Angelmass

In the silence of the car, she could hear the faint sounds of scratching and one or two tiny and very indignant squeaks. It's a normal chop and hop, she told herself firmly. It's not going to go boff on us and fall apart. It's not. Taking a deep breath, she set herself into her role.

Not surprisingly, Forsythe's office complex was considerably more lively than it had been the previous night. Ronyon was nowhere in sight, but the two guards were still on duty across the room.

Two different guards, that is; there must have been a shift change sometime in the past few hours.

That was good—the last thing they wanted right now was for someone to recognize her. Pulling open the door, Chandris held it as Hanan marched through, once again every bit the serious, overbearing, and rather obnoxious Dr. Gridley Fowler.

There was a receptionist seated at the desk just inside the door, working her way through a neat stack of mail. Hanan stepped to the desk and planted himself squarely in front of it. "I'm Dr. Fowler," he a

The receptionist blinked. "Mr. Cimtrask isn't here," she said, sounding perplexed. "He understood that he was to meet you in Supervisor Dahmad's office."

"In Supervisor—?" Hanan sputtered under his breath. "That ni

Cimtrask and Supervisor Dahmad were both supposed to meet me here. Get them back."

The receptionist's face set into hard lines. "Sir—"

Chandris didn't wait to hear the rest of the argument, which she was pretty sure Hanan would win anyway. Slipping around behind him, she crossed to a temporarily vacant desk and surreptitiously slid an envelope of her own from her sleeve onto it. She glanced at the nameplate—the man's name was Bulunga—and passed it by, heading for an older man scowling at his computer a few desks away. His nameplate, she saw, identified him as a Mr. Samak, Agricultural Affairs. "Excuse me?" she said hesitantly.

He looked up from his work with clear a

"I've got a letter for you, Mr. Samak," she said, producing another envelope from the side pocket of her overcoat and handing it to him.

He shifted his scowl to the envelope. "There's no return address," he said. "No official markings.

Where did it come from?"

Chandris spread her hands. "Don't look at me," she protested. "I'm just a page temp—I don't know anything. I didn't even know where to deliver it until he told me."

"He gave you my name?"

"How else would I have known?" Chandris countered patiently. "There's no address on it, either. He just pointed me to the door, gave me your name, and told me to deliver it."

"So it was someone already in the building?" Samak asked, peering suspiciously at the envelope. A

man without much humor, Chandris decided, who had likely been on the receiving end of other practical jokes through the years. Her instincts had played her right; she'd picked the perfect target.

"What did he look like?"

"Oh, gee, I don't know," Chandris said, shifting around far enough to glance behind her. Mr.

Bulunga was back at his desk now, a slight frown on his face as he opened the envelope she'd left for him. "He had short dark hair, dark eyes, and a sort of round face," she continued, describing Bulunga as accurately as she could without being too obvious about it. "He had on a dark-blue cutback jacket with a gray scarf. Some kind of red pattern on the scarf, I think, but I don't remember what it was."

"Hmm," Samak rumbled, slitting open the envelope with a paper knife. "Very well. You may go."

"Yes, sir," Chandris said humbly, backing away. Picking up a stack of papers from another unoccupied desk as she passed it, she continued to move away, pretending to study the papers as she waited for the fireworks to begin.

It didn't take long. Samak's scowl grew deeper as he read through the letter Hanan had crafted, and his face was starting to turn an ominous shade of red. Four desks away, Bulunga was undergoing a similar transformation, only in his case it was from harried distraction to open-mouthed astonishment as his contracting grip made crumpled finger marks on the edges of his letter.

Samak fired the first shot. His darting eyes fixed on Bulunga; and then he was out of his chair, striding over to the other's desk. "Did you send me this?" he demanded, shoving the letter under Bulunga's nose.

To Chandris, Bulunga had the look of someone who was normally fairly easygoing. At the moment, with his own letter half crumpled in front of him, he wasn't in an easygoing mood. "Get that out of my face," he growled, glaring up at the other. "What in hell are you talking about?"

"Gray scarf with a red pattern," Samak said accusingly, hooking a finger under the edge of Bulunga's scarf and flipping it out of his jacket. "It was you, all right."

"I don't know what in stux you're talking about," Bulunga snapped, snatching his scarf back out of Samak's hand and standing up so abruptly that the movement sent his chair rolling back to crash into the desk behind him. "But while we're on the subject of letters, what is this?" he snarled, waving his paper at Samak.

"What in the name of holiness is going on?" a man in a neat gray suit muttered from a nearby desk.

Chandris glanced at his nameplate: Wojohowitz. "I was afraid this would happen," she said to him, letting her voice tremble a little. "That man—Mr. Samak—is an escaped lunatic."

"Samak?" Wojohowitz gasped disbelievingly. "But he's worked here for—well, nearly five years."

"That's his pattern," Chandris said, raising her voice just enough for Wojohowitz to hear her over the rising volume of the argument. Samak and Bulunga were close to blows now, from the looks of them, and the whole office had stopped dead in its tracks as they watched the show in stu

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Wojohowitz glance toward the two guards. "Somebody ought to do something," he said. "Why doesn't somebody do something?"

"We're waiting for the proper authorities," Chandris told him. Across the room, she could see Hanan whispering conspiratorily to another of the belligerents' shocked officemates. Weaving a similar story; only in his version, it would be Bulunga, not Samak, who was the escaped madman. Hanan glanced up, caught her eye—"Unless," Chandris added. "—yes. You go talk to them."

"Me?" Wojohowitz looked like she had just suggested he go swimming with crocodiles. "You must be joking."

"I'm a psychiatrist, Mr. Wojohowitz," she reminded him severely. "I never joke. You're one of his colleagues, one of the few people he trusts and looks up to. You're someone he'll listen to."

"No, no," Wojohowitz protested. "Not me. I mean, he hardly ever even talks to me."

"Don't argue," Chandris said sternly. "I know this man; and whether you realize it or not, he respects you. Go on—talk to him. He'll yell at you—he yells at everyone when he's like this. But trust me, he'll be listening."

"But—"

"Either you go—right now—or we have to wait for the authorities," Chandris told him. "He won't listen to them like he would to you, and they'll probably have to use physical force or even gas to subdue him. You want that to happen just because you're not willing to be a hero?"