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questioning?—the black-and-white wouldn’t start, they needed a jump; and when we’ve been talking to her in here the lights keep dimming and my hearing aid doesn’t work.”
    Armentrout was frowning thoughtfully. The electromagnetic disturbances indicated one of the dissociative disorders—psychogenic amnesia, fugue states, depersonalization. These were the tastiest maladies he could cure … short of curing somebody of their very life, of course, which was ethically problematic and in any case contributed too heavily to the—
    He shied away from the memory of the morning telephone calls.
    But a thousand dollars! This Hamilton fellow was a greedy pig. This wasn’t really supposed to be about money.
    “I don’t,” Armentrout began—
    But she did go crazy on this morning, he thought. She might very well have been reacting to the same thing, whatever it might be, that saved me from my intolerable wake-up call. These poor suffering psych os are often psych ic , and a dissociative, having distanced herself from the ground state of her core personality, might be able to sense a wider spectrum of magical effects. By examining her I might be able to figure out what the hell has happened. I should call around, in fact, and tell all my sentries to watch especially for a psychosis that was triggered this morning.
    “—see any reason not to pay you a thousand dollars for her,” he finished, nevertheless still frowning at the price. “Can I safely fax you the AWOL report?”
    “Do it in … exactly ten minutes, okay? I can make sure nobody else is near the machine, and then as soon as your fax has cooled off I’ll smudge the date and pretend to find it on yesterday’s spike.”
    Armentrout glanced at his watch and then bent over the police-report form again. “Name and description?”
    “Janis Cordelia Plumtree,” said Hamilton. “She has a valid driver’s license, and I Xeroxed it. Ready? DOB 9/20/67 …”
    Armentrout began neatly filling in the boxes on the escape-report form. This morning a manic teenager on benzodiazepine, and, soon, a dissociative who was strong enough to interfere with both AC and DC … and who might also provide a clue to why Armentrout had been, at least for this morning, freed from the attention of all the resentful ghosts and ghost fragments!
    This was already shaping up to be a fine year, though it was only eleven hours old.
    When he finally hung up the telephone he looked at his watch again. He had five minutes before he should send the fax or expect the bipolar girl to be brought in.
    He got his feet firmly under the chair and stood up with a grunt, then crossed to the long couch that couldn’t be seen through the door window, and lifted off of the cushions a stack of files and a box of plastic Lego bricks. Clearing the field, he thought with some anticipation, for the cultivation of the bipolar girl’s cure. The plowing and seeding of her recovery. And it would be a real cure, as decisive as surgery—not the dreary, needlessly guilt-raising patchwork of psychotherapy. Armentrout saw no value in anyone dredging up old guilts and resentments, ever.
    Finally he unlocked the top drawer of the filing cabinet and rolled it partway out. Inside were only two things, two purple velvet boxes.
    One box contained a battered but polished .45-caliber derringer for which he had paid a hundred thousand dollars a year and a half ago, its two stubby barrels chambered to take .410 shot shells as well as Colt .45 rounds; some spiritualist medium had found the blocky little gun on Ninth Street in downtown Las Vegas in 1948, and there was documentation to suggest that the gun had been used to castrate a powerful French occultist there; and Armentrout knew that a woman had killed herself with it in Delaware in October of 1992, shortly before he had acquired it. Probably it had inflicted injuries on other people at other times. The tiny gun was alleged, with some authority, to be able to shoot