her! Daring to pre-empt a moment that belonged solely to him! He would enter the hut if it killed him. If he had to, he would tear down its walls and banish its memory forever from the country of his mind.

With the aid of his pocket torch, he found her footprints in the dust. He followed them down the street, the three Erinyes tagging doggedly along behind him. The trail, erratic no longer, led straight to the labyrinthine alleys of the native sector and thence along the shortest route to Eldoria's hut. For a person who had never been to Dubhe 4, Sabrina York certainly knew her way around.

Maybe, though, she had been to Dubhe 4. He knew very little about her. He knew nothing at all, in fact, save that she had murdered her father. He did not even know how she had murdered him, or why. Abruptly Blake shoved the matter from his mind. It wasn't his business to know how or why she had done the deed. It was his business to find and apprehend her.

Presently, in the darkness before him, he made out a motionless white-robed figure. He approached it warily, found to his consternation that it was frozen in the act of taking a step forward. He shone his light into the face. It was dark bronze in hue. The eyes were wide apart, and the teeth showed in a vivid white line between half-parted purple lips. Eldoria, on her way to keep her tryst with him....

But why didn't she move on? Suddenly Blake knew. In treating a patient, Trevorite psychologists sometimes froze certain place-times in his past in order to study them in greater detail. The girl in Blake's mind had either frozen the Dubhe 4 place-time herself, then, or had hired a professional to do the job.

Clearly she had something up her sleeve about which Blake knew nothing.

He went on, not quite so confidently now. He had proceeded less than a dozen steps when he saw the brooch. It was lying in the dust just to the left of one of Sabrina's footprints, and it threw back the light of the torch in glittering shards that hurt his eyes. Disbelievingly, he picked it up. The Erinyes clustered around him to see what he had found. They were still wet and dishelved and reeked of the piercing odor of decayed algae. They looked anything but happy.

Blake turned the brooch over in the palm of his hand. The inscription on the back leaped up and smote him right between the eyes, and he staggered and nearly fell. To Deirdre Eldoria, he read, from Nathan Blake.

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