“Duncan was giving you looks.”

“I know.”

“Not your type?”

“Oh, Duncan’s okay. We’ve known each other since Houston. But you know what they say about keeping the complicated side of life separate from your work. I think it’s good advice.”

They reached the door of Sandy’s cabin, which she opened with an unvoiced command to VISAR. Inside, she picked up a briefcase, set it on the bureau top, and took out a flat box of the kind used for carrying storage chips. “How about a coffee before you go?” she asked Gina.

“Why not? Make it black, no sugar.”

“Anything else to go with it?”

“Uh-uh. Dinner just about filled me up.”

Sandy asked VISAR for two coffees. “Ah, here’s the one I was talking about,” she said, handing Gina one of the capsules from inside the box. “I’ve got another with some of their classical stuff, but I don’t think it’s here. I must have left it at home. It’s a bit weird, anyhow.”

“Thanks. This’ll be fine.” Gina put the capsule into a pouch in her

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replacing the briefcase, Gina picked up the mugs and carried them over to a table in the lounge, where she settled herself into one of the easy chairs. Sandy followed a few moments later.

“So, how about the romantic side of your life?” Sandy asked as she sat down in the other chair. “Or are writers always too busy to have one?”

“Oh, now and again, when it wants to happen. But nothing…”

“Entangling?”

“Right. I don’t want complications getting mixed up with my work, either. But with me, work and life keep having this tendency to become the same thing.”

Sandy tasted her coffee. “Not bad.” She looked up. “Were you ever married?”

“Once, awhile ago now-for about four years. We lived in California. But it didn’t work.”

“What happened? Did you see yourself heading toward oblivion on Domesticity Street?” Sandy gave Gina a critical look over the top of her mug. “Somehow I can’t picture you taking pies to garden parties or selling Tupperware.”

Gina smiled distantly. “Actually it was more the opposite. Larry was the kind of guy who wanted to go everywhere, do everything. You know, always meeting new people, the life of every party. It was fine as long as I was content to tag along as an accessory in his life. The problem was, it didn’t leave any room for me to have one of my own.”

“You should have introduced him to me,” Sandy said. She made a motion with her free hand to indicate herself. “It’s nice in some ways to work surrounded by scientists and all kinds of other guys who are smart, but there’s an incredible number of nerds among them. You know the kind-they think a hard-on’s some kind of quantum particle.”

Gina had to stifle a scream of laughter. “Vic doesn’t seem like that, though,” she commented.

“He’s an exception. Now him I could go for. Maybe it’s the accent. But like I said, it’s not the thing to do. Anyhow, he got tangled up with somebody when we were at Houston, before the division relocated to D.C., and nowadays he likes to keep his day-times uncomplicated, too.”

“You, er, don’t exactly come across as the epitome of detached, intellectual science,” Gina said.

“Give me a break. I spent a year and a half down a hole in the ice on Ganymede. That’s a lot of time to make up for. Vic said something once about not wanting to get old with a lot of regrets about missing out. I agree with him.”

Gina, watching the way Sandy’s straight, dark brown hair fell about her face as she leaned forward to pick up her cup again, noticed the firmly defined features and the long lines of the jeans-clad legs. Sandy was the kind of girl that men had told her radiated sex appeal without being especially pretty, Gina decided. Intelligent, adventuresome, and uninhibited. Definitely Larry’s type.

Sandy looked up. “Anyhow, scientists are supposed to be curious, aren’t they? Like journalists. Isn’t that what the job is all about?”

“I suppose so,” Gina agreed.

Back in her own cabin, Gina found herself restless and not inclined toward sleep, despite the time she had been awake. Lurking just below the level of consciousness, something that she couldn’t pinpoint was disturbing her, something tugging for attention, distilled from the day’s flood of events and experiences. She went into the bathroom and brushed her teeth while she grappled with the problem.

It had something to do with VISAR. More specifically, it had something to do with the way VISAR was designed to function. Back in the bedroom, still fully dressed, she propped herself up with a couple of pillows and stared at the picture of a snowy mountain scene from some world or other, on the far wall of the room.

The part of the PAC complex on Jevlen that she had “visited” with Hunt earlier in the evening had contained such objects as ornaments and pictures on the walls of the cafeteria from where they had seen the Shapieron, and some tools standing against a wall in the gallery outside. What would have happened, she had asked Hunt, if she had tried to “move” one of those objects to a different place? He had said that VISAR would cause her to experience the action faithfully. In that case, she asked, where would she find it when they arrived physically at Jevlen tomorrow? Obviously, where it had been in the first place, Hunt replied-since the object would never have really been moved at all.

That bothered her. She remembered, too, the burr that she had felt on the edge of the door into the coupler cubicle, and the business with the cigarette ash on her sleeve. It all bothered her. She got up from the bed, went back into the lounge to get a cup of hot chocolate from the autochef, and tried to fathom why.

Judged by Terran notions of what constituted worthwhile return for cost and effort, the whole thing seemed a pointless exercise in elaborate absurdity. More than that: a deception that confused synthesis with reality, leaving the recipient to disentangle the resulting fusion that would be left impressed upon memory. But the Thuriens could handle it naturally, without conflict or contradiction. Indeed, to them, in a way that no human could really feel or comprehend, the capturing of the actuality was all-important, and the degree to which the system failed to do so constituted the deception. Hence their extraordinary obsession with levels of detail that to humans would have served no meaningful purpose and made no sense.

And now, she felt, she was getting closer to what was troubling her.

Yes, the Thuriens were benign, nonaggressive, and rational, and that was all very nice; but it was also beside the point. What was less reassuring, she realized, was the utter alienness that she had glimpsed of the inner workings of the Thurien mind. The professionals like Hunt and Danchekker had been too close for too long, and were too excited by the technology, to see it. Or perhaps they had forgotten.

What kind of havoc, then, might have been wreaked on the collective psyche of a whole race immersed in a form of mind manipulation essentially alien to its nature for thousands of years?

She turned and stared at the door, uncertain for several seconds of exactly what she intended to do. Then, resolving herself, she left the cabin again and returned to the cubicles containing the Thurien neural couplers.