Still smiling, he noticed. The number two smile--to a prospective suitor, provocative and understanding. It had been preceded, in their relationship, by the number one nice-girl smile, the don't-misunderstand-me smile, to be worn on all occasions, until the correct words have been mumbled. "That's right," the voice said. "It's in how you look at things." Look at what? Anders glanced at Judy, annoyed at his thoughts. If he was going to play the lover, let him play it. Even through the astigmatic haze of love, he was able to appreciate her blue-gray eyes, her fine skin (if one overlooked a tiny blemish on the left temple), her lips, slightly reshaped by lipstick. "How did your classes go today?" she asked. Well, of course she'd ask that, Anders thought. Love is marking time. "All right," he said. "Teaching psychology to young apes--" "Oh, come now!" "Warmer," the voice said. What's the matter with me, Anders wondered. She really is a lovely girl. The _gestalt_ that is Judy, a pattern of thoughts, expressions, movements, making up the girl I-- I what? Love? Anders shifted his long body uncertainly on the couch. He didn't quite understand how this train of thought had begun. It annoyed him. The analytical young instructor was better off in the classroom. Couldn't science wait until 9:10 in the morning? "I was thinking about you today," Judy said, and Anders knew that she had sensed the change in his mood. "Do you see?" the voice asked him. "You're getting much better at it." "I don't see anything," Anders thought, but the voice was right. It was as though he had a clear line of inspection into Judy's mind. Her feelings were nakedly apparent to him, as meaningless as his room had been in that flash of undistorted thought. "I really was thinking about you," she repeated. "Now look," the voice said. [Illustration] * * * * * Anders, watching the expressions on Judy's face, felt the strangeness descend on him. He was back in the nightmare perception of that moment in his room. This time it was as though he were watching a machine in a laboratory. The object of this operation was the evocation and preservation of a particular mood. The machine goes through a searching process, invoking trains of ideas to achieve the desired end. "Oh, were you?" he asked, amazed at his new perspective. "Yes ... I wondered what you were doing at noon," the reactive machine opposite him on the couch said, expanding its shapely chest slightly. "Good," the voice said, commending him for his perception. "Dreaming of you, of course," he said to the flesh-clad skeleton behind the total _gestalt_ Judy. The flesh machine rearranged its limbs, widened its mouth to denote pleasure. The mechanism searched through a complex of fears, hopes, worries, through half-remembrances of analogous situations, analogous solutions.