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Heaven, repeated them to himself to get them perfectly in mind. Somehow, they all sounded like pieces of broken glass dropping off his tongue.
    He swung the car in front of the steps of the main promenade before the huge double doors of the Sanctuary. He got out, rushed up the steps, through the portals and into a well-lighted lobby.
    Proteus hurried behind.
    Davis crossed the carpeted floor to where a woman sat behind a reception desk, a gray-haired matron with enormous fallen breasts. "I'm looking for Matron Salsbury," he said, panting.
    "You've found her, then," she said, smiling. "I'm Matron Salsbury. And you must be Mr. Stauffer Davis." She rose, trembling visibly with excitement.
    Before his encounter with the League rep at Alice Bunter's house, he would have held Matron Salsbury's hand, talked of his books, charmed her with his tales of writing and publishing. Now, all of that was behind him. To engage in any of it would have driven him quite mad. Instead, he snapped, "The girl. Leah. The one who was my guide. Could I see her, please?"
    "I'm sorry, but she's not here at the moment."
    The alcohol was gone, but he was drunk with fear, fear that she had gone off for an idyllic holiday with her smooth-skinned young angel and that even now they were tangled in love.
    "Her husband," Davis said. "Could I speak to him?"
    She looked at him blankly. "What?"
    He was enraged by her inability to understand so simple a request at so urgent a moment. "Her husband, woman! I want to speak to her husband!"
    "I don't understand," she said, looking a bit frightened. "She has no husband. There are only sixteen winged people left. They are all women."
    He felt his mouth unhinge.
    Exterminated…
    He closed his mouth, licked his lips with a tongue that felt swollen and dry. She had known what he felt! And to save him the pain and the loss of public respect, she had cunningly offered him this out. If they were married, they were better apart. And each had been lying to the other. She had known it, but he had been ignorant. She had taken steps to insure his career and his ego. To hell with those! he thought.
    "Where has she gone?"
    Matron Salsbury looked flustered. "I don't know. She sat here in the lobby for two days. She even took her meals here, slept here. She watched those doors as if she were waiting for someone or—" She stopped as if understanding had struck like lightning inside her head. "And then, just an hour ago or so ago, she left without saying where she was going."
    She was still talking as he ran across the lounge, out the doors and down the steps. Proteus came after him, barely bobbling inside before he slammed on the grav car's stress power, kicked at the accelerator and shot across the field between the two hills, not bothering to use the much longer road that connected them. A hundred feet from the temple, the grav plates gave up trying to adjust to the varying distances to the ground and blew on him. The car jolted up the base of the second hill and came to a noisy halt, settling ruggedly to the ground where the rubber rim was sheared away. He opened the door and ran.
    Just as he entered the main hall of the great cathedral there was a flapping of wings. Leah departed from one of the teardrop portals high in the walls. The base of the Face of God was open, the chin now a door. She had been into the corridors of the idol's mind, looking out through its eyes, waiting for Stauffer Davis, the famous novelist, the love-seeker, the—he cursed himself—stupidest man in the Alliance! But he had come in just a moment too late, and she had left without seeing him.
    He turned, ran down the echo-sharp hall and out onto the rounded dome of the snowy breast, leaving his footprints in its white skin. He looked for her, searched the sky.
    She was flitting off toward the yellow mountains.
    He called to her, but she was too far away. She could not hear him.
    And the car was useless. He could only run.
    He ran.
    She flew.
    The distance