It used to be just a plain office with a chair and some instruments on a table. Then they got the new, fancy polygraph system. Now it's like going in for some kind of high-tech medical scan. The room is completely rebuilt, no vestige of its original function, the window covered over, everything smooth and beige and smelling like a hospital. There's only one chair, in the middle. Y.T.'s mom goes and sits down in it, puts her arms on the arms of the chair, nestles her fingertips and palms into the little depressions that await. The neoprene fist of the blood-pressure cuff gropes blindly, finds her arm, and seizes it. Meanwhile, the room lights are dimming, the door is closing, she's all alone. The crown of thorns closes over her head, she feels the pricks of the electrodes through her scalp, senses the cool air flowing down over her shoulders from the superconducting quantum-interference devices that serve as radar into her brain. Somewhere on the other side of the wall, she knows, half a dozen personnel techs are sitting in a control room, looking at a big-screen blow-up of her pupils.