ll's office.

He saw at once that he was too late.

The CA manager's door was open and O'Donnell and Mulhall of Irradiated
Foods were emerging. Both wore street jackets and both men had the
unmistakable air of euphoric calm that came within seconds of Alcorn's
approach.

O'Donnell gave Alcorn his familiar long-lipped grin, looking, with his
thin gentle face and neat brush of ermine-white hair, like an
aristocratic Irish saint.

"You missed a pleasant meeting," O'Donnell said. "I've just signed a
refund release to Charlie here, and a pleasure it was."

The awareness that they had been calmed before he'd arrived left Alcorn
speechless.

"Really shouldn't have accepted," Mulhall said sheepishly. Mulhall was a
big, solid man, bald and paunchy and, when his normal instincts were
controlled, an argumentative tyrant. "Niggling technicality, I say.
Shouldn't have taken a refund, but Sean here insisted."

They laughed together, like children sharing a joke.

"The claim was justified," O'Donnell said firmly. "Once Charlie's
secretary explained the case, there was no doubt."

Mulhall grinned at Alcorn. "Remarkable girl, Janice Wynn. She's waiting
in Sean's office. Wants to meet you, Philip."

They went toward the lift with their arms about each other, sharing an
all-too-brief moment of companionship.

* * * * *

Alcorn hesitated in front of the closed door of O'Donnell's office.

When he entered, Janice Wynn was standing at the window, watching the
soundless rush of traffic in the street below. She was dark, not pretty
in any conventional sense, but charged with a controlled vitality that
made physical beauty unimportant.

Her face was anything but serene, the complex of emotions in her tilted
green eyes far removed from the ready placidity he had learned to
expect. There was an unmistakable impression of driving urgency--the
same urgency, Alcorn thought, that he had felt in the people of his
waking dream.

"You're one," he said. His face felt stiff. "After all these years, I've
found another one like--"

"Like yourself," she said. "But it's I who have found _you_. Did you
really think you were unique, Philip Alcorn?"

He tried to answer and couldn't. The meeting he had dreamed of all his
life had come about with precisely the electric suddenness he had
imagined, but he felt none of the elation he had anticipated. He felt,
instead, a sudden panic.

For behind Mulhall's secreta