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his voice. She would say things, try to talk him out of it for God knows how long as he cut the cords from the lamps and began to bind her. She was a Harvard graduate, a surgeon. She would attempt to use her mind against a force that is mindless.
    Then the images went wild, like a film at high speed, flapping off the reel as her attempts disintegrated into unmitigated terror. The unspeakable. I would not look. I could not bear to see any more. I had to control my thoughts.
    My home office overlooked the woods in back and the blinds were typically drawn because it has always been hard for me to concentrate if I'm offered a view. I paused in the doorway, quietly letting my attention drift as Lucy vigorously tapped away on the keyboard on top of my sturdy oak desk, her back to me. I had not straightened up in here in weeks, and the sight of it was shameful. Books leaned this way and that in the bookcases, several Law Reporters were stacked on the floor and others were out of order. Propped against a wall were my diplomas and certificates: Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Georgetown, et al. I'd been meaning to hang them in my office downtown but had yet to get around to it. Sloppily piled on a corner of the deep blue T'ai-Ming rug were journal articles still waiting to be read and filed. Professional success meant I no longer had the time to be impeccably neat, and yet clutter bothered me as much as ever.
    "How come you're spying on me?" Lucy muttered without turning around.
    "I'm not spying on you."
    I smiled a little and kissed the top of her burnished red head.
    "Yes, you are."
    She continued to type. "I saw you. I saw your reflection in the monitor. You've been standing in the doorway watching me."
    I put my arms around her, rested my chin on the top of her head and looked at the black screen filled with chartreuse commands. It never occurred to me before this moment that the screen had a mirror effect, and I now understood why Margaret, my programming analyst, could hail by name people walking past her office though she had her back to the door. Lucy's face was a blur in the monitor. Mostly I saw a reflection of her grownup, tortoise-rimmed glasses. She usually greeted me with a tree frog hug, but she was in a mood.
    "I'm sorry we couldn't go to Monticello today, Lucy," I ventured.
    A shrug.
    "I'm as disappointed as you are," I said.
    Another shrug. "I'd rather use the computer anyway."
    She didn't mean it, but the remark stung.
    "I had a shit-load of stuff to do," she went on, sharply striking the Return key. "Your data base needed cleaning up. Bet you haven't initialized it in a year."
    She swiveled around in my leather chair and I moved to one side, crossing my arms at my waist.
    "So I fixed it up."
    "You what?"
    No, Lucy wouldn't do such a thing. Initializing was the same thing as formatting, obliterating, erasing all of the data on the hard disk. On the hard disk were - or had been - half a dozen statistical tables I was using for journal articles under deadline. The only backups were several months old.
    Lucy's green eyes fixed on mine and looked owlish behind the thick lenses of her glasses. Her round, elfish face was hard as she said, "I looked in the books to see how. All you do is type IOR I at the C prompt, and after it's initialized, you do the Addall and Catalog. Ora. It's easy. Any dick head could figure it out."
    I didn't say anything. I didn't reprimand her for her dirty mouth.
    I was feeling weak in the knees.
    I was remembering Dorothy calling me, absolutely hysterical, several years ago. While she was out shopping, Lucy had gone into her office and formatted every last one of her diskettes, erasing everything on them. On two of them was a book Dorothy was writing, chapters she hadn't gotten around to printing out or backing up yet. A homicidal event.
    "Lucy. You didn't."
    "Ohhhh, don't worry," she said sullenly. "I exported all your data first. The book says to. And then I imported it back in and reconnected your