Kierk wakes up gasping, vexed to wake by nightmare. Something had been trying to get at his face, at his eyes, and he’s trying to shove it off but already it’s dispersing into amnesiac dream vapor. Blinking and sweating, he realizes that he must have left the air-conditioning off as the entire room is sweltering hot and stuffy. Running cold water he takes a shower, but keeps going back to the knocking late last night, and has to remind himself that he did not dream it. It was too surreal to be real, too strange. Yet not a dream. Going over it in his mind he acknowledges some possibility that it had been someone from SAAR, or maybe even a Crick Scholar, even just a random stranger trying to break in. The other possibilities were too fantastical even to consider, and he kept aborting those halfway through. And finally the equally dark thought: that this is not a problem with the world, but the observer of it. Both now and perhaps earlier, that first night at the break-in. After all, auditory hallucinations are the most common, and a knock on the door is syntactically and semantically simple enough to be such an early mirage, the preface of something more dire.

Out on the streets he’s still playing around with these notions but soon the reality of the hot complex world sandblasts them all away, almost like he really had dreamed the knock, and there were daylight explanations for everything; his worries were dissolving in sun. Outside the CNS he stops to squint at the bloodred spray paint near the front door: DOUBLE TROUBLE LIVES. TORTURE FOR TORTURERS. He watches the snub-nosed toy of a plane drawn steady across a perfect blue far above

. . .

During a brief meeting last Thursday Max Pierce had been skeptical that Kierk had done animal research previously, despite Kierk’s insistences. In response Max had asked Kierk to perform two surgeries, one implantation and one decapitation. It was an obvious challenge and Kierk, pissed off, had claimed he wouldn’t need supervision, and is now regretting it.

There’s a knock on the lab door, and Carmen peeps in at the scene: a stainless steel expanse, the thin alien elegance of surgical equipment, reflective pans, maneuverable lights, tubing and optrode-preparation kit, and Kierk, looking very serious in his white lab coat, sitting in the middle of it all. He glances up from the mouse he just anesthetized, which is shifting about on the metal tray it lies splayed on, its little feet flexing as if dreaming.

“Came in right at the worst part,” he says.

Her hands in the deep pockets of her lab coat make her look like a child in a too-big suit. “I assume this involves some kind of pissing contest between you and Max?” Seeing Kierk’s surprise, she says—“It was inevitable. Want some help?”

“Pull up a chair then.”