Leah Flores and Andrea Urlan were close to changing their minds, too; not about God, but about Jack Fleetwood. They were beginning to think he was untouchable.

They had once been confident that they would see him ride the State of Michigan’s lethal injection gurney for the murder of Blue Monday. They had seen the evidence themselves in the form of water-filled capsules which should have contained life-sustaining medicine. The fact that the capsules had been in the temporary custody of Fleetwood’s State Police wasn’t iron-clad proof, but it should have been a good start. It wasn’t. They could get no one but the staff of God to so much as look at it.

With all the excitement and speculation surrounding the man on the mountain, the fate of the defendant in the trial of the century seemed to matter only to the central figures in the case. Try as they might, Blue’s lawyer and her lover could make no headway against the rising tides of indifference on all sides. They themselves were spending less of their time thinking about Blue because they were spending more of their time thinking about the man who might have been the Prince of Peace—or a wino looking for a place to take a wizz. It was a difficult emotional balancing act on the eve of a good friend’s funeral—which might usher in the dawn of humanity’s spiritual rebirth....

Hector Clay would have known that the couple’s strong feeling about the impact of Blue Monday’s funeral on world affairs was more than wishful thinking. It was the combined intellectual and emotional faculty parapsychologists once mistook for extra sensory perception. Hector and Vince, had survived by it—by trusting it and by relying on it. It was the strange, but not necessarily supernatural, quality of mind and body that sensitized them to the location of well camouflaged enemy booby-traps and ambush sites before they could see them. Perhaps it was no more than heightened sensitivity in general to a myriad of clues and cues that a computer program like Janus could gather and collate with equal or greater efficiency.

He turned off the automatic navigator of his bright yellow Chrysler Buccaneer and headed west to nowhere in particular. If the "strange quality of mind" which had served him so well in South America had been switched on, it would have told him to go east.

A thick blanket of hardened old snow lay everywhere it had fallen except for the cleared roads and sidewalks. A fresh snowfall, quickly gathering strength, was already beginning to stick in those places where plows, blowers and shovels had removed it three days before.

Hector groaned, thinking of the shoveling he might have to do. A hard fall shortly before the funeral had capped his last back-breaking, snow shoveling experience and left him with the banged-up knee. Getting into the car had been a painful chore. He didn’t relish the idea of getting out. He couldn’t imagine getting out and shoveling snow. He hated the snow. He hoped it wasn’t a bad omen....

The artificial rock salt Andrea and Leah sprinkled over the driveway and sidewalk as soon as they got home had been more than enough to melt the light snow. Though they had been home for over an hour, hundreds of the undissolved crystals lay scattered across the pavement in dry little islands unto themselves. Looking down at their driveway through her upstairs office window, Leah saw the diamond-like crystals as a pathetic reminder of the fact that sewing them like chicken feed was the last thing she and Andrea had done together.

As long as they were engaged in such mundane pursuits or delving into the big questions about Blue and Kimberly and the Man on the Mountain, they were okay. These were bodies in motion in their current universe of concerns but not the universe itself. They saw their new universe on the night of Blue’s death when they followed the advise of an anonymous phone caller and tuned to the X Channel. They had seen themselves in 3-D color pleasing each other as only lesbians could. They had seen enough to verify its authenticity and to understand the full implications of it.

Their entire sex lives had been put on flashback tape, any portion of which was now available on demand to any curious voyeur or dangerous psychopath or whomever. That was the universe they now lived in.

They could continue to say and do the things they’d always done as friends. They still slept in the same master bedroom on distant sides of the same bed. But they were no longer comfortable in each other’s company, in or out of bed, and no longer able to touch each other intimately.

Only two nights had passed since their universe changed, but each night and each day had been worse. Leah could barely stand to think of how the third night was going to be...

Andrea stood alone in their spacious shower stall with her face turned up into the spray. This used to be a play room—like every other room in the house, a place where she and Leah could jettison their inhibitions and test new ways to wring pleasure out of each other’s bodies. It used to be a place where they could find endless excuses to be together, to groom each other, to kiss, snuggle, titter and shriek with glee. It was now a place where Andrea went to be alone. It was now the place where she went to cry.

Leah turned her head from the window of the office which had once been a small bedroom and stared at the blank T-window of her desk-top computer. The fingertips of one hand rested on the one-handed keyboard while the other clutched the folds of her new, gray housecoat to her throat. Through the crack in the door she could see the light from Andrea’s bedroom office on the other side of the wall. She could hear the water running in the bathroom.

She didn’t have to see Andrea’s tears or hear her sobs to know what was happening in the shower. She and Andrea knew each other well enough to read each other’s thoughts. They loved each other enough to feel each other’s pain. They were the same thoughts and the same pain arising from the same source.

The telewindow broadcasts of them engaged in illicit sex was a true threat to their careers, their financial assets and their freedom that dangled over their heads like the sword of Damocles. That was a risk they had been prepared to take when they made up their minds to befriend and defend Blue Monday. The spurious programs featuring them in lesbian embraces that had emerged during his trial had been easy to parry. Leah had even managed to use them to her advantage and Blue’s. Now that Blue was dead, she and Andrea no longer had the shield of a selfless cause to protect them. They were like zoo exhibits in a glass cage put there for the amusement of the masses.

Leah slammed her open palm down on the keyboard, then stood and thrust her middle finger in the air. "Fuck you!" she hollered at the top of her lungs.

Three and an half seconds later, Andrea stood in the doorway, wide-eyed, naked and dripping wet. She held her hand to her heaving chest. Her lower lip quivered in anticipation of some unthinkable calamity. "What’s the matter, Sweetheart?"

Leah’s defiant hand dropped to her side. Her face softened. Sweetheart! Her mind shouted, she called me Sweetheart! Her housecoat parted down the middle revealing a long, thin strip of light brown flesh terminating in a short ribbon of matted hair. For a long time they stared at each other, telling each other with their darting eyes, twitching chins, flaring nostrils and trembling bodies how much they loved each other—and ached for each other in ways the law did not allow.

Leah’s eyes scanned down the wet, white, nude, body of her mate, envying the size and shape of her breasts which defined good taste in fashionably see-through blouses. Andrea’s eyes roamed down her mate’s adorably plump, brown body to the valley between her unfashionably oversized breasts. How, she wondered for the 500^th time, could people permit the law to define those beauties as "obscene?" If anything was obscene, it was that harebrained definition of obscenity.

A slow, wicked smile spread across the younger woman’s face. With a shrug of her shoulders and a little help with her fingertips, the flaps of the housecoat slipped to the outside of her breasts, leaving her entire unclothed front exposed.

Andrea’s smile mirrored her friend’s. She thrust the middle finger of both hands into the air and lifted her face to the ceiling. "Fuck you!" she shouted at the orbiting peeping TOM.

Leah laughed. Andrea laughed. With the somehow erotic, not-so-distant sound in their ears of the shower beating against the tiles, they glided into each other’s arms and kissed each other’s open mouths like the lovers they were. The heat from the kiss ignited a flame of passion hot enough to melt away all fear. In a perverse way that neither woman could have anticipated, the inhibition which had grown from the knowledge that their entire sex lives were open to public view, was turned inside out. Why not be themselves? They had nothing more to lose.

They thought they had nothing more to lose....

In the next forty minutes, viewers of the X Channel were treated to an authentic display of off-beat sex-play which included Andrea in a dog collar and Leah behind her holding her leash. At that point, Leah had been wearing fish-net stockings and black, stiletto heals. Now, in the same relative positions, Leah wore only a black leather harness around her hips supporting a huge, flesh-colored replica of a male sex organ, only part of which was visible. Andrea sill wore the collar and leash, but only because she had forgotten to take it off. That game was over. They were doing something different now.

Viewers of the X Channel saw them in their bedroom engaged in an act which was not only illegal to perform, but illegal to depict in any form. On the other hand, a mainstream media version of their arrest in the commission of their unspeakable crime against nature was not only legal but useful for a successful prosecution. A ten second broadcast delay would enable the network censors to put a fuzzy, electronic white spot over Andrea’s obscenely trimmed pubic area, Leah’s obscenely large breasts and the obscene object protruding from her crotch. In another ten seconds, that is what the viewers of Condor Broadcasting Incorporated’s popular Gossip Channel were going to see.

A special news report on the Vice Squad raid was going to fit in well with the regular programming of CBI’s Gossip Channel. Whether or not that programming had been conceived as a viewing guide for the X Channel was beside the point. That’s how it functioned so that’s what it was. It left little to the imagination and nothing to chance with respect to allowing its viewers to have the electronic censer blanks filled in on the X Channel.

In 9 million telewindows throughout the length and breadth of North America, a young, pretty, wide-eyed, hostess in a tastefully transparent blouse exclaimed, "Flash!"

Among the 12 million American adults watching the prime-time show were patrons of a popular bar in Lansing called the Keyhole. Most of them wore white hospital uniforms because the Keyhole catered to the Fleetwood Memorial Hospital’s medical staff. One reason for its popularity, apart from its proximity to the hospital, was its wall-sized telewindow with ambient sound to facilitate a communal spirit, and its non-stop gossip show motif.

Few of the people in the bar, who weren’t already looking in the window, responded to the gossip lady’s "Flash!" The bulk of the crowd sitting at round-top tables, each of a different color, was simply not happy about what "Flash!" had come to mean. A few short months before it would have meant something to them that they knew ahead of time would be entertaining, enlightening and validating of their world view. It would have meant that a prominent, liberal, son-of-a-bitch, past or present, had been figuratively caught with his hand in somebody else’s pocket or literally caught with his pants down.

Lately, only Americans were showing up as thieves and perverts or hypocrites who indulged privately in the vices they condemned publicly. Late-breaking news flashes used to be fun. They used to show the truth. Now they were nothing but blatant, predictable, Liberal propaganda. That’s how most of the patrons of the Keyhole saw things.

Then, of course, there are always people who see things differently.

Paula Quin, the top-heavy blond nurse with the ski jump nose on special assignment to care for Kimberly Fleetwood was one of those people. When the gossip lady asked, "Guess which famous doctor and lawyer team are about to lose their licenses to practice?" alarm bells sounded in her head. A light-speed exercise in deductive reasoning told her who the doctor and the lawyer were. Still, she was horrified when rotating mug shots of Andrea and Leah replaced the gossip lady in the window.

Her three companions at the aquamarine table, Head Nurse Lattamer and a male/female couple in ruby Daylight glasses, would have shared her concerns had they seen what she had. Paula recognized the women in the telewindow as close friends of the couple at her table as well as friends of Kimberly Fleetwood and Blue Monday. She knew them from the trial and the X Channel and their visits to the hospital with their table companions in the ruby Daylights. The two couples had convinced the two nurses that Kimberly’s husband was a dangerous man.

"Max!" she said, elbowing the rotund, middle-aged nurse, "You gotta see this."

Maxine Lattamer, who had been too involved in her conversation with the other woman at the table to ascribe any special significance to the noisy reaction of the crowd, glared at the blond. With many of the other patrons whistling, jeering, guffawing and stamping their feet, she had to shout to make herself heard. "Paula!" she scolded, "I was having a serious conversation with Vera and Glen."

Paula Quin rolled her eyes. Jabbing a finger toward the screen, she said, "Look, goddamnit!"

Maxine Lattamer and Vera, a woman in her mid-thirties on the attractive side of dowdy, peered up at the T-window through the ruby tint of her form-fitting glasses. The man, a slightly overweight brunette in his mid-thirties, was already staring open-mouthed into the window. Maxine and Vera saw nothing at first. Then they couldn’t believe what they saw inside the window or around them in the bar.

In the window were two nude women, Andrea Urlan and Leah Flores, having sex like a man and a woman—or two men—or two dogs. With the censor blots in place, it was impossible to tell exactly what they were doing, but it was obviously sexual and it obviously involved penetration. The delayed effect on the Keyhole crowd was a mixture of what one would expect at a football game when the home team scored a touchdown, and how most people would react to a pool of vomit.

Self-appointed ushers immediately sprang up to quiet the crowed so everyone could hear what was going on in the window as well as they could see. For the most part, they succeeded.

Whenever a celebrity of the moment appeared on the gossip show in a compromising situation, what followed was as certain as night after day. Delinquent minors who might have been sneaking a peek at the adult show were going to get a lesson in civilized conduct and the cost of violating natural law. They were going to see why there could be no such thing as a right of privacy in a moral society and what happens to sex criminals who think they can hide their perversion behind closed doors.

The closed door of the lesbian couple’s master bedroom swung open with the thunderous bang of a battering ram and several voices shouting "Police!" One male and five female police in traditional DPD blue saucer caps and thick, dark blue leather jackets, stormed in. Three of the policewomen brandished P-27 stun guns with the distinctive lightning bolt on the flat side of the barrel housing. Handcuffs flashed in the hands of two other women in blue.

As a female sergeant and the officers with handcuffs sprang forward, the others cleared a path of observation for a low-crouched, camera operator with a visor-mounted camera and a steady aim. The camera operator’s brown, shoulder-length hair fluttered dramatically with her forward movement. A second, unseen camera recording the first one in action zoomed close enough to the back of her white leather jacket to show the crest of "Condor Spotlight News": a white condor clutching a shining spotlight, inside of a black circle ringed in gold.

The picture shifted to the field of view covered by the lead camera. Within that field, the male officer stood to one side while his female comrades grabbed, kicked and shouted unintelligible orders at the same time. One of them, a husky blond, forcibly separated the couple by yanking the chubby Latin woman wearing the obscene sex harness away from her partner. The slender white woman in the dog collar howled in pain as a short-haired sergeant with dark eyelashes and vermilion lipstick hurled her face forward onto the bed. Another officer with her open handcuffs held high, jumped on the bed with them and assisted the sergeant in jerking the nude woman’s arms behind her back.

Meanwhile, the husky blond had pushed the Latin woman’s face and chest into the nearest wall with a stiff right arm. Her fingers held an open pair of stainless steel handcuffs while her palm pressed, with all of her weight behind it, between her captive’s dark shoulder blades. The rough treatment brought cries of pain and protest from the prisoner which were utterly ignored by the police.

In the Keyhole Bar, chants of, "We see you! We see you!" sprang up in three places at once.

In the window, the blond officer ordered, "Spread’em!" at the same time she kicked her prisoner’s legs far apart. With her free hand, the sergeant brought one of her captive’s hands behind her back, slapped the cuffs around her wrist and held it there as she reached for her prisoner’s other hand.

Both women were handcuffed within seconds of each other amid more shouting from them and the officers alike. The policewomen on the bed with one foot on the floor and one knee on each side of the nude white woman, jerked their prisoner to her feet. With more scuffling than would have been necessary had they given their prisoner a chance to establish her balance, they stood her up next to her brown-skinned partner.

From the standpoint of most Gossip Channel viewers, the Latin lawyer made famous by her defense of Blue Monday and her fair-skinned psychologist lover made an odd-looking couple. Here they were, two women, not even of the same race, with no legitimate reason to be in the same room with no clothes on. Moreover, if the censor blots were any clue to what they covered, the artificial thing sticking out of the lawyer’s crotch would have been unnaturally large, even on an unusually large man.

For those viewers, the intrusion of the state into the bedroom of their fellow citizens was not an issue. The issue was clearly one of wanton disregard for the law. Both women had guilt and fear written all over them, for good reason. As of the moment the police entered the scene of their crime with a duly authorized warrant of search and seizure and caught them in the act, they were criminals in the eyes of the law and therefore subject to arrest.

Though most of the people in the bar squirmed and bounced and rocked in their seats, bursting to explode in a sustained celebration of normality over perversion, they restrained themselves.

The male officer stepped to the center of the window and held up a bright, orange card. "Vice Squad!" he barked, his white, clean-shaven, all-American face twisted in disgust. "Leah Maria Flores, Andrea Denise Urlan, this is a search warrant, duly signed by the Honorable Thomas Starr the 3^rd, chief magistrate of the 31^st District Court of the City of Detroit."

With the exception of two premature hoops and a whistle, the bar crowd maintained its expectant hush. The next words of the arresting officer were going to be as familiar to the Keyhole regulars as the Maranda warnings had been to television cop show viewers of the late 20^th century. But each time a policeman read the Bork advisory to a different perpetrator, they evoked a different level of interest.

Flipping the card over, he read, "You are under arrest for crimes against natural law from which all just laws are derived. By your lewd and lascivious conduct in the sight of God, you have forfeited your rights as a citizen of the United States. Come quietly, or we will use force."

This time, the Lansing gossip bar rocked with hoots, whistles, cheers, and raucous laughter. Men shouted, "Lezzies!" Women shouted, "Dykes!" One man yelled, "Nigger lovers!" Grinning women put their hands over their mouths and pointed. Loud talk welled up from table after table with words like "pervert" and comments like, "It’s about time!" forming bridges of friendly interaction from one table to another.

In the window, the naked women, trying vainly to hide their tear-streaked faces, were pulled and prodded down the narrow, spiral stairway. The female sergeant pulled Andrea by her leash while the husky blond prodded Leah in the small of her back with the tip of her baton. The censor blots gave shape to the jiggling and bouncing, natural and artificial, parts protruding from Leah’s plump, brown body as she struggled to keep from falling down the stairs. If anything, the bouncing effect was greater than it would have been without the fuzzy light blots, all of which was great fun for the Keyhole Bar patrons—for most of the Keyhole bar patrons.

While some in the bar laughed so hard they choked, the people at the aquamarine table who knew the women in the window stood out from the crowd like nuns in a whorehouse. At the plumb-colored table next to them, a happy young man with white hospital clothes and a missing front tooth distinguished himself from a group of similarly dressed men and women by turning to look at the unhappy quartet.

Unsure of what to make of their nonplused reaction to a scene that tickled everyone else’s funny bone mercilessly, he began to divide his attention between them and the show in the window. The woman next to him followed his lead. The man across from her followed the woman, and the woman next to the man followed the second man.

Now, the nude women in the window were being forced through the open front door of their house into the bright, red and blue flashing lights of a half dozen Pursuer squad cars into the cold, winter night.

Vera gasped, grabbing the man at her table by his sleeve, "Oh, Glen," she said, "how can they do that?"

Glen’s angry eyes made a quick scan of the bar. "Look around you," he said. "That’s how. The voters are getting what they want."

The gossip lady broke in for a moment to explain how careful the police had been to insured that no minors in the area of the arrest who could see what was going on. "So," she said, confidentially, "enjoy! There’s nothing to be concerned about."

Glen, Vera and Paula Quin all noticed the relief on the few faces of people in the crowd they had falsely assumed were as appalled as they were by the entire scene. Maxine Lattamer saw only what was in the window. She saw close-ups of the salted porch, stairs and sidewalks and then a cut to close-ups of the prisoner’s bare feet. She pounded the table with both fists. "No!" she yelled. "No! No! No! Noooo!"

Not wanting to miss a second of what was to come, the people at the plumb table who’s attention had been divided between the aquamarine table and the window, fixed their eyes on the window.

The gossip lady said, "You gotta reap what you sow."

Some people at the plumb table got the gossip lady’s joke; some didn’t. They all laughed anyway in anticipation of the scene they were going to see. The white woman’s hysterics and the dark one’s belligerence only served to amuse them more.

"This is great!" said the man with the missing tooth.

From one end of the bar to the next, red-eyed philosophers without Daylight glasses jabbered about what they saw and nodded at what they heard: It wasn’t as though these lezzies were going to be thrown to hungry lions or anything like that. They were simply going to have to take a short walk in the cold in their birthday suits. The pavement was going to be damn cold and the rock salt might hurt their tinder tootsies a little, but there was no way the cold air, the cold pavement or the artificial rock salt could cause them permanent harm. The filthy lezzies were overreacting to an uncomfortable situation that they had created for themselves.

There was something funny about that. People who didn’t think so had to be mental defectives or Liberals, of course. Liberals had no sense of humor and insisted on forcing their humorless world view on everyone else. That was one way to tell them apart from regular people. Perhaps that was why the people responded so enthusiastically to the treatment of the two perverts. It had been so long since they’d seen anything like it—since Dean Piper, the Chief Executive Officer of CBI dropped out of sight and those no-name Liberals took his place.

All of those thoughts, expressed in one way or another by scores of happy people within earshot of the humorless folks at the aquamarine table, found their way to 8 burning ears. Paula, Maxine, Vera and Glen listened while they watched the naked women in the window being forced down the front porch steps and sidewalk in tandem. They saw the telewindow camera pan back to emphasize the awkwardness of the prisoners’ steps and the bounding censor blurs on Leah’s torso. They saw Andrea Urlan and Leah Flores hobble though a human tunnel of uniformed police officers. They saw madness in the other Keyhole patrons’ enthusiastic endorsement of everything they saw in the window.

For Glen and Vera, watching the cruel treatment of dear friends they knew to be kind people, was torture for them as well. How, they wondered, could so many people be so cruel that they couldn’t imaging themselves or someone close to them in a similar fix? Apart from the satisfaction some people could take in the abuse of people unlike themselves, there were aspects of this public humiliation show that should have frightened or enraged everyone.

Paula couldn’t believe that she was the only top-heavy woman in the bar offended by the censoring of Leah’s breasts, considered obscene only because their size reminded some people of Euelalia Charmain. Nor did she believe that the thing protruding from her crotch was a one-of-a-kind sex toy. Judging by the size and shape of the censor blur, Paula guessed that she had one just like it. She doubted that she, of all the women in the Keyhole that night had the only other one.

Maxine Lattamer’s head swam with the same horrid visions as her companions in addition to her own. She could not see the fun in ridiculing a woman because of her weight, especially one as pretty as Leah Flores who was being exposed against her will. She wondered about the woman at the indigo table—the one with the tasteful breasts beneath the see-through blouse, the dark-haired woman standing and pointing at the window with venom spewing from her tongue. She wondered whether that woman knew the political and economic reasons why the size and shape of her breasts were considered tasteful, while noticeable variations were considered obscene.

Maxine Lattamer wondered about the little man at the violet table on her left, the bug-eyed one with the big ears laughing so heartily at the jokes being made about Leah’s weight. She wondered how he could do so without being profoundly aware of his own superficial imperfections. She wondered how many of the white people shouting racial epithets had been born to parents of a different race. She wondered how many of the men and women mocking Andrea’s painful chicken-walk to the patrol car could see themselves hopelessly in love with someone that the proponents of "natural law" would not have approve of.

Maxine was in love with such a person. Never mind the fact that it was strictly a one way proposition. Never mind the fact that it was patently absurd, that she had never told the object of her adoration how she felt. Never mind the fact that they had never touched, and in all likelihood never would, Maxine Lattamer was in love, passionately, deeply, eternally in love. She knew what it meant to be in love and to feel the other natural emotions that came with being in love. She empathized with Andrea and Leah more than anyone would ever know.

In the window, both nude women, chilled to the bone and crying like teething babies in need of a diaper change, were being helped into the back of separate blue and white Pursuers when the window went blank.

The momentum of loud celebration carried over for a second or two in some sections of the bar, then stopped altogether. The blank window became a blue one. Out of the blue came a white bird, a condor with a burning spotlight in its talons.

The time stamp on the bottom right corner of the window said, 6:42 PM.