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confessed graver concerns. She’d told him nothing specific, of course, but spoke of matters she had discovered that, if not outright criminal, at the least seemed at odds with the very mission of their organization.
    “In this new world order,” he’d tried to reassure her, “perhaps what seems untoward is just the way of business.”
    No, she’d told him. She knew the difference between matters of simple exigency and what was downright wrong.
    Was there no one she could talk to about these matters? Torsten had asked. No, she told him. There was no one. Of course that was not exactly true. There was one person, and she had taken certain steps, but she had not seen fit to tell even Torsten that.
    Besides, by then they had begun to speak of other intimate matters, discussions of things that had swept her into utter dizziness as she tapped and read, tapped and read. It had started with his admission that he had found himself thinking of her lips as he read the words she typed, how her mouth would move as she formed the words, and she’d quailed at first, but then thought, well, yes, they had the words between them but not the sounds, not the lips…
    …and then discovered as she typed her timid response that her thighs were bathed in warmth. They’d somehow passed on from lips to skin to hands and what those might do…
    …and had anyone suggested to her a month ago that she would find herself admitting to a total stranger that yes, she had in fact touched herself in those ways, and found it intensely pleasurable, she would have called it unthinkable. But now, what would have been a flush of embarrassment or shame had become a heady, heart-pounding rush of exhilaration as she responded to his inquiries: “Tell me how…tell me how it feels…tell me that you can feel me there with you, in your office, my hand with yours…”
    Even now, her hand had moved to her breast, was squeezing the knotted flesh of her nipple to the very edge where pain took over pleasure. She swallowed thickly, saw that her robe had fallen entirely open, that she was fully bared before the glowing machine. She closed her eyes and arched her neck up to the blue light, and thought that some soft sound had escaped her throat.
    I am in Norway
, she thought…
in Tibet…in Oz…I am floating in clean, clear space where nothing can hurt me, nothing can trouble me, where I can be just as I wish to be
…
    Glorious freedom here, then. And thanks be to Torsten, who had told her of the need to move their meeting place again. He read the magazines, the specialists’ reports, kept up with such things, it seemed. When he’d discovered that others had invaded their “room,” to “lurk” invisibly while they spoke of such intimate matters, he’d been not so much incensed or embarrassed as saddened. While she had felt a sudden pang of fear—imagine if the others with whom she worked were to ever learn or overhear—he had reassured her. The two of them were just as anonymous to those electronic voyeurs who “watched” as they had ever been.
    Still, the dynamics of their meeting had been altered dramatically. Certainly, there had been no more discussions of her work. And even their sexual conversations became awkward, truncated, interrupted by signals that others had slipped into the “room,” or by Torsten’s manipulations to check for such intrusions.
    Then he had discovered the safeguards. First, the device she’d used when she logged on, a tiny computer itself, actually, which converted her password into a different, encrypted code each time she used it.
    And now, as a double safeguard, this new place, this Comnet. A “remailing” service. In reality, a computer somewhere in Scandinavia, where their messages would arrive, after leapfrogging along the Internet, to be stripped of their original identifying codes, and receive new, randomly assigned names. Here, in some room within a room within a room of an indifferent Nordic machine, they