In the early evening of November 2^nd, only two of the people who had been at work that day on the 9^th floor of the Buel building were still there. From the doorway of Leah’s office, Andrea could see the shinny black hair on the back of her head above the back of her captain’s chair, as well as her lovely brown face in her T-window.

"How many times are you gonna watch that?" she asked.

"I can’t help it." said Leah, with her eyes fixed on the window in front of her. "It’s been three days. The jury is still out. Where did I fuck up?"

"You didn’t, baby. "If you had, they would have returned a verdict of guilty by now."

"No way, Andrea. It’s a crazy charge and a crazy punishment that only a crazy person would insist on carrying out, regardless of what the polls say. How can a man or woman sit in a locked room with eleven other people for three whole days and argue it isn’t? I mean, poles are one thing, people are afraid of giving the ‘wrong answer’ on anything that looks like a sex test. Who knows how the results are going to be used or who’s gonna check up on the fools who did give the wrong answers. But if they don’t acquit Blue, everybody’s gonna know what they did to him...I must have done somethin’ wrong."

"Nobody could have done better than you did, considering the fact that you couldn’t even say what the trial was really about. Who would have believed it was about power?"

"Big trials like this are always about power. Everybody know that."

"No, Leah," said Andrea approaching the chair, "This one happens to be about who controls the technology that controls us. Who wants to hear that kind of stuff, much less think about it?" She put her hands on Leah’s shoulders and gave her a gentle massage.

With her free elbow on the arm of her chair, Leah rested her head in her hand and sighed heavily, doing a freeze-frame after the first line of the Ink Blot joke. "I’ve found a hundred things I could have done better. My voice sounds thin. I never knew what to do with my hands. I look like a robot up there—a fat robot. And look at the way my ass sticks out. Jesus..."

Andrea listened patiently to Leah’s litany of short-comings. The list was getting longer every day. "You’re not going to let up, are you?"

Leah rubbed her cheek against Andrea’s hand, then kissed it. "I have to know what I did so I can figure out what’s happening with that damn jury. I’ve been over and over the selection process and I can’t see anything wrong there. It’s gotta be something I did after the jury was seated."

"Have you thought of how the actual programs entered into evidence might have affected things?"

"Of course. The "dirty" picture routine at the end was supposed to tap into that, remember? It was your idea. A good one. If any of those people had bad reactions to Blue’s more esoteric stuff, they must have felt the same way about one or two of the ‘ink blots.’"

Andrea moved over to the companion chair and sat down. "I thought I covered everything with Blue, but I might have missed something."

Leah swiveled her chair around to face her friend. She smiled and touched her knee. "You’re as wrung-out as I am, aren’t you sweetheart?"

Andrea patted the hand on her knee. "It’s been a rough couple of months; the trial, the exposure, the fight to hang on to our professions, Arnold’s suicide, Kimberly’s accident."

"Do you honestly think it was an accident?"

"Yeah," said Andrea. "I think Jack Fleetwood accidentally bashed her over the head with something heavy and threw her down a long flight of stairs."

Though they’d never expressed Andrea’s suspicions before, Leah accepted them without question or comment. "Do you really think she’s still in a coma?"

Andrea hunched her shoulders. "You know as much as I do, honey. If she isn’t, Jack Fleetwood is lying to his son as well a everybody else. Glen says that the boy say’s that the cook say’s that somebody at the hospital told her she was sitting up and talking. How many people removed from the source is that? But then Vera, the only one we know who’s seen her every day in the hospital, gets told that nobody can see her now but family. It sounds melodramatic, especially on top of everything else that’s happened lately."

"Doesn’t mean it isn’t true," observed Leah. "We trust Glen. Glen trust’s the boy. The boy trust’s the cook. She trust’s her source at the hospital. We ought to be able to run down that line ourselves and see where the credibility stops."

"What if it stops at Jack Fleetwood?" asked Andrea, with a frowning tilt of her head.

Leah could only hum an answer, a short hum that, in any language, meant she didn’t know. She swiveled back around to face the telewindow and used a button on the control panel built into the arm of her chair to start the action.

Andrea reached into the pocket of her slacks and pulled out a disk. "You might want to try this," she said.

"What is it?"

"A micro-movement stress analyzer. It’s pretty good. Works off of an in-depth catalogue of dynamic, universal, body language constituents; all the stuff an expert would know by looking, and a hell of lot more we can’t see in real time with the naked eye. It can even tell minute changes in breathing. You’ve got enough baseline data on file to make it pretty reliable. Might help you to figure out what the hold-up is if you can really see who’s hot about what."

Leah nodded. "How do you use it?" she asked, inserting the disk into the drive. When the new disk on top of the blank ones already there locked into place, Leah clicked on the flashing icon in her window. A button bar menu of options was spread out across the bottom of the courtroom scene.

"Pick the circle," said Andrea. "Yeah. Now drag it over the face of one of the jurors."

Leah did another freeze-frame and adjusted the size and perspective of the scene with a left-hand ball control in the armrest, so she could see all twelve jurors. Then she dragged the circle over the face of juror number one, a trim, dark-haired woman in her mid-sixties."

"Now click over the faces of all the other jurors and hit the circle button again when you’re done."

Each time Leah clicked her light-pen over a person’s face, the circle appeared at the amber point of light. When she’d picked off all twelve, she started to click on the circle button again, then hesitated and rolled the ball controlled perspective until she could see Blue Monday. She cut her eye at Andrea.

They had both been bursting with curiosity about Blue’s private world. After Leah’s speech about curiosity not giving anyone a right to trespass on their neighbors’ right of privacy, it was no small thing to go through with it. This was an invasive tool they were using on their neighbors with questionable ethical justification. They were on shaky ethical grounds to begin with, but that fact did not loom large in either of their minds until it came to Andrea’s long unanswered question about Blue. That was the real reason she brought Leah the program, and both of them knew it. She waited a moment and gave a tiny nod.

Leah moved the point of light over his face and clicked. With the circle now around his head, she clicked the button bar again.

To her astonishment, every circled face turned snow white, including Blue’s. "What the hell?"

"This is one of those color match things, like the one you used to pick the jury; only a hundred times simpler. The default setting measures everything in shades of red and blue. Red is for positive perceptions of experience. Blue is for negative perceptions. The brighter the red, the more positive the feeling. The darker the blue, the more negative. Everybody feels something all the time, so the least you’ll see is a hint of color either way. Shades of purple are for highs you can’t get without a dash of fear. The program has a context discriminator that searches every movement in your computer memory of the people you’ve circled and gives you a probability readout on whether you might call it anger, distaste, anxiety, delight or whatever. You have to use your own judgment here, but it’s usually pretty clear."

"Where’s the start button on this buggy," said Leah eager to get going.

"Run the scene you wanna look at and watch the faces turn colors. Freeze it when you want to do an analysis. I gotta warn’ya. It can be so funny to look at, you might forget what you’re doing. And you have to remember that the people aren’t always responding to what you think they are. They may have seen something out of the corner of their eye that struck them funny or they may be daydreaming. There’s supposed to be a newer version of this program that compensates for that but I’m not sure I’d trust it."

Leah unfroze the action in the courtroom and laughed at the bright play of colors across the people’s faces."

Ignoring the bright color show, Andrea, zeroed in on Blue’s faded pink complexion with growing apprehension.

At the punch line of her joke, when she was thrilled to see twelve red faces in the jury box—some of them bright red—Leah saw the faded color of Blue's face, too. She felt a sudden chill of fear along with an eye-popping blast of enlightenment when she saw how little it changed. No wonder Andrea had been so concerned for him. Something about his normal physiology seemed to be out of kilter. She froze the scene on his faded blue face as she said her last words to the jury.

Turning her head toward Andrea in painfully increasing degrees of dread, she uttered her worst fear in a quavering voice too timid to be her own, "This isn’t going to be another Arnold Travis, is it?"

"Could be," said Andrea. "Damnit. I should have seen it all along. He’s gotta be on Bounce."

"What?"

"Bounce, the tranquilizer Estelle Gidarb wrote about in Doing Without, remember?"

"Vaguely," said Leah.

"It was supposedly Euel’s last hope to curb his sex drive without surgery. It would have rendered him practically impotent. Only ‘practically’ wasn’t impotent enough for Estelle. Turns most men into zombies and makes some of them highly susceptible to suicide if their supply runs out. That’s probably what happened to Arnold Travis. They call it bounce on the street because it bounces you really high or really low when it wears off. Usually high, but you can’t predict what it’s gonna do so you have to have another pill ready to take if it bounces you the wrong way."

"Well," said Leah, "now that we know what he was on, we know why he wanted to keep it a secret. But why did Jack Fleetwood keep quiet about it? he’s gotta know. And what would a guy like Blue Monday be doing with a drug like that?"

Andrea’s brows knitted in thought. "That’s what I can’t understand. Everybody who knew him before his arrest says he was naturally up-beat about everything. He would have had no reason to take it for the bounce affect. And, as far as we know, he never lost his interest in sex and never wanted to."

"What do you make of that?"

"It has to mean that the dosage was carefully controlled."

Leah bit her lip. "Which means you were right about his ex, the doctor. If she was giving it to him it’s more than likely he needed it...That time in the Jupiter VRS when he looked so much happier than he usually does, and had to leave early, I bet he was cutting back on the dosage. What kind of risk to you think he was taking?"

"Grab your coat," said Andrea, feeling like a fire-fighter who’d just heard the firehouse bell. "We gotta go. Now!"

On the way out of the Buel building Andrea and Leah called everyone they could think of who might have talked to Blue since they had spoken to him that morning in their bedroom telewindow. He’d been as cheerful as he was with them. Not manic, just light-hearted, amusing and easily amused. Blue’s daughter said he sounded more like his old self. His ex-wife said the same thing. But she didn’t seem happy about it. She’d been barred from seeing him in person as a condition of his tethered release from police custody, pending the jury’s verdict. She asked Leah and Andrea to tell her how he was. She looked troubled. She sounded scared.

They were in an adjacent parking structure walking briskly toward Leah’s White Toyota Royal. The close proximity of the electronic key in her wristband unlocked the doors.

"Dr. Hill, we know about the Bounce," said Andrea to the surprised black woman in her wristband telewindow. As Leah got behind the wheel of her Royal, Andrea slid into the passenger seat and transferred the woman’s image to the pop-up T-window on the instrument panel and switched on the ambient sound.

"When did he tell you?"

"He didn’t," said Leah, starting the car with the Smart-start device in the break peddle, "We figured it out."

"How?"

Leah punched in the preset for Blue’s address on her automatic drive control. "It’s kinda involved," she said. Right now we need to know if you’re worried about the same thing we are. Is Blue in more danger than most people if he bounces?"

"It would kill him instantly."

"Oh Lord," breathed Andrea, flashing back to the Jupiter VRS, as the car rolled itself out of its parking space and onto the exit lane of the structure. Leah closed her eyes, feeling as though she’d had the wind kicked out of her.

"But without the medication he would have died six months ago. A sudden thunderstorm would have done it. That’s the kinda shape he was in before he went on the medication. Actually, it was that book he was reading—Dr. Gidarb’s book, Doing Without, that nearly finished him off before it ended up saving him. I never would have read it under normal circumstances. If I hadn’t, he’d be dead."

Leah frowned. "What gave you the idea that bounce was the answer to Blue’s...whatever you call it?"

"It’s a congenital, degenerative condition," said the doctor. "Our...His father died of it in his twenties. To be honest, I didn’t know that Bounce, as you call it, had any legitimate pharmacological applications till I read it in the book. I was looking for a miracle, and, ‘poof!’ there it was in my hand. It had to be Blue’s choice. My only regret is that he had to make it under sedation."

The look on the woman’s face was one of pure anguish. "Believe me, I wouldn’t have encouraged him to do it if there had been any other way. You know the down side, but one of the benefits for him—not for everybody, because everybody’s body chemistry is different—is that it allows him to think clearly and stay alert. He can even enjoy things, up to a point."

Andrea said, "Dr. Hill, does he have enough of it to last?"

"Of course. You’re wondering why he sounded so buoyant?"

"Yeah." said Andrea and Leah in unison.

"Sometimes he takes a razor blade to the capsule and squeezes out a little of the medicine so he can go higher than usual. That’s what I’m afraid of. Even at the prescribed dosage he has to exert plenty of self-control. He’s very good at it. But nobody can stay that focused around the clock. That’s another possible explanation. But then, you’d expect him to be down, not up, with that tether on his leg and this verdict hanging over him."

Andrea said, "He wouldn’t take his own life, would he?"

The woman in the T-window hesitated. "Not unless they returned a guilty verdict. But he wouldn’t give up prematurely."

"That’s the way I read him," mumbled Andrea. "This is gonna sound crazy," she said, "but I think his medication might have been tampered with."

Dr. Hill paused again. "It doesn’t sound crazy," she said. "Fleetwood’s gotta know what those capsules were for. Going after Blue was a political mistake that’ll cost him no matter what the jury decides. There is one problem with that. If they switched the medication four days ago, I don't know of anything they could have used in its place to have a time bomb effect."

"I don't know," said Leah, "Maybe one of the jurors is a plant, somebody with a phony profile tailored for the defense."

"That's what I think," said Andrea. "They only need one vote to convict. Why not slip in one ringer to stall for time just so Fleetwood can claim that Blue's medication couldn't have been tampered with."

"That doesn't explain how he could have survived this long," said the doctor. "He has to have the right dosage every 16 hours to stay alive. It's been three days since the last time he was out of the house long enough for anyone to get in and pull a switch. Nothing I know of can keep him stable from dose to dose and have that kind of time bomb effect. I don't see how it's possible."