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He said carefully, “Well, John, I don’t deny I was uneasy about it But it went off more smoothly than I dared hope.

“And now we’ll get you blanked, and splice in a set of phony memories for last night, and you’ll be safe.

“Yes, John.”

“Want to take a little workout first? Get yourself back into shape?”

“I think we’d better tend to the blanking first,” said Kravchenko. “I’ve got a few things on my mind that I’m better off without.”

Roditis nodded. “Right. Come with me.” Kravchenko followed the stocky little financier through the maze of the building. He did not much like the idea of submitting to a blanking; he hated to surrender consciousness, hated to go under the machine. But so long as he still carried around memories of the discorporation of Martin St. John, he ran serious risks. Noyes, whom he pretended to be, might well be under suspicion of that discorporation. It they picked him up, ran a routine mindpick on him, and found the evidence, all would be up not only for Noyes — whose personae would be destroyed because of his crime — but for Kravchenko as well, since the routine mindpick would be followed by a deep pick that would reveal who was actually running the Noyes body. Kravchenko thought he could conceal his dybbuk status if the pick merely went scraping around looking for a specific event, the discorporation episode. But he was finished for good if they sank the pick beyond the surface. His only hope of avoiding that was to blank out everything having to do with last night. Which Roditis now proposed to do.

Technicians were readying the blanking apparatus. Kravchenko studied it warily. A blanking was something like getting a persona transplant-in reverse. Instead of having taped information poured into your receptive brain, you yielded information. Instead of being doped with mnemonic drugs to damp out memory decay, they washed your mind with a selective memory suppressant, carefully measured to obliterate a certain chronological segment of the memory bank Kravchenko distrusted all this fiddling with the brain. Yet he admitted the necessity of it.

“Will you lie down here?” a technician said. Kravchenko waited. They gave him injections. They strapped electrodes to his skull. They took EEG readings of Noyes” brain waves. Silently they bustled about while Roditis hovered somberly in the background.

“Ready, now,” someone said. A helmet was lowered over his head. “Don’t worry about a thing. Charles,” came Roditis’ confident voice. “We’ll clean you up in no time.”

“Now,” said a technician.

Kravchenko went tense, imagining that switches were being thrown and contacts made. He could see nothing. His drugged mind grew foggy. Abruptly he heard what sounded like a colossal explosion, and in the same instant a burst of intolerably bright lightning shot through his brain. He felt as though his skull had split apart Chaos enfolded him. He was swept away by a terrible tide — down, down, down-out of control-helpless-and with his last conscious thought he asked himself how this could be happening, when a blanking was supposed to be such a trivial thing. Then he was swallowed up in darkness.

This was her moment, Elena thought. Jim was downstairs undergoing his blanking; afterwards, he’d be resting for a few hours. Now was her chance to add Roditis to her collection.

She hadn’t felt like telling Jim that one of her motives in accompanying him to Evansville was to seduce John Roditis. Newly returned to corporate status by her scheming, Kravchenko would not understand that he was not going to be the only man in her life. She loved him passionately; but she wanted Roditis. Two hours ago, when she and Kravchenko had arrived here, Elena had met Roditis for the first time. They had exchanged perhaps ten words; Roditis had hardly seemed to take notice of her. He was too preoccupied with the maneuvers surrounding the St John discorporation, as was only natural. But she had taken notice of him. That muscular, powerful body held promise of physical delight; and the strength of the man was unmistakable. To Elena, a connoisseur of strong men, Roditis seemed an ideal mixture of raw power and intuitive intelligence. Santoliquido and Mark Kaufmann and the others had palled on her; Kravchenko, now that he was back, offered many pleasures, but he was shallow, a floater, a playboy; new adventures beckoned to her. With Roditis.

She said, “I’ve always been curious about you. It’s strange we never had occasion to meet before.”

“I don’t move in your high-society circles.” Roditis seemed distant even bored. “You really should, you know. We aren’t such ogres. A man of your vigor, your enterprise — you’d inject some new vitality into our group.” Surreptitiously she moved closer to him. Elena regretted that she was not dressed for her purpose; she had flown to Evansville in workaday travel clothes, and there had been no chance to change into something more clinging, something more revealing. In this drab garb she felt as though locked into armor. Yet it was a handicap she felt she could overcome.

Roditis said, “I object to snobbery, Miss Volterra. I am a wealthy man, yes, but no playboy. My values are not those of your set. I have work to do every day.”

“You ought to let yourself enjoy the benefits of your work,” she purred. She stood beside him now, at his desk, examining the sonic sculpture. “How beautiful,” she said. As she reached forward to caress the piece the soft hill of her breast pressed into Roditis’ elbow. It was hardly a subtle gesture, but she did not regard Roditis as a subtle man.

He moved smoothly away, breaking the contact. Elena nibbled her lip. She threw him a coquettish glance; she asked him about the sculpture, found that it had been made by one of his personae, praised it extravagantly; she adopted a posture so sensual it might almost have been self-parody. Roditis seemed unmoved. What’s the matter with the man, she wondered?

Her approach became even more direct. She flattered him; she told him how thrilled she was to have met him at last; she cornered him behind his own desk and filled his ears with praise. She could not have made it more obvious if she had stripped and sprawled out spread-legged on the carpet. And Roditis grew more brusque, more withdrawn, as she fought to reach him.

It was a dismal moment. Elena sensed that she was being refused, which had never happened to her before, and she could not imagine why. From what she knew of Roditis he was unmarried, heterosexual, promiscuous. Why, then — ?

To hell with it, Elena told herself. She thrust herself into his arms. Her breasts crushed up against him. Panting, eager, she hunted for his lips, while her hands clawed the muscular ridges of his back. By now she was so angry that she felt only the counterfeit of desire; but she came on in seemingly uncontrollable passion, determined to sweep Roditis off his feet. He would have her on the floor, she resolved. A wild bestial coupling. She’d show him her abilities, and afterwards he’d need less coaxing.

His hands went to her breasts. Not to caress, though, but to shove. He pushed her back, disengaged himself, adjusted his clothing. He looked ruffled; his eyes were steely. In a frosty voice he said, “This is no pleasure palace, Miss Volterra. This is a workingman’s office. I’m not in the mood for a wrestling match now.”

She cursed him eloquently in Italian. Then, inspired, she went on to roast him in Greek; but not even that got a rise out of him. Incredulously she stared as he summoned a robosecretary and instructed it to show Miss Volterra to her lodgings.

“Dog!” she cried. “Eunuch!” Roditis glowered, slammed fist into palm, and switched up the vents to get the reek of her perfume out of the room. Damn her! He could hardly believe what had happened — the coarseness of her, the grossness of her assault. He had known from the very first naturally, why she was here, hitchhiking along with Noyes to get an introduction to him. All that ogling and rump-wiggling when she had first showed up had not failed to get through to him. And now, in his office, the winks, the ever broader hints, the breast nuzzling against his arm, finally the desperate lunge and clutch — he had not expected the famed Elena Volterra to be quite so blunt.