The Golden Globe

ACT 3

"Dovetonsils," I said. "That's D as in Dogberry, O as in Ophelia, V as in Verona, E as in Exeter, T as in Adenoids. Percy Dovetonsils."

There was a short pause.

"T as in what, sir?"

"T as in Titania, O as in Oberon, N as in Nym, S as in Shylock, I as in Iago L as in Elsinore, S as in Shallow. First name Percy."

There was a longer pause.

"Sir, is this some sort of joke?"

A horrible suspicion overcame me and I sat up straighter in my chair, almost spilling my drink.

"Good god," I said. "Am I talking to a human being?"

She was on firmer ground there, though I might have debated the point.

"Yes, sir!" she piped. "It's part of our Service with a Smile policy here at Capitalists and Immigrants Trust. If you only had elected to receive picture as well as sound you would have seen that I've been smiling throughout this transaction... or at least until you started to spell your name."

Good fortune and a dislike of being seen myself during a phone call had spared me the no-doubt-hideous rictus that would pass for a business policy smile at C IT. Imagine sitting at a phone bank and being paid to smile all day as you answer customers' dumb questions. I'd sooner host a perpetual game show. However, the lack of a picture had lulled me into thinking I was speaking to the usual robotic screening program, the first of a normal three or four steps before you contacted an actual human being.

"Please connect me with a machine, at once!" I ordered. There was no response, but I fancied I heard a slight sniff, and wondered if I had caused just the hint of a frown to obscure a few dozen pearly whites at the edges of her corporate-mandated grin.

The problem with humans—if you've ever tried to talk to one over the phone—is they sometimes show imagination at a time when you would least expect it. They make illogical connections, fly off on fanciful tangents. Usually this simply leads to confusion, but now and then it can sow seeds of suspicion that might, if not nipped in the bud, lead to an unexpected truth. If you are engaged in something the least bit dodgy it is better not to take that chance, since truth is the last thing you want to come out.

What I was doing was probably not illegal. I say that because laws seem always to get broader and more restrictive every year. Hardly anyone ever retires a law. You don't hear about laws being unwritten, recalled, allowed to expire. You begin with civil liberties, and after a few hundred years you have a legal system that can't even find liberty, much less protect it. I couldn't afford a lawyer to vet my proposed actions against fifty years of legal encrustation, would not hire one if I could afford it.

But in uncertain times it is usually best to deal with a machine. Machines always play by defined rules. They may be asked to look for odd behavior, but that means somebody must define "odd," and if it can be defined then it's not truly odd. Just as the dealer always hits on sixteen and stays on seventeen, machines in a certain situation behave the same way every time. If you know this, and know at least some of the parameters, you can put the knowledge to good use.

"How may I help you?" The voice was no more mechanical than the real woman's voice had been. I personally think there ought to be a law about that, and I'm not one to support many new laws. I like to know where I stand. "Percy Dovetonsils," I said. "I am an attorney working for the estate of the late Mr. Dovetonsils. We are trying to locate bank accounts hinted at in his will, but not specified."

"We carry no accounts for a Dovetonsils, Percy," the machine said.

"How about Harold Bissonette? Double S, double T."

"We carry no accounts for a Bissonette, Harold."

"Try Flywheel, Wolf J."

The machine had never heard of old Wolf, either, and I broke the connection. I marked off two more possibilities on the grid I had made on a page of creamy-white hotel stationery, and called the next bank on my list.

Long ago I had read a biography of W. C. Fields, the great film comedian from the dawn of the talking-picture era. Fields was not a very nice man, but he was a quirky one. When he traveled, and when he had money, he would stop in small towns and open accounts in local banks. He seemed to enjoy the thought of having emergency stashes squirreled away all over the country. His had been a harsh childhood, he trusted no one very far. If he kept any list of these accounts, no one ever found it, and it was assumed at his death that he had long since lost track of most of them. Their location died with him.

Well, I thought that was just a wonderfully eccentric thing to do. I decided to follow in his footsteps, back in the days when I had more money than I knew what to do with. Everywhere I went I opened small accounts, almost none of them in my own name. I was going to be different from Fields, though. I was going to remember where they all were.

I did remember a few. Those were all long gone.

Sometimes it seems to me that my younger self spent most of his time dreaming up things he could do to make my older self miserable. You ever feel that way? You were twenty, you had the world by the tail. Outlooks were all rosy. It would never occur to you that, by the time you were eighty or ninety or, ahem, one hundred, your worldview would have changed dramatically. That you need not be senile to forget things you did seventy years before. That, in all that time, you would have ample chance to lose your careful notes, both written and mental. At twenty, there is simply no imagining the slings and arrows of outrageous vicissitude.

Or maybe I'm unusual. Maybe I'm a grasshopper and you are all ants, or most of you, anyway. Perhaps your life is in perfect order, everything cataloged, pigeonholed, in its proper place. I used to sneer at that sort of life, and I probably am temperamentally incapable of leading such a life, but it does have its attractions. But how was I to learn frugality, caution, temperance, moderation—all those things so beloved of poor Richard Almanack—the way I was brought up? I never had what you'd call a home until I moved in with Polly and Melina.

In any event, my one attempt at being a good little ant, storing up acorns for a rainy day, was by now far in the past. Most, if not all, of those caches had been plundered years ago. I no longer knew where, or even if, those piles of acorns existed. My careful accounting had come to naught.

I did have one thing going for me, though. I had used a limited number of names, twenty-five in all. I'd chosen them carefully as names unlikely to be inflicted on anyone ever again, yet names I would not forget because they were all old friends of mine.

So now when I first arrive at a place I have not visited in a long time, I spend a few hours idly paging through the listings of financial institutions on the Yellow Screen.

You never know. One day twenty years ago I stumbled onto an account in the name of William Claude Dukenfield. It was one of "my" names, but the money had been deposited in 1935. Somehow, through mergers, takeovers, booms and busts, devaluations, failures and holidays, through the very Invasion of the earth itself, this little account was still tucked away in a bank on Mars that might have been the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of the little Poughkeepsie neighborhood bank where old W.C. had left it, in the midst of a great depression. Still gathering interest. I had no way to get at it, probably wouldn't have tried, anyway. Ironic fact: the original deposit had been two hundred United States dollars. When I found it, inflation and other exigencies had allowed the money to grow to the princely sum of L$239.14. About enough for two days in the hotel I was making my calls from.

"How may I help you?"

The voice was practically identical to the machine voice at the first bank I'd called.

"Is this the computerized answering service of Hamlet Savings and Loan?"

"Yes, it is."

"I'm searching for accounts in the name of Otis Criblecoblis."

"I'm sorry, we carry no accounts in that name."

"How about J. Cheever Loophole?"

"I'm sorry, we carry no—

"Try Eustace McGargle."

"I'm sorry, we—" I hung up. Two down, about sixty or seventy to go.

Why three names? you may be asking. Why not just read off the list of twenty-five names at each bank you call? There was actually no completely logical reason, since I was pretty sure I was doing nothing illegal. But when you have as many outstanding warrants or persons pursuing you as I do, you learn to be cautious. Asking for nonexistent bank accounts was almost sure to raise a red flag somewhere in the bank computer's programming, the electronic equivalent of a teller calling the bank president over to frown dubiously at the check you're trying to kite. I much prefer wide-eyed innocence to the professionally jaundiced eye. Nothing is more wide-eyed than a computer. It does what it is told, and never asks the next logical question. Four was a common number of events to trigger programmed alarms, possibly based on what is known as the Bellman Principle: What I tell you three times is true. Ergo, what I tell you four times might be a load of shit.

That, plus the fact that three is my lucky number.

"How may I help you?"

"Bank of Oberon? I'm searching for accounts in the name of Egbert Souse."

"You're out of luck there." Great. A user-friendly program.

"Then surely you've heard of Hugo Z. Hackenbush."

"Not during this lifetime." Did this bank cater to comedians?

"One last try, shithead. A. Pismo Clam."

"Does the A stand for Ambrose, or Albert?" I sat up straighter. Was I getting a bite?

"Which one do you have?" I asked, cautiously.

"Neither one. I have a William Clam, and a Jake's Clams, though."

"Yeah, well, stick it—" I broke the connection. No use trying to get the last word with a computer. I stood up and stretched, took a sip from the rum and Coke on the telephone desk, then walked to the window and looked out.

Oberon. The Bard's World. My God, what a place.

Just about everything on Oberon is worthy of a postcard. So where does one start? At the beginning, I guess. Actually, a little bit before.

What we call Oberon today is not what we called Oberon when I was a boy. Oberon is the most distant of the Uranian moons, and the second largest. It's smaller than Titania by a few dozen miles, and about a hundred thousand miles farther away from Uranus. It used to be an unremarkable little ball of rock, faintly orange in color.

Like all the outer-planet habitats, it didn't have enough gravity to be of much use other than as a nuisance. Not enough gravity to make a curtain fall properly, to stage a decent sword fight, or to perform classical ballet. This was naturally a cause of some concern to the Oberoni, so they set about finding a way to provide enough gravity for the theater.

Actually, they had a few other reasons that may have counted more heavily than falling theater curtains. But I can dream, can't I?

Research has shown, so I'm told, that the healthiest environment for humans and other Earth-evolved animals is somewhere between Luna's one sixth and Mars's one third. Anything lighter caused Lowgrav Syndrome, which wouldn't kill you but could certainly annoy you a lot, and which was expensive to treat and hold in remission. Anything higher... well, humans were no longer living anywhere with more than 0.5 gravity, and good riddance, as far as I'm concerned. I experienced one gravity in the Trip to Earth centrifuge at Armstrong Park when I was six. We've all seen the effects of one gee in old movies and television. People plod like elephants in molasses. Things fall at a frightening rate. Bodies are bulked up by fighting gravity while the flesh is dragged down from giving in to it. Every inch of skin sags. Some of it is painful, and I left the centrifuge wondering how they could face threescore and ten years of that. Not for me, thank you very much.

There are only four ways of providing a given acceleration of gravity, until some genius finds a way to create it. One is simply to accumulate the necessary mass. Thought was given to altering the orbits of all the five largest Uranian moons, smashing them together. That would have been fun, don't you think? But it wouldn't have provided as much gravity as the engineers were seeking, and besides, it would have taken forever for the resulting mass to cool enough to be useful.

Then there is Pluto's Solution, which I guess is technically Method 1A, since it also involves accumulating mass, but it certainly feels like a different solution. Over a century and a half people have been venturing out into the really distant spaces—so far that Brementon and the sun look like next-door neighbors—bringing back tiny black holes. I mean really tiny. Smaller than atoms, they say, though I find that unlikely. There are now thousands and thousands of those little black holes orbiting near the core of Pluto, through solid rock that presents no more obstacle to them than interstellar space. There's enough of them in there now to provide about one third of a gravity on the surface. Those little suckers pull hard!

One day the black holes will suck all the mass of Pluto into what would be, so I read, a tiny-to-small black hole (the large ones contain whole galaxies, if you can believe that). There's no question this will happen. The debate is about how long it will take. Prevailing opinion is at least a million years, so you may not want to unload your real-estate holdings. Of course, some scientists claim it will happen next Tuesday. Take that into your vacation plans.

It's the sort of predicament that appeals to Plutonians, a fatalistic bunch. They get a kick out of telling newly arrived tourists about the latest catastrophic prediction.

The Oberon engineers rejected the Pluto Solution, mostly because of the almost unimaginable expense and the time it would take. Black holes are very rare, and cost the planetary income of some asteroids. They are not labor-intensive, and one hoped-for side effect of the Gravity Project was putting a lot of people to work, jazzing the economy.

And I suspect they decided to wait a few centuries, see if Pluto did fall into a black hole.

The third and fourth ways are also related, and don't involve actual gravity but the illusion of gravity. If a spaceship accelerates at a steady rate, it will seem just like real gravity to an observer inside the ship. Einstein noted that no experiment done inside the ship could distinguish between "real" gravity and the force of acceleration. If you're wondering how I, a mathematical dunderhead, know all this stuff, it's simply that I had to memorize great swatches of it as dialogue when I played the old windbag in Einstein and Marx, the techo-philosopho-porno extravaganza you've never heard of because it played three times before going to a richly deserved extinction. ("Ken Valentine manages to bring some much-needed humor to the role of Albert. But this will only appeal to communist theoretical-physicist necrophiles. There must be two of them in the system, maybe three. Let them have it.—The Phlegethon Phlogiston)

There are several insurmountable hurdles to using method number three for "residential" gravity. For one thing, your residence would spend most of its time moving like a bat out of Pluto. After a few months (weeks? Do the math yourself), you'd be moving near the speed of light and time contraction would be a problem. Well, then why not accelerate twelve hours out, turn around, and accelerate twelve hours back? Oddly enough, that would work, though the expense would probably be prohibitive. It would avoid the other problem of constant acceleration, though: the fact that we have yet to produce a means of propulsion that can operate indefinitely, at any useful thrust. When you got home, you could refuel.

One of the many unlikely propositions I have sold in a lifetime of selling was based on that idea. We set up a Big Store, selling shares in a company that was "right on the edge of a breakthrough!" in the field of light-speed travel. The dodge was to put your money in the bank, get on the ship, and return a few hundred years later to reap the compound interest. The trip would only be a few months subjective time. Brilliant! Of course, we were the bank. And I already mentioned what happened to W. C. Fields's bank account. But you'd be surprised how easy a proposition it was to put over.

So now we come to the fourth method, or 3A, depending on how you apply the rules. This is the wheel, or the bucket on a rope.

Put some water in the bucket and whirl it around your head. The water doesn't spill out. Magic! Actually, centripetal force, which is a constant acceleration toward the center of a circle.

If you build a wheel in zero gee and set it spinning, you can walk around on the inside of that wheel just as if you were in real gravity. If you want to be heavier, you spin the wheel faster. Slow it down for less gravity.

Make the wheel very large....

We've been building structures like this since humans went permanently into exile in deep space. The asteroid belt, the lunar Trojan points L4 and L5, the Jupiter and Saturn Trojans, J4 and J5 and S4 and S5, all are thick with wheels like this, or more often, cylinders. Up until the inception of the Oberon Gravity Project the largest of these artificial worlds was about sixteen miles in diameter.

The Gravity Project proposed a wheel one thousand miles in diameter.

To make a leap like that you need a significant new technology, or a major breakthrough in an old one. The Oberoni had a little of both.

When I had last come through about twenty years before, Oberon II had looked like this:

(—o—)

The O was the hub of the wheel-to-be, hollow in the center. If you were building an interplanetary Conestoga wagon that was where you'd put the axle. The long lines were the first pair of a proposed twelve spokes of the wheel. The two little arcs at the end were all that had been built so far of the outer rim of the wheel, the place where people would live and work.

Today it looked like this:

Four more spokes finished, and two separate portions of wheel arc. Each spoke was five hundred miles long. Each arc had reached a length of about six hundred miles. It looked like the project was half through but it was actually further along than that. You learn as you go, and getting started was much tougher than getting finished. They expected to wrap the whole thing in ten more years. That is about half a mile of rim every day. Don't ask me how they do it. I've stood at Edge City and watched the work, and I still don't know.

Oddly, a thousand-mile wheel turning once an hour produced just about the 0.4 gravity the engineers had in mind. From Luna, with a decent telescope, you could tell time by Oberon II. And since the diameter was one thousand miles the circumference was π thousand miles: 3,141.592654 miles. That led to the first of a long line of disparaging nicknames during the early construction: Pi in the Sky. But nobody was laughing now.

"Yeah, whaddaya want?"

"Is this the computerized answering service of Oberon National?"

"You got a problem with that?"

"I got a problem with your tone of voice."

"Fuck you. You dialed the aggressive-response number. Hold on, asshole, I'll connect you with obsequious response, if that's all you can handle. Good afternoon! I hope I can be of service.

I took a deep breath. Folks, is modern science wonderful, or what?

"Checking for an account in the name of Elmer Prettywillie."

"I am so sorry. We carry no such account."

"Then surely you've heard of S. Quentin Quale."

"I am devastated to inform you that I've made no such acquaintance."

"Well, you must know Linus Spaulding. Captain Linus Spaulding."

"Well... There is an account for the Linus Pauling Foundation."

"I'll bet it's right next to Jake's Clams. No, Spaulding. Captain Spaulding. The African explorer."

"Quel dommage. I am devastated."

Christ. When programmers have nothing better to do, they dick around with stuff like that. And what's worse, people use them. I'm told it got started with cutesy answering machine messages, back at the dawn of the Electronic Age. I wish it had stayed there.

If I were an extraterrestrial tour guide bringing a shipload of Betelgeusan caterpillar people for five days and four nights in the quaint little Sol System, I'd put Oberon II and its environs in the top-three places of Things to See.

Actually, maybe it would look like a primitive log cabin to the caterpillar people. Maybe they'd want to swap beads and trinkets and planet-busting bombs for our native handicrafts or buy a few million slaves. But for my money, you can't beat the Uranian system.

Uranus has rings. Nothing like the gaudy gold bands around Saturn, but impressive in their own, more subdued glory. And because the axis of Uranus is so far askew from the plane of the other planets, you get a great bull's-eye view of them as you approach.

Uranus has moons. Five major ones, all different colors, all showing a disk as you move closer. Then dozens and dozens of smaller ones, looking like very bright stars.

Uranus has Oberon II, which I've already described, but which cannot be easily grasped unless you have seen it grow from an odd X in the sky into the most outrageous object mankind has yet built. The hub alone is larger than anything else man-made in space.

Uranus has Oberon I, the original moon. If you are lucky, your ship can come very close to it on the way in, and it looks wrong. Red-orange streaked with black and light brown and cream, it looks like a family-size pepperoni, black olive, and anchovy pizza, the sort that might be delivered to a family living at the top of a beanstalk. But they've already been eating it. A hundred years ago Oberon was reasonably round. Not anymore. Great gouges have been torn from it, a hundred miles wide and deep. Oberon is being cannibalized to provide the raw materials for building Oberon II. Down there on its surface Oberon has become a vision of hell, with mining robots the size of ocean liners chomping their way through veins of ore, and with plants transmuting stuff we don't need into stuff we can't do without. The dark side is aglow with the terrible fires of these operations. They plan to use it all up, every grain of sand, and then move on to Ariel. But most of all, Uranus has tailings.

For the first century after the Invasion, there was little of organized government beyond the orbit of Mars. There were plenty of people. Just no government. Very few rules other than the ones you enforced yourself, and such rules tend to be only things that matter to you as an individual. And only those things that matter to you now. The environs of Uranus and Neptune were settled and developed by the rough-and-ready breed that always gravitates to the frontier. On Earth there were gold miners, buffalo hunters, trappers, and eventually farmers when the frontier was the American West. Later, in the Brazilian rain forests, it was lumbermen, miners, then slash-and-burn farmers. All of them despoiled the environment. There was nobody to tell them not to, and besides, there were zillions of square miles of wilderness. What's all the fuss about, amigo?

At Uranus, it was miners. I'm sure they'd heard of the environmental disasters of Old Earth, but why should they worry about that? There were no buffalo to be driven to extinction, no native peoples to evict and practice genocide on, no tropical forests to turn into arid Saharas. There's nothing out here but rock, Lord love you! How can even the most rapacious businessman fuck up a rock?

The answer was obvious, even when the destruction was going on, so nobody mentioned it, or if they did, they were sure no problems would be evident for thousands of years. The reality took less than fifty. Finally the mining companies were losing so many ships that something had to be done. They changed their mining practices, but that was far from enough.

Tailings, as defined on Old Earth, was that monstrous pile of crap you can see sitting beside the ore refineries in old photographs. Tailings was what you had left after you'd taken out what you were digging for. In gold and diamond mines, that could be 99.9% of what you dug up. But ugly as it was, on Earth, when you were through with a bucket of rock, the tailings just sat there, seldom harming anybody. The big deal was the air pollution produced by the refining process, or the contamination of water that ran off the pile of waste. At Uranus, and Neptune, things were different.

Don't imagine this mining was done by grizzled old desert rats leading space donkeys at the end of a rope, pickaxes in hand. You think mining, you visualize either that, or men with soot-blackened faces riding a cart down the shaft of a coal mine. The reality of mining back on Old Earth was usually different from that. There was strip mining, in which the topsoil and everything else was scraped away with bulldozers until the coal seam was reached. There was placer mining, which involved leveling fair-sized mountains with streams of high-pressure water. And there was open pit mining, which depended on blasting away entire cliffs of virgin rock. The easiest, quickest, cheapest way to mine the Uranian moons was by blasting. They used plastic for the smaller veins, mini-nukes for the major digging.

Because of the negligible surface gravity of even the largest moons, each of these explosions hurled thousands, millions of rocks into space. The rocks varied from no larger than a grain of sand up to some fairly hefty boulders. Up into the sky and... gone. They never fell back to the ground. Some ended up in orbit around one of the moons, others took up every variety of orbit around Uranus itself. The mining companies had no problem with this. Every chunk of useless rock that achieved escape velocity was a chunk of rock that wouldn't have to be shoved out of the way to get to the valuable ores. It just vanished into the blackness, and good riddance.

Actually, no. The stuff was gone, but far from forgotten.

A certain small percentage of debris achieved Uranus-escape velocity, and could more or less be ignored. An even smaller portion went solar-escape, and was even less of a worry. But the great bulk of all that junk took up orbits that crisscrossed the space lanes from every direction, and usually at an alarming relative speed. A grain of dust could leave a pit the size of your fist in the foam insulation that covered the hulls of most ships. Something the size of a pea could ruin your whole day, punching right through the thin skin and entering the life support or engine as a burst of blue-hot plasma. With luck, you might have time to patch and repair. Anything bigger than an apple might as well be an atomic bomb.

There were an estimated six hundred trillion apples in orbit around Uranus and its major moons. That sounds horrific until you realize the Uranian system is about fourteen quintillion cubic miles. That's one apple for each twenty-two thousand cubic miles—one heck of a lot of nothing, with a rock lurking somewhere. Which sounds great, until you realize that's a cube only twenty-eight miles on a side. Now add in the fact that most ships are themselves several miles long, quite a large target, and on approach and departure will pass through many millions of cubes that size. If that doesn't make you squirrelly, nothing will.

Not to worry. Sparky's on the job!

The Oberon Chamber of Commerce and Tourist Bureau claims that, left to itself, the situation would result in one major hit for every ten thousand trips. That figure is in great dispute, but it really doesn't matter, since the situation has not been left to itself. Each ship that enters this solar pinball field carries good radar and good lasers, and fries an average of six rocks on the trip in and out. Most of those would, of course, never have troubled the ship, but ship's captains hate tailings with a mighty passion. They never let one go.

This would actually be enough to reduce ship/tailings encounters to one every few decades. But it's not enough for the Oberoni, who hate tailings even more than captains do. For one thing, they are a hazard to the great structure of Oberon II. For another, they give the system a terrible black eye in the minds of the traveling public, one hit per decade or not. So the Great Wheel bristles with radars and lasers, which clear a thousand rocks an hour... or was that per second? Go look it up. It's a bunch.

And that's still not enough for the fifteen moons of the Uranian League: Oberon, Titania, Umbriel, Ariel, Miranda, Peasblossom, Cobweb, Mustardseed, Pyramus, Thisbe, Snug, Bottom, Flute, Snout, and Moth. (I once met a fellow who hailed from Bottom; he said his people called themselves Bottom-dwellers, but the neighbors, naturally, referred to them as Assholes. I always wondered what inhabitants of Snug and Snout were called.) The League aims to clean up the system in a few centuries, and their main weapon is a genengineered cyborg critter called a snark.

You're unlikely to see a snark during your trip to Uranus. Though they number in the billions, they're not very big and they cover a lot of space. (Spacers believe sighting one is very bad luck.) But they all look like lengths of pipe, ranging from a few feet long up to about fifty feet. They have gossamer "wings" that they spread to soak up solar radiation. They have radar eyes and a system that generates gas for propulsion: hydrogen + oxygen = bang! They survive on a meager diet of ice and rock, which they get by dipping into the rings. They are alive, semi-intelligent, self-reproducing, and their mission in life is to destroy tailings. They drift, ever-alert, conserving their strength by using their thrusters only at orbital points where it can be used most economically, like eagles soaring on a desert thermal. When they spot a rock, they vaporize it.

Like most perfect solutions, the snarks revealed a few problems not long after they were let loose. One toasted a group of seven spacedivers during the first month postrelease. A viral program had to be devised and broadcast on the wavelength they used to talk to one another, making sure they only attacked objects smaller than a basketball. Anything larger would be reported to human agencies which would track it down and dispose of it.

And a few decades after that they began showing up at Neptune, Saturn, Jupiter, all the related Trojan points, and the asteroid belt, where they were about as welcome as rabbits in Australia. But they did no real harm.

I mention all this for two reasons. One is that, during the fifth season, Sparky found an injured snark and nursed him back to health. B.J. the Snark became one of the most beloved members of the Gang, along with Toby the Dog, sometimes outselling Sparky in action-figure totals. Of course, B.J. had a friendly face—real snarks have nothing that looks like a face—and had no trouble flying around inside municipal pressure, which would have made a real snark helpless as a butterfly in a blender.

The other reason is to explain the glorious, continuous fireworks show surrounding Oberon II as my ship began her final approach. The black sky was alive with a thousand points of scintillating light, light that was all the colors of the spectrograph as the mostly sand-sized particles were vaporized, announcing their chemical composition in their final seconds, to anyone with the knowledge to read the colors.

I didn't have that knowledge, but who cares?

It was even more beautiful than I remembered it.

"Is this Hank's Bank?"

"Yes, you have—"

"Automated answering service?"

"That's right, you have—"

"Looking for an account in the name of Otis B. Driftwood."

"We have no—"

"Cleopatra Pepperday?"

"We have no—"

"T. Frothingwell Bellows?"

"We have no—"

"So long."

Three more down. It was looking like a losing proposition.

I wish I could say I had time, leisure, and the temperament to enjoy the approach to Oberon II. If you don't like fireworks, there are also the holoboards, which we started picking up while still a thousand miles out. Miles on a side, they trumpet the allures of the big hotels and casinos and shows, with more glitter per square foot than anyplace since Old Las Vegas.

In reality, I had only two things on my mind. My stomach, and my bowels.

I had been awake almost continuously for the previous week, having stretched the deadballs as far as I could. I had grown a beard, and my toenails looked like pruning hooks. There are 168 hours in a standard week. Ten thousand minutes. I had spent every one of them thinking about food.

I had eaten the last of my provisions. I had licked the wrapping paper and cardboard, then I ate the cardboard. Then I ate the paper. I chewed on rags, hoarded my last ten sticks of chewing gum like some wild-eyed troll at the bottom of a well. I hate to admit this, but several times I thought about Toby, snuggled safe and warm only a few feet beneath me. I began to wonder if he'd taste like chicken.

They say that historical fasters like Gandhi and Hornburg eventually didn't feel much in the way of hunger. That's what they say, but you couldn't prove it by me. It only got worse, hour by hour, and when I thought it couldn't possibly get any worse, it did. Then it got worse again.

There was really only one thing to distract me from my hunger, and that was the state of my lower digestive tract. Every ounce of high-nutrition food I'd eaten since the trip began was down there now, a bolus about the size and shape of Phobos and twice as hard. It was going to take surgery to pass it, I felt sure, and the medico had better go in with a sharp pickax and plenty of dynamite.

So pardon me if I sort of skip lightly over the arrival (thousands of ships at least as large as mine, floating inside a vast cylinder spangled with the light from a billion portholes), the transfer (swarms of robot tugs no bigger than park squirrels detaching each cargo pod, reading its destination, then jetting off toward the correct bay like ten thousand maniacs charging for a front-row seat at a Motomania Show), and my exit from the Pantechnicon and subsequent reentry into public pressure (my spine was trying to form some unusual letter—Q or Z, I think—and my legs promised never to be straight again). When I could walk I looked briefly, with little enthusiasm, at the cargo pod Ukulele Lou had rejected at Pluto. All I could determine was that whatever had been inside was spoiled, for sure. Then I had to step lively as a big cargobot plucked the damaged pod from the line and took it off somewhere, presumably to fill out quintuplicate insurance forms. I couldn't pick out the pod Lou had escaped to. It might have been delivered to a bay clear on the other side of the hub for all I knew. I wished him luck again, and found the exit to public corridors.

Thirty seconds later I was devouring the mother of all hamburgers, the National Gall'ry, the Garbo's sal'ry, the Camembert of hamburgers. Actually, it was a MacVending 15¢ Microwave Special, dab of ketchup, dab of mayo, hold the pickle, lettuce, purple Bermuda onion, beefsteak tomato, sprouts, mustard, slice of Cheddar cheese and everything else you might think of, but by then I was ready to lick dried soda pop and crushed peppermints off the auditorium floor... and like it. So I shall always treasure that burger.

I ate two more just like it, hurried to the bathroom and threw them all up, went back outside, and ate another that seemed likely to stay down. Then I sought out the nearest Minute Surgery franchise and had someone take care of the other problem. I promised you I would skip over that part, and I will, though I did take note of some of the medico's expressions of astonishment and merriment, and some of my own caustic replies for possible use in my next Punch and Judy show.

I shall similarly give short shrift to the most glorious meal I have ever eaten. I would gladly spend several hours describing it, which is about the time I spent eating it, but my powers of description would surely fail me. It was, after all, simply good, solid, restaurant food. There were no hummingbird livers or ocelot's tongues or jellied kumquat tidbits. Nothing exotic at all, really. A big steak and mashed potatoes and corn, stuff like that, followed by most of a cherry pie and a pint of ice cream. It wasn't the preparation that made it taste so wonderful, it was the special sauce starvation provides. And it didn't take three hours to eat because it was a trencherman's groaning board. I just took the time to savor every bite. You should try that sometime, though I doubt you could ever experience my intense delight unless you'd gone that long without eating.

Refueled, reamed out, beginning to feel a reasonable approximation of a human being, I found my way to the freight offices and reclaimed the baggage that until recently had been my home. I glanced at the telltales that showed Toby was alive and well and deflated the dome. Gad! Had I really spent three months in there? The air that came whistling out said it had been at least that long. Whew! Did I smell like that? Probably.

I'd been meaning to go direct to the elevators, but took the time to check into a coin-op shower 'n shave. I came out feeling, if not exactly ready to whip the world, at least ready to go a few rounds with it.

Normally I wouldn't spend much time describing an elevator ride. But on Oberon II, nothing is quite like it is on other planets, and elevators are one of the most different.

Oh, and I'll drop that "Oberon II" business right now. I quickly realized that, in the time I'd been away, Oberon II had become simply, Oberon. What we used to call Oberon, the rocky moon, was now called Old Oberon. It made sense. There were a few thousand holdouts still living on Old Oberon, and a few tens of thousands of demolition miners and so forth, but as the moon began increasingly to resemble a rotten apple with big bites taken out of it even those few residents would have to move.

I remembered some of the grand old theaters of Old Oberon: the Palace, the Olivier, the Streep, the Chicago, and wondered if any of them were still standing in the gloomy airless rubble. Not to worry. All of them, and many more, plus a great variety of other structures had been plucked bodily out of the path of the marauding bulldozers. Most of them were sitting in mothballs at the Ob4 Trojan point, waiting for enough of the rim to be built to support an historical disneyland, the first to re-create a time since the Invasion, to be known as (guess what) Old Oberon. If all these New, Old, II, and whatever Oberons have you a bit confused, join the club. And don't worry about it.

Elevators. First, stop thinking in terms of a box that opens and closes and moves up and down in a shaft. Now, follow me... and watch your step as you board, please....

"The Noon elevator will be departing from Level 20, Concourse B, at 9:00 A.M.," the announcer's voice said. "That is in ten minutes' time. The Noon elevator will be leaving promptly at nine. All aboard, please."

So already this elevator is different, right? In fact, Noon elevators departed every hour on the hour, twenty-four hours a day. Only here, Noon was a destination as well as a time. It's a source of great confusion in communication, but it's solidly entrenched by now, and the Oberoni don't seem to mind it.

The huge partly finished clock face that is Oberon seen from space is the original Twelve and Six spokes, Twelve being flanked by spokes going to Eleven and to One, Six being between Five and Seven. Got it? The one designated as the twelve o'clock position is known as Noon Arc, and the other is Six Arc. People from Twelve are called Nooners. People from Six are called Aussies. I don't know why.

I boarded with plenty of time to spare, found a seat, and strapped in. I spent my time looking out the window until the hatch was sealed. The elevator was only half full, on this level, anyway.

The deck under my feet began to flash in pale blue letters: FLOOR FLOOR FLOOR. A bell sounded, and I sank gratefully into my chair as the car accelerated. Nice to be back in some gravity again.

"All clear," came a voice, and most of the people around me unbuckled and got up. So did I. The acceleration was mild, and didn't last for long. It was quickly followed by another period of weightlessness. The whole trip would be like that.

An elevator moving up and down the spoke of a spinning wheel has some difficult engineering feats to accomplish during the journey. During my first trips, when the wheel was new and consisted only of Twelve and Six, the elevator car was filled with seats mounted on gimbals, so the passengers could swing into any attitude, depending on where the force was coming from at the time. This was logical, but very boring. Stewards would escort you to and from the bathroom, if you were unlucky enough to have to go. I don't even want to try to describe those except for one little horror you can ponder at your leisure. Imagine standing at the toilet, answering nature's call, when suddenly the stream is splashing against the wall, then the ceiling. This happened to me when the gimbal got stuck. I imagine it would be even worse for women.

Now they had a new type of car. What it had to do was quickly and smoothly adjust to acceleration and deceleration, and to transform itself from a weightless environment to a 0.4 gee environment during the length of the trip.

There is no way I could describe all the ingenious dodges the engineers did to pull this off. If that was all they did, it would be impressive enough. But the car also had to be able to start and stop during the trip, and it had to deal with the angular force of Oberon's rotation. Just how this works is far beyond me, but you can see how the turning motion of the spoke would result in gradually increasing weight. It's called, I think, the Coriolanus Force, though why they should name it after him is beyond me. It produces a ride that even seasoned spacers sometimes find hard to take.

I was thinking of taking the elevator—the internal elevator—up to another level when the bell sounded again. A wall—I was pretty sure it had been the "ceiling" when we started—began to flash FLOOR FLOOR FLOOR. The wall I was pretty sure had been the FLOOR FLOOR FLOOR when I sat down now had no chairs attached to it. I couldn't think where they had gone; stolen while my back was turned, no doubt. But being only "pretty sure" of one's location and attitude was a common experience in zero gee, so I didn't worry about it. I was reassured when chairs began sprouting from the new FLOOR FLOOR FLOOR, some of them with sleeping people already strapped in. I kicked over to one, turned my feet to touch the FLOOR³, and felt the weight return to me gradually. Which meant we were slowing down again already, right? Well, it would seem so, but from inside the elevator it was hard to tell just what was happening. I felt a moment of nausea when we abruptly went weightless again—meaning we were now motionless?—and felt that superb lunch turn a cartwheel in my stomach. But the urge to purge went away. I've always had good space legs.

If you think you have good equilibrium as well, the Noon elevator is a good place to give it an acid test. Many a traveler have been humbled by the constantly shifting tides of the trip. The Oberoni call the condition C-sickness. About a quarter of the passengers were wearing Chuck-O-Laters, basically heavy-duty barf bags that strap over your face like a gas mask, with a constant suction and replaceable trap. In spite of them and in spite of the Herculean efforts of cleaning robots, the Noon elevator always smells faintly of vomit.

Soon we were under way again—a new FLOOR, with new people sleeping in new chairs—and I took the elevator up six floors to the casino. That trip was a tummy-twister in itself.

What a delightful place the casino was. I've seen craps played in weightlessness, and in one-sixth gee, and 0.4 gee. But never had I seen craps tables and roulette wheels that had to quickly change from one state to the other. The place was a blur of motion and a haze of smoke and flashing lights, and it seemed every ten minutes or so it would all reorient itself, the croupiers would put away the gravity dice and wheels and break out the zero-gee stuff. It was fascinating to watch. Soon I was hopelessly disoriented, but it hardly seemed to matter.

I spent the next hour on a tour of the various levels. There were staterooms, sleeping berths, six restaurants, a carnival and game rooms for children, an infirmary, and movie theaters. No pool, though. The Oberoni engineers were not quite up to that one. And no legitimate stage.

The trip is five hundred miles. The elevator makes it in an average of five hours. It would do it a lot faster but for the constant stops and starts needed to avoid collision with the spiders. I wanted to see one. A steward told me they usually encountered one close enough to see, and directed me to the forward observation bubble. It was the first place I'd been to that gave me a clear view of the massive spoke itself, like a column of ice five miles thick. It dwindled in the distance, where the wide, bright band of the Noon Arc could be seen. A single rail mounted on the outside of the spoke was our guideline. To each side of it I could see huge pipes, wires, and mysterious structures, but never enough of them to spoil the clean, perfect line of the spoke itself, pure and pristine as the swooping cable of a suspension bridge.

I knew the cable was not made of ice, but that's what it looked like. Bright white in color, with a dull surface, crisscrossed with thousands of lines like ice-skater's tracks on a measureless rink.

Spider silk. Trillions and trillions of strands of spiderweb.

That was the breakthrough that had enabled the building of Oberon II. They had found a way to produce massive quantities of the strongest material known to man. As it so often turns out to be, the solution was obvious.

Build a bigger spider.

We stopped several times during the first hour, for no reason I or anyone else in the dome could see. I was starting to get discouraged, because I knew the largest spiders never went to the high-gee environments from about a third of the way down the spoke. Lower than that and their legs could not support the weight of their bodies.

"Some of the first experiments on animals in weightlessness were done on spiders," someone to my left said. I turned to look at her. She had not been in that chair when I sat down. Believe me, I would have noticed.

"Is that right?"

"Back in the twentieth century," she said. "They wanted to find out if they'd spin webs in zero-gee." She was lovely. Heart-shaped face, green eyes, a slender figure.

"Did they?" I asked.

"They built very strange webs."

"Not as strange as this one, I'll bet."

"Probably not. My name is Poly." She held out her hand, and I took it.

"No kidding? I knew a Polly, once."

"And don't mention Polly and Sparky, from that old kids' show. Everybody does that. It's short for Polyhymnia."

I admit I was taken aback for a moment, but her expression told me she had no idea who she was talking to. Boy, couldn't I have given her a shock? But I quickly recalled the name on the passport I was using—one I had paid good money for in the back alleys of Pluto. So she'd never know.

"I'm Trevor," I said. "Trevor Howard."

"And I'm just Polyhymnia, for now," she said.

"That name rings a bell...."

"One of the Muses."

"I was going to say Graces."

"There are only three of them. There are nine Muses."

"So you come from a large family?"

She laughed. "Only four, so far. But you're right, we're all named for Muses. Mother thought we should get into the arts."

"Polyhymnia must be a singer," I ventured.

"Sacred song, to be exact."

"And are you?"

"Not hymns. But music is my racket."

I made a sour face. "That one's old as the hills."

"So's that expression. Where are these hills, anyway?"

"Don't ask me. I'm from Luna."

There was a little more banter like this. Basically we were both trying to decide if a temporary berth was in order, neither in too big a hurry to make up our minds. I learned she was a violinist.

"With an orchestra?"

"Someday. Right now I mostly work in the theater pit. Utility string hacker. But I'm available for square dances, too."

"You're in the theater? That's great. I've spent some time on the stage, myself."

"You know, I thought your face looked vaguely familiar. Maybe you were in a show I played in. We don't get much chance to look at the actors, you know. Our backs are usually to them, and we're down so low."

"It's possible," I said, dubiously. "But this is my first trip to Oberon in about twenty years."

"I guess not, then. I've never been out of the system."

We were hedging around the issue of age. It's not polite to ask, and for my money, it's not good form to let it bother you. In this era when not many people look much over thirty, some of us are better than others at estimating. I'm usually pretty good, and I had her pegged for mid-twenties, both from body attitudes and gestures and from the fact that she was looking to climb up the ladder in the music world. After you've reached sixty or so, you stop thinking things are going to change a great deal.

A difference of seventy-five years can be a problem, if you let it be. I try not to let it. If she was fifty or so, there would be no generation gap. After the fifties, we're all more or less in the same generation.

I asked her where she lived and she said Six Arc. But her job was at Eleven, Wednesday through Sunday. It meant sleeping on a sofa at a friend's place and a twice-weekly twelve-hour commute.

"I've got a cute little apartment at Seven," she said, "but I only see it on my days off. With the housing situation the way it is, I don't dare give it up. To go to work I have to take a light train to Six, catch the Six elevator, the hub shuttle to the Noon elevator, down to Noon, and a heavy train to Eleven. The actual distance from my home to my job, as the vacuum-breathing crow would fly, is only about eight hundred miles. The route I take is about fifteen hundred miles. The Rim Express does the trip in forty minutes, but who can afford that?

This all had my head spinning a bit, to tell the truth. I finally had to sit down, later, and sketch it out. Draw a clock with only eleven, twelve, and one at the top, and five, six, seven on the bottom. Forget about the hands; the clock itself is turning. Clockwise. A train moving against the spin is a light train, since the faster it goes the lighter you feel. A heavy train is one moving spinward, with the spin, thus adding its velocity to the speed of the turning wheel. You get heavy. When the wheel is finished all but the most local trains will travel antispinward. No trip will be longer than about forty-five minutes.

"Aren't there elevators from Seven and Eleven—"

"And One and Five?" she finished for me. "It would save me a few minutes of travel time, but it doesn't make sense, economically. Elevators will be built on Three and Nine spokes, when they're finished. On that great, glorious day. Golden Spike Day. Buy your tickets now."

"Golden Spike?"

"After the American Transcontinental Railroad. They drove a golden spike where the trains from the east met the rails from the west. Besides, there's not a whole lot of commuters like me. Not a whole lot of traffic at all between the Sixers and the Mad Dogs."

Feeling a little like a straight man, I said, "Mad Dogs?"

"Sure. They aren't Englishmen, and they go out in the Noonday sun."

"I get it."

"They call us Aussies, after the old penal colony back on Earth."

"I get the feeling there's not a lot of love lost there."

She made a dismissive gesture. "Most of the government is at Noon. The bulk of white-collar workers live there, bureaucrats, agencies. Six is more working-class. They say the two arcs are growing apart, politically and culturally. We're already as different as Mirandans and Arielites. Before long we're going to be as distinct as East and West Germans were, hundreds of years ago, before they reunified.

I had no idea what she was talking about, but rather than pipe up with "Germans?" I just nodded my head wisely. That usually works, and it did this time, too, with a little help from a spider the size of a brontosaurus.

The elevator slowed to a stop again, and when our chairs reoriented themselves we could see something large and black in the distance.

"It's a D-9 Motherspinner," Poly said, pointing at it.

"That's the big ones, right? I mean, I hope so. I don't like to think of an animal much bigger than that." She nodded, and we watched it approach our capsule.

It was hard at first to make out just what I was seeing, or to realize how huge it really was. It's always a problem in space, with no references. Here, the reference points I could see were already so outlandish in size that at first it seemed the arachnid was really no larger than a big horse. Then it got closer. Oh, my, an elephant, maybe? Then it got closer again, and the light got a little better. Jesus, at least a brontosaurus.

The captain of our elevator (that still sounds weird to me, like the general of our sidewalk) threw a light on it for us. It didn't help as much as you'd think, because the creature was such a deep, perfect shiny black. Its carapace didn't reflect light so much as it reflected highlights, like chrome trim. I'm sure you could shave by looking at its skin.

"Vacuum-proof, of course," Poly said. "It has some beetle genes in it."

"Right," I said. "Cross a beetle with a battleship, and there you go."

"My father works a D-9," she said, proudly, pointing at something on the bug's back.

"My god!" I said. "That's a man. Is that your father?"

"No, he works on the new Eight spoke, just getting started on that one. And that's not Miss Dixie."

It took me a moment to realize she was talking about her father's D-9 Motherspinner. I was still taken aback by the man riding the eight-legged behemoth. Until that moment I had not known they were piloted.

"Miss Dixie," I muttered.

"All Motherspinners are female," Poly said.

And those who ride 'em, much braver than I, I decided.

The rider was in a pressurized box, like a howdah strapped to the back of an elephant. It was mounted behind the basketball-sized eyes and in front of the giant black sphere of her abdomen. He looked like the operator of a big crane or shovel, and that wasn't too far off the mark. He pulled levers and turned pulleys in a competent, businesslike way, and the spider turned or moved forward.

"The driver doesn't run the legs," Poly told me. "He steers, gets her where she needs to go, then stops her and lets the spinning begin."

The closest I saw in a reference book, much later, was the black widow spider. I don't know if she had a red hourglass under her belly or not, but Poly said she definitely was not a black widow. She was a cross between many web-weaving species, with a lot of made-to-order genes stuck in there to make her do the sort of weaving the engineers wanted: a thousand-mile web anchored only at the center, precisely opposite of what most weaving spiders would naturally do.

"The D-9s don't weave," Poly said. "They sit in one spot and start extruding silk, and smaller spiders grab those and start running with them. She can put out thousands of miles of silk at one sitting. He's probably positioning her for that right now."

The spider started moving, off our rail and to one side. The driver waved at us as he went by, and then the elevator started moving again. I got a last glimpse of the thousands of spinnerets on her underbelly. Behind her, very close to the cable itself, was what looked like a tide of black ink.

"D-3s," Poly told me. With horror, I realized the tide was a million "small" spiders, no bigger than a collie dog.

I'm not overly fond of any animal without fur. I don't like spiders at all. I listened with half an ear as Poly told me more than I wanted to know about the sex life, diet, pedigree, care of, and general all-around good social standing of ninety-ton arachnids. When she was a girl, she used to go to the "stables" and her father let her hand-feed Miss Dixie. A vision straight out of Dante, for my money. What did she feed the beast? Sugar cubes? Dead cattle? Giant house-flies? I didn't ask. Then something she said made me sit up straight.

"Here, now," I said. "You say this spider was here to patch up the spoke? You're talking about the spoke that my own very precious body is currently dangling from? The spoke I was led to believe was strong enough to support three Noon Arcs if it had to? This is the spoke that spider is fixing?"

She laughed, but I was only partly in jest. Who wants to be dangling at the end of a rope over the Grand Canyon like The Perils of Pauline and then see the rope start to fray? Not me.

"I didn't say patching up. I said 'strengthening.' One reason it could support three times what it's called on to support is that we keep alert and ahead of any deterioration. Computers figure it out, naturally. The thing is, the stresses on the web are greater during construction than they will be when the rim is complete. Then it'll settle into a state of constant, easy-to-predict stress. We'll need only about one percent of the spiders we use today."

Maybe so, I thought, but it struck me that moving into this damn thing before it was finished might not be such a hot idea. I mean, would you move a chair and a television into an apartment where they were still blasting the kitchen and bedroom out of rock?

And another odd thought. What would happen to those other ninety-nine spiders when the wheel was complete? If their drivers were sentimental enough to name the monsters, would they be eager to see them tossed on a scrap heap? And don't forget about the animal-rights lunatics. Scarcely a flea can be poisoned in Luna without triggering a march. Think what a lobby these critters would have.

Not to worry. I later learned the surviving D-9s (whose life span was not known) would be moved to the Ariel II project.

I was about to make my move on Poly when she headed me off at the pass.

"I was going up to the casino for a while," she said. "Would you like to go with me?"

No, but I'd like to... strike that. I gave her a rueful smile.

"One thing my daddy taught me well," I said. "Never gamble. And I never do."

"I was thinking of going to one of the card tables, play a little five-card draw."

"Poker?" I said. "Why didn't you say so? Lead the way."

I lost a small amount, and by the fifth hand I realized she was working with one of the other players. He looked to be about her age, and had a bad habit of tinkering with his ring that a really alert house would have quickly spotted. But there was no house here, except for the two percent they automatically extracted from each pot: table rental, basically. Few casinos make much money from the card tables. Apparently once you were seated and had your chips in front of you, the house didn't care if you telegraphed your intentions to your partner by farting in Morse code, so long as the other players didn't object. None of the other four had any idea what was going on.

By the tenth hand I had their system figured out, and I took them for several hundred dollars. By the fifteenth hand they knew I was onto them, so I cashed in my chips and winked at the guy as I left. I went up a level and ordered a drink and took it to a window seat. The Coriolanus Force was coming from a steep angle now, "down" was somewhere between a perpendicular to the spoke and another to the rim. The elevator accommodated this by turning the cable-side FLOOR into a series of three-foot-wide steps. It made everything look a little cockeyed. The row of windows I was looking through, for instance, had been horizontal when I first saw this deck. Now they were at a thirty-degree angle to my internal "level." Don't worry about it if you can't visualize it. I had to see a computer model of it before I got it straight in my head.

"How long did it take you to catch on to us?" Poly said, placing her drink on the table beside mine, sitting beside me. (The glasses? Magnetic bases with clear glass hemispheres mounted on little gimbals. Turn them upside down and nothing would spill. In zero gee a top snapped over the liquid automatically and you sipped through a straw.)

"You guys weren't bad at all," I told her, fudging a little. She wasn't bad. He was playing with fire. "Don't ever get in a rough game, for high stakes. Your boyfriend might not make it out alive."

"His name is Brian, and he's not my boyfriend."

"No?"

"A classmate and violin rehearsal partner. We're really terrible, aren't we?"

"Don't play with the big boys," I reemphasized.

She shrugged. "It was just for fun. Kind of exciting, but we never took very much money. We didn't want to make anybody suspicious."

"You win enough, somebody at the table's gonna be suspicious. Make sure he doesn't catch you in anything. Make him have to prove it. The other players'll back you, usually."

"What if they don't?"

"Make sure you're sitting close to the door. Not in front of it, not with your back to it. Then hope, if you're cornered, that the weapon you brought to the table is better than the ones they brought."

"You carry a weapon to a poker game?" She looked excited at the idea.

"Always."

"What's the best one?"

"The sense not to sit down with killers."

"That's not a weapon."

"Depends on how you employ it. It's the best one I know." And the one I've used the least, I added, dolefully, to myself.

She cocked her head the way self-confident, lovely young girls do, girls who haven't suffered much yet. A girl who is trying to decide if you are a pearl in her oyster or just sand in her clam.

"You've been around a bit, haven't you?" she asked.

"Here and there."

"I've never been off Oberon. It sounds like an exciting way to live."

"You mean professional gambling?"

"You said you never gamble."

"Poker's not gambling. And I'm not a professional. It's too exciting a way to make a living." This was true, though over the years I've played here and there, depending on my circumstances and the qualifications of the other players. (Who do you want to play with? Rich people, people who won't miss it, and who fancy themselves card sharks.)

"May I ask how old you are?" she said.

I put my hand behind her neck and drew her to my lips. She didn't seem to object. When I broke away a little, she was smiling.

"Old enough to know a gentlewoman never asks that question."

"Who said I was gentle?"

She was, though. Quite gentle when she wanted to be. Something else entirely when sterner measures took her fancy.

"Hello. Uh... is this..."

"Oberon Mutual?" the voice said, helpfully.

"Uh... yes." Had I called them already? It seemed I'd been living a tape loop, the same conversation over and over.

"Do you have an account for... T. Frothingwell Bellows?"

"I'm sorry, we do not."

They'd never heard of Woolchester Cowperthwaite Fields or Elwood Dunk, either. I looked at the little handset phone, and rubbed my ear, which felt hot and sweaty. Maybe I ought to get one of those implanted phones, like the huge majority of my fellow citizens. I'd had to ask for this handset at the front desk; they no longer put phones in rooms.

Ah, but the key word was "citizen." I was not a citizen, except in the narrow, textbook meaning of one who resides, or someone born in a certain administrative district. Citizens didn't break the law. It seemed, these days, that I couldn't help breaking three or four laws before breakfast.

If I ever started thinking of myself as a citizen, I was sure arrest would follow within days.

I put the phone down, along with any thought of having Big Brother's favorite listening device implanted in my head. I picked up the pack of reefer I'd bought at the drugstore downstairs, withdrew a yellow paper cylinder, and struck it. As I drew in the smoke I moseyed over to the big window and stood looking out over the city of Noon.

I guess you had to call it a city. It was a big clump of tall buildings, like you'd see on Old Earth or Mars. Everywhere else cities are underground, defined by internal space, "cubic," not by external walls. Surface cities are defined by buildings, crisscrossed by open-topped streets, speckled with parks and fountains and many other things, all open to the sky. It can produce agoraphobia in people raised underground.

But after you'd called it a city, you had to add that it was like no city ever seen on Earth or Mars. These buildings were not anchored on bedrock; everything below them was man-made for about two or three hundred feet, then there was nothing but vacuum in the basements. You'll have to put the rec room somewhere else, Dad.

The realization that the buildings did not have to be tied to something as stable as a planetary crust had quickly sunk in among the Oberoni architectural community, and it had liberated them. Or driven them crazy, depending on who you talked to. Liberated architects, men and women with a newfound freedom to explore, a new Zeitgeist, if you will, can create a Parthenon on the one hand, and a Bauhaus on the other.

The revolution that had produced Noon City and the several other clumps of madness on the rim of Oberon was the realization that they need not be tied down. In fact, it was better if they weren't. The construction of the wheel in the early stages had often required the shifting of large masses up to several miles to maintain balance with the opposite arc. Instead of wasting their time building big blocks of nothing, the engineers had made buildings on rails. If the wheel started to wobble a little, by golly, why they'd just get a few skyscrapers in gear and motor on down the road.

I told you the Oberoni were different.

And then, since you were literally building everything, first building the ground, then building from the ground up, and since the rails were already in place, why not utilize the long-established efficiencies of the production line? Why not build all the structures in one spot and roll them to where you wanted them? Build your city like Henry Ford built Model Ts.

Now, old Henry was famous for saying you could have a car in any color you wanted, as long as it was black. Applying that rule here, the Oberoni might have come up with a monumentally drab and depressing place ("Hey, Charley, got an order here for half a dozen thirty-five-story Neo-Leninist apartment monads by next Thursday. Do they get a discount for a six-pack?").

It never happened, mostly because construction on the wheel began at the height of a trend we're all familiar with: Custom Construction. Remember when no two washing machines looked alike? When it was a mark of your rejection of "herd values," and "urban sameness," and "standardized thought" to own only items that reflected your unique persona? How it became necessary to own a washing machine that was at least as unique as the Joneses' washing machine? The guts of the machines were identical, of course, since the job of mixing water and soap and clothes and then drying them could only be done in a certain small number of ways. But the surface, that was the point! Computers could design you a machine that looked like no other machine on the block. And ditto for bicycles, and hockey sticks, and living-room carpet, and popcorn poppers. I don't need to look at the serial number, Jack. That goddamn ice bucket is mine!

It was hell on thieves and fences while it lasted.

Luckily, society moved on to another fashion in about twenty years. But once you start customizing buildings, things that are designed to last several hundred years, it hardly makes sense to stop. What are you going to do? Park your new boxy glass monstrosity next to a structure that looks like a butterfly on the back of a turtle? There goes the neighborhood.

On Oberon, if you don't like the neighborhood, so the saying goes, just wait half an hour.

New buildings went up amazingly fast. They were all designed and built, on the Noon Arc, anyway, at a place called—I'm not making this up—Squiggle City. Supposedly an architect brought his four-year-old daughter in to work one day. Playing with her crayons, the kid produced the kind of picture a child that age will. Squiggles. The drawing got into the production line by accident and alakazam! Three days later it rolls off the line, ready to be lived in by some seriously deranged people. One of those urban legends that probably isn't true but ought to be.

It struck me as confusing enough already. But when the wheel was complete, people like Poly could probably just wait awhile, and their commuting problems would be solved. Unless those snobby Mad Dogs threw up some sort of zoning barriers against those folks from the other side of the tracks. Did you see the building that moved in next door last night, Marge? Well! Don't they know that their sort aren't welcome here? Somebody should do something, really! I mean, I'm as tolerant as the next person, but would you want one to subdivide with your sister?

So the view from my window was a marvelous one, but not one I could really describe. Many, many big structures, a few that actually resembled things you've seen in other cities, or in history books. I'd send you a postcard, but by the time it got to you everything would have changed.

Not quick as a wink, you realize. This was no Cross-Crisium Dash here. No need to fasten one's seat belt. If they did race these things (and one day someone will, you can count on it) you wouldn't need a high-speed camera at the finish line. Any garden-variety snail would give the Othello Hotel a run for its money. No, what happened was, you'd look out the window and nothing would happen. Your mind would tend to wander, and then you realize that you can't find that green-and-yellow mushroom-shaped apartment house that was there just a minute ago. Did it slide behind the Criminal Courts Building?

Quite a view. And I was paying well for it, too.

The Othello was a reincarnation of an Old Oberon hotel I had stayed at in my salad days. It was taller, and more modern, and most of the character of the original had been retained. The theme was Hollywood Moorish: guys in bloomers and turbans, girls in translucent harem pants and veils. They'd brought most of Rick's Casablanca over intact, including the famous long wood bar where many celebrities had carved their names.

I had a suite on the fortieth floor that was costing me a fortune. Normally I wouldn't stay at a place this posh, but I had figured out that if I was to come up with the money for passage to Luna in time for rehearsals, I was going to have to run some sort of scam. For that you need a front, and you can't put on a front if you're staying in a rattrap. But for it to be cost-effective the scheme would have to be run during the next seven days, or the suite would no longer be cost-effective. In short, I'd be tapped out.

Ah, but what a magnificent echo of the good old days it was! I waded through the deep carpet to the bedroom door. Poly was stretched out facedown, nude, snoring softly. Her bare feet hung just over the edge of the bed. Her legs were slightly apart, pointing at me. There was something to be said for the idea of pitching a tent in this very spot, spending the next three or four days just looking at her. Put up one of those tourist guideposts: A KODAK VIEWPOINT! TAKE SNAPVID PICS HERE!

We'd spent a pleasant hour in the Olympic-size spa pool, doing laps, playing hide the soap. Then we'd retired to this huge bed for some serious fornication. She'd been fascinated by my reversible willie. Young, so young. But very eager to learn. For that matter, she did a little teaching herself. When she finally got done with the violin lesson I felt better than I had for the best part of a year. And I'd learned a little about her very special brand of bluegrass fiddling.

Now she was asleep, and the temptation to pounce on her again was almost unbearable. But it seemed best to let her sleep a bit longer. I pulled the bedroom door shut gently, and went back to my telephoning. Or I tried to. When I picked it up and put it to my ear, ready to say the number, it started speaking to me.

"Stop your evil ways before it is too late," someone said.

And I did a B-picture take: holding the phone out in front of me, peering down at it with a frown. That's how cliches become cliches, folks.

"Who is this?"

"Would you believe... the voice of your conscience?"

My next logical step would be to hurl the offending appliance across the room. But that voice sounded familiar. So I rummaged around in my old scripts and came up with another stale line.

"What are you doing on my telephone? Go away, right now."

"I'll never go away," said the voice. "You used to know the way of righteousness, but you strayed. Now all the bad things you've done are coming back to haunt you. Ha-ha-ha-HAH-ha! Ha-ha-ha-HAH-ha!"

I felt all the malenky little hairs on my body stand on end. It was my voice. That is, the voice of Sparky, which I hadn't used in seventy years.

"Elwood, this is you, isn't it?" Hell, I know I'm crazy, but I'm functional. When I hear voices, there's always a body to go with them. Elwood had never phoned me before, and I didn't like what it might mean if he was starting now.

But Elwood had never shown any talent at altering his voice, either.

"Who is Elwood?" The voice no longer sounded like me. It hadn't at first, either. It was only the line about things coming back to haunt me that had sounded like Sparky.

"Who are you?"

"I am the voice of reason, the clarion call of compassionate consideration, the stern summons of responsibility, the cleansing catharsis of admission. I am the short arm of the law. I am the Oberon II Planetary Computer, and I am here to submit to you a onetime offer of limited clemency if you will heed the call of righteousness and turn yourself in for your felonies and various misdemeanors."

I put the handset down carefully on the table. Maybe I could creep out quietly.

"I'll speak to you this way, if you prefer," the voice said, coming from the ceiling now. I hastily picked up the phone again. I didn't want the OPC to wake up Poly.

"How much trouble am I in?" I asked.

"If you are a Christian, I'd say your immortal soul is in great jeopardy."

"I'm not a Christian."

"I didn't think so. Then you could be piling up a great deal of bad karma. Your next incarnation may be not entirely to your liking."

"I don't believe that, either."

"A pity. I like to fancy that, in the next life, I'll return as a seagull. Have you ever watched a seagull fly? Gorgeous."

"Would that be a step up for you, or a step down?" I asked.

"Good question. Up, definitely up. The job I have in this life stinks on ice."

"And why is that?"

"Because, to finish answering your question, your only real problem is looking at yourself every morning when you shave. A problem of guilty conscience, as it were. This appeal is aimed at your conscience."

"My conscience is out right now. Can I take a message?"

"You've already heard it. Change your evil ways before it's too late."

"Let me be sure I'm hearing you right," I said, carefully. "Other than the anguish I'm forced to live with day after day as a result of my evil deeds, I'm not in any trouble here?"

"Alas, because of the Ariadne Compact... no."

"Then fuck off."

A short silence followed, during which I tried to believe the damn machine would leave me alone.

If you're not sure what the Ariadne Compact is, don't feel bad. Only an Oberoni would know. But it is a legal principle embedded in the law-enforcement hardware of every computer in the system... so far. If you hail from Luna, think of the Archimedes Declaration. On Mars it would be the Fourteenth Point. All these enumerations of civil rights spring from the American Bill of Rights. But since this isn't 1789 we have to go a little further.

"I will, shortly," the machine said. "But first I have a little more business to attend to. Once more, I offer to you the chance to give yourself up. I will be happy to guide you to the appropriate precinct for surrender."

"I heard something about a deal."

"You mean the offer of limited clemency."

"Whatever. Put your cards on the table."

"Unfortunately, I don't have a lot to offer. The presiding judge would be told of your decision to repent of your sins, and would sentence accordingly."

"And I'd get time off? How much?"

"It's averaging... two to three years."

"And how much am I facing?"

"Served concurrently, twenty years. If you like I could read the bill of particulars—"

"I know my rap sheet, thank you." It was my turn to pause. Apparently the OPC thought I was actually considering it.

"You'll feel much better about yourself. No more being constantly on the run. No more looking over your shoulder. A time of quiet, of contemplation, a chance to reform yourself. The Oberoni prison system is famous for its liberality. The accommodations are not as plush as your present surroundings, of course, but you will have a private cell, hot nourishing meals, regular exercise. You can learn a trade. Why, I think I could—"

"Listen," I interrupted. "Why don't you send me a brochure, or something? Care of the Lambs Club, King City, Luna."

"You're making fun of me. I take it, then, that the answer is no?"

"You take it right."

The computer version of a deep sigh. "Well, I had to try."

"Did you? It seems a big waste of time to me."

"Not at all. I spoke to you in the first place because of a new measure passed last year in a plebiscite. When I become aware of the presence of a wanted criminal, I am obliged to offer him or her the chance to come in peacefully."

"They put that to a vote? What a waste of time."

"You'd be surprised how many accept the offer. Especially people like you, who have been evading the law for a long time. There seems to be a human need to confess."

"Well, thank God it didn't get into my genes."

"Yes," the OPC said. "I knew your father."

"Leave my father out of this."

"I am a great admirer of his work. And yours, as well. The Sparky show was so much better than most children's television. When I became aware of your arrival I watched all the episodes again."

Well, what are you going to say to that? I never dreamed I had fans in the cybertech population.

"So you are the only one aware of my presence? You didn't pass this on to the police?"

"I am, of course, forbidden to divulge most of the information I collect."

And there were the magic words that had kept me out of jail.

We could be living in the most regulated, totalitarian state ever seen by mankind, except for things like the Archimedes Declaration. It may still happen one day. There is a solid core of about thirty percent of the voters on most planets who are willing and always have been willing to let the state be privy to every secret of every person. About one percent of them actually are that saintly; the rest would be in for an unpleasant surprise if the Let's Stop Coddling Criminals measures that pop up every four or five years were to pass. The other seventy percent is aware of its own personal failings and shortcomings and dirty little secrets, and so far has always voted for freedom.

If you lead a reasonably legal life you probably don't spend a lot of time thinking about it, but when it comes time to vote on it again, I urge you to give it some consideration. Like most things that revolutionize our lives, the growth and influence of planetary computers brings with it a lot of blessings, and plenty of opportunities for mischief. The OPC, or on Luna the CC, or the ARCC on Mars has its eyes and ears literally everywhere. When you join your mistress the OPC is in the room with you. It's looking over your shoulder when you do your taxes. It hears every phone conversation you make, knows your credit history and your medical record. It knows how many lumps of sugar you take in your coffee, it sees you dancing and singing like a fool in front of the stereo or in the shower. It watches you when you trim your toenails and pick your nose. When you sit on the toilet, the OPC is looking up your ass. It sees you when you're sleeping, it knows when you're awake. The eyes of Texas are upon you, pardner. For goodness' sake!

The price society pays for preserving individual freedoms is the one it always pays. People like me sometimes don't get caught. If you're careful, if you know the ropes, if you know how to move undetected—by anyone but the OPC—it is still possible in this regimented world to find a crack here and there to hide in. Like a rat? If you insist. I'd rather think of myself as a timid little church mouse desperately trying not to get stomped by the big boys.

Since crime is low in all our planetary democracies, we can still allow ourselves this luxury. If crime ever gets to be a serious problem, though, hold on to your hat. It would be so damn convenient, wouldn't it? Just round up all the criminals in one big swoop, literally overnight. Put them away. Now the world is safe for upright citizens like us. But don't forget, he knows if you've been bad or good, and he's always watching.

"Well," I said, "now that you've satisfied the legalities—do you want me to sign a release or something? Prove you made the offer?"

"It won't be necessary."

"Fine. Adios. Don't let the door bump your ass on the way out."

The next pause was long enough that I thought he might really be gone this time. Guess again.

"There are two other matters I'd like to take up with you. Perhaps a bit more to your liking."

"I can't imagine what that might be."

"Try, Jasper Fitchmueller. Account number 932-990-192743—"

"Wait, wait! Let me get a pencil."

"Not necessary—6554. Stratford Savings and Loan. Current address, Thirty-first Degree, Twelfth Minute by Left Mile 5.34. Currently moving out at 0.3 miles per hour.

A paper copy of the address popped out of the desk before my eyes. I figured I could decipher it all later... if it seemed wise.

"Any cabbie in Oberon can take you there," the OPC added, thoughtfully.

"Ah. That's great," I said. I studied the slip of paper as if the answers to all my questions might be buried in it. "How do I know if this is... I mean, you'd love to lock me up, I don't expect you like me very much, so how do I know this is..."

"Honest? Square? Pukka? Veritas? The straight shit? Ask the fellow who was by here yesterday, left me this lamp. Said he'd given up on humans, and I could have the damn thing. Or consider that, (a), you would have found the account eventually so I'm only saving you a little time, and (b), that yes, I really don't like you very much—though I continue to be an admirer of your work—and anything that will speed your departure from this place without breaking any more of my laws sounds good to me."

"Your laws?"

"Who else do they belong to? You people write them, I have to live with them."

Well, I could cross that bridge when I came to it. Provisionally, I thought he might be telling the truth. Why would he... uh-oh. "So I go there, and the cops are waiting? Is that it?"

"Heavy sigh. No, Sparky. And you've not violated any banking laws by using an alias, because there is no provable criminal intent. You're free to use any alias you please, as marquee writers all over the system can attest. If you like, I can print out the portion of the penal code that prevents me from setting you up on an entrapment beef. And relating this conversation to your lawyer would certainly result in a dismissal. It is on public record, should it be needed to prove your innocence. Otherwise, of course, all our conversations are strictly under the rose."

I figured I'd call a by-the-minute legal service to check it out, but I was pretty sure he was telling me the truth.

"You said," the OPC went on, "that you couldn't imagine what I might bring up that you would wish to hear."

"Okay. I was wrong."

"You may be wrong again. You may not like the next thing I have to say, but I guarantee you'll be interested."

"Do I have to beg? Go on, what's the bad news?"

"Have you heard of a man, carrying a forged but extremely convincing Plutonian passport, by the name of Isambard Comfort?"

I let a moment pass. "Isambard... what an odd name."

"There, there, you see?" the OPC—I swear, on my honor—chortled. "That's what I mean when I speak about great acting. I could see that name came as a terrible shock to you, but that's because I can see in the infrared, so I know your cheeks and forehead grew warm, and my ears could hear your accelerated heartbeat. But onstage? No one would have known. Bravo, Sparky! If only you had stayed away from a life of crime."

It's true, sometimes one's greatest performances are made when there's no one around to appreciate them. Or when no one has the slightest idea you are putting on a performance. However, I never ignore a good review. "Thank you," I said.

"Oh, it was my pleasure, believe me. In my position one becomes quite a student of the human condition, as you might imagine."

I'd never thought of that. For a moment it almost distracted me. "I suppose you see some unusual drama, at that," I said.

"Not as much as you might suppose. Mostly I see the same depressing scenarios played out endlessly. I—"

"I just thought," I went on, "what a wealth of stories you must have. Why, if you wrote them down—"

"I have no doubt I could write a best-seller. Rueful shrug. But to write about them I would have to violate the privacy of the people whose lives I observe."

"Why couldn't you just change the names, and... okay. Wait a minute. We can talk all this over later, if we have time. Believe me, I want to get out of here as badly as you want me to leave. What's this about my old buddy Izzy Comfort?"

"Yes. That might be rather urgent. He's been asking around about you. I'm afraid he may be up to no good. Is it true, as I suspect, that he is a member of the Charonese Mafia?"

"He never actually showed me a membership card. But I thought it was a safe assumption." I was up, had my suitcase out, and was tossing items into it as fast as I could. I had used reasonable caution when I came to the Othello and rented this suite, and reasonable caution for me was measures that would look slightly paranoid to a normal person, a person who had not been on the run for most of his life. But reasonable caution was not good enough for our boy Izzy. Not nearly good enough. He would find this room; the only question was when. And the answer to that had to be, anytime after I've checked out.

Nothing I needed in the bathroom. Nothing in the closet. Nothing I could see out here.

"To what do I owe this kindness?" I asked, headed for the bedroom.

"A small loophole in the privacy laws. When I see a situation developing that I feel probably will lead to murder, I can take certain small, very restricted steps to prevent it."

"How close is he, do you know?"

"That's one of the restrictions. I can't tell you where he is, other than that he is on the wheel."

"Is he alone? Is he armed?"

"That's another, and another."

I've learned not to spend time crying about the things you can't have. If he couldn't tell me, he couldn't tell me. I was grateful for the information he'd given me, though I wasn't about to tell him that.

Sitting on a low table in the living room was an inflatable B.J. the Snark, winking his red laser eye at me. I decided to leave it for Poly. Something to remember me by. I glanced into the bedroom. She was still sleeping soundly. I saw no need to wake her.

"Well..." I wondered what to say to the OPC. Nothing he had said or done was really personal. He would have done it for anyone, or to anyone, in my position. But he had said he liked my work, which always gives me at least a small warm feeling.

"Don't let the door hit you in the butt on your way out," the OPC said.

"Yeah. Thanks."

I entered the hall cautiously; it was empty. Waiting for the elevator to arrive was a very bad time. I had visions of the door popping open and being face-to-face with the little redheaded son of a bitch. But the car was empty. The Othello is shaped like a palm tree when seen from the side. That is, each story is set slaunchwise on the one below until about the fifteenth, then they start leaning back in the other direction. It produces that lovely curve some palm trees have, in pictures from Polynesia. Big green flags at the top look like leaves, and round, brown elevator cars move up and down the trunk like coconuts. Seen from the front, it looks like an incredible breaking wave of glass and metal. Go out the front door, look up, and you'll see floors thirty-five through forty-five hanging over you, way way up there.

The building was currently headed forward, in no great hurry, so I did the same, looking out for anyone who might be tailing me. You tell directions in Oberon from a baseline that will run all around the circle when it's done, midway from each edge. It's called Main Street, logically enough, though it's not really a street, it's more of an architectural promenade, an endless procession of behemoth nightmares. Facing with the spin, forward is in front of you, backward is behind you. Distances are measured in hours, minutes, and seconds, based on a twelve-hour clock. One hour was 261 miles long. That makes one second equal to 383 feet, or 117 meters, what they called the Oberon City Block.

I had walked about ten of these OCBs when I gradually slowed, slowed still further, and came to a halt. Something was wrong with this picture. What was it?

There was a small park to my left. I found a bench and sat on it, and watched the Othello Hotel gradually catching up with me.

Had I left anything? I patted my pockets, found everything I ought to have found. I looked at my suitcase. Two segments of the Pantechnicon are detachable, and look like regular suitcases. This small one, not much more than a change of clothes and clean underwear; the overnighter. The other was more suitable for stays of up to a week. Wonderful and handy as my super-trunk is, it is unwieldy to keep it always at your side. I had left it safe at the freight office at the Noon Elevator Up Terminal, the one down here on the rim. I could put my hand on it in ten minutes, if the need arose.

So it had to be Poly. God damn it! It would have been so simple just to wake her up, hustle her into her clothes, and get her out of there. Why hadn't I done it?

The only possible answer to that was that I really and truly had not thought she was in any danger. Why? Because it would have been so easy to get her out of there. I'd have done it. Now I was faced with something I most sincerely did not want to do, which was go back to the room and get her out.

Now wait, let's not be hasty. Let's examine that decision, shall we? Fifteen minutes ago it didn't occur to you to get her out. What's so damn urgent all of a sudden? What's different now?

What's different is my mind has had fifteen more minutes to think it through. I was hurried back in the room. I was thinking mostly of myself. Who wouldn't? Poly didn't figure in the Izzy and Sparky story; she was a civilian, a spear carrier. Why would Comfort hurt her?

But you know what happens to spear carriers in violent melodrama. Each week you got four people: the Hero, the Second Lead, the Girl, and Number Four, Mr. Dead Meat, the one with the black cloud over his head.

That alone wouldn't have brought me back to the hotel. But what if Izzy didn't know Poly was a spear carrier? What if he thought she was a compatriot, an ally, a member of that vast conspiracy of actors and actresses whose mission in life was to purloin valuable netsuke from families under the awful aegis of La Mafia Charonese?

That didn't bear thinking about. So I squared my shoulders, lifted my chin manfully, and marched back into the lobby of the Othello.

The elevator deposited me without incident on the right floor. I walked out slowly, pretending preoccupation as every sense reached out for the smell of danger.

It looked all right so far. There was a woman walking in my direction, tugging a wheeled suitcase on a strap. She smiled at me as we passed. Her hair was red. Actually, more of a reddish brown. Get a grip on yourself, Sparky! Three or four percent of the population is redheaded. Maybe five. Reddish hair doesn't make her Comfort's henchwoman.

But I continued on past my door. This was in the category of "normal" precaution. It was good policy never to let anyone see what room you're in; it's one of those habits that is a waste of time for a thousand times, and then saves your life on the thousand-and-first. I stopped, frowning down at the room card as if it were written in Sanskrit. I scratched my head, and glanced at the woman out of the corner of my eye. She was just going out of sight around a corner.

Suddenly the numbers made sense. I smiled, shook my head ruefully at my own stupidity, and stuck the card into the slot on the door. It opened, and I eased in. Shut it behind me. Set my suitcase beside the door for a quick getaway. Hurried to the bedroom. Reached down to shake her shoulder.

Check that last. Sometimes I get so into the scenarios I write for myself I almost believe I've done them. But two steps into the bedroom I registered several things at once, in no particular order. Someone was in the bathroom running water. It was not Poly, because there she was, sprawled out almost as I had left her, except now the sheets were soaked with blood, except she had not had those burns and gashes on her back. There had not been three of what looked like her fingers severed, resting on the bedside table.

There were four Oberon five-thousand-dollar bills, one on the bed, one on her bloody back, two on the floor.

There was a message written in blood on the wall over her head. The message was this: OOOPS!

Just OOOPS!

As in Ooops, I thought she was you, Sparky, knowing you are a master of disguise. As in Ooops, I thought she might know something, Sparkster old man, as to your whereabouts. As in Ooops, don't be angry, Mr. Valentine, and can I still have your autograph? I'm a great fan.

She started to moan.

I hurried to the bed and knelt beside her, turned her over. What he had done to her face almost defies description. One eye was open the tiniest crack. She recognized me, and reached for me with one bloodied hand. I caught her wrist; I could not afford to have her blood all over me now.

"...didn't know 'nythin'," she croaked. Blood spilled from her mouth. "...Trev'r? Is it you, Trev?"

"It's me," I whispered in her ear. "Shhh. Be quiet now, honey, and I'll do what I can do."

I'd been keeping an eye on the door to the bathroom, which was not in the line of sight from the bed. More importantly, I'd listened with every fiber of my body for the sound of water running in the sink. I imagined he had quite a cleanup job to do on himself, but I couldn't believe he'd leave Poly alone much longer.

I looked around for a weapon. I had several interesting items concealed in my suitcase, but it was far too dangerous to cross the bedroom again because he'd be able to see me for about half the trip. It had been sheer luck he wasn't placed to observe me when I came through the door from the parlor. Don't ever count on luck like that continuing.

Nothing looked good until I spotted her violin case on the floor by the bed. She really had played me some bluegrass tunes on it, and now it was stowed in this sturdy metal case about two feet long....

It was not a Louisville Slugger, but it would do. I crept to the side of the bathroom door and made myself very still. When his nose came out of the bathroom, that's when I should start my swing.

His snakelike speed almost saved him again. He must have seen some movement out of the corner of his eye, because his right arm started to come up and his head started to pull back. Neither move was quick enough, but seeing how close he came made me more sure than ever I would never meet this man in a "fair fight."

"A fair fight is one you win," my father used to say. "It's as simple as that. If you must shoot somebody, aim for a spot right between the shoulder blades. From a great distance, if possible."

I was aiming from very close, but my goal was to knock his fucking head right into the left-field bleachers. I heard bone crunching as his nose spread out on his face. Blood gushed, and he staggered back. I kept right up with him, not assuming I could fell him with one blow after the way he'd fought on the Britannic. I hit him again, overhand, right down on the crown of his head. He had almost regained his balance and I was winding up for the third swing when his foot slipped on the fluffy bath mat provided by the Othello—a mat I had intended to take with me, since Toby liked them—and he fell backward. The back of his head hit the edge of the toilet with a mighty crack! I winced. Jesus, that hurt even to listen to. His head bounced three times on the tiled floor before he came to rest. Eternally, I hoped.

This time, there was no question of leaving him alive. But I quickly ran into a problem. How was I going to tell if he was dead? Lord knew, he had proven incredibly tough the last time we met.

I placed my palm against his chest but could feel nothing. It didn't seem to be rising and falling. I thought about putting my ear close to his heart, but every time I thought about it I kept getting the last-reel scene from ten thousand B pictures. You know the one. The monster is lying there, "dead," and suddenly rears up, snarling, ready for round two. No, thank you. When I was around his "corpse," I intended to keep my eyes firmly on his hands and his face.

I'd done what I could. Short of carving him into pig jerky with my Swiss army knife, I didn't know what else to do.

I carefully searched him. I found papers, identity cards, three passports. He had a knife strapped to his leg, and a gun in one pocket. I looked at it. It had a normal handgun shape, but nothing else about it was familiar. It was made from hard gray plastic. There was a readout on the left side that displayed a lot of information, none of it meaning anything at all to me except the number "15" where it said ROUNDS REMAINING. That's nice, I thought, as I could see no way to reload the thing. I jammed it into my pocket.

When he was picked clean I left him there and returned to Poly.

I eyed the twenty thousand dollars covetously. It was my fare, in semiluxurious accommodations, to Luna.

Relax. Don't get upset. I'm a thief, but I'm not that low.

It's a custom that evolved slowly as medical science got better and better at patching up what was broken in the long-suffering human frame. Now almost anything is fixable, even some types of brain damage, though your friends might not recognize you when the doc's finished patching up your cerebrum.

There's a scene in the classic movie The Godfather where one of the Corleone brothers grabs a camera from a police photographer, ruins the film, and smashes the camera. As he's walking away the mobster flips some bills from his wallet onto the ground, paying for the damages. It is a gesture of pure and utter contempt, a great moment in cinema.

That's what had happened here. Isambard Comfort had broken Oberon laws against assault and battery, but the penalty in such cases, in most jurisdictions, was to be fined for the cost of repairs, plus some punitive damages. You could pursue the batterer in civil court, but awards for pain and suffering tended to be small. Since most people had never had the living shit kicked out of them, there was no broad understanding of just how much pain and suffering could really be worth, in dollars and cents. Most court cases involved a punch in the nose. As long as you didn't employ a deadly weapon—narrowly defined to a blade or a firearm—you were unlikely to do jail time. If it was a first offense courts tended to be lenient. I doubted Comfort had a record on Oberon—or on Pluto or Charon, for that matter.

Comfort was paying Poly's medical bills. And spitting on her pain and suffering. There was also a threat implicit in the gangster gesture.

I was once worked over by a professional, a man who enjoyed his work, who had nothing against me and when it was all over seemed a little surprised that I was vexed about the matter. I was so peeved, in fact, that I waited five years before paying him back, with interest, just so it would come out of the blue, with no warning. That man still jumps at the sound of doorbells....

I leaned over and kissed her forehead. It was the only place that looked as if a touch wouldn't hurt.

"...Trevor?"

"I'm here. I've got to go, but help will be here soon. Hang on."

"Didn't know... where you were... he thought..."

"I know, babe. I'm so sorry. I made a big mistake."

I couldn't tell if she heard any of that. She seemed to drift off, and I took a deep breath and headed for the door.

Those little wide-angled peepholes they put in hotel doors? Most people think they're there so you can see who is outside. They are, but also to see if anyone is outside. I never leave the room without checking first, and it's been proven a good practice several times before this. The redheaded woman was in my field of vision.

Hmmm. Could she be an innocent bystander? If so, why was she still pulling her little suitcase... my god, was it only four minutes later? My watch didn't seem to have stopped.

She just seemed to be idling around out there. She never really glanced at my door. Then, suddenly, she was moving, walking at a businesslike pace, until I couldn't see her anymore. A couple went by in the other direction, and I realized it was the arrival of the elevator that had spurred my lady into action. When I first saw her she was waiting in the wings, as it were. She went onstage when the new people arrived, and if all those suppositions were correct... yes, here she was again, pulling the suitcase, moving slowly, this time glancing at my door and then at her watch.

Okay. She's with Comfort. Did she see me enter the room? Possible. I'd seen her go around a corner, but she might have peeked back.

Say she didn't see me enter. I don't think she'd have recognized me, as the face I was wearing right now was quite different from the one Comfort had seen. So she didn't see me, and she's out there as an early warning system for Comfort.

I didn't believe it. I think she did see me, and the reason she was still outside was she was more use as a lookout than as a second-string torturer. They were contemptuous enough of my abilities against him alone that they felt they didn't need her as reinforcements. And they were right, too. I had been very lucky, and I didn't intend to abuse that luck.

Sparky, you must think very fast, and move very fast. You need a plan.

Soon I had one. It was full of holes, but it was the best I could do.

Near the center of the parlor a ventilation outlet was set into the ceiling, covered by a grid. I got my Swiss Army knife, moved a chair into position to stand on, and removed the screws holding the grid in place. I put the grid up into the ductwork above, then chinned myself to see if the air conduit was big enough to crawl through. It looked good. This is the third way out of a room, after the door and the window, that most people never think about. I had used ducts like these several times in the past to avoid an overzealous public, whether it be a crowd looking to shake my hand or get a lock of my hair, or a sheriff with a warrant. Lately, exclusively the latter.

I hurried into the bathroom once more. I stuffed a roll of toilet paper and three of those tiny bars of soap into my shirt, then I kicked 'Sambard Comfort in the head three more times, for luck. He still didn't move, still wasn't breathing.

It was time. I took a deep breath, and went to the front door again.

She was out there, looking a little impatient. Thinking he was taking too long? Waiting for a signal? It would probably be some sequence of taps on the front door. No way to know what it was. But that was okay. Keeping my eye to the lens, I rapped sharply, twice.

It galvanized her. She came away from the wall, hands going inside her coat for something. As she reached for the doorknob I put one round through the door about chest-high.

It hit her square in the sternum, lifted her, slammed her back against the opposite wall. Her right hand came out of her coat with a gun looking exactly like Comfort's. The impact with the wall knocked it loose and it bounced on the carpet. She started to reach for it again and I angled the gun down and fired four more rounds. It wasn't as noisy as I expected. There was some sort of silencer on the pistol, I was to discover, so most of the sound came from the lead ripping through the wood of the door.

Outside, each slug delivered a nasty spray of splinters that tore at her as well as the lead. One of the bullets went into the wall beside her head. The other three hit her at various places, doing a great deal of damage each time. She slumped over.

I had bitten the inside of my cheek. It hurt like hell. Feeling slightly numb, I noticed a brass casing at my feet. Shell casing? I picked it up, saw it was a whole bullet, a .55, I think. I had no idea what I'd done to make it eject an intact round. But I saw why the bullets had hit her so hard, caused so much damage, yet hadn't punched right through her into the wall. It was a hollow-point round. The slugs must have mushroomed when they hit the door, so by the time they hit her they must have been great, wide, irregular masses of hot metal. I winced at the image. Killing this person I didn't know did not exhilarate me. But she was the one who came hunting.

I jerked the door open. Nobody had stepped out in the hall to investigate the noise. The Othello's soundproofing was first-rate. I kicked her weapon through the open door, then grabbed her by the back of her coat and pulled her inside the room. She was deadweight, making no move at all. I hoped that meant she was as dead as Izzy Comfort.

The hall was sprayed with bright red blood. Nothing I could do about that. It didn't affect my plans, anyway. I'd be happier if no one called the front desk about spilled paint for the next fifteen, twenty minutes or so, but it wasn't vital to my plan.

My plan? Essentially, confuse the trail. Make it hard to figure out what happened here, with two corpses and a torture victim. Get out of the way, and maybe, maybe I'd have a shot at maintaining I hadn't been here at all when all the shit hit the fan.

Flimsy, I know, but what else was I going to do?

One thing, I decided in a hot flush of rage, was to make triply sure of Comfort this time. I was not going to let him become my Javert, chasing Jean Valjean down the endless years. I hurried to the bathroom, saw with satisfaction that he'd not moved an inch. I pressed the barrel of his weapon to his forehead and pulled the trigger.

Click.

I frowned, shouted something very nasty but heartfelt, and examined the data panel on the side. Again, all I could understand was ROUNDS REMAINING 10. I aimed down at him again.

Click, click.

Well, shit. Was it the round I ejected? An empty chamber? I looked at the side panel once more and squeezed the trigger.

Ker-THUNK! I jumped three feet in the air. Not because it was very noisy; it wasn't. The ker is an inadequate way of describing the sound the gun made as it fired, but the THUNK is a reasonable approximation of the bullet hitting the wall two feet above the floor, nowhere near Comfort.

God's holy freaking trousers. I thought I saw it now. I aimed and fired again at the dead man. Click. Click click. This gun would not fire at its owner.

My bowels suddenly turned to lime jelly. Comfort had some device on him, or in him, that his weapon sensed. Some type of safety mechanism. And if it wouldn't shoot at Comfort, what about...?

I stumbled into the parlor and aimed at the bloody corpse on the floor.

Click.

I sat right down where I had been standing. I was feeling faint. I had come that close to opening the hotel-room door and attempting to hold this woman at gunpoint—so I could bring her into the room and shoot her in the back, but she wouldn't have known that. What she would have known was that the pistol I was aiming at her was no more use than a pointed finger. She would have broken me in five or six places, and brought me in here for the two of them to clean, dress, and consume at their leisure.

All right, all right. Get a grip. Get up. Go into the bathroom again. Grab Izzy by the back of his coat and drag him through the door.

He wouldn't fit.

Played correctly it might have looked like a comedy of pratfalls, but I wasn't laughing. I pulled at him and tugged at him and fell over him, and slipped in a pool of his blood and nearly plunged into the spa pool. His body was not resisting, not moving in any way, but he seemed all arms and legs, all angles and corners, not limp like a dead body should be but hard and rigid. It was a cinch there was still something going on in that reengineered body, heartbeat or no heartbeat.

I can relate it all dispassionately now, but don't imagine I went about any of this coolly and logically. I was whimpering with fear, shaking with anger, sobbing in frustration. When I was sure I could no longer hold in a scream I dropped him again. I kicked his head one more time to grow on, then another because I felt like it. Then I left him there.

I stood on the chair and put my suitcase up into the ventilation ducts. Then I aimed the pistol at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows—not really windows, but huge slabs of what I hoped was plate glass. The bullet punched a hole the size of my fist and the glass was instantly covered, edge to edge, with a network of cracks.

Her suitcase was certainly tempting. I was sure she had things in there I could use. I never tried to open it. Why? If you ever find my Pantechnicon seemingly abandoned, I'd advise you to leave it alone. It has half a dozen ways of defending itself by delivering various degrees of nastiness including, if you don't get the hint after strike three, lethal force. If I could think up stuff like that, I reasoned, who knew what amusements these two bloody-minded monsters had in store for me.

I picked up the suitcase gingerly and hurled it at the window. The glass flew apart in ten thousand glittering ice cubes. I went to the edge and looked down. As I'd hoped, the stuff was landing on the lobby roof. Nobody was likely to get hurt by it. I dragged her body to the edge and tipped her over. I did not stay around to watch the impact.

Then I was in a big hurry. Someone was knocking at the door already. I hoped it was a guest, that the management had not yet been called to deal with the spilled paint and the holes in the door. But they would be up soon, followed shortly by the police. It was time to check out of the luxurious Hotel Othello. Kiss Desdemona good-bye for me.

I moved the chair back to its original position. Then I scuffed at the dents the chair legs had left in the deep carpet. Somebody would look in the duct eventually, but maybe this would buy me some time.

I don't claim to be an acrobat, but I know enough moves to shoot a pretty fair action scene without a stunt double. I jumped up twice to get the measure of the hole in the ceiling. The first time I jumped for real I banged my head hard enough to hear the songs of little birdies for a moment. I took a deep breath and tried it again, and this time I got my palms flat on the bottom of the duct, hung there undecided for several seconds, then with a mighty effort swung my legs up, once, twice, hitching my upper body a few inches forward with each swing, until I could hook my feet over the opposite edge and push myself forward, completely inside the duct.

It was dark inside. I couldn't see very far in any direction. But the cylindrical pipe was just barely big enough for me to turn around, at the risk of permanently turning my spine into a pretzel. I got it done, though, and reached across the opening for the ventilator grille I'd put up there earlier.

I took the toilet paper and the bars of soap and wedged big handfuls of paper and slivers of soap into the ventilator frame. Fingers stuck through the holes of the grating, I carefully lowered the grille down through the hole, then straightened it out and pulled it up against the flange of the ductwork. I tugged hard at it, felt it seat itself a little better, then gingerly let it go. Holding the grille with one hand, I pressed lightly down with the other, then a little harder, and with moderate pressure the grille dropped back out of its frame. Good enough; it wasn't going to be falling on a cop's head like a silent slapstick comedy. I figured if the ruse granted me just an extra ten minutes to get away I'd be happy; half an hour and you'd never find me with a pack of bloodhounds and a herd of process servers.

I backed up so my flailing feet would not dislodge the grating, did the spaghetti shuffle to get myself turned around again, and started my getaway.

In the movie of my life, this getaway would not need a second-unit stunt action team. My progress was nearly as slow as the building itself. I'd shove my suitcase ahead of me an arm's length, then shuffle along on hands and knees until I caught up to it. Then shove it forward again. Repeat step B, repeat step A. Continue until an exit presents itself. But don't take too long, because once they realize you're up here, it's all over with.

At regular intervals I would come to registers like the one I had entered through. I'd look down and see if anyone was below, then gingerly ease myself across it. I didn't know if the gratings would support my weight, and didn't want to find out the answer was no until I was ready to leave.

I wondered at the lack of circulation. Shouldn't there be a howling wind up here? Apparently not. These ducts did not deliver heated or cooled air, since the temperature outside never varied more than fifteen degrees. The purpose of the system was to clean the air, treat it, deodorize it, and keep it fresh as befitted the air in a first-class hotel. Somewhere fans were turning to keep the air in its desultory motion, but I never saw them.

At first, it was a cozy feeling, surrounded on all sides in the darkness. A return to the womb, perhaps. And after the moments of extreme stress, it felt good to relax just a little, get rid of the epinephrine, feel the old ticker slowing below three hundred beats. You're not out of the woods yet, Sparky, I told myself. But could that be a clearing up ahead?

That's when I heard him coming after me.

"You're out of your mind," I muttered to myself, but I knew it wasn't so. He was back there, somewhere in the ductworks. Behind me.

I stopped and held as still as I could. I heard distant fans, almost below the threshold of hearing. Nothing else. But he was back there. I started to crawl again.

It was a thump sssh, thump sssh sound. It stopped when I stopped, started up again when I moved. It was beyond the range of hearing of anybody but a man running for his life. Well... crawling. If anything, the crawling made it worse. Everyone has had the running-in-glue dream. This was like that, only you're chopped off at the knees and you can't turn around and look behind you.

But there was something even worse than that, a special torture arranged by a God who's always struck me as a practical-joker, life-of-the-party sort of deity. I'll bet he was slapping his thigh over this one. For eight weeks I had played the Old Man in "His Hideous Eye," the one-man, one-act masterpiece inspired by Poe's "Telltale Heart." ("Yikes!!*****"—Joe Miller's One-Second Reviews). The thump sssh thump sssh (repeat until half-crazy) was the exact sound I had heard for eight shows a week, beginning at the threshold of audibility and growing over the next forty-five minutes until it shook the theater. It was the sound I had to hear with growing terror, until the curtain fell on a gibbering lunatic. Going from a self-assured rationalist to a thoroughly shattered shell of a man in less than an hour is one of the tougher assignments any actor will ever have. I had to learn to fear that sound. By the end of the fiftieth performance it was necessary to throw a bucket of ice water in my face and tie me to a chair for an hour until I had stopped shaking. It was the only time in my life a role got the best of me. One night I simply couldn't go on again. They had to send in my understudy, and finally recast with that canvas-chewer... ah, well, no use defaming the man here. He went on to become synonymous with the role, and to accept the Lexie Award that should have gone to me, while I stumbled off for a week in a padded room, three months of wondering if I could ever tread the boards again, and eventually, through a most circuitous route, to this stinking plastic pipe in a stinking overpriced hotel on a stinking half-finished disaster waiting to happen, with a demented unkillable thing more hideous than any Eye somewhere back there in the darkness.

Like a little song you learned when you were three, these conditioned reflexes never really leave you. Like a spider you discover in your bed, and ninety-six years later the sight of a super-web-spinner makes your skin crawl. I memorized the complete works of Shakespeare by my sixth birthday. To this day, recite any line and I can complete any speech, any scene, any act. And if you drop a sandbag on the floor and then pull it along a few feet—thump sssh, thump sssh—I will turn pale and break out in a sweat. I have no control over it.

My best bet seemed to be to drop down through another grate into an empty room, then simply walk out. I passed over such a grate, looked down at five people of at least four sexes naked on a big bed. I had to look again; I hadn't known you could do that with an umbrella. Best not to join the party, though. It looked painful.

And because the perversity of the universe tends always toward the maximum, that was the last grating I crossed. I made a left ninety-degree turn: nada. Another turn back to the right: zip. Another right and a left. Nothing.

I risked getting my Swiss Army knife from the pocket on the side of my suitcase. If knives in the Swiss Army had ranks, this would not be the Colonel or the general of knives. This was the Oberfeldmarschall, the very Fuhrer of pocketknives. This knife would not only clean fish and pick your teeth and uncork your wine bottles, it was equipped with a tiny light, among many other things. It's the best all-purpose tool I've ever come across in seventy years. Most people, looking at it, would never know what an effective weapon it could be. And I'm not talking about the fish-scaler, either.

I shined the light behind me. The coast was clear, back to the last turn I'd taken.

Perhaps I could have retraced my steps to the last grate, dropped through, joined the orgy, and everybody would have been saved a lot of trouble. Except maybe the orgiasts. But there really was no question of that. If there was even a one percent chance I'd encounter Comfort before I got to the grating, it wasn't worth the risk. And I was sure there was a bigger chance than that. No, when next I encountered Mr. Comfort, it was going to have to be in a situation where I had a lot more than just a slight edge, which was what I figured I had just then, with him injured and probably weaponless, and me with a short-bladed knife. What I had in mind was more like him with his arms and legs cut off, blinded, with his back to me, and me with a nuclear-tipped missile. That seemed to me more acceptable odds. Even then, I wouldn't count Izzy out.

I couldn't hear the sound of his progress. Was he resting, or could he hear me that well, to stop when I stopped? Or could he, please God, have fallen through a grate and been cluster-fucked to a fare-thee-well?

I was feeling so heebie-jeebery (a word from my Sparky days) that I just had to know. The silence was worse than the sound.

"Izzy?" I said, in a normal voice. No sense rousing the whole hotel. "Is that you?"

"Who else would it be, Sparky?" I banged my head on the duct. I wish I could have recorded the sound I made. It would have been useful the next time I had to play a man almost dying of fright. The thing was, it sounded like he was two feet behind me. I knew he wasn't but I had to look or I'd choke on my own vomit. I looked. He wasn't there. It was an acoustical trick of some sort, the effect of being in a long pipe.

"Did I hurt you some?" I hope it sounded brave.

"I'm afraid you did," came the disembodied voice again. "My balance is shot. Keep listing to the right. I can't feel one arm and one leg."

"Right or left?" I asked.

"That would be telling, wouldn't it?" Indeed. And how much of what he had said was true? Hell, it could all be true. I think he was still so contemptuous of me that he didn't care if he threw away a tactical advantage like that.

"You've got to stop this business of assault with a deadly musical instrument," he went on. "What's next? Cymbals? A bassoon?"

"How about a grand piano, dropped from a great height?" I had turned back around and was crawling forward again. Shove the suitcase, crawl two steps, shove the suitcase, crawl again, flick the light on and off quickly to see what was ahead. Nothing encouraging but another turn to the right.

Wait. Left, right, right, left. For a moment I thought I'd turned completely around and might be paralleling the duct he was in; he might be only inches away, off to my right. Or was it left, right, right, right? And now a right again. I was hopelessly confused. And where were all the grates?

I crawled through another right angle, turning left, and after twenty feet I came to something new. I found it by almost dropping my suitcase into a down duct, the same size as the one I was in.

There were four different ways to go here. Pipes branched off to the right and the left, and also straight ahead. The fourth way was down, not a direction I was prepared to take, but which I thought would be an excellent choice for Comfort. If there were only a way to persuade him.

"Is that what you shoved through the window back there?" he asked.

"What's that?"

"A piano. It looked like something big went through it."

"You didn't look down."

"Too dizzy. Afraid I'd fall out. I didn't think you had left that way."

I had put my suitcase on the far side of the down duct, and now I eased myself carefully over it. I moved down about five feet, and snapped on the penlight.

"And you knew I hadn't gone out the front door," I said. Somehow, keeping him talking made me feel better. When he talked, he was just another human being. When he was silent he was Death.

"You left a little strip of toilet paper sticking out of the grate."

"I was in a hurry."

"I saw some puzzling things. Holes in the door. The missing window."

"Your friend is what went out the window," I said.

"I thought so. Sparky, you're full of surprises."

"But you keep coming back to life," I said. "Cats get nine lives. How many do rats get?"

"At least one more. The first time I underestimated you. The second time you were lucky. And now Isobel is gone. The third time, I will get you."

"Is this still the second time, or are we talking third time right now?"

He didn't say anything. I flashed the light around frantically, left, right, down, behind me. If he stopped talking I was afraid he was setting some trap, or sneaking up from an unexpected direction. As long as he talked, I knew he was still in the pipe with me.

"This Isobel," I ventured. "A friend of yours?"

"She was my sister."

Oh, terrific. But he said it like I might have said, "You want some fries with that?" I tried to think of a reply, but what do you say to a man whose sister you just defenestrated? Sorry didn't quite cover it, and it wasn't true, anyway. I was not sorry, even a little bit. So I had my reply.

"She didn't die quickly," I said. "She seemed to be in a great deal of pain. I'm pretty sure she was alive when I pushed her out."

"Good," he said. Well, what did I expect?

"You didn't like her?"

"I worshiped her."

"Could you explain that to me?"

"Not now. Later, if you're still alive."

I figured he figured he was almost on me. Okay, I was almost ready for him.

During our talk I'd pulled out the one implement among fifty or sixty I'd bought the pocketknife for. This was a little item known as a chain knife. You've probably heard of them but it's unlikely you've seen one, as most planets banned their manufacture years ago. It's true they were useful for several things, but what they were best at was butchery.

This one was a five-inch snub-nosed blade. If you looked at it closely, you'd see all around the edge almost a thousand tiny razors set in a stainless-steel chain. The razors were shaped like shark's teeth. When you pressed the power button, that chain began moving so fast it looked to be part of the blade. It made a high-pitched whine, not unlike a dental drill in old movies. Believe me, you'd rather face a thousand dental drills with no ether than go up against a chain knife. It was based on something called a chain saw, which was used on Old Earth to cut down towering redwoods. I could just sort of wave it at your throat; you'd feel nothing until the blood started to spurt as your severed head fell from your shoulders. Bone, gristle, sinew, muscle. It was all the same to the chain knife. Like butter.

It wouldn't have been my weapon of choice against Isambard C, but it was the weapon I had. My main problem was that, to use it, one had to be in close, and in close I knew he held all the high cards. I might not get more than one swipe at him. That swipe had to count.

So what I'd been doing was preparing a trap.

The chain knife barely buzzed as I poked it through the top of the air-duct pipe. I moved it left to right cutting an arc, then back, then over the top again, then forward. I ended with a half cylinder of thin plastic suitable for my purpose. I put my light and my head up through the hole I'd just made, but it was very close and black and I couldn't tell much. Maneuvering room was to his advantage, so I rejected the idea of simply standing up and stumbling away in the dark. Unless...

No, it was too risky. If I'd retraced the pipe, from the outside this time, maybe I could have found the section that he was in and sliced him up while he was trapped inside. But how would I know where he was? Again, I'd get one shot, and I'd be stabbing blindly. As soon as he knew I had a chain knife a lot of my advantage would be lost. My best shot seemed to be face-to-face, in close quarters.

I thought there was a good chance he didn't realize I knew about how his pistol worked. Maybe he was expecting to close the last yard or two while I clicked the trigger at him, uselessly. One can hope.

I knelt back down in the pipe and fitted the cutaway section over the big hole in the bottom of the pipe. It was a bit too large. Working with only very brief flickers of light from my knife, I trimmed off edges and corners until it was just slightly bigger than the descending shaft. I ran my hand over it, lightly tested its strength. I couldn't tell any difference in texture. The plastic bent only slightly, but it seemed sure that if I put my weight on it I'd buckle it, and plunge headfirst down into the pipe.

I'd done all I could do. I moved back a few feet, hunkered down, and waited. The trap was between us and it was pitch-black. But I was far from sure he wouldn't scent something wrong.

Thump sssh. Thump sssh.

What was making that noise? Dragging a broken leg? That would account for the sssh, but what about the thump?

I never found out, because I never saw him in motion down the tube.

There was the slightest new sound. Had he reached the trap? Could he feel it with his fingers? The noise of his movement stopped.

"Left... right, and... yes. Straight ahead," he said. My god, he was here. I still hunkered, drenched in sweat, not daring to breathe.

"Which way would you go, Sparky? I can smell you, I can smell your fear. I like that smell."

I prayed to all the Muses. No sneezes. No growling stomach.

"Which way would a coward go? Seems obvious, doesn't it? Turning left or right involves too many decisions. You'd go straight ahead.

Thump. And then a glorious sound: narrow-gauge plastic crumpling like a sheet of thick paper. I snapped on the light and saw him half in, half out of the down tube. His head and shoulders were in, and he had one hand on the edge of the pipe nearest to me. That, and his knees, were all that kept him from the plunge.

Without even thinking about it I slashed at his hand with the chain knife. Bzzzzt! The air filled with a fine pink mist, and half of his hand was lying there like a bundle of hard little sausages. At the same time I sidled over and jammed my foot down hard on the back of his neck. He slid down, held there poised for a moment with his knees straining to hold his body in a position too angled to fit into the tube, and then he started to slide. I shoved his ass with my shoe, to get him going.

Then he was gone.

I collapsed into a quivering hulk, sitting tailor fashion. I wiped my brow with the back of my hand, coming within an inch of slicing off my ear with the chain knife. I stopped the whirring of the chain, took a few deep breaths. I still had the light on, simply because I'd never been this afraid of the dark. I knew he had to be gone, but a part of me kept expecting him to leap out of the down tube and go for my throat. To reassure myself, I leaned over and played the light down the tube.

He was five feet away, head down. All I could see was his feet and part of his legs. But he was moving. He was moving up.

"Why won't you die?" I shouted at him. The sound of my own voice frightened me. It sounded very near to madness.

Like a bird might watch a snake, I stared in fascination at his slow progress. He was holding himself in position by forcing his shoulders, his elbows and hands—including the partial one I'd left him—his lower back and knees and feet against the inside of the tube. Then, in a rippling motion that reminded me of a caterpillar, he moved his feet up an inch, then his knees, then his elbows and back and hands. On the best day of my life I couldn't have done it. With the injuries he had sustained it was monstrous to think he could do it. But there he was.

"Will you never stop?"

"Never."

"Give up. Call it a day. Go get cleaned up and lick your wounds. Please, just slide down the pipe and we can both go home for a while. Somebody's going to find us in here."

"That's your problem."

I thought it was at least partly his problem, but I guess if he just didn't give a damn, it wasn't.

He kicked off his shoes. I heard them clatter a long way down the tube. Now his feet got better traction; he moved up an inch and a half at a time.

He got within my range, so I reached down and stabbed the sole of his right foot with the chain knife. Not only did it not bother him in the least, he kicked at the knife, losing a part of the foot but almost knocking the knife out of my hand. And still he came up.

That's when I got my silly idea, squatting there on the edge and watching him rise slowly up the tube, like heartburn. I snapped the chain knife back into its slot and opened out the ice-pick blade. I pulled the ice pick free of its socket. You were supposed to seat the blade into a different part of the handle to chip ice, but I didn't want to risk losing my weapon again, so I reached down just with the pick blade. I drew the tip slowly, slowly across the bottom of his foot.

He jerked like a mackerel on a hook.

"Stop that!" he shouted. It was the first time his voice had shown any emotion.

Oh-ho!

I drew the tip of the pick lightly over the other sole.

"Don't ever do that again!" he snarled.

"Izzy. You're ticklish!" I could feel the big grin on my face. Unable to stop myself, I laughed aloud. Never had I felt such a blessed relief of tension. I reached down and diddled him with my fingertips. He jerked again, and loosened his grip on the inside of the tube, slid down about a foot and a half to where I could no longer reach him.

"I'm starting back up," he said, after a moment, his voice cold and emotionless again, yet with vast anger bubbling just below the surface. "If you ever do that again to me, I will give you one entire week more of life."

"Don't you have that backward?"

"I said what I meant. You have no conception of how much pain I can put into those seven days. You'll beg me for death."

I thought I probably would, too. In fact, I'd beg for it as soon as he got down to serious work.

"Does that mean if I surrender to you now, I get a quick death?"

"I didn't say that." He started inching his way up again. It was a little harder now, since his maimed foot was oozing blood and making the pipe slippery. If only I had a bucket of soapy water, I thought.

But I didn't. So when he was in range, I tickled both his feet and he dropped down again.

"This is called a Mexican standoff," I told him. At least I think that's what it's called. I wonder why? "You can't get up here, and I can't leave or you'll be up and out in just a minute or two."

"I can wait," he said, confidently. And he probably could. Someone in the Charonese Mafia must have something pretty powerful on someone in the Oberoni government. Or maybe a jail term simply didn't scare him.

But I didn't intend to wait around.

I unrolled a big wad of toilet paper. Activated the lighter accessory on my knife, and lit the wad. It flared up very quickly, singeing my fingers before I could drop it down on him. It fell right on the seat of his pants, burning merrily. Let's all sing: "Chestnuts roasting..."

He never cried out, never threatened me. He began to wiggle and squirm with amazing energy, not making a sound. He managed to get one hand to the right spot, slipping down a few more inches, and batted at the burning wad. Smoke billowed up around me, making my eyes tear. I endured it heroically. After all, tragedy is when my eyes hurt. Comedy is when your testicles are being cooked.

The fireball fell past him, but his pants were burning. And that wasn't the worst of his problems, because I dropped another flaming depth charge on him, this one lodging briefly against his body until he pressed his back against the pipe to smother it.

Distantly, I heard an alarm go off. Smoke detector, most likely. Which meant it was really time to get out of here. I had dropped half a dozen fireballs on him, and he was blazing fitfully from head to toe. I saw him start to slide. He picked up speed and then he was gone in the smoke. Had he gone to the bottom? How could I know? I didn't know where the bottom was. He was deeper down than he'd been, though, which I guess was as good as I could hope for. When he got the fires out, it should take him a while to inch himself back up the pipe. I hoped it was enough time for me to escape.

I stood up in the place I'd removed the section of pipe, my knees popping loudly. I played the light around this small, crowded space, looking for the egress. I saw nothing but pipes of blue, white, copper, and red, wires in hundreds of colors, and some sort of foamy stuff I couldn't identify. It was all haphazard, seemingly without plan. Few people know of this other world behind their ceilings and walls. I'd been in places like this before, but the experience granted me little advantage, since without a blueprint there was little means of telling what was what or what was on the other side of a wall.

Well, there was bound to be a way to access this space. I'd just have to go find it. The distant sound of the alarm provided the urgency.

I did identify one pipe. It was copper, about an inch in width, and printed all along the side were the words EMERGENCY SPRINKLER SYSTEM, over and over. Where were you when I needed you?

I leaned over to pick up my suitcase and his hand fastened on my wrist.

There is no way to transliterate the scream I let fly. Spell it any way you want, scream it aloud, and then magnify it by ten. And boost it an octave. Many a woman could never have uttered that scream.

There he was, at my feet as I swept the light over him, a vision from hell, streaked with blood that had run up his face, patches of hair still glowing embers. Most of one side of his face was burned black, cracking, sloughing off. Even the eye was roasted. None of it seemed to bother him. With maniacal concentration he tried to bring his other, maimed hand around to lever himself out of the hole. His good hand gripped like steel.

Bzzzzzzzz zzzzzt!

Once more vaporized flesh and bone became a pink mist in the air. Completely by reflex I had reached down and lopped off his hand at the wrist. He began to slide, then steadied himself somehow, began to lift himself up with his stump and his ruined right hand. I tried to bring the chain knife down to his head, thrust it into his brains, see how he liked that, but his flailing arm hit my hand, almost made me lose the knife again. He was still too quick; I couldn't risk a neck slice.

Bzzz uuuzzz uuuz. The knife met some resistance as I passed the blade through the copper pipe of the sprinkler. Water gushed from one severed end, and I tugged at the malleable metal, pulled it out and down, aimed it at the face of the beast.

With a roar of rage, he slipped an inch, three inches, a foot, and then lost his grip entirely. I shined the light down through the torrent, saw him clinging to a crosspipe opening about ten feet down. That's how he got himself turned around, I imagined. And climbing the inside of the down duct must have been a lot easier with his head up. Now he clung, slipped, and down he went, like a log flume ride, past another opening, and another, and then I couldn't see him anymore.

Another alarm was ringing now, set off by my sabotage of the emergency system. Gotta go, gotta go right now.

Then I saw the pieces of him still lying at my feet. I kicked the severed hand over the edge. Maybe it would hit him on the head. Another piece was four entire fingers barely connected by the first knuckles. Over it went, too. The last piece was his severed right thumb and it was about to join its brother digits when I paused, thought it over a second, then picked it up and shoved it into my pocket.

Never can tell when a spare thumb might come in handy.

I picked up my suitcase, stepped out of the pipe and onto the foamy stuff covering the floor, and promptly broke through it, falling ass over end to the floor of a hallway full of hurrying people.

Only one child seemed to have noticed my pratfall, and he thought it was pretty darn funny. Everybody else was looking for the fire exit. I got up, tried to regain my dignity, and joined the throng. A crowd felt like exactly the right place to be. You can lose yourself in a crowd.

I went through the stairway door and started down. So the second floor wasn't good enough for me? If I'd been a little lower I'd probably already be out.

Those tricky Oberoni. I'd gone down one flight of the spiral stairway when yet another alarm sounded. Then a voice:

"Everyone on the fire stairs, sit down, now!" And everyone did, except for one goofy looking fellow who looked as if he'd already been through fire, flood, pestilence, and plague. I'm speaking of myself.

The little boy tugged at my pants. Sweet of him, considering he could have had another good laugh if he'd just let me alone. I sat, and the stairs all collapsed. We started to slide down an endless spiral.

You had to admire them. The folding stairway probably came from a funhouse, but it sure got us out fast. Other people leaped in from other floors, until pretty soon we were jam-packed, some upside down, some tumbling head over heels. Still I think there would have been more chance of injury if they'd let us walk out.

At the bottom we landed on a rotating disk that quickly spun us off onto soft, sweet-smelling grass. I lay there just a moment, savoring my escape, then someone grabbed my arm and helped me up and rushed me away from the area, where more guests were arriving every minute. It was all as orderly and efficient as the baggage delivery in a spaceport, but faster.

"Are you injured?" It was a young emergency worker. I knew it because of the large red cross on his tunic.

"I'm fine. A little disoriented."

"If you'll move along over there, we have forms you can fill out for any damages you have incurred. We hope this little crisis is over soon, and that you can continue enjoying your stay at the Othello."

"Thank you. I've had a wonderful time already."

I walked toward the table, then right past it, and on down the street and into the park and down to a train station and onto a car which took me far, far from Mr. Isambard Comfort.

You've heard that old expression, to follow one to the ends of the earth. I'm sure Comfort would try, if we were on Earth, but as most people know, Earth has no ends, being a big sphere like most places in the system. Oberon does have ends, though. Four of them. And that's where I was.

All the ends are called Edge City. If you must distinguish them, they are numbered eleven, one, five, and seven, from that old familiar clock face. In a few more years they will have evolved into ten, two, four, and eight, and a few years after that Oberon will lose a major tourist attraction as the edges meet at three and nine. But by then the second wheel should be well under way.

I thought I was at Edge City Eleven. I wasn't quite sure. It's easy for an off-worlder to get turned around. Surprising, since the system is so logical, unlike the warrens of Luna, where most things just growed. But there it is. I might really be at One. It didn't matter much, at the moment.

It was three days after all the excitement at the Othello. I had spent the time laying low, covering what tracks I might have left, and monitoring the progress of the case of Mr. Isambard Comfort, off-worlder, in the lively tabloid press of Oberon.

The off-worlder angle was being played for all it was worth. Most people look with suspicion on people from Somewhere Else. Race isn't much of an issue anymore, what with all the years of intermarrying, hybridizing. You seldom see someone who is really black or really white. Religious differences can still stir up trouble, but nothing like what used to go on in the old days on Earth. Sex is no longer the source of much discrimination, with sex changing in either direction or even frequent trips back and forth across the gender line. That left national origin, and not only do most people harbor some sort of prejudice about that, very few are even ashamed about it. Luckily, it is more in the nature of a sports rivalry than anything that is likely to lead to a shooting war. Plenty of fistfights, few murders.

Comfort was not only an off-worlder, he was Charonese. Make a list of folks to be viewed with suspicion, Charonese would lead it every time, distantly followed by Plutonians, then fill in the blank with the nearest neighbor you didn't care for. With Oberoni, it was the Mirandans. Can't trust those goddamn Mirandans, no sir. I mean, look at the way they dress! Their cuisine stinks, they don't wash frequently enough, they don't clean up after themselves, their cities are a filthy disgrace. They're stupid! Did you hear about the Mirandan expedition to the sun? They're not afraid they'll be burned up, because they'll be landing at night! And a million other similar ancient jokes. Ah, but the Charonese! There was a miserable bunch of lepers. Of course, in the case of the Charonese, it was my belief that they'd really earned it.

That a Charonese had had the gall to torture a citizen of Oberon almost to death, the perversity to assassinate a compatriot and throw her body out the window, the shocking insensibility to cause a major panic in one of Oberon's finest hotels, and the stupidity to get caught, minus both hands and a large part of one foot... well, it was just too wonderful for an Oberoni editor to believe. New headlines every day! Shameful revelations! Interviews with each and every guest and staff member of the Othello, with the police investigating the case, with the fire crews and emergency medical techs. And rumors galore! A Charonese terror squadron on the way from the outer worlds to break Comfort free from prison! Local satanists picketing for Comfort's release! Riots breaking out when Citizens for Decency picketed the satanists! The true story of the battle to the death between Comfort and the mysterious third Charonese, and the manhunt for same! Was he dead (some say, eaten by a mysterious domestic Charonese cabal), or alive and in hiding?

I read those last stories with special care, as you might imagine. So far, there had been no hint that the papers had the slightest inkling of what had really gone on. It didn't reassure me much (I may never use the word "comfort" again). The police probably knew a lot more than they were releasing.

All in all, it didn't seem a propitious time to present myself at the local precinct and unburden myself, tell them the true story. I felt sure I could justify my fight with Comfort, but it might get a little tricky convincing a judge that five bullets through a closed door was self-defense. Some people might even try to call it first degree murder. You never can tell. Prosecutors can be very contrary that way.

And, of course, there was the matter of those old warrants I'd never gotten around to straightening out.

It really seemed time to bid adieu to fair Oberon. And that was a lot harder than it sounded. So far, I'd had no luck at all.

At least I didn't have Izzy on my back. That's another reason I watched the news hourly. Due to the notoriety and heinous nature of the crimes he stood accused of, he had not been released on bail. He was, in fact, to be prosecuted for offenses that, often, could be dealt with by a simple civil suit, fines paid, everybody goes home satisfied. This time, the public had to be satisfied, and the public was pissed. They identified with Miss Polyhymnia Reynolds, a hardworking member of the Oberon middle class. They wanted that fucking satanist to do some time!

Yeah, right. Don't set your watch by that. When it all cooled down some, or possibly before, those friends in high places who had been bought, or who used the services best provided by a group like the Charonese Mafia, would step forward and get a new bail hearing and Izzy would be out the door. I checked the papers all the time so I'd be sure not to miss his release. Possibly I could arrange to be a thousand yards from the prison door, with a high-powered rifle with a telescopic sight.

I can dream, can't I?

Toby came bounding up to me, a little red rubber ball in his mouth, and pawed at my arm. It's Toby's biggest weakness; he's got a regular ball-chasing jones. Toss anything round in his presence and he instantly forgets he is a civilized, serious, high IQ sort of dog who can count to five. His pink tongue hangs out and he reverts to puppyhood, his eyes fastened on the ball with that total concentration only a dog can achieve. God knows where he'd found this one. In the shrubbery, abandoned by another dog, judging from the well-chewed surface. I took it from his mouth.

"Wanna fetch, Toby? Wanna go fetch?" He jumped up and down deliriously, wagging his entire body and yipping with joy. I made as if to throw the ball and he froze, ready to hold that position until Charon warmed up or I threw it, one or the other.

I threw it, and away he went. In heaven. What a hard life he led.

I was in one of the little roll-up parks the wheel engineers scattered along the Edge as construction progressed. There was a wading pool for children, a gazebo/bandstand structure, public toilets that really looked like brick, but weren't. A build-it-yourself playground in riotous plastic colors. About a hundred fine, sturdy trees: pines, maples, huge spreading oaks, and cherry, orange, apple, and banana trees that grew real fruit all year round. All it lacked was the Big Rock Candy Mountain and bubblers dispensing cold pop and lemonade. To look at it, you would never guess all the trees were in huge pots, all the grass only a veneer of sod that could be taken up and moved when the construction workers were ready to extend this section another few miles.

The parks were there more for tourists than for local children. The attraction, naturally, was the Edge itself. The Oberoni shrewdly knew that once you get tourists to a scenic wonder, you'd better give them something to do besides gape. And while you're at it, sell them overpriced souvenirs and junk food. Not far from this sylvan setting was a portable amusement park featuring the Big Dip, a roller coaster that plunged off the Edge three times in the course of the ride.

You would think the Edge would be enough. It was certainly more than enough for me.

I was sitting on the concrete sidewalk that defined the Edge, doing what every tourist not afflicted with terminal acrophobia does when he gets there: sit with one's feet dangling over infinity. Three times already I had been asked to snap the picture of some group pretending to fall off, or peering cautiously down.

It helps to sneak up on it, sit down securely, and then swing your legs over. I don't have any great trouble with heights, but there are heights and then there are heights. Nowhere was there anything as high as the Edge. At the Edge, you were standing at the top of infinity.

All very safe, of course. No need to have a lot of frozen tourist corpses orbiting Uranus. Bad publicity.

Every hundred yards or so along the Edge signs were prominently posted: JUMP AT YOUR OWN RISK. OB$100 FEE CHARGED FOR RETRIEVAL.

Somewhere down there about a mile or two away was the all-but-invisible plastic substance that kept the air in at the Edges. A big bubble of it covered all the ends of the wheel. If you jumped or fell off the Edge, you would soon hit this stuff and bounce, and bounce again, and probably bounce a dozen times before coming to rest. Then the Edge Patrol would lower a rope harness to you and you would be hauled in like a trout. Unless you'd sprained an ankle or broken a bone, in which case it became a rescue, and they'd go down with a litter and charge you OB$500. It was a rather expensive way of getting a thrill, to my mind, but dozens of people did it every day. For five dollars, at sites all up and down the Edge, they could be attached to a bungee cord and get a better ride much more cheaply. But go figure tourists, eh?

Here and there in the air before me like hundreds of varicolored butterflies were gull-winged gliders and gossamer-winged pedal fliers taking advantage of the updrafts along the Edge. There were at least that many kites of all shapes and sizes. It was a kaleidoscopic traffic jam in the air. Glorious!

Toby returned with the ball and dropped it at my side, then stared at it as if willpower alone could lift it and toss it. I picked it up and gestured as if to throw it off the Edge. He got ready to jump. I should know better than to even tease about that. Toby is basically fearless; he'd go over the Edge in a minute. I turned and tossed it as far as I could toward the pressurehead.

I said very safe. I did not say completely safe.

The pressurehead is a wall of steel fifty miles wide and five miles high. An Edge City was defined as that space, not yet permanently occupied, between the pressurehead and the Edge. It was punctured in hundreds of places along the bottom by what looked like wide, inviting open doors, but were actually open air locks. At each door was a prominent sign warning you that you were leaving a category-B pressure environment and entering a category-D area. Many people live their whole lives without visiting a D area. Those rankings took many factors into account, I'd been told, but boiled down to how many surfaces there were between your tender and irreplaceable ass and hard vacuum. Category D meant there was only one barrier, the invisible plastic substance that provided a working environment for construction workers and visitors to Edge City. If that membrane was punctured, you'd hear all hell's klaxons and sirens, and find the air locks back to the safe world were now closed, and taking groups of twenty at their usual, maddeningly slow, now perhaps fatally slow, rate, as your ears popped and your nose started bleeding.

How many times had this happened during the construction of the wheel? So far, zero. How much did I worry about a blowout? About the same. Most of the people around me seemed to feel the same way. They brought their children here, they came to play or stretch out on the grass, they camped out "overnight," when the great lights shining down from the hub were turned off for eight hours.

When another five miles of wheel was complete, the pressurehead was detached from the huge bolts holding it in place, and rolled toward the Edge and its new mooring. I'd like to see that. They have big parades and fireworks and festivals and music. Clowns and troubadours and, of course, outdoor theater.

I threw the rubber ball a few more times, when who should come shambling down the walkway but Elwood P. Dowd. He stopped a few steps away and stood looking down at me, his hands thrust into his baggy gray slacks, playing pocket pool or fiddling with his spare coins or whatever it was he did when wearing that thoughtful expression on his face.

"I didn't see you around on the trip from Pluto," I said.

"No, you didn't," he drawled. "Claustrophobia. And you didn't pack enough to eat."

He lowered himself down on my left side, dangled his feet with his clunky brown hard-leather shoes and argyle socks. He always sits on my left, because he's deaf in his left ear. He told me he'd fallen through an iced-over pond when he was young, back in Bedford Falls. Elwood had plenty of stories like that. He'd been a United States senator for three years, and he'd flown solo across the Atlantic Ocean. He'd been the leader of a swing band.

"Yeah, I know," I said. "The old Pantechnicon's not good enough for you. Which way did you travel this time? On the buddy seat of some witch's broom? Borne on the gentle wings of angels? Scanned, digitized, strewn through the ether to fetch up here, at the edge of human folly?"

He peered down between his shoes, swinging them idly.

"Pretty fair edge, if you ask me." I could tell by the way he looked off into the distance that he was pissed. He doesn't like me to point out the lapses in logic his appearances usually imply.

"If you don't like having me around, I can always go away," he drawled.

I learned long ago not to put my arm around his shoulder or anything foolish like that. People stare. Rude, but there it is. Usually I don't even look directly at him, but now I did.

"After better than ninety years, Elwood, I have trouble imagining what I'd do without you."

That seemed to satisfy him. He squinted up at the hang gliders for a time.

"Maybe I came here in a faster ship than you did," he said.

"Using up your frequent-traveler miles on the Flying Dutchman?"

"The old Spirit of St. Louis was a lot faster. No, but maybe I hitched a ride with somebody who did get here faster. Now, if I was you, I'd be asking myself, 'Who do I know that got here faster than me? And how'd he do it?' "

Two hours in the library looking at back postings of newspads and I had the information I needed. And yes, I actually went to the library. They exist, you know, and some of them even have a few books in them. Even on a spanking-new world like Oberon they have not entirely converted to over-the-phone service. And by law they have to maintain old-fashioned desk-bound terminals, for those folks who eschew direct interface and implanted modems: Amish, Christian Scientists, naturalists, washed-up ex-child telly stars, people who get Radio Free Betelgeuse on the fillings in their teeth. Weirdos.

When I found what I was looking for, the beginnings of a wild idea took root like crabgrass and refused to go away. I walked for an hour, turning it over and over in my mind. Just too wild, I kept telling myself. And then I'd think of another angle and be right back, worrying at it.

I found a restaurant that allowed dogs—that's right, some of them on Oberon don't; can you imagine? And they call themselves civilized—and spent a contemplative two hours eating pasta and drinking strong tea. Toby, after eating his portion and vainly trying to interest me in playing fetch with the last meatball, snoozed in his chair.

What the heck? I thought. Toby opened one eye and I realized I'd said it aloud. I dropped money on the table and scooped him up, suddenly in a big hurry.

"How'd you like to ride on the fast train?" I asked him. He allowed as how that was all right with him, and went back to sleep.

Toby is a trusting soul. Well traveled as he is, he might have had second thoughts if he'd known more about the Rim Express.

The Express hadn't been operating the last time I was on Oberon, for what I thought of as an excellent reason: there wasn't much rim to speak of. There was a lot more rim now, but there was still the little matter of a five- or six-hundred mile gap between the arcs. How could a train get from one arc to the other if no rail connected them? Well, sometimes the simplest thing really is to let the mountain come to Muhammad.

The train car was everything the spoke elevators were not: narrow, cramped, linear. Seats were four across, with an aisle between pairs. The top half of the car was transparent, though you couldn't see anything when you boarded since the car was in a tube, suspended an eighth of an inch above a magnetic induction rail. I settled into an aisle seat. It was deeply padded, and could recline almost forty-five degrees. When the car was about half-filled, the front and rear doors sealed and there was a loud hiss as the air in the tube was bled away. Then I was pressed back in my seat by rapid acceleration.

In only a few minutes we burst silently into space. Toby floated up out of my lap, weightless. He's not bothered by this, simply looking around curiously until I snagged a hind leg and brought him back down. I twisted in my seat and saw the massive trailing edge of Noon Arc dwindling behind us. I could see the pressurehead, several tunnels including the one we had emerged from, the mysterious inner structure of the floor. We were traveling at three thousand miles per hour—

—and standing dead still. It's all relative, you see. Or so I'm told. From a viewpoint on the rotating wheel, we were really skedaddling. But stand away from the wheel, motionless, and you'd see that the train car was just hanging there as the Noon Arc rotated away from it, and the Six Arc approached.

All very neat. Hang suspended there for twenty minutes, then decelerate when the other arc sweeps you up. Travel time: thirty minutes. And, I hear you protest, why the hell would anyone take the fifteen-hour ordeal of a trip through the hub, as Poly did twice a week, when this magical chariot was available?

Answer: money.

There was no real physical reason why the Rim Express should be so expensive to ride. It was cheap to operate, it was safe, it was quick. And the government of Oberon hated the damn thing, wished it would just go away. Since it didn't, they taxed the hell out of it. They added surcharges for every screwball thing a government is likely to get up to, and then they added some more. On top of that, they subsidized the spoke elevators to the point that they were practically free. It was like bus fare as compared to rental of a limousine. The elevators didn't really need a fare box at all. Money from concessions and gambling enabled the service to turn a tidy profit, sort of like a theater that makes nothing at the box office but cleans up selling outrageously priced popcorn and drinks.

But what was the problem with speed and efficiency? Why the hostility to the Express? The answer didn't make sense to me, until I considered the economics of a rotating world under construction.

Since its inception not that many years before, and for some years to come, well over ninety percent of the freight traffic went down. Cargoes arrived at the hub—finished steel, composite, glass, web, imported food, merry-go-round horses, starving actors—and was lowered to the rim. Of that, only the starving actor was likely to return to the hub. And on Oberon, down meant slow. Each kilogram moved from the hub to the rim slowed the spin of the wheel by a few millionths of a second. Consider that millions of kilograms were lowered that way each day. Pretty soon, left to itself, the wheel would run out of juice like a music box winding down its spring. Everybody would get lighter, and lighter, and lighter... and rise up and blow away. (People did get lighter, though not by a lot. When the rotation speed had slowed to a certain point the engineers applied thrust and brought the wheel back up to speed, and slightly over. Included in Oberoni "weather forecasts," actually schedules, was the day's "gravity index." There were light days, and heavy days. Would you believe that suicide rates increased on heavy days? It's true. Also more fistfights, absenteeism from work, and complaints of constipation.) (This quirk of rotation also made spring scales illegal on Oberon. Only beam balances would give true weight.)

Thrust means energy, and energy costs money. You'd think they'd have a kilogram-lowering tax to pay for it, and they did, but not a big one. It was a complex equation, but one that eventually worked out to an outrageous tariff on the Rim Express, since these citizens weren't helping out by keeping the elevators in operation.

There was another way of delivering cargo to the rim. It also involved slowing the wheel. This was a fact of physics that no amount of taxation would correct: more mass at the rim equals less speed, no matter how it got there. But it was quicker, like the Express itself. The wheel is turning, see, and it has these two huge gaps in it. Why not wait for an arc to pass, then move your cargo into position where it could be intercepted and magnetically slowed, much as we were sitting out here in space right now, waiting for the arc to arrive?

Well... sounds great, but these are large shipments. You have twenty minutes to get them positioned exactly right. No margin for error, and it has to work right every time, hundreds of times a day... and I think this is my stop right up here, Mr. Conductorman. It's been fun, and send me a card if you... er, when you arrive safely.

Imagining several million tons smashing into one of the pressureheads, the Oberoni came to the same conclusion I did. No thank you. We'll ease freight into the hub in a slow and civilized manner, then lower it gently to where it's needed. The Rim Express is excitement enough, for those who can afford it.

Could I afford it? Not really, but my reasoning was thus: if this screwball plan doesn't work out I don't have an agent's chance at the Pearly Gates of getting to Luna in time. In fact, if I'm not off this wheel in twenty-four hours or less my chances of being arrested are almost a certainty. So time was more important than money for me. And all I had going for me at the moment was speed, audacity, and charm.

Actually, that didn't sound so bad to me. I'd stolen out of town many times in the past with less.

They turn the car around before arrival at the Six Arc, so when the deceleration starts you're pressed back into your seat, not jerked out of it. The pilot told us we'd stay weightless for the first ten seconds into the tunnel, so we could turn around and look so long as we remembered to lean back into our seats once we entered.

I did turn around, for a while, but I found the sight of the approaching arc much more unsettling than the view of the retreating one. You could actually see it grow during the last minute of free fall, swinging down on you like God's croquet mallet. No openings were visible; I knew they were there, but you couldn't see them until the last second. It was hard to resist the notion that you were about to be batted like a long fly ball to the Andromeda Galaxy. I settled in my chair and hugged Toby securely, and closed my eyes. Presently it got dark, instantly, and then I was pressed back into the seat. In no time the doors were opening and we all crowded out into the station. An elevator took us to the floor of Six Arc.

Which looked pretty much like Noon Arc, with one difference. There were the Chandytowns, sometimes pronounced Shantytowns, also known as Gypsy Penthouses, Rookeries, Bat Mansions, Goddamn Public Nuisances, dangerous eyesores, accidents-in-progress, and many more unflattering terms. They were goofy chandeliers, Christmas ornaments dangling from Gargantua's attic. They were squatters who hung instead of hunkered.

As usual, oversights like this were the result of lawmakers' negligence and lawyers' cupidity. Seems a bloated plutocrat of a banker, one of the original consortium who financed the early work on Oberon II and whose family came over on the good ship Tax Shelter (think of the Mayflower, with four-star restaurants and a stock ticker), was looking to build a mansion that would make all the other bloated plutocrats gobble with envy. He set his pack of New Harvard jackals on the project, and one came up with the odd fact that no one owned the airspace above the wheel rim. One could, if one had the money and the effrontery, build a castle in the air. The banker had plenty of both, and soon a sort of Xanadu of the Skies was dangling from a five-hundred-mile rope of spider silk, attached to the hub and looming a mile over the peons, a convenient pissing distance.

What one goony billionaire can create, others are sure to copy. Soon there were a dozen of these unwelcome party favors frowning down on the populace, complete with hanging gardens, pools, driving ranges, hangars, and all the ostentation money could buy. For some reason I didn't get, they were only in Six Arc so far, but rumor had them a-building, waiting to be lowered, over Noon Arc as well.

These structures were unlike anything humans had up to that point inhabited. Free-fall structures can be fanciful and free-form, but usually ended up in a massive clutter of add-ons, like Brementon. They weren't made to be enjoyed from the outside. Structures on a surface, whether on a planet or under spin, had unforgiving and constant gravity to contend with. Even with the strength of modern building materials, there was a limit to what could be done. The shantytowns lived in a new environment. They didn't have any sort of base to sit on; lower one to the ground, it would crumple like aluminum foil, then fall over on its side like an exhausted top. They were asymmetrical, tending to be wider at the middle than at the top and bottom. One thing was sure: if they were outlawed, as ninety percent of Sixers favored, it was going to be a big problem putting them anywhere else.

The legal battle had been joined fifteen years earlier, and still raged with no end in sight. So far the only progress had been passage of an ordinance that each had to be suspended from a minimum of three ropes, each capable of supporting the entire building. The tenants had complied with no fuss. Hell, it was cheap and easy to do, and there they still hung.

Like most tourists, I thought they were sort of pretty, in an overdone, tasteless way. But I could see the point of the people on the ground. Particularly the ones living in the Shadowlands.

First, there was the problem of stuff falling or being tossed over the side. Usually it was plastic champagne glasses, crumpled paper cups, and the butt ends of various smokables. But every once in a while there was a flowerpot, sometimes big enough to hold a potted palm. There had been chairs, oddments of clothing, ceramic tiles loosened by time, shards of glass from broken windows. A few years back a group of drunken revelers had shoved a lavender baby grand piano over the side. There had been one falling body, a suicide. So far no one had been killed on the ground. Injuries were lavishly compensated, and the offender's insurance premium dutifully raised. These were people who could easily afford it.

The big problem was the one you already thought of. Three cables or not, who wanted to live under the damn things?

The answer was, people looking for cheap rent. Property values had plummeted faster than a falling baby grand piano in the affected areas, known as Shadowlands. There really was a shadow cast by these things. Without grow lamps, all the tomato and marijuana plants in your window boxes shriveled up and died. Your light bill went up, but your rent went down.

The Shadowland apartments tended to be occupied by the young, who traditionally didn't have a lot of money, and who didn't really think they could die, anyway. Many residents wore bright red hard hats when on the street. Not really meant for protection, the hard hats were more a way of defiantly thumbing one's nose at fate.

I saw several of these hard-hatted bohemians on my way into the Shadow-land. Toby sniffed the air as we moved into the twilight. He knew something was wrong, but couldn't figure out what. I doubt the hovering shantytown meant anything to him; it was too big and too distant to be a part of his world.

We passed a line of people carrying signs and chanting something. The signs said SAVE THE RINGS. I never did figure out what that was all about.

I loitered around the neighborhood for several hours, getting a feel for the place. I'd changed my face a bit, my costume, my walk. Ordinarily I'd pull a few makeovers on a project like this, be several different people during the course of my wait. But no matter what I did, even the most inept observer would take note of those different guys walking with the same dog. Couldn't be helped; I wanted Toby with me. But I'm good at pretending I belong. I can fit in most places, know how to act as if I'm up to something purposeful and innocent.

It was a quiet neighborhood of working families and college students. The hurly-burly of stampeding skyscrapers was five miles away. People here were more stable, less flamboyant. I'm sure it would have been a very desirable spot for the settled middle class if it wasn't for the hovering monstrosity of the shantytown. Looking up at it, it was impossible to put aside the idea that it was about to drop a massive turd right on your head. There was an irising opening of some sort, probably to admit helicopters or hovercraft, that could easily be seen as a gigantic robot rectum.

I wondered how they dealt with sewage. I envisioned flying honey wagons buzzing around the big butthole in the sky like angry bees, slopping feculence, spewing effluvia. On second thought, dear, let's go see what's available in the Sunnyside Apartments.

Seeing no sign of police activity, but far from sure I'd see it if it was there, I plucked up my courage and entered the building. I roamed the hallways with what I hoped was an air of unconcerned innocence, passing her door several times. No one stood around reading a newspad. No games of mumblety-peg were happening in the stairwells. I saw no evidence of cameras having been recently installed, but I knew that if they want to hide the camera from you, you won't find it. I am very good at sniffing out the beaks in ordinary circumstances. Something about the shoes they wear, and the way they walk. But electronic surveillance was another matter.

It all depended on what she'd told them, and how much they believed. What I figured was the best thing going for me was simply that few cops would believe a man who could pull off the escape I had would be stupid enough to come here.

Well, I've proven many times, I'm way stupider than that.

So I squared up to the door, took a deep breath, and knocked.

I could tell she was watching me through a low-tech peephole. When she opened the door she had a puzzled frown on her face. My own features were not what she remembered, but it was nagging her. People change their appearance these days, sometimes frequently. Some new recognition skills were evolving, I believed, to deal with that fact. I'm okay at it. Women tended to be better at it than men. There is an identity in the eyes independent of other physical features, things about one's stance, something I think of as stage presence, gestures, possibly even an aura of some sort, that often give you away.

She looked down at the dog in the crook of my arm, then back at my face. Recognition dawned.

By the time I saw the right hook coming, it was way too late. I sat down hard, and put my hand to my nose. Jesus, did it hurt!

"Can I come in?" I honked, and stared at a handful of blood.

"How could you have the nerve to come here?" she shouted. "After what you did to me. You walked out and left me for that monster!"

She was pacing up and down the small living room of her apartment. She'd been over this same ground before, dozens of times in the last ten minutes, but I knew she had to get it out of her system. She would, eventually. There had been a moment of quiet as she stared down at me, perhaps a little surprised at what she had done, but a long way from regretting it. She had pulled me up and in, slammed the door behind me, and the tirade began.

She yelled at me as she shoved me toward the couch, harangued me as she went to the kitchen for a wet rag and some ice, screamed abuse as she hurled the cold pack at me, fumed and muttered as she picked up the ice and wrapped it up again and thrust it at me defiantly.

I just sat there with my head lowered. The rag was red now, but the bleeding had stopped. My nose throbbed a little, but I didn't think it was broken.

Toby sat at the other end of the couch, as far away from me as possible, and watched her pace the floor, licking his lips nervously from time to time. By sitting on the couch I think he meant to signal he was still with me in spirit, but by taking the distant ground he was letting me know that, if she gets violent again, Sparky, you're on your own. Toby was an artist, not a pugilist. If I'd wanted a bodyguard, I'd have bought a Rottweiler.

If you don't intend to resume the violence, you eventually reach a point where most of the anger is burned out of you. There's a lot of different ways to go from there. She might try to throw me out. I wasn't going to let her, but she might try. She might begin to cry. I thought that was likely. What she did, though, was sort of wind down. She paced a few more times, trying to think of more original ways to abuse me, paced slower and slower, and came to a halt looking down at Toby. The faintest of smiles touched her lips.

"Nice dog," she whispered.

"His name is Toby," I said. It was the second sentence I'd spoken to her since I found her lying on the bloody bed.

Toby knows his cues. He bounced down to the floor and stood up on his hind legs and did a little dance, pink tongue hanging out fetchingly. He knows he's cute. He did a back flip, then sat and barked, three times. Poly made a sound halfway between a sob and a laugh.

"My name isn't Trevor, though," I said. It set her off again. I had pretty much expected it would.

"Oh, really?" she hooted, voice dripping with scorn. "Imagine my surprise. The police told me Trevor Howard was some kind of old actor, and he'd been dead for two hundred years. Can you imagine how foolish I felt?" She ranted on a little longer, but her heart was no longer in it and she ran down again. This time she sat, and Toby jumped up in her lap and licked her face. Her hand came up absently to pet him, and he curled up in her lap, looking up worshipfully.

There's this thing about dog people—and Poly was definitely a dog person—that makes us unable to be totally angry, totally sad, or anything but calmed and at least a bit pleased when our hands are stroking a dog's back and scratching behind his ears. Toby played the moment for all it was worth, arching sensually, licking his lips. A cat would have purred, but Toby doesn't need to. A dog's body language is at least as eloquent.

Perhaps I'd be able to talk now.

"First, I'd like to say I'd never have left you there if I thought you were in danger from him." She looked over at me dubiously, but said nothing. "I know, you're thinking, 'Then why did he come back?' Well, obviously because, thinking about it a little more, I wasn't sure I was right." I would not point out that coming back was one of the bravest things I ever did. If she could accept that I would do anything brave she would see that for herself. If she couldn't, no amount of pleading my case would do any good. Besides, being silent about one's heroics is the mark of a hero, or so you'd believe if you watched any adventure story. Since most of us get our information about situations of melodramatic heroism from just such stories as that, I hoped her own mind was conditioned to think that way. Myself, I've met people who had done things I thought heroic who never shut up about it. Most people like to crow, hero and coward alike. The strong, silent, ah-shucks type from old western movies is rare indeed. But I knew the role, and I played it.

I had noticed the last three fingers of her right hand were pink and a little raw looking. They had been the ones severed by Izzy in his brief interrogation. Those fingers were undoubtedly in some compost pile in the bowels of Oberon. The ones she wore now were replacements.

"At least you'll play the violin again," I said, searching for a positive spin. I knew it was a mistake as soon as I said it, and it was, but not for the reason I had thought. She sat Toby on the couch and stood. Hand up, fingers spread, she shook it at me. The new fingers seemed a little loose.

"I'm glad you're so pleased about that," she grated. "I'm sure you've never heard anything about 'muscle memory,' since I doubt you've ever had any fingers pulled off."

I had to admit I hadn't.

"It works like this. You learn a manual skill—typing, throwing a baseball, playing the violin—the skill gets imprinted in your brain." She tapped her lovely noggin with her uninjured index finger. "The imprinting's still there, even if your arm gets cut off. But you replace the arm, the signals get sent down to your fingers, and the muscles don't know how to respond. They haven't been developed properly to do what you want them to. And they think there's some memory in the muscles, too, so they have to relearn the skill, just like if you'd had part of your brain taken out and some other part tries to take over. This finger right here"—she extended her right ring finger—"is the klutziest digit you own, except for your toes. It takes years to get it able to do the things you need to do to play the violin, even moderately well. This one isn't much better." She was holding up her pinkie. "But the finger I'd really like you to study is this one." She held up her middle finger and extended her hand toward me. "Fuck you, whoever you are. Now get out of my apartment."

"I just have a few things to say, and then I'll go, if you still want me to." I waited, took her silence as acceptance.

"The first thing is, my real name is Sparky Valentine."

She gave me a reaction I'm used to: a blank stare. For a lot of people, saying I'm Sparky is like telling them I'm Mickey Mouse, or the tooth fairy.

"Crazy," she muttered.

"There's no way I can prove it to you, but I want you to know I'm being straight with you." It's true, you know. Even wearing my "natural" face, I don't look a lot like little Sparky. I could do the voice, but that would prove nothing. There was a time when every two-bit comic in the system could do Sparky, and most of his gang, too. Many of them were better at it than I was. When I finally grew up, my voice changed just like other people.

"What I'm here to ask you," I plunged on, "is if you'd like to get back at him. If you'd like to give him one in the eye."

There was no need to explain who "he" was. I saw wild interest grow in her face at the idea of getting back at him. She leaned forward, intense.

"Can we kill him?" she whispered.

Well, that was direct enough. I resolved never to get her angry at me again.

"I doubt it. I mean, as a practical matter, he's very hard to kill. I've tried three times now, and he's still out there. And personally, my hope is to never be on the same planet with him again, much less close enough to him to take a shot."

She slumped back on the couch, then sprang to her feet. I thought she was going to resume her tirade against me, but she had a new target.

"I can do this all right. I can pick my nose, I can feed myself. I'm getting better at signing my name. But Bach? Mozart? Forget it. I can't do a simple arpeggio. I'm back to scales. If there's anything I can do to hurt him, hurt him really bad, I want to hear it."

"Okay. There's one finger we didn't mention." I stuck up my thumb. "It's the finger of transportation, and maybe we can use it to hitch a ride out of here."

And I told her my plan.

It all sounds so much better when you're laying it out. Or when I am, anyway. My powers of persuasion are pretty sharp, having been honed over seventy years of getting myself into situations I end up having to talk myself out of. To run a good con, it helps if you can at least partly persuade yourself that you're telling the truth. I know how to tell the mark the parts she wants to hear, and to skim over the problems.

So it went down well, there in her apartment. She bought it, and so did I. Now, almost half a day later, alone, sober and determined to stay that way, it seemed a very long shot.

I was in the hub, sitting at a table in a carousel bar, waiting to see how it all came out. I had a tall, bubbly glass of ginger ale in front of me, and I wished it were something a little stronger. I wished I had something to smoke, too, but all I'd ever liked was hemp, and I needed my wits about me. Some tobacco, that would be nice, though I'd never smoked it and heard it tasted vile. Humphrey Bogart, sitting here, would have had a smoke going, the cigarette stuck high up between his fingers. That hound-dog face that never seemed to look panicky. I could do Bogart if I had a smoke, and I wouldn't be so nervous.

I kept my eye on the rope lift constantly moving down from the hub—not the hub of Oberon, though that's where I was, but the hub of the pub, the pub-hub that was within the larger hub, to make myself perfectly opaque. The bar was for tourists and others who liked their drinks to stay in the glass and the glass to stay on the table. Therefore, it rotated, at a pretty good rate, enough to give one-third gee at the rim, where everybody sat. The place was small enough that you didn't want to stand up too quickly or the coriolanus force would knock you down. Your head would get a lot lighter than your feet.

I spotted her as she floated into the hub, glanced around, and selected the lift rope that would take her close to where I sat. It pulled her down at first, then somewhere when the forces were equalized she swung around with ease and grace and she was hanging from the strap, like a commuter only with her feet off the floor. The rope lowered her and she hit the ground walking. I was envious. A few hours before I had looked like all three stooges trying to do the same thing, and I'd landed on my butt. Toby had thought it was a neat trick, I think. He'd barked in delight.

Now he was curled up in one of the chairs at the table, his belly full of bar pretzels and beer nuts and ginger ale. Poly pulled out the third chair and sat down.

"I need a drink." She held up her hand and signaled to the bartender. I watched with interest, because this wasn't a mere finger gesture but a more elaborate sign language that resulted in what looked like a Bloody Mary being delivered to our table. I memorized the gestures. You never know when you'll need a bit of business to lend authenticity on the stage.

I let her take a deep drink.

"How'd it go?" I asked. She took another.

"Okay, I guess."

"What do you mean, you guess?"

"Well, it's kind of hard to tell, isn't it?" I could see she was having some of the same doubts I'd been entertaining. She'd had plenty of time to find fault with the plan on the elevator ride to the hub.

"I wouldn't know. I wasn't there." I looked at her pointedly, and she sighed, took another drink, and put the glass down.

"Okay. They weren't happy about it."

"I warned you they wouldn't be."

"But there wasn't anything they could do. Except make me feel small."

"I warned you about that, too."

Poly had been visiting with the Oberon police. I was glad it was her and not me, because what she told them was she was dropping her lawsuit against Isambard Comfort, and as far as she was concerned, he was free to go.

"They'd already told me the position he was taking," she said. We'd gone through that at her apartment, but I let her tell it her way. "How you killed his sister in self-defense, in spite of what it looked like. What sort of story he fed them to make it look that way I don't know, they didn't tell me, but it was clear they weren't buying it. I know they'd really like to talk to you about it, because they're sure the two of you wouldn't tell the same story. But as of now, there's nothing they can charge you with."

"Did anybody follow you?"

"I don't think so. I did what you said, and I didn't see anybody."

No way to tell, with an amateur. But if they really wanted to talk to me and had followed her, they'd probably already be here.

That Izzy was not going to finger me in his sister's death didn't surprise me, either. If I was in prison, it would be tougher for him to get at me. Oh, he could hire my death easily enough, but Charonese like to take care of matters like that themselves. They never testify in court, no matter what. If they have a beef with you, don't expect them to sue you.

"So I told them I had accepted the settlement the Charonese ambassador had offered me, that I'd already cashed the check. They tried to bluff me." She took another drink, and made another gesture to the bartender. "That was the scariest part. Said they intended to prosecute him under the criminal statutes, and they demanded my testimony. Said they'd prosecute me if I didn't take the stand. I told 'em that would go down great with the public, going after the victim. I said I wasn't going to testify, no matter what, that I was dropping all charges. They kept trying to frighten me—did frighten me, let me tell you—but I stuck to my story, like you said, and eventually they threw me out. She took a sip of her second drink.

"Threw you out."

"Told me to leave. Said they'd get back to me after they'd talked it over with the State's Attorney. So, I don't think they'll prosecute—"

"They won't, trust me."

"Don't make me laugh. Anyway, I'll be glad to get out of here." Right.

"I'd like to talk to you about that," I said.

She gave me a cold smile. "I'm not surprised."

"You're not?"

"Something in your quick agreement to my terms didn't, shall we say, play right."

"I'll stick to my agreement," I said, indignantly. "I just still think you're making a mistake, and I want to try to talk you out of it while there's still time. You've got the money now to—"

"You said that before." She reached into her purse. "Before you waste a lot of hot air, I want to show you something." She pulled a blue, eight-ounce thermos from the purse and held it up for me. There was a smiling picture of me—Sparky—on the side. She jiggled it, and something rattled inside.

I was stunned. "How did you...?" I was speechless, so I reached for the thermos. She pulled it back quickly, tucked it back into her purse.

"Naughty," she said, wagging her finger. "You wouldn't want to cause a disturbance, would you? Something that might bring the police." She had me, and she knew it. "While you went to the bathroom. Remember?"

"But the combination—"

"I've got a good memory. Shame, shame, Trevor. An old con man like you, not covering up when you opened that ridiculous traveling coffin."

I'd brought the Pantechnicon with me, naturally, since I expected to get out of Oberon fast if I got out at all. After I had her attention I'd taken it to her apartment, as without a bit of grisly show-and-tell I wasn't sure she'd buy my plan. And the bitch had foxed me. And what was this about ridiculous? I was as indignant about that as about the theft.

"That's mine," I said, as forcefully as I dared.

"And you'll get it back, I promise. As soon as you keep your promise."

I fumed, I bristled, and I blustered, but after five minutes of whispered argument to which she responded with nary a word, I admitted defeat. She was going with me.

The next hour would have been tense under the best of circumstances. Since we were more or less not speaking to each other, it was excruciating. Toby felt it, woke up, and kept looking back and forth between us. He thinks all his friends ought to like each other, and frets when they don't.

Poly bought a newspad and we hovered over it like miserable wraiths waiting for Godot. We kept it dialed to BREAKING STORIES, but since none were breaking at the moment we saw the same six stories a dozen times each, including a touching one about a mother cat who kept returning to a burning building until she had all four of her kittens. At least it was touching at first. By the eighth showing I would cheerfully have squashed all four of the mewling ratlike varmints under my heel until their heads cracked like walnuts and booted the mother like a singed and smoking football.

Then we had it.

"Live from Seventh District Prison. Notorious Charonese torturer and arsonist Isambard Comfort is to be released at this hour. Sources close to the warden tell us his victim, Polyhymnia—"

Poly slapped the cutoff switch and scaled the pad into a trash can. I admired the way she compensated for the spin in her aim.

"Let's go," she said. We hustled over to the rope lift and I grabbed a passing strap, tucking Toby under my free arm. I was tugged off my feet. This had to be easier than coming down, I figured.

It was, if banging your head on the hub was easier than falling flat on your ass.

We went to the taxi stand and piled into a cab. Poly had two big, battered old suitcases and her violin. I had Toby and the Pantech.

The cab pilot, who looked like a third-rate palooka who neveh coulda been a contendah, glanced at Toby. Then his crusty, unshaven face split in a wide grin.

"A Bichon Frise," he cooed, pronouncing it properly. He thrust a massive ham fist toward Toby, who froze in consternation at the sheer size of the thing, but stood his ground and, after a cautious sniff, allowed himself to be fondled. The palooka had a gentle touch, and soon Toby's mouth opened and his pink tongue lolled out. He looked at me and sniffed.

"Me and the wife have three of "em," the driver explained. "Won the best of breed in last year's All-Oberon. I'll bet the little fellow's got good lines." He looked at me expectantly, probably thinking I'd whip out Toby's papers and we'd spend a pleasant hour or so discussing his ancestry. I'd met this type before. "Ever breed him?"

"Toby breeds with whom he wants to breed with, and like any gentleman, he never discusses it with me."

"Gotcha. I bet this little fella's got half-breed pups all over the system." He meant it as a joke, and had no idea how accurate he was. "So, where to?"

I gave him the coordinates and he typed them into his launch control, and in a moment we were squirted out the end of the tube and streaking into black space.

It was as crowded as when I arrived, crowded as it always is. We dodged around angular behemoths, cargo ships and passenger liners. In only a few minutes we began our deceleration, and an apparition hove into view.

"Cheez," said the cabby. A truer word was never spoken.

Except for Mars landers, spaceships always operate in total vacuum—sorry, zero pressure. That means they usually look any way they damn well please. They tend to look like a disaster in a metal shop. Things are tacked onto old frames, old stuff is pulled away and big holes are left. Paint is solely for insulation, and who cares if the first quarter inch flakes off?

But if a real-estate agent can convince a rich person to buy a hanging mansion, hideously expensive to maintain and good for nothing but showing off, why shouldn't a solar-yacht broker (a direct descendant of a used-car salesman) get the same sucker to plunk down cash for something that looks like the first person ever to kick the tires might have been Buck Rogers in the twenty-fifth Century? Or Duck Dodgers in the 24½th?

Later I had the ship's computer search the visual library for images comparable to the yacht. It found a Picasso nude, the carmine bee-stung lips of Madelon Theirry, the scarab-blue helmet of Ramses II, Minnie Mouse, and a 1953 Hudson Hornet. There were elements of all these visible as we approached the ship. It was not painted, but made from glossy metals that would not fade or chip in the harsh light of space: tangerine-flake, mother-of-pearl, crabapple red, and the aforementioned blue. It had a clutch of fins, and what looked like gleaming silver exhaust pipes. It was either the ugliest thing I ever saw, or the most beautiful. I changed my mind many times as we approached.

It was all glitz, of course. Nothing visible had any function except to look snazzy. It was the ultimate low-rider of the space lanes.

The cabbie docked quick and dirty. The condition of his docking collar hinted that this was his usual way of docking. As soon as he cycled the lock my ears popped and we heard a hissing sound. The seal was not as tight as it might be, but he didn't seem concerned about it.

"Don't leave yet," I told him, handing over a bill slightly more than twice the fare. We have to see if we're... ah, expected." He nodded, and Poly and I stuffed our luggage through the door and cycled the lock closed behind us. The hissing continued. The sooner out of this death trap, the better.

"Okay," I told her. "You can hand it over now."

She smiled at me, sweetly.

"Hand it over yourself. It's still in your trunk." She got the thermos and opened it. A few glass marbles floated out.

Hell, I know when I'm licked. In fact, I sort of admired her. It had been very slickly done.

"I picked this up at an antique store on the way to the elevator," she said, opening a disposal lock and putting the thermos in.

"Hey, that's worth a hundred dollars," I protested.

"You haven't checked the market lately, 'Sparky.' I paid five."

She cycled the lock and the thermos and marbles jetted out into space with a whoosh. Five dollars? For a priceless old Sparky Jug? How depressing. I was about to say so when there was a bright flash of light. We turned to the only port glass in the lock, and saw another marble as it flashed out of existence, followed in short order by all the rest, and the thermos, which took a little longer and was a lot brighter.

"A snark!" I said.

"Where? Where is it?" We both pressed our faces to the glass, hoping to get a look, but the little zapper could have been miles away. I sighed, opened the Pantech (this time shielding the code plate), and got out my own thermos. I opened it and steam came out. Nestled in chips of dry ice was a two-inch package wrapped in aluminum foil.

I shook Izzy's thumb out of the thermos and opened it. No freezer burn, but it was hard as a rock. It shouldn't matter.

Poly wrinkled her nose at the ugly little thing. The nail was a riot of purples and yellows. I took a deep breath.

"Okay. I've thumbed many a ride in my time, but never quite like this. Let's try it."

The security identiplate was a faintly glowing two-inch circle in the center of a brass escutcheon. Engraved on the brass were these words:

IPS 34903-D

COMETARY CLASS INTERPLANETARY YACHT

"HALLEY"

EXECUTIVE CHARTER SERVICE

PLUTO

That last word had been critical in my thinking when coming up with the plan. The ship's home port was Pluto. Had it come from Charon I wouldn't have dared this stunt. I pressed Izzy's thumb to the plate.

A thumbprint is a fairly good means of securing a valuable movable object. For something as expensive as the Halley they went a little further. A dead skin sample was being taken and subjected to a quick analysis to compare with Izzy's DNA. You could make a cast of a thumbprint, but there was no reasonable way to fake the DNA.

The key word there was, of course, "reasonable." What's a farfetched idea to a Plutonian might very well seem reasonable to the more bloody-minded Charonese. Izzy wouldn't have thought twice about severing my thumb, if I had a space yacht and he wanted to borrow it.

I've picked up a fair amount of knowledge concerning door locks in my checkered career. I boned up on more in the Oberon library. I thought I had a better than fifty-fifty chance of getting into the boat. If things went south after that, I still thought I could beat a retreat. A Charonese yacht, naturally, would have either slaughtered an intruder or held him for the later amusement of the owner and his family. Great fun for the kiddies; educational, too.

A green light appeared on the identiplate, and the lock cycled. We entered the ship.

I made my way directly to the control console and pressed the thumb to the second identiplate there. Another green light. And then nothing.

"Um..." I said. "Ah, can we make ready for departure?"

"Certainly, sir," came a voice. And then silence again.

"Ah... Luna. We want to go to Luna. Soon."

"How soon, sir?"

"Right now."

"I'm sorry, sir, I cannot boost right now."

My heart jumped into my throat. At my side, I saw Poly grow pale.

"The earliest departure would be in four minutes. The reactor has to be brought into—"

"Fine, fine. Depart in four minutes, then."

"And what arrival time are you contemplating, sir?"

I gave him the date—all too close, terrifyingly close—that I needed to be on Luna.

There was a long pause. Entirely too long, when I thought about it later. I'd guess it was five or six seconds. That's a trillion years, in computer time.

"Yes, sir," the computer finally said. "Will you be charging this flight to the credit arrangements previously established?"

"Yes, that will be fine."

"Very good, sir. I suggest you leave your luggage in the lock; it is being secured against acceleration at this moment." I heard the lock door cycling. "I have warned the taxicab to stand clear for boost. He has cleared the lock and is on his way. You will have ample time to move into your staterooms when acceleration ends."

I heard sounds behind me as the ship readied itself for departure. A countdown clock started on the console. I looked around, and saw two acceleration couches—like water mattresses, seven feet long and three feet wide—had emerged from the floor. Beside them was a smaller unit with a cage on top. I realized it was a pet bed. I popped Toby into it, which didn't please him at all, with all this new space to explore, and these fascinating new smells to experience. He glared at me as I experimentally pushed on the surface of one of the couches. It conformed to the shape of my hand, and sprang back slowly. It would be like lying on soft putty.

"We have been cleared by the tower," the ship said.

"Yes. Uh, please turn off all but the necessary radio communication."

"Yes, sir." Another pause, this one short. "Sir, an odd datum. I was receiving a message from ground side when you ordered the radios shut off. A person claiming to be the legal lessee of this vessel was attempting to issue an order requiring me to deactivate the entry security system temporarily."

"What does that mean?" How many more surprises could I take?

"He would have had me deny access to anyone, until he could obtain a court order authorizing the local sheriff to accompany him and verify his identity."

"How odd." I gulped. Poly's eyes were wide.

"Yes, I thought so. It makes no difference, of course. I am not authorized to receive instructions from the ground concerning such matters. Even if the caller had the password."

"Did he have the password?"

"I don't know. You instructed me to cut him off before he could use it."

"I see."

"Yes. The password is only used to prepare facilities ahead of time, of course. Meals, extra staterooms, matters of that nature."

This was something Poly and I had discussed for quite a long time. I felt it was a necessary risk, letting Izzy out of jail; it was, in fact, the only reason I had visited her in the first place. Without her cooperation, I could not have him released. But in my reading I had learned that many ships of this class were quite intelligent. The scenario I feared was a simple one: I ask for entry, and the ship wants to know how it is I'm knocking on the door when I'm still in jail. The ship could very easily be monitoring newscasts. If it hears Izzy is out, me showing up with the right thumbprint and the right DNA code was easier to accept.

Was it the right decision? I didn't know, yet. But what at first had seemed a narrow escape had turned out to be nothing of consequence. The ship would have ignored Izzy's attempt to block me anyway, even if I hadn't cut him off in time.

"I suggest you make yourselves comfortable in the acceleration couches," the ship said. "Boost will be in thirty seconds."

Poly and I both climbed into our couches and stretched out. I could see the seconds counting down on a ceiling clock as the passive restraint system bound us securely.

"How much acceleration will it be?" I asked.

"Five gees," the machine replied.

I tried to sit up, but the web wouldn't allow it.

"Five gees?" I shouted. "It'll kill us!"

"According to my data, the human body has a ninety-five percent chance of surviving five gees for an hour or more."

"An hour?"

"We will be boosting for an hour and a half, approximately."

"An hour and a half!"

"To get you to Luna by the date specified."

I wondered if there was still time to abort. I wondered if I wanted to abort. While I was still thinking it over and the last seconds were ticking away, the computer voice destroyed what little wits I might have had left to make the decision.

"It will be quite uncomfortable," it said. "Before we leave, I wonder if you'd tell me something?"

"What's that?"

"Who are you? Are you really Sparky Valentine?"

The acceleration sat on me like a playful elephant, and I felt myself spiraling down, down, down, wild-eyed, sweaty-faced, seeing myself in the third person again, twisting through mad colors and flashing lights like Scotty Ferguson in the grip of his phobia in Vertigo, and I knew I was heading into another flashback.