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What about you and Cooper and O’Connor. Tony said just now he’d tell me about it someday.”
    She shrugged and got to her feet. “Let him.”
    “But you won’t tell me?”
    “We’d better join the others, don’t you think?”

FOUR
    B Y DINNERTIME THERE WAS still no change in Frank’s condition. His pulse and heartbeat were strong, according to Dr. Armstrong, but as yet he had not awakened. There’d been a great deal of talk about notifying the mainland of Emily Watson’s disappearance, but the feeling (Lawrence Hobbes’s feeling) was that the arrival of authorities at this time would endanger the successful completion of their experiment with Frank.
    “Wait until he’s conscious, at least,” Hobbes pleaded. “Whatever’s happened to Emily, a few hours or a day isn’t going to make any difference.”
    After dinner there was a distinct chill to the gathering. Even Freddy O’Connor’s remarks had dwindled into silence. It was as if the coming of night had made them all aware that one of their number might well have caused Emily Watson’s disappearance.
    Earl walked upstairs with Dr. MacKenzie who said he was retiring early. “That surgery last night took a lot out of me. It made me realize I’m not as young as I once was. You know, I kid the ladies and try to act like a schoolboy at times, but I’m not a schoolboy anymore. I’m a middle-aged man who once walked on the moon, and that’s not worth much at all these days.”
    “You’re one of the world’s best surgeons,” Earl reminded him. “I know. I watched you for three hours last night.”
    “Surgery is a matter of dexterity, like fixing a car. There are no famous surgeons in the history books. Even Christiaan Barnard is only a footnote today. That fellow with the mechanical heart gets more space. Invention always wins out over dexterity.”
    “Well, have a good night,” Earl said, leaving him at his door. He felt vaguely sorry for MacKenzie, but at the moment he had enough other problems to concern him.
    For one thing, he had to decide how soon he should notify Crader, back in New York, of the strange turn of events. The disappearance—and possible murder—of Emily Watson had a meaning, but it was one he hadn’t yet been able to fathom.
    He’d just reached his own door when Lawrence Hobbes came up the stairs. “Would you care to join in a game of laser? We need a fourth.”
    “Who’s playing?”
    “Freddy and Whalen and I.”
    “All right,” Earl decided, and followed him back downstairs.
    Laser, widely promoted as the first new parlor game of the twenty-first century, was a chesslike tournament among four players, each seated on an opposite side of the grid. The pieces were large, irregularly shaped blocks of polished glass, some surfaces of which had been silvered. The so-called laser beam was in truth merely a beam of high-intensity light. It was directed across the playing grid as the opponents attempted to position their pieces in such a manner that the beam would be deflected away from them. A mirrored piece could deflect the beam, but of course it passed straight through an unmirrored one.
    Earl Jazine had played the game a bit back in New York but he was far from an expert at it, a fact he quickly discovered when seated across the grid from Hobbes. The man rolled the dice and moved his pieces with a skillfulness that showed long hours of practice.
    “I often played the two-man game with Emily,” he said, rolling a four and moving his chance-man into position to intercept the laser beam. “But the four-man version is really more aggressive.”
    Within five rounds of the dice the light beam penetrated Whalen’s defenses and hit him full on the chest. “You’re dead!” Hobbes chuckled. “Out of the game!”
    Freddy O’Connor rolled a seven and debated which piece to move. “This game is the next best thing to a good fuck!”
    Lawrence Hobbes frowned disapprovingly. “I wish you wouldn’t use that word. If you