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corpse? Did the real Victor Salsbury (if that was, in fact, who the dead man was) really kill himself, or did another black-suited man come in the night and do the job for him?
        None of these were sleep-inducing thoughts.
        At one-thirty in the morning, the vibrations echoed up from the cellar again. He slipped out of bed, pulled on a pair of jeans he had purchased in town (since the computer had only furnished him with a single change of clothes). He stepped into his loafers, went into the hall, and down the stairs to the darkened living room. Intrepid followed, making god awful noises, half falling down the steps, then prancing excitedly to the cellar door.
        In the cellar, with the lights out, they stood side-by-side, man and dog, equally scared. The circle was a lighter shade of blue, but that was not what frightened them. Beyond the circle, dim and indistinct, were gray, moving shadows. There were no features to be seen, nothing he could readily identify. There seemed to be a conglomeration of wires, struts, and tubes upon which one of the moving forms was perched. The other shadow stood beside this, legs quite skinny, feet abnormally broad, perhaps a foot wide. That and the shape of its head (narrow, half again as large as a human skull, with a high forehead) told Salsbury that the things beyond the blue glow were not men.
        Intrepid sensed it too. He bounced around, snarling, the first ugly mood Salsbury had seen him in. He threw himself against the blue spot, bounced off the wall a few times. When he was sure there was no way to reach the gray forms, he contented himself with crouching against Victor's leg, teeth bared and eyes gleaming, spitting insults at the intruders.
        Abruptly, the blue glow grew lighter, the shadows more distinct. There was a click, a sharp snapping sound like a dry twig breaking underfoot. The ringing ceased and was replaced by ghostly silence. The blue light disappeared altogether, leaving the circle which gave as clear a view as any window.
        But the window was not looking out on Earth. Not on any Earth Victor had ever known.
        The machine on the other side-apparently the one that had been establishing contact with this world, the one projecting the blue light-was an intricate jumble of condensers, sensors, wires, transistors. There was a chair atop it where the alien sat. The second demon stood beside the machine, looking through the window.
        They were both looking directly at Salsbury.
        Their heads were hairless, and, indeed, hinted at a rough gray cross-hatching of scales. The bony ridge of their foreheads shelved off as if on sudden impulse, leaving their eyes sunk two inches back in their heads. Their eyes… fire leaping, crimson flushing, rouge, cinnabar, scarlet…
        Victor pulled his gaze from those burning eyes, quickly examined the rest of the face. For a nose, there were five vertical slits arranged evenly above a sunken, pulsing hole that seemed to serve as a mouth. All of this was on a withered, leathery body whose muscles were drawn long and tight and lacquered over with a hundred coatings of varnish to make them look brittle.
        Unconsciously, Victor backed against an old workbench. He wished iron Victor would surge up and take command. But iron Victor was gone. There was no trace at all of his alter ego. The programming had-perhaps temporarily-come to an end. He was on his own.
        Intrepid cringed against his legs, trying to find some way of crawling up his pantlegs where he could not see the demons and would not be tempted to look.
        Salsbury looked to the steps, realized belatedly that he would have to go right by the window where the demons waited. Just as he felt his spirits scrape the bottom of his splintered soul barrel, the shadow monster standing beside the machine, the one in clear view, raised a long, bony arm with six three-jointed fingers on the end and made as if to reach