input by direct sensing of product identity tags within a radius of fifty kilometres. The single feature of the system which had operated in Mathieu's favour was that the computer did not interact with Madison City's general information network. It sat in the building's deserted lower levels, like a spider interpreting every vibration of its web, acquiring and storing detailed knowledge of the movement of Metagov supplies throughout the region. The information was jealously guarded, locked inside an armoured data bank — but it would be yielded on receipt of the correct command.
And even a cursory glance at the print-out would show that Mathieu had privately disposed of public property worth some half-a-million monits. The consequences of such a revelation were something that Mathieu could not bear to think about. He had resolved to destroy the evidence, regardless of the additional risk.
On reaching Sublevel Three he turned right and went through a ballroom-sized area which had once been used as a computer centre and now was a maze of movable partitions and discarded crates. He found the door he was seeking, one he would never have noticed under normal circumstances, and went through it into a short corridor which had three more doors on each side. The most distant bore the initials N.R.R.D. in stencilled lettering, a combination which meant nothing to Mathieu, and again he wondered how Solly Hume had chanced upon the troublesome computer in the first place. A junior architect in the City Surveyor's office, Hume was a self-styled 'electronic archaeologist' in his spare time and was currently trying to have the machine declared obsolete and redundant so that he could buy it on behalf of some like-minded enthusiasts. It had been pure coincidence that Ezzati, the salvage officer, had mentioned the subject to Mathieu during a meeting, thus alerting him to the imminence of disaster.
Mathieu used his master key to open the door and quietly stepped into the fusty little room. The ceiling globe pinged faintly as it came on, throwing an arctic light over a plain metal table which supported the department of Supply computer, it looked more like a strongbox than a complex electronic monitor, with only a plate engraved with chains of serial numbers to indicate its true nature. In a volume not much greater than that of a shoebox were sensors which could track the incredibly faint signals emitted by product identity tags, plus a computer which converted the signal variations into geographic locations and stored them in its memory. Millions of freight movements had been recorded, going back to before Mathieu's birth, but he was solely concerned with those of the last three years — the evidence of his grand larceny.
He stared at the box for a moment with resentment and grudging respect, and then — feeling oddly guilty — drew the Luddite Special out of his pocket.
He aimed its bell-shaped muzzle at the machine and squeezed the trigger.
Cona Dallen switched off her voice recorder, forced to acknowledge the fact that she was too hot and uncomfortable to do any serious work. She had chosen a seat beneath one of the mature dogwood trees in the City Hall grounds, but the shade meant little in the pervasive humid warmth. It was almost four months since she and Mikel had arrived from Orbitsville, and apparently she was no nearer to adapting to the climate of the area which had once been known as Georgia.
And being seven or eight kilos overweight doesn't help, she reminded herself, resolving to have nothing but green salad for the rest of the day. A glance at her watch showed there was more than an hour until the luncheon appointment with Carry. It seemed a pity not to do as planned and outline the next chapter of her book, but on top of the unsuitable working conditions she had a problem in that her subject was becoming increasingly remote.
With its working title of The Second Diaspora, the book should have been a genuine personal statement about the history of Judaism on Orbitsville, but — somewhat to her surprise — the work had gone slowly and badly after Carry's transfer to Earth. That fact had contributed to her agreeing to join him earlier than she had planned. Also, she had been touched when, trying to conceal his nervousness over venturing into academic realms, he had put forward the idea that distance would improve historical perspective. The prospect of ending a year of separation had helped persuade her he was right, that what she really needed was an overview, but now the two-century adventure that had been the founding of New Israel seemed oddly perfunctory, oddly passionless, when observed from a distance of hundreds of light years.
Was her new perspective valid? Was the fate of a single nation a truly insignificant fleck in the vast mosaic of history, or — as had been the case with other writers — had the very act of voyaging from one star to another leached some vital essence from her mind?
It war a mistake to come to Carry, she thought, and immediately regretted having allowed the thought to form. After four years of one-to-one marriage, it seemed that her relationship with Carry might turn out to be the durable armature around which she ought to build the rest of her life.
'Mum!' Mikel picked up the miniature toy truck he had been trundling through the grass and walked backwards until he was pressed against her knees.
'What's wrong, Mikel?'
He pointed apprehensively at a grey-and-white gull which had landed nearby. 'A bee!'
'That's a bird, and it won't hurt you.' Cona smiled as she dapped her hands and caused the incurious gull to retreat by several metres. To Mikel, every creature which flew was a bee and all four-legged animals were cats, and yet he had a vocabulary of at least a dozen nouns which he applied accurately to forms of mechanical transport. Cona wondered if a child could show engineering aptitude so early.
'Don't like,' Mikel said. He continued to press against her and she detected the pure smell of baby perspiration in his coppery hair.
'It's too hot out here — let's go into Daddy's office and get a cold drink.' She stood up, easily gathering Mikel into her arms, and walked towards the north side entrance of the City Hall. Carry's office would be empty till noon and, provided that Mikel was prepared to amuse himself unaided, offered a better environment for working.
The silvered glass doors parted automatically as she reached them, attracting Mikel's interest, and she walked into the air-conditioned coolness of the north lobby. Cona hesitated. The correct procedure would have been to go quarter-way round the building and report at the main entrance before taking an elevator to Carry's second-floor office, but her clothes were sticking to her skin, Mikel seemed heavier with each passing second, and there were no officials around to enforce the rules. Late morning stillness pervaded the lobby.
She opened the door to the emergency stair, a route favoured by Carry when he was in a hurry to get to work, and began the brief climb to the next floor, unconsciously making her footsteps as light as possible. There was a square landing midway between floors, and Cona had barely reached it when the air was filled with the shrill bleat of an alarm signal.
Shocked, filled with irrational guilt, she clutched her son closer to her and froze against the wall, momentarily unable to decide whether to turn back or goon.
The sound of the alarm caused Mathieu to moan aloud in panic. He backed away from the Department of Supply monitor, knowing that the hail of radiation he had sent blasting through it would have erased programmes and memory alike. For an instant he thought the machine had retained the ability to warn of sabotage, then it dawned on him that there was a still-functioning alarm system somewhere in Sublevel Three, a relic of the days when it had housed a computer centre. This was something he had not even considered, yet another proof that it was foolhardy to plan anything important while under the influence of felicitin…
Why are you standing around? The words reverberated between his temples. Run! RUN!
He dragged open the door of the room and sprinted back the way he had come, moving so fast under adrenalin boost that he could actually hear the rush of air past his ears. His sponge-soled shoes made virtually no sound as he zigzagged through the huge outer room at dangerous speed. The continuing screech of the alarm lent super-human power to his legs as he reached the foot of the emergency stair and hurled himself up it in time- dilated dream-flight, taking four and five steps at each stride, his mouth agape and down-curved, scooping air.
I'm going to be all right, he thought as the floor markers appeared and dropped behind with impossible rapidity, fm going to get away with…
The woman with the child in her arms appeared before him as in a vision. Time had now almost ceased for Mathieu. In an altered state of consciousness he recognised Cona Dallen, understood that she could and would destroy him, that she had no option but to destroy him, and in that protracted, tortured instant the weapon he was hardly aware of carrying came up level and his finger worked the trigger. A conical storm of radiation, noiseless and invisible, engulfed the woman and child.
Even before they had time to collapse, Mathieu had passed them, silently flitting upwards like a great bat,
