fairly informal basis as far as the law and its enforcement were concerned. In the days immediately following the blanking of his family Dallen had been certain that somehow he would obtain private interview with Beaumont. He had never allowed himself to consider the possibility of his being unable to force the prisoner to talk. He had fuelled himself night and day on the conviction that Beaumont would give him a name, the name, and that events thereafter would take a divinely ordained course. Now he was haunted by a suspicion that the young terrorist would be arraigned at the next session of the regional court and receive the routine sentence of — irony of ironies — deportation to Orbitsville. And once Beaumont reached Botany Bay, the popular name for the area surrounding the N5 portal, he would be beyond the reach of Dallen or any other private citizen. Economics and celestial mechanics had conspired to bring about that particular circumstance. A starship docking at an equatorial port simply went into orbit around Optima Thule's central sun, but only a few vessels — all owned by Metagov — were fitted with the complex grappling equipment which enabled them to ding like leeches to entrances in the northern and southern bands… 'What's wrong with your car, old son?' The voice from only a few paces away startled Dallen. He turned his head and found that a gold Rollac convertible had slowed to a craw! beside him without his noticing. The top was down and at the wheel was the buoyantly plump figure of Rick Renard, a man who had started showing up recently at the city gymnasium used by Dallen. Renard had red curly hair and milky skin which was uniformly dusted with freckles. He also had an uncanny ability to needle Dallen and put him on the defensive with just about every remark he made.
'Why should anything be wrong with my car?' Dallen said, deliberately giving the kind of response Renard was seeking, as if to be wary of his snares would be to pay the other man a compliment.
Renard's slightly prominent teeth gleamed briefly. 'Nobody walks in heat like this.'
'I do.'
'Trying to lose weight?'
'Yeah — right now I'm trying to get rid of about a hundred kilos.'
'I'm not that heavy, old son,' Renard said, eyes beaconing his satisfaction at having provoked an outright insult. 'Look, Dallen, why don't you get in the car with me and ride downtown in comfort with me and use the time you save to enjoy a cold beer?'
'Well, if you put it like that…' Suddenly disenchanted with the prospect of walking, Dallen pointed at the curb a short distance ahead, making the gesture an instruction as to where to halt the car. Renard overshot the mark by a calculated margin and scored back against Dallen by allowing the vehicle to roll forward before he was properly in, causing him to do some quick footwork as the door dosed.
'Aren't we having fun?' Renard's shoulders shook as he enjoyed a private triumph. 'What do you think of the car?'
'Nice,' Dallen said carelessly, slumping into the receptive upholstery.
'This lady is sixty years old, you know. Indestructible. Brought her all the way fom the Big O. None of your modem Unimot crap for me.'
'You're a lucky man, Rick.' Feeling the passenger seat adapt itself to his body, coaxing him into relaxation, Dallen was impressed by the car's sheer silent-gliding luxury. It came to him that its owner had to be wealthy. He vaguely recalled having heard that Renard was a botanist who had come to Earth on some kind of a field trip, which had suggested he was a Metagov employee, but salaried workers did not import their own cars across hundreds of light years. 'Lucky?' Renard's narrow dental arch shone again. 'The way I see it, the universe only gives me what I deserve.'
'Really? Do you accept donations from any other source?'
Renard laughed delightedly. 'As a matter of fact, my mother was a Lindstrom.'
'In that case, shouldn't the universe be getting hand-cuts from you?' Dallen closed his eyes for a moment, glad to be distracted from his own affairs, and considered Renard's claim to be related to the legendary family which had once monopolised the space travel industry. For a brief period after the Big O's discovery its official designation had been Lindstromland, and the Scandinavian connotations of its present name hinted at the clan's continuing if muted influence. In their heyday the Lindstroms had amassed a fortune which, apparently, was beyond human capability to diminish; and if Renard was connected with them, no matter how tenuously, he was no ordinary botanist.
The universe only gives me what! deserve. Dallen got a mental image of his wife — wandering aimlessly through shaded rooms, smock gathered to the waist, crooning to herself as she masturbated on the move — and the pressures within him grew intolerable. Cona deserved better…
'I heard you're a botanist,' he said quickly. 'You collect flowers?'
Renard shook his head. 'Grass.'
'Ordinary grass?'
'What's ordinary about grass?' Renard said, smiling in a way intended to let Dallen know that his education was incomplete. 'So far we've found only thirty or so species on Orbitsville — an incredibly low number considering the areas involved and the fact that we have more than ten thousand species on Earth. The Department of Agriculture did some work on determining mixes of Earth seeds which are compatible with Orbitsville soil and the native species, but that was in the last century and it was a half-assed effort anyway. I'm doing the job properly. Soon I'll be going back with over a thousand seed varieties and maybe two thousand square metres of sample trays.'
'So you work for Metagov.'
'Don't be so naive, old son — all Metagov wants from Earth is a decree nisi.' Renard turned the steering wheel with a languid hand, swinging the car into an avenue which ran due west. 'I work for nobody but myself.''
'But…' Dallen grappled with unfamiliar concepts. 'The transport costs must be…'
'Astronomical? Yes, but it's not so bad when you have your own ship. For a while I considered chartering, then I realised it made more sense to recuse an old flickerwing from the graveyard and amortise the cost over three or four trips.'
'That's what I would have done,' Dallen said, concealing his grudging awe for an individual who could so casually speak of owning the artificial microcosm that was a starship. 'What have you got?'
'A Type 96B. It was designed for bulk cargo work, so there aren't any diaphragm decks, which means it isn't all that suitable for my work. But I got round that by building really tall racks to hold the grass trays. Do you want a free trip to Orbitsville?'
'No, not at… Why?'
'I need people to tend the samples by hand — not worth installing automatic systems — and I'm paying with free transportation. That way everybody benefits.'
'Perhaps I'll become an entrepreneur.'
'You're not cut out for it, old son — you've conditioned yourself to think small.' Renard's smile conveyed affectionate contempt. 'Otherwise you wouldn't be in the police.'
'I'm not a policeman. I work for…' Dallen widened his eyes, belatedly aware of the car's change of direction. 'Where the hell are we supposed to be going?'
Renard chuckled, again pleasurably triumphant in what appeared to be a never-ending personal game. 'This will only take a couple of minutes. I promised Silvia I'd drop by with a carton of glass she's been waiting for.'
'Silvia who?'
'Silvia London. Oh, I don't suppose you've ever been to the Londons' place?'
'Not since my polo stock got woodworm.'
'I like you, Dallen,' Renard said appreciatively 'You are a refreshingly genuine person.'
And you are a refreshingly genuine bag of puke, Dallen thought, wondering how he could have been stupid enough to give up part of his day to such criminal waste. His previous encounters with Renard in the gymnasium had been brief, but they should have been enough to let him recognise and beware of a stunted personality. Renard's life appeared to be a continuous power game, one in which he never tired of contriving all the advantages, one in which no opponent was too small and no battlefield too insignificant.
The present situation, with Renard at the wheel of a car and therefore temporarily in control of his passenger's movements, was a microscopic annoyance, and yet the other man's obvious relish for what he was doing was turning it into something else. Furious with himself for being drawn in, Dallen nevertheless sat up straighter and began watching for an opportunity to quit the car. It would have to be done in a single effortless
