before Erich had danced on the bomb, he'd been heckling Bruce
from the crowd. Still, there would have been time between heckles for
him to step quietly back from us, Introvert the Maintainer and ... well,
that was nine-tenths of the problem.

If I was the guilty party, I was nuts and that was the best explanation
of all. Gr-r-r!

Bruce's motives seemed so obvious, especially the mortal (or was it
immortal?) danger he'd put himself in by inciting mutiny, that it seemed
a shame he'd been in full view on the bar so long. Surely, if the
Maintainer had been Introverted before he jumped on the bar, we'd all
have noticed the flashing blue telltale. For that matter, I'd have
noticed it when I looked back at the Ghostgirls--if it worked as Sid
claimed, and he said he had never seen it in operation, just read in the
manual--oh, 'sdeath!

* * * * *

But Bruce didn't need opportunity, as I'm sure all the males in
the Place would have told me right off, because he had Lili to
pull the job for him and she had as much opportunity as any of
the rest of us. Myself, I have large reservations to this
woman-putty-in-the-hands-of-the-man-she-loves-madly theory, but I had to
admit there was something to be said for it in this case, and it had
seemed quite natural to me when the rest of us had decided, by unspoken
agreement, that neither Lili's nor Bruce's checks counted when we were
hunting for the Maintainer.

That took care of all of us and left only the mysterious stranger,
intruding somehow through a Door (how'd he get it without using our
Maintainer?) or from an unimaginable hiding place or straight out of the
Void itself. I know that last is impossible--nothing can step out of
nothing--but if anything ever looked like it was specially built for
something not at all nice to come looming out of, it's the Void--misty,
foggily churning, slimy gray....

"Wait a second," I told myself, "and hang onto this, Greta. It should
have smacked you in the face at the start."

Whatever came out of the Void, or, more to the point, whoever slipped
back from our crowd to the Maintainer, Bruce would have seen them. He
was looking at the Maintainer past our heads the whole time, and
whatever happened to it, he saw it.

Erich wouldn't have, even after he was on the bomb, because he'd been
stagewise enough to face Bruce most of the time to build up his role as
tribune of the people.

But Bruce would have--unless he