Hi, Barbara.

“Get out!”

This is the spook.

Hatred lashed out at him.

You remember me?

The hatred subsided into the turbulence to be replaced by a wave of hot desire.

“Linc, you’d better jet. If you get trapped inside that pleasure-pain chaos, you’re gone.”

“I’d like to locate something.”

“You can’t find anything in there except raw love and raw death.”

“I want her relations with her father. I want to know why he had those guilt sensations about her.”

“Well, I’m getting out.”

The furnace fumed over again. Mary fled.

Powell teetered around the edge of the pit, feeling, exploring, sensing. It was like an electrician gingerly touching the ends of exposed wires to discover which of them did not carry a knock-out charge. A blazing bolt surged near him. He touched it, was stunned, and stepped aside to feel a blanket of instinctual self-preservation choke him. He relaxed, permitted himself to be drawn down into a vortex of associations and began sorting. He struggled to maintain his frame of reference that was crumbling in that chaos of energy.

Here were the somatic messages that fed the cauldron; cell reactions by the incredible billion, organic cries, the muted drone of muscletone, sensory sub-currents, blood-flow, the wavering superheterodyne of blood pH… all whirling and churning in the balancing pattern that formed the girl’s psyche. The never-ending make-and-break of synapses contributed a crackling hail of complex rhythms. Packed in the changing interstices were broken images, half-symbols, partial references… The ionized nuclei of thought.

Powell caught part of Plosive image, followed it to the letter P… to the sensory association of a loss, then by cross circuit to the infant’s sucking reflex at the breast… to an infantile memory of… her mother? No. A wet-nurse. That was encrusted with parental associations… Negation. Minus Mother… Powell dodged an associated flame of infantile rage and resentment, the Orphan’s Syndrome. He picked up P again, searched for a related Pa… Papa… Father.

Abruptly he was face to face with himself.

He stared at the image, teetered on the verge of disintegration, then scrambled back to sanity.

Who the hell are you?

The image smiled beautifully and was gone.

P… Pa… Papa… Father. Heat-of-love-and-devotion-associated-with… He was face to face with his image again. This time it was nude, powerful; its outlines haloed with an aura of love and desire. Its arms outstretched.

Get lost. You embarrass me.

The image disappeared. Damn it! Has she fallen in love with me?

“Hi, spook.”

There was her picture of herself, pathetically caricatured, the blonde hair in strings, the dark eyes like blotches, the lovely figure drawn into flat, ungracious planes… It faded, and abruptly the image of Powell-Powerful-Protective-Paternal rushed at him, torrentially destructive. He stayed with it, grappling. The back of the head was D’Courtney’s face. He followed the Janus image down to a blazing channel of doubles, pairs, linkages and duplicities to — Reich? Imposs — Yes, Ben Reich and the caricature of Barbara, linked side to side like Siamese twins, brother and sister from the waist upward, their legs turning and twisting separately in a sea of complexity below. B linked to B. B & B. Barbara & Ben. Half joined in blood. Half—