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for some bizarre nervous system. Then, with a squeal and a rattle, the flow of water ceased. From outside, six stories below, came the angry sound of a car horn blasting several times in rapid succession.
    “The Senate recesses for three weeks after next Thursday,” Andrews said. He felt the mattress shift as Pat stirred beside him. “Why don’t we go to the cabin for that last week?”
    Andrews and Pat had spent time at the cabin before. It was a small, modern and very secluded structure in the mountains of Colorado. Shortly after meeting Pat, Andrews had bought the cabin through a straw party and had it refurbished. It was equipped with a furnace and air conditioner, kitchen facilities and a telephone that had never once rung. Everything he and Pat needed was there.
    “I’ll let you know if I can get away from work,” Pat said. She was an editor for a national financial magazine headquartered in Boulder, Colorado. “You know I’ll try.”
    “I could use a week of quiet and sanity.”
    “I’d settle for just one of the two,” Pat remarked drowsily.
    Andrews raised his upper body, supporting himself on the mattress with his elbows. “Dammit,” he muttered.
    Pat rearranged her hair and turned to look at him. “What’s the matter?”
    He said, “I just remembered something I forgot to do.”
     
    Dr. Dana Larsen sat in his office in his West Fifty-seventh Street Manhattan condominium and gave the rough schedule on his desk a last quick check. It was here in New York that Martin Karpp had through his six identities pursued what were in effect six different lives. Each of these identities had been shallowly explored for sensationalism by the news media immediately following Karpp’s confinement. And defense psychiatrists had delved into the lives of these identities only deeply enough to establish legally that they did indeed exist, each in the body of Martin Karpp. But Larsen would be the first to study thoroughly and scientifically the splintered pasts of Karpp’s five other personalities.
    He was excited by the prospect. Court transcripts had provided him with several leads, as had his conversations with Karpp. It wouldn’t be difficult to contact people who had known the various Karpps by their pseudonyms, not suspecting that their acquaintance was at times different people entirely in every way but physical. How these lives interrelated was what interested Larsen.
    The cloying uneasiness that had gripped him in Carltonville had all but disappeared. There was much still unexplainable about what had happened there, but it was the more immediate and important unexplainable that now compelled Larsen. He regretted his visit with Jerry Andrews. But at least he could depend on Jerry not ever to remind him or anyone else of those unreasonable and inexact fears. Jerry Andrews always had recognized and respected the various needs and apprehensions in people, which was why he was such a successful politician.
    Though it was well past midnight, lighted windows still sequined the night beyond the sliding glass doors opening onto Larsen’s small balcony. Larsen got up from his desk and stretched elaborately, then walked out onto the balcony and breathed in the cold night air. A dozen stories below, a few pedestrians scurried like nocturnal insects on the sidewalk, and a tiny, foreshortened cab veered to the building’s entrance to deliver a passenger. Larsen wasn’t tired and knew he wouldn’t be able to relax fully until he’d completed the second phase of his research on Karpp.
    Though he’d already begun that phase, it occurred to him that some of the places he needed to visit, some of the people he needed to talk with, would be most accessible in the late night hours. Why not continue his investigation now—tonight?
    The idea gained appeal for Larsen. It would be more interesting than a glass of milk and a few hours of scrap-time TV, and undoubtedly more productive. So enthusiastic was he that he didn’t