atch the world in rewind. It’s faster, scoured of soul, a knife grated over fish scales until all iridescence is gone. Stop. Enjoy the fleshy slap of magnetic tape stretched thin. Play. Infinite hallways, all identical, white-coat clones gliding through like platelets. Isolate a person of interest. Toggle, toggle. Dissect the tape into seconds, half-seconds, quarter-seconds. Men are no longer men. They are abstract shapes you can study like an eremite studies scripture. That shadow in that scientist’s pocket could be the secret to all life. The muddy grin of his freeze-framed face might be the devil’s skull. Sixteen cameras. Infinite clues. Rewind, stop, toggle. This hallway, that. There’s no way out. All routes lead right back here, to his office. No closer to the truth. No further. He’s trapped.

Strickland’s eyes feel like spoiled sausages about to rupture. All that green candy he brought back from the jungle, when he should have brought back vials of buchité. A couple of drops and he’d see everything these tapes were hiding. Hour after hour after hour he’s been at this. Took only one hour to master the playback console. M1 Garand rifle, Cadillac Coupe de Ville, VTR deck—it’s all got the same guts. You put your hands to it, make it part of you. He quit feeling the buttons and dials around noon. Now it feels like he can direct the tapes with his mind. That’s the secret, he thinks. Let the footage flow by like water, dip your hands into it, and catch yourself a fish.

And there it is. Just like that. Camera 7. Loading dock. The first few seconds of the final tape before the blackout. The camera, does it bump upward? A couple of critical inches? Strickland toggles. Before, after, before, after.

He gets up out of his chair. The hallways, he swears, have gotten brighter. He shades his eyes with a hand, who cares if the MPs think he’s nuts, and travels past F-1 to the loading dock, the same route as the stolen creature. He pushes through the double doors and drops his hand. There is no sun. It is night. He’s lost track of time yet again. The ramp is empty but for puddles of oil. He whirls around. Looks up at Camera 7. Then looks straight under it.

Four people stand there, faces rubbery with shock. Each holds a cigarette. They have uniforms, lousy postures, different shades of skin. What they share is laziness. The time since the asset’s theft he’s spent slaving in his office, and they can’t endure five minutes without a break, and down here, where it’s against regulations? But Strickland needs information. He tries on a hard, waxy smile.

“Y’all taking a smoke break, huh?”

Does Fleming hire mutes exclusively? No, he decides. They’re just terrified.

“Don’t worry, you’re not in trouble.” He extends the smile, feels his wax lips start to crack. “Heck, I ought to join you. I’m not supposed to smoke inside, either, but darn it if I don’t do it anyway.” The janitors steal glances at their untapped, elongating ashes. “Tell me something, though. How do you lift the camera so you don’t get caught?”

Names are sewn to their uniforms, just like tags on a dog.

“Yo-lan-da,” he reads. “You can tell me, honey. Just curious is all.”

Dark brown hair. Light brown skin. Black eyes. The kind of thin lips that like to mouth off. Not in front of him, though. She knows her place. Strickland lets his wax grin melt a little. It works. He can smell her sweat through her perfume of bleach. She drops her eyes from the shit-scrubber cohorts she must think she’s betraying and gestures at an object behind them. It’s no sophisticated gadget like the one that blew the fuses. It’s a broom. A motherfucking broom.

Strickland’s mind is the VTR. It forwards, stops, plays, rewinds, toggles. He’s closing in on the critical frame. “Say.” He means to sound convivial, and doesn’t, and doesn’t give a shit. “Any of you folks ever see Dr. Hoffstetler back here?”