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in, sat in one of the chairs, and ate one of the bagels while she watched me finish the other two.
    “You look like you’ve been dragged through hell by the ankles,” she said. “Any thoughts yet?”
    “It will take a while,” I said, scratching my day-old beard. “I wonder about Anshiser.”
    “If he’s crazy?”
    “I might have picked a different word.”
    “But that’s what you want to know,” she said. “The answer is, no, he is not crazy. He is extremely anxious. This might be our last card. If we’re going to play it, we have to do it soon. In six weeks, or two months, it will be too late.”
    “Hmph.” I drank the last of my coffee. “Let me shave and take a shower, and we can get out of here.”
    She came and leaned on the bathroom door-jamb while I shaved, still nibbling on her first bagel. “I used to watch my father shave when I was a little girl,” she said as I wiped the last of the shaving cream off my face.
    “You watch your father take a shower, too?” I asked.
    “Of course not.” A tiny frown.
    “Well, if you’ll move your elbow, I’ll shut the door and spare you the experience,” I said, and she grinned and moved off across the room.

    THE ANSHISER RESEARCH plant was somewhere out by O’Hare, a nondescript, modernoid building. It looked, as somebody clever once said, like the box the building should have come in. The director didn’t quite slaver over Maggie’s hand, but he personally took us down to the laboratory level, where a String package was being assembled.
    The lab looked like the world’s cleanest machine shop, with concrete floors and a lot of noise. The String package was in a back room. Entry was through three sets of glass doors, and for the last two the director needed different-colored key cards.
    String was the size of a console television. It was mounted on a testing gyro that allowed it to swivel freely. There was nothing tidy about it. Wires and electronics boards stuck out at all angles. There were nozzlelike protrusions here and there, and cylindrical openings where other nozzlelike protrusions would fit. A dolly full of testing equipment sat next to it, and nearby, two engineers in blue smocks argued about readouts. They stopped when we walked in.
    Maggie introduced me as Mr. Lamb and told them I was cleared for all access. “What do you think?” she asked me.
    I walked around the instrument package and shook my head. “Beats the shit out of me,” I said.
    “We could give you the Bigshot show,” one of the engineers suggested. He had tape wrapped around the bridge of his glasses, which gave him a slightly crazed look. “It’d take about two minutes to rig up.”
    “Sure, why not?”
    The testing equipment was quickly disconnected. The two engineers rolled in a dolly that carried what looked like a cartoon fishbowl, except that it bristled with short metallic rods. At the end of each rod was a glassy bubble. The engineers fitted the fishbowl around the String package like a Plexiglas jacket, and plugged in a half dozen multicolored flat cables.
    “Okay,” said one of the engineers. There was a keypad with a tiny digital LED panel on the side of the package. He punched a few buttons and peered at the readout, punched a few more, and nodded.
    “Mr. Lamb, if you could stand right here.” He pointed at a spot on the floor and I stood there.
    “Okay. Now look at this screen.”
    He turned on a monitor. It showed what looked like a head as painted by a two-year-old.
    “That’s your head as interpreted by high-frequency audio waves, infrared sensors, radar and laser rangers. Right now we’re looking at the laser sensing. You can read it like a contour map. The brightest yellow part is your nose, then it moves through the red, green, and blue as it goes further back.
    “Now here,” he said, flipping on another monitor, “is a simulated three-dimensional readout of your head, and its direction, size, range, velocity, and probable identity shown