"A lovely house, don't you think, Mr. Corbish?"

"Uh, well…" Corbish looked down the road again at the white cabin.

"Who owns that?" he asked.

"Oh, you're not interested in that. That's barely insulated, only one improperly working bathroom and the owner wants an unreasonable amount for it."

"Hmmm," mused Corbish. He was in his late thirties, a trim gentleman with clipped brown hair, parted as if with the help of a mechanic's rule, a smooth, slightly tanned face hinting of sailing at the Hamptons and skiing at Vail, a neatly tuned body draped in the elegant simplicity of Brooks Brothers gray, and the strong solid roots of the muted black and orange stripes in his not-too-wide tie. A perfect IDC executive, a model IDC executive, a vice president at thirty-seven. Maybe even the next senior vice president of IDC if there were not thirty others at IDC almost exactly like him on various rungs of the corporate ladder in "the corporation to be in" if you were talking about corporations. And no one talked about anything else in the circles of Blake Corbish,

"Let's see the house," said Corbish in that perfect IDC way that committed nothing and demanded everything.

He endured the flossy enthusiasm of the agent, who described the parquet floors of the bedrooms, the solid stone of the massive fireplace, the new weather control that could create anything indoors from Berkshire autumn to Puerto Bican spring, and, of course, the carpeting. From fireplace right out to patio, indoor-outdoor, and it could take anything from mud to a hurricane and come up pure and clean as the day it was installed. Wall to wall, of course.

"Anything else?" asked Corbish, who did not like the telephones in every room.