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powder.
    On the eighth day he gave up. The solution to Crescent’s murder wasn’t going to be found in his files.
    It was time to look for parallels. He’d spent too much time at GenDyne, but he was used to finding hints, clues, leads wherever
     he searched and this utter failure rankled. Perhaps the Parabas box would be more revealing. It was time to access Noschek’s
     work.
    Half on a whim he requested Hypatia’s assistance. It was a measure of the importance GenDyne attached to his work that they
     agreed immediately. As for Spango, she was delighted, though she concealed her pleasure from the dour company official who
     pulled her off her current project to give her the news. It was like a paid vacation from designing.
    When the people at Parabas were told, they went spatial. They’d sooner shut down than let a GenDyne Designer into their box.
     Important people in LaLa talked reassuringly to their counterparts in Sao Paulo. It was agreed that finding out what had happened
     to the two Designers was paramount. There were certain safeguards that could be instituted to ensure that Parabas’s visitor
     saw only the contents of Noschek’s files. Parabas consented. Agua Pri was overruled. Hypatia would be allowed in. But nobody
     smiled when Cardenas and his GenDyne “spy” were admitted to the dead Designer’s office.
    It was larger than Crescent’s, and emptier. No charming domestic scenes floating above this desk. No expensive colorcrawl
     on the walls. Noschek had been a bachelor. Barely out of Design School, top of his class, brilliant in ways his employers
     hadn’t figured out how to exploit before his death, he’d been the object of serious executive headhunting by at least two
     European and one Russian multinat in the three years he’d been at Parabas.
    Hypatia’d read his history, too. As she looked around the spartan office her voice was muted. “Nobody becomes a Senior Designer
     before thirty. Let alone at twenty-five.”
    Cardenas called up the pictures they’d been shown of the vacuumed Designer. Noschek was tall and slim, still looked like a
     teenager, a beautiful Slav with delicate features and the soulful dark eyes of some Kafkaesque antihero. Something in all
     the holos struck Cardenas the instant he saw them but he couldn’t stick a label on it.
    The Parabas box was approximately the same size as Gen-Dyne’s. Noschek’s key was Delphi Alexander Philip. The voice of the
     wallscreen was deep and resonant, instantly responsive to his sponging, as he scanned the meteoric career of the young Designer.
     Parabas’s Security team had been at work ‘round the clock. Some of the information would reveal itself only when Hypatia was
     out of the room. The South Americans might be cooperative but they weren’t stupid.
    Each time Hypatia left she took Charliebo with her for company. She liked playing with the dog and the hair shescratched out of him gave Parabas’s cleanteam fits. Each day brought them closer together. Her and Charliebo, that is. Cardenas
     still wasn’t sure about her and himself.
    It didn’t matter whether she was present or not. Three days of hard sponging saw him no nearer any answers than when he’d
     stepped off the induction shuttle from Nogales.
    On the fourth day the screen went hostile and nearly took him with it.
    He was sponging off a hard-to-penetrate corner of Philip, down in the lower right corner of the box. Hypatia had gone outside
     with Charliebo. Biocircuits spawned the same steady, sonorous flow of information he’d been listening to for hours, revealing
     themselves via concomitant word streams and images on the wallscreen. If he’d been watching intently he might have had time
     to see a flicker before it declared itself, but as usual he was most attuned to aural playout. Maybe that saved him. He never
     knew.
    Wind erupted into the office, blasting his thinning hair back across his head. On the screen the visual had gone berserk,
     running at