Something was rubbing against my ears. I turned my head about as quickly as they rotate the big scope out in Copernicus, and saw a bare foot. At first I thought it was my foot, but I knew from reports flown in by carrier pigeon that my own feet were about three kilometers behind me, at the ends of my legs, which were stretched out straight. I turned my head the other way, saw another foot. Hers, I concluded. The first was probably hers, too.

"But that damn steel case. Crimony! I can't tell you what a-you should pardon the expression-headache that thing can be. Especially when nine out of ten directors will insist the head shot has to be in slomo. You give the chump a false forehead full of maxfactor #3 to guarantee a juicy wound, you annodize the braincase in black so-you hope-it'll look like a hole in the head when the skin's ripped away, and what happens? The damn bullet rips through everything, and there it is in the dailies. A bright, shiny spot of metal right down there at the bottom of the hole. The director chews you out, and it's Re-take City."

Was I aboard a ship? That might account for the rocking motion. But I remembered I was in the Blind Pig, and unless the bar had been cut from its steel catacomb and embarked bodily, it seemed unlikely we were at sea. I decided I still needed more data. Feeling adventurous, I looked down between myself and the woman's body.

For a moment the view made no sense at all. I could see my own legs, and my feet, as if through a reversed telescope. Then I couldn't see them any more. Then I could again. Where were her legs? I couldn't see them. Oh, yes, since her feet were tickling my ears, her legs must be those things against my chest. So she was on the floor, on her back. And that explained the other activity I saw. I stopped my up and down motion.

"I don't want to do this," I told her.

She kept talking about the difficulties of a head shot. I realized that she was at least as detached from our coupling as I was. I stood up and looked around the room. She never missed a syllable. There were a pair of pants on the floor; they were a million sizes too small for me, but they were probably mine. I held them, lifted each leg with gargantuan deliberation, and presto! The pants did fit. I stumbled through a curtain and into the main room of the Pig.

It was maybe twenty steps to the bar. In that distance I shrank alarmingly. It was not an unpleasant sensation, though at one point I had to hold the back of a barstool to keep my balance. Pleased with myself, I gingerly climbed onto a leather stool.

"Bartender," I said, "I'll have another of the same."

The fellow behind the bar was known as Deep Throat, for a famous clandestine news source. He probably had another name, but no one knew it, and we all thought it was fitting it should be that way. He nodded and was moving away, but someone sat on the stool next to mine and reached over to grab his arm.