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don’t have respect for me, at least show some respect for Emily, wherever she is.”
    “Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Freddy growled, shifting a piece in sudden anger that Earl could see was a mistake. In three more rounds he was eliminated and stalked out of the room.
    “Just you and me now,” Hobbes said.
    “Yes.” Earl glanced around but their audience had faded away. Only the deaf and dumb Hilda stood watching from a position a few feet behind Hobbes’s chair. Earl studied her deeply tanned face and realized for the first time that she was younger than he’d imagined. Her face had a sort of quiet beauty one often found among Mexican women, especially the peasants of the interior. He could imagine Cortez when he first saw a face like that.
    Hobbes rolled the dice and scored a twelve, which allowed him to move two pieces. “It’s my lucky day,” he said, shifting a mirror-man and a chance-man.
    “You’re a good player.”
    “Tony Cooper claims he could beat me, but he wouldn’t play.”
    Earl rolled a three. He moved a chance-man into position to block Hobbes’s advance. “There now.”
    Hobbes grinned and tapped the beam button. The false laser shot out again, reflected off two men, passed through two others, and ended up on Earl’s chest. “Dead man! I win.”
    “Damn!” Earl got up from the grid and poured himself a stiff shot of scotch.
    “Better luck next time, Jazine.”
    Hilda smiled her approval and moved away in the direction of the kitchen. A short time later Earl went up to bed.
    He’d often had the experience of sudden inspirations coming to him in the morning, with his waking thoughts. The following morning it happened again. It was barely daylight when he awakened from a deep sleep, and he knew with a sudden certainty where Emily Watson’s body was hidden.
    He dressed quickly and went through the dim halls to Lawrence Hobbes’s room. “Hobbes! Wake up! I have to see you!”
    The stocky man opened the door after a moment. “What is all this? It’s still the middle of the night! Why didn’t the alarms go off with you roaming the halls?”
    “I don’t know about that. I want you to come with me to the operating room. I know where Emily Watson’s body is!”
    “Go back to bed.” He started to close the door but Earl blocked it with his foot.
    “We have to check now!”
    The door across the hallway opened and Whalen stuck his head out. “What’s all the fuss?”
    “Come on,” Earl urged. “Down to the operating room. I know where Emily Watson is.”
    “The operating room was searched.”
    “But there’s one place nobody thought to look.”
    Phil Whalen was skeptical. “Where?”
    “Five tubes were brought up on the elevator from the vaults. In four cases only organs were removed and the tubes were sent back down for refreezing. But what happened to the fifth tube—the one that contained the shell body?”
    “I sent it back down empty,” Hobbes said, “just to get it out of the way. It’s probably still on the elevator because I didn’t want to freeze it without a body.”
    “Come on!”
    They followed him downstairs, along the by-now familiar passages to the operating amphitheater. Frank still rested on the table, his bare chest rising and falling with regularity. The room seemed unchanged from the last time Earl had seen it.
    Hobbes walked to the elevator and pressed the button. There was a faint familiar humming as it rose from the vault area. “All this foolishness is for nothing,” he said. “The tube is empty.”
    “We’ll see. If I’m wrong, we can all go back to bed.” He glanced at Whalen, wondering whether he wore his gun with pajamas too.
    “Here it is.”
    The long metal tube slid out of the elevator on its cart. The end was screwed tightly in place, and when Hobbes was slow at opening it Earl took over. He felt the end plug begin to turn under his hands and quickly unscrewed it.
    There was a body in the tube.
    But it wasn’t Emily Watson. It was