ll
Inversion to get at the bomb inside to disarm it. Doc too had got the
idea from Lili's trick with the glove. What an inside-out tactical
atomic bomb would look like, I could not imagine and did not
particularly care to see. I might have to, though, I realized.

But the fast-motion film was still running in my head. Later on, Lili
had decided like I had that her lover was going to lose out in his plea
for mutiny unless she could give him a really captive audience--and
maybe, even then, she had been figuring on creating the nest for Bruce's
chicks and ... all those other things we'd believed in for a while. So
she'd taken the Major Maintainer and remembered the glove, and not many
seconds later, she had set down on a shelf of the Art Gallery an object
that no one would think of questioning--except someone who knew the
Gallery by heart.

* * * * *

I looked at the abstract sculpture a foot from my nose, at the clustered
gray spheres the size of golf balls. I had known that the inside of the
Maintainer was made up of vastly tough, vastly hard giant molecules, but
I hadn't realized they were quite _that_ big.

I said to myself, "Greta, this is going to give you a major psychosis,
but you're the one who has to do it, because no one is going to listen
to your deductions when they're all practically living on negative time
already."

I got up as quietly as if I were getting out of a bed I shouldn't have
been in--there are some things Entertainers are good at--and Kaby was
just saying "you go mad in about fifty heartbeats." Everybody on their
feet was looking at Lili. Sid seemed to have moved, but I had no time
for him except to hope he hadn't done anything that might attract
attention to me.

I stepped out of my shoes and walked rapidly to Surgery--there's one
good thing about this hardest floor anywhere, it doesn't creak. I walked
through the Surgery screen that is like a wall of opaque, odorless
cigarette smoke and I concentrated on remembering my snafued nurse's
training, and before I had time to panic, I had the sculpture positioned
on the gleaming table of the Invertor.

I froze for a moment when I reached for the Inversion switch, thinking
of the other time and trying to remember what it had been that bothered
me so much about an inside-out brain being bigger and not having eyes,
but then I either thumbed my nose at my nightmare or kissed my sanity
good-by, I don't know which, an