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to the skelter system; they were instant geographical symbols of freedom from the limits of separative space. This condition of depressive nostalgia being so common, he had literally hundreds of patients on supportive therapy because he couldn’t cope individually with them. But Hans had located a drug Karl desperately needed dug out of the scrap-pile of Europe, and from gratitude he had offered to add Dany to his list.
    One of these days Hans was going to
insist.
But not today. Right now he wanted her safely out of the way so that he could adjourn to his darkroom and see how the pictures of the Swedish house had come out.
    ‘Let me look,’ he cajoled, and the sobs switched off like a light and she gave him the card with the hopeful expression of a slum child promised a trip to the wonderland of the country. He selected the image with conscious pride from the stock of data about the near past which he carried in his head. In the old days it had been said that the period of history about which people knew least was the one directly before they were born: too recent to be taught from a book, too vivid still for their elders to offer an objective appraisal. He had resolved not to let that be true in his own case.
    The card bore a short enigmatic verse, akin to a crossword-puzzle clue. That much he had expected. He had not foreseen that – if this did indeed emanate from Chaim Aleuker – it would be so childishly simple.
    He read aloud, without stressing the rhythm, ‘I’ll give to you some exercise and syllogisms from the wise. Madam will you walk, madam will you talk, madam will you walk and talk with me?’
    ‘It’s – it’s sort of like poetry, I think,’ Dany ventured. ‘The library computer says it goes to an old English tune called
The Keys of Canterbury.’
    ‘So I suppose Canterbury was the first place you madefor?’ he countered – more scathingly than he had intended. The last thing he wanted was for her to lose her temper so completely she would abandon all hope of finding her way to the party and stay home for the pleasure of spoiling his own leisure-time.
    She colored, although one would have imagined her too old to blush, and miraculously replied in a mutter instead of a scream.
    ‘You can’t. Not the original one, anyway. They dropped so many bombs on Eastern England. But there’s another Canterbury in New Zealand, so I went there, but there wasn’t anyone to give me the second card, and – ’
    ‘Oh, honestly!’ He handed back the card. ‘Athens! The Lyceum! Aristotle founded a school of philosophy there, and they called it the Peripatetic School – the walking-around school – because of his habit of strolling along while he was lecturing.’
    ‘Are you sure?’ she asked doubtfully.
    ‘Ah … No! I’m not even sure the Lyceum still exists, even as a ruin. But I think it may; Athens was among the few capital cities that didn’t get blasted, wasn’t it? Look, you check out the idea, and if it doesn’t fit come back and see if I’ve thought of an alternative.’
    He had been ready to cap his contribution to her day’s amusement with a kiss, but his embryo gesture went to waste. She snatched the card back and headed for the skelter at a near-run, tossing over her shoulder a word of thanks that was literally cut in half as the transmission effect displaced her.
    Typical!
    But at least she had left him in peace. For that small mercy he made perfunctory obeisance to the nearest life-symbol – here in the hallway they kept a tortoise, because Dany refused to be content with a mere plant in sight of the spot where invited guests gained their first impression of the ‘Dykstra Residence’ – before shutting his light-tight darkroom door.

INTERFACE E
    Father!
    You desired me to do you honor
    As a dutiful and loving son.
    Father!
    I am indeed obliged to you because
    It was you who facilitated my existence.
    Father!
    You must not imagine that I’m disrespectful
    But the best way I can