The next day, Tom learns from the company lawyer that while Meredith's complaint of sexual harassment will not be made public, Tom will have to accept transfer to a division of the company he secretly knows is about to be sold off. Rather than capitulate, he decides to hire a lawyer and sue.

Now, Meredith Johnson, as Mr. Crichton paints her, happens to be the embodiment of all those antiquated, chauvinistic stereotypes of the power-hungry woman: she is two-faced, underhanded, manipulative, mendacious, underqualified for her position and delighted to wield sex as a weapon. You quickly grow to loathe her. Yet for a reader to admit this is to risk making common cause with the Neanderthal characters in the story who cry out, "We told you so!," or ridicule Tom for effetely failing to service the boss and keep the peace.

Meanwhile, Mr. Crichton seems to remain above such flinging around of raw meat. He is too busy lecturing on the true meaning of his subject. "Sexual harassment is about power," says the lawyer whom Tom hires, Louise Fernandez, "and so is the company's resistance to dealing with it. Power protects power. And once a woman gets up in the power structure, she'll be protected by the structure, the same as a man."

The author wants us to know that while only 5 percent of sexual harassment suits are brought by men against women, only 5 percent of corporate supervisors are women. As Ms. Fernandez concludes: "So the figures suggest that women executives harass men in the same proportion as men harass women. And as more women get corporate jobs, the percentage of claims by men is going up. Because the fact is, harassment is a power issue. And power is neither male nor female."

Finally, Mr. Crichton offers an afterword in which he solemnly intones: "The advantage of a role-reversal story is that it may enable us to examine aspects concealed by traditional responses and conventional rhetoric. However readers respond to this story, it is important to recognize that the behavior of the two antagonists mirrors each other, like a Rorschach inkblot. The value of a Rorschach test lies in what it tells us about ourselves."