What time was it? The faintest dawn gathered in the window. Birds chirped. It must be five or five thirty.

Lydia slid carefully out of bed, slipped on her panties, and padded about the dark room. It occurred to her that she could put her clothes on and slip out right now, leave a tawdry note like "Thanks for the good time, see you around." How would Wade react to that? It was too hard nowadays to judge the nature of emotions-a litmus test would be so much easier. Her cutoffs lay on the floor, her loaded derringer on the desk. Did she, a rather dedicated police officer, want to get involved with Wade, a rather undedicated student?

How could they be compatible? They were opposite in so many ways. The physical thing had been good; was she letting that fog her focus? This seemed different, though. The s.e.x aside, her heart deciphered itself: she did want to be involved with him. Even better, maybe she already was.

She heard footsteps in the hall. They sounded stealthy.

Abruptly then, the doork.n.o.b jiggled.

But surely Wade had locked the door. Only idiots leave their doors unlocked, she thought.

Then the door opened.

Lydia grabbed her gun and hid behind the desk. A figure entered cautiously and took time to close the door without making noise. Lydia made no details of the shape. It crossed the room in silence and stopped at the foot of Wade"s bed.

Was the figure deliberating? It stood still a moment. Then, quickly, it began to reach for Wade.

Lydia snapped on the light and pointed the .22 at the 5x zone of the trespa.s.ser"s torso. "Don"t move," she ordered.

A wearied face stared at her. Wade leaned up from bed, squinting.

"I don"t believe it," the trespa.s.ser said. "I"m being held at gunpoint by a topless blonde."

"A topless police officer," Lydia corrected, but then she thought: Oh my G.o.d, it"s true! I"m practically nude!

Wade laughed. "Put away your heat, Annie Oakley. He"s a friend of mine."

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it!" she shouted. Embarra.s.sment flooded her. "Get him out of here! And quit laughing!"

"In the hall," Wade said to Jervis Phillips, who quickly scooted out. Lydia couldn"t remember ever being this p.i.s.sed off. "Sorry," Wade apologized, and put on his robe. "These things happen."

"s.h.i.t!" she yelled at him.

Wade went out to the hall. Lydia quickly put on her cutoffs and top. The conversation was easy to overhear.

Jervis sounded hesitant. "I saw something. I know it sounds crazy, but I think I witnessed a murder. Over at the girls" dorm."

"You"re right, Jerv. It sounds crazy. You been drinking?"

"Of course. I guess I pa.s.sed out at the end of it, because it happened around two A.M. He killed him."

"Slow down. Start at the beginning."

More hesitance. "I, uh, I was checking out the dorm with a telescope; I wanted to see what Sarah was doing with the German guy, but they never showed. Anyway, another window was lit up, the Erblings" window, so I, you know, I-" Jervis spoke with caution, charting his words. "I saw a woman in black. She had a guy with her. The guy was Tom."

"Tom?"

"Yeah. And then the Erbling girls popped up. That guy Dave Willet was with them, the guy everyone calls Do Horse-"

Wade chuckled.

"-and Tom killed him."

Wade stopped chuckling.

"He killed him. Then he threw his body in the bathtub. Christ, there was blood everywhere. And then that woman came in, that woman in black. She...ate him."

"The woman in black ate Do Horse?"

"That"s right. You should"ve seen it."

"And I guess she ate the Erblings too, huh?"

"No, no, but she did something to them, knocked them out somehow. Something. Tom rolled them up in a rug and took them out."

Wade was chuckling again.

"I know it sounds crazy. If you don"t believe me, let"s go over there and check it out. I know what I saw. It was Tom."

Now Wade seemed to be hesitating. He didn"t believe this nonsense, did he? "Tom"s car hasn"t been in the lot for two days," Wade mentioned. "And last time I saw him, he gave me the slip."

"Wade, it"s true. I can prove it. Let"s go over there."

Silence.

Then Wade came back in the room. "Did you-"

"Yeah, I heard it," Lydia smirked. "Your friend"s a peeper, a drunk, and a nut. That"s three strikes."

"I"ll admit he"s a little off track; his girlfriend just dumped him, he"s been drinking heavy. But he"s not the kind of guy to make something like this up. Plus, there"s something else..."

"What?"

"It"s better if I tell you later. Just trust me."

What was he talking about? Was he nuts too?

"There"s no harm in looking into it, is there?" Wade persisted, and got dressed. Lydia said nothing, but she supposed he was right.

She felt like a complete a.s.s, knocking on a student"s door at five thirty in the morning, but only for a second. Her first rap on room 208 edged the door open an inch. The doork.n.o.b was squashed, just like at the clinic. The latch bolt was mangled, the strike plate half dug out- "Just like the clinic," Wade said.

Score one for Jervis the Drunk, Lydia thought.

The faintest ring of dust clung in a circle on the floor, as might be left by a hastily removed throw rug. Hmmm, she thought. The bed was sloppily made; guys made their beds like that, not girls. Hmmm, she thought again.

The hamper was stuffed full of clothes. Among the garments was a pair of men"s jeans. The jeans contained a wallet. The wallet contained a driver"s license: David Ubel Willet.

"Believe me now?" Jervis asked.

Lydia was stumped. "I believe you may have witnessed a break in," she replied. "I don"t, however, believe you witnessed anything more than that."

Jervis said three clipped words. "Bathtub. Blood. Everywhere."

The three of them squeezed into the bathroom. They all looked down at the tub.

"Where"s the blood?" Wade asked.

"Tom must"ve cleaned it up," Jervis was quick to answer. "There was so much, though. It must"ve taken him an hour."

"Forget it, Jerv," Wade said. "The tub"s clean."

Too clean, Lydia thought. She"d had Jervis tote along her field kit. From it she removed a tiny amber bottle with an eyedropper cap. "This is a detection compound called Malachite Reagent V; it reacts with protein components in hemoglobin. Blood contains free protein electrons which bind to almost any surface. You can wash off the blood, but you can"t wash off the electrons."

"So if someone got murdered in this tub," Wade said, "the stuff in that bottle will prove it?"

"Yep. It turns turquoise on contact." Lydia let a tiny drop fall from the eyedropper into the middle of the tub.

"Nothing," Wade observed.

"Wait."

In a second, the drop turned turquoise.

Lydia sprinkled more drops around, all over the inside of the tub, the ledge, the tiled back wall. They all turned turquoise.

Jervis looked unsurprised. Wade looked ill.

This guy"s not bulls.h.i.tting, Lydia thought, and it was a ghastly thought indeed. There"d been blood all over this tub.

Blood. Everywhere.

"I instructed you to be careful!" Professor Dudley Besser bellowed within the cove of pointaccessmain #1. "I told you!"

"I know, sir," Tom mumbled.

"You left their wallets! Their keys! Everything!"

"It slipped my mind, sir. We had to get out of there. It took me a long time to clean up the mess the sister made. I mean, Christ, can"t they eat here?"

Besser recessed back into the strangely etched darkness. Inaudibly the labyrinth hummed, a vibration more than a sound. The sisters had told Tom that it was the Supremate thinking, but Tom had begun to doubt that, along with many other things. Sometimes he wondered if there even was a Supremate. The huge loving voice that sometimes filled his head seemed phony, an overdone charade.

Besser"s disapproval drew crevices into his bulging moonface. "This better not break before we leave. Who knows what the Supremate will do?"

The premise was not a pleasant one. Tom remembered the chasms he"d seen. He remembered the squat factories whose winding winze belts hauled slabs of black meat.

"I don"t want any problems with your next task," Besser said. "The Supremate needs a holotype. Winnie and I have agreed; it shall be Wade St. John. This should please you."

"It does, sir." You ain"t kidding it does!

"We only have a few more days; I want Wade secured in the unit hold well beforehand. He works at the sciences center at nine A.M. Bring him in today."

"Yes, sir."

"And let me emphasize that the quality of your future within the family may depend on the success of your remaining procurements."

"I understand that, sir. You can count on me."

Besser dismissed him, the moonface disappearing into the egress. Tom followed the dimensionless servicepa.s.s to the acclimationprepchamber. He didn"t need directions; the labyrinth had its own sort of telepathic directory called mindsigns. Ahead, one such sign read EMWGUIDANCETRACKINGPOINT. Besser had explained it wasn"t really a power plant but just a simple stabilization mechanism, like a keel on a sailboat. The Supremate controlled it, along with everything else, by instinct.

The next mindsign glowed in nonexistence: GERMINATIONWARREN. Tom used the key around his neck and prolapsed through the egress. This was some security system they had here; no one without a key could escape the labyrinth"s solid walls, nor could entry be gained by any outsider. The labyrinth was, fully and ultimately, impenetrable.

Within the acclimationprepchamber, the Erblings lay stretched on the levitationslats. Before antirejectorybifertilization could be initiated, certain biological changes had to be made. Tom knew the Erblings were conscious despite complete paralysis. He grabbed two infusers containing optimized doses of calciumdecimationliquefactor. All fissionizationvessels needed proper softening before they could safely disbirth their interspecielmetis units. Tom had wandered around the biomaintenancegrowthaccelerationvaults once or twice, and some of the things he"d seen down there were as big as sunfish! The Erblings both jerked once when he activated the infusers against their throats. The injection attacked only fossilized CaCo compounds. Besser and Winnifred had taken blood samples from Lois Hartley and Penelope, to ascertain the most effective serum absorbability levels for humans. The Erblings would be pudding in an hour.

Liddy"s fingers and toes twitched, and Stella was blinking. The sister"s neurohemolyticpyrrolizicvenom was wearing off. Tom pushed the levslats through the next extromitter. Besser had told him that the slats had an unlimited load capacity. Theoretically you could push an aircraft carrier around on one of these things. You could push worlds.

But no worlds today. Just a pair of naked coeds. Tom could feel the warmth of the sensorpost behind him. They were everywhere in one way or another-hybridized into the sisters" eyes, in the sensor rings that Besser and Winnie wore, even in Tom"s transceptionrod. Through such sensor circuits, the Supremate saw and heard everything. The sensorpost was merely a black rod above the keypa.s.s. It reminded Tom of the Orwell novel.

He flipped the Erblings off their slats onto the carbonized floorwall. "If you think Do Horse was hot stuff," he joked, "wait"ll you see what"s waiting for you in the next room. You"ll be the only gals in town with boyfriends from another planet!" Tom laughed. "I"ll be right back, and in the meantime, you"ll be trying on some new genes, and I don"t mean Levi"s."

He extromitted to the pointaccess of the xyholotypehold. The exposed unit read #1003WADEST.JOHN. The hold was empty, but not for long. In sisterspeak the hold was called a carbonma.s.srepulsiondiodedeflectiveenergybarriersecuritynodule. In Tomspeak, it was called a f.u.c.kin" jail. It reminded him of the brig on Star Trek. Nothing could penetrate its repulsion screen. A TOW missile wouldn"t dent it. A sixteen inch naval sh.e.l.l would bounce off its transparent face like a tennis ball.

Tom touched the scrollmode on the revolutionactivator, thinking of the proper stockcodes #765NRLDYL and #6500: .::. . Instantly the first appeared, something reminiscent of a giant gray chicken gizzard, which rose joint by joint on segmented legs. "Come on, Valentino," Tom said. "Time to make some bacon." Nrldyl had haired antennae in place of eyes and ears, and at the end of its single arm was not a hand but a rubberish shovel like thing. Tom understood that this particular genus had intercourse by means of manual seminal congestion: It took its s.e.m.e.n out of itself with the scoop and stuffed it into its mate. True pa.s.sion, Tom thought.

#6500: .::. . appeared next. "Ah, Blob Man," Tom commented, noticing the bucket. It was nice to know that earth was not the only sphere in the universe that used buckets. He carried it down the pa.s.s, as Nrldyl dumbly followed. Tom didn"t have to worry about the holotypes getting rowdy; the ganglionstaticreflexpulsemodificationdischargenodes implanted into their nervous systems would zap them a nutcracker at the faintest negative thought. That way they couldn"t rough up the female surrogates.

Tom decayed the radiophaseshifttriionizer, which paved the way for successful antirejectorybifertilization. He took the two holotypes into the warren. "Girls!" he announced. "I"m back! With your new dream dates!"

Stella began to visibly jerk. Liddy managed a m.u.f.fled whine from deep in her chest.

"Go to it, fellas." Tom set the bucket between Liddy"s feet and nudged Nrldyl toward Stella. "If you guys need a G.o.dfather, let me know. I could be available."

Nrldyl was hopping up and down in pure alien excitement. Clumps of its s.e.m.e.n were already visible within the slit of its spermonic duct. The grotesque thing then knelt between Stella"s legs and began to tenderly transfer the globs of its off-blue s.e.m.e.n, via the scoop hand, into Stella"s v.a.g.i.n.al vault. The scoop packed it in nice and tight, leaving poor Stella bloated like a blueberry turnover with too much filling. What a way to f.u.c.k, Tom thought. Nrldyl chortled. Stella vomited a yard into the air while at the same time convulsing in multiple o.r.g.a.s.ms.

Meanwhile the thing in the bucket had already dumped itself out. The brown blob spurtled, groaning, surging upward as if against tremendous gravity. After several strenuous attempts, it managed to stand upright, sporting a dripping, long erection that looked sort of like a giant chewed Tootsie Roll. Liddy screamed through her paralysis when the thing climbed between her legs.

Tom plugged his key into the extromitter. But before he left, he turned and offered a final commiseration. "Have no fear, girls. You"ll live forever. You"ll be cosmic mothers of miracles-forever."

But where did that leave him? As he fed the thought "Student Shop" into the extromitter, he wondered. They said he would live forever too. But how could that be, when already shreds of his own flesh were beginning to peel off?