'You didn't have to do it this way, Grishkin.'

His cloak had fallen open. He looked up. In front of him stood the pilot of the atmosphere vehicle, a puzzled expression on his decent flier's face. 'What are you staring at, you bastard?' But he could no longer avoid his reflection. It was in the man's eyes: the plum-colored cloak; the horrible naked scrawny body, shaven and goosefleshed in the wind; the bald head -

And the little plastic panel implanted in his abdominal wall. He stared at it and began to weep.

It was disgusting.

It hurt.

'Here,' said the pilot, helping him up. 'Take it easy.'

But that wasn't the end of it, either, although he soon found that he could keep the cloak discreetly wrapped round him and ignore what lay beneath it — so that when he got back to Golgotha some of his composure, such as it was, had returned. It was precarious. He'd take Pater's injunction to heart and he could no longer guess what might become of him.

It was dark by then. My Ella Speed was blacked out. She seemed deserted, but up in the control room he stumbled over Tiny Skeffern, snoring on the floor, a ripped-off bottle of Pater's ethanol under his hand. He kicked the body gently. 'Tiny? Fix, why aren't there any lights on?' He found the switches himself, worked them petulantly. 'Fix, where are you?' There was something scrawled on a bulkhead in tremulous yellow crayon:

DERE BOS

IVE GOTTA JBO ONA FRATER OUT FRUM ERTH AN IF WEER TAUKGNI ABOT

PAY WEL I HAVENT BIN PAYD FRO 6 MNUTHS

FIXX

All Chromians are dyslexic from birth. It may be why their culture is still feudal. Truck sat down in one of the command chairs and shrugged at the inscription. 'Fix, Fix.' It was no more than he deserved. He felt unutterably weary.

Tiny, meanwhile, had stirred, rubbed his eyes, and sucked the empty bottle. 'Fix left,' he said, helping himself up with the edge of the chart computer. 'Christ that stuff stinks.' He staggered round the cabin looking for water, tripping repeatedly over the bottle, intent only on his own pain. 'Took his chopper and everything.'

'It's happened before. Hell be back. We're always falling out.' It was true, but it didn't make him feel any better: it was always his fault.

Finally, Tiny got his sight back.

'Hey, Truck,' he sniggered, 'did you get converted?' He squinted across the control room, a big, silly grin spreading across his face as he took in Truck's new clothes. 'Jesus, what — '

Truck, inspired by a dreadful rage, had leaped to his feet and was making determined grabs for Tiny's throat. He skipped smartly back. 'Truck, I — '

Truck got hold of him. Laugh, and I'll kick your head in, Skeffern,' he said earnestly. 'Come on then — ' He wanted to hurt somebody. He was being driven further and further out on his own, away from even the minimal decencies of the hinterlands. He shoved Tiny up against the bulkhead until his thin blond hair was rubbing out Fix's illiterate plea for fair treatment. 'Come on' — Inviting with steely fingers — 'say one word.'

And then, from all the sick misery of his awakening in Grishkin's ghoulish city; 'Oh sod it, sod it. Help me, Tiny.'

Tiny gaped and snuffled.

Truck slumped back in his seat and set his eyes sorrowfully on the bos'n's stupid half-erased note (he wasn't fit to be out on his own: he only got into fights with people bigger than himself, or pawned his chopper). 'What am I doing, Tiny? I made a deal with Grishkin. It was the only way I could see to get hold of the bloody Device. Now I'm not sure he didn't suspect that all along. He expects me to try and doublecross him. He cut me open as a warning. What am I doing?'

'It was only a joke, Truck, I didn't — '

Truck shivered and stared at the bulkhead.

Bleak steel.

2367: without Truck to operate it, the Centauri Device (bomb or Totem, perhaps both) remained in its bunker, quiescent but maybe reviewing in solitude memories of an earlier war. Or even — sensing that Truck was now gravitating toward it, spiraling in from his own choice rather than General Gaw's or ben Barka's or Grishkin's — stirring a little in its two-century sleep.

2367: above, on the fringes of Centauri's rubbished atmosphere, hung evidence of the new war — blind black battleships, slipping constantly into new patterns of defense, casting mechanically about like beasts that will tear each other if there is no scent of quarry.

2367: the Galaxy had begun a horrible gavotte to Earth's tune. On Sad al Bari IV, adolescent shock-troops with doomed delinquent faces wore their IWG uniforms through weekend leave in the hinterland, shyly testing their new boots in the alleys off Bread Street; from the factories of Parrot issued the graveyard shift, rubbing its hands to stir a sluggish, sleep-deprived constitution and congratulating itself on overproduction of long reaction guns for the mutual succor treaty with UASR (the notorious 'Salisbury' pact); while everywhere else young girls with clear winsome eyes were lifting their feet to Earth's popular songs and their skirts to dashing young Earth-liaison officers with the colonial squadrons.

2367: a brief hush out there among the stars, as it all hit a pinnacle of awed preparation. Then — lips parted in wonder and a calm dewy smile — the long graceful pratfall into Earth's mucky business.

2367: Intestinal Revelation (lately the Ella Speed, out of RV Tauri II — Stomach — with a cargo of nothing) lay at Egerton's Port. Avernus, that infamous planet at the edge of the Ariadne arm. Out there, the war seemed remote but plausible.

Egerton's Port went down the drain before it was ever a finished proposition. It never experienced that state of spiritual pioneering — during which the local Women's Institute will hang a spacer whose hair falls a centimeter below his collar (and even specify the type of collar) — through which ports on newly-colonized planets inevitably pass; but moved from raw incompletion to the decadence of an established hinterland while the earth-movers were still mapping it out of the ground. Thus, while its streets were cinders and its buildings sour corrugated plastic, its heart was as rotten as Earth's; and while its considerable warehouse facilities were still in process of development, so was the sore that came to be called 'Junk City.'

Before the civil engineers left there was a pusher for every street corner and every possible sensation, from AdAcs to Ziapaprothixene. By the time John Truck got there, there were ten (and the reputation of the place, had been going anywhere but in circles round Beta-X-ligo XVII, would have preceded it at every stop along the way). They fought one another in vicious obscurity through the confines of Junk City, and those who survived went out like rats into the port-proper; they were the red-eyed end, they were the continually-replaced rodent teeth and alligator shoes of the Galaxy — they were so eroded in the skull that they'd ask you one minute if scruples were shot or snorted and wonder the next if you could get them a kilo or two at the right price,

But it was their clients that made the place an agony.

They sat or slumped in groups with their backs against the shaking walls, caught like depraved family snapshots — the spike still hanging from the arm, the tiny trickle of blood from the nose — Denebian, Gygnian, Chromian, Earthman, they had given up all pretense of being spacers or whores or anything they had started out to be, and become cyphers with creased open palms, evil clothes, soft bleached voices. The whites of their eyes were gray and somehow crystalline: and whatever it is that the eyes are attached to had gone that way too. Every day just before dawn an irregular detail drawn from their own ranks would clear the streets of those who had died in the night. It kept them in dope.