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my Big Hexperiment— you’ll need it!—because the stench is going to be unendurable.
    Your little apprentice demon, D.C.
    He threw the stylus away over his shoulder and slipped on the robe of light-flow fabric, looping part of it over his head like a cowl.
    Some twenty minutes ago a depressed young man in business jerkin and shorts had entered the Monsterarium.
    Now an exultant-hearted heat-shimmer, with a reserve glow under its robe of invisibility, exited from it.
    There is a batable ground between madness and sanity, though few tread it: laughter.
    —the notebooks of A.S.
    Andreas Snowden sat in Joel Wisant’s bedroom trying to analyze his feelings of annoyance and uneasiness and dissatisfaction with himself—and also trying to decide if his duty lay here or back at Serenity Shoals.
    The windoor was half open on fast-fading sunlight. Through it came a medley of hushed calls and commands, hurried footsteps, twittering female laughter, and the sounds of an amateur orchestra self-consciously tuning up—the Twilight Tranquility Festival was about to begin.
    Joel Wisant sat on the edge of the bed looking toward the wall. He was dressed in green tights, jerkin, and peaked cap— a Robin Hood costume for the Festival. His face wore a grimly intent, distant expression. Snowden decided that here' was a part of his reason for feeling annoyed—it is always irritating to be in the same room with someone who is- communicating silently by micromike and softspeaker. He knew that Wisant was at the moment in touch with Security—not with Securitor Harker, who was downstairs and probably likewise engaged in silent phoning, but with the Central Security Station in New Angeles—but that was all he did know.
    Wisant’s face relaxed somewhat, though it stayed grim, and he turned quickly toward Snowden, who seized the opportunity to say, “Joel, when I came here this afternoon, I didn’t know anything about—” but Wisant cut him short with: “Hold it, Andy!—and listen to this. There have been at least a dozen new mass-hysteria outbreaks in the NLA area in the past two hours.” He rapped it out tersely. “Traffic is snarled on two ground routes and swirled in three ’copter lanes. If safety devices hadn’t worked perfectly there’d have been a hatful of deaths and serious injuries. There’ve been panics in department stores, restaurants, offices, and at least one church. The hallucinations are developing a certain amount of pattern, indicating case-to-case infection. People report something rushing invisibly through the air and buzzing them like a giant fly. I’m having the obvious lunatics held —those reporting hallucinations like green faces or devilish laughter. We can funnel ’em later to psychopathic or your place—I’ll want your advice on that. The thing that bothers me most is that a garbled account of the disturbances has leaked out to the press. ‘Green Demon Jolts City,’ one imbecile blatted! I’ve given orders to have the involved ’casters and commentators picked up—got to try to limit the infection. Can you suggest any other measures I should take?”
    "Why, no, Joel—it’s rather out of my sphere, you know,” Snowden hedged. “And I’m not too sure about your theory of infectious psychosis, though I’ve run across a little folie a deux in my time. But what I did want to talk to you about—” “Out of your sphere, Andy? What do you mean by that?” Wisant interrupted curtly. “You’re a psychologist, a psychiatrist—mass hysteria’s right up your alley.”
    “Perhaps, but security operations aren’t. And how can you be so sure, Joel, that there isn’t something real behind these scares?”
    “Green faces, invisible fliers, Satanic laughter?—don’t be ridiculous, Andy. Why these are just the sort of outbreaks Report K predicts. They’re like the two cases here last night. Wake up, man!—this is a major emergency.”
    “Well . . . perhaps it is. It still isn’t up my alley.