She thought about Hiko Ohashi: a strange man. He was fifty and didn't look a day over thirty. He had grown children. His wife had died of cholera eight years ago. Francine wondered what it would be like married to an Oriental, and she found herself thinking that he wasn't really Oriental with his Princeton education and Occidental ways. Then she realized that this attitude was a kind of white snobbery. The door in the corner of the room opened softly. Ohashi came in, closed the door. "You awake?" he whispered. She turned her head without lifting it from the chairback. "Yes." "I'd hoped you might fall asleep for a bit," he said. "You looked so tired when I left." Francine glanced at her wristwatch. "It's only three-thirty. What's the day like?" "Hot and windy." Ohashi busied himself inserting film into the projector at the rear of the room. Presently, he went to his chair, trailing the remote control cable for the projector. "Ready?" he asked. Francine reached for the low editing light beside her chair, and turned it on, focusing the narrow beam on a notebook in her lap. "Yes. Go ahead." "I feel that we're making real progress," said Ohashi. "It's not clear yet, but the points of identity...." "They're exciting," she said. "Let's see what this one has to offer." Ohashi punched the button on the cable. A heavily robed Arab girl appeared on the screen, slapping a tambourine. Her hair looked stiff, black and oily. A sooty line of kohl shaded each eye. Her brown dress swayed slightly as she tinkled the tambourine, then slapped it. The cultured voice of the commentator came through the speaker beside the screen: "This is a young girl of Jebel Tobeyk. She is going to dance some very ancient steps that tell a story of battle. The camera is hidden in a truck, and she is unaware that this dance is being photographed." A reed flute joined the tambourine, and a twanging stringed instrument came in behind it. The girl turned slowly on one foot, the other raised with knee bent. Francine watched in rapt silence. The dancing girl made short staccato hops, the tambourine jerking in front of her. "It is reminiscent of some of the material on the Norse sagas," said Ohashi. "Battle with swords. Note the thrust and parry." She nodded. "Yes." The dance stamped onward, then: "Wait! Re-run that last section." Ohashi obeyed. * * * * * It started with a symbolic trek on camel-back: swaying, undulating. The dancing girl expressed longing for her warrior. _How suggestive the motions of her hands along her hips_, thought Francine. With a feeling of abrupt shock, she recalled seeing almost the exact gesture from one of the films of the Galactics. "There's one!" she cried. "The hands on the hips," said Ohashi. "I was just about to stop the reel." He shut off the film, searched through the notebooks around him until he found the correct reference. "I think it was one of Zak's films," said Francine.