The woman in the summer dress asking a curious question about Avignon continues: "I had heard, from friends I no longer trust, that were I to bring a question about Avignon to you," her voice dropped to a husky whisper, "you would supply me... with... new eyes." New eyes, SOME PEOPLE, HOWEVER, WILL ACTUALLY TRY THESE PLANS. A DETERMINEDLY MURDEROUS AMERICAN TEENAGER CAN PROBABLY BUY OR STEAL A HANDGUN FAR MORE EASILY THAN HE CAN BREW FAKE "NAPALM" IN THE KITCHEN SINK. NEVERTHELESS, IF TEMPTATION IS SPREAD BEFORE PEOPLE A CERTAIN NUMBER WILL SUCCUMB, AND A SMALL MINORITY WILL ACTUALLY ATTEMPT THESE STUNTS.   that's right. Besides a large data collection of oddities which he sold to alien governments and sadistic culinary cults, Saul sold new eyes. Not everyone would. Medical insurance denied coverage. But some people needed them: they had seen too much or too little, or been afraid of what they had seen while young. Some real freaks just wanted a different color. "You heard wrong," Saul said, looking at her with obvious disgust. "Oh," turning away with a sad voice. But then she looked up. "What if I said it over and over?" "Said what?" "Avignon avignon avignon avig --" Saul has many rages. Once when he was five he spent four months attempting to bite his teeth, only giving up when his father suggested licking his tongue would taste better. Repetition in others drives him batty. "MY LORD, WOMAN!" he roared, rattling the shop, grimacing, smashing a splinter clear through the web of two fingers. The birds didn't move. The cat & didn't move. "gnon avignon avignon!" Unafraid, her eyes lit up, and her poison eyebrows rose in triumph. Saul shuddered. His massive frame seemed to deflate. "Do you sell new eyes now?" she purred. Harry remembers: Do Not Attempt to Adjust Your Television Set. True enough these days, he thinks, what with everything all solid-state and microchips. His father used to carry around paper bags full of ten-cent tubes. Often enough a bad tube was like a blown lightbulb, visibly scorched or fused. But now you couldn't say which part was which, let alone what was wrong. We Propose No Underlying Theory To Attack Or Defend, But Rather A Heuristic Device, A Set Of Four Questions, Which We Call A Tetrad. These days when a set stopped working you parked it at the recycling center and told yourself some story about salvage, though you knew it would just end up on the landfill. Lorraine is the technical one; Harry's college major was finance. Concerning electronics, he knows only enough to be dangerous. Yet he lies there unable to ignore the little sonic glitch. The problem sticks in his mind like a stubborn lump in the throat. What Does It Enhance Or Intensify? What Does It Render Obsolete Or Displace? What Does It Retrieve That Was Previously Obsolesced? What Does It Produce Or Become When Pressed To An Extreme? What could make their TV set act this way? Harry tries to think what his wife would say, aside from,"It's probably nothing." "A short in transformer," he imagines her saying, "creating a freak potential that discharges through the audio channel after the power is cut." Plausible? Stick a screwdriver in the right place and find out. He finds himself watching the television: Resonance Is The Mode Of Acoustic Space; Tactility Is The Space Of The Significant Bounding Line, Or Pressure, And Of The Interval. looking at it, the inert object, maybe for the first time, studying its dim outlines in the dark. After a while he notices the screen is very softly glowing. He can't say if this is normal or symptomatic. He's not even sure what he's seeing. A few loose electrons bouncing around the phosphor dots. Maybe some of those "quantum fluctuations" from Nova or Star Trek. Neutrinos. Baryon particles. Gamma rays. Or it's all in his head: maybe the "glow" is just a trick of the eyes, something in the retina or visual cortex. He remembers the word habituation from an old psychology course, though it's not a term he could define. This has major implications for discussion of the lexia. When you thought about it, the whole thing was inevitable. Boris, this is my old friend... Oh; heh... Natasha... [grin] How could they not become an item? It was a match made in pop culture. For the record, neither of them looked the part. She was a small and rather brawny woman, genuinely Slavic, with high, broad cheekbones and intensely blue, deeply spiritual eyes. Her family were out of the Ukraine via Sydney and Vancouver. He on the other hand was some sort of Scots-Welsh-Luso-Yankee whose pink-thinking parents got some perverse ideas about boys' names during the Eisenhower regime. His older brother, christened Igor, was now with the court's permission called Spike. Jay Ward cartoons aside, what really brought them together was flying.