And the doors of the future remained obstinately closed, denying him any hint of what was to come.

Gerald Mathieu opened a drawer in his desk and, in spite of a drug-induced sense of tightness, he frowned as he looked down at the object within.

The gun was of a type which had once been known as a Luddite Special, and had been custom-designed for a single purpose — chat of killing computers. It was also one of the most illegal devices that a citizen could own. Even with Mathieu's extensive connections it had taken him nearly a month to obtain the gun and to make sure that no other person in the whole continent knew it was in his hands.

Now the time had come to use it and he was highly apprehensive.

Merely being caught with the device in his possession would bring a mandatory prison sentence of ten years; and if it were established that he had actually used it he could expect to be removed from society for the rest of his life. The severity of the punishment was intended to protect people rather than property, because the weapon — in a consequence its inventors never foresaw — had a devastating effect on anyone caught in its beam. In some vays worse than straight forward murder, had been one judicial comment, and in many ways a greater threat to social order,

"How in hell did I get into this situation?" Mathieu said to his empty office, then dismissed the question, trying to push irrelevancies aside as he picked up the gun and released the safety catch behind the trigger. The whole assemblage was solid and heavy in his hand, evidence of close-packed circuitry within, and a certain angularity and lack of cosmetic finish showed it to be the product of an underground workshop.

Aware that he was in danger of hesitating too long, Mathieu slipped the gun into the side pocket of his loose-fitting jacket and turned to check his appearance in a wall-mounted mirror. He had reached the rank of deputy mayor at the exceptionally early age of thirty-two, and he took a secret pleasure in seeming even younger by virtue of his fair-skinned athleticism. He also had a reputation for the casual perfection of his dress, and it was important that nothing about him should look out of place during the next few minutes. At this rime of the morning his chances of encountering others on his way to Sublevel Three were slight, but the risk was always there and if a meeting occurred he wanted it to be unmemorable, something which would quickly be lost in City Hall's humdrum routine.

Satisfied that he had made himself ready, Mathieu went into the corridor and walked quickly towards the emergency stair on the building's north side. The transparent wall ahead of him provided panoramic views of the city of Madison. Its suburbs shone placidly in the distance, colours muted and outlines blurred in the humid air streams swirling inland from the Gulf. Mathieu, with a final glance back along the empty corridor, opened the door to the stairwell and went downwards. He had chosen to wear soft-soled shoes and his progress was both swift and silent, like the effortless sinking spiral of a gull.

Be careful, he thought; quelling a sudden exhilaration. He had omitted his pre-breakfast shot of felicitin, knowing he would need a clear head for the morning's desperate venture, but the drug was bound to be lingering in his system, subtly persuading him that he was invincible. And a foil at this stage could turn the threat of disaster into hard actuality.

The discovery some weeks earlier that Sublevel Three housed an independent Department of Supply computer had, in spite of the chemical shields around his mind, numbed Mathieu with dread. It had been installed decades ago at the instigation of some forgotten Metagovernment official, back in the days when Orbitsville was more actively concerned with the affairs of Earth, and since then had — unknown to Mathieu — been monitoring the distribution of certain categories of imports.

The computer's specification had apparently been drawn up by a bureaucratic supersnoop with a tendency to paranoia. It had an internal power supply which was good for at least a century, and it obtained its entire data 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.