neous. It didn't seem to be a different kind of
people he was meeting exactly: it was the same kind of people
approached differently. He didn't know exactly how it was done, and he
let the other two take the lead.

Perhaps he had drunk too much, he thought as he rode the hotel
elevator. For in retrospect, the evening was a haze of pleasure that
was hard to pin his attention to. Everything he had said, everything
that had happened seemed profoundly right, an atmosphere which he had
encountered rarely before and only then in the last stage of
drunkenness. But he was sober. He had had only a few drinks, and his
perceptions seemed sharpened rather than blurred. Yet, where there
should have been critical thoughts and regrets for errors and restless
plans in his mind, there was only a pleasant empty buzz.

"Too much talk," he thought, yawning as he walked down the luxurious
hotel corridor to his room.

* * * * *

It was that night that he first noticed something wrong with the
mirror.

He glanced into it casually while undressing, then not so casually,
walking up to it and inspecting his face. A slight, unpleasant tingle
coursed along his nerves.

A stranger--When he tried to focus on what was wrong he could find
nothing that looked any different, yet the total effect was completely
wrong. He decided that it must be the mirror, some subtle distortion
of the reflection. The old one must have been broken in cleaning and a
new one put in.

The chill passed and still the good blank feeling lasted. He went to
bed reviewing the evening and smiling, and went to sleep without
resorting to the mental arithmetic that he generally used to clear his
mind of dissatisfactions.

The next morning the mirror still looked peculiar. There seemed to be
nothing wrong with the reflected image of the room, but when he gave
himself the usual inspection before stepping out into the corridor the
feeling of strangeness returned and his eyes felt as if they were
blurring.

He put his hand up to his eyes instinctively and felt a distinct shock
when the mirrored image did the same.

Odd.

A slender smiling young man joined him in the lobby, rising and
falling into step with him as he passed, going through doors before
him with the inconspicuous alertness and precaution. He did his duties
as a bodyguard well, Bryce noted, but that was only to be expected.
Efficiency is, and should be, unnoticeable.

One thin