"God..." she said.

With the other eyes in retreat, the joy came back.

"Can't stop, babe," Marty said.

"Go on," she said. "It's all right. It's all right."

Flecks of her sweat hit him as she moved on top of him.

"Go on. Yes!" she said again. It was an exclamation of pure delight, and it took him past the point of return. He tried to stave off eruption for a few more trembling seconds. The weight of her hips on him, the heat of her channel, the brightness of her breasts, filled his head.

And then somebody spoke; a low, guttural voice.

"Stop it."

Marty's eyes fluttered open, glancing to left and right. There was nobody else in the room. His head had invented the sound. He canceled the illusion and looked back at Carys.

"Go on," she said. "Please go on." She was dancing on him. The bones of her hips caught the light; the sweat on them ran and ran, glowing.

"Yes... Yes..." he answered, the voice forgotten.

She looked down at him as imminence infested his face, and through the intricacies of her own flaring sensations she felt the second mind again. It was a worm in her budding head, pushing forward, its sickness ready to stain her vision. She fought it.

"Go away," she told it, under her breath, "go away."

But it wanted to defeat her; to defeat them both. What had seemed like curiosity before was malice now. It wanted to spoil everything.

"I love you," she told Marty, defying the presence in her. "I love you, I love you-"

The invader spasmed, furious with her, and more furious still that she didn't concede to its spoiling. Marty was rigid, on the threshold; blind and deaf to anything but pleasure. Then, with a groan, he began to spurt in her, and she was there too. Her sensations drove all thoughts of resistance out of her head. Somewhere far off she could hear Marty gasping

"Oh, Jesus," he was saying, "babe... babe."

-but he was in another world. They weren't together, even at this moment. She in her ecstasy, he in his; each running a private race to completion.

A wayward spasm made Marty convulse. He opened his eyes. Carys had her hands glued over her face, fingers spread.

"You all right, babe?" he said.

When her eyes opened, he had to bite back a shout. It was, for a moment, not her who stared out between the bars. It was something dredged up from the bottom of the sea. Black eyes swiveling in a gray head. Some primeval genus that viewed him-he knew this to his marrow-with hatred in its bowels.

The hallucination lasted two heartbeats only, but long enough for him to glance down her body and up again to meet the same vile gaze.

"Carys?"

Then her eyelids fluttered, and the fan of her fingers closed across her face. For a lunatic instant he flinched, awaiting the revelation. Her hands dropping from her head; the face transformed: a fish's head. But of course it was her: only her. Here she was now, smiling at him.

"Are you all right?" he ventured.

"What do you think?"

"I love you, babe."

She murmured something as she slumped on him. They lay there for several minutes, his cock diminishing in a cooling bath of mingled fluids.

"Aren't you getting a cramp?" he asked her after a while, but she didn't reply. She was asleep.

Gently, he slid her sideways, slipping out of her with a wet sound. She lay on the bed beside him, her face impassive. He kissed her breasts, licked her fingers, and fell asleep beside her.

Mamoulian felt sick.

She wasn't easy prey, this woman, despite his sentimental claim upon her psyche. But then her strength was to be expected. She was Whitehead's stock: peasant breed, thief breed. Cunning and dirty. Though she couldn't know precisely what she was doing, she'd fought him with the very sensuality he most despised.

But her weaknesses-and she had many-were exploitable. He'd used the heroin fugues at first, gaining access to her when she was pacified to the point of indifference. They warped her perception, which had made his invasion less noticeable, and through her eyes he'd seen the house, listened with her ears to the witless conversation of its occupants, shared with her, though it revolted him, the smell of their cologne and their flatulence. She was the perfect spy, living in the heart of the enemy's camp. And as the weeks had gone by he'd found it easier to slip in and oil of her unnoticed. That had made him careless.

It was carelessness not to have looked before he leaped; to commit himself to her head without first checking what she was doing. He hadn't even thought she might be with the bodyguard; and by the time he'd realized his error he was sharing her sensations-her ridiculous rapture-and it had left him trembling. He would not make such a mistake again.

He sat in the bare room in the bare house he had bought for himself and Breer, and tried to forget the turbulence he'd experienced, the look in Strauss' eyes as he stared up at the girl. Had the thug glimpsed, perhaps, the face behind her face? The European guessed so.

No matter; none of them would survive. It wouldn't just be the old man, the way he'd planned at first. All of them-his acolytes, his serfs, all-would go to the wall with their master.

The memories of Strauss' assaults lingered in the European's entrails; he longed to evacuate diem. The sensation shamed and disgusted him.

Downstairs, he heard Breer come in or go out; on his way to some atrocity or home from one. Mamoulian concentrated on the blank wall opposite him, but try as he might to exile the trauma, he still felt the intrusion: the spurting head, the heat of the act.

Forget, he said aloud. Forget the brown fire off them. It's no risk to you. See only the emptiness: the promise of the void.

His innards shook. Beneath his gaze, the paint on the wall seemed to blister. Venereal eruptions disfigured its emptiness. Illusions; but horribly real to him nevertheless. Very well: if he couldn't dislodge the obscenities, he would transform them. It wasn't difficult to smudge sexuality into violence, turn sighs into screams, thrusts into convulsions. The grammar was the same; only the punctuation differed. Picturing the lovers in death together, the nausea he'd felt receded.

In the face of that void what was their substance? Transitory. Their promises? Pretension.

He began to calm. The sores on the wall had started to heal, and he was left, after a few minutes, with an echo of the nothingness he had come to need so much. Life came and went. But absence, he knew, went on forever.

"Oh, by the way, there was a telephone call for you. From Bill Toy. Day before yesterday."

Marty looked up at Pearl from his plate of steak, and pulled a face.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

She looked contrite.

"It was the day I lost my wick with those damn people. I left a message for you-"

"I didn't get it."

"-on the pad beside the telephone."

It was still there: "Call Toy," and a number. He dialed, and waited a full minute before the phone was picked up at the other end. It wasn't Toy. The woman who repeated the number had a soft, lost voice, slurred as if by too much drink.

"Can I speak to William Toy, please?" he asked.

"He's gone," the woman replied.

"Oh. I see."

"He won't be coming back. Not ever."

The quality of the voice was eerie. "Who is this?" it asked of him.

"It doesn't matter," Marty replied. His instinct rebelled against giving his name.

"Who is this?" she asked again.

"I'm sorry to have bothered you.'

"Who is this?"

He put the receiver down on the slushing insistence at the other end. Only when he had did he realize that his shirt was clinging to a cold sweat that had suddenly sprung from his chest and spine.