s 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.

And this was what he loved. Anders saw too clearly and hated himself for
seeing. Through his new nightmare perception, the absurdity of the
entire room struck him.

"Were you really?" the articulating skeleton asked him.

"You're coming closer," the voice whispered.

To what? The personality? There was no such thing. There was no true
cohesion, no depth, nothing except a web of surface reactions, stretched
across automatic visceral movements.

He was coming closer to the truth.

"Sure," he said