The screen went blank for a long moment. But the time elapsing didn't cost much. Prerecorded one-way calls were cheap. Emily's call had been compressed into a high-speed burst and sent from machine to machine overnight, at midnight rates.

Emily reappeared on the screen, this time in her bedroom.

She now wore a pink-and-white satin night-robe and her hair had been brushed out. She sat cross-legged in her wooden four-poster bed, a Victorian antique. Emily had refinished her ancient, creaking bed with modern hard-setting shellac. This transparent film was so mercilessly tough and rigid that it clamped the whole structure together like cast iron.

She had attached the phone camera to one. of the bedposts.

Business was over now. This was personal. The video eti- quette had changed along with Emily's expression. She had a hangdog look. A new camera angle, looking down into the bed from a somewhat superior angle, helped convey the mood. She looked pitiful.

Laura sighed, pausing the playback. She shifted Loretta in her lap and nuzzled her absently. She was used to hearing

Emily's problems, but it was hard to take before lunch.

Especially today. Weirdness beginning to mount. She lifted her finger again.

"Well, I'm back," Emily intoned. "I suppose you can guess what it is. It's Arthur again. We had another fight. A

brutal one. It started as one of those trivial things, about nothing really. Oh, about sex I guess, or at least that's what he said, but it came out of the blue for me. I thought he was being a bastard for no reason. He started sniping at me, using

That Tone of Voice, you know. And once he gets that way he's impossible.

"He started shouting, I started yelling, and things just went straight to hell. He almost hit me. He clenched his fist and everything." Emily paused dramatically. "I ran back in here and locked the door in his face. And he didn't say a damned thing. He just left me in here. When I came out he was gone.