Cupertino said, "You haven't gotten a day older and it's been well over three years." In fact she was even more slender, more supple.

Seating herself at the kitchen table, her arms still modestly folded, Carol said, "Is that suspicious?" Her cheeks were flushed, her eyes bright.

"No. A compliment." He, too, seated himself. "Hagopian sent me here; he decided I should see you. Evidently -"

"Yes," Carol said, "I've seen him. I was in Northern California several times on business; I stopped by… he had asked me to in a letter. I like him. In fact you should be about cured by now."

" 'Cured'?" He shrugged. "I feel I am. Except -"

"Except that you still have your idee fixe. Your basic, delusional, fixed idea that no amount of psychoanalysis will help. Right?"

Cupertino said, "If you mean my recollection of killing you, yes; I still have it – I know it happened. Dr. Hagopian thought you could tell me something about it; after all, as he pointed out -"

"Yes," she agreed, "but is it really worth going over this with you? It's so tedious, and my God, it's only six A.M. Couldn't I go back to bed and then sometime later get together with you, maybe in the evening? No?" she sighed. "Okay. Well, you tried to kill me. You did have a laser beam. It was at our conapt in New Detroit-G, on Ganymede, on March 12, 2014."

"Why did I try to kill you?"

"You know." Her tone was bitter; her breasts pulsed with resentment.

"Yes." In all his thirty-five years he had never made another mistake as serious. In their divorce litigation his wife's knowledge of the impending revolt had given her the dominant position; she had been able to dictate settlement terms to him precisely as she wished. At last the financial components had proved unbearable and he had gone to the conapt which they had shared – by then he had moved out, gotten a small conapt of his own at the other end of the city – and had told her simply and truthfully that he could not meet her demands. And so the threat by Carol to go to the homeopapes, the news-gathering extensors of the New York Times and Daily News which operated on Ganymede.

"You got out your little laser beam," Carol was saying, "and you sat with it, fooling with it, not saying much. But you got your message over to me; either I accepted an unfair settlement which -"

"Did I fire the beam?"

"Yes."

"And it hit you?"

Carol said, "You missed and I ran out of the conapt and down the hall to the elevator. I got downstairs to the sergeant at arms' room on floor one and called the police from there. They came. They found you still in the conapt." Her tone was withering. "You were crying."

"Christ," Cupertino said. Neither of them spoke for a time, then; they both drank their coffee. Across from him his wife's pale hand shook and her cup clinked against its saucer.

"Naturally," Carol said matter of factly, "I went ahead with the divorce litigation. Under the circumstances -"

"Dr. Hagopian thought you might know why I remember killing you that night. He said you hinted at it in a letter."

Her blue eyes glittered. "That night you had no false memory; you knew you had failed. Amboynton, the district attorney, gave you a choice between accepting mandatory psychiatric help or having formal charges filed of attempted first-degree murder; you took the former – naturally – and so you've been seeing Dr. Hagopian. The false memory – I can tell you exactly when that set in. You visited your employer, Six-planet Educational Enterprises; you saw their psychologist, a Dr. Edgar Green, attached to their personnel department. That was shortly before you left Ganymede and came here to Terra." Rising she went to fill her cup; it was empty. "I presume Dr. Green saw to the implanting of the false memory of your having killed me."

Cupertino said, "But why?"

"They knew you had told me of the plans for the uprising. You were supposed to commit suicide from remorse and grief, but instead you booked passage to Terra, as you had agreed with Amboynton. As a matter of fact you did attempt suicide during the trip… but you must remember this."

"Go on and say it." He had no memory of a suicide attempt.

"I'll show you the clipping from the homeopape; naturally I kept it." Carol left the kitchen; her voice came from the bedroom. "Out of misguided sentimentality. 'Passenger on interplan ship seized as -' " Her voice broke off and there was silence.

Sipping his coffee Cupertino sat waiting, knowing that she would find no such newspaper clipping. Because there had been no such attempt.

Carol returned to the kitchen, a puzzled expression on her face. "I can't locate it. But I know it was in my copy of War and Peace, in volume one; I was using it as a bookmark." She looked embarrassed.

Cupertino said, "I'm not the only one who has a false memory. If that's what it is." He felt, for the first time in over three years, that he was at last making progress.

But the direction of that progress was obscured. At least so far. "I don't understand," Carol said. "Something's wrong."

While he waited in the kitchen, Carol, in the bedroom, dressed. At last she emerged, wearing a green sweater, skirt, heels; combing her hair she halted at the stove and pressed the buttons for toast and two soft-boiled eggs. It was now almost seven; the light in the street outside was no longer gray but a faint gold. And more traffic moved; he heard the reassuring sound of commercial vehicles and private commute wheels.

"How did you manage to snare this single-unit dwelling?" he asked. "Isn't it as impossible in the Los Angeles area as in the Bay area to get anything but a conapt in a high-rise?"

"Through my employers."

"Who're your employers?" He felt at once cautious and disturbed; obviously they had influence. His wife had gone up in the world.

"Falling Star Associates."

He had never heard of them; puzzled, he said, "Do they operate beyond Terra?" Surely if they were interplan -

"It's a holding company. I'm a consultant to the chairman of the board; I do marketing research." She added, "Your old employer, Six-planet Educational Enterprises, belongs to us; we own controlling stock. Not that it matters. It's just a coincidence."

She ate breakfast, offering him nothing; evidently it did not even occur to her to. Moodily he watched the familiar dainty movements of her cutlery. She was still ennobled by petite bourgeois gentility; that had not changed. In fact she was more refined, more feminine, than ever.

"I think," Cupertino said, "that I understand this."

"Pardon?" She glanced up, her blue eyes fixed on him intently. "Understand what, Johnny?"

Cupertino said, "About you. Your presence. You're obviously quite real – as real as everything else. As real as the city of Pasadena, as this table -" He rapped with brusque force on the plastic surface of the kitchen table. "As real as Dr. Hagopian or the two police who stopped me earlier this morning." He added, "But how real is that? I think we have the central question there. It would explain my sensation of passing my hands through matter, through the dashboard of my wheel, as I did. That very unpleasant sensation that nothing around me was substantial, that I inhabited a world of shadows." Staring at him Carol suddenly laughed. Then continued eating. "Possibly," Cupertino said, "I'm in a prison on Ganymede, or in a psychiatric hospital there. Because of my criminal act. And I've begun, during these last years since your death, to inhabit a fantasy world."

"Oh God," Carol said and shook her head. "I don't know whether to laugh or feel sorry; it's just too -" She gestured. "Too pathetic. I really feel sorry for you, Johnny. Rather than give up your delusional idea you'd actually prefer to believe that all Terra is a product of your mind, everyone and everything. Listen – don't you agree it'd be more economical to give up the fixed idea? Just abandon the one idea that you killed me -" The phone rang.