uty", as he called it, when he spotted this woman's
observatory and decided to hang around anonymously and watch over her
for a few days and maybe help protect her from some dangerous characters
that he knew were in the neighborhood.

"Pop, that sounds like a lousy idea to me," I objected. "Risky, I mean.
Spying on another person, watching them without their knowing, would be
the surest way to stir up in me the idea of murdering them. Safest thing
for me to do in that situation would be to turn around and run."

"_You_ probably should," he agreed. "For now, anyway. It's all a matter
of knowing your own strength and stage of growth. Me, it helps to give
myself these little jobs. And the essence of 'em is that the other
person shouldn't know I'm helping."

It sounded like knighthood and pilgrimage and the Boy Scouts all over
again--for murderers. Well, why not?

Pop had seen this woman come out of the manhole a couple of times and
look around and then go back down and he'd got the impression she was
sick and troubled. He'd even guessed she might be coming down with
Alamos fever. He'd seen us arrive, of course, and that had bothered him.
Then when the plane landed she'd come up again, acting out of her head,
but when she'd seen the Pilot and us going for him she'd given that
scream and collapsed at the top of the shaft. He'd figured the only
thing he could do for her was keep us occupied. Besides, now that he
knew for sure we were murderers he'd started to burn with the desire to
talk to us and maybe help us quit killing if we seemed to want to. It
was only much later, in the middle of our trip, that he began to suspect
that the steel cubes were jet hypodermics.

While Pop had been telling us all this, we hadn't been watching the
woman so closely. Now Alice called our attention to her. Her skin was
covered with fine beads of perspiration, like diamonds.

"That's a good sign," Pop said and Alice started to wipe her off. While
she was doing that the woman came to in a groggy sort of way and Pop fed
her some thin soup and in the middle of his doing it she dropped off to
sleep.

Alice said, "Any other time I would be wild to kill another woman that
beautiful. But she has been so close to death that I would feel I was
robbing another murderer. I suppose there is more behind the change in
my feelings than that, though."

"Yeah, a little, I suppose," Pop said.

I didn't have anything to say about my own feelings. Certai