"One of those damn simulacrums," the THL agent who was not Frank said in disgust.

" 'Simulacra,' " Frank corrected, his teeth grinding in outrage as a major transformer from the power-supply struck him on the temple and sent him flailing backward, off-balance; he fell against the wall of the flapple, groaned and then slid to a sitting position, where he remained, his eyes empty. The other THL agent, arms windmilling, fought his way through the still-exploding debris of the simulacrum toward Freya; his fingers groped for her ineffectually — and then he gave up, abandoned whatever he had had in his mind; turning, he hunched forward, lurched blindly off, in the general direction of the entrance hatch of the flapple. And then, with a clatter, disappeared. She remained with the disintegrating simulacrum and the unconscious THL agent Frank; the only sound was the metallic thump of components as they continued to pelt against the walls and floor of the flapple.

Good lord, she thought indistinctly, her mind in a state of almost deranged confusion. That book they showed me — it was wrong! Or else I failed to read far enough...

Desperately, she searched about in the rubbish-heaped flapple for the book; then all at once she remem­bered what had happened to it. The smaller THL agent had escaped with it locked in a briefcase chained to his wrist; the book had, so to speak, departed with him — in any case, both the agent and the volume were gone, now. So she would never know what had come next in the printed text; had it corrected its own evident misper­ception, as she had hers? Or — did the text of Dr. Bloode's book continue on, manfully declaring that Theodoric Ferry was an aquatic — what was the term it — and she — had used? Mazdast; that was it. She won­dered, now, precisely what it meant; until she had read the word in the text she had never before encountered it. But there was something else. Something at the rim of consciousness, crowding forward, attempting to enter her mind; it could not be thrust back, odious as it was.

The Clock. That term, referring to one of the so-called paraworlds. Had this been — The Clock? And if so —

Then the original encounter between the black space-pilot, Rachmael ben Applebaum, and the sim of Theo­doric Ferry — that, back in the Sol system, had been a manifestation — not of a Ferry-simulacrum at all — but, like this, of the paraworld called The Clock.

The delusional worlds somehow active here at Whale's Mouth had already spread to and penetrated Terra. It had already been experienced — experienced, yes; but not recognized.

She shuddered.

15

For more than thirty minutes nothing had ema­nated from the anti-prolepsis chamber of Gregory Gloch, and by now Sepp von Einem realized with full acuity that something dreadful had gone wrong.

Taking a calculated risk — Gloch in the past had ranted against this as an illegal invasion of his privacy, of his very psyche, in fact — Dr. von Einem clicked to on the audio monitoring mechanism which tapped the in­put circuit of the chamber. Shortly, he found himself receiving via a three-inch speaker mounted on the wall the same signals which passed to his protégé.

The first rush of impulses almost unhinged him.

"Pun, there," a jovial masculine — somewhat elderly voice — was in the process of intoning. "Life of you, life lived over... see?" It then chuckled loudly in a comical but distinctly vulgar fashion. "Heh-heh," it gloated. "How you doin', ol' boy, Gloch there, ol' fella?"

"Fine," Greg Gloch's retort came. But to von Einem it had a very distinctive weak quality about it, a vivid loss of surgency which chilled him deeply, caused him to hang on each following word of the exchange. Who was this person addressing Gloch? he asked himself. And got no response; the voice was new to him. And yet —

At the same time it acutely resembled a voice he knew. A voice he could however not identify, to save his life. He had the intuition, then, that this voice had deliberately been disguised; he would need a video breakdown by which to identify it. And that would take time, precious time which no one, at this moment in the struggle over Whale's Mouth, could afford to spare — least of all he.

Pressing a command key, von Einem said, "Emer­gency call. I want an immediate trace put on the audio signal reaching Herr Gloch. Notify me of the origin-point, then if you must, obtain a video pic of the voice-pattern and inform me of the caller's identity." He paused, pondering; it was, to say the least, a decision of gravity which he now entertained. "Once you have the locus detailed," he said slowly, "run a homotropic foil along the line. We can obtain the voice-ident after­wards."

The microscopic feedback circuit within his ear spluttered, "Herr Doktor — you mean take out the caller before identification? Das ist gar unmöglich — gar!"

Von Einem rasped, "It is distinctly not out of the question; in fact it is essential." For, underneath, he had an intuition as to who the disguised voice consisted of. It could only be one person.

Jaimé Weiss. The enfant terrible of the UN, prob­ably operating in conjunction with his brother-in-law, the 'wash psychiatrist Lupov. Thinking that, von Einem felt nausea rise like a gray tide within him. Them, he reflected bitingly; the worst pair extant. Probably in orbit in a sealed sat at Whale's Mouth... transmitting either at faster-than-light directly to our system or worse still: feeding their lines during routine traffic through one of our own Telpor stations.

Savagely, he said to the technician brought into con­tact by means of the command key at his disposal, "There is an exceedingly meager latitude for the per­formance of successful action against this party, Mein Herr; or don't you believe me? You suppose I am mistaken? I know who has infiltrated the anti-prolepsis tank of poor Herr Gloch; mach' snell!"And you had damn well better be successful, he said to himself as he released his command key and walked moodily to the chamber to look directly at his protégé to discern Gloch's difficulty with his own eyes.

I wonder, he thought to himself as he watched the youth's face twist with discomfort, if I shouldn't obli­terate the alien audio signal that's so successfully jam­ming the orderly process within the chamber. Or at least reroute it so that I receive it but Gloch does not.

However, it appeared to von Einem that the interlop­ing audio transmission had already done its job; Greg Gloch's face was a mass of confusion and turbulence. Whatever ideas Gloch had entertained for a counter-weapon against Bertold had long since evaporated. Zum Teufel, von Einem said to himself in a near-frenzied spasm of disappointment — as well as an ever-expanding sense that the Augenblick, the essential instant, had somehow managed to elude him. Somehow? Again he listened to the disruptive voice plaguing Gregory Gloch. Here it was; this was the malefactionary disturbance. This: Jaimé Weiss himself, wherever in the galaxy he had now located himself and his fawning sycophantic retinue.

Can Gloch hear me now? he wondered. Can he hear anything beyond that damned voice?

As an experiment, he cautiously addressed Gloch — by means of the customary time-rephasing constructs built into the chamber. "Greg! Kannst hör'?" He listened, waited; after a time he heard his words reeled off to the man within the chamber at appropriate velocity. Then the lips of the man moved, and then, to his relief, a sentence by Gloch was spewed out by the transmitter of the chamber.

"Oh. Yes, Herr von Einem." The voice had a vague quality about it, a preoccupation; Greg Gloch heard, but did not really seem able to focus his faculties. "I was... um... daydreaming or... some darn thing. Ummp!" Gloch noisily cleared his throat. "What, ah, can I, eh, do for you, sir? Um?"