crimson arrow glowed on its surface, pulsing rapidly, pointing to the hotel. Aware of the measured thudding of his heart, Dallen angled across the street. He entered the off-street parking area and had almost reached the building's entrance when a thick-set man materialised in the dense shade of the canopy. The man was youngish, prematurely grey, and had a pump-action shotgun slung on his shoulder.
'Where do you think you're goin', fella?' he said, sounding curious rather than hostile.
Dallen absorbed the fact that the hotel was serving as some kind of headquarters. I’ve got to see the boss.'
The man extended a hand, husking thumb and fingers together. 'Papers.'
'Sure thing.' Dallen smiled, slipped his hand into his jacket pocket and fired the sidearm without taking time to grip its handle. The wide-angle cone of radiation sleeted through the guard's body, turning him into an organic statue. Dallen closed with him before he could topple and, taking a chance on the small lobby being empty, waltzed the rigid form back into the hotel. A door beside the desk looked as though it led to staff washrooms. It was necessary to take another risk, but Dallen had begun to feel supercharged with confidence, like a man high on felicitin, and he bore the guard through the door without pause. The room beyond was empty. It took him only a few seconds to bundle the inert figure into a closet, then he was out in the lobby and running for the stairs.
On the second-floor landing he checked with the quarry finder and got a reading which told him to go left. Dallen hurried silently along the corridor, dragging the sidearm from his pocket, and halted at a door which was indicated by an abrupt swing of the bright arrow. Allowing no time for reflection, filled with a heady certitude, he twisted the handle and went through the door fast. The room contained one bed upon which was lying a black- haired woman of about twenty, naked except for a rumpled waist slip. She stared up at Dallen without moving. Items of her discarded clothing were draped on a chair, among them a durocord skirt and a man's belt with a metal buckle.
'It's Beaumont I want,' Dallen said in a fierce whisper, unable to accept that something had gone disastrously wrong. 'You'll be all right as long as you keep quiet. Do you understand that?'
The woman nodded, opened her mouth and screamed.
'You stupid…!' Dallen almost silenced her with his paralyser, then realised there would be no point. The scream seemed to have been amplified rather than damped by the building's partition walls and he could already hear startled male voices in an adjoining room. He turned back to the door, thoughts in turmoil, and was trying to choose between two unpromising courses — running for the street or locking himself in — when the woman pulled the trigger.
Harry Sanko, 'mayor' of West Cordele, was wearing a full business suit, complete with traditional-style collar and tie, regardless of the moist heat. He was in his early forties and had regular features with a Latin cast which was emphasised by a neat pencil-line moustache. He was well-fed, articulate, forceful in his manner and smiled a lot in spite of having only one front tooth.
'What you did was stupid,' he said to Dallen. 'The only word for it is… well… stupid.'
Dallen managed to nod in agreement. He had been dragged the length of the corridor to a conference room and had been pushed into one of the high-backed chairs which surrounded a circular table. Sanko was sitting opposite him and two burly young men armed with shotguns were standing at the door. The fact that Dallen was able to move his head meant that he had been zapped with a low-power personal defence weapon, but he derived scant comfort from the knowledge. He was very much aware of being totally helpless.
'Marion is a close friend of mine,' Sanko went on. 'She's a protйgй, you might say… and if you had touched her… or if you had used this on her…' He tapped Dallen's sidearm, which was lying on the table in front of him, and shook his head, apparently awed by inner visions of his retribution.
'I told you I was only interested in Beaumont,' Dallen replied. 'I didn't know your so-called protйgй had his belt.'
Sanko leaned forward and showed his single tooth. 'You are quite a stern character, aren't you, Dallen? You're sitting there, paralysed, helpless, not knowing whether I'm going to have you strung up or castrated with a blunt knife, yet you can't help referring to Marion as my so-called protйgй. A man in your shoes should be more diplomatic. I mean, how do you know I'm not sensitive?'
'People who plant bombs usually aren't.'
'So that's it!' Sanko stood up, walked quickly around the table and sat down again, hard enough to make his chair creak. 'I've got news for you, Mister Metagov — this is a civilised community here in West Cordele. We've got laws, and we enforce them. We don't have electricity or clean water or any amenities like that, but we're not savages. We don't go in for terrorism.'
'Beaumont does.'
'Beaumont was a brainless punk.'
'War?' Dallen's fingers twitched, first sign of returning mobility. 'Does that mean…?'
'It means he's dead. He was tried and executed yesterday along with two of his buddies — for stealing community property. Does that seem a trifle harsh to you?'
'No — just barbaric.'
Sanko gave a barely visible shrug. 'You've got to understand that in any Independent community almost the worst crime anybody can commit is the crime of waste. We have a small cash reserve for buying black market medical supplies, and Beaumont and his brother cretins blew some of it on bomb kits.
A few months back two of them wrecked one of our last working automobiles, and if they hadn't totalled themselves along with it we'd have had to…' Sanko broke off and gazed solemnly at Dallen, his tooth digging into his lower lip.
'I don't get this,' he finally said. 'Why are you here? What was Beaumont in your soft little life?'
'The day I pinched him in Madison he said his friends were going after my family.' Dallen spoke slowly and carefully, his mind labouring to assimilate the news of Beaumont's death and the wider implications of what he had just heard. 'About the time he was saying that somebody went into the City Hall and used a Luddite Special on my wife and son… but…'
'But what. Mister Metagov? Brain beginning to stir? How much cash does it take to buy one of those fancy toys?'
A corrosive acid was seeping through Dallen's mind, burning away one world-picture, disclosing another. 'Somebody in Madison… Probably somebody in City Hall itself…'
'What were you saying about barbarism a minute ago?'
'But I can't see why,' Dallen went on. 'There was no reason for. it.'
'Maybe a slug of this will get your head working.' Sanko took a silver flask from his pocket, came round the table and poured some of its contents into Dallen's mouth. 'A Luddite Special is its own reason, man. It only does one job.'
'There can't…' Dallen gagged as warm neat liquor reached his throat, but the spasms seemed to accelerate the return of sensation to his limbs. He became aware of a twitching in his calf muscles.
'Your wife and kid must have known something. They must have seen something.' Sanko drained the flask and tossed it to one of the armed men who caught it and left the room unbidden. 'You're no Sherlock Holmes, are you?'
Dallen wasted no time in speculating who Sherlock Holmes was. He was appalled at his own lack of perception, at the weeks he had wasted, at his unconscious arrogance in assuming that he and his futile, insignificant. Earth-limited activities had been the root cause for what had happened to Cona and Mikel. The alternative theory was that there was a monster roaming loose in Madison City, enjoying the immunity that Dallen had personally gifted to it — but what had been the original crime? What could have been sufficiently serious to justify the erasure of two personalities? Had it been a murder? The circumstances did not fit — nobody had been found dead or reported missing.
'It still doesn't make sense,' Dallen said. We don't have any serious crime in Madison.'
'I love it!' Sanko laughed aloud, his mouth and the solitary tooth forming a notched dark circle. 'Graft doesn't bother anybody in Madison and that means it isn't serious.'
'There might be some petty…'
'Listen to me — Madison City is a kind of general store for all the big Independent communities in this part of the world. They come from as far away as Savannah and Jacksonville, any place that can scrape up big money,
