“Don’t feel like that, Jerry. Reich’s fighting for his life. You can’t expect him to be too careful.”

“Well, I’m fighting, too, and that bastard’s made up my mind for me. Get ready, Powell. I’m opening up. I’m going to give you everything.”

After he finished with Church and returned from Headquarters and the Tate nightmare, Powell was grateful for the sight of the blonde urchin in his home. Barbara D’Courtney had a black crayon in her right hand and a red crayon in her left. She was energetically scribbling on the walls, her tongue between her teeth and her dark eyes squinted in concentration.

“Baba!” he exclaimed in a shocked voice. “What are you doing?”

“Drawrin pitchith,” she lisped. “Nicth pitchith for Dada.”

“Thank you, sweetheart,” he said. “That’s a lovely thought. Now come and sit with Dada.”

“No,” she said, and continued scribbling.

“Are you my girl?”

“Yeth.”

“Doesn’t my girl always do what Dada asks?”

She thought that one over. “Yeth,” she said. She deposited the crayons in her pocket, her bottom on the couch alongside Powell, and her grubby paws in his hands.

“Really, Barbara,” Powell murmured. “That lisping is beginning to worry me. I wonder if your teeth need braces?”

The thought was only half a joke. It was difficult to remember that this was a woman seated alongside him. He looked into the deep dark eyes shining with the empty brilliance of a crystal glass awaiting its fulfilling measure of wine.

Slowly he probed through the vacant conscious levels of her mind to the turbulent preconscious, heavily hung with obscuring clouds like a vast dark nebula in the heavens. Behind the clouds was the faint flicker of light, isolated and childlike, that he had grown to like. But now, as he threaded his way down, that flicker of light was the faint spicule of a star that burned with the hot roar of a nova.

Hello, Barbara. You seem to—

He was answered with a burst of passion that made him backtrack fast.

“Hey, Mary!” he called. “Come quick!”

Mary Noyes popped out of the kitchen. “You in trouble again?”

“Not yet. Soon maybe. Our patient’s on the mend.”

“I haven’t noticed any difference.”

“Come on inside with me. She’s made contact with her Id. Down on the lowest level. Almost had my brains burned out.”

“What do you want? A chaperone? Someone to protect the secrets of her sweet girlish passions?”

“Are you comic? I’m the one who needs protection. Come and hold my hand.”

“You’ve got both of yours in hers.”

“Just a figure of speech.” Powell glanced uneasily at the calm doll face before him and the cool relaxed hands in his. “Let’s go.”

He went down the black passages again toward the deep-seated furnace that was within the girl… that is within every man… the timeless reservoir of psychic energy, reasonless, remorseless, seething with the never-ending search for satisfaction. He could sense Mary Noyes mentally tiptoeing behind him. He stopped at a safe distance.