The CA manager's door was open and O'Donnell and Mulhall of Irradiated Foods were emerging. Both wore street jackets and both men had the unmistakable air of euphoric calm that came within seconds of Alcorn's approach.

O'Donnell gave Alcorn his familiar long-lipped grin, looking, with his thin gentle face and neat brush of ermine-white hair, like an aristocratic Irish saint.

"You missed a pleasant meeting," O'Donnell said. "I've just signed a refund release to Charlie here, and a pleasure it was."

The awareness that they had been calmed before he'd arrived left Alcorn speechless.

"Really shouldn't have accepted," Mulhall said sheepishly. Mulhall was a big, solid man, bald and paunchy and, when his normal instincts were controlled, an argumentative tyrant. "Niggling technicality, I say. Shouldn't have taken a refund, but Sean here insisted."

They laughed together, like children sharing a joke.

"The claim was justified," O'Donnell said firmly. "Once Charlie's secretary explained the case, there was no doubt."

Mulhall grinned at Alcorn. "Remarkable girl, Janice Wynn. She's waiting in Sean's office. Wants to meet you, Philip."

They went toward the lift with their arms about each other, sharing an all-too-brief moment of companionship.

Alcorn hesitated in front of the closed door of O'Donnell's office.

When he entered, Janice Wynn was standing at the window, watching the soundless rush of traffic in the street below. She was dark, not pretty in any conventional sense, but charged with a controlled vitality that made physical beauty unimportant.

Her face was anything but serene, the complex of emotions in her tilted green eyes far removed from the ready placidity he had learned to expect. There was an unmistakable impression of driving urgency—the same urgency, Alcorn thought, that he had felt in the people of his waking dream.

"You're one," he said. His face felt stiff. "After all these years, I've found another one like—"

"Like yourself," she said. "But it's I who have found you. Did you really think you were unique, Philip Alcorn?"

He tried to answer and couldn't. The meeting he had dreamed of 

 Prev. P 7/20 next