e same bell that used to tinkle when I came into the stamp store
tinkled in back of the partition when I came in. A moment later the
curtain in the doorway of the partition parted, and a girl came out.

How can I describe her? In appearance she was anyone of a thousand
smartly dressed brunettes that wait on you in quality photograph
studios, and yet she wasn't. She was as much above that in cut as the
average smartly dressed girl is above a female alcoholic after a ten-day
drunk. She was perfect. Too perfect. She was the type of girl a man
would dream of meeting some day, but if he ever did he would run like
hell because he could never hope to live up to such perfection.

"You have come to have your portrait taken?" she asked. "I am Lana."

"I thought you already had my portrait," I said. "Didn't you get it from
that eye in the hotel cafe?"

"It's not the same thing," Lana said. "Through an eye you remain a
variable in the Mantram complex. It takes the camera to fix you, so that
you are an iconic invariant in the Mantram." She smiled and half turned
toward the curtain she had come through. "Would you step this way,
please?" she invited.

"How much will it cost?" I said, not moving.

"Nothing, of course!" Lana said. "Terrestrial money is of no use to me
since you have nothing I would care to buy. And don't be alarmed. No
harm will come to you, or anyone else." A fleeting expression of concern
came over her. "I realize that many of the people of Sumac are quite
alarmed, but that is to be expected of a people uneducated enough to
still be superstitious."

I went past her through the curtain. Behind the partition I expected to
see out-of-this-world scientific equipment stacked to the ceiling.
Instead, there was only a portrait camera on a tripod. It had a long
bellows and would take a plate the same size as that picture of the
church I had seen.

"You see?" Lana said. "It's just a camera." She smiled disarmingly.

* * * * *

I went toward it casually, and suddenly I stopped as though another mind
controlled my actions. When I gave up the idea I had had of smashing the
camera, the control vanished.

There was no lens in the lens frame. "Where's the lens?" I said.

"It doesn't use a glass lens," Lana said. "When I take the picture a
lens forms just long enough to focus the elements of your body into a
Mantram fix." She touched my shoulder. "Would you sit down over there,
please?"