Once more: "Alec?"

Then she went ahead, opened the last door, peered into the last room. The light was on here too.

She saw the body lying on the floor.

At first she thought it was Alec. She had killed him and then forgotten all about it and come a second time. Wasn't that funny? Or maybe this was a dream. She was being forced to relive the act again and again. This was her punishment. They were never going to let her wake up.

Then, stepping closer to the body, she realized it couldn't be Alec. It was a woman.

She turned the body over and looked at the face.

At first, she didn't know. It wasn't herself. Who was it? Recognition came slowly. She remembered a tall, tall building. An outside elevator made of glass. Eathen.

Oh, oh, oh, yes. Sylvia Mencken. She had a gaping hole in the center of her forehead. And she was dead.

Anna, kneeling beside the body, cradled the unused gun in her lap and rocked on her heels. She began to sing: "Sylvia-poor Sylvia-dead Sylvia-poor, lousy, dead, dead, dead..."

She started to laugh.

It wasn't so bad. Hey, her head didn't itch any more. She had passed the sign and now she was free. Alec was saved. Nobody was going to kill her any more.

She did laugh.

Then, suddenly, her body jerked stiff. She sprang to her feet, balancing on the tips of her toes like a dancer. She threw her hands high in the air. She screamed. She fell over.

On her back, she shook, trembled, twitched. She was fighting and fighting and fighting. He had promised. He had told her. The sign... the sign... the sign.... She had passed it.

Someone was laughing.

It was useless. She fought and fought and fought.

She lost.

Standing, no longer shaking, she reached down carefully and retrieved the beam gun. She placed the weapon gently into her pocket. Then she turned and went obediently toward the door.

She passed into the second room. Then the first.

Within her mind, a single image dominated everything. There was no room for other thoughts; resistance was inconceivable. A big house set high on a hill. Dawn. An eerie orange glow spreading across the surrounding countryside. The house was shaped like a square doughnut. At its center, not a hole-a plush green garden.

She had to go here. She had to enter that garden and then she would be free.

A man stood in the center of the garden. A narrow stream, flowing briefly. A high arched wooden bridge.

"Alec," she whispered. "Alec-I'm coming."

She stepped out into the dim and silent corridor and went to find the elevator.

Twenty-One.

With the faint first light of dawn streaming across the naked flesh of his back, Alec Richmond sat on a bare strip of grass in his garden and sipped orange juice through a straw. Long ago, Alec had removed the glass dome from over the garden, preferring the natural light and heat of sun and moon and stars to their more demure and artificial replicas. Because of this, many of the more exotic varieties of foliage in the garden were now wilted, dead, or dying. Only the sturdy, experienced, native American varieties had managed painlessly to withstand the casual poisons which lurked within the local atmosphere, remnants for the most part from those ugly years before the human race had been forced to learn-however dimly- that nature could kill men as easily as men could attempt to kill nature.

He had chosen this open space deliberately because it was one of the few places in the garden that did not make him think of Anna. She had always liked trees and bushes, running water and high bridges. There was nothing like that here: just grass, a few decaying plants, maybe a worm or two.

He crossed his legs beneath him and continued to sip. The house was far enough distant so that if the phone in the living room decided to ring he could easily pretend not to hear it. He had already disconnected the garden extensions. He felt good now, clean, able to luxuriate in a degree of privacy he had not known in years and years, if ever.

It was a shame he had promised the general his new android model so soon. It must be well past six o'clock by now. Soon enough-probably before seven-his failure to appear with the promised designs would seem suspicious. They would try to call him-first at the office and finally here at home. By eight, their patience should be exhausted. He set eight-thirty as the likely time for them to reach the office. Before nine, they would reach him here.

But that still gave him three hours alone. And the war might well delay them too. As soon as he stepped through the front door, the tridee screen in the living room-which neither he nor Anna ever watched-had automatically blossomed into life, revealing a dull man who spoke with an unemotive voice. War had been declared. Hostilities had commenced. And on and on and on.

Removing the poker from its place on the fireplace hearth, Alec had driven the end straight through the tridee screen, coolly destroying-in a flash of sparks, a buzz of shorted wires-both the man and his voice.

From there, he had gone directly to the garden.

Alone. Three hours. Less now. What to do, what to do? How should he spend these final few hours? Should he simply sit and sulk and mourn for Sylvia? Or should he be more active: sit and curse and spit hatred at Cargill? Or what about Anna? He had barely given her a thought, despite Cargill's warning that she might be in great danger.

How lucky Anna was.

She had been permitted to meet and know her own father. If he happened to be-as Cargill asserted-something ugly and despicable, a monster who would calmly squash her underfoot without a second thought-well, that was really irrelevant; what mattered was that he was still her father.

What about his own?

At the government home, when Alec turned thirteen, the director, Mr. Eliot, had called him in-it was official procedure-and congratulated him on his birthday. Then, reading from what appeared to be-from the rear-an official state document, Mr. Eliot began to discuss Alec's own father. He had been, said Mr. Eliot, a mechanic and for years had worked on his own, repairing broken machinery, tending to the maintenance of cars and planes and other devices and gadgets. All of this was recorded (or so Mr. Eliot claimed) in the official state document. But the need for human mechanics was fast disappearing; machines could fix other machines far more efficiently than any pair of human hands. The profession moved toward obsolescence-it would soon be as unnecessary as ditch-diggers, bootleggers, or Indian scouts. So Alec's father had been forced to move farther and farther away from his real enemy-civilization. Eventually, in a cold corner of Alaska, he had met and married Alec's mother, who had soon died while giving birth under very primitive conditions to Alec. But, even here, work was scarce. Soon, there was not nearly enough to support a man and his son. Alec's father had been faced with a decision: he must choose between his work and his son. He could remain where he was-in the civilized world-and risk starvation. Or he could emigrate-to any primitive nation-and find his services well-required and his belly quite full. He would not be permitted, of course, to take his child with him if he left the civilized world; the law required the boy to enter a home.

"But," Alec had asked Mr. Eliot, unable to restrain himself despite the fear he felt for this man, "why didn't he retrain? Wouldn't they let him?"

They would but-he saw no other alternative-Mr. Eliot would cover this point quite bluntly. The fact was that Alec's father had refused retraining. The only open professions at that time-and the situation was little different today-were artistic and electronic. Alec's father had no interest in or knowledge of the arts, and he further rejected official denials that any such interest or knowledge was necessary. No. And, as far as electronics was concerned, he flatly refused that too. He didn't mind fixing machines-he loved the work in fact-but he wouldn't work any closer with them. It was a point of personal pride. In any man-machine relationship, Alec's father believed, one party must dominate-and he felt it had to be- and ought to be-the man. Perhaps this view was obsolete. He didn't know. But it was his view, and it meant enough to him that he was willing to sacrifice his son and leave his homeland forever.

"Where did he go?" Alec asked, boldly.

"Africa," said Mr. Eliot, peering over the edge of the official document. "Senegal. But-I warn you-don't try looking for him when you leave this home. You will be sorry-very sorry. You won't find him. He won't be there."

Alec had accepted this advice. For some reason he had known as soon as Mr. Eliot spoke that it was true. Anna had acted otherwise.

And she had been the one to win.

After that, Mr. Eliot had shown him the tridee photograph. A middle-aged man-but tall, strong, smiling. A black beard. Blue shirt and blue jeans. "This is your father," Mr. Eliot had explained, "the way he looked the day he left you with us. Don't expect him to be that way now."

"Yes, sir," Alec had said.

And was he? In other words, which picture was true? The one shown him by Mr. Eliot-or the other, the Cargill version? Man or monster? Mechanic or superman? Callous killer or loving father?

Or both?

Alec crossed the open grass and crouched beside a budding flower. Was it any different from this? Bending way down, he placed his nose close to the tiny red blossom and he sniffed.

There were two worlds. In one, this flower was a collection of molecules, capable of being broken down into its component particles. More importantly, it could be explained. The fragrance, the shape, the color-all of this could be explained. But in the other world-a place where things existed in the form they ought to possess-this same flower was only an object of rare and unique beauty, a divine creation of color and scent, form and structure and feeling. Two worlds-and they could not be merged. One must accept either one or the other. The world of science-the world of poetry. The way things were-or the way things ought to be. In the past, Alec had tried to combine the two. He had created life through science, but the thing which had emerged in the end (the android soldiers) had been all science and no life-no poetry. Or take Ah Tran-the new messiah-another presumptuous advocate of fusion: the poetry of compassionate mysticism and the science of natural ecology. It wouldn't work. It could not be done. One or the other-never both.

Bending down, Alec plucked the flower and held it lightly between his fingers. He made his choice: poetry. He did not want a world where things could be explained. He wanted a place where everything-flowers, androids, gods, fathers- existed in the form they ought rightly to possess.

Anna's failure to know and decide had driven her mad. That was her own fault, but his too. When he first met her, he now recalled how impressed he had been-glancing into her mind-by the depth of knowledge and wisdom she possessed. To have these qualities close at hand on a more or less permanent basis, he had married her.