ar.

One thing these suggestions had steered very clear of was naming any one
of us as a suspect, whether acting as Snake spy, Spider political
police, agent of--who knows, after Bruce?--a secret Change World
Committee of Public Safety or Spider revolutionary underground, or
strictly on our own. Just as no one had piped a word, since the
Maintainer had been palmed, about the split between Erich's and Bruce's
factions.

Good group thinking probably, to sink differences in the emergency, but
that didn't apply to what I did with my own thoughts.

* * * * *

Who wanted to escape so bad they'd Introvert the Place, cutting off all
possible contact and communication either way with the cosmos and
running the very big risk of not getting back to the cosmos at all?

Leaving out what had happened since Bruce had arrived and stirred things
up, Doc seemed to me to have the strongest motive. He knew that Sid
couldn't keep covering up for him forever and that Spider punishments
for derelictions of duty are not just the clink of a firing squad, as
Erich had reminded us. But Doc had been flat on the floor in front of
the bar from the time Bruce had jumped on top of it, though I certainly
hadn't had my eye on him every second.

Beau? Beau had said he was bored with the Place at a time when what he
said counted, so he'd hardly lock himself in it maybe forever, not to
mention locking Bruce in with himself and the babe he had a yen for.

Sid loves reality, Changing or not, and every least thing in it, people
especially, more than any man or woman I've ever known--he's like a
big-eyed baby who wants to grab every object and put it in his
mouth--and it was hard to imagine him ever cutting himself off from the
cosmos.

Maud, Kaby, Mark and the two ETs? None of them had any motive I knew of,
though Sevensee's being from the very far future did tie in with that
idea about the Late Cosmicians, and there did seem to be something
developing between the Cretan and the Roman that could make them want to
be Introverted together.

"Stick to the facts, Greta," I reminded myself with a private groan.

That left Erich, Bruce, Lili and myself.

Erich, I thought--now we're getting somewhere. The little commandant has
the nervous system of a coyote and the courage of a crazy tomcat, and if
he thought it would help him settle his battle with Bruce better to be
locked in with him, he'd do it in a second.

But even