

Copyright Christopher Ant 2016. Smashwords edition. All rights reserved.

Any similarity to people, places or things in the real world is purely coincidental.

### Return to Ganymede

Christopher Ant

### 1

Her desk was three rows up and two over. Blue-black hair hung almost to the collar of her crisp white dress and shone in the sun. She seemed to be paying attention, but most likely was dreaming of one of the far-away places depicted so glossily on the walls.

The instant Miss Hooper would turn to the blackboard, the dusty oasis at the room's center, she would turn to gaze out the open window at the distant mountains and beyond.

"Pio Ood! Please try not to exacerbate my already perilously low opinion of your commitment to the scholastic endeavor!"

Miss Hooper glowered in silence for a moment and then returned to her scratching. When he turned back to Pio it had started already. Behind her the classroom had become indistinct and she was aging fast—years passing in seconds—as life was sucked out of her. She turned to him, and her eyes, so dark you couldn't tell where pupil ended and iris began, reached out to him, pleaded with him. He'd counted on having more time. He knew where to find the cause: A dark stain, a shadow that would scuttle back if looked at directly, keeping always just on the edge of his vision.

Thread after thread whipped out from it. Those that found their mark dug in and joined the feeding frenzy. They would leave a husk only, would take him somewhere he couldn't go.

He crouched and spun to confront the shadow's source. The burning searchlight blinded. The wolf-howl gale deafened. Overloaded nerve endings threatened to burn out, told him to pull back. If he could hold on just a _little_ longer.

Bugs careered erratically behind his eyelids and he tore at them. Blood dripped freely from his nose and ears. He had to scream just to be sure he was making any sound at all.

" _Who."_ The pain doubled.

" _Are."_ Doubled again.

" _You."_ And again.

He cut the visualization and slumped back in the chair. He opened his eyes. Sweat-slick fingers fumbled for a cigarette and lit it second try. As he'd been taught he began the visual inventory essential to avoid bleed-over: File cabinet where her TV had been. Stacked and dusty boxes of files overflowing from her kitchenette. Blown up telephoto shots covering every wall, tacked ribbon forming an abstract web between them.

Visualization was his most powerful investigative tool, allowing him, as it did, to draw together all the disparate pieces of data he'd gathered into a single gestalt whole. But in this case...in this case it was problematic. It always led to the same place: The body of a pretty, young woman, bespattered with restaurant garbage, oblivious to the cockroaches making a playground of her nostrils, her lips, her staring eyes.

He started to dial his girlfriend, thought about it and dialed his wife, ex-wife, instead.

"Yes?"

"It's me."

"Hello, Georg. How's the case going?"

"Case?"

"Young Miss Ood. You only call when she's giving you a hard time. You're picking at that sore again."

"Come on, Helen."

"Go look in the mirror, Georg."

He picked up the phone and squeezed into the bathroom.

"You looking?"

"Yeah."

"You see scratches. Deep, red scratches from just below your hairline, over your eyes and down your cheeks."

Silence.

"So how's the case going?"

"Same as ever."

"You always were one for flogging dead whores, Georg. Why've you picked it up again?"

"I just have this feeling time's short."

"Really? How so?"

He pulled back the edge of the drape and peered into the darkness.

"I got this call..."

### 2

The sun streaming through the half-closed vertical blinds behind him made her look like she'd been put through a giant hard-boiled-egg slicer, he thought as he listened to her tale. "Oh, Mr Draygo. I don't know what I'd've done without..."

A sobbing heap, the woman was unable to continue. It wasn't an unusual situation. Clients, grief-stricken by an unexpected visit from the grim reaper and overawed by his oversize and luxuriously minimal office, often fell apart on him. He studied her as she wept. She was a typical fat and pasty denizen of Blossom Heights, hiding under a wide brimmed hat and behind huge sunglasses. That she'd gone to pieces was no surprise at all. What _was_ surprising, though, was the demeanor of the young girl sitting next to her. Back straight, head held high, eyes drilling into him, she showed not the slightest sign of being either crushed by sorrow or cowed by her surroundings. She was wearing the same long-sleeved cotton smock they all wore but he just couldn't picture her flitting from shadow to shadow like the rest.

Without breaking her stare she held out a pack of cigarettes. The woman took one and the girl lit it.

"It's nothing, ma'am. Nothing at all."

"Oh no, Mr Draygo...I'm sorry."

"Take your time, ma'am."

He handed her another Kleenex and slid the box across the desk.

"I have faith in you, Mr Draygo. I know you can find whoever did this terrible thing, if anyone can."

"I'll find them. You can count on it."

"Oh, Mr Draygo, that's wonderful. I owe the poor man that at least. I just couldn't face the next electric bill if I didn't do right by him."

He nodded sympathetically as he stood and came around the desk to show them to the door.

Without taking her burning eyes from him the girl noisily and deliberately hawked up her phlegm, rolled it around and, as the woman stared open mouthed, spit on the floor in front of him.

"Daphne! Mr Draygo, I'm _so_ sorry. She's been _so_ upset. He was like a father to the poor child," she said as she stooped and dabbed at his shoe.

"Calm yourself, ma'am. Grief takes people in different ways."

The elevator closed on her hate-filled stare but he didn't let his expression of pious sincerity slip til he heard it descending. She was a brat, yes, but fiery, spirited. And it was this quality, he realized, that had brought to mind so forcefully someone he'd been sorely neglecting of late.

He returned to his desk, sat back down and pulled the phone toward him. "Hello, Mike. I have a job for you. A Mr..." He picked up the form the woman had filled out. "Fetherly, Elmrod. Age forty-three. Shot to death night-before-last in back of Waxman's Theater. You start looking into it and I'll pay him a visit, see if he has anything to tell me."

He cut the line and dialed again.

"Morgue."

"It's Georg."

"Hey man! Long time."

"Long time. You busy?"

"No, man."

"Okay if I drop by?"

"Come on over."

"I'll see you in about ten."

He picked up his hat and dropped off the woman's form with his secretary. "Deal with this, will you, Molly."

"Of course, Mr Draygo."

"I'll be about an hour. You need anything?"

"I'm just fine thank you, Mr Draygo."

He stepped from the cool lobby onto the sidewalk and paused in the heat. It was, as always, an unimaginably beautiful day. He looked around, soaking it up. Sun beat down from an impossibly blue sky, pure clean air held a hint of fresh-cut grass, and small birds chattered happily to each other in a nearby tree. He swelled contemplating it all. He paid a pretty penny for a spot here but, _damn_ , it was worth it.

The lobbies of the apartment and office buildings that formed the sides of the square were mingled with high-end café-bars, restaurants and stores, and together they backdropped the lives of the stylish residents, who in turn served as supporting players in each other's lives. In the park at the center, children played, mothers watched and a strolling couple paused to admire the pond's resident swans.

He froze. An elderly roach was shuffling in his direction. He slid a shaking hand into a pocket, pulled out a glass pill-bottle and managed to unscrew the cap and swallow two pills. As the roach drew level it stopped and rotated its head toward him. Antennae twitched and mouth parts rubbed obscenely against each other. Somewhere deep inside him a switch flipped, a circuit closed. Every cell screamed at him: _Filthy vermin! Exterminate it!_

"Excuse me, sir. I find myself disorientated in your fair city. Would you do me the service of directing me to the nearest Western Union establishment?"

Shorted-out with hate and fear, he couldn't speak.

"I'm from out of town."

No shit, Sherlock, he thought as he jerked his thumb.

He watched in disgust as the creature shambled off. He looked around. The perfect day was soiled. Unable to stand the sight of it, he sank back into the building.

"Draygo Investigations. How may I help you?"

"Put me through to Draygo."

"Mr Draygo's in conference at the moment, sir. May I take a message?"

"My, my, he has conferences these days, does he?"

"Yes, sir, he does."

"Listen, girlie, you tell that little gutter-shamus the peace want to talk to him. Pronto."

"I'm sorry, sir, he's out of—oh, here he is now. I'll put you on speaker."

She pulled a face at Draygo as she flicked the switch.

"My office. Twenty-twenty tomorrow. And I want to see you _in the flesh_ , so drag your rancid carcass out of the tub. Pronto."

"In the flesh? Are you serious?"

"Deadly."

"In public?

"You heard me."

"Ain't gonna happen, Cooper."

"This is a direct order, and under state-of-emergency powers I can apply any sanction— _any_ sanction—I see fit."

"Well shucks, if you're gonna go all honey-dripper on me how can I decline."

"Your mommy never tell you the story of the wiseacre was so sharp he cut his own head off? Tomorrow. Twenty-twenty. In the flesh."

The connection was cut.

Grinding another butt into the ashtray, he looked at the ratty couch piled with boxes of interview transcripts, at the spools piled on top of them. He'd done a lot of work, gathered a lot of information. He had plenty of facts, possibly too many. A cloud of facts obscuring the truth. He'd hit a roadblock. The kind of complete and utter dead-end that made him think maybe someone was being protected. Someone _worth_ protecting.

She was passing. Lots of girls and boys did it. As long as their looks held, there was good money to be made. He'd never been able to establish a motive. He'd ruled out sex, and she had no money or property that _he_ could find. He looked around the tiny cheap shabby apartment. No, money hardly seemed a plausible motive. She was simply eliminated. Someone wanted her to not exist. Some one.

He followed ribbon from face to face, waiting for his gut to kick in, and, as always, kept coming back to Shitstain. Wherever he started, whichever direction he headed, he always ended up staring into the eyes of the high-priced shyster and part-time pimp. He was connected, rich, and to all intents and purposes a fine upstanding citizen. And he was _all wrong_. It was time to turn over a few rocks. He lay back in the chair, closed his eyes and initiated.

Across the moonlit lawn he could hear music, conversation, laughter. Naked pool girls and boys, powerful men and women, stood around the pool, spilled from french windows at the rear of the house. The french windows led to a ballroom where semi-naked groups, serenaded by a blindfold quartet, stood and sat, chatted and drank. At the far end a goon stood before the oversize oak doors that led to the smaller salon. There, a robed Shitstain lounged in a velvet-upholstered chair, a half-dozen aspiring starlets hanging on his every word and whim.

He spooned powder from a silver bowl and sipped oily blue liquid from a silver goblet. A clap of his hands and the room cleared save for two of the girls. He stood and they followed him into an even more private chamber. He closed and locked the door. He cut. There was no doubt, he realized, as to the 'who'; it was the 'why' that escaped him.

He locked up the apartment, pocketed the key and skipped down the narrow uncarpeted stairs. Her landlord, his landlord, stepped into the corridor from the door that led to the back room of his bookstore. "Hello, Mr Draygo. How are you keeping?"

"Fine."

"You've started using the apartment again. Can I assume that means you've reopened Miss Ood's case?"

"You can assume what you like, Simonds."

"Let me rephrase my question. Are you currently investigating the murder of Miss Pio Ood?"

"You know that was just a name she got along with a dead baby's birth certificate, don't you?"

"She didn't kill the baby. It died. Unless, that is, you believe she travelled in time."

"I know how it works."

"She was born a farm girl and committed the victimless crime of changing her identity."

"True, it need only have taken the odd misdemeanor, but few manage it without racking up a felony or two on the way."

"She was born on one of the most notorious farms on the planet and was raped and brutalized by her overseers. To pay a family debt her childhood sweet-heart shipped out as a lady-boy on a deep-space mining vessel."

"I fetch a cop and you'd be Mars-bound in a second for the way you said what you just said."

"Go ahead, Mr Draygo. They know very well what I think. I'm old news."

"Poor kid was just looking for a decent life, I guess."

"You think she came here to save herself."

"Can't blame her for that."

"Let me know how you get on."

"Of course."

"And drop in the store sometime. I've some new items in might interest you."

The morgue was a three-story brick affair squatting in the shadow of a smokestack-topped municipal power plant. Above ground was all administrative. Guest quarters were in the basement.

He rode the elevator down and was deposited in the short corridor that led to Stanislav Ludnikov's candlelit office.

"What kept you?"

"Sorry. Something came up. Couldn't get away from the office."

"Hey, man, don't sweat it."

Draygo reached in his coat and produced a paper-wrapped bottle.

"Just like old times, man," grinned Stan.

Draygo planted it on the desk and sat down. "Got any glasses?"

"As always. And of course _plenty_ of ice."

He half-filled the glasses with crushed ice from the small fridge in the corner and then brimmed them both. "So, to what do I owe the pleasure?"

Draygo dropped Fetherley's details on the desk. Stan glanced down at the slip of paper but made no move to pick it up. "Why the personal visit? It's a long time you haven't been here."

"Well you have to understand, what with modern methods, your butcher's tricks are all but redundant, but just occasionally—"

"Be. You. Double el. 'Cos you don't want to _remember_ is why. So I'm thinking if you're here it's 'cos now you _do_ want to remember. So how's my aim?"

"Deadeye Dick, as always."

"So you've picked up that case and come here to fire up your blood."

"That's about the size of it."

"You're sure about starting it all up again?"

"It's now or never."

"Why not never?"

"You know why."

"Yeah I do, but I also recall a time you were in here every day, three weeks straight."

The image of her face seen dimly through the frosted-up lid of a chest freezer tucked away behind piles of junk in a forgotten store room flashed into his mind.

"Yeah."

"Thirty-five."

"Thirty-five what?"

"The number of cats and rats I had to round up to make the books balance in order to save her from the flames. Til they had that clean out and I had to send her on her way, that is. I'll bet that skinny old guy's folks were surprised-as-all-hell when they got a credit for two hundred fifty pounds deposited."

"Kept their mouths shut though."

"Naturally. What about this one?"

He nodded to the scrap of paper on the desk.

"You still got him?"

He picked up the note and studied it for a second. "Yeah, he's due to check out on Saturday I believe. Gotta keep the home fires burning. You want to see him?"

"Not especially. Could you do your thing on him for me?"

"Fee's gone up. Seventy-five now."

"Fine."

"It'll take me forty, fifty minutes. You not gonna come watch?"

"I'll just wait here, if it's all the same to you."

"That's fine, man, but the refreshment is coming with _me_."

Draygo sat in the gloom and listened to the distorted echo of subtle precise observations being committed to electro-magnetic tape. Alone with the familiar sights and smells he sipped his drink and let his mind drift to the tiled room, the sink below the rows of gleaming saws and scalpels, the overhead spot on its articulated, perfectly balanced arm, the steel table, the sheet covering but not concealing the body of a young woman.

"You say she's a farm girl?"

"Yeah."

"Well, Dorothy here is _full_ of some opiate or other. There are _multiple_ lacerations. C.O.D: She bled out. No sexual activity either post-mortem _or_ immediately ante-. One thing, there are no defensive wounds. None."

"And that's unusual?"

"There are normally defensive wounds."

"But not always?"

"It's rare."

"You said she was drugged."

"Still..."

Stan stopped the tape transport, released the brakes on the table and wheeled his patient back to his drawer. He hung up his rubberized apron, washed and dried his hands and then, glass and bottle in hand, started back to his office. "No mystery there," he called out as he turned the door handle. "A half dozen slugs did for him."

There was no reply. The room was empty. The barely touched drink, the un-smoked cigarette burned to ash and the hundred dollar bill on his desk, the only signs he'd had a visitor at all. He poured himself a drink and put the bottle in the fridge, picked up his glass and raised it high. "So long, Draygo-man. Good hunting."

### 3

At McClusky's the blaring TV sets hanging from the ceiling masked his arrival. _Elements of the 352nd and 41st peace special-action battalions pacified a collaborationist nest unearthed at the southern edge of the Trang spread early this morning._

As he reached the bar, a fly turned. "Hey, Draygo-man! How goes it?"

"I need a drink."

He looked around. Guys playing pool, two guys at a table holding forth. "The second track on the fourth album."

" _Strange Alignment of the Stars_ was a _good_ album."

"Yeah, the second track"

" _As am I_. What about it?"

"Have you ever listened to it?"

"I _wrote_ it."

"Yeah, but have you ever really _listened_ to it?"

He turned to a screen. _In other news, the Government was assassinated again last night. The First Lady said he refuses to let it interfere with his schedule and still plans to officiate at a medal presentation ceremony tomorrow. She added: He would never let down our brave boys, especially at a time like this with threats to our very existence from without and, treacherously, from within. He said to tell them to be confident he is at the helm, guiding us through these stormy waters_.

"Hey, Draygo. What you saying?"

He laid a dollar on the bar and knocked back the shot placed in front of him. "Put it on my tab."

The barman folded the bill and slipped it into a vest pocket.

"I need to let off some steam. There anyone in the garden?"

"Yeah, sure, go on through."

He reached under the counter and depressed a button. A panel in the wall slid back, Draygo walked through and it slid back behind him. He went to his locker, undressed and climbed into his coveralls, and then sat on the bench and pulled on his boots. He laced them tight, adjusted his knee and elbow pads and tested the power to his goggles, then closed the locker, spun the combination and walked through to the armory.

"Draygo, G/ 4238."

The guy behind the counter put down the form sheet he had been studying, parked his cigarette, and rose unhurriedly. He took the key from around his neck, unlocked the keypad next to the heavy steel shutter set into the wall and tapped in a code. It slid aside to reveal another keypad and he entered Draygo's ID number. Behind the wall, machinery labored for a minute and then fell silent. He raised the shutter to reveal Draygo's 9mm submachine gun, .38 revolver and silenced 9mm automatic pistol.

"Just the 9 mil pistol, please."

"How many you want?"

"One."

He slid the box across the counter.

"Lights on or off?"

"Off."

"You want G-men, roaches or collaborators?"

"Surprise me."

Draygo laid a twenty on the counter.

"What d'you bid?"

"Zero."

The guy glanced up from his notepad and then wrote aloud: "Draygo, G/ 4238, twenty dollars, bids zero."

He filed the bet and looked up. "The last guy just finished. It'll take a minute to reconfigure and reset. Go on through."

Draygo was standing at the hatchway filling spare magazines, when his ear-piece crackled. "Okay, you're good to go."

The light changed from red to green and the lock disengaged with a clunk.

_Miss Universe has been snatched by—Collaborators. G-Men. Roaches—and is being held captive. You've been tasked with eliminating the kidnappers and rescuing the hostage. Their ultimatum expires in twenty-five minutes. You're entering a natural cave system converted into a stronghold by the—Collaborators. G-men. Roaches—Expect to encounter fanatical guards with no thought for their_ —He pressed mute.

Weapon at the ready, he prowled silently and purposefully through the pitch-black glowing-green maze, senses raw for the edge-giving tell: The click of the switch, the whine of the motor that propelled the target from its recess, the— _Click_. He whirled around the corner and squeezed three times. The thunk of the target slamming into place and starting the clock reached his ears at the same instant as the sound of his round ripping through its pasteboard heart.

He'd offed one berserk roach, one skulking collaborator and two sinister briefcase-carrying G-Men and was creeping up to a corner, when directly opposite: _Click_. He kicked the heavy rubber-coated panel and it gave and toppled over into a void of blinding light. He couldn't see his red dot wavering over the face of the man still, even as he raised his hands, emptying his bladder into the urinal. "Easy, Draygo-man. You need to relax, buddy."

Draygo lowered his weapon and powered down his goggles.

"Come have a drink, man."

He changed back into his street clothes, had a quick drink and made his excuses and left. The hard lump of the pistol nestling under his arm, its place in the armory taken by a harmless replica, barely disturbed the line of his coat.

Wandering through the cocktail lounge of the _El Camino Real_ , drink in hand, he saw small parties, cooing couples in private booths and the particular type of lone woman he was looking for. He went up to one sitting on a stool at the bar. "I find you sexually attractive."

She looked up for a moment and then turned back to her drink. He moved off, scanning the room. Several knock-backs later he was on the point of writing the night off, when a tall brunette entered the room from the door that led to the rear parking-lot. He approached her. "I find you sexually attractive."

She looked at him distractedly. "And I you."

"Your nipples are erect. Are you cold?"

"No. I would like to engage in sexual intercourse with you."

"And I with you."

She held out her hand and he took it.

"Valerie Dubois."

"Georg Draygo."

She took him to her bungalow and they rutted.

He was halfway dressed when she looked up at him, smiled and said, "You have a black wound."

"A what?"

"A dead and rotting wound in your aura. I'm very sensitive to these things."

"Okay. That's nice you let me know. Thanks."

She smiled again and began to recite. "I consider myself fully recompensed for this transaction by the benefit that has accrued to me—"

"You think that shit'll stand up!? They'll laugh in your face and give you, hell, give _us_ a five year Martian vacation. You won't accept payment?"

"No."

"Shit. Then I hereby invoice you for services rendered. Payment is required within—"

"You gonna _register_ that invoice?"

" _Just take the fucking money_."

"No."

"Non-payment on receipt of the third reminder will trigger my debt collection service: A couple of guys of my acquaintance who only know the meaning of a handful of words. And 'no' isn't one of them."

"What's the charge?"

"I dunno. A buck?"

"A buck?"

The drug was still pounding through his veins like a freight train. "Yeah. A buck for a fuck."

He pulled out his billfold and let a dollar fall to the floor between them.

"Sounds reasonable."

It still lay there when he left thirty minutes later.

Little yelps of pleasure greeted him as he entered his apartment, and the television turned on and started to burble: _The noble eagle soars majestically, surveying its realm_. "Hello boy. You wanna take a walk? Good boy."

He attached the excited animal's leash and led it to its walker. He got it onto the deck, anchored the leash and set the mechanism running. The screen flickered into life as the deck started to pick up speed, and the animal yipped happily as it matched its stride to the pace of the machine. He set the timer and went to his bedroom.

He got down on his knees, reached under the bed and dragged out his heavy gun-box. The quiet light rounds were all-well-and-good against pasteboard assailants but out here in the real world he wanted something with stopping power. He unlocked the box and lifted the lid.

All the ammunition was still there, the squat .45's for the heavy silver automatic, the 9 mil pills for the submachine gun, the sleek spikes for the hunting rifle, the shells for the pump action, just none of the guns. In their place was a piece of paper.

He picked it up and started to read. _Your firearms have been impounded as part of our ongoing random seizure and examination program. Once it has been established they have not been used in the commission of any crime, they will be returned to you. Please note that there will be grave consequences if you are found in possession of any firearm during this period._

None of them were much good as a concealed weapon but not having them there to fall back on, knowing they weren't there, unnerved him.

He unscrewed the silencer and dropped it into the box, and then ejected the magazine, thumbed out the rounds, emptied the two spare mags and filled all three with heavy hollow-points.

He held up the gun and studied it. He'd taken it because he wanted it by his side, he realized. He trusted it, had formed a relationship with it. He inserted a magazine, chambered a round, pointed and sighted. Man and machine in perfect harmony. "Looks like it's just you and me, partner," he said as he slipped it back under his arm.

He closed the box, slid it back under the bed and then went back to the living room. _The weak are picked off and the species is stronger for it_.

He had all but killed a fifth, saving the last to wash down a couple of barbs, when the phone rang. "Hello?" Silence. "Hello?" He listened. Not silence, not quite breathing, but something. Maybe nothing more than a breeze on a wire somewhere far out in the desert.

He replaced the handset, mouthed the pills and jiggled them around with his tongue as he reached for the last of the scotch. But if they _were_ trying to intimidate him then he must be close. _Oblivious in the darkness, she contentedly suckles her young_. He spat the pills into his palm and dumped them in an ashtray.

He pulled up in front of the bookstore and ran upstairs. He initiated. Pio leaving a bar, striding confidently, coming to an area not so well lighted. _His_ voice. She turned. A look of surprised recognition but not fear. Not til she saw the knife. He cut. He took her life. But _why?_

He strolled up the shyster's floodlit driveway and climbed the steps to the main doors. Beaming at the goon/doorman he walked straight in, planning to subtly pump a few guests, find out exactly what went on here, and then get the hell out.

The hallway was crowded. Grinning and waving he dove into the throng. He turned and saw that the goon, index finger pressed to his ear, was now facing the room. He started talking to himself. Draygo pressed on.

He opened the door to the ballroom and found himself looking instead into a library. Where there should have been mirrors there were books, where there should have been a piano, a desk. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the goon easing his way toward him through the press.

As one, the handful of people in the library turned to look at him. Nodding left and right he plunged into the room and headed for the door on the far side. As he took hold of the handle he looked back and, speaking to nobody in particular, said, "Pool this way?"

A woman in a mauve gown frowned and said, "Pool?"

As the goon entered the room Draygo turned and saw a small office: Bookcase, framed photographs and certificates on the walls, desk facing a photo-covered corkboard, file cabinet: a Meyerhof Debonair, four drawer. A heavy hand landed on his shoulder. "Okay, buddy. Fun's over."

Draygo turned. "I'd like to talk to the boss."

"Ain't that a coincidence."

He looked from the blank face to the unobtrusive little automatic leveled at his belly.

"Go on in. Sit."

He followed into the room, gun and eyes fixed on Draygo, and closed the door and leaned against it. They waited. Presently there was a sharp rap on the door and the goon edged to his left. "Okay," he called out.

The door opened and, followed by a second goon, the dinner-jacketed shyster entered.

"Do I know you?"

"Georg Draygo."

"A scion of the Family Draygo?"

He nodded.

"To what do I owe the honor?"

"Heard you throw a mean party."

"Private parties. Invite only."

"Any chance of an invite?"

"Unfortunately the guest list is full. I'll put your name forward. You can take an application on your way out."

He nodded and the goon opened the door as he moved aside.

One either side, one behind, they escorted him through the library, and as they passed through the now-empty hallway a door opened momentarily and he glimpsed a hooting crowd, a leering master-of-ceremonies and a spinning wheel-of-fortune.

Flanked by his goons the shyster watched him from the top of the steps. Halfway down the drive he turned back smiling and held up the form and shook it. Around the corner he crumpled it and dropped it in the gutter.

The party was in full swing. Nobody was going anywhere anytime soon. He sat in his car drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes for three hours and then they all left as a piece, the goons acting as traffic marshals. He spent thirty minutes snapping license plates and faces before calling it a night and driving home to down a large scotch and a barb and fall into bed.

In his office the next morning he picked up the phone and dialed. "Hello, Mike. Got anybody in the frame?"

"Everything points to a Seymour Xavier Ping. Fetherly offed his— "

Mike's voice faded out as the familiar sensation of déjà vu surged through his body like a drug. "It's him. You're sure yourself, Mike?"

"Oh yeah."

"Good work."

In his tiny office Mike Delgado replaced the handset in its cradle and said to himself, "Yeah, I'm a regular Sherlock-fucking-Holmes."

Draygo killed his cigarette and dialed his girlfriend.

"Hello?"

"Hello, baby. You good?"

"I am now."

"I'm seeing my folks. You want to come?"

"Oh, I'd love to, my love. But what with the exhibition opening next week, it's crazy here at the moment."

"Don't sweat it."

"Did you get the vase?"

"It's beautiful."

"It's how I see your soul, my love."

"I love it."

"I got the idea at a workshop I did last month. We spent three hours with our eyes focused on a dot but our attention, our awareness, focused edgewise."

"Really? That sounds—"

"Constructed reality imposed on you starts to melt, to crumble at the edges. You can see the way the world _really_ is."

You were still seeing with your brain, through your eyes, he thought. You didn't somehow step outside your percept system. A few drinks and you could alter reality just as effectively _and_ have a lot more fun.

"We buddied up and sat facing each other. I stared into this chic's eyes for _two and a half hours_ and then everything around her face started writhing and melting! I saw the reality beyond the veil of illusion!"

"Gee that's—"

"She told me about this experiment where they proved prayer works _and_ that time is circular. You know, it was really fucking spooky we met. We've attended virtually all the same workshops at one time or another, visited all the same places. We love the same bands, the same artists, the same writers."

"You think there's some higher force at work?"

"It's too much of a coincidence to be just a coincidence."

"What a crock of shit."

"Are you so arrogant you think nothing exists beyond the current bounds of human knowledge?"

"Just because we don't know everything, doesn't mean you can just decide what's out there is whatever you want it to be!"

She said nothing but he could hear her steadily working herself into a volcano of rage. He slammed the phone down. It rang and he picked it up.

"Hiya, baby."

Silence.

"Hello?"

"It's me."

"Who's 'me'?"

"It's me."

"Who is this?"

"It's me...Help me."

"What!?"

"It's me. Help me."

He slammed it down again. It rang again and he stared at it as he lit a cigarette. He had mixed himself a second drink and killed his second cigarette before he noticed he was shaking like a leaf in the breeze.

### 4

According to his tame DMV contact, the plates belonged exclusively to the great and the good. He trawled through the miniaturized newspapers in the library, matching names to faces and histories. He knew their business interests, achievements, education, which clubs they belonged to, who they had dated, who they _had_ been and who they were currently married to, the names of their children. Only, none of the pictures he'd taken showed a single one of them. Was it just their cars being used? Servants hijacking them? The people he'd photographed hadn't carried themselves like any chauffeurs, butlers, valets or maids _he_ had ever seen. Who the hell were they? What the hell were they up to?

The bell above the door summoned, eventually, an old man from the depths of the store. He shuffled to the counter and stood there, pen poised.

"Meyerhof Debonair, four drawer."

"You buying?"

"No. How much?"

He sniffed, and looked Draygo up and down. "Trouble is, buddy, you don't smell none to good to me."

"How much?"

He sighed. " _If_ you were right, buck seventy five an hour, twenty five bucks down, non-returnable."

He took out his billfold. "I'll give you five an hour and twenty, forty, sixty, eighty, one hundred, here and now, non-returnable."

He grinned at the bills laid out on the counter and as he scooped them up said cheerily, "Guess you scrubbed up pretty good, young fella."

He scribbled a note and ambled off down one of the canyons created by the towers of overflowing metal shelving.

On the way to his car he stopped dead. Up ahead, on the front stoop of an apartment building, a group of roaches lounged in the sunshine and jabbered at each other in their own barbarous tongue. He got out his pills, unscrewed the cap and managed to drop half of them on the sidewalk. Looking up he saw they were now all silently turned in his direction. He popped two pills and put the bottle back in his pocket. Staring straight ahead, he walked on.

As he passed them, their twittering and clicking started up again. Even though he couldn't understand what they were saying, the jeering mocking tone was unmistakable. He gritted his teeth and carried on to his car.

He drove til he found a payphone and called Valerie.

"Hello?"

"Hello, baby."

"Who is this?"

"It's Georg. Georg Draygo."

"Oh, hi."

"Can I come over?"

"Yeah, I guess. Leave it forty-five minutes though."

He rang her bell and waited. The mail slot opened and her mouth appeared.

"Yes?"

"It's Georg."

"Yes?"

"We spoke on the phone earlier."

"Of course, yes. Come on in."

She opened the door and led him to the living room. _Using a sharp knife, julienne the celeriac and apples into matchstick size strips_.

"You want some wine?"

"Sure."

She fetched a glass, filled it and topped hers up. He fell into an easy chair and she squirmed herself into his lap.

"Bad day, honey?"

"Not the best."

"Tell Aunty Valerie all about it."

He told her the whole thing, from the dead girl to the partygoers with the wrong faces.

"You know," she mused, "that bookstore would be a primo spot for a peace spy. He could worm his way in with troublemakers, run an entrapment set-up and turn people into pigeons, or just sit there passing back juicy tidbits that came his way."

He looked at her. She had a point.

She pushed him back into the chair, nuzzled into his chest and said, "Now _I'm_ gonna tell _you_ a story. There was this prince who spent all his time dicking around and pulling pranks on people. His dad, the king, was seriously worried about this. This kid was gonna be _king_ one day, for Christ's sake! And all he did was act like a jerk! So what he did was, he went to his advisers and they worked out a plan.

"They hired this jester guy, and the prince was over the moon at first. But little by little he found himself becoming more somber, more dour. There was no space left for clowning, see. The guy had occupied it all. The job was taken. Before he knew it the prince had formed himself to the space left for him like Jell-O in a mold, and throughout his long and peaceful reign was known by all as Serious Derek."

"So what you saying?"

"What I'm saying, honey, is that someone's got their hand deep deep up your derriere."

"Where are you from? Before, I'd've said mid-west, but now I'm getting east-coast."

"I'm from all over, honey." She looked at her watch. "Let's do it."

He held her waist with both hands and caressed her stomach with his thumbs as she bounced. He looked into her eyes and she smiled.

"What is it about roaches that human women can't get enough of?"

Her smile died. "What? The aliens?"

She rolled off him, grabbed her cigarettes from the nightstand and lit one. He talked to her back as she smoked. "Not you, obviously, but do any of your...any of your girlfriends, you know...talk about it?"

She turned to look at him. "Uh, yeah, sure." Her free hand reached across and started to caress him. "Those guys, my God the things they can do! It's like having every cell in your body coming over and over and over again. It's too much for some girls."

She elaborated at length as she worked. It didn't take long, in spite of the horror story she was telling him. It was a good drug.

He kissed her on the cheek and turned to go.

"Aren't you forgetting something, handsome?"

He turned. Her hand was out, palm up. He reached for his billfold.

She stood in the doorway smiling and blew him a kiss as he reached his car, turned and waved. She closed the door as he pulled away, and then checked her watch, fixed herself a large rum and coke, lit a marijuana cigarette and seated herself in the chair next to the phone. It rang, as always, on the dot. She took a long drag on the cigarette, drained her glass and picked it up.

"So what you been up to?"

"This guy, _Gay Dago_ or some-such-shit, was just here. Jesus, is _he_ one fucking grade 'A' whack-job!

### 5

He couldn't recall the last time he'd gotten out of the tub. Not in the last twenty years anyhow. In public, more like thirty. He opened the inner door of the bathroom and steam rushed into the small ante-room-cum-corridor. He entered his cubicle, sat down and dialed.

"Good day, Mr Draygo, sir. Welcome to Shellcorp. Can I take your ident number?"

"9725-404-8938."

"Thank you, sir. How can I be of service to you this fine day?"

"I need to get out of the tub for a couple of hours."

"Authorization code?"

"Cooper, T/2369-348-5629."

"Thank you, sir. Are you sure you wish to proceed?"

"Yes."

"Okay, sir. Are you sitting comfortably?"

"Yes."

"I'll set things in motion. Should be about twenty minutes. That okay?"

"Fine."

"Thanks for your call, sir. Have a nice day. And remember: It's better in the shell!"

Through the fogged door of the cubicle he could just make out the outline of his tub. He leaned back, closed his eyes and relaxed.

Fifteen minutes later he was struggling to coax hot humid air into his lungs and trying to ignore the blurred presence in the cubicle as he dried himself on a mildewed towel. The room was like a sauna. His heat-dulled brain figured out that the air-con must have failed, that the building super would have to be called.

He opened the bathroom closet and flicked through the handful of abandoned suits, looking for the least derelict one. All he could come up with was a brown coat and a pair of gray pants. The coat lining had been eaten almost completely away but, kept buttoned, wouldn't show. The pants were moldy but at least in one piece. A quick brush and they might not look too bad.

Fully dressed, unable to put off the mirror any longer, he wiped away steam with the remnants of a vest and gazed at his reflection. He looked like something fished out of the docks after a week bobbing around. Red rimmed eyes squinted out from a hairy bloated sore-covered face as white as the tiles behind it. His hair, slimy and plastered to his head, looked like low-tide seaweed. Fuck that.

He steeled himself, opened the cubicle door and managed to dial without looking directly at his shell.

"Welcome to Shellcorp. Is there a problem, sir?"

"The flesh is weak. I'm going to have to get a quack out."

"That's fine, sir. Remember: It's better in the shell!"

"I'll try not to forget."

He undressed, got in the tub and hooked himself back up. Twenty minutes later he opened his eyes, stood up and, as he closed the cubicle door behind him, cast a furtive glance at the tub and the thing lurking just beneath the surface of the murky water.

As he stepped into the sun, a car dropped down to ped level and glid to a halt in front of him. He couldn't move a muscle. A fizzing spluttering energy-beam started to snake ravenously toward him, searching him out. "Hello, smart guy," grinned the ape behind the gun. The beam groped blindly. If it made contact he would be atomized. It did. He was. The car eased back into the flow of traffic and sauntered off.

Gagging on his air tube he thrashed frantically as he slipped and slid trying to get a purchase on the slimy walls of the tub. Luck not judgment brought him crashing through the surface and into the air. Retching, he ripped out the tube and hung slumped over the edge of the tub, trying to gather some strength.

He staggered to the now-empty cubicle and dialed still dripping.

"Welcome to Shellcorp. How can I help you, sir?"

"I need you to ship me my next shell."

"Of course, Mr Draygo. Can I take your ident number?

"9725-404-893."

"Thank you, sir. Okay, let me just check the delivery date. Just a moment...Here we are. Okay, your new shell will be with you in three weeks."

"Three weeks!? I need it now. Sooner than that. It's an emergency."

"It's not ready. You're not due an upgrade for seven months, so it's already a warranty-voiding rush job to get it to you in three weeks."

"Just give it top priority. I'll pay whatever it costs."

"We'll be as fast as is humanly possible, sir."

He dried himself, dressed and started to step into the hallway but drew back sharply. Cobwebs hung everywhere and the baseboards were covered in a thick downy layer. He bent to intercept a tiny tumbleweed, picked it up and saw it was mainly hair but with a generous mixture of dust and lint.

Wandering through the hot airless rooms, closing drapes in a vain attempt to keep out the harsh sunlight streaming in, he saw the whole apartment was the same. He'd forgotten what it was like, or rather had chosen not to remember. His beautiful furniture, all his beautiful things, he saw now as cheap ugly approximations of themselves. And then there was Lance: The cowardly bastards had poisoned him, by the look of it with something radioactive in his food. _Add the drained tuna and half the mayonnaise, then mix_.

Trying to focus his thoughts he turned the TV down as low as it would go but it was still audible, still insistent. He drank two glasses of ice-water and popped a bennie hoping to clear the fog from his mind.

Stepping into the street he stepped into a furnace. The glare and the heat-blast threw him back and he peered out from the relative safety of the lobby. It was as if the ferocious heat had melted his world. He steeled himself and rushed out, counting on momentum to see him through.

Exposed skin burned, and sweat-stung eyes squinted behind worthless sunglasses as he strode over green painted concrete, past green bladders of various sizes and shades—some fixed to the concrete, others to the tops of brown plastic poles—moving gently in the breeze. He would normally linger, watch the ducks, but not today.

The world for the most part was a half-made thing, a sketch not meant to be seen by the naked eye. Knowing this intellectually was no protection against the raw reality of it though. It wasn't that it was so terrible in itself. It was the gap between here and there that fed the constant dull throb of anguish. The filth everywhere didn't help. He told himself to hold on, that in five minutes he'd be on the roof of his parking garage getting into his car.

"Draygo!"

Oh shit! Hand raised, a man was coming toward him. As he neared, Draygo's face screwed itself up in a vain attempt to protect him from the monstrosity: The skin was a completely uniform puce, the hair was like a plastic helmet, and the eyes, huge and lidless, stared right through him. Unable to control his expression he scrutinized the ground intently, but not before registering the look of horror frozen on the man's face as his brain fought for a way to extricate itself from the intolerable social situation it had landed itself in. It opted for staring straight ahead and marching straight past Draygo as if he weren't there.

He had stopped off at one of the numerous street vendors who serviced the daily influx of labor from Blossom Heights and purchased a pair of goggle-like sunglasses and a large bottle of ice water but was still sweltering. Even turned up all the way the air-con was no match for the relentless pitiless sun, and no matter how he struggled he couldn't un-stick his sodden shirt from his back.

The water had taken the edge off his throbbing head, and, as he steadied the wheel with his knees, he used the last of it to soak his wadded-up handkerchief and mop his face and neck.

Unable to shake the feeling someone was tailing him in spite of his best efforts to flush them out, he found himself stuck in traffic and looked down and saw shysters, shylocks and bean-counters streaming from the mouths of their various buildings. They surged and ebbed around those stood facing each other in pairs or small circles, or waiting in line at carts for a triple-shot espresso to wash down their bennies. Cheap-suited cells in an undifferentiated organism, eyes focused permanently on the middle distance, they went about their mindless business.

Sweating in line at the front desk, a hand landed on his shoulder and he turned to see the never-smiling face of Peace General Tarmin Cooper. The untranzed peaceman about-faced and strode toward the exit on his thin little legs and Draygo followed. Emerging into the glare of the plaza, he saw Cooper standing by the open door of a limousine, gesturing for him to get in.

The car lifted off and nudged its way into the flow. Inside, the air was cool and the windows somehow managed to turn the sun's violent assault into a gentle caress.

Cooper was on Draygo's right. Opposite him, on the other side of a low mahogany table, sat a tall fat man in a non-descript business suit that might as well have been a uniform.

"Who's the G-Man?"

Cooper sat stony faced. Draygo didn't push it.

After five silent minutes Cooper turned to Draygo.

"I got a little job I need done."

"Not interested."

"Why, you little punk, I'll—"

"Not interested, _copper_."

The bear opposite raised a calming paw and Cooper instantly—as if his plug had been yanked—went limp.

"I was murdered on the way here."

Cooper shot him a look but let it ride.

"How unfortunate," said the G-man.

"Yeah."

"You seem to be doing reasonably well on it."

"I'm getting by."

"Mr Draygo. We're in need of your services."

"And who might 'we' be?"

"The human race."

"And you speak for the species, do you, Mr...?"

"Koenig. On this matter, yes I do."

Draygo nodded for him to proceed.

"Are you a patriotic man, Mr Draygo? Do you think the human race worth saving?"

"What's this all about?"

"We have a problem. The war could be going better. We're killing roaches at a phenomenal rate but there are always more of them than when we start."

Draygo paused to swallow a pill and said, "What about these miracle weapons I keep hearing about? Seems there's a new one every week."

"I'm glad you brought that up. We've been receiving a steady supply of what are commonly referred to as miracle weapons but—"

"Receiving?"

"They...appear."

"Appear?"

"They appear in the laboratories of one of our weapons research facilities. They close up for the night and the workbench is empty, and in the morning they're sitting there bold as brass. We need to identify the source."

"Have you ruled out elves?"

"Yes, we have."

"Because?"

"We need control. It's unacceptable to the Government that we're dependant on an unidentified external agency for the means of our very survival, _and_ we need more effective weapons. As fantastic as the ones we're getting are, they're not capable of delivering the final blow."

"Why me?"

"You have special...shall we say...skills, experience."

Draygo didn't bite.

"Ganymede."

"Ganymede?"

"The research facility is a sideline of Tranz Central on Ganymede. Three years ago you did a job there for my predecessor."

"I did?"

"Who's your shrink?"

"I'm unlucky with shrinks. Just when I feel we're getting somewhere, they seem to die, go insane, disappear, things like that."

"I'll put you in touch with someone in our psyche department I think might have a bit more longevity. Anyhow, they've no doubt outlined the benefits of a Tranz spin-off called Selective Memory Deletion."

"Yeah, the last one tried to substitute the memory of a cat-I-never-had for the memory of a neighbor's dog. Ugly little cur with crazy yellow eyes, bushwhacked me every day on the way home from school, mauled me pretty bad this one time. My father blasted it to kingdom-come with a twelve gauge right there in the street."

"Tried?"

"I gained access to his office and took a look at my file."

"So now you remember something you'd forgotten."

"Yeah."

"Didn't that somewhat defeat the object of the exercise?"

Draygo shrugged. "Isn't that exactly what you say you're trying to do to me?"

"I have good reason. You've been allowed to sleep and now you're being woken. It's time to remember who you are, Mr Draygo."

"But that's the problem with your little story, isn't it: I'm out of the shell and I _don't_ remember this job you're talking about."

"My predecessor, thorough and precautious man that he was, must've had your real memory altered as well. They may not be as sophisticated as SMD, but the old fashioned methods can be just as effective in their own way."

"The problem is, of course, I have no way of knowing if you're telling me the truth."

"It doesn't matter what you _think_ , Mr Draygo. We want you for this job. We've decided we need _you_. It doesn't matter to us one way or the other what you believe."

"Well why the hell don't you start by doing something about the roach problem here on Earth?"

"Roaches here on Earth?"

"Everywhere!"

He studied Draygo for a second, not sure what to make of him, and then looked to Cooper. His unspoken question was answered silently and he returned his gaze to Draygo. "I think we can all agree the roaches present an extremely serious and urgent problem to be dealt with in the firmest possible manner."

"Damn straight! We gotta wipe the little fuckers out."

"I couldn't agree more, Mr Draygo. That's why we want you to go back."

"Where? Ganymede?"

"Yes."

"You want me to go back somewhere I've never been before? Sorry, that would break my sixteenth golden rule."

"We'll book you in for an SMD session when you get back, if you like. Be like it never happened. Anyhow, you can't choose to sit this one out. You're already enmeshed in this, whether you want to be or not. The fact you have unanswerable questions demonstrates this."

"And which questions might those be?"

"Who are you, who murdered you, who—"

"I've a fair idea on the second one."

"Oh?"

"I was cornered by a Snatch Field and then zapped with a Y-gun."

"Peace tactics. Peace weapons."

"Yeah."

"And what conclusion do you draw from this?"

"You organized the hit. Either you knew I was Tranzed and didn't want me attending like that, or more likely you just wanted to play safe, guarantee you met the real me or no-one at all."

"Is that so?"

"Putting aside for one moment the ludicrous explanation that you wanted me to remember something that never happened, the only reason I can see that you'd want to be so certain, the only reason you're both untranzed yourselves, is that you were trying to minimize the chances of having this conversation overheard."

"Go on."

"This says to me you're a renegade or part of some rogue group. That you'd risk killing the real me, someone who is supposedly so valuable to you, tells me you're playing for keeps. Why, for instance, are we having this little chat here rather than in your plush office, Cooper?"

"It's being redecorated."

"De-loused?"

"Redecorated."

"The whole thing stinks like a week-dead cat."

"As I mentioned before, Mr Draygo, we're not interested in what you believe. You _will_ go to Ganymede, and you _will_ procure for us a war-winning weapon."

"Is that all!?"

"Yes, Mr Draygo, that is all."

He pressed a button and the car dropped abruptly and came to a halt. Draygo made to open the door and Koenig said, "We can compensate you to the tune of, say, two hundred fifty thousand dollars."

"Catchy tune, but I still don't want the job, thanks all the same. Anyway, I'm in the middle of a case, and professional ethics...you know."

Cooper snorted. "An unplugging?"

"A murder."

"I've murdered forty, fifty-odd people in my time and I'm still on speaking terms with most of them. Hell, one guy was best man at my last wedding!"

"A real murder."

"Pee on pee? Nobody's interested."

"The victim was a pleb, the perp wasn't."

"Get off your high horse and smell your coffee, Draygo. _Nobody is interested_."

Koenig leaned forward. "We can help with your 'investigation.' A token of good will."

"Under state-of-emergency powers—"

"If you could've you would've from the get-go, so don't try and shit me, Cooper."

He got out, shut the door and went in search of a cab.

Cooper rolled down the window and shouted, 'Hey! Shamus!'

Draygo turned.

"Sign any death warrants today, smart guy?"

"What?"

"You heard me, smart guy. You heard me just fine."

Feeling no guilt, Draygo turned and walked off. They kill each other, aping their betters, and nobody gives a damn because they're non-citizens. And he got the victims the only kind of justice they were ever going to get: The eye-for-an-eye kind.

He turned his thoughts to the job offer. They'd chosen him for humanity's champion, as the savior of the world. It was what he was doing in his own small way writ large. As large as it _could_ be writ. But he knew he couldn't go off-world into the interplanetary void, and he knew he couldn't have anything to do with anything to do with roaches.

Cooper rolled up the window and turned to Koenig. "The flaky little prick's not gonna play ball."

"Patience, General. There's more than one skinny cat."

### 6

He woke late, carried the two newly-purchased floor fans with him from the bedroom to the living room, popped a bennie and breakfasted on coffee and cigarettes.

After breakfast he emptied a bag of ice cubes into the sink and filled it with water. He took a breath and held it as he pushed his face under the water and splashed it over his head and neck.

He dried himself and then dug out Lance's travel cage. Not holding out much hope for the quality of magazine he was likely to find at the vet's, he went to the bookshelf. _An entire roach assault fleet was destroyed down to the last ship yesterday in an epic battle which is already being called one of the most significant engagements in human history_. He pulled down a book and saw with a pang that what had been a tri-dee image on the cover was now just a shoddy print, its colors ever-so-slightly misaligned.

Trying to banish the sadness he opened it and started to read: _He did it for a period of time and then decided to stop doing it. She entered the room and said it to him again and they left together and went there and did that with them_. He flicked forward and chose another page. He let it drop and pulled down another then another then another. All of them, all the same, all just garbage. _Heroic undercover peace agents today thwarted a collaborator plot to poison the water supply of every major city on the planet_.

He shoved a book into his pocket, picked up the cage and closed the door behind him. Two steps toward the elevator, the phone started to ring. He vacillated for three rings and then turned and re-entered his apartment. He put down the cage, stared at the phone and then picked it up and placed it to his ear. The line was dead. He replaced the handset and left and was in the elevator before he realized he didn't have Lance. Cursing, he went back to his apartment, opened the door and stared warily at the silent phone as he picked up the dog and backed into the corridor.

He pulled over to the curb, cut the engine and got out of the car and into the stifling heat. As he retrieved Lance from the back, the grease-monkey from the gas station slid across the seat and behind the wheel. When he had gotten himself comfortable he rolled down the window and said, "She'll be ready in an hour, but I'm shorthanded. You want her back today, you'll have to pick her up yourself."

"I'll give you an extra ten bucks to drop it back here."

"I told you, Mac, I can't spare anyone. I'm down three guy and the ones I _have_ got are working flat out."

The guy rolled up the window, started the engine and pulled away. Draygo watched til his car disappeared around a corner, and then looked around. It was a typical Blossom Heights street, half its teeth knocked out, clapboard shacks that seemed held together by flaking paint alone and rows of rotting three and four story gray-block buildings. What struck him, though, was the cleanliness. As ramshackle as it all was, it was still free of the filth that choked the city. Then there were the people. They still kept to the shadows, still wore the same wide brimmed hats, the same outsize sunglasses, the same outfits. But they'd been transformed physically, were no longer the doughy blobs he was used to.

"These haven't come on overnight, not even in the last few weeks."

He bent over the animal, parting hair to reveal patches of raw and infected skin. "What you see here is the result of long-term neglect. You just pick him up stray?"

"Yeah."

"I'll give you some ointment. You'll need to apply it all over and massage it in thoroughly."

"Will you do it for five bucks?"

"Uh, yeah, sure, I can get it done."

"I have some business to attend to. How long will it take?"

"About a half hour, I guess."

"That should be plenty long enough."

He climbed the open stairs, reached the street door, and, now level with the large, central ceiling fan, turned to look back. It was the standard Blossom Heights arrangement of a first floor just high enough to stand up in, with the floorboards and joists completely removed to reveal the deep basement below. With no windows, the only illumination came from lights embedded at intervals along one wall.

He'd always thought these places gloomy and frigid before, but now had to steel himself to leave this refuge of relative coolness and go back into the scorching heat.

On the way to the bookstore, passing through the warren of six-foot wide streets which made up the bulk of Blossom Heights once you got off the main drag, he now saw the narrow shaded alleyways not as claustrophobic but as a blessed protection from the stupefying heat of the day. Sweeter still were the tunnels formed when two facing buildings came together overhead.

His headache was starting to grow again and he stopped at a serving hatch, bought an iced coffee and mopped himself with a handkerchief as he drank.

He came to a particularly rancid abandoned-lot. Repulsed but fascinated he stopped to peer into the moldering weed-choked dump. From the shadowy depths he could hear what sounded like a broken water pipe dripping into a no-doubt fetid puddle, rusty hinges creaking in the wind.

Descending the stairs, he found the store empty. He went around the counter, pushed the curtain aside and entered a small living-room-cum-kitchen. Simonds was behind a breakfast-bar drying a cup with a dishtowel. "Mr Draygo. Is there something I can do for you?"

He slammed the book down. "Everything you sold me is just trash."

"I hope you don't mind me saying, but I can't help noticing you're out of the tub."

"What of it?"

"Coffee?"

"Yeah, sure."

"Take a seat."

He wrapped the cup in the dishtowel, massaged it roughly for a moment and then, holding it by two corners, flicked the towel open. The cup had vanished. He pointed to the end of the bar where a steaming cup of coffee, a bowl of sugar and a small jug of milk waited. "Misdirection and distraction are powerful tools, Mr Draygo."

"Fantastic. What about my books?"

"Do you have any friends, acquaintances or family members who are in the tub and possess a copy of this book?"

Draygo looked at it. It had been top of the bestseller list for six weeks last year. "Almost certainly."

Simonds picked up a notepad and a pen. "Give me a number between one and one hundred."

"Seventy-four."

"Next, a number between one and thirty."

"Nineteen."

"Now, a number between one and ten."

"Six."

He handed Draygo the pad and pen.

"Find the sixth word in the nineteenth line of the seventy-fourth page."

He waited while Draygo searched.

"Got it."

"Write it down. Now, I'll pay you ten dollars to phone someone and get them to do the same thing."

Draygo picked up the phone. "Hello, operator, can you connect me with apartment three sixty-two, Sheridan Buildings."

"The name of the other party, sir?"

"Tolley."

The phone rang. "Hello, Tolley. It's Georg Draygo. I'll give you a fiver if you can bring a copy of Rock Stone's _The Killfuckers_ to the phone."

"A fiver?"

"Yeah."

"When?"

"Tomorrow morning."

"Okay."

Tolley went off and returned a minute later. "Got it."

"Okay, now turn to page seventy-four, count down to the nineteenth line, count off the sixth word and tell me what it is."

Draygo wrote it down. "I'll drop by tomorrow."

He put down the phone.

"The two words are the same?"

"He has a different edition. So what."

"Phone him back."

"No."

"Do you want to understand or not, Mr Draygo?"

"I'm not going to do it."

"I'll pay you fifty dollars."

Simonds held up a bill. Draygo thought for a moment and then picked up the phone.

"Hello, Tolley. I'll give you ten bucks to do it again."

"You fucking with me, Draygo?"

"No. Ten bucks."

"Okay."

He went and fetched the book again. "Got it."

"What edition is it?"

"It's a paperback. Got a hero-type guy pleasuring a pneumatic chick on the cover."

"That's the one."

He repeated the process and got a different word.

"You made a mistake."

"No I didn't."

"Do it again."

"For twenty I'll do it."

"Okay."

It was a different word again. Draygo put down the phone and looked at the pad. He had four different words.

"So you can do magic tricks. So what."

"It's not a trick, Mr Draygo. At least not a trick of mine, anyhow. How did you do in reading class?"

"I had the two hundred thirty-seventh best speed in the history of my school."

"An achievement you're rightly proud of. You learned well. You learned how to project, to see what you expect to see. Even a real pre-Great War novel doesn't contain a complete world, is just a seed, a dehydrated reality to be revivified by the reader. It's a trick the brain uses to conserve processing power but it's been perverted by those who would deceive us. You've been trained to not pay attention. You've been duped by the sleight of hand of a malign prestidigitator, a hustler who waggles his fingers in your face while he dips your pocket."

"You really don't care what you say, do you."

"I've been officially classified a harmless lunatic."

"Half that description doesn't surprise me one little bit."

"You seem a trifle overwrought. Is there something on your mind?"

"It's probably just being out of the tub. I don't know how you stand it."

"I don't."

"Sorry?"

"I'm _in_ the tub."

"But..?"

"Why've I not chosen a more glamorous shell? This one is identical to my own body except the arms and legs work. Out of the tub I'm quadriplegic."

"I'm sorry."

"Just one of those things."

"How do you afford it? No offence, but this place can't bring in anywhere _near_ enough."

"I still have friends from the old days. They 'invest' in me. How long til you get a replacement?"

"Should be any day now."

"And have you spent time out of the shell before?"

"No."

"You'll need a few things."

He scribbled a list and handed it to Draygo. "Turn right as you leave, take the second left and then the first right and you'll find a general store a couple of hundred yards down the street on the right. Give this note to the clerk and he'll fill it for you. Make sure you drink plenty of water. As far as food goes, I'd stick to shakes if I were you."

Five minutes waiting produced no taxi and he set off for the gas station on foot, planning to flag one down on the way. In the noon-day sun, windowless stores and all but deserted streets combined to produce an oppressive, ghost-town atmosphere, a feeling everyone else knew something he didn't. He stopped in the shade of an awning to examine one of the murals used, in the absence of window displays, to lure in passers by, and was trying to work out what the store sold, when movement at floor level caught his eye.

He hunkered down for a closer look. Behind a wire-mesh covered, ten-inch square window were tiny people, or rather their reflection in a mirror angled back at forty-five degrees. There was an identical window every five feet along the wall, but all that the other mirrors showed was a foggy light.

He watched the silent play and saw men seated while other men wielded scissors about their heads, snipped at their hair. He stood and his hand went to his own hair.

He entered, descended the stairs and sat in an unoccupied chair. "Morning, sir. I'll be with you in a few minutes," said one of the men with scissors. He looked to the row of wall lights, noticed the diffusing cover was missing from one, went over and saw the street above, feet walking by. They appeared to be some sort of reverse periscope for channeling light into the room.

When the customer had paid and left, the guy fixed Draygo up with one of the back-to-front capes and said, "So, what'll it be?"

"I'd like you to cut my hair."

"How do you want it?"

"I...I don't know."

The guy gestured to the photos on the wall. Draygo pointed at one. "Like that one."

"You want a shave as well?"

"Shave?"

The guy sighed. "Do you want me to remove the hair from your face?"

He looked at himself in the mirror. "Yeah. I want to look like the guy in the picture."

The guy was nearly finished with his hair when, in the mirror, Draygo noticed another customer having his foam-covered face scraped with an evil-looking blade. "Forget the shave. Just cut it short with scissors."

"A trim?"

"Yeah. A trim."

"Would you like me to trim your fingernails too?"

Draygo looked at the claws on the ends of his fingers. "Yeah."

The grease monkey took his money and handed over his keys and he set off for the general store. Within five minutes he had managed to get himself thoroughly lost, and spent the next half hour driving around in circles. Eventually he found the place he was looking for, pulled over, made his way down the stairs, approached a clerk and handed him the list and a dollar. While the clerk was filling his order, he wandered around the store.

Going down an aisle he passed a fading pool-boy furtively examining a carton of something. This part of the store seemed to be mostly supplies for those who wanted to pass but couldn't cut it anymore on looks alone. He paused at a rail of what appeared to be second hand clothes, looked in the full length mirror next to it and saw he was wearing the suit of a taller thinner man. His hat was also at least two sizes too big.

A hovering clerk came up to him and said discreetly, "Recently indisposed?"

"It won't be for long."

"Of course not, sir, of course not. I'm sure you'll be back on your feet in no time at all. But in the meantime why not look the best you can? This suit for example."

He rummaged through the rail and held up a black double-breasted coat and almost matching pants. "Hardly worn. And I bet my bottom dollar, would fit you like a glove. If you had on a corset, that is."

"Corset?"

"Nothing like you imagine. Very modern, very unobtrusive. Instantly gives you the abdomen of a professional athlete."

"Really?"

Scenting blood the clerk dove in. "Our complexion is crucial to how others perceive us, judge us. You can achieve a beautifully even color effortlessly and inexpensively. There's this spray but frankly it's a waste of money. It's only really any use for touching up. You need this paste if you want to achieve really _good_ results. As far as headgear goes, you have options. You need to decide what best suits your lifestyle. Basically, you can either have a separate hair piece and hat or a combination affair. The separates are more expensive, but you can clip on a different hat to express your mood at any given moment, or just go hatless. Just as you feel."

"Separates sound better."

"I couldn't agree more, sir. Now for the crowning touch. These glasses magnify your eyes, stop you looking so rat-like. You need to have a small, completely reversible procedure so you can see through them. It's not cheap but, y'know, you get what you pay for."

"I'll just keep my sunglasses, thanks."

"And beautiful they are too, sir. But would you want to wear them at the theater, at a nightclub?"

"I'll see how I go."

He was starting to feel pretty seedy by the time he was closing the trunk on his purchases. He took out the small electric fan he had bought and played it over his face and neck. Jesus, it was a scorcher. He looked around and saw a boy sitting in a doorway. He beckoned him over, and the boy reluctantly left the shadows and approached.

"There a quack nearby?"

The boy pointed and Draygo gave him two bits.

He descended to the quack's office and the receptionist had him fill out a registration form as he waited to be seen. Presently she ushered him into a consulting room. The quack looked up from his form. "You Georg Draygo the shamus?"

"Yeah."

"What do you want, Mr Draygo?"

"I'm running out of pills for this long-standing condition I have."

"Oh?"

"I get shakes, sweats, palpitations, stomach cramps. Sometimes dizziness and vertigo," said Draygo as he placed the near-empty bottle on the desk.

"And your regular quack won't see you untranzed."

"Uh, yeah. I mean no."

The quack picked up the bottle, looked at it and said, "What is this condition?"

"Well they were never able to pin it down exactly."

The quack examined him.

"I can find nothing physically wrong with you apart from the long-term effects of a life spent in the tub, without running tests, that is. But I imagine you've had all the tests I could run and more besides."

"I've had a lot of tests."

"I can give you more of these but all they do is suppress the symptoms."

"That's perfect. I'm also running low on bennies and barbs."

Later, as he wrote out a scrip, the quack said, "Your body isn't disposable like a shell. You want to be careful with these things. I'm only doing this because, from what you tell me, like most Tranzers you're an addict and sudden cessation could be extremely psychologically dangerous."

"I don't plan on being like this for long."

"Try and gradually reduce your dose. I've given you my medical opinion. The rest is up to you."

On the way to pick up Lance he noticed a large sign on a storefront. _Free Shells!_ He went over for a closer look. _Free shell. Free room and board. Two afternoons free a month. Experienced butlers, chauffeurs, valets and maids always in demand. Salary N/A._

He found the dog smothered in greasy cream and buttoned up in a clear plastic raincoat. "That's to protect your clothes, car seats, household fabrics and suchlike."

He got home, fixed himself a long cold drink and took the phone as far away from the TV's babble as the cable would permit. For a while now, he realized, a sixth sense had been trying to tell him he was being followed _all the time_ , and it was only now, with the constant sense of being pursued having become too overwhelming to be ignored any longer, that he was hearing what it was saying.

He dialed.

"Mike, do you have someone free to tail me?"

"Beg pardon?"

"I'm being shadowed. Only, he's better than me. I can't shake him because I can't spot him."

"I'll put my best man on it."

"Thanks."

He put down the phone and picked up a newspaper. It took him the best part of an hour but, standing back to survey his handiwork, he was pleased with the results. The twenty copies of the Times he'd bought from the bemused newsie, once taped over the windows, reduced the sunlight to an almost bearable glow.

He again dumped ice into the sink and filled it with water, then let his wrists soak for a while before splashing water over his face, neck and head. He dried himself and then applied cream to his face. When he washed it off five minutes later he was clean shaven. He mixed the dye-paste, smeared it over his face, neck, hands and forearms, waited twenty minutes and then rinsed off the excess. Finally he strapped himself into the corset, put on the new suit and plastic wig and stood looking at himself in the mirror.

He entered the living room and stopped dead. While he'd been in the bathroom an envelope had appeared on the coffee-table. _The Martian Dullbrown sacrifice themselves, proud in the knowledge that one of their number will shine_. He sat down and looked at it, picked up a pen and poked it. If it was a bomb it was very thin.

He opened it and pulled out two sheets of paper. He upturned and shook it. No note.

On each sheet were two columns of figures. He scanned down them. The left hand were grid references, the right, time codes. He dug out his city map and spread it out on the table and then picked up one of the sheets, located the first coordinate and marked the spot with a cross. It was Shitstain's house. The first coordinate on the second sheet was the bookstore.

The first time-code on her sheet was eighteen minutes before the first on his. As he plotted points he pictured her arriving at a bar, saw him arriving eleven minutes later, saw her talking and laughing with friends for a further thirty-six minutes while he sat alone and watched. Six seconds after she left he followed her out. The pattern repeated itself twice more before reaching the alley. His line looped back to its start, hers ended in a dumpster behind a Blossom Heights eatery.

### 7

Parked a hundred yards from the house, somewhat more comfortable now he'd had the windows tinted and the air-con beefed up, Draygo watched the shyster pull out of his drive and head downtown. He slid back a panel on the dash to reveal a six-by-four screen, flicked it on and started to twist the knob.

He picked up a camera in the dining room, moved on and got one in a bedroom and then another in a corridor. When he was sure the house was empty he got out of the car, went to the low perimeter-wall, stepped over it and then strolled boldly, as if he had every right to be there, across the glaring green concrete and to the house.

He reached into his coat, pulled out a jimmy and applied it to the door. It splintered and gave, and he pulled it closed behind him. He set to work, and after bypassing the alarm and tampering with the CCTV made his way to the shyster's office.

In front of the file cabinet he fished out the bunch of keys. Third time was the charm. He flicked through the O's. No 'Ood.' He flicked through the P's. No 'Pio.' He tried her real name. Nothing. He sat down at the desk and rifled it. There was a notebook containing a list of names, each with a coded entry next to it. His stable? Customers? Blackmail victims? Whoever they were, her name wasn't on the list.

He sat back in the chair, absently staring at the corkboard photo-wall, thinking there could be a hidden safe anywhere in the house. If one existed, his chances of finding it were minimal, of opening it non-existent. Fuck.

Then there she was smiling at him. He reached out, took down the photo and saw it had been taken in a small apartment. _Her_ apartment. _His_ factroom. He rearranged the others to fill the gap he had made, pocketed it and left.

Sitting in his car he stared into space. Shitstain blackmailing her with her real identity? A parasite preying on the vulnerable, on a poor girl just trying to escape to a better life? He started the car and headed for the bookstore.

He was stopped at an intersection when a familiar limo pulled alongside. Its rear passenger window rolled down as it came level, and a fist reached across and rapped on his window. Reluctantly he rolled it down.

"Catch the news, shamus?"

"Been a bit preoccupied."

"Consignment of babies bound for some God-forsaken colony planet."

"Destroyed?"

"Boarded. Eaten."

"Jesus Christ!"

Cooper passed him an envelope. He pulled out an eight-by-ten and saw himself in some sort of dress uniform, a shiny new medal on his chest. It looked real enough but there was no way to tell if it was a genuine snapshot of a previous life or just something pasted together. He looked at himself and saw a dog bursting with barely contained joy at having pleased its master. The back of a man who could easily have been Elver Moorland, the Government three years ago, faced the camera. "Sorry, I don't know the guy."

He put it back in the envelope and held it out. Cooper reached to take it and Draygo let it go, let it flutter to earth.

He stood in the middle of the room and, holding the snap out in front of him, turned on the spot. He stopped, moved back and to his left and sat on his heels. He looked around, pulled down the Murphy bed, stared at it imagining the scene for a long moment and then sat on the edge. Bingo. He lowered his arm and frowned. Something awkward and unnatural in her pose, like she was trying to—He raised the snap again for a second and then dropped it, tore down photos and stared at the blank wall.

He pressed his palms against it and it flexed slightly. Tapping, he mapped the extent of the void. A three-foot by two-foot rectangle of some thin board had been set into the wall, the join had been taped and then the whole thing papered over.

He took out his pocket knife and inserted it into the join at the top-left corner. Getting both hands behind it, he dragged down. He went all the way around and then got the knife in behind the board and levered. When he had made enough room he got his fingers into the gap and pulled. Prying and pulling, he worked his way around again and then took hold of one side and yanked.

It came away and revealed a recessed bookcase, a miniature library consisting of hundreds of slim volumes with consecutively numbered spines, an unbroken run from one to three hundred seventy-two of some nameless journal. There was only one actual book. He pulled it down and opened it. Inside were two photographs. One showed a young couple working a small printing-press, the other a smiling child, unmistakably Pio as a little girl, with sunlight reflecting from her hair, from the tin shack behind her and from the muddy stream at her feet.

The left hand pages were blank save for a sentence or two in the middle. The right hand pages were full. He flicked through, reading the words on the left and then studying what turned out to be the accompanying commentary on the right.

It was the worst kind of collaborationist poison. He'd known this sort of sick filth existed, of course, but to actually see it, to hold it in your hands, was a whole different matter.

He spent an hour wrestling with the pernicious half-truths, trying to pin them down, before, exhausted, he closed the book and put it in his pocket. He replaced the board and secured it as best he could, retrieved the scattered photographs from the floor, tacked them back up and then went downstairs.

He slammed the book down on the counter. "You knew about this?"

Simonds glanced at it. "I knew whose child she was."

"They were fucking collaborator propagandists! Filth-peddling truth-twisting mind-fucking apologists for totalitarian anarchy! No wonder she had to escape. Sentimentality, some misguided sense of loyalty, making her keep all this shit."

"Remember, seeing from their own point of view, everybody always thinks _they_ are in the right, that _they_ are doing the right thing."

"They want to destroy the world."

"In its current form, yes."

"Those fruitcakes think there's some sort of giant conspiracy!"

"What would actually constitute a conspiracy for you, Mr Draygo? A group of people sitting around a conference table discussing their control of the world? A contract signed in blood between a cabal of billionaires?"

"I guess."

"No, this is not the way things are done. A self-regulating system has been set up. The system has been set in motion and doesn't need to be tended. But those who benefit defend it ruthlessly and quash with lethal brutality any threat or alternative."

"It's not a _system_. It's just the natural order of things. Survival of the fittest. Nature."

"There are various models we could take from nature. The sand tiger shark kills and eats its brothers and sisters in the womb. And yet, a hundred trillion individual cells in your body can live and work together harmoniously. You're using a partial view of Nature as a metaphor for human society. A metaphor says something is like something else, but just _saying_ it doesn't make it so. You can lie with metaphors. Even in its own terms it's a lie. Look: Two guys race. One can afford a pair of sneakers, the other can afford a sports car. The guy in the sports car wins. Is this a race or a test of wealth?"

"Who said life was fair?"

"The winners aren't the fittest, but the richest at the start of the game. It doesn't make you clever or skilful if you win a game rigged in your favor. Unless you have a level playing-field it's just a rationalization of systematic robbery."

"Life's not a Sunday school picnic."

"You win more, you have more leverage to tilt the game in your favor, so you win even more and you have even more leverage to tilt the game in your favor, and so on and so on til 99.99% of the world end up as slaves of one kind or another."

"Okay then, not nature. _Human_ nature."

"Human nature is contradictory. Each one of us is born with varied and conflicting propensities which can be either encouraged or discouraged.

"Some are born more intelligent, stronger, more daring."

"And some are born richer."

"Some work harder."

"The guy in sneakers sprints and the guy in the sports car floors it."

"It's just envy, plain and simple."

"A man breaks into your house and all your neighbors' houses and steals from you all. Later you see him in the street. He's bought a beautiful new car with the proceeds of his crime. Would you describe the feeling you have when looking at the car as envy?"

"You're one of them."

"I'm simply trying to help you understand how Pio's parents saw the world."

"People are free to do what they want to do, be who they want to be."

"Some people are."

"Anyone can be anything they want. Someone born in the gutter can grow up to be the Government. There's no rule they can't."

"But no chance they can."

"This shit was hidden in _your_ building."

"In an apartment _you_ lease, Mr Draygo."

Their horns remained silently locked for a moment and then he disengaged, pocketed the book and turned to leave. In the doorway he turned back and said, "I had you looked up. You were a professor, successful. Then you wrote some bullshit collaborationist paper. I couldn't get a look at a copy no matter how much I offered. They wouldn't even tell me what it was about. In the end I had to bribe them just to not report me for trying to bribe them. Your career was over, obviously. What I don't get is how you managed to dodge Mars."

"I spent some time there. I was able bodied when I arrived."

Draygo left. He'd have to be careful, he thought. Even if he weren't a plant, the guy could have a co-pilot on board and not know a thing about it.

Rounding a corner he ran smack into a guy coming the other way. Stooping to pick up his dropped parcels he started to apologize but stopped when he looked up and recognized Draygo. "Well, well. What do we have here?"

The vague sickish feeling in his guts congealed into a nauseous lump as he remembered the guy. He'd been a suspect in a case six months ago he'd had to get rough with. _Very_ rough. The guy was built like a brick shit-house but hadn't stood a chance against Draygo's Tranz enhancements. It had been too one sided to be called a fight. It was a beating, plain and simple.

The guy had removed his coat, carefully folded it and laid it on top of the parcels, and was now unhurriedly rolling up his shirt sleeves.

"You don't want to do this."

The guy carried on grinning.

"I'll be Tranzed in the next couple of days."

"Yeah, I figured as much. But I would just _hate_ myself if I didn't take the chance to give you the shellacking you been begging for, even if I have to pay for it double, triple tomorrow."

Draygo limped down the stairs and collapsed onto the couch. The receptionist hurried off and returned a moment later with the grinning quack in tow. "Well, Mr Draygo, looks like the shoe's on the other foot, so-to-speak."

As he dressed Draygo's wounds he said, "It's mostly superficial. A lot of bruising, a few cuts, nothing broken or ruptured. Nothing like some of the people _you've_ sent me in the past."

"I don't like getting physical but some people you just can't reason with."

"Are you sure you're not just a sadistic thug?"

"No. I mean yes. I'm sure."

### 8

He had been cruising over virgin forest for an hour when the manicured expanse of his parents' estate came into view. Five minutes later he was dropping down and pulling into his spot in the parking area in front of the main house. He rang the doorbell and presently Jenkins appeared. "Good day, sir." A true professional, the butler betrayed not the slightest reaction to his condition. "The family is in the drawing room. Please follow me."

As Jenkins led him down the wide spinal corridor, past vases bigger than a man, past gigantic tapestries, oil paintings and sculptures, he saw himself as a boy, trailing behind his father, hearing the history of each and every item. It was a repository of human achievement, an ancient and priceless trove. "All this will be your responsibility one day, my boy."

"It will all belong to me?"

"We don't _own_ these things, Georg. We're simply caretakers for future generations."

He saw it all now draped in cobwebs, covered in a thick blanket of dust.

As they neared the drawing room he fixed his face into a blank mask. He knew what they would look like: Bug eyed, puce skinned, plastic-haired freaks.

His mother rose as he entered the room and her hand went to her mouth.

"My God, Georg! You look _terrible_. Father, _speak_ to someone."

"Yes, Mother."

"Georg, promise me you'll think again about giving up this foolish shamus business."

"It's a profitable business, Mother."

His brother stood. "If you decide to stop playing around, you can head up Research."

"What about Anderson?"

"He's become a liability."

"How so?"

"We need him and he's got his head stuck up his ass."

The gong sounded and father led the way as they filed through to the dining room. They seated themselves, and a small carafe of water, a glass and a small plate of colored pills were placed in front of each of them.

They had eaten in silence and were finishing up their meal when he cleared his throat, turned to his father and said, "This case I'm working on, there's this guy comes out with the most outrageous collaborator bullshit."

"Report him to the peace."

"I think he probably _is_ peace."

"You must report him, Georg."

"I have time. I'm investigating him, gathering evidence. It's just the crap he comes out with. You wouldn't believe it."

"No, I wouldn't. Do you?"

"Good God no! But the barefacedness is astounding, the completely brazen twisting of the truth. And it's maddening that I can't find the flaw in his perverted argument, can't work out how he's managed to 'prove' black is white and up is down."

"Don't engage, Georg. Don't get sucked into an argument. You start listening to their moonshine and they've won. You can't beat them with logic. They're too devious, too shameless. They will trick you and trip you and you will lose. Don't stoop to their level and you can't be unhorsed."

"I just want to expose his lies."

"When the Devil whispers in your ear, it's your vanity he's counting on. It's your vanity that makes you engage him in argument, and he'll use it to seduce you. We may not be big-time anymore, but never forget the one fundamental truth: Our ancestors, your ancestors, saved the world. Humanity teetered on the brink of the abyss and they, we, stepped in. We're the guardians of civilization, of culture. Without us, all that is fine and noble would be drowned in blood. It's not a burden you can choose to put down, Georg."

"He would talk about the lives of the work units."

"They're treated humanely, are kept fed, watered and safe. In the wild, left to their own devices, they'd reproduce unchecked and then slaughter each other. They're protected from themselves. They're animals to be bred, herded and their labor harvested."

"It's nature's way," said his mother.

"But they don't have a chance."

"No, they don't. Would it be kinder to fill their heads with dreams and nonsense that can never be? They've lost and therefore are the losers. What would it serve to tell them they're in fact the winners?"

"He'd say they'd lost before they even got started."

"You only get one go at life, and its dog eat dog," said his brother.

"Yes, but—"

"The weak, the lazy and the stupid lose. What would the race be if we turned nature on its head and placed them at the top?"

"Does it have to be this way?"

"Which alternative would _you_ choose, Georg? Some jumped-up little bureaucrat telling you what tie to wear, or bloody anarchy in the streets?"

"Take over as head of research, Georg. Come back into the fold," said his mother.

There was a certain appeal to all that plotting and espionage, the thrust and parry of it all. "I'd like to visit a farm, get eyes on the business."

His mother glanced at his father. "We raised you to tell the truth, Georg. Why do you want to visit a farm?"

"This case I'm working on. It would really help if I got a feel for life on a farm. But I'd be killing two birds."

Father pressed a button and Jenkins appeared.

"Bring me a telephone, will you."

"At once, sir."

Jenkins returned with a phone on a silver tray, placed it on the table and plugged it into a concealed socket. Father dialed. "Hello, Desai. My son's going to pay you a visit...No. Georg. Give him the grand tour."

"Thank you, Father."

Later, as he was leaving, he heard a discreet cough and turned to see Jenkins with a slip of paper on a small silver tray. "Your check, sir."

He reached for his billfold.

Turning to Molly on his way out of the office, he said, "I should be back the day after tomorrow. Anybody calls, tell them I've been called away on urgent business."

"Do you have a minute before you go, sir?"

He glanced at his watch. "What is it?"

She looked to her left and he turned and saw two women, one older, one just a girl, sitting in the corner of the reception area. So meekly had they been waiting, they had become invisible.

He looked back to Molly and raised a questioning eyebrow. In answer she reached under her desk and came back up with one of the ostentatious typed and bound reports which so dazzled the clients.

He came to her desk, opened the weighty volume at the first page and took the fountain pen she held toward him. Under where it said: _In my professional capacity as a fully licensed and accredited shamus, I, Georg Draygo, hereby certify all assertions made in this document to be 100% bona fide facts_ , he signed his name. She carefully blotted the ink and he closed the cover, picked up the tome and took it over to the women.

The older one smiled weakly as he neared. The younger one continued to stare at the floor. When the intrusion of his shoes into her field of vision made her look up he saw what a listless and dead-eyed creature she was. A more unappealing specimen of humanity you couldn't hope to meet.

He cleared his throat. "I know nothing can ever make up for the loss you've suffered but hopefully this will go some way to beginning the healing process."

He held out the report.

They both stared at it. The older woman made to take it but the girl put a restraining hand on her forearm and then, looking at it like it was a rattlesnake poised to strike, reached out and took it herself.

"If you'll excuse me, ladies, I have a cab waiting."

He turned and left.

### 9

The hookers on the intercon flight had been distinctly ordinary and Draygo had slept most of the trip. Sitting in the stuffy VIP lounge of the small provincial field, he had been staring at the TV for twenty minutes when a guy in coveralls came up to him and said, "You Draygo?"

"Yes."

"I'm your ride. Follow me."

Halfway to the exit the guy stopped to bend over a drinking fountain. His thirst slaked, he filled a canteen and then reached into a pocket, pulled out two small tubular metal devices and handed one to Draygo.

"You'll need this."

"What is it?"

"Oxygen."

As they negotiated the complicated multi-door system the guy stuck the tube in his mouth and started to puff. The final door opened and the outside world took Draygo's breath away and drenched him in sweat. It was like the invisible sustaining nurturing atmosphere had been burned off, and in its place was some vampiric entity which, crazed with hunger and thirst, sucked the air and moisture out of whatever it touched.

Draygo stumbled along in the guy's wake and found himself standing next to a hopper. They strapped themselves in and lifted off. Fifteen hot and sweaty minutes later they were touching down in a dusty compound.

As he unbuckled himself he noticed a guy in a wide brimmed hat, loose smock shirt and baggy pants approaching from the direction of a cluster of buildings. The guy got closer and Draygo saw that, despite the pleb clothing, he was in fact Tranzed.

"Hello! Mr Draygo?"

"Yes."

"Pleased to meet you, sir. You have a pleasant journey?"

"Fine, thank you."

"After you freshen up we can have a drink while I go over the set up with you."

"I'm a bit pressed for time. I'd rather just get on with what I came for."

"You'll make more sense of what you're seeing if you let me outline the bigger picture for you."

"Thanks, but no."

"Sure I can't tempt you? I have a bottle of thirty-year-old scotch just begging to be cracked open."

"I have things to do."

"Okay, you're the boss."

He led the way to a heavy tracked vehicle which, in spite of blacked out windows and full power air-con, turned out to be a mobile oven.

Puffing on his oxygen tube and sipping warm water, Draygo lost all sense of direction as they spent the next hour trundling along a twisting and rutted dirt-track through a landscape of low hills and patchy scrub.

He opened the glove compartment and pulled out a map. "Hey! That's my private stuff!"

Draygo held it up. Emblazoned across the front were the words: _Property of Draygo Industries_. "Well not _that_ , obviously."

He unfolded and studied it. "From this it looks like the village is only a mile or two from the compound by this other road."

"Yeah, this time of year that way's impassable though."

They plodded on, and were rounding the umpteenth bend when a fenced enclosure containing several large structures and some smaller ones appeared. As they drew nearer he could make out people milling about behind the wire. They pulled up twenty yards short, and the guy standing in the doorway of the small hut next to the gate slung his rifle and approached the driver side window. There was a murmured exchange and he went and unlocked the heavy padlock and swung the gate wide. In the mirror Draygo watched him lock it behind them.

"What's with the fence?"

"Wild animals."

"And the hardware?"

"Wild animals."

They started with a dirty sweat-box schoolroom dominated by a giant poster showing a blown up cutaway illustration of a toaster. He picked up a book and looked at the cover: _Wiring protocols of the X79b_.

"What about math, English?"

"They get more than they'll ever need."

"Where are they?"

"Who?"

"The kids."

"Fieldtrip."

They moved on. "This is the medical center."

The room was full of filth. No self-respecting pleb would've been seen dead here, and he could see no sockets for all the impressive-looking equipment.

The sweltering dormitory was full of dust, cobwebs and dry leaves.

"What's the capacity?"

"Capacity?"

"How many work units live here?"

"All of them."

"Where do they cook?"

"Cook?"

"Where do they prepare food?"

"They all eat at work."

After they left, the rags and bones in the yard were herded onto a waiting truck and the gate was padlocked behind them.

They had already been travelling for twenty minutes when he realized something was wrong. "Why are we heading back to the compound?"

"There's some bad news about the main facility."

"What about it?"

"We had a radiation leak late last night. Be too hot to go anywhere near for a week or so, suit or no."

"I thought we were exclusively producing small domestic appliances here. What's the source of the radiation?"

"They gotta have power, don't they? The atomic pile got a little over-excited is all. Happens two, three times a year."

"That's disappointing."

"Well, hang around for a week. You can have my old bungalow, and I'm sure we could scare up a perfectly adequate suit for you."

"I have things to do."

The hopper was off on an errand, and they waited in silence in Desai's subterranean office for its return. Draygo put down the empty glass he had been toying with and said, "Any problems I should pass on?"

"Just the gardens."

"Gardens?"

"Anderson already knows _all_ about them. I can't keep the little fuckers—sorry—the _work units_ away from them and they don't even use them, just finish one and move on to the next. Hauling rock, planting seed. They get five hours between shifts and spend damn near all of it gardening. They make two for every one we smash. I have my suspicions they're some sort of _communal_ thing."

"Collaboration?"

"Bordering on it. They don't actually work together or help each other but they're sure-as-hell working to a common goal _and_ there's no profit in it we can see."

"What do the peace say?"

"They _say_ they're monitoring the situation. They _say_ they have bigger fish to fry."

"You've no evidence, of course, that they're growing food."

"God, I wish! I have hidden cameras. I have plants in every garden. They don't crop _anything_."

"Grazing?"

"None."

The hopper turned up eventually and Draygo thanked his host for his hospitality and left. They had only been airborne for a minute when a thought struck him.

"Where does the sun set around here?"

"West. Same as everywhere else."

"Then it should be behind us, not on the left. The field is directly east."

"Boss said to take the scenic route."

"I'm in a hurry."

"You're the boss."

The hopper banked sharply, and as it righted itself on reaching its new heading a structure appeared on the horizon.

"What's that ahead?"

"Wouldn't like to say, sir."

"Take us lower."

They dropped sharply and then abruptly leveled off. "Thought you were in a hurry, sir."

"Take up lower."

As they descended, the radio crackled into life. _Be advised. You are now in Draygo Industries airspace. Draygo Industries asserts its sole ownership of this manufactory and all its ancillary facilities, and its firm intention to exercise to the fullest extent all rights and privileges flowing therefrom. By receiving this broadcast you have consented to our terms and conditions. Message ends_.

With its sea of shacks crowded around a central castle-like structure and enclosed behind a twenty-foot wall, it looked like a medieval town. The setting sun glinting on the tin shacks and on the brown stream snaking its way between them added to the fairytale effect, but when the wind changed direction the fantasy was replaced by mundane reality: The smell of burning plastic from the many small fires over-laid, but couldn't completely mask, the fecal stench rising from the settlement.

### 10

He entered a café and Draygo dropped down, a hundred yards back, on the other side of the street. He slid back the panel on the dash and flicked past the workroom of a laundry, the lobby of an office building, and then found what he was looking for: The shyster seated at a table and reading a paper.

He looked at his watch, folded and put down the paper and sat sipping his drink. The camera panned off him to a girl on a stool at the counter. Draygo adjusted the fine tuning and picked up a camera near the door, looking back into the room. A prosperous-looking middle-aged man was now seated opposite him. They spoke briefly and then the shyster got up and left. Draygo let him go. Presently the man left and hailed a cab and Draygo tailed him across town.

The cab made a signal and started to descend. Draygo mirrored the maneuver, pulled in five spaces behind and was already on the street when the prosperous-looking man got out with a paper under his left arm and set off. Keeping to the shadows he kept on him for two minutes before he turned into a dead-end street. Reflected in a store window, Draygo watched him enter the private lift at the rear of the Government's house, the private lift that led directly to the Government's office.

He knew now why his investigation had stalled... _someone worth protecting_...Shit!

On the way to his car he put the pieces together: Shitstain ran exclusive parties of some sort, was connected to the Government and to Pio, and had done away with her even though she was most likely laying golden eggs for him. Pio had been gotten rid of on the orders of the Government, was silenced to _protect_ the Government.

Draygo got behind the wheel and hit the starter. Nothing. His hand slipped inside his coat and his eyes flicked to the mirrors, found nothing untoward and darted on.

On the edge of his vision he caught a small black squid flying through the open window. Lighter but harder than he expected, it landed in his lap. He looked down and saw a distributor cap, cables trailing.

"How you doing there, shamus?"

Cooper's leering mug filled the window. He took out a roll of bills, peeled off a fifty and mashed it into Draygo's breast pocket. "We're buying a few hours of your time. Unless, that is, you want to turn down the business."

He held out his hand. "Gimme."

Draygo pulled out his gun and laid it in Cooper's open palm. Cooper dropped it into a pocket as he opened the door. "Get out."

He patted him down, relieved him of the two spare magazines he'd been carrying and turned and walked off. Draygo followed him to a battered pick-up. Cooper opened the door. "Get in."

They were both out of the shell again and were now also wearing the oversize smock-shirt and baggy pants of Blossom Heights. On his left, Koenig now appeared solid rather than fat, and on his right, Cooper just looked like the fighting-fit Jack Russell Terrier he had before.

Koenig turned to him as he shifted into drive. "We'd really appreciate it if you'd let us know if you're going to take any more little trips."

They drove to the edge of the city and then on out into the broiling blistering heat of the open desert. The truck windows were barely tinted, the air-con was feeble and Draygo slowly cooked as they travelled on.

Cooper took out Draygo's gun, checked the chamber and disengaged the safety. He rolled down the window, took pot shots at cactuses til the gun clicked empty on the third magazine, and then pulled his arm in and tossed the gun and the empty magazines into the glove compartment.

They rode on in silence and presently, still staring straight ahead, Cooper said, "I catch you packing unauthorized heat again I'll throttle you myself."

The mountains on the horizon grew steadily larger and larger til eventually they loomed like a fossilized wave constantly threatening to break over them. They turned off the highway and as they climbed higher the dirt road degenerated into a rock-strewn track. When their progress slowed to a crawl, Koenig pulled over and cut the engine.

Pausing every few minutes while Draygo mopped himself and wheezed, they hiked for two miles up a narrow overgrown path and came to a metal door set in the rock-face. Cooper produced a key.

As the door sealed shut, in spite of the relative coolness inside, a wave of absolute fatigue overcame him. Receding into the distance, the corridor swam, and he clutched at Cooper's arm.

"Steady there, big guy."

Cooper and Koenig set off and Draygo staggered after them, past metal door after metal door, left and right. They stopped to wait for him but turned on their heels and marched off the instant he arrived, allowing him no rest. He stumbled on.

They were waiting for him yet again. As he reached them, Koenig gestured to a door. It was identical to the others apart from being not much more than eighteen inches wide.

"In there!?"

Cooper opened the door on a rock-cut passage slightly _less_ than eighteen inches wide, stretching into darkness, and flicked a switch. Lights set into the floor every six foot struggled to life, marking the path with their feeble glow, and Koenig gestured again.

Sandwiched between smooth rock walls, they scraped along, and when he slackened his pace, Cooper harried him with sharp little jabs. The lethargy seemed to have stabilized around about 'drowsy zombie' but he couldn't seem to get any air into his lungs, and his heart was still jack-hammering-for-Jesus.

After what seemed like an hour they came to a chimney-like spiral staircase, no wider than the passage they had just escaped, curving up into darkness. Feeling their way in the dark they climbed the near-vertical steps cut into the raw rock, and as they rose, in spite of his screaming muscles, Draygo felt stronger and stronger.

After twenty minutes the harsh blackness above seemed to soften. A warm glow appeared and grew and became a scorching blinding light. He put on his sun goggles and stepped into it, filling his lungs.

When his eyes adjusted he saw they were in a circular domed room about thirty feet across, with light and heat flooding in through large unglazed openings cut at intervals around the wall. He went to one and breathed deeply as he looked out across the desert.

Nestled, as it was, in the dead center of a large salt-pan that shone like water in the sun, Blossom Heights was lost in glare and in rippling air. The towers of the city behind seemed to rise out of a glittering lake.

"This place was built during the Great War. With the shutters down, it's one hundred percent radiation proof."

"Impressive."

"As an educated man, you know Tranz is a projection that needs to be sustained, not a physical transference."

Draygo nodded.

Cooper pulled a lever and heavy machinery under their feet rumbled to life. He pulled another lever, a clutch engaged and the shutters started to close.

"Intelligence is telling us the roaches are plotting to disable the Tranz process. Permanently," Koenig shouted.

Draygo's hand went to his pocket. "Holy shit!"

"Precisely."

"Well I suppose...I suppose I'll survive."

"That's exactly it, Mr Draygo. _You_ won't."

Dragyo cupped a hand to his ear. "Come again?"

"What you believe to be your real body," Koenig bellowed, "is in fact just a shell."

Draygo looked from Koenig to Cooper and back again. Cooper was smiling, Koenig was not.

The last shaft of daylight dwindled and died as the shutters locked into place. Draygo opened his eyes and saw them staring down at him. The shutters were opening. "You've proved...nothing."

He managed to prop himself up on his elbows. "You could...you could achieve the same effect with drugs or...or hypnosis."

Koenig leaned over him. "You didn't come back, Mr Draygo. Your body, more specifically your brain, didn't survive your last assignment. A recording of your mind Shellcorp had on file was projected onto your next un-enhanced shell and then you were force-grown. You have an unmodified shell instead of a real body. Your bones, muscles, digestive system, nervous system, internal organs, everything, all absolutely standard, indistinguishable from the real thing. They always grow a blank one in case of emergency, as a back up."

"Bullshit."

"You spent six months awake in the tank. Naturally you went insane."

Draygo struggled to his feet. "That's against the most basic—the most basic laws of Tranzing."

"Nevertheless, it _was_ done. It was done because it was felt you might be 'useful' at some point in the future. And here we find ourselves. In the future."

"How?"

"We don't know. We tried it. It worked. It hadn't before and it hasn't since."

"What...what happened to me?"

"All the neurons in your brain were lined up in straight rows, files and columns. There was a pattern, but it was no pattern at all."

"It had the eggheads wetting their pants. They spent months slicing and dicing and peering and poking."

"Most of it's still in our museum if you'd like to have a look."

"So what was the goddamn point getting me out of the tub?"

"When you returned from Ganymede you were...different. You are, or rather the shell you inhabit is, off the grid. You're not being sustained by Shellcorp."

"Who then?"

"We don't know. You're a mystery, Mr Draygo. An anomaly. Ganymede is the key to you _and_ to the weapons. But the key is also a lock. We need to find the key."

"The key to the key?"

"Precisely."

"You're both fucking nuts."

"There's something else."

"I can't wait to hear."

"Your situation. When you get back it can be rectified."

"Rectified?"

"There are real bodies vacant."

"Real bodies? Where from?"

"They are...harvested."

"They're not like these tank-grown pieces-of-shit which start to fall apart after a few years."

"Bullshit."

"Your family might have been a big noise once upon a time, Mr Draygo, but nowadays it's strictly penny-ante."

"I... I can't...I need to...digest this."

Cooper pulled a lever and a section of wall slid back to reveal an elevator cage.

"But..."

"You didn't think that was the _real_ way up, did you, big guy?"

Cooper shook his head solemnly as he clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth.

The elevator opened onto a cool and empty cavern that could have accommodated a small army, vehicles and all. They got in the waiting golf cart and set off toward the hangar doors on the far side. They led to a gallery that could have taken three tanks abreast.

A point of light in the distance grew, and after ten minutes they came to another set of doors and emerged to blazing sunlight and a leveled marshalling area, in the center of which sat an idling hopper.

"What about the truck?"

"Fuck the truck."

Assisted by the crew chief, Koenig and Cooper got aboard. Draygo started to clamber after them and Cooper reached out, placed a firm palm on his chest and shoved. Draygo reeled.

Cooper jerked his thumb and shouted, "Highway's two miles that-a-way, big guy. There's usually something rolls down it every few hours or so."

He tossed a canteen and it landed in the dirt at Draygo's feet.

The hopper raised itself into the air amid the whine of turbos and a swirling dust-cloud. Standing in the doorway, one hand holding onto the frame, the other cupped to his mouth, Cooper yelled, "Decide!"

### 11

Sultry night had fallen by the time he made it back to the city. He took a cab to his car, popped the hood, refitted the distributor cap and drove home. In his living room he stared at the filthy misshapen lump-of-a-vase sitting on the coffee table, and was for a moment able to make it flicker to the thing of beauty it had once been.

Valerie Dubois was on the phone when her doorbell rang. "Hang on a sec. Let me just see who that is." She carried the phone to the door and squinted through the peep-hole. "Jesus! I gotta go. I think it's that roach guy."

Beaming, she opened the door. He looked at her hair, her skin and her eyes and wondered if he'd brought enough pills.

"Hello there, lover."

"You don't notice anything different?"

She shrugged.

"I'm untranzed."

"I can see that."

"Is that a problem?"

"You got a dick and dollars, you're alright with me."

He entered her, and she was entered by him.

Back home, the phone rang. He watched it. It rang and it rang and he picked it up.

"Hello? Georg?

"Hello, Pieter."

"Are you okay?"

"Fine."

"Have you thought about the job?"

"I'm tied up at the moment."

"We _need_ you, Georg. Something's going on."

"Have you picked up anything about these gardens?"

"Don't _you_ start. All Anderson does all day is scan reports and listen to chatter for anything about his damn gardens."

"He get anything?"

"Nothing. But he still won't drop it. He wants to nuke the lot!"

"Why not do it? Just to be sure."

"They're all over the place. We'd leave our entire holdings unproductive for decades. Anyway, they're all over the planet."

"It's bordering on collaboration."

"If it keeps the work units docile, it's fine with me."

"But—"

"Forget about the damn gardens, Georg. Look, we can't rely on Anderson anymore. We need you to take over."

"I'm close to cracking something and the peace are after me to do a job for them."

"Georg, the big boys gave us an invite to a special shareholder meeting. We'd been getting information about a big move someone was planning but there was something strange about it, something chaotic, and I just wanted to fit the pieces together, see how we needed to position ourselves for maximum advantage." He took a deep breath. "It was bedlam. The Government all but burst an aorta trying to keep order. I can't believe no one was killed. I made notes as accusations were slung back and forth and then mapped it all out later. The allegations, looked at as a whole, didn't add up. The finger points everywhere and nowhere. Someone's lying. In fact it was like they were all lying. Even what we had to say didn't make any sense."

"What're you saying?"

"I'm saying I don't understand it, and I don't like that. I think we're being fed total bullshit, but of a highly organized kind. Someone is preparing to make a move and is throwing up this fog to confuse us, blind us. In order to formulate a strategy we need to find out who's behind it and what exactly it is they're planning."

"Maybe everyone's working together against _us_."

"Shit! You think?"

"Why not?"

"That's the sort of left-field insight we need, Georg. I've always said that as an organization we think along far too conventional lines."

"Do you have any contingency plans if Tranz goes down?"

"For a play?"

"For security."

"We do...But they could be better...A lot better..."

"Pieter?"

"Yeah, sorry. Look, Georg, you've _got_ to drop whatever you have on at the moment. The family needs you. I don't know what's going on but I do know we're going to need to pull together if we're going to come through this."

"I'll see what I can work out. Goodnight."

"We'll talk soon. Goodnight."

He mixed himself a generous nightcap, sat down in front of the TV and turned it up. _Toss the contents again and return to the oven for three more minutes_. He pressed a button and sipped his drink. _The challenger vanquished, his harem safe for the time being, he returns to the crevice he calls home_. He pressed a button. _The Government today paid tribute to the valiant defenders of an isolated outpost wiped out yesterday in a roach sneak attack_.

He turned it down, washed down a barb with the dregs of his drink and went to bed.

In the morning he drove over to the bookstore, went upstairs and sat down at his desk with an open file in front of him. He had been poring over it fruitlessly for an hour when he heard the door open behind him. He turned to see his busybody landlord and saw Koenig and Cooper instead. From the middle of the room, they surveyed the sea of photographs plastered over every square inch of wall.

"Jesus, Draygo. You got yourself an honest-to-God, by-the-book off-the-books factroom. I haven't seen one of these in _years_ ," said Cooper.

"What is it about this girl, Mr Draygo?"

"He's the one that found her. Right, shamus?"

"Yeah."

"It's decision time, Mr Draygo."

"I can't...I just can't do it."

"Quid pro quo, Mr Draygo. You do this for us, and we'll do something for you."

"I can't."

"A fresh start _and_ footage of the girl's death."

"All the cameras for a three block radius were hit by an unexplained power surge thirty minutes before...before it happened."

"Not all were fried completely. We've been able to obtain some salvaged footage."

"Of...of the actual moment?"

"Yes, Mr Draygo."

If they got it, then it could be gotten, and he could get it somehow, he thought.

"No dice."

"If you're not going to do this, if you're no use to us, something unfortunate might happen to you. High explosives could get wired to your ignition, ground glass could find its way into your food, or you could just get run over crossing the street...without our protection."

"You...you wouldn't. My family..."

"You forget, _Mr_ Draygo, that _officially_ you're a non-citizen. _Legally_ your family influence means nothing. And with no legal protection..."

His shoulders dropped and his head sank. "I just need to get a few things straightened out first."

"If you have any smart ideas about getting a black-market loaner, don't bother. That's a felony and would automatically negate your citizenship."

"A couple of my boys'll be ringing your bell at sixteen-hundred hours sharp. Don't keep them waiting, shamus."

At his apartment he went straight to the phone.

"Good day, Mr Draygo, sir—"

"Where the fuck is my fucking shell!?"

"Sir, it's an extremely delicate procedure bringing on a shell this far ahead of schedule. You wouldn't want it irreparably damaged, would you?"

"Just call me as soon as it's ready!"

"Of course, sir."

He fetched a grip from the closet and burglarized himself, sweeping in anything he thought might be useful. _Put the haddock aside to cool, then remove the skin_. He called his girlfriend. Her message service answered.

"Hello, darling. I am going to be out of town for a while. I will call you when I get back. Is that accurate, sir?"

"Perfect."

On the street, keeping to the shadows, he walked as far as the heat allowed, found a rank of surface cabs and went to the third in line. The cabbie at parade rest came to attention as he approached.

"You want that in the trunk, Mr Draygo?"

He nodded to the bag at Draygo's side. Draygo looked the man in the eye. "How do you know my name?"

"Why it's right there on your luggage, sir."

He looked at the peeling letters. Finding another cab would arouse too much suspicion, he thought. "Okay, no, I'll keep it with me."

He opened the door and stood back and Draygo got in.

"Where to, sir?"

"Take me to The Milverton."

"Yes, sir."

As they pulled away, he said, "You're very observant."

"It's my job, sir. You got to know the customer, you want to provide top-quality service."

They pulled up in front of the hotel and Draygo got out and paid the fare. He peeled off letters as unobtrusively as he could as he walked. After a half block he hailed another cab.

Once in open country, the car ate up and shit out mile after mile of blacktop as Draygo fitfully dozed. They had put something like a thousand miles between themselves and the city, and the scrubby desert had given way to dense forest, when he said, "Pull in at the next gas-station, will you."

"Sure thing, sir."

He picked up a pamphlet issued by the local chamber of commerce and studied it as the wall of trees on either side rushed by. "Take me to the Shady Oaks Cabin Park. Looks to be about thirty miles."

He closed his eyes and lay back.

He was sitting on a bench, holding a large ring of keys and watching over a group of people in a cage. They were sitting on stools, huddled around something. He stood up and approached the bars to see better. They were watching a cage about four-foot by six-foot by four. It was full of people, only they weren't cramped at all, being only about one-fifth normal size. He watched his prisoners watching their prisoners and then looked at the midgets. They were gathered around something. Not wanting to but having to, knowing what he would see behind him, he turned and woke with a jolt to the gentle crunch of gravel, the car easing to a halt.

He entered the reception area and the girl behind the counter smiled sweetly and said, "Good day, Mr Draygo, sir."

His entrails turned to ice. "How do you know my name?"

"I beg your pardon, sir?"

"How. Do you. Know. My name."

"Well, sir, we have two reservations for today. A couple called the Kippermans who were very particular about wheelchair friendliness, and a single male named Draygo."

"I didn't make a reservation."

"Your driver called ahead from a payphone to make certain of a cabin for you, sir. An unnecessary precaution, I'll grant you,"—She glanced meaningfully at the all but empty bar/dining area through the archway to her right—"but that's what he did."

"You never get people just turn up?"

"Sir, in the twelve years I've been here nobody, _nobody_ , has ever 'just turned up' at this time of day."

Strolling over lush lawn back to his cabin after dinner, the identical trees dotted about grew closer together and the identical cabins fewer and farther between til he found himself lost in a moonlit wood.

He stopped in a small clearing overlooking the lake. It looked a helluva lot better in reality than it did in the crappy painting in reception but otherwise was identical. Wooded shore, the moon reflected on the water. Even down to the small rowboat in the middle with its lone occupant. Only, this guy had a glint of light, a reflection, in the area of his head though.

The question, which all evening had been no more than a vague albeit stubbornly persistent feeling he'd missed a bum note, chose this moment to coalesce into a concrete thought and spread dread through his entire body: How had the _second_ cab driver gotten his name?

A silent roar erupted simultaneously from all sides as shadows became solid, hard men rushing him. In a whirl of knees and elbows, two attackers dropped. The rest withdrew to form an alert circle, ten feet in diameter, with a panting wild-eyed Draygo at its center.

Eyeing him, the squad leader touched his throat. "Sir, it's going to be problematic delivering the package completely undamaged."

Cooper leaned into the microphone. "Just club the bastard til he stops moving, and get him to the fucking field. Pronto."

He nodded and they drew their batons and moved in swinging.

### 12

Draygo opened his eyes and saw stars through a foot-square window a foot from his face. He was exposed. The walls of the tiny pod all that separated him, all that protected him, from infinity. He felt stripped naked, scrutinized like a bug under a magnifying glass. He remembered, at sea as a boy, being hit with the stomach-flipping realization that there were a thousand fathoms beneath him, that the usually solid dependable surface was now fluid and concealing God-knew-what horrors, that he was vulnerable.

His rising panic was registered and the pod introduced trank into the atmosphere, and then, as he became calmer with every inhalation, cut the gas.

He was so close and now he was here. It was only a detour though. He'd get Koenig his weapon and he'd get the footage, a new body and a new shell. Then there'd be a reckoning, a settling of accounts.

He tried to move and found he was strapped in tight. He'd've had more room in a goddamn coffin. Under his fingertips were what felt like switches. First thing was to close the shutter, if there was a shutter. He flicked a switch and words a million miles high formed out in the depths of space and started to blink. _Message waiting. Message waiting_. The window somehow doubled as a screen. He flicked another switch and the words and the stars winked out. For a second he was staring into complete bottomless blackness, and then a snowstorm of static.

With what seemed an immense effort of will, the dots managed to form themselves into the glitching face of Koenig, clicks and beeps swirling around him.

"Mr Draygo. You are, by now, well on your way. The credentials you'll be furnished with give unrestricted access and will ensure full cooperation—"

The face collapsed completely for a second and then re-formed. "The fate of the human race is in your hands. For all our sakes—"

Again it dissolved, but this time the chaos resolved instead into the face of a roach. Jesus Christ! He'd got the crossed line from hell! "I wish you a profitable field-trip."

The recording ended and a warning flashed. _Trank levels at seventy percent_. He tried to calm himself.

Music blared and a voice screamed. _A plague sweeping the galaxy, devouring everything in its path! A ravening horde from God-knows-where!_ The scowling face of a roach zoomed from the center to fill the screen and words wrote themselves gaudily across it. _A Universal Information Bureau Presentation: Bloodlust from Above!_ He tried all the switches but couldn't turn it off. The image cut to a close-up of an old-style household radio and the screaming was replaced by the gentle babble of conversation on a summer's day, children squealing gleefully as they chased each other, glasses clinking, food sizzling. Then came muted quizzical voices, the flutter of a million gossamer wings, then diabolic clicking, chirruping and whirring. There were shouts, sounds of panic and stampede, and finally screams not of dying but of wanting to die to end the pain.

The image cut to a cartoon dotted-line making its way through space. _Another world falls silent. Their crime? Being in the path of the expressway of death being carved through the universe. There's another planet on that path. A certain blue-green world, home to nigh-on a billion people_. The camera pulled back to reveal a cartoon Earth with the dotted-line headed straight for it.

The screen faded to black, and soothed by the trank he eventually drifted into unconsciousness. He was still out four hours later when the pod's walnut-size governing monad received an external signal, scrutinized it and passed it on. The instruction arrived at the attitude control sub-system, it confirmed receipt and then carried out its orders. Tiny jets hissed and the pod turned in the void.

He woke to find the shutters open, found the switch and flicked it. He tried it again. The stars stayed put and a message flashed up over them. _Planetfall in 78 seconds_.

There was a weak thump and tiny, fanatically licking flames appeared around the edge of the window as the pod entered the atmosphere. He could still see stars but the pure-white crescent of the surface was edging into the bottom of the screen and grew steadily til it filled it. Whiteout.

He'd see nothing til the pod broke cloud cover. _Planetfall in 36 seconds_. Still all white. The pod began to decelerate. _Planetfall in 19 seconds_. Still nothing. It slowed to almost touch-down velocity still shrouded in cloud.

Tranked to the gills, he landed in a blinding swirl of microscopic particles which smashed into the window and silted and covered it completely in seconds. A tractor trailing a command wire behind rumbled through the blizzard toward him. It reached him, stopped and arms emerged from its sides and took a firm grip of the pod. Dragging him behind, the tractor rumbled back the way it had come.

A hand scraped away silt, and a face peered in at him. The face disappeared, the locks disengaged with a clunk and the pod began to decompress. When the pressure had equalized, the top half swung away from the bottom like a coffin lid and he saw a soldier looking down at him. He looked around the hangar and took in a hopper, jeeps.

"Hey, man, what's with the visibility?

"Dust storm's up. Outside, you'd be bones in twenty seconds. In two minutes there wouldn't even be any bones left, _man_."

Grinning at the gawking Draygo, the sergeant said, "Missing 'old red' yet, son? Orientation's in ten minutes. Welcome to Aggie."

"Aggie? Someone screwed up."

"No kidding."

### 13

He found himself dressed in drab coveralls and slippers and seated in a chair in the middle of an empty white hall. White walls, white ceiling and white floor. From concealed speakers a voice boomed. _Welcome, recruit. Welcome to Aggie. Welcome to Fort Ardak_. The wall opposite turned black and then the face of an officer appeared, the Flag fluttering behind him. _You're joining an elite group of men, one of the most successful outfits there is. You'll find me a firm man but fair. Do your job and we'll get along just fine. Our mission here is to kill roaches, pure and simple_. Draygo started to shake and reached for his pills. _Hit your targets and you could be whisking the little lady to Earth in as little as eighteen months. If you think dicking around is the way to go, you're in for a nasty shock_.

The officer's face faded but the Flag carried on waving as a soup-kitchen line of plebs in the same drab coveralls and slippers shuffled into the room as if linked, one to the other, by invisible ironmongery. They fanned out around the walls, slid back panels and took out folding chairs. The trank was starting to wear off and he was starting to get scared.

In line for the cigarette machine, he said casually to the guy behind him, "So, there are roaches on this planet."

"Stands to reason."

"How many you think?"

"Could be a few hundred thousand, could be a few million. They just don't know."

Draygo had a vivid flash of wave after wave of roaches hurling themselves at him as his ammo dwindled. He downed a couple more pills, saw he was nearly out and said, "What does a guy have to do to get a drink around here?"

"No booze in this man's army. No bennies or barbs either. As much weak-ass weed as you can stomach but no booze, bennies or barbs."

Sipping his thin ersatz coffee, Draygo sat alone in a corner and smoked. For the time being he'd been well and truly neutralized. The Government had arranged for him to be shanghaied, and was no-doubt feeling pretty damn smug and secure thinking he was marooned here to rot and die, or be killed in a roach attack. Only, he wasn't that easily taken out of the game. Patience was what was required. Being subject to military justice in time of war he'd have to play along, keep his eyes peeled for an opportunity.

### 14

The dew-covered fieldstone homestead glistened in the pre-dawn haze. Ma was up first and outside beginning the day's chores before the day had even begun. She saw them and was afraid. For the half second, that is, before they slit her throat. Her death-scream wrenched the family from its slumber. The element of surprise gone, the roaches opened up with their fire-ray guns. The sod roof of the main house burst into flames, as did the barn and henhouse. A rearing horse shrieked and then exploded. Pa, bursting from the front door, ancient rifle in hand, had a foot-wide hole blasted in him before he got three steps. The others were simply clubbed into unconsciousness as smoke and heat drove them outside.

Bleeding but alive, trussed like turkeys in the dirt, they were awaiting their fate, when their new sister-in-law was herded from behind the burning barn to join them. Her hair was all mussed up, her nightshirt was torn and she wasn't walking right.

Six roaches stood around the six survivors in a wide-eyed drooling circle and stared down at them. Then at some silent signal they swooped, mouths gaping, and took off their heads in one bite. As six fountains of blood rained down on them, they crunched and chewed and swallowed.

Sucked-clean bones shining in the sun, smoke rising from burned out buildings, and the occasional jar still exploding in the root cellar greeted the eldest son on his return that afternoon from a trip to town to sell three goats and buy a hat for his new bride. The camera zoomed in on a broken and soot-smudged doll in the ruins and the credits rolled.

The lieutenant's face faded in as the doll's faded out. _They are weak. We are strong. We crush them because we can. Because we can, we must_.

The others dozed, read magazines, played cards, listened to headphones.

A klaxon sounded and then a metallic voice intoned: _General quarters. General quarters. All hands, man your battle stations_.

The men stopped what they were doing, got to their feet, picked up their chairs and exchanged them for rifles. Draygo swallowed three pills and made to get up but Sergeant Gutierrez put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down. "Better stay put, freshmeat," he said as he handed him a rifle.

Walls, floor and ceiling disappeared, and, for a shaky second, Draygo found himself floating thirty yards above the planet surface. His brain struggled and failed to cope and he fell off his chair and sprawled face down on the floor-that-wasn't-there but didn't fall. The floor, like the walls and ceiling, was a screen.

He got to his knees and saw again, in every direction, as far as the eye could see, the completely featureless milk-white plain below a cloudless sky.

"A sphere of polished bone floating in the immense cosmic darkness."

"Can it, Irzyk," growled Sergeant Gutierrez.

Everyone peered in the same direction except for one green-faced guy hunched over a scope, "Any second now. Any second..."

On the horizon a squadron of fast-moving attack-craft appeared. "Okay, here they come. Hold your fire til I give the word."

Coming in at speed and in perfect formation, the black dome-shaped craft seemed to ride on a molecule-thick cushion of air. The infantry, obviously first-rate troops, hit the ground running and, even though they wove and zigzagged, effortlessly kept pace with the ships. There were about a hundred or so of them and their inhuman speed froze his innards.

A hundred yards out, the domes began to decelerate. Two smashed into the fort and disintegrated, the rest passed by, left and right, and stopped dead surrounding it. Running around in circles, the infantry now seemed disorientated and disorganized.

"Fire at will!"

Men were firing in all directions. "Hey, shitbird!"

Draygo swiveled and was momentarily blinded by a muzzle flash. "Get out of my goddamn way!"

He moved aside and the red-haired giant stepped into the gap and started to fire.

Draygo quickly fell in with the slow steady rhythm. The men around him were coolly selecting their target, sighting, and firing a single shot. Always a head shot.

Too many chiefs, not enough indians. The rest of the unit took care of the soldiers and he surgically removed the brains: The little ones who spilled out of the main craft when an explosion on its left side ripped it open. Cut off the head, and the body will die.

The last roach fell and the men lowered their rifles. The whole thing had taken only a matter of minutes. Sergeant Gutierrez looked around and bellowed, "Anyone not outside in three minutes forfeits their bounty! Move!"

Each man took a six-foot bar from a rack by the hatch and joined the line filing down the ramp. They were a motley group, no two outfitted the same. One in rain pants and boots, another in waders, another in gauntlets and an apron, they looked like the crew of some kind of pirate trawler.

He'd taken three pills as the others had dressed but out here among the bodies he swallowed three more. The men were pairing up and Sergeant Gutierrez turned to him and said, "You're with me, freshmeat."

He turned and strode off and Draygo followed.

The surface looked like a pristine snowfield but underfoot was more like sand. He scuffed his toe in the powder and found it was only a two inch layer. The actual planet surface underneath was like white glass.

Gutierrez stopped at the body of a huge roach, held up his bar, and a heavy double-edged blade appeared at the tip. He jammed it in the roach's side and worked it in til the blade was swallowed up and then got behind it, bent his knees, took hold of the end with both hands, pulled up, and straightened his arms above his head. Finally he pulled it down, forced it down, trod on it and bounced on it. "Come on, son. Have at it!"

Draygo looked at the bar in his hands. There was a recessed button where his thumb naturally fell. He depressed it and a blade leaped from the end and jolted to a halt.

"Come on, son."

He stuck it in the roach's side and tried to force it home.

"All the way in, and give it some."

He wrenched the bar up and there was a tearing sound. Something gave, and as he fell forward he was drenched by a jet of thick black foul-smelling goo.

"Lesson number one: Never stand at the tail end. Now get up and give me a hand with this goddamn thing!"

He jammed the blade in, moved his bodyweight behind the bar and shoved. There was a crack and more goo seeped out. "Break it straight and _then_ lift it."

They worked with machetes, hacking at rubbery sinew, discarding heads, limbs and internal organs. In one spot a pile of shells grew, and in another a hastily erected enclosure filled with offal.

It was a slaughter, a massacre. They'd lost fifty to nothing. Impressive as it had been, their attack was suicidal. He wasn't sure he liked the idea of a foe unafraid of death. And then a thought struck him. "There were more than this. Where are the rest of them?"

Sergeant Gutierrez looked around at the endless plain and shrugged.

"Why are we collecting their shells?"

Gutierrez gave him a hard look, grunted, and returned to his work.

They were finishing up and Draygo wandered over to one of the attack craft for a closer look. The black dome was fused to the surface. Perhaps something that happened if the power were left running when they were stationary?

Inside he could find nothing he could recognize as a power source or instruments or controls. In fact there wasn't much of anything at all. The only object of any size was a narrow white dresser of some kind with a heavy, metal bucket sat in pride of place in the center of it. He picked the bucket up by the protrusions on either side and saw it had no bottom. Such different technology.

The walls of the craft were paper thin and covered in a design that consisted of one continuous—at least he hadn't found a join or break in it so far—incredibly convoluted line. He cautiously reached out and touched it. The shapes it formed weren't representations of anything he could recognize but he felt they were representations of _something_. It was like a giant story.

Leaving the dome he paused to lean against the doorframe and watch as, gesticulating wildly, Red approached Sergeant Gutierrez. The others seemed oblivious at first but soon were all watching intently. He was straining to hear what was being said, when the confrontation ended abruptly as Sergeant Gutierrez touched something at his belt and all the men clutched their heads and fell to the ground writhing and jerking.

Sergeant Gutierrez surveyed the prostrate groaning men. Draygo straightened and the sergeant snapped his gaze in his direction and stared at him as he yelled, "Get up, you idle bastards. We got work to do. You can sleep when you're dead. Til then, you belong to me."

It was dusk by the time the shells had been loaded and stowed and Draygo, clipboard in hand, was on the veranda watching men pour kerosene over the craft and the pile of unwanted gore. They lit torches, tossed them and turned and ran for the fort, and Draygo counted them off as they passed.

Greasy black smoke billowed, and dark orange flames leaped. The reek reached down his throat, got its claws into his guts and tried to rip them out through his mouth.

The wind was getting up and debris was starting to swirl in little eddies. A piece of paper blew against his chest and dropped to the floor. He picked it up. It was a photograph of a very large attack-craft, possibly some sort of mother ship, with a group of roaches posed in front of it. Three of the ones he'd taken for officers—smaller, less developed physically and with larger heads—stood at the front. Directly behind them were two members of the much bigger and heavier warrior-caste. Slightly off to the right was one of intermediate size and indeterminate function.

He looked up and stared slack-jawed: The pyre and the burning craft and everything, all in perfect unison, had started to drift away from him. It was as if they had become incorporeal specters and, no longer belonging in the world of the living, were being drawn slowly but inexorably to the place where dead things live.

From the doorway Gutierrez shouted, "Get moving, dumb ass."

The veranda only extended one side of the fort and there was no door. He jumped down and found himself drifting away from the fort in synch with everything else. Caught up in whatever phenomenon had taken hold of the shambles, he was being taken wherever it was being taken. Gutierrez was holding out his arm. "Come on, you dumb fuck! Run!"

He'd been dragged about a hundred yards from the fort, when everything stopped. The sergeant came down the ramp and trotted over to him. Jerking his thumb at the fort over his shoulder, he said, "The twelve hundred bucks it cost to stop-and-start that bastard is coming out of _your_ end."

### 15

As the men rested, Gutierrez raised the lieutenant on the radio.

"What can I do for you, sergeant."

"There's something wrong with the new one."

"We need him pulling his weight if we're going to meet our quotas."

"I got no complaint about his _killing_. It's just there's something not right about him."

"I'm only concerned with his performance, sergeant, not his personality. I've had to speak to you before about bothering me with trivialities. Please don't let it happen again."

Gutierrez marched into the main hall.

"Draygo!"

"Yes, sergeant?"

"Fetch me a chair."

He doubled-timed off, returned with a chair and put it down next to Gutierrez.

"Sit."

Draygo sat. Gutierrez produced a small device, switched it on and it started to beep. He passed it over Draygo's head. He shook it and then systematically, on a grid pattern, passed it an inch from Draygo's skull. It carried on beeping. He widened the beam and turned up the gain, and again slowly passed it over Draygo's head and neck. It carried on beeping.

"Go."

Draygo got up and walked off.

"Get over here, Wagura."

Draygo was halfway to the door when an ear-splitting electronic whistle turned him around. Sergeant Gutierrez, eyes narrowed, was staring at him. He switched off the device and returned it to his pocket.

Draygo found the medic, showed him his empty pill bottle and was directed to a window down the corridor with the word 'Exchange' above it. He showed the guy behind the counter the bottle.

"Sure, we got _crates_ of the stuff. Bottle of a fifty'll cost you a hundred bucks."

"A hundred bucks!?"

"Go find another store, you don't like the price."

"I've no cash on me."

"You got an account with a thousand bucks in as a grubstake. Whatever you use gets deducted automatically."

"Like what?"

"Electric, food, water, air, bullets. Whatever you use."

"Air?"

"You know, the stuff you breathe. You want air, don't you?"

Draygo took two bottles, pocketed them and left.

Later, as he was helping re-arm the external guns, Draygo turned to the guy next to him and said, "I found something interesting earlier."

The guy sighed and held his hands apart. "Doohickey about yey big, looks like a metal flowerpot with inch-thick walls and no base? Got some sort of handles on the side?"

"Yeah."

"We got a dozen and haven't been able to figure them out. They got no moving parts but we think they're some sort of engine for liquefying the planet surface. They make tools, furniture, jewelry from it, things like that. But unless you can tell me how to use it, it's just another useless piece of roach junk."

While Draygo pounded away at an exercise bike and listened on headphones to Army Regulations, everyone else lounged and puffed on either a High Life or a Land-O-Smiles as the screens oozed an ever changing kaleidoscope of gentle sounds and soothing shapes and colors.

Red strode into the hall and as usual his coveralls were pressed, his face was freshly shaved and his hair was neatly combed. He was the only one who maintained a soldierly appearance. The rest were slobs in comparison.

He grabbed the remote and changed to Army Rolling News. There were groans and half-hearted shouts from the daydreamers. Some left, others put in earplugs. He seated himself and leaned forward, elbows resting on knees, hands meshed together. Draygo took his headphones off to listen but kept pounding away.

The guy reading the news was wearing starched and pressed fatigues and looked fresh from the salon. The ticker tape running along the bottom flickered black to red and back again with the constantly changing figure as he went on about promotions, unit citations, reassignments and the like. A story about the successful test of a new type of all-weather boot sent the tape black for a while, and the guy became even tenser until news of the untimely death of a prominent general sent it red again and he visibly relaxed.

The guy was transfixed. He reminded Draygo of a gambler he'd known as he watched his last-chance horse moving up the field with a half furlong to go.

Draygo dismounted, picked his way to the door and was stopped in the doorway by a fanfare followed by up-beat martial music. He turned back to the screen and saw the tape stay black as the number plummeted. There was a sound he couldn't place. A low rumbling growl.

_Good news from_ —He closed the door behind him, and had stopped to light a cigarette when the terrible scream of a large animal dying in excruciating pain came from the hall. It was followed by yells and yelps and what sounded like chairs being broken.

Red burst through the door and swung at Draygo. He blocked and countered and found himself on his back with a knee in his chest and hands around his throat. He snarled in Draygo's face for a moment and then let go of him and stalked off.

After chow, Draygo hunted up one of his less standoffish comrades-in-arms and asked him what it was all about.

"We'd've told you soon enough but I guess this forces the issue some. You know what it's like when they come around the camps, chests full of medals, looking strong and healthy and well fed, showing their movies, making their promises. You want to believe it. A chance. My wife and kids believed it, anyway. Hell, I wasn't doing them any good. This way they get the extra rations of a service family, at least. But you're going to find out it's _total bullshit_. You _can't_ win. He was told. Couldn't, wouldn't believe it. Knew better."

"I'm not meant to be here. I was bound for Ganymede on a top priority mission."

"They brainwashed you, son. You got delusions, what, you're going to save the planet?"

"The human race."

"They just fucked up programming you is all. Happens sometimes. Anyhow, he just lost big-time, same as all of us. The market crashed when the 504th took that necropolis on Bezlar 4. It's his first time is all. He had visions, no-doubt, of turning up on Mars a hero, taking his girl up in his arms. He'll soon realize, and so will you, that no matter how many ladders you climb there'll always be that chute you don't know about waiting for you around the corner, especially when you're reaching out to grab the prize."

"This isn't my life."

"Look around you, son. You're a soldier, you're on Aggie and you're not going anywhere."

"But—"

"Close your eyes."

"Why?"

"I'm going to try and help you remember."

Draygo closed his eyes.

"You need to anchor yourself to a fixed point, something you can use as a solid foundation to build yourself back up. Think about your girl. That 'someone' every guy carries a picture of whether he knows it or not. Fix her in your mind's eye. Hold on to her."

Pio came into his mind. Strong, funny, clever, beautiful Pio. "I see this girl from a case I'm working on."

"You think you're a cop?"

"Shamus."

"No sweetheart?"

He pictured his girlfriend and then Valerie. "No one special at the moment."

"The shamus thing'll be part of the delusion. That girl though. Keep hold of her."

### 16

Draygo was in the radio room again, listening to the radio operator's stories and feeding him cigarettes, when Sergeant Gutierrez pushed past and said, "Put him on the speaker."

"Yes, sergeant."

"Okay, Perkins, what's all the excitement about?"

"Get over here ASAP. We hit the mother-fucking mother lode. There must be two, three thousand of the fuckers."

Draygo reached a shaking hand for his pills.

"What's the situation?"

"There's a fat column. Looks like they got all their worldly goods with 'em, either on their backs or on carts. They're sitting ducks. There's no big ones but there's a _fuck_ of a lot of 'em."

"Good work, Perkins."

Static hissed.

"Perkins, respond."

Static hissed.

"Your transponder's malfunctioning. What's your location?"

"There must be two, three thousand of the fuckers."

"What's your location?"

"They're sitting ducks."

"Drop yellow smoke. Drop yellow smoke."

"Get over here ASAP."

"Can you drop yellow smoke? Confirm."

"Get over here ASAP."

They looked at each other. "Their radio must be on the fritz."

"Yeah."

They set course for their last known location, and after thirty minutes at top speed spotted a plume of black smoke on the horizon. Draygo turned to Sergeant Gutierrez and said, "I guess they only had black left."

"They don't carry black."

They pulled up to the burning carcass of the bird and piled out.

"Fuck!"

"Poor bastards."

"There's two blood trails!"

Searching for the injured men they groped their way through the pall of smoke, and, as it thinned on the far side, two giant X's loomed up. "What the fuck?"

They drew nearer and saw they had survived the crash only to be flayed and crucified. "Perkins is still alive!"

The less squeamish went up to him, gave him water and heard his croaked final words.

"Power died...Dropped like...On us...Too many...That way."

His head fell straight back as he died. They looked and saw a trail of discarded belongings disappearing into the distance.

Gutierrez raised the lieutenant on the radio, filled him in and then listened as he raged. "Those murdering fuckers aren't going to slip through the net this time! Break out the realguns. Send out all the jeeps. I want five men in each. I want a point-two pincer—"

"Regs say minimum of point-five, sir."

"Fuck regs, sergeant. Those are your buddies they've just butchered. Point-five and those animals will be gone over-the-hills-and-far-away."

"No hills down here on Aggie, sir."

"Point-two, sergeant. Now!"

"Yes, sir."

Twenty minutes later, tearing across the plain, they sighted the roach column and radioed the news back to Sergeant Gutierrez following behind in the fort.

"You're gonna miss one helluva turkey shoot, sergeant."

"Hold your fire."

"Sergeant?"

"Hold them til we get there."

"Yes, sergeant."

In two minutes the jeeps caught up with the column, and one overtook and cut them off, one took up position on either flank and one came in behind them.

Drivers and gunners stayed with their vehicles and the twelve passengers jumped down, fanned out and encircled, a hundred feet off, the now-halted roaches. Grinning, they cocked weapons and fingered triggers, and the huddled mass pressed still closer together.

"How many you reckon?"

"Three, four hundred max."

"Perkins always was full of shit."

As they waited they became aware of a low hum. It was as much a feeling as it was a sound, being almost infrasonic.

"You hear that?"

"I _think_ so."

"What is it?"

"Fuck knows."

"Hey! What's that!?"

Around the roaches the surface seemed to quiver and ripple for a moment and then started to sag as if no longer able to support their combined weight. It looked as if they were standing on a giant trampoline rather than solid ground. It sagged so far and no farther and the roaches started to shrink. Within seconds only the top half of their bodies were left as, seemingly completely unfazed, they dissolved into the ground. The last heads disappeared and the surface sprang back as if nothing had happened.

Frozen in disbelief, they had fired not one shot.

"They're getting away!"

"They _got_ away."

"Fuck!"

The men stared uncomprehendingly at each other and at the now-empty space between them. They hadn't moved five minutes later when the fort pulled up and Sergeant Gutierrez shouted down from the battlements, "Where the hell are they!?"

"They...they..."

"That noise again."

"Speak up, soldier!"

"Yeah..."

"What's going on down there?"

"Look!"

In every direction the surface was rippling and quivering. Then, in an instant, a double circle of giant white warrior-roaches, a ghost army, sprang up around the fort, the jeeps and the men. Those in the front rank whipped out an arm and jeep-mounted heavy-cals and fort guns were cut to pieces. They dropped to the floor and those behind whipped out _their_ arms and the fort became a sieve.

Inside, the main lights died and emergency lighting kicked in.

"Chief!?"

"Power transmission's shot. I think I can jury-rig it though."

"Can we move?"

"No."

"Fix it!"

The front rank, having drawn their short leaf-shaped swords, leaped up and charged the stranded soldiers. The men unfroze, and unloaded their magazines into the roaches bearing down on them. They juddered back for a moment and then came on again.

A sword scythed down and sliced off one guy's ear and cheek and buried itself ten inches deep in his shoulder. Another sword was thrust fully up to the guard into another guy's belly. The blade stuck a foot out his back.

Soldiers dealt with, they turned their attention to the fort, and as they hacked at the hangar door another wave sprang up.

Gutierrez yelled, "Chief! We need power _now!_ " as he hit the flamethrowers and got nothing but a dull click in response. Red grabbed a grenade launcher and ran.

In the hangar he found roaches swarming through the open doorway and pumped and fired, pumped and fired, and then slammed the flame-button just inside the door. Liquid fire jetted out all around the base of the fort and incinerated everything in a fifty-yard radius.

The reinforcements kept out of flame-range and peppered the fort. Inside, projectiles smashed flesh and bone on their way through. In the hangar, Red got the door shut and unleashed more flame each time a group or roaches approached.

Gutierrez raised the lieutenant.

"Permission to nuke, sir."

"Denied, sergeant! Do you have any idea how much dough is crawling around out there!? Anyway, my readouts are telling me your integrity's compromised."

"There's more and more of them all the time and the flame-tanks are all but empty!"

"Sergeant!"

"What is it, Magnuson?"

"Look!"

The surface around them in all directions was shivering, rippling.

Emergency lighting cut out and the main lights flickered back to life.

"Full astern! Now!"

They made it a hundred yards before lurching to a crunching halt as one side suddenly sank and the other reared up.

"Give lift everything, then slam it all full astern!"

"That'll rip the heart out of her!"

" _Now!_ "

The fort groaned and creaked as it rose, and then, bumping and scraping over the lip, shot backward. They got a half mile, pursued all the way, before the patched up transmission tore itself apart.

The roaches were nearly on them as Gutierrez whirled the dial to zero and slammed the button. The nuke shot straight up from the fort and detonated fifty yards above it.

Five guys died and one lost an arm when the room was filled for a moment with a fiery lattice as beams of flaming radioactive dust flashed through. The shockwave fell on them like a mountain.

When the dust settled, outside, all was still.

"What the fuck just happened?"

"We got ambushed with slings and swords and got royally fucked."

"Analysis?"

"Well they can't walk through walls or they'd've just walked straight in here. So it was the ground that was different, not them. We knew they could manipulate the crust, we just didn't guess the full extent. The way I figure it, our nuke fixed the surface. They can liquefy it, but we can set it."

"How long you think we got before they're back?"

"I'll have to do some calculations. It'll just be back-of-the-envelope stuff."

Gutierrez looked around at the hundreds of shafts of sunlight criss-crossing the hall. "Go below first and see if you can help speed things up. I'd rather not let off another nuke if I don't have to."

Night fell and bodies and parts of bodies were piled up in a storeroom. The screams of a guy in sickbay with his guts gone echoed through the fort til someone gave him too much morphine. Flares created an island of light, a dome of impenetrable blackness, as men on the battlements scanned for ripples, listened for sounds.

"How are things going down there?"

"Slowly."

"How long we got?"

"Well, you have to understand, we don't know the type or strength of energy their device produces, we have no analysis of the surface, we have dust samples but they tell us nothing about the structure, we don't know the depth of the crust, and we have no way of calculating the effect the nuke had on it."

"So what are you telling me?"

"Maybe an hour, maybe a week."

"Go back and help the chief, and tell him we don't need to be able to move _fast_ , we just need to be able to move."

Three hours later the fort limped off, and in the wreckage of the main hall the survivors huddled together to lick their wounds.

"Well now we know why we never get what we expect to out of a ville."

"Those fucking animals use their young and old and women to bait their trap."

"For all we know they got whole cities down there, a whole civilization. We could be sitting on top of a fucking goldmine, an egg with a golden center just waiting to be cracked open. Course, we'd have to feed it into the market real subtle like."

Draygo choked down three pills.

"And just how exactly do you propose to achieve this here cracking open you're talking about? A nuke don't dent it. Hell, it don't even _mark_ it."

"They can't _live_ down there, you asshole, or we'd never see a damn one."

"Maybe the ones we see are escaping overcrowding _so_ bad it's worth taking the risk of running into _us_."

Draygo turned to Red. "You really pulled our balls out of the fire. You're a fucking hero, man."

Red just stared into space.

Floating a thousand miles above them the lieutenant scrutinized telemetry readouts as, in the radio room, Gutierrez waited in silence.

"Jesus, this is one fucked up mess. The fort's a write off. You're getting sloppy, sergeant, losing your edge."

"Yes, sir."

"I can get you a dust off in nine days. That's the best I can do. You'll just have to hold on til then."

"Yes, sir."

"You're okay so long as you keep moving and so long as you don't let yourselves get lured into any more traps."

"And how do we avoid traps then, sir?"

"If it seems too good to be true, it probably is."

"Thanks for the tip."

"Good luck, sergeant."

"Thank you, sir."

Gutierrez broke the connection, returned to the hall and relayed the conversation to the men.

"Jesus, sarge! Is that all the help we're gonna get? Crummy one-liners."

"You got to remember the lieutenant had a previous career on Madison Avenue and will be back at his desk, pushing some-shit-or-other, when his tour ends in six months time."

### 17

Red and Draygo were part of a busywork repair-crew sitting around the rim of a shaft that led from the roof to the bowels of the fort. At the bottom of the shaft, enormous meshed gears whirled.

Draygo watched him as, without looking, he disconnected his safety line. "Hey!" Dead eyed, he looked at Draygo and grunted, then simply shifted his weight forward and let himself fall. The machinery ground him up in an instant and sent a fountain of blood and matter a third of the way up the shaft.

"But he was a hero."

"Guess he figured it out."

"What?"

"There only ever _was_ one way he was going to get out the Army. It dawns on everyone sooner or later. Some can't take it is all. I don't know, maybe they're the strong ones."

Gutierrez pressed 'eject' and the cartridge popped out. He placed it on the desk, took a pen and wrote on it: _Draygo, G. Tape 5_ , and then dropped it into a pocket and went to the radio room.

"That's my best man gone and I know in my bones the new guy was in back of it somewhere. The little creep is bad for morale. He's spreading dissent and defeatism. The guy is unserviceable. If we're going to rebuild this crew he's _got_ to go."

"Okay, sergeant. You're on the ground. I have to defer to your judgment. If that's your call, I'll note it in the log. Wipe him and pipe him."

Back in his civvies, still comatose from the crude electrochemical memory-erasure, he was packed into a pod and blasted into space.

He slept dreamlessly and then the beam on Ganymede was guiding him into an underground hangar and he was groggily emerging from the pod.

### 18

"You're late."

She placed a third origami crane on the sill of the viewing window set into the door, pressed the call button on the intercom, and a silver face appeared.

"Hey, Dennis."

"Hey, Miss Hayes."

"He's here. Can we get on with this now?"

"Sure thing, Miss Hayes. Just give me a minute."

Dennis disappeared and presently the door swung open and the girl and Draygo stepped through into a large chamber. Whoever she was, she was untranzed. But that was probably because, with her strawberry-blonde hair, milky skin and soft black jumpsuit, she couldn't have been more stunning than she already was.

Still behind glass, Dennis waved to them from a control booth set high up in the far wall and his amplified voice bounced around the room. "Okay, first thing, you both need to strip off and put your clothes, shoes, jewelry and all in the chute there on your left. Don't worry. You'll get everything back when you leave. Anything you need with you goes in one of those little silver bags. Next, see the goggles and nose plugs behind you? Make sure they're good and tight. That's perfect. Okay, I'm going to start the first cycle now. Move to the center. Little to your right. Perfect. Now raise your arms above your head, hands back-to-back, a foot apart. That's right."

Spindly robot-arms descended from the ceiling.

"Take a deep breath and hold it."

They breathed in.

"You ready?"

They both nodded.

Nozzles at the ends of the arms sprayed a fine mist as they worked around their bodies and in thirty seconds they were silver from head to toe. "Okay, don't move, but you can breathe again."

He started the second cycle and intense lights in the ceiling and floor strobed for ten seconds. "Okay, you can take the goggles off now. Make your way over to the door below me. You'll find clothes in there."

As they were getting into the skin-tight silver coveralls the girl said, "I'm here to assist you in any way I can."

"Who are you?"

"I was told you'd be expecting me. Arthur sent me."

"Arthur?"

"Arthur Koenig."

"The G-man?"

She nodded.

"Why should I trust you?"

"Why shouldn't you? My oath as a certified shrink supersedes all others. If that's not good enough, maybe this'll convince you."

She held out a three-inch-wide, quarter-inch-thick plastic disk. He took it, put it in a pocket and zipped it up

"So what's your plan?"

"I need to understand what goes on here."

"Sounds like a solid place to start."

They turned as Denis entered the room and said, "Goggles on first and then the hood. You get a better seal. That's right, sir. Let me just get that for you. Perfect."

"Thanks."

"You stay like this _at all times_. You never, _never_ , unsuit in an unshielded area. That's rule number one around here."

"Where's shielded?"

"This induction area, your quarters, a couple of other places. Basically anywhere that patch on your sleeve is green not red. "

"Shielded against what?"

"Radiation."

"Why don't you shield the whole place?"

"Can't be done. Okay, follow me and I'll show you to your quarters."

They followed him down a maze of white corridors. Up lights, down lights and side lights dazzled even through the mirrored goggles. Everything was spick and span. _Too_ spick and _too_ span for anywhere Tranzers lived.

"You've been assigned this one, miss. Yours is identical, sir, so I'll just run through things once for the both of you, if that's okay."

Dennis showed them the en suite, the cot, and the closet with a dozen sets of identical coveralls. "These things are disposable. Just put them in the chute over there when you're done with them. I have to get back to work now but someone will be around shortly to give you the grand tour. Mr Draygo. Follow me, sir. "

Draygo was still poking around his room when the door opened on another efficient-looking young man. "Hello sir, I'm Larry. If you'll follow me."

They picked up the girl and started the tour. "On your left is the infirmary. That's hydroponics."

"You keep the place very clean."

"Sir?"

"How many of you are out of the shell?"

"No Tranzers permitted here, sir"

"You're _all_ out of the shell?"

"What, you aren't?"

"I...I don't know. Is that going to be a problem?"

"The director will have to adjudicate. Over there are the laboratories. Here we have the administration area."

The whole thing took no more than twenty minutes.

"You were expecting something bigger?" He smiled. "Nobody can believe how compact the facility here is. The only place left to see is the control room. I'll take you there now and present you to the director."

The director turned from the main screen as they entered, and strode through the rows of technicians at their terminals to greet them.

"How are you doing, Mr Draygo?"

"Fine thanks. Pleased to meet you."

"You don't remember me, do you."

"I'm told I was here before."

"Very much so, Mr Draygo, very much so."

"Mr director, sir. I have to report the visitor is Tranzed."

"Mr Draygo is a special case. How long've you been with us?"

He stood even more erect. "Almost two years, sir."

"Mr Georg Draygo is an honored guest."

"Very good, sir."

He saluted and left.

"How much have you been told?"

"About your visit?"

"Yes."

"Other than the fact you'd be arriving, absolutely nothing."

He unzipped his pocket and pulled out the plastic disc. The director glanced at it. "I see. Well, of course, my little kingdom is at your complete disposal."

"I'm going to need to interview all relevant personnel individually."

"We have a meeting room you can use."

"And speak to you in detail."

"Of course. You've been shown around?"

"Yes, very impressive."

"How nice of you to say so, but I'm well aware of the underwhelming initial impression we make on visitors. You've seen nothing yet. The young lady can organize the interviews while we take a little walk and I show you what makes this place so special.

As they passed down more brightly lit corridors, Draygo said, "What's with the lighting?"

"We try to minimize shadows. People see things in shadows."

"Right."

"The lighting wasn't to your taste last time you were here either."

"It wasn't?"

The director shook his head and smiled.

"So I know you control the Tranz process from here and have weapons labs. What else do you do?"

"Primarily we're a scientific research station. You mentioned weapons. Can I take it that's the reason for your visit? You need say nothing. It's no secret. They've made their feelings abundantly clear: We're not delivering the goods."

"I'm sure they mean to imply no criticism."

"Your tact does you credit, but I don't take it personally. I'm a scientist not a weaponologist. If they want to replace me, give management of this facility to someone else, if they can find someone who understands its workings better than I, good luck to them."

They entered a large elevator with bucket-type seats around the walls.

"Strap yourself in. This is the longest fastest elevator in the known universe but it's still going to take a quarter hour to get where we're going, even though we'll reach speeds in excess of Mach ten."

The ride was soundless and without sense of motion. After five minutes Draygo turned to the director and said, "I understand Tranz is a projecting, not a moving process."

"That's correct. It's a widely held superstition among the masses that we're in the business of transporting minds, or possibly souls, around the place. Ridiculous!"

The director spent the rest of the journey putting forward at length and in detail his opinion that men of pure science were hamstrung at every turn by credulous idiots. Draygo listened politely.

The elevator opened onto a narrow chamber with a heavy door at the far end. Hung down the side walls were protective suits. They suited up and the director pressed his ID to the lock, the door swung open and they stepped through onto a ten-foot wide gantry running around the equator of a huge spherical silver-lined cavern.

He led the way to a six-by-four balcony jutting from the gantry and leaned on the rail.

"What do you see?"

Draygo followed his gaze. "The mouth of a tunnel."

A technician in a golf cart pulled up and the director said, "Let's take a ride. And keep your eyes on that tunnel."

As they rode they got no closer. The tunnel seemed to move as they moved, remained opposite them.

When they arrived back, the balcony was occupied by a technician checking the contents of a cart of electronic equipment. He stood to attention as the director again led the way to the rail and said, "Now what do you see?"

"A ball."

"Yes."

"At the center of the cavern."

"Yes."

"Unconnected to its surroundings, floating."

"Very good, Mr Draygo. _That_ is the core, the heart, of Ganymede."

The director pressed a button on the rail, and the balcony started to extend, became a catwalk reaching out to the ball.

As they got closer there was still nothing about it to say it was three-dimensional. He knew it intellectually but his eyes, his brain, still told him it was a disk.

They stopped a hundred feet short.

"This is as close as we can safely get."

"What is it?"

"We don't know. We _do_ know it has a phenomenal amount of energy. At its extremes, beyond our capacity to measure. It's held in equilibrium, permanently teetering."

"Permanently?"

"Permanently so far."

"It's...fascinating."

"It does have a certain mesmeric beauty, doesn't it."

"But you're afraid of it."

"We've harnessed it but I couldn't say we've controlled or even understood it. It's a sensible precaution to be afraid of what you don't understand, to treat it with a healthy respect."

He turned to the technician. "Hand me that PKD meter, will you."

He switched the device on, checked levels and held it up to the sphere. "Look at that."

Draygo peered at the screen, at the wildly fluctuating patterns of light and shade.

"What does it mean?"

"It's off the scale. The range of energy flux is unprecedented in the known _or_ theorized universe. We've built experimental substations, working models of the Tranz computer/projector, in other places, but Ganymede is the only place they work. And what you're looking at is the reason why. We use it as a projection device but we don't know if that's its only or even its primary function. I think I _can_ safely say we're not using it to its full potential."

"Where did it come from?"

"We don't know if it's a natural phenomenon or if it was created by some long-dead civilization. Whatever its origins, whatever its capabilities, we know enough about it to be wary. Before we excavated and lined the cavern around it things happened."

"Things?"

"Strange unwholesome things appeared and people disappeared or died in horrible horrible ways."

### 19

Topside again, the director returned to the control room and Draygo went and found the girl. She handed him a clipboard and said, "This is everyone connected with weapons research. They're ready when you are."

He installed himself in the meeting room and one after another they all said the same thing: The weapons just appeared. They carried on with their own projects, tinkered, developed and refined, but the good stuff just appeared overnight. Cameras in the labs showed nothing, or rather in one frame there was nothing there, and in the next whatever-it-was was just sitting there as if it always had been. They all seemed perfectly candid in their answers to his questions but they were awkward, ill at ease, as if concealing something, holding something back.

In the cafeteria the girl came over, put down her tray and sat next to him.

"I mentioned to the director what you said about them being funny with you."

"Yeah?"

"He said something that pretty much explained it."

"What?"

"I think he'd better tell you himself. I don't want to get any of the details wrong."

He found the director and they went to his office. "Take a seat, Mr Draygo."

They sat and the director produced a bottle of scotch from his desk. "Drink?"

"Why not."

He poured two glasses and handed one to Draygo.

"You made quite an impression last time you were here, but their respect is mixed with repulsion. We had everything ready to go when you turned up. We had on ice a roach pod and its passenger we'd picked up disabled and floating in space, and we had a rather beautiful object, an iridescent blue-green globe slightly smaller than a tennis ball, which an engineer had found one morning on his workbench. We believe it was a scrambler, based on its effect, that is."

Not liking the way the story was headed, Draygo took out his pills and washed two down with the scotch.

"We hooked you both up and attempted to wipe the roach's mind and copy yours in its place. What we ended up with, well, we didn't know. Your body seemed to contain nothing. Autonomic functions were unaffected but...Let's just say the lights were on but nobody was home. The roach body was awake and aware. It was extremely agitated but not belligerent.

We made the only assumption we could that would allow the project to continue. We assumed a copy of your mind was now in the roach, and your real mind no longer existed."

Draygo took two more pills and drained his glass.

"Once you were in the roach you weren't shielded from the radiation. You were also photophobic. You scuttled about all day looking for a shadow to hide in. It was most disconcerting. Imagine turning a corner to find an enormous roach hanging from the ceiling.

"We'd been unable to establish communication with you and had just decided we were going to have to terminate the project, when you just disappeared. The pod was still in the dock but the weapon was gone and you weren't anywhere on the facility."

"I'm guessing I consented to all this."

"Consented? It was _your_ plan."

"So how did my plan pan out?"

"Their radio traffic dropped sharply, dwindled and then petered out altogether. You fatally disrupted their command and control structures. They're isolated, can't communicate or organize. It was a great triumph. Three months later, every time anyone picked up a telephone, turned on a radio or TV, there you were, screaming for help."

### 20

That night in bed he dreamed he was in a rainforest. A winding track led to a small circular pool whose sheer sides dropped six feet to its opaque surface. In the middle an exhausted Pio trod water. She saw him, smiled and, as she reached out to him, sank under the surface and disappeared.

He woke with a jolt, pushed aside his bedding, got up and got dressed. He wandered aimlessly around the deserted corridors and found himself facing an elevator door. He entered, strapped himself in and pressed the button. Fifteen minutes later he was passing between the racks of suits and approaching the inner door.

He stood in front of the scanner. _Draygo, G. Access granted_. The door swung back and he stepped onto the gantry. Skin prickling, he rode the catwalk to within twenty feet of the ball and stood staring into it. He reached out and his hand passing through the surface sent out gentle ripples. He walked forward and was swallowed whole.

He found himself in a room. Against the left-hand wall was a row of chairs, against the right, a large fish-tank, opposite him was a door. On the wall next to the door was a poster showing a cartoon light-bulb. The legend beneath the image read: _The difference between a laser and a light bulb is focus_. A large wall-clock said ten of six.

He tried the door. It wouldn't open. He went around the whole room feeling the walls and found them all solid. He dragged a chair over to the fish tank and sat and peered into it. He turned to the clock. Ten of six.

He watched it. The second hand was moving but the minute hand was not. He went to the door and tried it again. It wouldn't open. He stood back and shoulder-charged it and fell into blackness and found himself thrashing around as he tried to untangle himself from insubstantial threads hanging all around him. He stopped, panting.

A narrow vertical strip of light appeared in front of him, the tip of a gun nosed out of it and a voice said, "Out!" He stepped forward and found himself in the girl's quarters. She lowered her gun. "What the fuck?"

He looked at the closet and then back to the girl. "You wouldn't believe me."

"Try me."

"No. Goodnight."

The next morning over breakfast, he said, "I'm leaving. We're not going to find out anything here."

### 21

Back on Earth, he was escorted to a small barely-furnished windowless room and found Koenig and Cooper waiting for him.

"Well?"

"The ball. It's the heart, the engine. Anything connected with Ganymede, that's in back of it."

"This is _not_ a revelation, Mr Draygo. You discovered nothing else?"

"No."

"It seems we've overestimated your abilities. Your usefulness appears to be at an end. You can go."

"That's it? Just like that?"

Koenig nodded.

"The footage?"

"I'll have it sent over."

"And those...those other things that were mentioned?"

"Don't push it, shamus."

Draygo turned to leave.

"Mr Draygo."

He turned and saw Koenig's hand held out. He reached in his pocket and handed over the plastic disk.

The stench from his apartment reached him even before he opened the door. _In the nest, the two stronger siblings gang up on the weaker_. Even after he'd located the source—a bag of rotten meat and vegetables he'd bought not thinking how he was going to cook without a kitchen—and dumped it down the waste chute in the corridor, it still hung in the stagnant air. He set the floor fans going and looked around. Filth, a stink and fatso Lance asleep in his basket: Some welcome home.

He opened the medicine cabinet, took down the jar of bennies and made to unscrew the cap but stopped himself, held the jar up and stared at the pills through the glass. He placed the jar back on the shelf and closed the cabinet door. _Without enough food to go around, one must die or all will._

He sat down and dialed Shellcorp.

"Mr Draygo, there's been a hitch."

"A hitch?"

"Nothing major, but it's going to mean a slight delay."

"How slight?"

"No more than a week at the absolute outside, sir."

"Okay."

"There really is nothing we can do about it."

"I said okay. Call me when it's ready."

"Sir?"

"What?"

"I'd like to...I'd like to express my sympathy. For the position you've been put in."

Draygo grunted and put down the phone.

There was a knock at the door. He opened it and saw the building super standing there.

"Mr Draygo, may I come in?"

"I'm busy."

"Of course, of course."

"What do you want?"

"I must say, I was a tad surprised to see you. You hadn't been around and I assumed you were 'vacationing' somewhere."

"I was. Now I'm back. What do you want?"

"It's rather a delicate matter. Wouldn't you rather talk inside?"

"No."

"Though I'm loath to draw attention to a situation such as this, I do have a duty to see standards are maintained."

"Spit it out."

"May I enquire how long...how long you intend to remain indisposed?"

Draygo yelled, "As long as I damn well please," as he slammed the door in his face.

"That's not good enough, Draygo. This is a respectable building," he hissed through the mail slot.

Draygo yanked the door open and said, "Go!"

The guy smiled a nasty smile and said, "You haven't heard the last of this, Draygo."

When he had left, Draygo removed the false panel concealing the VCR, ejected the cassette, went to the living room and inserted it in the VCR connected to the TV. He mixed himself a drink, went to the couch, lit a cigarette and picked up the remote.

He saw himself on the phone. He saw Lance running about. He saw himself on the phone. Lance walked past. He saw himself ransacking the apartment. He saw Lance scratching at the door. He saw himself systematically search the whole apartment for something he couldn't remember looking for. He saw Lance asleep on the doormat. He saw Lance go to his bed and curl up. He saw himself enter the apartment, make a call and then go to the VCR connected to the motion-detector initiated CCTV he'd had installed after the visit of the mystery postman.

A wave of suffocating claustrophobia overcame him and he stopped the tape, stood up, picked up his car keys and left.

He drove over to Valerie's and was just about to get out of the car when he noticed a guy ringing her bell. The door opened and a grinning Valerie threw her arms about his neck and kissed him passionately on the mouth. She took his hand and led him inside. The door closed. Draygo sat staring at it for a moment and then started the car and pulled away from the curb.

In McClusky's he went to the bar.

"Forget something?"

"Not that I know of. Give me a drink."

The barman poured a soda and placed it in front of him.

"What's this?"

"You've had enough for one day, pal."

"Yeah, I guess I have."

He downed the soda and left.

He drove out to Blossom Heights, parked up and watched the bar across the street. After a few minutes the door swung open momentarily as a patron left, and loud music and raucous laughter spilled into the street. He stared at the door, imagining the vague shapes moving about in the shadowy depths behind it, and then started the car and drove away.

Cruising, he saw a place looked more his style and pulled up outside. Appraising glances were cast his way as he entered and made his way to the bar.

"Brandy. Large."

The guy put a grimy glass half-full of a syrupy brown liquid in front of him and he sat on a stool and surveyed the room: The huge TV blared, and the sun glaring through the too-big windows turned the place into an oven, lit up the dust in the air and mercilessly exposed the dust covering every surface, the debris and general filth everywhere.

The clientele seemed to be a roughly even split between superannuated pool kids and those who'd bankrupted themselves running a shell but couldn't come to terms with the fact. They didn't mix and periodically shot disparaging looks at each other.

The barman returned and dropped a small shallow bowl divided into three sections on the bar next to him. The low walls separated green, red and yellow pills. He picked one up. It was irregularly shaped as if made by a human rather than a machine. He put it in his mouth and found it was pleb food done up to look like a pill.

He turned back to the room and watched a guy put his glass to his mouth, reflexively flinch as he noticed a large piece of dried-on crud on the lip, instantly smother his revulsion and then force himself to take a swig.

Draygo finished his drink and left.

He needed a vacation. A poster on the wall of a travel agent caught his eye and held it: Three smiling children, their smiling parents behind, posed in front of some historic building. He started to sweat and shiver and his guts cramped up but he couldn't tear himself away. He groped for his pills, swallowed three and was able to escape.

He got home and realized he was going to have to get the place fumigated. _It's just been confirmed that a collaborator death squad massacred more than three hundred in a cowardly sneak attack on a shoe farm last night_. He poured himself a drink, put it to his lips and noticed Lance was still asleep in his basket. He put the drink down.

"Come on, fatso. What say we go for a walk, see what those ducks are up to. Boy? Boy?"

He looked closely at the motionless animal for the first time. He wasn't just bloated. The skin showing through the hair had a greenish tinge, there was dried black froth around his open mouth and he had soiled himself. He also stank to high heaven. The chute in the corridor flashed into his mind and he suppressed it.

The square was its usual filthy sweaty self. The sidewalk was crowded but the freaks veered off, clearing a path for him. He stopped at a leather-goods store. In the window, handbags of different shapes, sizes and colors were posed to show them off to maximum advantage. The workmanship was careless or clumsy or both and they looked to be made of some cheap synthetic material. The discreet price-tag next to the smallest and plainest read nine hundred seventy dollars. At a restaurant he pretended to study the menu in the window but instead inspected the diners, the rows of freaks pecking at their pills and screeching at each other. The bladders swayed in the hot breeze and the sick-looking ducks floated listlessly on the oily scum.

At home he sat down and dialed the vet.

"My dog..."

"Yes?"

"He's dead."

"My deepest sympathies, Mr..."

"Draygo."

"My deepest sympathies, Mr Draygo."

"What do I do with him?"

"We can arrange things if you like."

"Okay."

"Someone will be with you within the hour."

"Thanks."

Thirty minutes later a guy in a white smock, a large, lidded wicker-basket in his hand, was standing in the hallway.

He called his ex.

"Yes?"

"It's me."

"Fuck off, you little shit."

Draygo redialed and this time got a busy signal.

He called his girlfriend and got her service.

"Miss Peters has instructed that you be told she does not wish you to contact her."

"What?"

"Miss Peters has instructed—"

"Why?"

"Miss Peters has instructed that you be told she has obtained a restraining order against you that prohibits _any_ form of contact."

### 22

Sitting at his desk the next morning, Molly brought him a coffee and the day's mail.

"Anything been happening while I was away?"

"You didn't leave any instructions so I've been getting them to fill out forms and passing them on to Mr Delgado like usual."

"That's fine."

"Oh, and my vacation starts Monday. I've arranged for my cousin Tina to cover. I've explained to her the way everything works."

"Fine."

"You okay, Mr Draygo?"

"I'm fine thanks, Molly."

"There's a guy due in at eleven. I can deal with him if you like."

"No, I'll see him."

When the man arrived, Molly had him fill out the paperwork and then brought it in to Draygo. She placed it in front of him and said, "Shall I bring him in?"

"Yeah, show him in."

She left, and returned a moment later accompanied by a stocky dark-haired guy. Draygo rose and held out his hand. "Good day, Mr—" He glanced down at the form on his desk. "Mr Ping."

"Good day to ya."

They shook hands and sat.

"That's a distinctive name."

"I got it from my pa."

"Naturally."

"I also got 'Philidor' and 'Xanadu', for which I'm eternally grateful to the cocksucker."

"How can I help you?"

"My kid brother Zavi was promoted to glory by this little whore-bitch he picked up. She tied him up, gagged him, shived him in the guts a bunch of times, watched him in agony for an hour and then went and found his own razor and slit his throat."

"Sounds like you were there."

"Zav liked to film himself. For posterity."

He dumped three tapes on the desk.

"Three?"

"Three cameras. Different angles."

"She look familiar at all?"

"Sure."

"You know who she is?"

"Certainly."

"Where she is?"

"Naturally."

"Then, if you don't mind me asking, what do you need me for?"

"Let's just say I'd value your second opinion on my deducements."

"My opinion will set you back five hundred bucks."

"Worth every penny."

They rose and shook hands. "I can see myself out."

Later, on the way out, he handed the guy's form to Molly and said, "I'm going for a drive. Can you send this to Mr Delgado."

"Of course, Mr Draygo."

He spent three hours tailing the shyster all over town before the fun of watching him going about his business oblivious to what was in store for him started to wear thin and he turned for home.

When he saw Pio boarding a bus she was wearing a red headscarf and a lightweight, three-quarter length, off-white coat. The hard u-turn he pulled gained him a torrent of abuse and a view of her back. He kept behind the bus for an hour before she got up, and as it stopped he pulled sharply to the curb and jumped out. She was twenty yards ahead of him and heading toward the metro. He broke into a trot, caught up with her and put his hand on her shoulder. "Pio!" She turned. It wasn't her. In fact the startled girl bore a passing resemblance only.

On the way home he counted seventeen girls in red headscarves and lightweight, three-quarter length, off-white coats. No doubt some TV star had been snapped in the same outfit yesterday.

He knew he'd seen what he wanted to see, but even though it was obvious his mind had played a trick on him he'd still have to check out the possibility he'd followed the wrong girl. He saw a bank of payphones and pulled over, made his way to the nearest unoccupied booth, inserted a coin and dialed.

"Delgado."

"Mike, I want you to start looking for a girl."

"I already found one."

"Oh?"

"The girl who killed Seymour Ping. She changed her name by court order from Daphne Stubbs to Daphne Fetherly."

"Fetherly?"

"Yeah."

"Great work, Mike. I saw this girl getting on a bus at—"

"Draygo."

"What?"

"I quit."

"What!?"

"I quit."

The line went dead.

He carefully replaced the handset, turned and walked back toward his car. A child single-mindedly pursuing a rubber ball ran past and into the street and Draygo just managed to yank it back in time from the path of a speeding truck. The frantic mother arrived panting and said, "My God, Siegfried! Your father would've killed me!"

He looked from the woman back to the grinning boy and saw thick black goo seeping from his eyes, his mouth and his ears. He stared. The woman held out a twenty and said, "If he'd had to shell out _again_ my husband would've gone absolutely berserk."

She waved the bill in his face. "Hey. Mister."

He carried on staring.

"Pervert," she hissed as she crumpled it and threw it at him. The goo vanished. The woman grabbed the child's arm and said, "Come on, Siegfried. You've made us late enough already."

He got home and found a package on the coffee table. He sat down and ripped it open. Turning the slab of black metal over in his hands he realized it was some sort of data storage block for a computer. That prick Koenig's idea of a joke. He drove to the apartment of a guy he knew and they watched it together.

"She's on her own."

"Seems to be."

"What's she doing? Having some kind of fit?"

Slashes began appearing in her dress, blood started to seep.

"No, she's reacting to someone."

"Where? Out of shot?"

"I don't think so."

"So who then? A ghost?"

"Someone's been erased."

"Erased!?"

"Where did you get this?"

"From a comedian I know."

"Whoever did this had access to some heavy shit. There's good news though. To save on data processing, these cameras only respond to change. It's what the brain does with the trillions of individual bits of information the eyes feed it."

"Fascinating."

"Because each pixel's time code resets every time it's altered I can follow the changes they've made. I can't bring back what was there originally but I _can_ make every pixel that's been altered white or red or—"

"Black?"

"Sure, whatever you want. Only, with these lighting conditions black won't—"

"Black will do fine."

"You're the boss. There's this guy I know, works in the labs over at T&T, been working on a new process. You can wait here if you like. Long as you don't drink _all_ my booze, that is."

He got himself a drink, lit a cigarette and sat back. Soon he'd have footage of Shitstain in the act. Concrete evidence. Okay, so no crime had been committed, but it meant the gloves could come off as far as squeezing him for details of whatever sordid scandal the Government was trying to cover up was concerned, the scandal he would use as a weapon to _destroy_ the Government.

The guy returned and put a tape in the player.

They saw the knife-wielding silhouette of a shit-faced staggering drunk. A second figure watched from the edge.

"She's not protecting herself."

"Wouldn't do much good."

"No, I suppose not."

The girl fell and the shadow straddled her and slashed a few times more. She lay motionless as he stood and stumbled and crashed against a dumpster and slid to the floor, an unmoving heap.

The watcher came over and hunkered down next to the girl for a few moments, and then stood up, went over to the man, looked down at him and turned and walked off.

Draygo was staring at the dumpster, when the tape ended.

"Is it any help?"

"The knife man...I don't know...There's something familiar about him but...I don't know."

He wasn't heavily built enough to be the Government. The prosperous looking middle-aged man? Possibly. But certainly someone acting on the Government's orders, someone he recognized but couldn't place.

"The other one though. I'd know that posture, that walk, anywhere. I've spent a lot of time watching that guy."

### 23

Sitting in the gloom, awaiting the shyster's return, Draygo fell asleep. The front door closing woke him and he silently positioned himself behind the half-open door that led from the entrance hall to the library, the door he would come through to switch off the radio in his office he must've left playing, the desk light he must've left burning.

He paused in the doorway, peered into the room and then entered. Draygo's sap laid him out cold and he woke gagged and trussed to a dining-room chair in the middle of his office. Opposite him, naked, unconscious, gagged, trussed to another dining-room chair, he saw his real body.

He heard movement behind him and then a pillow was pressing into his face. He fought for air, strained every muscle, but to no avail.

He woke with a sharp intake of breath and saw his lifeless shell opposite. A face appeared in front of him, and Draygo gave him a hard open-palm the instant recognition started to appear in his eyes.

"I have a little movie, Shitstain. There are three players. Two of them I know. I want the name of the third."

Shutstein bulged his eyes and Draygo cuffed him again.

"Look at me, Shitstain!"

He forced his eyes open a crack as he cowered from the expected blow. Draygo reached into his pocket and slowly pulled out a hard shiny lump, fitted it onto his right hand, flexed his fingers and made a fist. He pressed the cold metal against Shutstein's quivering cheek. "I'm going to remove the gag and you're going to give me a name."

He clamped his face with his right hand and pulled out the balled rag with his left. He started to babble and he gave him one in the gut. He vomited a thin bile, as much from fear as from the blow.

"I have footage of you in an alley, watching as a girl is carved up, walking away and letting her bleed to death. In my book you as good as did it yourself, but I'll overlook that. I'll let you live, you little piece of shit, _if_ you give me the who and the why of it. Why did the Government want her gone? Who did it for him?

Tears began to run down his cheeks halfway through and by the time Draygo had finished he was sobbing uncontrollably. He hit him too hard and had to go hunt up a pitcher of water to throw over him. "Wake up, shithead!"

Shutstein opened his eyes, looked up at Draygo and said, "The desk. Middle drawer."

Draygo swept papers onto the floor with his forearm, pulled out the drawer and emptied it onto the desk. He saw a typical selection of the debris that collects in office desks. There was nothing here for him. "What'd I do? Trip some alarm? I bypassed the main box. You should know better than to play games with me, scumbag."

He picked up the heavy wooden drawer and swung it back and forth as he approached the shaking shyster.

"Underneath."

Draygo looked. The solidly made wooden drawer was lined with pasteboard on the underside. He took out his pocket knife and picked at the edge of the board. It came away. Behind was a large envelope with the words 'Pio's letter' written on it. He shot Shutstein a questioning glance, went to the desk, seated himself and opened the envelope. Inside were several singed fragments of paper which had been glued to cloth backing to keep them from disintegrating further. He began to read.

Competition is a good thing. It doesn't just show who is best at something, it can get more out of people than they ever thought possible. It is an important part of the picture, but it is only a part of the picture. Historically, competition to reproduce determined the evolution of the species. Today, competition is a mechanism for ensuring that, regardless of ability, the children of the rich and powerful grow up to be the rich and powerful themselves.

If competition is to play its part it must be real competition, not just a smoke screen for a swindle, and winning a race will not confer the right to gorge yourself while those around you starve.

We have long dreamed of seeing the shells piled up like cordwood to decay behind a chain-link fence. The work to realize the dream had hit a road block. We had a fulcrum; we needed a lever.

We found one.

Draygo looked up. "They found a lever."

"It would seem...it would seem they believe so."

"You're one of them?"

He shook his head. "It's just my hobby. I collect different views of reality. I'm an ontologist. An amateur one anyway."

"You were blackmailing her."

"You never met her, did you."

"No."

Draygo read on.

Those unprepared when Tranz ends will be fragile, and will be cared for in the tranquil places readied for them. There will be no blood shed. Blood only begets blood. When it happens, it will be because it has already happened.

_There will be those who choose not to heed the call to do to others as you would have them do to you. They will be isolated on an island where they may live as red-in-tooth-and-claw as they please_.

"This is a swansong. She was going away, out of the way."

"Yes."

"This was written just before she was...just before she was..."

"Two days before."

"Who did it? Why?"

"I don't know."

" _You were there!_ "

" _I don't remember!_ "

Draygo pulled out his pocket knife and approached the wide-eyed shyster. He stood over him and let him contemplate the blade for a moment, and then cut the ropes, pocketed the knife and turned and left.

On the way home he pondered the implications of what he'd discovered. She found this lever she was looking for and it ended her life. It was a thread to follow: Find the lever, find the assassin. The Government still fit the bill just fine, but so did anyone wanting to protect the Tranz process. She'd been dealt with because she was a dangerous collaborator. Whoever'd done it no-doubt saw themselves as a hero. Hell, they _were_ a hero, had saved human civilization, but that wouldn't save _them_.

He touched down on the roof of his parking garage, gave the keys and a dollar to a liveried pleb and made his way to the elevator.

By the time he'd tracked down her apartment there was not one thing of hers left. Not one scrap of paper, not one item of clothing. It looked like it'd been spring cleaned by a crew of monomaniacs. They'd missed the bookcase but all the other walls were solid and there were no loose floorboards.

He crossed the square, entered his apartment building and called the elevator.

She could've had it on her, though, if she were on her way to pass the secret on to those who could, who _would_ use it. Maybe she was on her way to use it herself when she was...when she met her end.

He turned the key, opened the door and entered his apartment. _Deprived of the predators essential for survival, they become decadent and die out_.

Her shredded and blood-soaked dress and underwear had been incinerated, as had her shoes and hat. All that was left was her purse. He retrieved it from its hiding place, dumped the contents onto the coffee table and sifted through them. There wasn't much. The line 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' typed in the middle of a folded sheet of notepaper could've been a prearranged signal but to him it said nothing. There could be invisible writing, of course. He put it to one side.

The keys on the ring were to her apartment only. He emptied the powder from her compact and prized out the mirror. Nothing. He screwed the lipstick out fully, mushed it into the table, looked through it and then examined the casing. Nothing.

He snapped her sunglasses and hairbrush and found no hollows inside. A money clip held twenty-seven completely ordinary dollars. He tore apart the pack of cigarettes, cut open the individual tubes of tobacco, examined the paper and poked through the dust.

A book of matches told him nothing. He ripped out the purse lining and found nothing. He heated the letter and found no hidden writing. A thought struck him and he fetched his microscope. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog: One dotted 'i', one dotted 'j' and one period. He cut the dots out and Scotch Tape mounted each onto a slide. They weren't uniformly black, but were full of tiny white marks. He adjusted the focus. There was no message, no schematic or blueprint. A cryptograph? Maybe if they were overlaid. They'd have to be photo-transferred onto transparencies first. He found a small envelope, dropped the slides in, sealed it and put it in his breast pocket, and then fetched a wastebasket and swept the broken things on the coffee table into it.

He was on his way to have it out with Simonds when Shutstein's face on a pyramid of TVs in a store window pulled him over and dragged him in. _A shyster who collapsed and died today at a gala event attended by the Government was later found to have been unplugged_. Shutstein's face was replaced with Draygo's. _The peace are hunting Georg Draygo, a shamus who had become obsessed with the victim in connection with a case he was working on with no client, with no realistic possibility of being paid for his work. He is armed and should be considered extremely_ —

He left. They'd made him a pariah, a renegade to be hunted down and exterminated.

There was still his revolver at McClusky's.

He opened the door on a scene of chaos and destruction: Broken glass, broken and upturned furniture, and, by the look of it, spilled blood. Those picking up the pieces looked up as he entered. One shouted and pointed, another drew a pistol and took aim. Draygo ran.

The only other gun he could conceivably get access to belonged to a blowhard in his building who was always bragging about the arsenal being a Guardsman allowed him to keep. The overflow, he kept in the basement storage area. The locks on the units were pretty good. It would take him two, maybe three minutes to pick his way in.

He slipped into the basement and, making his way down the corridor between the units, noticed a door ajar up ahead on the left, right about where _his_ unit was. He stared at the smashed lock, and, stepping on a carpet of little Styrofoam balls, pulled open the door. Standing on its end, an empty eight-foot by three-foot by three-foot wooden crate sat in a sea of Styrofoam.

He turned over the lid leaning against the wall, saw his name and address as well as Shellcorp's logo stenciled on it and knew the dirty fucking bastards had his shell. By the time he remembered the guns he was pulling up outside the bookstore.

### 24

Simonds was in an armchair reading when Draygo stormed into the room and snarled, "You know what I've done? I've fucked myself trying to get justice for a fucking terrorist."

Simonds put down his book and said, "Sit down, Mr Draygo, and let me wise you up about a few things."

Draygo sat and Simonds poured them both a drink and began to talk.

"Pio and her like are a product of, a reaction to, a situation. We're in this situation because the sickness of a few meant they couldn't stop at equilibrium, couldn't stop til they had everything and everyone else had nothing, even though they knew it could lead only one place. With their eyes wide open they floored it and drove the world full-speed at a brick wall. It's not that they knew their wealth and power would insulate them from the smash-up, they knew it would make them _more_ wealthy, _more_ powerful."

Simonds took a long drag on his cigarette. "They built a machine for sucking wealth upward, they set it running and then they smashed the off switch. They said the magical engine they'd created would make _everyone_ rich, but as it chugged away, shrinking the pool as it concentrated wealth at the top, those at the ever contracting edge were left high and dry and gasping for air. Those who'd been bought off watched the noose tightening around their own necks but carried on paying homage to the machine lest they hasten their own demise, lest they find themselves an inmate rather than a guard, lest they lose the junk-paste baubles dangled in their faces."

He methodically crushed his cigarette into the ashtray. "The inevitable conflict was taking its time getting started. Those at the bottom of the pile have no illusions about the nature of the game—unlike those at the top and those they've seduced with glittering trinkets and lies, who adopt a view of the nature of the world that dresses up their self-interest as virtue and permits guilt-free exploitation of others, who believe what they need to believe to allow them to do what they want to do—but when revolt is suicidal, people think twice about it.

"And then they were given a nudge by a side effect of the scramble for loot: Take away the minimum requirements for life, take away water, food and shelter, give people a choice between a slow but certain death and a slim chance of survival, and they fight back.

"The place you live becomes uninhabitable, you move. The place you go was clinging on by its fingernails before you arrived and tipped it over into uninhabitability causing everyone to move on, and so on and so on. The snowball picks up momentum as it grows as it rolls on and is soon an avalanche."

Simonds lit a cigarette. "Those at the top didn't start the war—it just happened because of the situation they'd created—but they sure as hell finished it. Bombs and bullets, as well as thirst, starvation and disease, killed eight billion people. _Eight billion!_

"In their minds they did nothing wrong. After all, _they_ owned everything because they were the best, most valuable, most deserving people. The fact they owned everything _proved_ that. And anyway, the still habitable places everyone wanted to get to had been bought fairly and squarely. They were just defending what was theirs. Only, amassing the wealth they used to buy up the land had made war inevitable, and they had precipitated the opening of hostilities—fired the starting gun—by destroying the rest of the planet.

"When the war ended they ended up sitting atop a mountain of plunder surrounded by flunkies and slaves. As sociopathic a project as it was, you still have to marvel at the brazenness, the audacity, the sheer scale of the greed."

"You _are_ one of them!"

"Yes, Mr Draygo, I'm a cooperator. I'm one of those evil people who believes we should work together, not fight each other."

He sipped his drink.

"The Great War was just a battle. The last of many in a very long war."

"Sounds like a fucking great war to me. Get rid of some dead wood. The march of progress."

"Progress?"

"Progress."

"You wouldn't believe some of the things I found out."

"Try me."

"Phones you carried with you wherever you went."

"A walkie-talkie?"

"A walkie-talkie the size of a pack of cigarettes. Relay stations boosting the signal gave it effectively limitless range. You could call anywhere in the world."

"Neat."

"A cop could identify anyone in the world from a flake of skin left at a crime scene. Kids had computers on their desks more powerful than the whole of Shellcorp."

"Bull. Shit."

"The point is, if you're not the guy at the top of the pyramid you're being fucked, and if you're not the guys at the absolute bottom you're fucking those below you."

"Some people's idea of one helluva good time."

"It's a metaphor, Mr Draygo."

He put down his drink and lit another cigarette. "Through our vanity we junk-paste flunkies were seduced into the dance. And now the reel has started, the red shoes won't let us stop. The dancers spin and the world blurs. And as they whirl faster and faster they feel sicker and sicker as the lies they've told themselves are stretched thinner than thin. They can't stop, not on their own anyway, though they want to more than they want to carry on living."

"Who says they want to stop? Maybe they're having a ball."

"The best traps are the ones that grip tighter the harder you pull. They try to get away but the only thing they know how to do is what they've been trained to do, and that's what got them snared in the first place."

"So you've diagnosed the disease and now you're going to administer the cure whether the patient wants it or not."

"People must think for themselves, must choose freely."

"What if they don't choose the way you want them to? And you're crazy if you think the bosses of the world are just going to hand over the reins and meekly mumble 'sorry' when you point out what they've been doing."

"They'll make an informed choice. That's enough. And as coercive as the system is, it still relies on the consent, the support, of those who've been ensnared."

"So you and your kook-squad commissars take over and go around putting bags over the heads of the beautiful and lead weights around the necks of the quick. Fan-fucking-tastic. "

"The only person who'd want to do that would be someone who saw everything in terms of competition. People have different gifts. That's just a fact of nature. This isn't about leveling down, it's about working together for everyone's benefit."

"Your world will never work because it's based on a dirty lie. There's no such thing as altruism. Even if no money changes hands, nobody does something for nothing. They do it because it makes them feel good about themselves because they think they look good to other people. They don't live for themselves; they live for the approval of others, secretly resenting and hating everyone for making them a prisoner, and every 'unselfish' act feeds the hatred. It's _your_ way that's the deceitful trap: People act from normal healthy selfishness but all they gain is the slave-prison of other people's judgementalism. And you want to know what's behind all this wanting to be liked? Fear. Fear of what someone will do to you if they _don't_ like you. _That's_ the poison bubbling away at the heart of _your_ world. Our way is cleaner, more honest. You do something for someone, they pay you."

"Like _your_ business, for example?"

"Yeah. All the people I've helped. They pay me and I provide a service. A clean and honest exchange."

"Mr Draygo, the reason people come to see you is they _know_ you know who killed their loved ones. _You_ sent them. Hell, they know _themselves_ most of the time. They just want the 'Draygo Investigations' seal of approval to sanctify their bloodletting."

"That's a crock of—"

A bullhorn-amplified voice cut him off: _This is the peace. You're surrounded. Come out with your hands up_.

Simonds bent down, caught hold of the rug by a corner and whipped it back, and then hooked a finger into a knot-hole, opened a trapdoor, took the flashlight clipped to the underside and handed it to Draygo.

"Go."

"Why?"

" _Go!_ I'll stall them."

### 25

He heard heavy boots and shouts above him as he crawled away down the two-foot-high tunnel heading from the pit below the hatch toward the front of the store. After a few yards he came to a flat cart. He lay on it, took hold of the rope, and, as he pulled hand over hand, tried to figure out why the crazy old bastard had helped him if he thought he was such a shit. Using the twisted logic of a collaborator he'd made _him_ the bad guy! People came to him because their loved one had been murdered and he found the murderer. After that, well, with the peace not interested, they'd dispense their own justice, obviously. So what if occasionally his clients overlapped? It was just one of those things. _He_ hadn't killed anybody, hadn't _forced_ anybody to kill anybody else.

Why would they come to him if they already knew who the guilty party was? He'd said he what? Sanctioned the killings? Legitimized them? He remembered the thickset dark-haired guy. _He'd_ known. What'd he said he wanted? A second opinion? He groped into the past, clutched at the half-remembered names and blurred faces as they loomed out of the fog for a moment before sinking back into oblivion, and thought just maybe he began to see a pattern, a chain.

Was it possible? What had their money gotten them? He just acted as, what, a rubber stamp? Would they have lived if he hadn't pointed the finger? Would the cycle have been broken? Probably not. Most likely they were going to die anyway. Was he just regularizing vendettas, then?

He came to a dead end and another pit. He listened. There was no sound from above. He raised the hatch and found a yard-wide corridor behind lath and plaster walls, an arrow scratched into the plank floor. He walked twenty feet, turned a corner and was faced with a rough ladder disappearing into a two-foot square hole in the ceiling. He climbed thirty feet and found another hatch, sunlight shining through the gaps in the planks. He opened the hatch, found himself on a flat roof crowded with narrow wood-framed rope-based beds and crawled in the direction of the hubbub from below.

He peered over the edge of the parapet and saw peace jeeps, a peace ambulance, cops milling about in front of the store, and then Simonds, arms pinioned, nose and mouth bleeding, was dragged out and bundled into the ambulance.

He made his way down the fire escape on the far side of the building and slipped away, but had only managed to get a half block when a prowl car poked its nose out of a side street and he had to duck into an overgrown abandoned-lot between two buildings.

The trail wove under spiky trees and through thorny bushes and ended at a decaying but still solid twenty-foot brick wall. He collapsed on the car seat dumped next to a water filled tub, a dripping pipe sticking out of the wall just above it, and tried to calm his heart and breathing.

His mind was starting to shut down. He needed to anchor it, remind it about the outside world. He looked around the small dusty tree-shaded clearing and saw a tangle of bushes opposite, the wall to his left meeting the wall to his right at a ninety degree angle behind him.

A small brown bird hopped from under a bush and cocked its head to observe him. He watched it, and _it_ watched him. An incautious beetle chose this moment to pop its head out and the bird pounced just a fraction too late. The frustrated creature flew off, stationed itself in a nearby tree and jerked its head around, alert for food or danger. Between jerks it paused for the smallest fraction of a second, and in that instant must have had enough time to register and assess every movement, even the tiniest movement, in its field of vision.

The reckless beetle appeared again and made a dash across no-man's land to what it imagined to be the safety of a clump of weeds. Too late it saw the open jaws of the small lizard as they closed around it and crunched.

The snail, which had been halfway up the outside of the rusty tub, was now cresting the top edge. He watched the pulsing movement of its tentacles probing the air.

There were other smaller snails with more pointed shells among the weeds in the water. He was watching one at the bottom slowly making itself more comfortable, when something flashed across his vision. He focused on the surface. Nothing. Then something moved, darting from one leaf to another of an underwater plant. It was some sort of beetle but instead of legs it had an oar on either side of its body. It flicked them and pulsed through the water. A piece of sludge on a slimy rock at the bottom moved and he saw it was a tiny water-lizard. It whipped its tail and disappeared.

He stood up, made his way back to the street and walked off.

### 26

He rang Valerie's bell. The door opened and she stood there sporting a none too clean boxers and undershirt combo and chewed to a soundtrack of blaring hillbilly music. She turned and walked off. Draygo went in and closed the door behind him.

She slumped into the right-hand end of the couch, gestured to the left and said, "Make yourself t'home, son."

Draygo sat down and took in form sheets, overflowing ashtrays and empty cans of domestic beer littering her coffee table.

"Been seeing your mug all afternoon."

"Yeah?"

"Sound was down though." She paused to take out her gum and stick it to the side of an ashtray. "What say we turn it up."

She reached over the side of the couch, the music stopped and her hand returned full of chips. _On the rail it's Winsome Lad, Winsome Lad by a length_. She turned up the volume, and then her left hand slid inside her shorts and her right hand reached out of sight again and came back with more chips.

The image cut abruptly to a guy with a microphone talking straight to camera. Valerie crunched.

Not something you see every day, folks: The peace taking an interest in a Blossom Heights murder. But this death is believed to be connected with a, thus far unspecified but no-doubt heinous, collaborator plot, and the vicious unplugging of society shyster and pimp Alois Shutstein.

Emergency personnel milled about, sat in their parked vehicles. A line of cops kept back gawkers. Then a sheet-covered body on a stretcher with a cop at each corner came out of the store. Another cop stopped them as they reached the open doors of an ambulance and put his walkie-talkie to his head. The sheet covered, the reporter said, the corpse of one Francis Simonds, local entrepreneur and former respected academic.

The large irregular blotch of black-dried blood about the middle of the sheet started to move and began to dance around and he saw it was the cop on the walkie-talkie's shadow. _An apartment above the victim's store, leased from him by the collaborator-assassin Georg Draygo, is now being combed for clues_. The screen filled with a grainy close-up of his sneering face. _Draygo is armed and extremely dangerous and has killed twice already that we know of_.

She nodded to the TV as she swallowed and reached down for more chips. "I'd suck you off for a sawbuck but by the looks of things you couldn't spare the time."

Her left hand came out of her shorts as she spoke and her right came up holding not chips but a sawed-off shotgun pointed at him. She pulled back first one hammer and then the other then whispered, "Scat."

Back on the street he realized he didn't have time left to waste on underlings. It was time to look up the top dog.

He remembered the pride he felt the last time he'd been to the Government's house as, on a school field-trip, he pointed out to classmates his family name on one of the boards. It hadn't mattered that his father's office was little bigger than a broom closet. It hadn't mattered that he hadn't used it in over a year. All that mattered was that it was there.

He crossed the deserted lobby to elevator number seven and rode it to the ninety-forth floor. The elevator let him off in an empty reception area. Behind the desk was a four-foot by six-foot portrait of the incumbent, around the walls, framed eight-by-ten glossies of his predecessors. The single door in the room was marked 'Government.'

He went through it.

Across a marble floor, behind a desk, french windows gave onto a balcony and a panoramic view of the city. A huge gilt-framed mirror on the left wall reflected the room and magnified its emptiness.

He stepped over the heavy cable of a shrouded TV camera and headed for the desk. Sitting behind it he opened drawers and found them empty. Even the photo frames on the desktop were empty.

Apart from the door he'd entered by and the private lift door there were two others in the room. The first revealed scotch, cigars and a massage table, the second, a mixing desk in front of a huge window.

Standing behind sliders and switches, surveying the room from behind the mirror, he realized he saw, with the exception of himself, what he would've seen if he were looking into the mirror from the other side.

He froze. The chair was now turned to face the cityscape. In the glass he saw a man reflected. He strode into the room, planted his palms wide on the desk and leaned across it.

"You!" he spat. "I want a _word_ with you."

The chair turned and he looked into his own face, into his own eyes.

"Hello, Georg."

The 'fight' was a short and one-sided affair and ended with Draygo on his knees and bleeding. He stood over himself, wiping his hands on a handkerchief.

"You're a liability, Georg. It's an embarrassment having you running around dragging my good name after you. You're making me look bad, buddy-boy. I should thank you though. Being in limbo...You can't imagine. Waiting my moment. Waiting for you to fuck up."

He tucked the handkerchief into his breast pocket.

"So you thought you'd, what, brace the Government? Get some answers? Something like that?" He glanced at his watch. "If you hurry you can just catch him. Right about now I'd say he's just back from his morning swim and is probably trying to decide between a quick nine holes and an exotic massage before lunch."

"Who's behind the wheel? Cooper? Koenig? You in there?"

"Is that the limit of your puny imagination? The corner bull? There are people more powerful than you can conceive. God-kings walk the Earth like in ancient times and they've shaken our hand, treated us as a brother."

"They're just the current bunch of crooks who've managed to grab control. They have it long enough they start to believe their own propaganda."

"My, you really do have some nasty little new playmates, don't you."

He glanced at his watch.

"You can't even begin to imagine how insignificant you are to them. You're a bug and I'm going to squash you."

"Who's in there?"

"I'm you, you fucking moron."

"That's not possible."

"You think nobody ever lied to you, Georg?"

"You may be me, but I'm sure as fuck not you."

"No. A chip off the old block you certainly ain't."

He pulled out a hefty automatic, racked the slide and pressed the muzzle between Draygo's eyes. "So long, brother."

He stood there grinning and winked at Draygo. "I could tell you a few home truths but frankly, son, you're not worth the effort." His grin grew broader. "Just not worth the effort at all."

His eyes bulged wide and his jaw sagged. His arm dropped to his side and the gun clattered to the floor. He fell forward, a dead weight.

The hair on the back of his head was dark and wet. A ragged-edged hole he could just have fit his little finger in made him look up sharply. There was nobody in the room but the sliding doors to the balcony were now open. He manhandled him out of his coat, and, discarding his own stained and ripped rag, slipped it on.

"You done there?"

He spun around and leveled the gun at her. She was leaning against the frame of the open balcony-doors. Over the rail an idling car hovered.

"You!"

"I've been tailing you. Figured you might need some help." She shook her head and said, "Jesus, you look like shit, Georg."

He turned to the mirror and saw his streaked sweat-smeared make-up, his clown face.

"Hop in."

He turned. She was shouting from the car.

### 27

As they shot up into the night he nodded to the lumpy blanket spread out on the back seat.

"What's that?"

"Tools."

He delved in his pocket for cigarettes and pulled out instead a pair of sunglasses and a plastic disk.

"Well lookey here. Where to?"

"Where _to_?"

"You have to get off planet, Georg."

"I've unfinished business here."

"The girl?"

He nodded.

"Stay on Earth and you'll be dead inside a week. You can't do her any good dead."

He stopped toying with the sunglasses when he saw the brand name etched into the inside of the left arm: ' _Look Sharp!_ ' The filled in O's formed paired black dots.

"Ganymede."

"You said it was a dead end."

He thought about something at the same time a puddle and bottomless and shook his head and said, "I'll need ID."

"I know this guy."

In a Blossom Heights back alley a small hatch opened in a basement door.

"Hey, Louis."

"Hey, sister. Who's the shmo?"

"He's okay. He's with me."

He led them to a dingy living room and they all sat.

"What you saying, sis?"

"ID for him."

"When?"

"Now."

"Six fifty."

"Sure."

"He cool?"

"As a cucumber."

"A what?"

"He's cool."

While they waited, Draygo scrubbed his face, showered and threw his wig and corset in the trash. He emerged from the bathroom to find her standing there.

"Let's get going."

"You got it?"

She handed him his new ID. "Let's go."

They slowed as they approached the chain-link fence, and came to a stop next to the hut. The guy in the saucer cap and Sam Browne said, "This is a restricted area."

"Georg."

He held up the disk and the guy snapped to attention and saluted as he raised the barrier.

They drove across open concrete, skirted the runway and on the far side of the field stopped by a row of hangars. Between them the shadows were deep, but bright yellowish light flooded out from the open doors.

She got out, loped across the concrete apron toward the nearest one and disappeared inside. Draygo reached the doorway and looked in. Grinning, she glanced over her shoulder and said, "Check it out!"

It was one of the new interplan ships.

"There aren't five of those in the galaxy. What are the chances?"

"Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, Georg."

She climbed the ladder and slid into the cockpit.

It was a thing of unearthly beauty. The sleek two-man craft was said to have a revolutionary new power-plant, reverse engineered, some said, from alien technology.

"We're in luck. It's fuelled and ready to go."

"Hey! What the hell d'you think you're doing!?" yelled the guy in coveralls as he ran toward them waving his arms.

She leaned out of the ship and patted its flank. "We'll take this one."

"But that's—"

"Show him, Georg."

He pulled out the disk.

"Fine. You'll have to sign for it though."

"Of course."

He showed his new ID and signed.

"She's all yours. Knock yourselves out."

He turned and left and she smiled down at Draygo and said, "Hop in."

"You don't need to come. Why should you come?"

"I can be useful. Officially you're still my patient so it's my duty to come, and I can always say you kidnapped me. Anyway, are you telling me you have the slightest idea how to fly this thing? She flashed a smile at him and said, "Hop in."

When the silver face appeared at the viewing window he pressed the disk against it and pressed the button marked 'talk' on the intercom. "Open up now!"

The technician protested as they strode across the chamber, through the dressing room and into the maze of brightly-lit white corridors. Shouting over the sirens, Draygo said, "Where's the director?"

"Where he always is, in the control room."

Armed guards came toward them and he held up the disk and said, "Take me to the control room."

The director turned as they entered.

"You!"

"And who exactly do you think he is?"

"The wanted man Georg Draygo."

"This is _a_ Georg Draygo. _Our_ Georg Draygo. _Your_ Georg Draygo _was_ a wanted man. _Your_ Georg Draygo is on his way to Mars in shackles to keep a date with a firing squad. We're here to expose your connection to the renegade, someone you spent time with in private conference plotting God-knows-what atrocity. People are saying you're part of his cell or at the very least have been assisting him in the preparation of some collaborationist outrage."

"My loyalty is above question! I'll have to check this out, make a call."

"And tip off your accomplices? I don't think so." She raised her gun and looked around the room. "Georg."

He held up the disk and she said, "This man is to be held incommunicado. You hear me?"

They nodded and she turned back to the director. "Consider yourself suspended and confined to quarters. Guards!"

With the director squared away, the girl and Draygo conferred.

"Now what?"

"I'm going to check something out."

Twenty minutes later he was back in the room with the chairs and the fish and the poster and the clock that said ten of six. He went to the door, opened it and stepped into the blinding dark and found nothing below his feet but didn't fall. He held his hand in front of his face and saw nothing. He touched his face but felt nothing. His hand stopped but he couldn't feel anything. Maybe this wasn't such a good idea. He turned and saw the way back was gone. He walked on nothing without bumping into anything. He ran with no sense of movement and no wall abruptly pulled him up short.

He looked around. It made no difference if his eyes were open or closed, but closed he would've had to look inward, to think. He stared for two straight days that couldn't logically have been two hours and lights appeared in the dark. Tiny but very bright, a small group of dots slowly danced.

They travelled in circles of various sizes, some clockwise, some counterclockwise, and hissed as they moved. The hiss grew as more and more kept appearing til in every direction, above, below, behind and in front, he saw tiny dancing points of light.

Patterns? Faces? Two smaller dots level with each other, below and between them, forming a triangle, a slightly larger one. He looked around and saw constantly moving dots forming faces, separating and coming together as part of other momentary faces.

The hiss was joined by a crackle and then a crooner started to croon. _Love me. Love me like you used to. Love me, so that we two can dance among the stars again, make the whole world ours again._

What the fuck was he doing here? Something about a girl? Pat? Pauline? A face. Asleep? Dead? He wiped frost from glass to see better and his left arm spasmed. Then the whole left side of his body spasmed.

I should probably sit down, he thought, conserve my energy, get myself together. Yeah, that sounded like a really good idea. He sat on the floor that wasn't there, arms around knees pulled up to chest.

It would be meaningless to talk of hours rolling into days, into weeks, months and years as he sat there. Time had no meaning. He just existed. Alone. Surrounded by dancing lights and sounds.

And then, as the temperature plummeted, the lights and sounds began to coalesce, took on color and form. He closed his eyes and it all disappeared, opened them again and an angry crowd was rushing him. A shrieking whirring clicking crowd of angry roaches. He closed his eyes and waited to be torn to pieces.

### 28

As he waited he noticed his mind had managed to detach itself from its fleshy counterpart and was present only as a disinterested observer of proceedings. St Vitus himself never danced a more energetic jig, he thought, as he jerked violently and voided his bladder and bowels.

It was a scene his mind had tried to play out a hundred, a thousand times, but now he could do nothing to stop it. On some level he'd always known it would end like this. His luck had run out. There was nowhere left to run.

The noise grew and then they were on top of him but something held them back like a pack of snarling hounds at full reach of their chains. And then the noise began to diminish and recede into the distance behind him.

He opened his eyes and saw they were passing him by. The mob was in fact a stream of roaches which seemed to originate from a hole in the ground a hundred feet away. Some pheromone-induced surge, no doubt. The flow petered out and he was left alone. A howling screech from the hole grew, peaked and died. Some hideous gigantic roach-predator chasing them from their nest? He reached a shaking hand into his pocket, pulled out his pills and saw the bottle was empty.

He looked around. The heatless sun was high in the sky, but the murky light it gave off seemed to envelop rather than illuminate the unnaturally steep dun-colored hills rising up all around him. Looking like half-buried elongated eggs, they were between fifty and a hundred feet tall, were covered in small openings and had larger openings at the base. Between them, singly and in groups, roaches moved. It was undeniably a city. A _roach_ city. He was in the lair of the beast.

Another flood of creatures surged toward him, passed and became a trickle. Some had carried parcels, others seemed to have packs on their backs, all had their eyes focused dead ahead on some invisible goal.

His luck couldn't hold. He had to get off the street. He looked around, saw he was standing in the mouth of a narrow alley and ducked into the gloom.

Twittering clicks and whirs drifting from the openings in the drab densely-packed low-rise buildings he passed drove him on as, gun at the ready, he searched for somewhere to hide from the roaches and from the cold.

After ten minutes without even any possibilities to be investigated he saw, partially obscured by a large empty container of some sort, a small ground-level hole in a wall. Lighter held up, he stooped and quickly examined the hole and the tunnel behind. It was too small for a roach and if it went back far enough would provide a temporary refuge while he got his mind straight. He got down on his hands and knees and entered, maneuvered himself around and pulled the container fully over the entrance. In the pitch black he prayed as he headed off down the tunnel.

It went on for about fifteen yards before opening out into a chamber just too low to stand in. Saving fuel, he explored by touch and the occasional flash from his lighter. It was about seven yards long, four wide and roughly egg-shaped. In one place liquid dripped from the roof and pooled in a shallow depression. He shuddered at the thought of some creature crawling in here to lay, hatch and nurture its brood.

He leaned against the back wall, facing the way he had come, and looked at his situation. They couldn't get at him but, as there was no other way out, he couldn't get away if they found him. It wasn't ideal but it would have to do.

He stared into the darkness in the direction of the tunnel opposite and twitched and sweated as his exhausted mind ran back and forth in place before eventually slipping into unconsciousness.

He woke soaked and shivering, with his head throbbing and his mouth gummed shut. He crawled over to the puddle. The liquid hadn't burned his skin when rubbed between forefinger and thumb and after some hesitation he bent down and lapped at it. It was tasteless, odorless and didn't burn his lips, tongue or throat.

He crawled back to his post and fell asleep.

As he slept, his fevered brain showed him three roaches frantically scrabbling at the tunnel mouth, reaching inside with long thin claw-tipped limbs and flailing around. And then they started to throb and pulse and their bodies became fluid, oozed inside and, in the shape of three huge worms, slid down the tunnel and into his cave where they reared up in a hissing semicircle and wavered unsteadily over him.

They started to morph again but instead of becoming roaches took on human form. The first became Shutstein, the second, Cooper, and the third, Simonds.

Their hissing mutated, became rhythmic, then became words, and then they were all shouting at him, the same things over and over again.

"You really are a choice piece of work, aren't you."

"Steady there, big guy."

"Do you want to understand or not?"

"You never met her, did you."

"He's the one that found her."

"Let me wise you up about a few things."

"He's the one that found her."

"You never met her, did you."

"Let me wise you up about a few things."

"You really are a choice piece of work, aren't you."

"Do you want to understand or not?"

"Steady there, big guy."

"You really are a choice piece of work, aren't you."

"He's the one that found her."

"You never met her, did you."

"Let me wise you up about a few things."

"Do you want to understand or not?"

"Steady there, big guy."

He woke, heard movement in the darkness, flashed the lighter and saw their grinning faces six inches from his.

As he crawled to the water, a screaming Cooper rode his back, and either side of him Shutstein and Simonds leaned into his face and screamed at him.

They continued to harangue him as he drank, crawled back and slumped back against the wall, and then stood around him in a screeching semicircle. He pulled out the automatic, cocked it and put it in his mouth. He held it there for three long sweaty shivering seconds before he threw it down and, shrieking, jammed his hands against his ears and blacked out.

When he came round, the shaking had reduced to a tremble and his tormentors were gone. Hunger and fatigue had numbed his fear—or rather he lacked the spare energy to feed it—and he realized he couldn't just stay put and starve to death.

He made to stand up, found his pants stuck to him and remembered his ignominious arrival. He removed his shoes, undid his belt and peeled off his pants and undershorts, then went to the puddle, soaked his handkerchief and cleaned himself up. He dressed and on his hands and knees, searching for his gun, patted the floor. He found and pocketed it, took a last drink and crawled off down the tunnel.

As he neared the far end he became aware of cold air and a diffuse light. Stopping two yards back from the entrance, he saw the container had been moved and now only partially blocked the hole.

He could hear roaches passing and the sunlight streaming in was cut as their shadows passed over the hole. There was a smell reminiscent of cooked food, some exotic delicacy. He backed up a few feet and lay down to wait for nightfall.

He woke to darkness and silence, crawled to within a yard of the hole and stopped and listened. Nothing. Gun in hand he crept forward and peeked out. The alley was empty and the smell was stronger. He reached out and explored the ground immediately in front of the hole. His hand found something wet and cold. He brought it inside, retreated into the tunnel, leaned against the wall and got out his lighter. It didn't look very appetizing, but the _smell!_ He sniffed it and the neuro-chemical signals already surging around his brain went haywire. He put it in his mouth, chewed a few times and then swallowed. _God_ , it was good.

He positioned himself just inside the entrance and waited. After five minutes without a soul passing he wriggled out of the hole and found himself standing behind the now half-full container. The melting together of intoxicating fragrances was overpowering. He reached in and pulled out something firm but with a bit of give, put it gingerly in his mouth, bit off a chunk, chewed and swallowed. He finished it and dug in again. This time he had some sort of synthetic container, at the bottom, a thick sourish sharpish liquid. He tilted his head back and drained it, and when his gaze came level again he was staring into the bulbous eyes of an open-mouthed roach frozen in the act of pouring the contents of a medium size container into the large one.

He dropped the small container and the roach swiveled its head, twisted its body and re-froze, staring and open-mouthed, in its new pose. He remembered his gun, squeezed the trigger and got a click instead of a boom. The roach risked only the briefest of glances in the direction of the sound before returning its full attention to the container.

Draygo waved a hand and got no reaction. He waved both arms in the air. Nothing. He reached a foot out and nudged the small container so it shook and the roach backed away holding up the medium container like a shield. Draygo picked up the small container, held it above his head and waved it around. The roach's eyes followed it mesmerized. He pulled it back and threw it at the roach and it turned tail and ran yammering toward a large hole in the wall opposite, dropping the medium container in its haste. Out of sight, its voice was joined by others. He had to get out of here. He hurriedly filled his pockets with food and trotted deeper into the warren.

The roach hadn't been able to see him. It wasn't blind, had seen the container well enough. It just couldn't see him.

He needed to test this.

After ten minutes of left and right turns he started to look for an opportunity. Light spilling from a hole in a wall attracted his attention. He went in. In a side chamber he saw an old roach bent over something, working by lamplight. Barely breathing he stood in the shadows.

He slid into the room. Nothing. He moved between the roach and the light. No reaction. His coat snagged momentarily on something and the roach looked up and then returned to its work. They couldn't see him! He crept out and strolled off.

This was, he realized, a God given opportunity. He was in the heart of the roach empire and had, it seemed, almost complete freedom of movement. He could tailgate into any military-scientific facility. He could observe up-close any documents, any devices. If he could find some way to get a message back to Earth, or steal a ship, he could relay their biggest secrets, their Achilles heel. He idly wondered if Koenig had known, if this had been the _real_ mission all along.

Redemption beckoned. He could defeat the roach horde. He could save the Earth. What would one dead shyster more-or-less matter when he was the savior of the human race? If he could keep free, keep alive and keep sane in this hell, if he could find the soft spot where they could be attacked, he'd be a hero.

### 29

Cold and exhausted, he needed a place to hole up, to think, to work things out. He turned a corner and was confronted by a small square.

On three sides all the places were shuttered and most had furniture stacked in front. But on the fourth side, sitting around tables outside the one place still open, a dozen roaches twittered to each other and lifted containers to their mouths.

He steeled himself and stepped out of the shadows and everything carried on as before. He walked to the center of the square and looked around. Nothing. Emboldened, he approached the nearest table and watched them up close. After a minute he drew closer still, waved his hand in their faces, interposed himself between two apparently deep in conversation over the debris of a meal. Nothing. The fools hadn't the slightest inkling of his presence. Feeling invincible, he turned and strode inside.

Down the corridor, on the right, he looked for a moment into a room half-full of roaches sitting at tables. In one corner, behind a counter, a roach served drinks. He went deeper and saw, through a doorway on the left, an aromatic and chaotic kitchen full of scurrying roaches tending to steaming pots.

At the far end of the corridor was a locked door and a flight of stairs leading upward. He turned to leave and saw a group of roaches coming down the corridor toward him. He tried the door again. It was still locked tight. He put his foot on the bottom stair and then, as they passed the kitchen, crept halfway up to the second-floor landing.

They stopped at the bottom of the stairs and gibbered at each other. One handed something to another and then fitted a device into a slot in the door and opened it. The other two made their way through the doorway, raising their voices and waving their arms as they left. The remaining roach locked the door behind them, turned and started to make its way up the stairs.

Draygo stepped onto the landing and saw a roach heading toward him from a doorway on the right. He turned left. More stairs. He made his way up and found himself on a small landing with three closed doors and a ladder leading to a hatch in the ceiling.

Below, the two roaches stood facing each other and chattered. When they turned toward him and headed for the stairs he climbed the ladder, eased open the hatch and slipped through.

It didn't lead to the roof as he had hoped but to an attic where, surrounded by the discarded flotsam and jetsam of their lives, he listened. He fell asleep without realizing it, and woke with no idea how long he had been out. He listened again, and after five minutes of uninterrupted silence from below, opened the hatch and descended the ladder.

He was on the lower landing, staring through an open doorway at a meal laid out on a table, when he heard them. He couldn't see them til he got almost to the bottom of the stairs: At the far end of the corridor, blocking the street door, two loudly yammering roaches waving their arms at each other.

He looked back up the stairs. At any moment a hungry roach could appear from behind any one of those doors. On his way back to the attic he went around the dining table stuffing small amounts from each bowl into his pockets.

His hands were slippery as he ascended the ladder to his sanctuary/prison. In the darkness he wiped them on his pants til they were as clean as they were going to get, laid his coat down in an open space, and field stripped the pistol.

As soon as the firing pin was in his hands he knew it was bent. Keeping the pin in his mouth, he reassembled the gun and laid it down, and then searched his pockets and found a gum wrapper and a half-full matchbox. He tipped the matches into his hand and pocketed them and then laid the box and the wrapper next to the gun. He picked up the gun and jammed the firing pin into the gap between the slide and the frame and levered. Examining it, he saw it was still bent. He levered more forcefully and had to save himself when he lurched forward as it snapped.

He didn't move as he slowly breathed in and out one, two, three times. He gently laid everything down, felt for the sheared-off end of the firing pin and found it still wedged in place. He got hold of it between the tips of finger and thumb and worked it free, and then found the gum wrapper, carefully wrapped it around the small, pointed piece of metal, put it in the matchbox and put the matchbox in his breast pocket. Finally he refitted the broken pin and put the gun in a pocket.

Picking through boxes he found a lidded container made of some wood-like material, carefully tipped out the contents and refilled it with the fruits of his scavenging. Listening to the shrieks, tweets and clicks coming from the dining room, he realized he'd need to get a grasp of at least the rudiments of their language if he wanted to find out anything of any real value. He moved toward the hatch to hear better and tripped and crashed into a pile of boxes. He lay there unmoving as he listened to the silence from the diners below, and then carefully extricated himself from the mess and crept into the farthest darkest corner he could find.

Presently he heard steps and rustling on the stairs. The ladder creaked. He breathed in. The hatch lifted slowly and a roach peered around as it played a flashlight over the room. There was a noise to his left and then a flash of movement. A creature slightly smaller than a domestic cat darted forward, crashed into a box and shot off at a ninety degree angle and disappeared. The roach yammered something to someone below and then closed the hatch. He breathed out.

After nearly an hour of silence from the landing below he got up and slowly stretched his aching muscles. He needed a base of operations, somewhere he didn't risk discovery every time he moved. He got down on his hands and knees, crawled nearer the hatch and listened. Silence. He started to edge forward and froze at the sound of footsteps on the stairs. The ladder creaked and then the hatch opened and a light shone directly in his face for a moment before moving on to probe the rest of the room. A small box about six by eight by four was slid in and the hatch closed. Food smell wafted from the box. Delicious but somehow...wrong.

He heard roaches moving around and odd words from the floor directly below and then silence. After about an hour he risked lifting the hatch a crack, saw the coast was clear and descended the ladder. As he reached the head of the stairs, a door behind him opened and a bleary-eyed roach peered out. Seeing nothing, it closed the door and returned to bed.

He closed the street door softly behind him and turned to survey the empty square. The shuttered businesses and the stacked furniture were now all covered in a hard frost, and an icy wind was getting up. He turned up his collar, folded his right lapel under his left and set off. He needed a warehouse, abandoned building, something like that.

Two hours of being buffeted around the frozen, deserted streets and alleys yielded nothing even close to suitable. He hung a left and found himself back in the small square. Fucking circles.

Frozen to the bone and not wanting to be on the street at daybreak, he crept back in and crept up the stairs, up the ladder and into the attic. He found some fabric of some kind, stuffed it into the gap under the eaves through which glacial air was rushing in, ate and then, when he'd thawed out some, slept.

He woke to sounds of bustle below. Presently the noises became more muffled, carried on for a while and then stopped altogether. He opened the hatch.

The upper and lower landings had been silent. There was, however, a _lot_ of noise coming from downstairs, from the business end of things. He got to the bottom of the stairs and watched the corridor, the constant comings and goings, the polite ballets in the too-narrow-for-two passageway. Twice he started toward the outside door. Twice he had to turn back. It was impossible. He retreated to the third floor and prowled around what he took to be bedrooms and a bathroom and found nothing of interest. He moved down a floor and found a living space, what looked like bookshelves, comfortable seating.

He reached and took down a small, delicate ceramic bowl from a shelf and examined it. It was almost weightless in his cupped palms. He was reaching to put it back when there was a scream and he whirled around and dropped it.

As the roach in the doorway stared at the pieces of smashed bowl, he moved to a corner to wait his chance to escape.

Gathered around the dining table the family discussed their problem and Draygo listened.

"There's probably some perfectly logical explanation."

"The damn bowl was _floating_ , for Christ's sake!"

"Then there are the noises and that _smell_."

"So we have raccoons. Big mystery."

"Smart raccoons who won't touch poisoned food?"

"Why not?"

"I swear when we ate last night someone, some _thing_ , had been at the food. There were weird scoops out of the creamed potatoes and a lot of the meat was gone."

"What would a ghost want with food?"

"I don't _know_ , goddamnit!"

"Why didn't you _say_ something?"

"It's only just this minute struck me."

"One of my schoolbooks has disappeared."

"Well isn't _that_ an unfortunate catastrophe to befall your homework."

"I'm just _saying_ is all."

"There _is_ someone we can get in, someone who specializes in these kinds of things."

"Who?"

"This guy at work had a problem and this fakir guy helped him out."

"Fakir? He's just going to be a fake or a flake. Probably both."

"We've nothing to lose. You only pay if he gets results."

"Okay then. If it'll make you happy, give him a call."

He didn't know how he knew, it must've been their tone or body language or something, but he knew: They were talking about a foul odor and were going to call in some sort of occult pest controller to deal with the source, to deal with _him_.

A plan began to form in his mind. He was damned if he was going to be evicted, thrown out in the cold, by any damn roaches.

In the dead of night he stole downstairs and into the kitchen, found the sink and washed his clothes, and then hung them on the grille of the extractor fan in the alley to dry during the next morning's breakfast rush. He washed and dried himself and then, naked and shivering, returned to the attic. If he smelled of anything now it would be a kitchen, and who above a restaurant would think twice about the smell of a kitchen?

Windborne ice-crystals swirled about the short fat roach as he waited in the dark. He patted the wooden box hung by a strap over one shoulder and smiled. He was still smiling when the door opened.

In the middle of the living room he held the box out in front of him, four legs shot out and he set it down and opened it. Draygo, preferring to be at the center of things in the unlikely event this hocus-pocus merchant had any effect on him, stood in a corner and watched. The fakir cleared his throat and began to speak. "First thing is to make it manifest itself. The trick is to irritate it enough so it has to come out, but not so much you can't reason with it."

They glanced at each other, uncertain what they had gotten themselves into, and then watched as he took a bell and a short stick from the box, attached the bell to a hook on the end of the stick and held it up and shook it. He smiled and said, "It's safest to proceed by small steps."

He went around the room murmuring to himself and shaking the bell and then returned to his place in the center. He looked around. The family followed his example. He took his bell and left the room and they all trouped after him, Draygo bringing up the rear.

He led them through all the rooms on the second floor and then up the stairs and through all the rooms on the top floor, ringing the bell all the way. Passing the ladder for the second time, he stopped, glanced at the hatch and said, "Would you mind?"

The eldest son climbed the ladder, raised the hatch and propped it open.

The fakir pointed the stick at the open hatchway and it telescoped into a six-foot pole. He inserted it into the opening and gently shook it, then sniffed and looked around. Finally he retracted it and turned and led them all back to the living room.

"Seems we need to turn up the pressure some. I'm not surprised. Only the most nervous of spirits can be brought forth this way. But, as I said, prudence dictates a cautious approach."

He unhooked the bell and the stick, carefully placed them both back in the box and then theatrically ferried an incense burner, a squat candle and one large and three small glass-stoppered bottles from the box to the dining table.

"If you'd all be seated."

He moved the incense burner to the middle of the table, unstopped the large glass bottle and poured a generous glug of liquid into the bowl of the burner. The first small bottle contributed three drops to the mix, the second, two, and the third, one. He took a small glass rod and as he stirred said, "We're going to join hands in a circle to harness our combined psychic energy, but first I need to prepare myself."

He lit the candle and then produced a thin cloth and draped it over his head. It hung down, completely obscuring his face, and billowed as he muttered.

The burner steadily filled the room with an unpleasant odor and the younger children pulled faces, fidgeted, and elbowed each other til their mother's harsh stare stilled them.

He mumbled on like this for a while and then reached out his hands and said, "Ladies and gentlemen. Please." They joined hands and he started to chant and rock and Draygo watched from the corner of the room. As he went on, his voice rose til he was all but shouting the gibberish words. Periodically he paused and cocked his head under the cloth, causing the children to nearly choke on their giggles. This went on for five minutes before he sighed, removed the cloth and said, "It seems your unwanted guest is not of the thin skinned variety. I'll return tomorrow. No extra charge."

After he'd left, the children amused themselves at his expense for a good half hour before, sick of them, their mother shooed them upstairs.

The second visit proved to be simply a more muscular repeat of the first. Tiny cymbals were chimed all over the house and then the whole pantomime was repeated with a toy drum and finally with a shrill little brass horn. A coil of pinky-orange rubber hose came out of the box and was handed to the eldest son. "Would you connect this to a gas outlet, please, and then bring the free end back here."

He placed a three-legged iron crucible on the table, slid a burner underneath and connected the hose, then loaded the bowl with a double dose of drops and a pinch of powder and finally dropped in a small pellet which sank slowly to the bottom. "Would you turn on the gas, please."

He adjusted the nozzle and when he was happy with the flow lit the gas. The flame lapped around the bowl and he turned it down til he had achieved a focused intense heat.

The cloth appeared, he mumbled and the family and Draygo watched. Presently they joined hands and he started to chant.

The foul smelling mixture in the crucible began to bubble and hiss. After five minutes of mumbling, head cocking and increasingly violent fizzing, they were beginning to hope he would give up soon, when something strange started to happen in the middle of the table.

Unnoticed, the liquid in the bowl had become a bubbling foaming mass growing second-by-second. As they stared it started to pulse with light, quicker and quicker til it was all but continuous, and then a glittering pillar surged toward the ceiling, spread out to the edges of the room and slowly rained down sparkling particles everywhere.

They floated lazily to earth, popping as they landed.

The fakir looked around then yelled, "There! In the corner!" as he pointed straight at Draygo. The specks were popping all over him.

As he ran from the room, bursting a path through the tiny bubbles as he went, everyone stared.

The shower fizzled out, and, as the last few died, mother was the first to regain the power of speech.

"Some sort of invisible dwarf."

"We don't know _what_ we saw."

"But you can't deny we saw _something_."

They looked at each other and then at the smiling fakir.

"I'll see you all tomorrow then. Get this business put to bed," he said as he gathered up his things.

The fumes from the crucible were absolutely noxious on his third visit and the family, grimacing from the acrid stench and from the atonal screeches and screams coming from the small metal box in the corner, looked on as he added yet more drops, yet more powder.

They knew something was wrong when, staring at the crucible bug-eyed and open mouthed, he pulled out the burner.

"I believe it would be advisable to move back a little," he said as he stood, pushed back his chair and started to back away from the humming growling mixture in the bowl.

He had only gotten two steps when there was a flash, a deafening pop and the room filled with dense burning choking smoke. They groped their way blindly to the door, raced downstairs and out into the cold night air, and had all but coughed themselves out when father looked around and said, "What's that noise?"

Everyone listened. There was a strange repetitive grating sound coming from very close by.

"I don't know what it is and I don't care," said mother. "Nobody's been hurt. I say we get back inside and just forget about the whole thing."

They came to an accommodation: He stayed out of their way, and the strange creeks emanating from the attic, unexplained but non-threatening, became part of the background of their lives.

### 30

He quickly fell into a routine. At night, by flashlight, he studied the comic book/text book he'd taken from the smallest one, poring over the squiggles and trying to tie them up with the illustrations. By day he trailed behind him to school and leaned against the wall in the corner of the classroom, listening to the teacher and listening with special intensity when she got the children to read in turn from the book. The boy had to share with his neighbor, and was punished for losing his book by having to read aloud to the teacher as she graded assignments at lunchtime for a week while the rest of his classmates were off playing outside.

Looking over his shoulder, he listened to the boy recite, and on the third day it all started to fall into place. It was uncanny, felt more like remembering than learning.

When the other children returned after lunch he would slip away and explore. Eventually, as the weather started to improve, he followed him to school less and less. Spending whole days at a stretch wandering, he saw those leaving their homes at the start of the day as the stores were opening, the afternoon shoppers and park snoozers, the return home in the evening, the bustle at night.

It all seemed perfectly wholesome at first glance, but permeating everything, seeping between every fiber of their social fabric, was the sickly-sweet stench of collaboration.

As he went he picked up snippets of conversation everywhere. At the weekly market held in a nearby, significantly larger square, a heated dispute: "You cheating bastard!" Overheard passing a café: "He was always the same. Always was, always will be." In the library: "You can only take out four at a time. You'll have to put one back."

His most fruitful and sustained source of exposure to their language, however, came like a bolt out of the blue as, sitting on a bench, enjoying the strangely beautiful park, he was shocked out of his daydream when an ancient roach in a bath chair started to talk at him.

The paralyzing terror faded as he realized the roach's only interest in him was as an audience for his monologue. He still couldn't move though, found himself pinned to the spot by the oddly soothing torrent of words.

He talked and Draygo listened. A half hour later, when the nurse who had parked him next to Draygo's bench returned, he clamped his mouth shut and stared straight ahead. He knew enough not to be caught talking to someone other people couldn't see.

It was unnerving to say the least to discover his invisibility wasn't absolute, but he comforted himself that the rare person able to see him would never be believed by the vast majority who couldn't. He'd just have to be more careful was all.

From then on, several times a week Draygo would make his way to the bench at the time the roach took his constitutional, and he would talk and Draygo would listen.

There being no way of telling in advance what detail might turn out to be the key to a fatal weakness, he recorded everything he heard and saw, no matter how seemingly trivial, in the journal he had started to keep, til in a matter of months he was fluent, in theory at least anyway.

As an exercise he translated one of the stories in the child's book and transcribed it into his journal. 'The Wishing Star Tales,' the title of the collection of fables and myths, was straightforward enough to translate, but he couldn't make his mind up how to render the title of the story itself. One group of characters could have represented either 'sweet' or 'bitter-sweet' just as easily. He finally settled on 'My Sweet Prince.'

He sat back to admire his handiwork, and then leaned forward and started to read.

My Sweet Prince

Princess Tina's heart was heavy. She wanted to please her father, she wanted to marry Prince David, a man known far and wide as a lout and a brute, but she could not. The people's hearts were heavy. They wanted the king to be happy, for he was known to be a spiteful vindictive man if all was not rosy in his garden. And he badly wanted his line secured, and he badly wanted this alliance.

A painting of the prince had arrived. It was set up on an easel and minstrels played and sang of his undying love for her. As she listened she sampled one of the heart-shaped chocolates that had accompanied the painting and then placed it back in the box, closed the lid and put it to one side. The undeniably excellent chocolates were a nice touch but her obsession was well known and the gift signified no special insight.

She hadn't outright turned down his proposal but she hadn't jumped at it either. She suggested an exchange of letters so they might get to know each other. She also sent her court painter with two identical canvases. On the right side of each was _her_ likeness, and on the left a space for _his_ to be inserted.

The king was incandescent with rage at his daughter's prim prudery but, having no effective threat to hold over her that wouldn't also damage the merchandise, was powerless. Enraged by his own impotence he turned to arbitrary torture and execution. Every day someone died, most days at least a handful. At any time of night or day anyone could find themselves on the wrong end of his ire. And as judge, jury and executioner, his word was law.

She read and re-read his exquisite letters and wavered as she popped one of the accompanying chocolates into her mouth. The oafish pig seemed to possess a beautiful soul. Was it possible his reputation was _so_ far from the truth?

The portrait came back not ugly, not handsome, but with a certain dull viciousness about the eyes and mouth. That the prince and his advisers had been happy for this telling likeness to leave the borders of their kingdom uncensored, that they perceived it as normal, flattering somehow, spoke volumes.

With an impenetrable gaggle of ladies-in-waiting permanently surrounding her, she visited his court. Over the week of her stay a half dozen of the fairest detached themselves from the group, attached themselves to gentlemen of his court and stayed behind when she bade farewell to return to her filial duties.

Back home she found that her crossbow-wielding father, escorted by a company of men-at-arms, had taken to riding the countryside dispensing justice randomly on his hapless subjects.

Every letter leaving his court being intercepted and scrutinized, the words of her spies arrived on the lips of gypsies, peddlers, tinkers and strolling players. The reports painted but a single picture: A foam-mouthed thrashing of a serving lad for making eye contact, the vomit-covered-and-worse velvet jerkins and breeches arriving daily at the laundry, a dozen tiny bastards at the bottom of a disused well in his private gardens, the jumpy courtesans with thick make-up covering black eyes at various stages, a veil hiding here a split and swollen lip, there a broken nose. Brandy having ruined his stomach, he attempted to mask his stench with perfume. As one particularly coarse actor confided out of the side of his mouth, the man stank of shit, piss and sweat.

An itinerant mason had just informed her that the prince's letters were penned by a hired scribe, when a red-faced servant rushed into the room.

"Ma'am! He's _here!_ "

From her window she looked down on the golden coach pulling into the main courtyard and then hurried downstairs to take her place next to her father.

There was a loud belch and the drape quivered. A footman opened the door and held out a hand to help the prince down. Tall and broad, he stood unsteadily in front of her for a second and leered, and then, with the aid of the footman, made his way to the waiting sedan chair, got in and closed the drape.

The footman returned, stood before them and discreetly but urgently signaled two men waiting next to a large wooden casket. They took hold of it with both hands and hefted it off the ground, waddled over to them and gently lowered it back down. The footman opened the box, waved a hand at the contents and announced it to be two hundred fifty pounds of the finest cacao beans. Unprocessed.

The men staggered off with their load and were replaced by two more men with another casket. The footman opened it and gestured at what he said was thirty-two yards of the finest sugar cane. Next came a man with a smaller casket containing some kind of rare fungus. This went on, and seed, tree bark, tuberous roots, mineral crystals and living plants—around their root balls, rough cloth tied up with twine—passed by. The princess smiled dutifully and the pile of exotic ingredients to one side grew.

In the great hall that night, drunk and red faced, the king stood up, swayed, put down the half-devoured duck carcass he had been gnawing and started to shout at the assembled diners.

"This is truly an occasion of great joy. The coming together of two great and noble houses. We stand on a threshold. A door of opportunity stands before us. Let it be flung open, let us stride through, and let any who bar our way be branded the traitors they surely are."

He turned and stared at his daughter, rocked on his heels and collapsed in his chair.

With the unconscious king removed to his bed, the food was cleared, the drinking began in earnest and she slipped quietly away.

The prince had been given a suite adjoining hers, and before she knelt to pray she retrieved the key to the connecting door from its hiding place, turned it in the lock and left it there. She would have slid the bolt home as well but it had been removed earlier on her father's orders. It was only by pure chance that she had happened by and prevented the removal of the lock itself.

She fell asleep praying to be able to love him, and was woken by the sound of her neighbor stumbling and crashing around, emptying his stomach and then his bladder, berating a servant.

The racket subsided and was replaced by loud snoring. She prayed and prayed to be able to love him, and the people prayed and prayed for her to be able to love him. She drifted off and opened her eyes to a strange sound and realized it was silence. The snoring from next door had stopped.

She tiptoed to the door, pressed an ear against it and listened. Silence and, strangely, the scent of chocolate. If the pig swallows his own tongue and chokes on it, she thought, it would mean bloody war. She whispered, "Prince David. Prince David." Silence. She rapped lightly on the door. "Prince David, are you unwell?" Gingerly she turned the key, the lock clicked, and, as she softly opened the door a crack, she was struck by a waft of chocolate. She peered into the silence. "Prince David!" she whispered urgently. "Are you unwell?" Nothing. She fetched a candle, steeled herself, opened the door fully and stepped into the room. Finding the bed rumpled but empty, she lifted the candle high and turned around. She saw him, gasped and her hand went to her mouth.

He was sitting facing his dressing table, hands on thighs, in complete motionless silence. She went to him, the growing smell of chocolate as she got closer drawing her forward, and was about to place her hand on his shoulder, when she caught their reflection in the mirror.

She moved around til she was face-to-face with the statuesque prince. His eyes were closed and his face relaxed. He looked serene, at peace. She moved closer, only a few inches from his face, and the smell became overwhelming. She touched his cheek, sniffed her finger and mouthed it. He was covered in the most impossibly exquisite chocolate—it was so far beyond what she'd imagined possible that she hesitated to call it chocolate at all, but chocolate it most certainly was—and by the look of him was stone dead.

She backed away in horror at the sight of the looming bloodbath this turn of events presaged and trod on his bare foot. His little toe broke off and she picked it up and examined it. It wasn't just _covered_ in chocolate; it was solid chocolate all the way through! She sniffed it, licked it, popped it in her mouth and gasped. She held up the candle and approached to examine him. The silk dressing gown was normal but all his flesh was chocolate. She pressed an ear to his chest and listened for a beat or breath. She felt for a pulse. Nothing. She tapped his chest. Solid. She sat back on the dressing table and gazed at him and wanted him. She coveted him more than she'd ever thought it possible to covet anyone. They were married the next day.

Answering his door that morning she had barred his valet's way and demanded the king be summoned. When he arrived she lowered her gaze to the floor and whispered, "We joined. We came together." She had woken in his arms, she said, and he was sick. Dawn filtering through the drapes burned. Even candlelight was unbearable torture. The slightest noise, even his own whisper, was agony.

Her exultant father placed a hand on her belly and said, "It's a son! I can feel it in my bones!"

At dusk she travelled, hidden under the voluminous cowl of her cloak, to the nearby priory, and told the prioress that a person of very high station wished to do penance for their sins, wished to bathe a leper.

Later that night she led the blindfold velvet-slipper-shod physician into the prince's darkened room and over to his bedside. As he silently examined his patient, she jabbed the confused and frightened leper with a stick causing him to scream out til she stopped the examination on the grounds of the prince's suffering.

To the assembled court the physician announced that the prince was suffering from a total intolerance to any and all stimulation of the senses, and after the private ceremony conducted that night by a blindfold priest and with two blindfold witnesses they set up home in the isolated east tower.

She wrote his father explaining his condition and what had happened. The old man couldn't have cared less. She ministered to his needs herself and with her own hands the saintly girl kept their apartment neat as a new pin. When, six months after they were married, her father died, they became king and queen, and in spite of the pain it cost him he fulfilled his kingly duties.

His councilors and those wishing his judgment on disputes would gather in absolute silence in an anteroom. They would then, in turn, be brought into an empty room with no other door but with a grille in the far wall. Peering through it into the gloom they could just make out their king (absolutely still as even the slightest movement was agony) seated on his throne. They would hand their written questions to her through the grille, she would whisper them to him (the voice of his beloved being the only sound he could bear) and then relay his words to the waiting supplicants.

People loved his wisdom and serenity, his balanced just pronouncements, and were sad the union was never blessed with children.

Miraculously over the years the bloom of imperfection, the decay that affects chocolate, left him untouched and he stayed as fresh as the day. She never tired of him nor was she ever sated. She had redoubled her old search for the perfect chocolate in an attempt to save him but, as she knew she would, she failed.

Self denial, of course, only made the inevitable yielding to temptation all the sweeter, and after twenty years all that was left under his robes that was not wickerwork was the portion of his face not covered by his veil: His eyes, nose, cheeks and the lower part of his forehead. She hadn't tasted him in six months.

She was nibbling the end of his nose and thinking how she was going to alter his veil, sew a patch between his eyes to create two eyeholes that would inevitably grow smaller and smaller over the years, when she looked into the pair of eyes in her hands and realized this was the last time she was going to see her dear dear husband. Tears rolled down her cheeks as she popped the last of him into her mouth.

The next morning, servants discovered her wailing, "My prince is gone! He's gone forever! No more will I taste his sweet lips on mine!"

And when they searched his chambers he was indeed nowhere to be found, and no trace of him ever _was_ found.

She wore widow's weeds for the remaining thirty-two years of her life, whether she might be instructing ministers, judging disputes, riding, at the theater or entertaining guests.

Draygo closed his journal, returned it to its hiding place and went to sleep.

### 31

Putting the newfound confidence his success with the language had given him to good use, he found a local metalwork shop, watched them at work and then, when they had left for the night, machined himself a new firing pin.

With the new pin in place, the gun dry-fired just fine. There seemed no reason it wouldn't work with a round in the chamber but that didn't mean it would. Ideally he would've liked to test fire it but, having only three bullets, that wasn't an option.

He slid the gun into a pants pocket and felt cold metal against his bare skin. He swapped the gun to the other side, turned the pocket inside out and found a hole worn rather than torn in the fabric.

He examined the whole suit and found it had become worn and frayed. The knees and elbows were threadbare, the backside shiny and tissue paper thin. If he didn't do something now it would soon be in tatters. He could also really do with a bag and couldn't very well carry one of theirs about. The suit would have to provide the thread and cloth to repair itself.

He stole some scissors, laid his pants and coat out on the floor and cut off the pants legs just above the knee, the coat arms just above the elbow. After unpicking a strip of cloth to give himself some thread to sew with, he took the needle he had found and, with tiny stitches, hemmed the suit's amputated stumps.

Every time it was cannibalized the suit shrank a little more and would eventually become shorts and a vest.

Most of the winter his freedom of movement had been severely restricted but when the days had started to lengthen, when the clumps of mossy fungus had started to appear, when the skeletons in the park had started to re-clothe themselves in flesh, he was free to roam at will.

As he travelled farther and wider he discovered he was in fact living in a provincial town and stowed away on a plane to the capital. Once there he got into military bases, research labs and factories, slipped into high level meetings of generals and politicians, spied on them at home, followed a lot of them to the same shrink and listened as they bared their souls.

So impressed was he by the shrink's insightful and humane words that from then on, whenever he was in town, he would sit in on his sessions whether the clients were of any interest to him or not. He would also spend time at the main port, watching the ships departing for their colony worlds, hanging around their deep space communication center seeing if there was a way he could contact Earth somehow. With a couple of hours to kill one day, thinking he should probably check out their 'high' culture, he went to an art gallery and found it full of crazy meaningless garbage, but remembered thinking the same about almost every gallery he'd ever been in.

Crisscrossing the planet at will, feeling like an unseen but all-seeing mole at the heart of their body politic, he looked down and, as well as towns and cities, saw mountains, forests, deserts and seas. But wherever he went, even in top-level military meetings, there was absolutely no mention of the war.

Their complete insulation from the conflict was stunning and sickening. Their husbands and sons, their brothers and fathers, were off dying for them and here they were acting like there wasn't any war at all. Whether it was some kind of defense mechanism or a way of keeping the home-world pure and unsullied, their total detachment from reality was as disconcerting as it was disgusting.

At the end of the day, wherever he was, he updated his journal, added whatever details he could to the picture he was building up. Some of it was military-scientific, most of it was about their culture and society, but all of it was potentially a source of something that might prove their undoing and his salvation.

### 32

The boy was on his way home from school, had been encircled by four older boys and was arguing with the largest of them when Draygo saw him and stopped to watch.

He was shoved, he shoved back and then his bag was grabbed out of his hands, dangled out of his reach and the contents shaken onto the ground. One of the other boys grabbed him from behind, pinning his arms, and the larger one reached into his pocket and brought out a change purse.

As the bully was opening it, the boy broke free and made a grab for it but only succeeded in knocking it out of his hands and spilling coins everywhere.

The bully lunged and a fight broke out.

The boy was giving a good account of himself, holding his own against the taller heavier opponent, when the bully switched it around in a flash, caught him off guard, got him in a nasty hold and began to pour on the pressure. The counter move was obvious but if he didn't act soon he was going to get seriously hurt.

Draygo was helplessly watching the boy start to lose consciousness, when he felt something rising up in his throat, and then a torrent of clicks, hisses and strangulated barks were vomiting forth from his mouth.

With the bully momentarily distracted by Draygo's shouts, the boy slipped out of the trap and landed a succession of sharp blows on his now exposed throat. He staggered back choking.

Clutching his bruised windpipe the shocked bully looked around at his sidekicks and croaked, "C'mon, let's get out of here. This little twerp'll keep til tomorrow."

After they had gone, the boy looked around the empty street and then looked up, saw an old woman basking in the afternoon sunshine and smoking as she leaned against the balustrade of her sixth-floor balcony, and discounted her as his savior.

Draygo crept closer, bent down and picked up a small coin and dropped it in a pocket. Sensing a movement behind him the boy spun and spoke the name filling his mind, asked the question. No one was there.

At the library the next day, bored researching their political system, he put back the book he had been studying and was aimlessly wandering the aisles, when he saw the name the boy had spoken. It was a sub-heading in the martial arts section and was on the spines of three-dozen books. He took one down and started to read.

In the boy's bedroom Draygo looked around at the walls covered with posters of the master. When help had come he'd naturally assumed it to be coming from his hero. His _dead_ hero.

The boy was getting home late from school and every day after getting shaken down for whatever pennies he had in his possession had to suffer the no-doubt galling injustice of being scolded by his mother for dawdling.

It was none of his business and he didn't give the boy's troubles another thought til, walking in the park, he saw him reading in the shade of a tree. The park wasn't on his way home from school and this studying, pleasant though the surroundings were, could have been done at home and wouldn't have earned him a maternal ear-bending. He was plainly killing time til the coast was clear.

Waiting outside the gates the next day, he saw all the other children leaving when school let out but saw no sign of the boy. He did, however, see the bullies hanging around in the shadows.

He found the boy in the park and realized he was going to get creamed when they eventually caught up with him. He also realized a little boy who believed the spirit of his hero was speaking to him could prove very useful indeed. Back at the library he read more about the master.

The boy was in the park again when Draygo approached him from behind and said, "Don't turn around, you'll see nothing if you do."

"Who are you?"

"It was I who helped you the other day."

The boy turned.

"You must show better discipline if you hope to be my pupil."

"Your pupil?"

"My pupil."

"Master?"

"Yes."

The boy caught a whiff of restaurant and said, "Do you...do you live in my attic?"

"Uh, no, that's this guy I know. He's bad news. I'm trying to get rid of him for you."

Every morning from then on Draygo researched training methods at the library and every afternoon after school they met and trained. Speed, strength, agility, flexibility, balance, awareness, control and focus were all developed, all honed.

The boy was a natural. He was small for his age but with an instinctive feel which shone through every movement. There being no one for him to spar with, Draygo got him to visualize an attacking opponent, the same routines again and again til he started to chafe under the yoke.

"But, master, why do I have to do the same thing over and over and over again?"

"Once you've seen, you can decide. Once you've decided, you can act. With practice this process becomes seamless, automatic and instantaneous."

"Will you tell me the story of your victory over the mountain giant?"

"We're not here for tittle-tattle; we're here to work, and you're wasting valuable training time."

"Yes, master."

After every session, unbeknownst to the boy, Draygo relieved him of a small coin and added it to those accumulating in the screw-top glass jar he had taken from the kitchen.

He started leaving little plates of food for him just inside the hatch, and each uneaten offering was daily taken away and replaced with a fresh one. Draygo was uneasy: It was only a matter of time before the boy's odd behavior drew his parents' attention to the half-forgotten lodger in their attic, and concern for their son's wellbeing would make their search for the truth remorseless.

They were atop a small hill at sunset and Draygo was lost in the swirling streaks of purple, green and orange subtly blurring and bleeding into each other, when the boy said, "Master, can I learn _your_ move?"

Draygo shivered and his hand went to his throat. "We'll see."

At the library he looked up the move. It was his trademark. He was the only one skilful enough, brave enough, to even attempt it. And it had killed him.

After every victory, which meant after every bout, he would step back from his opponent, bow, and execute the move to rapturous applause from the crowd.

There was, he learned, a movie.

He found a near-empty daytime screening, went in and watched what turned out to be a melodramatisation of the events leading up to his, the master's, death.

He'd been champion of the world. The week before a title defense, knowing he couldn't win by fair means, the jealous rival chose foul instead. The pretender drugged and ravished his beloved wife and then sent him the photos in an attempt to put him off his game. It was a cheap nasty trick, a nasty vicious thing to do, and it would have worked on someone with less mental discipline, with less focus.

Swaying from side to side as he entered the arena, he appeared listless, despondent. In the ring he stared at the mat, his arms slack at his sides, but seemingly by pure luck, never lifting his gaze from the floor, swayed just out the way of every attack.

Every few seconds, looking no more aware of where he was than before, his head would snap up and, dead-eyed, he would deliver a furious flurry of blows before wilting completely again like a puppet with its strings cut. Infuriated, his opponent would attack again to no more effect than before.

He was starting to puff and his face was reddening as much from exertion as from the beating he was taking. He was wearing himself out, and just as his punches started to lose all strength the master blocked, countered and gripped him in a death hold.

"Submit!"

Beaten, he gave a short nod.

He tightened his grip. "Say it!"

"I submit," he gurgled.

The master released his hold and backed away, and the snake, in one sinuous movement, drew and threw a knife.

The master parried it with his forearm but was scratched by its poisoned tip.

He staggered back.

As the grinning rat approached to savor his victory up close and personal, the fast-fading master, summoning up every last reserve, executed his move. The blow sent him flying but, without the hundred percent focus needed, he broke his own neck and only mortally wounded his enemy.

A gap opened in the crowd and the master's wife stepped through. She went to her dead husband, kissed him and, as she turned to the dying rapist-murderer, drew a knife from the folds of her robe.

He groaned as she gently tilted his head back and pressed the point of the long thin curved blade into the soft flesh under his chin. She pushed it in up to the hilt and worked it around in a circle. He stopped groaning.

A week after he'd seen the movie, after training, the boy said, "Master, you said you'd think about teaching me _your_ move."

"No."

"Why not?"

"You know why not."

The time came when the boy was ready, and instead of slipping away and hiding in the park at the end of the day he left the school gates with his classmates and walked boldly home.

They emerged from the shadows and surrounded him. He had taken two out and was dealing with the head bully, when the last remaining sidekick launched himself at his back. Draygo stuck out a leg and the would-be attacker went sprawling on the ground, knocking himself out.

Those who could, ran.

The boy picked up the abandoned leather satchel containing their ledger and the day's takings, and the next day went around the schoolyard returning everyone's money and crossing out their names in the ledger, then got the janitor to incinerate it with the trash.

That afternoon in the park, Draygo was surprised to see him sitting under his usual tree, couldn't believe the bullies were still giving him trouble. He approached him and said hello and the boy looked toward the voice and said, "The triennial citywide all-comers tournament is coming up next year. Would you...would you train me for it?"

Coaching the boy, as well as spying on generals, politicians, scientists and captains of industry, gave him the idea, a way to improve his circumstances, become independent, maybe even, with the right clients, get access to some deep secrets. He'd need a front man. He knew just the guy.

### 33

After three weeks of following him, going through official files, rooting through his private papers, he knew everything he was going to know about him and put the second phase of the plan into action.

The fakir woke and found himself gagged, tried to move and found himself tied to his bed. From the darkness Draygo began to speak. "You've always blamed yourself for your sister's drowning when she was seven and you were thirteen. You feel you've been playing a role your whole life and your deepest fear is being found out as a phony. Seven years ago, as an investigation into embezzlement at the small construction firm you worked at was closing in on you, you abandoned your wife and two children and have neither had contact with them nor provided any financial support since.

"Five years ago the bunco squad had you cold after a string of complaints from disgruntled clients. Charges were dropped when it came out the central complainant had a history of mental instability. You were engaged to be married, bigamously, two years ago but your fiancé skipped out on you with your then business partner the night before the wedding. Eighteen months ago you were arrested for possession of a controlled narcotic substance but managed to grease the right palms and escape prosecution.

"You've been secretly visiting the same hooker once a week for the last eight months. She gives you every third one free. Your bank manager has you in a red file. Red means a bad risk, strictly no credit. You have a drawer full of unpaid bills and hide in the closet whenever the debt collectors call."

He stepped forward and removed the gag.

"You're in deep shit and drowning, old son."

"Who are you? What do you want?"

He turned on the light.

"Where are you?"

He leaned into his ear and whispered, "I'm right here."

"You're here for my soul," he gasped.

"No."

"What _are_ you?"

"It doesn't matter what I am. What matters is that I can make you rich."

"I'm...I'm listening."

"What could you do with this sort of information on your clients?"

"I could...I could make a lot of money."

" _We_ could make a lot of money."

"Of course, of course...partner."

"Partner."

"Fifty-fifty?"

"Seventy-thirty."

"Sure, that's what I meant to say. Seventy-thirty."

"You have a long waiting list of clients wanting to contact the other side."

"I do?"

" _Now_ you do. Anyone wants to see you, tell them they'll have to wait at least three weeks. That'll give me time to get all the dope we'll need."

"Okay."

"And we're going to remodel and redecorate."

"Sounds expensive."

"Gotta speculate, you want to accumulate."

They sealed the deal with a drink, and got down to work the next day.

Constellations and arcane symbols on the walls were painted over, contractors knocked two large first-floor rooms into one huge consulting room, a white-painted table and white-painted chairs were placed at the center of the white-painted walls, and powerful lights were set in the ceiling above the table and in the floor below.

Heavy carpet extended into the yard high, mirror sided, floor-level alcoves let into the walls every eight feet, and more powerful lights in the back turned them into searchlights slicing and dicing the room. A concealed hatch in the top of each allowed him to come and go without using the door.

Next, Draygo moved into a suite of rooms on the third floor and set about streamlining the show. All the mechanical trickery, the fishing pole, the luminous muslin, the fake hand and all the rest of the junk, went. He did, however, when the money started to roll in, introduce the twin labor saving amenities of having a network of speaking tubes embedded into the walls and ceiling, and of having a new wiring system installed that meant he could play the room's lighting like a musical instrument.

In the beginning he'd moved about the room to make his voice come from different places, a far corner or right in the ear, whatever the situation demanded, but soon came up with the tube scheme, and once they had the funds he got the fakir to buy the materials and supervised as he did the work. The final touch: Painted over, pinprick-pierced fabric concealing tube mouths completely.

With the new arrangement he could sit in the newly constructed soundproof room manipulating the lights, speaking into the mouthpiece and flipping switches to route his voice to any part of the room, jump it from high at one end to floor level in the opposite corner.

He also looked on the set-up as an insurance policy: If the shit ever _did_ hit the fan they'd have no trouble proving fakery.

All other improvements aside, his main shtick was that, unlike all his competitors, he conducted business with the lights on. It was a simple gimmick compared to being tied up and locked in a box to 'prove' there was no trickery but it worked just fine.

Over time their performance became a work of art as they fine tuned it, honed it to a razor edge. The consultations always took place after midnight and before dawn. A car would appear outside a client's address and an apparently deaf-mute chauffeur would whisk them through the deserted streets, and then they would be kept waiting in the dark til eventually the fakir judged the moment was ripe and lit the globe in the center of the small table. The eerie up-light it cast revealed him looking like a successful scientist/businessman instead of a cut-priced wizard as he went through the pantomime of attempting to make contact with the spirit realm.

The actual meat and potatoes consisted of Draygo using the fakir as a ventriloquist dummy. His mouth flapped behind the cloth and Draygo spoke, telling their secrets, their desires and their deepest fears. Bag over his shoulder he would slip into the room to whisper in an ear and, with his footfalls deadened by the heavy carpeting, would pick up the lamp and dance it around the room. Things pulled from his bag appeared as if out of thin air. Things like a long-dead ancestor's spectacles, a dead lover's favorite bloom, some gewgaw swiped from their home, would sail around the room before disappearing as suddenly as they had appeared.

At moments of high drama he would flick the hidden switch that flashed all the lights on and off in rapid succession, alternately blinding them with light then dark.

The people who came came for different reasons, but all for the same reason: Some searching forgiveness from the dead or assurance they were not suffering, others looking for advice from some imagined spirit deity, but all easily awed by unknowable secrets and seemingly supernatural insights knitted together with cold-reading platitudes and some stale parlor-tricks, and all searching for peace of mind.

Mostly there were minnows swimming in his pond but in the depths somewhere lurked two big fish. Whatever their size they all presented tempting possibilities. The small-fry could be turned into a network of pawns. It wouldn't be a problem to string them along, keep them dependent and controllable. They were putty in his hands.

One young woman was particularly susceptible to manipulation. Plainly an undiagnosed schizophrenic tormented by voices that knew just which barb would hit the mark dead center and cause the most pain, he'd convinced her to listen to him not them, could've sent her on any errand, assigned her any task, and she would've blindly obeyed.

He could milk them dry by telling them an evil spirit had latched onto them and could only be gotten rid of by the fakir. He could introduce a threat into the life—or rather death—of their loved one that only the fakir, with his connections in the spirit world, could remove.

It was also a blackmailer's paradise.

The secrets he found out, together with the knowledge of what buttons to press, gave him complete power over them. The possibilities for profit were limitless. It was a goldmine and he couldn't touch it, couldn't afford to attract negative attention. All it would take was one pawn captured committing a crime, one mark with more spine than appearance suggested, and it could all be blown to shit.

As far as the schizophrenic girl was concerned, he contented himself with testing the extent of his powers. He got her to accept her voices' valid criticisms and make changes, and, by demonstrating practically the falsity of their lies, got her to reject the invalid ones. He even discovered a traumatic childhood experience which he came to believe had triggered the deluge of self loathing she was inflicting on herself and got her to realize she wasn't to blame. Within a month she was starting to stand on her own feet, to stand up to her voices and convert them from enemies into allies.

He caught them and then released them and received a steady flow of cash from a steady flow of happy customers. And anyway, hooking the big ones depended on the reputation he was patiently building up working with the little ones.

Everything was running like clockwork. Even the fakir, the loose canon who could've sunk them with one rash act, was behaving himself, had set up home with his hooker in a little apartment nearby and had started anonymously sending money to his family.

The prize catches, however, remained elusive.

While he waited he kept himself busy working on his secret weapon: The meticulous, painstakingly compiled dossiers on anyone he had identified as possibly in possession of either secret military information or a fat roll.

He went through all the paperwork in their houses, safe-deposit boxes and lawyers' safes, went through all the official records on them, followed them, sat in on their therapy sessions, was even able to listen in on their dreams by means of a few drops of the clear liquid the fakir had supplied which made them talk in their sleep.

He patiently accumulated levers to pull, buttons to press. But none of them took the bait. None of them responded to the business cards sent them. In fact the only person of interest who ever _did_ turn up at his door, he didn't even have a file on, had discounted as a profitable subject for his attentions based on her noisy and public advocacy of rationalism over superstition, on her successful scientific career.

She didn't make the approach herself but instead sent her butler to politely request an immediate session. She was plainly attempting to forestall any research into her, and the fakir refused, saying there was a long line of people who had been patiently waiting their turn. He offered to pay triple the standard rate. The fakir didn't budge. His word was his bond, he said. He politely requested a home visit. The fakir closed his eyes and frowned for a moment and then opened them and said, "To have any chance of success the contact must be attempted at an energy node, a nexus in the network of force lines encircling the globe. _This_ building is dead center of one of the most powerful nodes on the entire planet. I will, however, make an attempt at your employer's place on the understanding that the session will be merely a demonstration of my abilities, and that if she is serious then a further attempt will be made here."

He thought for a moment and then politely accepted the proposal.

When he left, Draygo followed, and when he got behind the wheel of an ancient and luxurious tourer, Draygo stepped onto the running board and grabbed a handle.

The car wove its way sedately through the city traffic and out into the countryside. After twenty miles of fields, hills and woods they turned onto a tree lined driveway that went on for another three-quarters of a mile before coming to an end in front of a huge mansion.

He followed the butler into the house, through the hall and into an opulent drawing room, and then listened as he walked up to the elderly woman standing by the open window, the evening breeze on her face, and said, "He's agreed to come here."

"Thank you, Peter."

He wandered around the house, gathering information, checking out her wealth. As a case it was pedestrian: Her only child, a daughter, had died age six more than forty years ago and it'd been eating her up ever since. The amount of dough she was sitting on, however, was anything _but_ pedestrian.

On the first floor there was a ballroom a hundred people wouldn't even have put a dent in and a kitchen that looked like it belonged in a large restaurant rather than a private home. Hundreds of oil paintings, not the dull portraits of ancestors you'd expect but attractive landscapes and scenes from nature, lined the corridors.

On the second floor he had seen at least thirty luxury bedrooms when he started to find the doors locked. Corridor after corridor of locked doors with God-knew-what treasures behind them. His mind filled with images of antiques, jewelry and art. All of it priceless. All of it readily turned into cold hard cash.

The grounds, in keeping with everything else, were more like a public park than a private garden and must've consumed the labor of a small army to keep in the exquisite state they were kept in.

He returned to the child's spotless shrine of a bedroom, went through it for levers and lit on a lovingly darned stuffed animal posed in a chair.

Having seen what he wanted, gotten what he wanted, he found a telephone extension in a far-flung part of the house, found a cab number and dialed.

Thirty minutes later a cabbie was ringing the front bell. Two minutes after that, the fuming cabbie was stomping back to his cab, furious at the dirty trick pulled on him. He cursed all the way back to town, oblivious to Draygo on his running board.

He fell asleep that night dreaming of doors and what lay behind them.

They rang her doorbell on the stroke of midnight, had walked the entire length of the drive in order to achieve a mysterious arrival. She answered the door herself, and, while the fakir exchanged pleasantries with her, Draygo went straight to the drawing room.

He'd checked it out thoroughly last visit, had paced out dimensions, committed layout to memory, and was just making last checks that the routine they'd worked out wouldn't encounter any unexpected hitches, that he'd remembered correctly, that no furniture had been moved.

Everything was perfect. She was going to get a crackerjack show, was going to get her mind blown.

They started with a few minutes of mumbling and then got going with the ventriloquism. From all parts of the room came vague half-heard words suggestive of red-raw pain, hollowness, death. Things flew around. Other things appeared out of nowhere, flew around and then disappeared again. Finally the lights flicked rapidly on and off til the main fuse box blew and the whole house was plunged into darkness.

Presently the butler appeared with a lit candle and placed it on the table between them. The woman leaned toward the fakir and into the pool of light.

"That was...amazing."

"Ma'am?"

"What just happened, what you just did, was more than I ever dared hope possible."

"Tonight was an abject failure, ma'am. Being this far from my place, from the energy node it sits at the center of, all I can pick up are faint echoes and dim reflections."

"Then we'll try at yours."

"I'd be honored, ma'am," he said as he bowed his head.

The day before the one fixed for their second attempt he rang her requesting she bring some object the child had been close to both physically and emotionally, something that might still retain a residual trace of her psychic energy. She knew just the thing: A stuffed animal she'd taken everywhere with her. He thought it sounded ideal.

She arrived in her own car and, squinting, was ushered into the dazzling consulting room. She tried to shade her eyes but the floor lights wouldn't let her.

"Could you turn the lighting down a tad?"

"Ma'am, we're hoping to be a beacon in the darkness."

"Oh, yes, of course, sorry."

She handed over the stuffed animal and the fakir placed it in an ornate metal bowl in the center of the table, and then they sat down across from each other and he took her right hand in his left, her left hand in his right. For a minute and a half, eyes closed, he breathed in and out, in and out, and then opened his eyes, draped the cloth over his head, took her hands again and started to mumble and rock back and forth.

Presently she became aware of whispering voices circling the room. The whispering became faster and faster as his chanting and rocking became louder and faster til, just as she was beginning to think he must be on the verge of flying apart at the seams, he stopped dead and the whispering stopped dead with him.

He cocked his head under the cloth for a moment and then began to slowly chant. Draygo started whispering again and started to switch the odd light on and off in time with the fakir's words. He flicked switches faster and faster as the fakir mumbled faster and faster, and then all he was doing was cranking the dimmer up and down as fast as he could, then _everything_ , floor, ceiling and alcove lights, on full as he reached a fever pitch of mumbling and twitching.

And then he froze, jerked bolt upright and, as the lights dimmed to nothing with him, crumpled in a heap on the table.

He hadn't moved for thirty seconds and she made to get up but the hands holding hers gripped tighter and she lowered herself back to the chair.

Presently, through his hands, she felt the tiniest of twitches. And then another. The lights were starting to slowly slowly brighten. She watched. A stronger twitch, a general stirring and then he was slowly slowly raising himself up.

Upright, his mouth started to move under the cloth and a voice boomed from all sides of the room simultaneously.

"Welcome, brother."

"Greetings, brother," said the fakir in his own voice.

"What brings you this way?"

"Brother, I have a friend wishing news of a loved one."

"A good friend?"

"She _is_ a good friend."

"Who does she seek?"

"A girl. A child. Her child. Gone over these past forty years, in our terms."

"By now she'll either have adjusted or her energy will have dispersed to the four winds."

The woman gasped.

"Would you try and contact her, brother?"

"I'll put out some feelers."

The fakir's head dropped forward and the lights brightened and dimmed with his breathing. After a minute he raised his head and the voice spoke again "I have spoken with her. She is well."

"Can I speak with her?" said the woman.

"Brother, my good friend asks if it is possible for her to speak with her daughter."

"As you know, it's very difficult."

"But not impossible.

"Impossible? No."

"Please ask him to _try_."

"Will you do us the great service of making the attempt."

"For you, my brother, I will try."

The fakir's head dropped forward and the room was still save for his breathing and the lights brightening and dimming.

Draygo fitted the box of tricks onto the mouthpiece, set the dials, routed his voice to the ceiling above her head and with a young girl's pitch and tone whispered, "Mommy?"

The woman squinted upward into the glare. "Baby?"

"Mommy!"

"Oh, my darling, my darling, my sweet sweet child. I love you _so_ much."

"I love you too, Mommy."

"Are you happy, my love? Are you safe?"

"Oh yes, Mommy. Did you know Muffy is here?"

"That's wonderful, my love."

"There _is_ one thing."

" _What is it, my darling?_ "

"I'm always worried that—"

A nerve shredding scream accompanied by insanely strobing lights filled the room for a second before being suddenly cut off when the stuffed animal burst into flames as the lights blew.

In the darkness the flames flickered and the fakir groaned then managed to say, "The spirit bridge is broken, has failed catastrophically."

"What happened?"

He removed the cloth from his head and said, "Who's Muffy?"

"Her dog. They were inseparable."

"That's unlikely to be the source of the problem."

"What _happened?_ "

"I was concerned a malign entity might have intervened. But in reality it's most likely just a question of power. As powerful as he is, he just didn't have the strength to keep the bridge open."

"Malign entity?"

"Like everywhere, there are the good and the bad, the weak and the strong."

The fakir closed his eyes and presently started to groan.

"Are you hurt, brother?"

"Maintaining the connection, it is...it is...tiring," came the voice from every direction.

"My brother, we are forever in your debt. Go rest now."

"I will go...and rest."

The lights came back to life and brightened and the exhausted fakir smiled weakly at the woman. She didn't respond, didn't notice, was transfixed by the charred remains in the middle of the table.

"That can happen, ma'am. If the connection is broken in an uncontrolled way."

Her chauffeur/butler appeared at her side, she stood and he crooked an arm for her to lean on as he shepherded her out and to her car.

For the next two weeks the drapes remained drawn and the fakir didn't answer the door or phone or leave the house. He got the maid to do the shopping and call clients to postpone their sessions. If she happened to be around when the phone or doorbell rang she would answer it and tell the caller the fakir was indisposed until further notice. He took it easy, slobbed around the house, even got laid when his woman would come over disguised as a nurse.

When she had stewed long enough he phoned her, told her he had been meditating, recuperating spiritually. She wanted to come right over. He advised against it, told her the damage to the node, the disturbance in the energy-flow matrix, must be allowed to heal, but he would come to see her immediately if she so desired. She so desired.

Draygo slid into the back seat of the taxi next to the fakir, and when they arrived at the house the butler/chauffeur led them through to the drawing room.

As they entered she stood and said, "When can we try again?"

"Ma'am, the damage we did to the node notwithstanding, since our last attempt I haven't been able to raise my guide. And you must remember, you're not the only one inconvenienced. I've had to disappoint a lot of important clients."

"I'm sorry."

"No matter, no matter. I _hope_ he's on the mend. I _hope_ the strain hasn't taken him from us forever."

"Is there really _no_ way?"

The fakir closed his eyes, was silent for a moment and then opened them and said, "There is a tale told of an object of immense power, an object from over there lost over here, an object able to facilitate _direct_ contact with the other side. _If_ it exists, _if_ it could be located, _if_ it could be obtained, it would be expensive."

Tears started to roll down her cheeks but her voice was clear and strong.

"Expensive?"

"Expensive to the _ordinary_ person, ma'am, not to someone in _your_ position."

"I haven't a penny to my name."

The fakir opened his mouth and Draygo started to speak. Out of force of habit the fakir flapped silently along as Draygo said, "Forgive me for being indelicate, ma'am, but how can you be short of funds when you live in such a splendid manner?"

Staring at her hands, she hadn't noticed the mis-match between sound and lips. She looked up and looked around the room. "This stuff? I never needed, never wanted, any of it. Just had nowhere else to go."

"Ma'am?" said the fakir.

"My husband was the only surviving member of a very _very_ rich family. He was a beautiful person but he was also a fool. After he died, all _his_ money and all _my_ money went on paying off his debts."

"But all the servants."

"There's only Peter and he's not a servant. In the new year he's going to use his savings to buy us into his cousin's restaurant. He's going to be head waiter and I'll keep the books. There's a small apartment above we'll live in."

"But this magnificent house, the grounds."

"The bank has owned everything for years now. They hire it out for weddings. At least five times a month I'm a maid and a cleaner."

He got hold of a pass key, opened locked doors and saw dust covered dustcovers over worm infested furniture, peeled paper hanging on by the skin of its teeth from moldy walls and ceilings, raddled paint, rotten drapes which disintegrated at the slightest touch, baseboards gnawed to pieces by the same unwelcome guests who'd left the little piles of droppings everywhere.

A week later the fakir phoned her with the news that his spirit guide had been in touch, had made a miraculous recovery and was even stronger than ever. And when he brought her daughter to talk with her a second time it turned out all she was worried about was her mother's happiness. She was horrified and bemused to discover that _she_ was worrying about _her_. After all, she was in heaven with her dog and all her playmates and had an eternity of happiness to look forward to. And anyway, they would be together again in the fullness of time, which of course for her meant the blink of an eye. After she had made her mother promise to be happy and to not worry about her, they bade their tearful adieus.

The next day, trying to distract himself from the whole fiasco, Draygo was walking in the park when who should he see but the old guy parked up in his usual spot next to the bench. He went over and sat down and, just like old times, he started to talk at him. He let him go on for a few minutes and then, as he was drawing breath, said, "What do you think of the war?"

Not missing a beat he replied, "War is a terrible thing, a curse, a plague on the people."

"No, what do you think about _the_ war?"

"Terrible."

"The war with the aliens?"

"The people you have a war with are always aliens. That's how you're able to have a war with them."

As he adjusted the sun shade attached to his bath chair he said, "You know what I liked about you? You were always such a good listener."

He got the shade fixed where they were both covered and said, "That's better."

He went back the next day to try and pin him down on the war but he wasn't there. When he didn't show up the following day either, Draygo decided to track him down. He'd heard so many stories about the nursing home he lived in, he had no doubts about recognizing it if he saw it.

Wandering the neighborhoods fronting the park, looking for a landmark from the old geezer's ramblings, he saw the nurse and followed her to the home. He went through the whole place from top to bottom. There was no sign of him. He got their number, went and found a pay phone in a deserted alley, called them and learned that the old guy had died in his sleep two days previously, that the funeral was tomorrow morning at eleven in the chapel attached to the home.

### 34

From the very first the rooms, with their shrunken parody furniture and odd smell, had given her the creeps. She'd never been alone in the house before and wouldn't have been here now if she'd had any choice in the matter. As she stole down the corridor, keys in one hand, jug in the other, she shuddered and thought to herself what a fool the old charlatan was to lay it on with a trowel for the suckers even behind closed doors. She comforted herself with thoughts of her beau waiting for her in the bar around the corner, and of his trusty old jalopy outside ready to whisk them away. It was just like him to spring something like this on her without thinking about the practicalities but a romantic road trip _was_ a lovely surprise and the fakir could manage perfectly well on his own for a week, but if the plants died she wouldn't have a job when she got back. She congratulated herself on the foresight she'd shown in having a copy of the keys made. He wouldn't have been happy if he'd known, but he wouldn't know and he wouldn't know she'd forgotten to water his precious plants.

He stood in front of the full length mirror and regarded himself. Not himself, of course, what with him not having a reflection and all, but rather the hooded robe he was draped in, the disguise he hoped to go out in and talk to people as himself rather than as a disembodied voice.

He put on the mask he had fashioned from pulped paper and painted with poster color and pulled up his hood, thinking how he could present himself to the world—A sickly child? A disfigured midget?—and decided he didn't look like anything that could be convincingly explained away.

Fuck it! He flung back the hood, tore off the mask and a shrill scream stabbed him in the back. He spun and saw the maid in the doorway, a smashed jug on the floor.

She slipped the key into the lock and silently opened the door. There was something standing looking in the mirror: A stunted goblin bewitched by its own reflection. It threw back its hood, ripped off its head and stood there headless. She screamed and let go of the jug. The creature whirled, the jug smashed and she ran.

Wrenching open the outside door and charging through she crashed straight into the parcel-laden fakir. As he picked her up from the floor, through her babblings, he pieced together what must have happened.

"My dear girl, my dear girl, you've worked yourself into a dangerous state."

He sat her in a chair and went and closed the door.

"You'll get hurt running amok in the street," he said as he prepared a draught for her. "Here. Drink this," he said as he passed her the tall glass.

She drank, her heavy eyelids fluttered and her head fell forward. As she slept he went upstairs and opened the door. "Psst! Psst! Are you there?"

"Yes."

"The girl's sleeping. What shall we do?"

"Bring up the hat stand, put these rags here on it and tell her it's an outfit for a puppet you're having made for the act. Then tell her she's been working too hard and give her enough money to take a well earned vacation."

He set up the scene and then roused the girl with a whiff from the appropriate bottle. As she came round he talked gently to her, and then supported her upstairs to show her that what she'd thought was a demon was in fact nothing more otherworldly than a puppet's clothes, but she had a robust constitution and rallied more quickly than he'd anticipated.

"That is _not_ what I saw. I saw this withered little creature. And it was headless!"

She shrugged herself free, darted for the stairs and had just yanked the street door open and crashed into her beau when he caught up with her.

"Let's get the hell out, baby. There's something _unnatural_ in here."

"What!?"

"The girl is simply hallucinating through overwork."

"I've learned to believe it if she says it's so. What's going on here?"

"He has some _creature_ upstairs. That's _how_ he does it."

He looked at her properly for the first time and saw she was woozy and glassy-eyed. He leaned toward her, sniffed and said, "You've been doped! I'm fetching a cop."

"Merely a calming relaxant of the nerves."

" _Stop!_ "

They turned and saw a small casket floating in the middle of the room. It started to move toward them, the lid opened and the gold coins inside seethed and bubbled, jumped up in the air and then fell back down among their churning brothers.

The casket stopped a foot from his stomach.

"Promise to hold your tongue and it's yours," came a voice from thin air.

"Bluh?"

"Promise!"

"I p..p..promise."

The lid snapped shut and the chest shot at him. He grabbed it, took the girl's hand and backed into the street.

"Be true to your word," the voice whispered in his ear.

### 35

He was on his way to meet the boy for the final training session before the tournament when he heard the news: Contact had been made with a sentient alien species and their emissaries were going to be presented to the public on the morning of the 14th. The same day as the tournament.

After the session was over he sat the boy down and said, "I'm very proud of you. You've worked very hard and have surpassed all my hopes for your progress. You have a natural gift, an instinct."

"Thank you, master."

"About the tournament. I'll be there watching, of course, but I'll say nothing. Know I'm there supporting you, willing you on, but I'll be silent. Now it's up to you."

"Don't worry, master. I won't let you down."

The crowd in front of the screen in the central square was huge but with care he was reasonably safe on the edge. They waited for hours and then there they were, beamed live from the capital, sandwiched between two bigwigs on the balcony, three small pink frail-looking creatures. Humans!

It didn't make sense.

The camera zoomed in and he saw them up close. The untranzed guy in the short, powder-blue, ermine-fringed ambassadorial cape had lost thirty pounds and had a new rug but it was him all right: The Government. Was he a collaborator? A fifth columnist? Or was this a peace negotiation? Whatever he was up to, the guy looked like the years since he last saw him out of the shell had been spent in the gym rather than the tub. But on the other hand his obvious awkwardness spoke of someone unused to being untranzed.

It didn't make sense. None of it made sense.

He began to speak. After five minutes, not wanting to get caught up in the mass exodus when it came and not wanting to be bored to death— he could tell by his tone and body language that he was just getting into his stride, just warming up for one of his famously interminable speeches—he left.

.

Even though it took him more than an hour to get across town he still expected to be in plenty of time and was surprised to see people streaming out as he arrived. As he got closer he sensed something strange in the atmosphere. Small groups were forming to whisper and shake their heads. He sidled up to one and listened.

"Why'd he do it?"

"What the hell was he thinking?"

"Who was he trying to impress?"

His spine turned to ice.

He waited and then, when the surge of people leaving the arena started to subside, made his way as quickly as he could to the entrance. Once inside he managed to work his way to the central mat and saw, covered with a sheet, a small lump. He looked at the main board and saw the boy's name flashing victoriously. Off to one side he saw another boy dressed for competition shaking and being comforted by his mother and father.

The official standing next to the lump finished writing on his clipboard and started toward the other boy and his parents. Draygo moved closer and looked at the lump as he listened.

"I'm pleased to be able to tell you it's been determined your son was in no way responsible for the incident."

"Well obviously. He never touched him."

"Quite. But, as I'm sure you can appreciate, in a case like this we have to go by the book."

"Little runt broke his own neck."

"It was undoubtedly an amazing feat of acrobatics but, as you say, the child broke his own neck."

"Sheer showboating, you ask me."

"Try and show a little class, Harry."

Sitting at the top of the hill he looked at the sunset-tinted clouds and saw a jumble of discordant hues swirled together by a color-blind madman. He looked toward the town and saw it for what it was: A filthy dung-heap crawling with giant bugs. He marveled that he'd managed to kid himself it was anything different. What the hell had he been thinking? He had to get away, hitch a ride home. If he couldn't escape then he'd have to...He'd cross that bridge when he came to it.

He boarded the flight to the capital and spent the journey mentally preparing himself to speak his own tongue for the first time in years and praying the Government didn't recognize him.

### 36

When he arrived the meeting was in recess and he tailgated into the greenroom behind a waiter carrying a tray of refreshments for the human delegation. The waiter transferred the drinks and nibbles from the tray to the table, bowed, and closed the door behind him as he left.

He took his first good look at the humans. They looked weak and fragile and they smelled.

Deep in conference, not one of them showed the slightest reaction to his presence. He cleared his throat, they looked around and then returned to their discussion. They couldn't see him. He'd assumed, he realized, they'd be able to, but it made sense they couldn't.

"I'm a human. I was sent here to—"

A thicket of pistols appeared pointing in his general direction.

"Show yourself!"

"I can't. I'm invisible. I'm a human sent here to spy on the roaches."

"It's just one of them with one of their translation devices. It's just some roach trick."

"Look, I'm going to sit in this chair here."

He pulled out a chair and sat down.

"I'm sitting right here. Someone just come over and feel me."

The Government nodded to two of his party, they approached Draygo from either side and after some exploratory fumbling each took hold of a wrist and an elbow and expertly pinned him.

"You got him?"

"He ain't going nowhere, boss."

The Government laid his pistol on the table in front of him and said, "Well?"

"I've been keeping a journal. I know everything there is to know about them. I can't see anything useful in it but maybe your analysts, if they went through it, could find something to help win the war."

"War!? How do you know about that? That's an ultra-secret. Have you told any of the roaches?"

"No."

"How long've you been here?"

"Near as I can tell, about three Earth years."

"Earth years! Whose side are you on you fucking madman, you lying fuck."

"I'm sorry. I've been a little out of touch."

"Well I'll just fill you in, shall I, tell you what your good pals have been up to. Pin your ears back, cocksucker."

"Go ahead."

"Just before we made contact _eighteen months ago_ there was some sort of Tranz glitch. Everyone, Tranzed _and_ untranzed, was swapped, for a moment saw simultaneously through the eyes of another."

"Eighteen months ago?"

"Almost to the day."

"I don't remember that."

"No one _Tranzed_ does."

"How is that even possible?"

"We don't know."

"What does it mean?"

"What it _means_ is invasion. They just swap minds wholesale, Earth to here."

"What would that gain them?"

"Earth! Hell, they could do twenty swaps and have control of the whole planet but we think they intend to maroon the entire species on this godforsaken mudball."

Because that's what you'd do in their position, he though.

"What's your plan?"

The Government's eyes narrowed. "You sure _sound_ like a roach spy."

"I told you. I'm a human."

"I don't know who or what you are, buddy, but I don't like loose ends and you're just one big, fat loose end."

He picked up his gun and pointed it at the empty chair. "Hold him steady, boys."

A lieutenant bent to his ear and whispered. He listened and then de-cocked the gun. "It's your lucky day. You're coming back to Earth with us."

"Thank God."

"Just keep right next to me."

"I...There's something I need to do."

"Jesus Christ, you're shacked up with one of these things, aren't you."

"No."

"If it's not some major sabotage, I don't want to know."

"I need to sabotage their...their communication network."

"Planetwide?"

"Intergalactic."

"Fuck yeah! Be here this time the day after tomorrow."

The door opened and they all stood and followed the usher into the corridor. In the doorway the Government turned and said, "Don't be late, cocksucker."

Draygo was picking at the untouched food and thinking about what lay in wait for him at home, when the wall-speaker crackled to life.

"Why have you placed one hundred twenty-six satellites in orbit around our world?"

"Twenty-three."

"Twenty-three overt and one hundred three covert."

"We want to learn about you, to understand and thereby foster good relations between our two great peoples."

### 37

When he got home the place was bedlam, was crammed with people there on the strength of rumors that had leaked out about the maid and her beau's new found wealth. Their lavish wedding and generally extravagant expenditure had, unsurprisingly, given it away. Drunk, they had been pressed and had spilled the beans.

There were two distinct groups shouting insults at each other: Mystics there to get evidence for their cause, and rationalists bent on debunking the sham.

He managed to get upstairs and had just forced the coin jar into his bag when he noticed the journals, all his research. With the jar, there was only room for one.

He was looking through them, trying to decide which would be the most valuable, when he came across one of his first conversations with the boy, closed the book and jammed it in next to the jar.

He had made it down the stairs without incident and was nearly at the door when his foot snagged something, a net fell to the floor beside him and all hell broke loose.

A tall thin individual started to fit and the one standing next to him began to scream, "It's taking possession of brother Frank! It's taking possession of brother Frank!"

The rationalists jeered and catcalled, the mystics gave loud thanks for the miracle they were witnessing and he slipped away under cover of the melee.

The old man on the stall outside the funeral home snoozed as Draygo exchanged the jar for a clump of purple bush and a transparent capsule of an oily yellow liquid. Inside, the boy, laid out on a bed of succulent vegetation, looked like the main course of a seafood special.

His family made a tight little group at the front. Squeezed onto the rows of benches behind them he recognized his neighbors, classmates, teacher and, he couldn't be sure, but what looked like one of the bullies.

He let everyone else go up and pay their respects, say their farewells and return to their seats, and then forced himself to move. He drew close and looked at the boy and felt nothing. The child was dead. It was born, it lived and then it died.

Lost in their own thoughts, nobody noticed him reach into his bag and pull off a hunk of the purple bush and add it to the deathbed. There were, however, gasps when the oil from the broken capsule landed on the bush and heavy coils of sickly-sweet smoke started to curl upward. He took a last look and slipped away.

He only just made the flight in time and spent the nine hour trip constantly on the move to avoid discovery. He was going to get in only just before the time the Government had specified but as he was going to go straight to his ship it shouldn't be a problem. He also had his pistol should he have to shoot his way in. He'd have liked more bullets but if he couldn't get aboard then one was all he'd need.

### 38

After they had touched down at the capital he had to force himself to wait til all the passengers and crew had left before hurrying down the steps just before the ground crew uncoupled them.

The human ship was in a restricted part of the port. He hitched a ride on the outside of an electric buggy headed the right direction, hopped off as it neared the wire, and had just made it through the outer security cordon when the roar of engines firing up froze his blood. He got through the inner check, saw the ship rising on a cloud of dust and flame and turned and ran.

Swaying and sweating as he waited his chance to slip through to the main part of the port, the pressure inside his skull building, he looked up and watched the ship shrink to a dot. As it disappeared hundreds, thousands, of other dots appeared and bolts of light started to flash and turn them into puffs of fire. As they got bigger and bigger there were less and less of them as more and more were turned into balls of flame by the automated shield. They would've achieved terminal velocity in the upper atmosphere but by a disconcerting trick of the eye seemed to be growing bigger faster and faster the closer they got. Planetwide, only a fraction would get through. But that, of course, would be no consolation to those caught in a blast.

Just as it began to dawn on him that his head was going to explode if he couldn't escape, the group of mesmerized security guards who had been blocking his exit parted to allow some sort of petty official and his entourage through and he seized his opportunity. On the other side of the wire he stumbled upon an unattended buggy and took it. Nobody looked twice as he raced it across the open concrete. Nobody paid attention to an apparently runaway buggy. They had their minds on other things.

He had made it out of the port and onto the freeway turned parking lot and was halfway to the city when the whine of the motor became a tired hum and then died altogether. The buggy rolled to a halt and he got out and started to run.

One landed over the horizon in the west, too far away to be anything more than a breeze by the time the unleashed energy had made its way around the curve of the planet. One landed to the south. Close. He flung himself down. There was a roar then a burning blast that picked him up and threw him twenty feet. Too far away but way too close. He staggered to his feet and started to run. He didn't know where he was running; he just knew to run, knew if he stopped running he'd have to use the pistol.

It wasn't long before he realized he wasn't going to make it on foot, wherever _it_ was. Shivering now, he pulled out the gun and approached a stopped car, keys in the ignition, engine running, driver standing next to it staring skyward. He got in and fumbled it into gear. The owner didn't react so he pocketed the gun, got the car turned around and, weaving through the stationary traffic, set off again.

Blinking icy sweat from his eyes he saw the fading outer-edge of a blast bite a huge chunk out of the skyline ahead. Wrestling with the wheel, he only just avoided a smash-up when the pressure wave hit.

He found an off ramp and as he was racing through the outskirts of the city saw screaming people running in every direction, masonry raining down on the street. A chunk the size of a house landed directly in his path, he swerved, a tree jumped out in front of him and he saw stars, clambered out and started to run.

Clutching the gun in his pocket, every moment expecting his skull to burst open, he ran blindly through the blitz and his feet took him to the shrink's door.

He slipped into the room and, twitching in the shadows as the shrink wrote up his notes, thought he looked tired, older. Presently he stole over and sat opposite him. He carried on writing. Draygo stared and then, without realizing what he was doing, reached out to touch him. His hand made contact and the shrink raised his head and looked him straight in the eye. "Hey, dragoman! You made it!"

Shaking and open-mouthed, Draygo stared.

"Hey, buddy, it's me. Your old pal lucifer. You all set for the apocalypse?"

Draygo carried on staring.

"We seem not to be on the same wavelength here."

The shrink twisted a knob on the small box hung on his belt.

"You can see me."

"Yes, dragoman."

"What do you want?"

" _Want_ , dragoman?"

"You know my name. You're waiting for me. What do you want?"

"I'm lucifer. I shine the light."

"Light?"

"Can you see in the dark, dragoman?"

He shook his head.

"Neither can I."

A movement caught his eye and he saw, inside his patched shorts and vest, slick with sweat, a small thin pinky-brown creature with long lank hair and an unkempt beard. Somehow he had a reflection again.

"I killed a child."

"Nothing you did for good or ill made any difference. They all died anyway, and their bones lie untouched where they fell."

"Was it all just an illusion then?"

" _They_ were real. _You_ were a ghost from the future."

"I came before, in the future."

"It's the future now. You came in the past."

"But what about everybody?"

"They're _all_ dead, dragoman. Everyone I ever cared about, everyone I ever knew, everyone except the raving lunatics who were immune like myself."

"Everyone?"

"Take a look out the window."

He looked and saw silence. No missiles, no defensive energy-beams, no scurrying people, no movement at all. In fact it didn't look like somewhere movement ever had been or ever would be possible.

The crumbling buildings looked like one strong gust, one good shove, would topple them, everywhere small trees grew through the cracks, and hundreds of shells—all that remained of the city's inhabitants once decomposition and wild animals had done their work—littered the streets.

To himself he whispered, "Dust. All dust."

He turned.

"The humans?"

"Yes."

"But the shield..."

"They, you, found a way around it."

"What...what happened?"

"Our representatives met and we found out about each other. The last thing your ambassador said before departing for good was that we represented a bad example. Do you understand what he meant? It was the subject of much debate."

"They have very fixed ideas of right and wrong. They're very moral people."

He rolled the ball he had been toying with across the floor and it came to rest at Draygo's feet. He tried to look away from the blue-green iridescent globe slightly smaller than a tennis ball but couldn't.

"Pick it up. It's quite harmless. Now."

Trembling, he bent down and picked it up.

"You recognize it?"

"No...Yes."

"You, we, came bearing gifts. It's an egg, or rather a container for a million microscopic eggs that hatch and grow into pinhead-size wasps that find a body, burrow into the brain, take it over, enslaving but not killing the victim, and then lay their eggs in the living host."

As Draygo listened, his face turned gray, tremors swept his body, and his mind started to shut down.

"The victims just stare at the TV feeding their faces as the eggs hatch and the larvae feast on their brain. When they've grown fat they transform into wasps and eat their way out and the whole cycle starts over again."

Draygo bent double and retched up his breakfast.

"Being born pregnant and reaching maturity in three days, they were able to wrap up the whole job in a little over a month. Because they're encephalotropic, only the insane were left alone."

Draygo wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "And we were protected because our mingled brainwaves fooled them."

The shrink nodded.

"I didn't know."

"Then or now?"

"I don't know."

"You know now."

"What are you going to do to me?"

"I'm going to listen to you."

"And judge me?"

"No, dragoman. Why don't you take a seat."

Draygo sat back down and said, "Do you know why I was sent here. I was sent here to find a once-and-for-all answer to the roach problem. And now you're telling me...telling me I already...already _killed_ everyone years ago."

"A brain is a very efficient data processing device but as with all such devices faulty input leads to faulty output."

"What do you want from me?"

"You have your role to play. For myself, there are thousands of small colonies scattered and isolated. Left alone they might flourish, might blossom. I want you to end what you call 'the war' and then...and then I want to join my loved ones."

He reached a clammy hand into his pocket, gripped the pistol, pulled it out and held it loosely at his side.

"How do you know when and where I've been? How do you know I have a role? And how did you know to wait for me? You're behind this, aren't you."

"No, dragoman."

"If not you, then someone behind you. Whose plan is it?"

"It's nobody's plan. It's just the plan."

Breathing fast and shallow, he raised the pistol and shakily leveled it at the shrink.

"Tell me."

"I know what I know and no more."

"I have to get away from here. How do I get back home?"

"Of that, dragoman, I have no idea."

"How'd I get home before?"

"I don't know. One minute you were there, the next you weren't."

He forced himself to take a deep breath, and let the gun drop to his side.

"Do you...do you know something that looks like a huge floating black disk but is actually a ball, a doorway of some kind? Do you know something like that?"

"What you describe sounds like something from mythology. An energy focusing lens known as the Eye of God. Children call it the Wishing Star."

"As in the Wishing Star Tales?"

"You've read them? You can read our language?

"Yes."

"Speak it too?"

Draygo nodded.

The shrink flicked a switch on the small box hung on his belt.

"I don't know how you get home, but I do know you must dree your weird. You must pull back the veil, dragoman."

Bug-eyed, Draygo raised the pistol, pressed the muzzle against his right temple, opened his mouth and then, as he started to squeeze the trigger, let out an unhinged wailing scream.

A small shiny triangle appeared out of thin air, floating in the middle of the room like a metallic butterfly somehow able to hover without beating its wings. As it suddenly became aware of the laws of physics and dropped toward the floor it grew longer, became a blade leaving in its wake a slit that became a leaf-shaped rent and then the girl burst through, leveled her gun at the shrink and blew his head off. She did a double take, knocked the gun out of Draygo's hand, then grabbed him and dragged him into the rift.

### 39

In the brilliant white, up lit, down lit and side lit corridor, she caught her breath and he sweated and shivered.

"What just happened, Georg? I was in the middle of eating and next thing I know I'm...rescuing you."

"I needed your help."

"Where've you been hiding? I can't stall them much longer."

He held out a trembling hand. "Can I borrow your gun."

"I _guess_ so."

She looked him up and down and said, "What the fuck _happened_ to you?"

"Time flew."

He looked down the corridor, closed his eyes for a moment and then opened them again. Strolling around the corner, engrossed in the contents of a clipboard, came the director.

"Hold it right there."

With the gun shoved into the small of the director's back, Draygo closed his eyes again, and when he opened them the three of them were behind two armed guards standing in the control room doorway. Startled, they turned and he ordered them all out into the corridor. He stabbed at the control panel with the gun and held their gaze as the metal door slid down. When it had closed he stared at it and the edges grew white hot and fused with the frame. He turned and saw the control room operatives staring open mouthed. "Everybody out!" The girl looked at him and nodded to the door. He closed his eyes and when he opened them again only the two of them remained.

"What...what did you do with them, Georg? Are they dead?"

The main screen started to blip. She turned and saw a starburst of emergency pods arcing away.

"What the _fuck_ is going on, Georg?"

"Before you act, you must decide. Before you decide, you must see."

"And what does _that_ mean?"

"We use this place as a broadcast station so we assumed that's all it was. It focuses energy, concentrates it onto one spot. This is the Wishing Star and I'm the forlorn hope."

He sat at a console and two new buttons grew out of blank metal.

"I'm going to restore everyone's memories and then I'm going to permanently wreck the Tranz process."

"Whoa, back on up there a second. That's exactly what the roaches _and_ the collaborators want, exactly what you were sent to stop."

"Is it? I get the feeling _everyone's_ been jerking me around."

"Why two?"

"What?"

"Why two buttons? SMD only affects the shell. End Tranz and everyone would automatically stop forgetting anyway."

"This way just seems...right."

He was right, she realized. After they unmerged, people would have a physical premonition of the impending disconnection, an anxious tingling in their guts and extremities, weeks before Tranz finally ended for good. It was better his way, in two stages, but how could he have known? And then she realized he didn't know, not consciously anyway. All things considered, it would actually have been strange if he _hadn't_ picked up on something.

"You look _terrible_ , Georg."

She put the back of her hand to his forehead.

"You're burning up. Do you think you should be making a decision like this in _your_ condition?"

"Don't bother trying to talk me out of it."

"I just want you to be sure you're thinking clearly."

"I'm going to do what I set out to do: Make a death make a difference."

"Jesus, this is all about that girl, isn't it. Arthur says you're the one who found her, and now you've failed her you're going to try and compensate by 'saving' the whole world, by playing the hero."

"I woke up with her on top of me."

She said nothing. He carried on.

"Ever since I was a kid I've had this thing of crawling into small cozy places and curling up and falling asleep. Some sort of return-to-the-womb thing maybe, I don't know. Anyway, I'd been on a bender and guess I crawled into the dumpster to sleep it off. When I woke up she'd been tossed in on top of me. Roaches were crawling over both of us."

"But just tell me, I just want to know: What gives you the right to decide for everyone else?"

"I need to know who I am. We need to know who we are."

"Arthur says you're permanently Tranzed. Do this and you'll be committing suicide."

"Yes."

"Then why?

"We're not who we think we are, who we want to be. But we could be."

"You've heard of Stockholm Syndrome?"

"Yeah, Stockholm Syndrome. Not anymore."

"You think you do this maybe they'll put up a monument to you!?"

He pressed the first button. He remembered Aggie, then he was in an alley behind a restaurant facing Pio, then the wasps came.

Very softly he began to chuckle and then he was laughing full throatedly and then was screaming as he smashed his head, again and again, against the console.

The deafening boom of the .45 slapped him out of it and she let the smoking gun drop to her side.

"What did you remember, Georg?"

"Everything."

"What?"

"It was...it was me. I did it."

"Did what?"

"Killed her. Enjoyed it."

Shakily, he reached for the second button.

"Georg, listen to me. That's suicide and you wouldn't even be punishing the right person. You're not the person who did those things. You've proved that by _wanting_ to punish yourself."

"You should've been a shyster except you're still wrong."

"Whatever you do, you need to do it with your eyes open, not just because you're too vain to live with the idea that you've been a total shit, not just to distract yourself from self-pitying self loathing by playing the hero."

"Is playing the hero _so_ bad?"

"It's just more vanity."

"You know, there's no such thing as altruism," he said as he winked and pressed the second button.

He woke strapped to an operating table, seeing through his own eyes. One of the quacks had merged with a farm-worker flat on his belly a mile underground in a yard-wide seam of gold and was staring at his upturned palms. The nurse turning in circles with her eyes wide and mouth open had merged with a high boss and saw as _he_ did, saw the whole rest of humanity through _his_ eyes.

"Hey, kid."

"Hey, how you doing?"

"Could be better. You?"

"It was me. _I_ did it."

" _We_ did it, kid. _We_ did it."

The pulse of energy that had powered the mind-swap/merge began to wane, and as it faded they drifted apart.

She unclipped and shook out her strawberry-blonde hair as well as she could in the restricted confines of the pod and it fell almost to the collar of her soft black jumpsuit. She opened the inner door of the waste hatch, unfastened her holster flap, took out her pistol and dropped it in the chute. Then she closed the inner door, depressurized the chamber, opened the outer door and watched the gun tumble off into the darkness.

She opened an inter-pod channel.

"You awake, Georg?"

"Yes..."

"How do you feel?"

"How am...how am I still here?"

"You don't feel a tingling in your guts and extremities, do you."

"No."

"Guess you were lied to, Georg. How do you feel?"

"I feel...I feel...better."

"I'm glad. I'm going to catch some shut-eye. Be seeing you."

"See you."

"Goodbye, Georg."

"Goodbye?"

"I'll see you back on Earth, Georg. Try and get some sleep."

"Okay."

She cut the connection, closed the shutter, closed her eyes and then, as she was wondering whether the pod would reach Earth before or after she woke up in her tub at peace headquarters, there was a cough in her mind.

"Okay, well, I guess this is it."

"Okay."

"Goodbye, Tara."

"I wish I could say, 'drop in sometime.' "

"It would've been nice."

Their minds hugged and then she was on her own and was thinking about the future as she fell into dreamless sleep.
