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to see the change that had come over her.
    She moved the adjuster knob with such patient care, seeking the right setting with such miniscule motions, that at first he did not realize she had stopped turning it. Then he began to wonder how long he should let her continue, whether it was dangerous to interrupt her, and even—the thought was ridiculous, but it crept eerily into his mind—whether she might here and now find what she was after … and vanish.
    He shivered. It was growing genuinely cool as evening approached, and the rush-hour traffic was filling all the nearby streets. But that wasn’t what caused it. He lit another cigarette and compelled himself to be as patient as Lilith. Sometimes the people coming and going aroundthe park gave a second glance as they passed the bench, but not often. Lilith was far from the only person in sight listening to a stardropper; idly, he counted seven in direct view.
    Almost half an hour elapsed, and he was preparing himself to take the risk of turning the knob and taking the instrument away, when she stirred and opened her eyes. She looked vaguely disappointed. Removing the earpiece, she closed the box with a sigh.
    “It didn’t work out,” Dan said.
    “Oh, it did!” she exclaimed. “It was great! This is a far more powerful instrument than my old one, but it’s the first I’ve tried which does anything at all for me apart from that.”
    “What difference does the extra power make?” Dan asked, thinking of the confused state of the “art” reflected in those letters he’d read in
Starnews
.
    “It feels—uh—harder to sort out what matters,” Lilith said, and bit her lip. After a moment, she shrugged. “But it was great anyway. Right now I simply can’t concentrate any more. But I’d love to try it again sometime. Please say I can!”
    Dan hesitated. If this kid started to pester him for the use of his stardropper, she could clearly become a damned nuisance. On the other hand, his brief required him to investigate the impact of the craze in as much detail as possible, so it would be very useful to have an entrée to this commune she’d said she was staying at, where everyone was involved with stardropping. He spread his hands and nodded.
    Grinning like a monkey, she jumped to her feet. “I’m terribly sorry about—about what happened,” she said. “If I’d had any sense I’d just have walked up and asked you, wouldn’t I? Can I try again in the morning?”
    “On one condition.”
    “That I don’t become a nuisance? I promise.”
    This kid was definitely a character, whatever kind of mess she’d got herself into. “That’s right,” Dan said. “So how can I reach you?”
    “It’d be easier for me to reach you, I think—we don’t have a phone in the house where I’m living. Tends toring at the worst possible moment, if you follow me. You are an American, aren’t you?”
    “Yes.”
    “So I suppose you’re in a hotel. Which?”
    He told her, and she walked off across the grass with her hands in her pockets, humming a cheerful tune. After a little she began to skip on every other step, as though joy had made her too light to stick to the ground.
    When she was out of sight, he opened the stardropper again and, out of curiosity, put in the earpiece. The knob was still on the setting which had given her so much pleasure. He upped the power and waited.
    No good. What he heard sounded like a dozen banshees having an orgy, a pattern of shrill acid whistling noises. It was a setting he’d chanced across the first time he tried out the instrument, and had disliked intensely.
    Now Lilith had owned a Gale and Welchman, and he’d been convinced already that that instrument had a particularly attractive setting in its repertoire. How could this unbearable racket relate to what Watson had demonstrated at Cosmica? More: how could it conceivably become meaningful?
    Well, he had learned a lot as a result of his chance meetings today, there was no denying.