Windows and doorways, never aglow, Dallen thought, recalling one of the most popular songs of the last two centuries. Everyone's gone to Big O…

Dismissing the mawkish lyric, he decided to walk into town and use the time to work on the problem of Derek Beaumont. The tragedy that had befallen Cona overshadowed everything else in his life, but he appreciated a certain irony in the fact that the one man he knew to bear responsibility also provided his only distraction. When not grieving over his wife or coping with the despairing drudgery she now represented, Dallen fantasised about being alone with the young terrorist, about making him name all the relevant names, about hunting and capturing and killing. Part of him, even in lurid visions, drew the line at coldblooded execution, but another understood only too well that confrontations could be manipulated. It was a technique boys learned at school. Give the enemy a gentle push, encourage him to push back, respond with a harder shove, escalate the violence and keep doing it until suddenly all thoughts of guilt can be discarded and it's time to cut loose and go in hard. When it's merely a matter of temperature, Dallen knew, the blood can be very obliging. And the man or woman who pulled the trigger on Cona and Mike! was going to know the same thing… in the final passionate, exultant moment that person was going to know… and that person was going to be sorry… in the end…

Walking south through slanting prisms of sunlight and green shade, Dallen heard his own footfalls change note as frustration hardened his muscles. Although his job occasioned him to think and act like a policeman, he held no official responsibility for local law enforcement. He was a Grade IV officer in the Deregistration Bureau, and as such his prime concern was with surveying tracts of land that had been declared empty and making sure they remained unoccupied for one full year, after which time Metagov was longer legally accountable. Madison City itself, thanks to the artificial mix of its population, had virtually no crime, and the police department consisted of an executive and a handful of officers who were mainly concerned with regulating tourist accommodation. In spite of the overlap in their jobs, Dallen had always maintained an easy working relationship with Police Chief Lashbrook. Consequently he had been surprised to find himself not only denied access to the terrorist, but made distinctly unwelcome in the downtown police building.

"It was a sickening thing, what happened to your wife and boy," Cole Lashbrook had said, eyeing him severely over pedant's spectacles. "I'm deeply sorry about it, but I've made every allowance I can. If you persist with your attempts to see Beaumont I'll be forced to take appropriate action against you."

Dallen's fists clenched as his sense of outrage returned, "Against me" he had almost shouted. "Are you crazy?"

"No, but sometimes I think you are. Beaumont has made a formal complaint about what you did to him in back of that store, Carry. The dust hasn't settled over that business of the pursuit fatalities a couple of months back, and now there's this… And on top of it all you come round here and expect to be let loose on my prisoner!"

"Your prisoner?" Dallen had refrained with difficulty from pointing out the police department's past willingness to allow onerous duties to be performed by his own force.

"That's right. He was in possession of an explosive device and that makes it a criminal matter, and I intend to deliver Beaumont for trial in good health — a condition he may not be in if you get near him."

"Exactly what does that make me?"

"Carry, you're a man who has been known to go too far — even when you weren't personally involved in a case — and I’m not going to help you land yourself behind bars."

Thanks a lot, Dallen repeated to himself, immune to the blandishments of the placid sunlit warmth through which he was walking. In the two centuries since the discovery of Optima Thule, to give Orbitsville its constitutional name, there had been a general and steady decrease in traditional crime. Most crimes had involved property in one way or another, and as the race had been absorbed by a land area equivalent to five billion Earths — enough to support every intelligent creature in the galaxy — the basic motivations had faded away. Keeping pace with that change, many vast and complicated legal structures had become as obsolete as barbed wire, and progressively fallen into disuse.

Even on Earth, where there were historical complications, a community the size of Madison operated on a 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."