and laid the terrarium beside those of the other desert spiders and plugged in its sun lamp.
    The
Ummidia Stellarum
had not stirred, but his eyes revolved upward at the sudden blaze of light. Sweat was beading on my forehead. Even as Eboli was telling me about this spider, I had known what I was going to do. Slowly I lifted open the terrarium’s metal lid and slid my left hand in toward the spider. He didn’t move. My hand was steady as I walked my fingers onto the rock and nudged him. Still no movement. After all, he had been handled before. But, then, for months I had been handling spiders too, and I knew something about it now. Quickly I slid the rock out from under him, and he jumped, scurrying for a hole in the sand. I blocked his way, then forced him into a corner, trapping him with my palm. Still my hand was steady as I closed it over him. And it remained steady when I felt him panic, fluttering and scrambling, and finally, desperately, biting me—a minute jab as from the corner of a razor blade, at the center of my palm. I knew this was the fang at the tip of his jaw that was a conduit from the poison gland. After a moment, I raised my hand, opening my fingers, and the
Ummidia Stellarum
darted through them, across the sand, and disappeared down the hole.
    Suddenly there was a hot pulsing in my palm that moved through my wrist into my arm and shot rapidly upward. When it reached my chest, the jolt I experienced was far more powerful than what I had expected, but I felt no fear. Seconds later I stopped sweating and my head grew cold. My tongue was dry and my lips numb. My fingers and toes felt numb too, as if they had been injected with Novocain. I put my index finger to the vapor that had condensed on the outside of the terrarium and drew a face with hands clapped over the ears, no mouth, and closed eyes. Before I could dot in the tears, I spun around, certain I heard a rustle on the stairs. Had Eboli, in his silent slippers, been watching me? I rushed over, but there was no one. Later, I wasn’t sure that I had closed the lid on the spider’s terrarium. I wasn’t clear, either, on how I managed to drive back downtown, my hands so numb they felt ice-coated and my head swimming.
    But one thing I never forgot. As I climbed the steps from the basementin Zaren Eboli’s blue house, the darkness deepened and I saw stars, thousands of them coming clear before me in the high stairwell, until they glittered sharply.
    Two days later, and two years to the day after I had taken Loren to the planetarium—it would have been his twelfth birthday—I walked along the river to the recruiting office on St. Clair Street and enlisted in the Navy Nursing Corps and was assigned first to Savannah and then to Honolulu, for intensive training. Nine months later, in September, 1968, I was placed on-line aboard the USS
Repose
, a hospital ship, off Quang Tri, South Vietnam, in the South China Sea.

5
The Abandoned Factory
    The woman led me down several dim dusty corridors, into a small, fluorescently lit room. The room had two doors: the one we had entered, which she left open; and another in the wall directly across from it, which remained closed.
    This was the moment I had been waiting to seize. The effects of the perfume had worn off completely: my legs were steady and my vision sharp