'My GOD.' There seemed to be a literal razor forming out of the air before her, a glint of sunlight on cold steel. She cowered, and crossed her arms defensively in front of her. 'Oh, no, not yet,' said the Stranger, as if he understood it all. He seized her by one foreshortened arm, and led her toward the next exhibit. After an interminable length of time he stopped again, and pointed. 'Seventh Avenue.' * Kalus remained, still as stone, but no longer in confusion and despair. He stood rooted to the spot in horror. The two shadows had met and become one, a broadsword of Death upon the wounded earth. The sun was now directly south of the monolith. Yet it was not the Shadow, but a patch of wicked, unexpected Light that showed him in a searing instant the real danger into which his woman had fallen, and the true Evil that walked upon the earth. A square-cut hole high in the center of the monolith, hidden earlier by its vague, uncontoured grayness, now let through a shaft of light, which came to rest in impossible coincidence upon a single carving of the dwarfish Obelisk: the face of a horned Devil, its lolling tongue six inches long, was held in the internal pentagon of a ghoulish star, pointing downward. Carved perhaps by some mutant from the days when half-men, like lepers, still clung to the fire-pillaged rock, it looked down upon the slab of altar at its feet, just large enough for a child, just deep enough to contain its flowing blood. As remorseless and aroused, the Beast smiled in the helpless light of day. 'Sylviana!' he cried aloud, knowing now that only he could save her. No answer. He stood up and called again, one last act of desperation. Nothing. He went down on one knee, and patted the ground with his open hand. He needed no more prodding. The time had come to act. 'Alaska,' he whispered intently. 'Sylviana. SYLVIANA.' This time the cub seemed to understand, and apparently had some insight as to where they might be found, for she set out at once. Or at least some idea where they might begin to look. If it was not already too late. * 'Stop it! Stop it!' she cried, covering her face with her hands. She had gone with him, and listened as he spoke of junkies, toxic waste, victims and violence and hospitals. From place to place, in growing horror, thinking with one last gasp of real courage that perhaps she deserved this, and needed to know. But when he brought her at last to the ruins of an enormous research facility, and began to describe, in detail, the torturous experiments performed here on bound, terrified animals in the name of progress and the greater good, she felt the tip of the blade licking at her heart.