For a reflexive time which he found himself unable to measure, McKie considered his exchange with the Caleban.  He felt cast adrift without any familiar reference points.  How could false be the opposite of proper?  If he could not measure meanings, how could he measure time?

McKie passed a hand across his forehead, gathering perspiration which he tried to wipe off on his jacket.  The jacket was damp.

No matter how much time had passed, he felt that he still knew where he was in this universe.  The beachball's interior walls remained around him.  The unseeable presence of the Caleban had not become less mysterious, but he could look at the shimmering existence of the thing and take a certain satisfaction from the fact that it spoke to him.

The thought that every sentient who had used a jumpdoor would die if this Caleban succumbed sat on McKie's awareness.  It was muscle-numbing.  His skin was slick with perspiration, and not all of it from the heat.  There were voices of death in this air.  He thought of himself as a being surrounded by all those pleading sentients - quadrillions upon quadrillions of them.  Help us!

Everyone who'd used a jumpdoor.

Damnation of all devils!  Had he interpreted the Caleban correctly?  It was the logical assumption.  Deaths and insanity around the Caleban disappearances said he must exclude any other interpretation.

Link by link, this trap had been forged.  It would crowd the universe with dead flesh.

The shimmering oval above the giant spoon abruptly waved outward, contracted, flowed up, down, left.  McKie received a definite impression of distress.  The oval vanished, but his eyes still tracked the Caleban's unpresence.

"Is something wrong?" McKie asked.

For answer the round vortal tube of a S'eye jumpdoor opened behind the Caleban.  Beyond the opening stood a woman, a figure dwarfed as though seen through the wrong end of a telescope.  McKie recognized her from all the news-visos and from the holoscans he had been fed as background briefing for this assignment.

He was confronting Mliss Abnethe in a light somewhat reddened by its slowed passage through the jumpdoor.

It was obvious that the Beautybarbers of Steadyon had been about their expensive work on her person.  He made a mental note to have that checked.  Her figure presented the youthful curves of a pleasurefem.  The face beneath fairy-blue hair was focused around a red-petal mouth.  Large sum-mery green eyes and a sharply cleaving nose conveyed odd contrast - dignity versus hoyden.  She was a flawed queen, age mingled with youth.  She must be at least eighty standard years, but the Beautybarbers had achieved this startling combination: available pleasurefem and remote, hungry power.

The expensive body wore a long gown of grey rainpearls which matched her, movement for movement, like a glittering skin.  She moved nearer the vortal tube.  As she approached, the edges of the tube blocked off first her feet, then her legs, thighs, waist.

McKie felt his knees age a thousand years in that brief passage.  He remained crouched near the place where he'd entered the Beachball.

"Ahhh, Fanny Mae," Mliss Abnethe said.  "You have a guest."  Jumpdoor interference caused her voice to sound faintly hoarse.

"I am Jorj X. McKie, Saboteur Extraordinary," he said.  Was that a contraction in the pupils of her eyes?  McKie wondered.  She stopped with only her head and shoulders visible in the tube's circle.

"And I am Mliss Abnethe, private citizen."