“Wait there, I want to make a copy of this,” he said when he came to the end. Billy nodded, happy to wait as long as possible in the air-cooled, richly decorated hall. “Shirl, where the hell is the pad?” O’Brien shouted.

There was a mumbled answer from the door on the left and O’Brien opened it and went into the room. Billy’s eyes automatically followed him through the lit doorway to the white-sheeted bed and the woman lying there.

She lay with her back turned, unclothed, red hair sweeping across the pillow, her skin a whitish pink with a scattering of brown freckles across the shoulders. Billy Chung stood unmoving, his breath choked in his throat; she wasn’t ten feet away. She crossed one leg over the other, accentuating the round swell of buttock. O’Brien was talking to her but the words came through as meaningless sounds. Then she rolled over toward the open door and saw him.

There was nothing he could do, he could not move and he could not turn his eyes away. She saw him looking at her.

The girl on the bed smiled at him, then reached out a slender arm to the door, her breasts rose full and round, pink tipped — the door swung shut and she was gone.

When O’Brien opened the door and came out a minute later she was no longer on the bed.

“Any answer?” Billy asked as he took back the message board. Did his voice sound as strange to this man as it did to him?

“No, no answer,” O’Brien said as he opened the hall door. Time seemed to be moving slowly now for Billy, he clearly saw the door as it opened, the shining tongue of the lock, the flat piece of metal on the wall with the hanging wires. Why were these important?