The Centauri Device

ELEVEN A Thin Time in 'Junk City'

Waking up ten minutes later, he rubbed his mouth and nose, sneezed. Odd silhouettes were forming and shifting somewhere beyond the streaming windscreen. He sat up and looked around. 'What do you know?' he said, his respect for ben Barka declining rapidly as the car lurched its way deeper into the mean and soulless night of Junk City.

'Shut your mouth,' suggested one of the Hashishin.

Junk City, a fair-sized industrial complex that had processed the raw materials for the pit-warehouse quarter of Egerton's Port during the early stages of colonization, was falling apart ten years after the fact in the evil glare of a failing temporary power plant that had somehow never been shut down, its foundries and plastics factories links in a well-established chain of warrens which served the hinterland pushers.

It was a nerve-racking horizon of slag tips and cooling-towers, leaning chimneys and gutted workshops, cold furnaces sadly gravid with congealed ore and fluxes, all linked together by a black etched spider-work of gantries, man-high conduits and precarious diagonal conveyors. Smoke and vapors vented from the overtaxed condensers of the power plant roiled between the rusting hoppers, drifted across the soaked ashy earth at the height of a man's waist to hang reeking over the terraces of the opencast mines.

Reactor-glare beat its way up and down the spectrum, now white and electric, now somnolent and purple — a constant unhealthy flicker of partially contained plasma struggling against the abused lines of force that restrained it, filling the wind with an awful, modulating, voracious roar like junk-tides on an abandoned planet at the very gutter-edge of Time. The denizens of this city, white-eyes and thin demented bones, watched the light racing and arcing across their grim skyline, and huddled close. Why should they be any less desperate for comfort than their customers? That leaky old engine menaced them, but they depended on it.

'I was on Centauri VII, Captain. I know what I saw when Grishkin burst through into the final bunker. I had been operating the cutter not a minute before he began to scrabble his way through, bare-handed. Yusef Karem saw it too, but later, and his report was garbled; Fleet agents were already close behind him — by then, they had cooked my sergeant's brains and knew we were there.'

Ben Barka had a bolt-hole in the ganger's shed of an ore furnace: a dusty room with faded yellow duty rosters pinned to the walls and a collection of the shaky, scuffed furniture that always seems to find its way into such places — two or three hard chairs, some adjustable metal shelving, and a half-made folding bed.

From small grimy windows the top-gas extractors and blast pipes of the smelter were visible, crawling over its outer shell like vast slow worms. Its charging platforms and skip-inclines hung askew, creaking on their broken welds in the wind. Shunting lines ran round its base, detouring heaps of machine-tool rejects once destined for the fire. Nothing here had been built to last; its very bulk seemed to lend it an impermanent air.

'What I saw is probably the most powerful propaganda tool the Galaxy has ever known. Conceive of a sort of psychical radio of great range and selectivity, which, by broadcasting images direct to the cortex, win bypass the interpretive moment and eliminate the possibility of evasion — '

Ben Barka was pacing the shabby room nervously, slapping his cane against the open palm of his left hand and frequently consulting his watch. He seemed to be expecting someone else. 'No more willful ignorance, Captain! The responsibility will be enormous!'

Truck massaged his foot, stretched. He felt rested and energetic, but wary. Down in the port he'd rather admired the desert fervor of ben Barka's eyes; this was less romantic.

'That's a disgusting little fantasy,' he said. 'I don't know anything about "interpretive moments." Whatever you saw in the bunker, the General seems convinced that it's a bomb. I suspect you're both as mad as Grishkin. He thinks it's God.'

Ben Barka rubbed some grime from a window pane, examined the end of his finger edgily.

'Did you ever stop to think, Captain, that there may now remain no useful definition of the terms "sane" and "insane"? It's war. Anything else is an impersonation, a dream.'

'Then stop it. You wouldn't have anything to eat round here, would you? I'm famished.'

'Give us the Device and it will stop. I can promise you that'

'Oh sure. It's not a case of giving — I've never even seen the bloody thing — and if it was, I wouldn't. I don't see you as much of an alternative to General Gaw. If only you'd slaughter each other instead of the rest of us. Why don't you hold your war on Earth? I'll sell tickets and applaud.'

The colonel looked nonplused.

'Now, if yours are the "safer hands" Angina had in mind, you've been wasting your time. Can I go now?'

At this, the door of the hut scraped open abruptly and an Earth-European in the uniform of the UASR(N) Political Corps bustled over the threshold. His skin was grey, his hands were covered with small seedy scabs, and the cuffs of his shut were frayed. Five centuries earlier, there would have been permanent ink stains on his fingers too, and secret meetings in his attic every second Wednesday.

He had obviously been eavesdropping. He glared aggressively at Truck, put his thumb in his mouth and ripped savagely at the nail, then said without looking at ben Barka, 'I'll take over now.'

Ben Barka shipped his stick and clasped his hands behind his back. He nodded coldly. Long, rolling dunes came back into his eyes, under a white moon. Trains full of overfed colonial infantrymen steamed out of the marshaling yards of Alexandria into the jaws of his ambush.

'I'd prefer you to sit in that chair,' said the PCO. His nose was running. When it became evident that Truck didn't intend to resist, he wiped it on his sleeve and grinned triumphantly.

'By dint of ceaseless energy and intelligence,' he began, in a vigoriously offensive voice, 'the watchful peoples of the United Arab Republics have uncovered a projected violation of their sovereignty involving an anti-humanitarian weapon built by the decadents of Centauri VII in an attempt to halt their engulfment by the equally corrupt expansionist forces of the so-called "Israeli World Government".'

He sniffed loudly. 'Well, we all know what happened there,' he said parenthetically.

'While we of the UASR would abhor and strongly protest the use of any such device as anti-beneficial to the interest of freedom-loving nationals of all the planets, there seems a possibility that in the hands of a properly-constituted Socialist democracy it would signal the overture of a new era of Socialist co-operation: the instant peaceful conversion of the Galaxy to true Marxist-Leninism, the end of the class struggle, the — '

He stared hard at Truck.

'Well?'

'Do we have to have this fucking down in here?' Truck appealed. But ben Barka, listening to the onion-skins peeling off the Saharan rock in a far-off cold dawn, only lifted one eyebrow. What did he have to do with Europe, his eyes were asking, in this or any other century -?

'You'll address me. The colonel isn't responsible for interrogation. Look here, Captain, we've started out on the wrong foot here. I'll tell you what well do. We'll cut the philosophy — fair enough, it isn't your line, I can understand that — and get down to brass tacks. OK?'

Truck shrugged stonily.

'Well then, about this propaganda machine: we know you can control it. It's in your genes.' He grinned ingratiatingly and repeated, 'Your genes,' He narrowed his eyes, as if that might enable him to spot the actual deformity, there in the bone. 'Captain,' he said, 'I'm empowered to offer you the rank of Hero of the UASR.' His eyes bulged at the thought of it 'Also — wait for it! — immediate honorary professorship in Political Philosophy at Cairo University. New Cairo, that is, of course. What do you think of that?'

It was everything he'd ever wanted, you could see that.

'I think you're a clown.'

'Captain, Captain. You're a spacer. You owe the Zionists nothing. Plenty of the hinterland people are committed to a Socialist Galaxy' — it had been fashionable, a couple of years before the New Music — 'even your wife, Captain. She was once a member of the Party — '

'Oh, shit.' Truck got to his feet, stormed across the room to confront ben Barka. 'I'm sick of this little idiot,' he said. 'Can I go now?'

'Sit down!' yelped the PCO. He danced around in the doorway, fumbling for something in his belt, his nose running horribly.

'No. Look, ben Barka, you don't really have anything in common with this wretched little commissar and his rubbish? You don't really agree with that stuff?'

The colonel blinked once, slowly. Beyond his initial nod, he hadn't once acknowledged the existence of the PCO. Now he brooded on the man's crumpled uniform and great raw ears. He smiled faintly. 'Yes, I think I do.' After a while, 'Yes, I do.' In his eyes, the remnants of an old dream, dissolving wadis, camels, and fellaheen fading into insubstantiality.

'Then you and Alice Gaw make a fine pair. God help you both.'

The PCO had succeeded in hauling out an enormous Chambers gun and was waving it about. 'I'm arresting you,' he shouted, 'in the name of the Peoples of the Galaxy.' Sick and hollow, Truck limped out. 'You'll co-operate. The exigencies of the class struggle demand it!' In the doorway, fumes from the chancy old reactor catching at his throat, Truck stared back over the greasy, bobbing head of his monkey captor. Ben Barka was sitting on the camp bed. Nothing but an old dream. Sand dunes and an old, sold-out dream.

Outside, filled with disgust, he tried to kick the PCO's face in. But the hashishin, who'd been hanging about in the gloom in anticipation of just such a contingency, grinned and threw him down a flight of steps. They were careful not to hurt him much, and he guessed their orders were to treat him decently unless the other side looked like getting hold of him. It was West Central and Nodes all over again.

They put him in the Cowper stove of the furnace. Someone had long ago ripped out the checkerwork, disconnected the blast pipes, and hacked out a crude door about a foot above ground level. What remained was a domed steel shell, all its ducts but one plugged and welded, and that one too high to reach. From it issued a sluggish trickle of warm air lighted by some peculiar inner quality caused by its passage over the reactor fire, so that his breath took on the palest yellow tinge as he mooched about sucking his split lip. He was too galled to care.

If Grishkin's lunatic violation of his innards in the Cathedral of Intestinal Revelation had robbed him of his sense of proportion — what Pater had called his 'fine vulgar iconoclasm' — ben Barka's scruffy little retreat among the rubbish was doing a lot to restore it. He knew a wrecking yard when he saw one, and he remembered the PCO from innumerable hinterland corners: snotty-nosed, one foot in the gutter, leaving small toothmarks on the bone.

It was a pusher's Galaxy all right.

After a bit, he reviewed his situation. His assault on the PCO, however satisfying, had been by nature an exploration; next time, he expected to get the Chambers pistol. He retrieved the knuckleduster from his boot, paced round a few more times — hobbling and cursing — to work the stiffness out of his bruised right arch, then squatted down to wait in a position that would put him behind the door next time it opened.

It stayed shut for nearly three hours.

He worried because he needed darkness, and the dawn must be near. He dozed off, he woke up with a guilty start. His stomach grumbled, his legs developed pins and needles. He recalled the holograms of Howell, and conceived a sudden retrospective lust for sallow Heloise, uncrowned queen of the Aesthetic Asteroid. Grinning into the luteous gloom, be clenched a fist and rubbed the cold steel knuckles against his cheek…

The sides of the Cowper stove boomed faintly as someone outside kicked at the door. He shot to his feet, sweating. He was only partly upright when the door slammed back — grabbed at it for support, found it swinging further toward him as a result, and was shoved painfully into the wall. So much for ambush. Sodding and blinding, he extricated himself and rolled out of the closing gap into the yellow arena -

White light pinned him crouching to the scaly floor like a child caught in the awful act.

'You watch it, spacer,' said a soft voice. 'What you doing in there?'

He sat on his right hand to hide the knuckleduster, blinked.

'Hey,' he whined placatingly, 'that hurts. I was having — ' Flapped his left hand in front of his eyes. The light went out.

'Fetch him here,' ordered the PCO, who'd sensibly sent a couple of commandos through ahead of him. They grinned at one another, pistols dangling negligently from their hard thick fingers. One of them shrugged and advanced.

'You just leave me alone!' pleaded John Truck, cowering away as the brown hand touched his shoulder, so that its owner had to stretch and grab at the last minute. Balance undermined, he swayed. 'Right, you sod!' shouted Truck, brought the knuckles round in a dirty gray arc and hit him in the mouth. Something broke, the Arab's fingers went lax, Truck had hold of the gun before it hit the floor.

'Now,' he said, trembling with relief and fury. He wound his left hand into the hashishin's belt and held the flaccid body up as a shield. Red unsteady light dispelled the gloom as the PCO and the remaining Arab let go simultaneously with their pistols. Lunchtime smells in the Cowper stove.

'No, no,' said the PCO.

'Oh yes,' whispered Truck, shuffling inexorably forward behind the smoldering corpse, 'Oh yes.'

All three of them were on fire when he left the chamber, expressions of horror on their rigid features. What else should he have done? He watched them dispassionately for a moment or two, then, weighed down by more guns than he'd ever owned in his life, ran off into the jungle of railway tracks and junkheaps. Rusty gear trains rolled about under his feet as he went, like the fossil bones of preposterous little animals.

Energy fronts resonated silent and dating from the cliff-faces of the rolling mills; from the convection currents dancing like translucent veils above the mounds of the city came a wicked, sucking roar; hot-air refraction shifted the positions of the known stars, cold winds howled toward the stricken center of it all across the bleak loading platforms. It looked like a dream of arson. It looked like Hell -

He didn't quite know what to do. Dwarfed and stumbling, a gun in each hand and a spare one stuck down the side of his boot, he took to the lanes of shadow beneath the great corroded walls, drawn toward that essential solipsistic djinn thrashing the confines of its magnetic bottle.

Ianthine light fired the lines and pylons of the high voltage system; it limned the Kaldo converters and the vast corrugated sheds of the borax refinery; it spilled like hot glass over Truck's bald, vulnerable skull as he turned to scan the waste behind him, and discovered twenty cruel black figures leaping through the rubbish — a complete fellaheen death-commando, threading the lunatic peep-show flicker in a classic search-and-destroy maneuver.

Ben Barka had decided to cut his losses.

Truck got down on the floor and crawled further into the shadows, shaking. He could see them, but he didn't think they could see him. He rubbed his face into the rust, he bit the inside of his cheek so hard it bled. They'd have found their dead by now, smoking in the Cowper stove. 'Oh Jesus,' he sobbed. He hadn't got a chance.

He fled down a blind narrow walkway, falling repeatedly into troughs and sumps of lukewarm sticky water — at the end of the alley, fetched up against a blank wall of flaking steel — opened his split lip and dropped one of his guns.

Panicked.

'Oh my Christ, my Christ,' staring back, mouth open, bloody-chinned, no way out.

He scrabbled about, discovering rivets.

There was a door.

He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. Spreading his cloak to hide the flare, he fired half a Chambers magazine into the rusty lock; reeled back from the heat with his forehead blistering; stab-kicked the door and dived through it panting and laughing like a madman, reeking of scorch and smoke and death.

He had broken into a gutted pumping station, where a score of small-bore pipelines converged to supply raw organic material to one great conduit fifteen feet in diameter. Most of the transfer valve gear had been ripped out, but a faint odor of partly-processed polymers still haunted the sour air. A shattered inspection window gave access to the conduit: as soon as he had relaxed enough to be able to turn his back on the rapidly cooling door — fairly sure that for a moment the pursuit had gone off in some other direction — he poked his head through it and had a look.

The main stretched away right and left in a slight but perceptible curve, lighted by dim orange bulbs strung from a frayed cable in the ceiling — adopted by the denizens of Junk City as a trunkline for furtive journeys, a rat's highway smeared with cryptic brown graffiti and littered with rubbish. He rested his elbows on the windowsill and wondered if it would get him anywhere. Small drafts fluted through splits in the inner cladding, drying the sweat on his temples.

He was clambering in, and stuff the consequences, when someone came tap-tapping out of the dim fallopian reaches, footsteps quick and purposeful. He ducked back into the pumping station until the noise got very close, then shoved his pistols through the window and hissed, 'Move, and I'll blow you to hell!'

A short, ironical laugh, then a female voice said, 'Go on and shoot'

'What?'

'You'd be doing me a favor, Captain.'

He peered through the window.

It was Angina Seng, all coppery hair and long body. She stood regarding him with a pinched, censorious expression. Once again, he had the feeling that she was fighting a doomed action to prevent her soul evacuating her skull and boiling off into space. The lines around her mouth were deep and sad.

'I can't seem to get rid of you, can I?' she said. 'Are you going to get it over with, or can I go?'

He was amazed to realize that she honestly didn't care. He hauled himself through the window and frowned aggressively. 'I've got a bone to pick with you,' he told her, remembering that he had.

'I've no time, Captain. You'd better shoot, if that's what you feel, because I'm not waiting around any longer. Whatever you feel necessary.'

And she turned on her heel and trudged off, arms folded, head down, breasting some personal hinterland wind.

'Look here — ' He watched her receding shoulders for a minute, glanced at his guns. He felt a bit of a fool. He hurried after her like some mad philosopher chasing the Numenon forever down a gradient of misunderstanding. 'Why do you always treat me like a child?' He complained. 'If you'd leveled with me just once — '

She stopped, swung on him, her eyes blaring and alive for the first time in his experience of her.

'Because you know nothing! Because you understand nothing! Because people like you are always too puzzled and decent to shoot people like me. Because that's what you are, Captain.'

She shrugged.

'Oh, what's the use? Truck, you're a baby: there's always someone shielding you and all the other odd little people like you — if you want me to apologize for your naïvete', then bloody well forget it!'

Off she went again, and this time all he got from her when he caught up was, 'Shouldn't you be running away? They've got half the Arabs in Junk City out looking for you.'

'I was rather hoping you'd help me,' he said diffidently. 'You keep getting me into these things. You've conned me twice and I think you owe me for that.'

She looked weary and compassionate. 'You see?' she said. Then: 'Why should I, Captain, why should I owe you anything?' She looked him up and down, shook her head. 'I see no reason to help you, Captain, no reason at all.'

On the other hand, she did nothing to discourage him; so, despite his armory, he simply followed her. She was familiar, and he couldn't think of anything else to do. Walking at a fair clip, she got about ten yards ahead of him. He could always, he reasoned, shoot her in the back if she turned out to be bait in an ambush. Somehow, he didn't think he'd ever be able to shoot her in the front.

The floor took on a downward slope. Patches of congealed plastic ridged the metal underfoot, trapping little runnels of bitter condensation. Up ahead, there was a ninety-degree bend in the main. He let her go round it, stopped, put his ear to the wall. He was close enough to the reactor to feel its soul in the steel and hear the distant moan of convection currents: but other than that, only moisture dripping from the lighting cable with a sound like tapped porcelain. Angina had stopped moving. She coughed, and shuffled her feet.

Truck checked his pistols, sucked his split lip indecisively. 'Oh shit,' he murmured, and went around the corner like an armored train. There was nothing up there he feared more than what lay behind.

He was in a shadowy alcove where cold stale air licked his face like a sick animal. The conduit terminated a few feet away in a screen of thick wire mesh, into which was set a wicket-gate of the same material. A vague brightness lay beyond it. In the alcove nothing moved but Angina's sharp black silhouette. She was standing with her face pressed up against the mesh, as if trying to see through it.

Truck crouched there sweating and ready to kill something, then relaxed. 'What do we do now, then?' he asked brightly.

'We do nothing, Captain,' staring through the mesh.

'Sorry I spoke.'

He investigated the alcove, rubbing his chin with the end of one of his weapons. 'You might be wrong about me not being able to shoot you,' he said. 'I'm not saying you are — ' There didn't seem to be any other way out. 'If you'll just stand aside,' he said, 'I'll open it for you' — sighting up on the wicket-gate — 'with no trouble at all.'

She gasped, turned away from the grille, an odd complex of fear and yearning in her eyes.

'Don't!'

She stared over his shoulder. Her lips moved, but it wasn't she who whispered eerily into the gloom:

'You don't want to go any further, Captain Truck.'

He was there suddenly, but with a look of permanence, as if he'd been waiting just beyond the periphery of Truck's vision ever since the debacle beneath Carter's Snort. As if once acknowledged, he would never go away again. His emaciated and reptilian body was hung with a pale fawn suit cut in that good twentieth-century fashion; his shoes were of the finest alligator; on his head was a straw panama, bent and grimy at the brim from being pulled down over his eyes. At a glance you could see he belonged to the streets of Egerton's Port, that he'd get you anything you needed: with the end of the longest-running party in the history of the universe, it seemed he'd found his level.

'You aren't a king any more Veronica,' said Truck; narrowing his eyes. 'Don't try and stop me.'

He felt something that might have been sympathy. Chalice Veronica had fallen from grace. He was fading away. What gray cheesy junk flesh he'd once possessed had melted off the bone, which shone through like a lamp behind waxed paper; he was all eyes and resentment, all paranoid jaw and gray stubble; he smelled like an old, old pusher who'd had his hand in the stock cupboard just once too often.

'You're a little fool, Truck,' he hissed, 'and I wish I'd never seen you. It's still a supplier's Galaxy. The King, even in exile, knows things, sees all — Timelines whip the Moment across the Universe like broken hawsers — Intimations input spinal sensors — H signals flicker like heliographs across the spaces of the dyne — I — see — ' He shuddered.

'Ben Barka or General Gaw, what difference can it make to you who owns your callow little brain?' He chuckled. 'I see one of my little dogs has found you again — '

He swung his blunt, shapeless head and — as if using some other sense than sight, some slow junk radar — located Angina Seng, up there rigid by the wicket-gate. Since his appearance, she had developed little muscle tremors; her face was drawn and white, her eyes were fixed on him.

'I want my stuff, Veronica,' she said. 'I want it.'

Veronica smiled at Truck. 'Pardon an old man's sentimentality, Captain. I say "my" little dogs, but of course I really only feed them. Angina liked what I gave her so much that she came with me when the General withdrew her patronage. It was quite lucky for Angina that we both — left — the General at the same time. The same Moment, eh, Angina?' And he rolled his lizard's eyes to show a thin rim of white veined like hairline cracks in ancient china.

'I want my stuff, Veronica, you bastard,' said Angina, and her voice was perfectly empty.

'Oh, my dear, we all want our stuff. But we have to be patient, don't we?'

He took a pace backward into the gloom. Only a ghost, only a thin spirit hanging on, an echo of habits past and a withered kingship under the earth. Truck shot out a hand and grasped the loose wattled skin of his throat. It was like touching a dead, damp leaf. 'What are you doing on Avernus, Veronica?' He felt sick. His fingers trembled with the effort of gripping that awful flesh. Only a ghost: but even in eclipse those old junk pores still oozed some stink of mold and darkness. Yellow teeth snapped at him. Veronica's breath rattled, but his head was already dead.

'I'm the paymaster, Captain. Ben Barka needs me as much as the old cow ever did. They all need what I sell, to keep their agents enthusiastic and faithful. Sometimes, ideology isn't enough. The law, the administrators on both sides, why, they're some of my best customers (I'd say "most regular," but all my customers are that) — '

'What sort of rubbish is this? What's behind that door?' Truck released his grip, flung the eroded bag of bones away from him. It chuckled.

'You're finished, Veronica.'

'Don't knock it until you can do it, my boy.'

He wasn't even trying to get away. He took out a small pewter pillbox and slipped something into his mouth — the merest delicate flicker of a black, saurian tongue. 'The General cut off Angina's supply the day after you refused your services on Sad al Bari, Captain. She's an impatient woman. What could poor Angina do?'

Truck looked at the girl. She had slumped against the mesh, mechanically repeating. 'I want my stuff, I want my stuff.' She hooked her fingers behind the wire and pulled herself upright. Her facial musculature was cracking up, assembling grotesquely inappropriate expressions — a sentimental smile, a port lady's breezy come-on — but her eyes were calm.

'There, Truck: nobody's protecting you now. I go where the junk leads. Can you say you honestly didn't know? It's a rotten Galaxy, and it doesn't belong to you or I. That bastard' — nodding and grinning and gasping at Veronica — 'and the General and ben Barka have it cut up between them. What scraps they leave go to Doctor Grishkin in return for absolution. Politics, religion, and dope: they keep us happy with Hell.

'Veronica, I love you, come in the dark with me and well — Oh, Christ!'

She dashed forward and, before Truck could move, grabbed one of his Chambers guns. She held it in both hands, whimpered, and blew the wicket-gate to pieces.

There was a writhing motion in the gloom. Chalice Veronica cackled madly. 'Down, girl!' He produced something small and black and shot her between the shoulder blades with it. She screamed and fell over, still scrabbling toward the twisted, melting mesh.

Veronica scuttled triumphantly after her. John Truck stepped between them and put a single bolt into Veronica's wet black mouth. The back of the king's head flew off like shell from a rotten egg, but his eyes knew that it's always a pusher's market. Truck stirred the heap of dry reptilian bones with one foot, then knelt beside Angina Seng. There was a hideous, smoking hole, but she was trying to say something.

He turned her over.

She looked up at him, quite lucid; blinked. 'I could have gone for you,' she said. She touched his hand. 'That little guitarist in the Spacer's Rave said you'd eat me. I wonder if you would have?' Blood came out of her mouth. She moaned. Faintly: 'Grow up, Captain. It's time someone helped us all. Get rid of the bastards. Stop avoiding the issue. They've no right to do the things they do to us — '

He thought she was dead. He was crying. About a minute later, she said: 'If you go in there, don't breathe too hard, and don't get close. It's Paraphythium D-20.'

She didn't say anything after that. She'd given him everything she could. It was an act of faith. For some reason, he kept thinking of Ruth Berenici.

He kicked his way calmly through the wreckage of the wicket-gate.

Behind it lay a cylindrical filter tank about thirty feet high. It was chilly and dun. Years of scalding reactor winds had formed the dull laminae on its walls.

There, he discovered about half a dozen people squatting in a semicircle around what appeared to be a bundle of old sacks and wool.

Every so often, one of them would stand up unsteadily, go over and take a deep long sniff at it, then sit down again. He leaned on a wall to watch. None of them took any notice of him. He recognized them from streetcorners and the concrete aprons of spaceports on familiar planets — faces you knew without ever having seen them before.

The membranes of his nose itched.

After a while, moving like an automaton (no more capable of feeling, or so it seemed, than one of Pater's holographic images), he went closer to see what they were sniffing. On went the rite: up, shuffle a few paces, sniff, hold the breath, shuffle back; up, shuffle, sniff, as if Truck wasn't there. In a way, he wasn't.

It was a dying sheep.

The fleece had fallen away from its hindquarters in great lumps, like stuffing from an armchair left to rot in the rain; small red blisters connected by thin raised threads of poisoned epidermal nerves covered the exposed hide where the Paraphythium infection had got to it. It shifted about restlessly, trying to find a comfortable position for its scabby legs, nuzzling its sores. It looked sadly up at him, dull brown eyes running and pained, and he stared dispassionately back. He studied the rapt, revelatory faces of the users, searching for some human distinguishing mark, but they all looked like animals, too.

Starting at the nearest end of the semicircle, he went around and shot them, one by one. They never made a sound. It was like being underwater; quiet, removed.

He went back to the sheep.

It tried to get up and run off, but the time was long past for that.

'Hush,' he sad absently, 'hush.'

He tangled his fingers in the fleece at the back of its neck and gazed for some time into its eyes, its sweet, strange breath warming his cheek. When he stood up and put the gun to its head, light from the burning corpses sent his shadow flickering and huge over the sides of the tank. He regarded the carcass, numb and unthinking. Then he turned his face to the invisible stars and roared wordlessly until the tank rang like the inside of a bell — like the inside of his head — with all his horror and rage.

He pulled the third gun from his boot and ran out of that place, blubbering…

… Paraphythium images of flight and pursuit, fire and steel, ran together like water color in his brain. He'd breathed too deeply of that air, he hardly knew what was happening to him…

Warrens and runways led him inevitably too close to the reactor, pumping and howling and sucking in the night with a rage as diffuse and frustrated as his own. He staggered away from it, whimpering and covering his eyes against the elemental blast… With his cloak on fire, he fluttered through the deep rusting canyons of the City, like a moth in an unbearable cyanic dream. He reasoned desperately with himself, 'It was only a sheep,' but he knew he was just as culpable as the Pusher King. On Morpheus, hadn't he worn the alligator shoes and given the customers their stuff?… He hoped the death-commando would kill him. Twice, they ran him down, spilling like maggots from the great carcasses of the foundries when he was least expecting them, calling to one another in harsh, mechanical voices. The first time, he hid in a culvert like a rat up a drainpipe, promising obscene things to the ghost of Angina Seng if only they would pass him by… The second time, at bay in a shadowy maze of turbine jigs, from head to foot in a black cerement (writhing up like a genie, like smoke from the stacks of the city); it came to his aid with a strange gun. 'Who are you?' he called, dazzled by the splashback. Its head towered above him. Had he shrunk? 'Leave this city,' it advised him, and laughed most sepulchrally. 'Leave this place,' and swept its weapon in a withering arc… But he was lost. He came upon the reactor from another angle. 'No more!' (Trying to cover eyes and ears, blind and deaf.) He braced himself in the teeth of the fifty-knot wind howling into its maw and fired both his guns at it until they were empty. The magnetic bottle ran with spectral colors for a moment, the plasma heaved and raved, but nothing else happened… He decided that if he couldn't kill Junk City, he'd kill ben Barka; went to find him; stalked three or four people who resembled him up and down blind alleys and among swarf heaps; sprang out on each one like a praying mantis, hands hooked. But, 'You're not him! You're not him!' every time. He killed them anyway… He reeled drunkenly through the city, alone. 'Let me out!' he cried, and shook his fist at the blank uncaring face it showed him…