"That's the second one in a month," says one of the nurses at the station, not quite quietly enough. "Spontaneous brain shutdown. Two in a month."

Hank Bismarck has been a doctor in Paraville for three days. He has not yet learned where the good coffee is kept or which of the hospital wing's four identical doors leads to the supply room. But he has learned how to tell when a building is frightened, because he has worked in frightened places all his life, and this one is frightened tonight.

He takes the records to the little office they have given him and reads them twice.

The first case was a woman named Ariel Voss, twenty-six, a technician who works with the antenna array. Four weeks ago, one morning, she did not wake up. The notes call it a coma, then strike th...

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