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strictly forbidden, but how could I ignore her? In the work I had done all my life, she was for me, in the concise elegance of her features, my earthly paradise. As she driveled on about the case in question, quoting me, quoting Barlow’s rotten poetry, I temporarily lost my head and allowed myself to remember.
    When I was a young man studying at the academy, we had a series of classes in the human form. These were early classes in “the Process” (a term used to describe the eight-year curriculum of the physiognomist), and they were extremely difficult so as to weed out those who were not worthy.
    I had an advantage over many of my classmates, because I refused friendships and eschewed social life. In the evenings, when the others were out visiting the cafés of the city, I took my notebooks and returned to the academy. Every night I descended to the bowels of the enormous old building to the Physiognomy labs. The human form lab was a small room with just enough space inside for a table and chair. When you sat down, you faced a window with a curtain drawn across it. Simply by speaking, you could command the curtain to open. As it did, a stark white, well-lit room behind it appeared. The academy saw to it that a subject for study was in that room twenty-four hours a day. These were naked forms, and by speaking you could order them to bend and pose for you. I often wondered how much these human puppets were paid or if they were paid at all. They were usually of inferior physiognomical design—who else would do such work?—yet this made them all the more interesting as subjects.
    I saw my first Zero there—a person devoid of any craniometric, facial, or bodily merit. This fellow was a real favorite with the students. He was often there late at night, I supposed, because he was so dim there was nothing else he could have been doing. Reading him, though, was like staring into infinity, seeing nature with her pants down, so to speak—both unsettling and sublime. I went one night expecting to find old Dickson there, as blank and crooked as a half-melted snowman, but when the curtain drew back at my command, I found something completely different.
    She had the most exquisite body I had ever seen. All perfection and her nipples were like the points of straight pins. I had her twist and turn and jump, get down on all fours, and lie on her back. Still, I could not find the slightest blemish. Her face was smooth and radiant, her eyes the deepest green, her lips full, and her hair a cascade of auburn that moved like a divine sea creature swirling in a tidal pool. That first night I stayed with her till dawn, and my commands for crude motor movement slowly gave way to whispered pleas for the wink of an eye or the flexing of a pinkie.
    I should have been dead tired that next day, but instead I was filled with a strange excitement, a smoldering in my solar plexus. I could not concentrate on my studies, all the time wondering how I might meet her and have a chance to converse instead of merely command. I returned the next two nights, and to my delight she was there behind the window. On the third night, I told the curtain to open, and the sight of Dickson, drooling, brought an audible groan from me that in turn made that idiot simulate silent laughter. Right there, I devised a plan to discover who she was.
    The following morning, I bribed the old fellow who oversaw the operation of the labs. “Just a name,” I said to him, and slipped fifty belows into his jacket pocket. He said nothing but kept the money and walked away. What I had requested was clearly against the law, and I waited for two days, wondering if I would be turned in. On the night of the second day, the authorities showed up at my apartment. Four men in long black coats, one holding back a huge mastiff with a chain thick enough to haul an anchor. “Come with us,” the leader demanded, and they hustled me outside and into a carriage