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Thurlow glanced up at the window. The space was empty now. The night had grown suddenly cold. Thurlow shivered.
    “Was Murphey looking out?” Lee asked.
    The man’s voice carried an irritating country twang that rasped on Thurlow’s nerves.
    “No,” Thurlow said. “I… I guess I just saw a reflection.”
    “I don’t know how you can see anything through those glasses,” Lee said.
    “You’re right,” Thurlow said. “It was the glasses, my eyes—a reflection.”
    “I’ve a lot more questions, Doc,” Lee said. “You wanta stop up at the Turk’s Nightery where we can be comfortable. We can go in my car and I‘ll bring…”
    “No,” Thurlow said. He shook his head, feeling the numbness pass. “No. Maybe tomorrow.”
    “Hell, Doc, it is tomorrow.”
    But Thurlow turned away, ran across the street to his car. His mind had come fully to focus on Murphey’s words: “Take care of Ruthy.”
    Thurlow knew he had to find Ruth, offer any help he could. She was married to someone else, but that didn’t end what had been between them.

Chapter 6

    The audience stirred, a single organism in the anonymous darkness of the storyship’s empatheater.
    Kelexel, seated near the center of the giant room, felt that oddly menacing dark movement. They were all around him, the story cadre and off-duty crewmen interested in Fraffin’s new production. They had seen two reels run and rerun a dozen times while the elements were refined. They waited now for another rerun of the opening scene, and still Kelexel sensed that threatening aura in this place. It was personal and direct, something to do with the story, but he couldn’t define it.
    He could smell now the faint bite of ozone from the sensimesh web, that offshoot from Tiggywaugh’s discovery, whose invisible field linked the audience to the story projection. His chair felt strange. It was professional equipment with solid arms and keyed flanges for the editing record. Only the vast domed ceiling with its threads of pantovive force focusing down, down onto the stage far below him (and the stage itself)—these were familiar, like any normal empatheater.
    But the sounds, the clicks of editing keys, professional comments— “Shorten that establishment and get to the close-up…” “Hit the olfactory harder as soon as you have light…” “Soften that first breeze effect…” “Amplify the victim’s opening emotion and cut back immediately…”
    All this continued to be discord.
    Kelexel had spent two working days in here, privileged to watch the cadre at its chores. Still, the sounds and voices of the audience remained discord. His previous experience of empatheaters had always involved completed stories and rapt watchers.
    Far off to his left in the darkness, a voice said: “Roll it.”
    The pantovive force lines disappeared. Utter blackness filled the room.
    Someone cleared his throat. Clearing throats became a message of nervousness that wove out through the dark.
    Light came into being at the center of the stage. Kelexel squirmed into a more comfortable position. Always, that same old beginning, he thought. The light was a forlorn, formless thing that resolved slowly into a streetlamp. It illuminated a slope of lawn, a curved length of driveway and in the background the ghost-gray wall of a native house. The dark windows of primitive glass glistened like strange eyes.
    There was a panting noise somewhere in the scene and something thudding with a frenzied rhythm.
    An insect chirred.
    Kelexel felt the realism of the sounds as pantovive circuits reproduced them with all the values of the original. To sit enmeshed in the web, linked to the empathic projectors, was as real as viewing the original raw scene from a vantage point above and to one side. It was, in its own way, like the Chem oneness. The smell of dust from wind-stirred dry grass permeated Kelexel’s awareness. A cool finger of breeze touched his face.
    Terror crept through Kelexel then. It reached