Ted Marshall shook his head. "No, I can't. The programming? No problem. But the chips themselves… I'm not a hardware man."

The old man sighed. "I was hoping to keep my originals. Oh, well."

Ted held out a placating hand. "Hold on, Will. I don't know how to duplicate the hardware, but I know someone who knows someone."

Free-lance electrosmithing was almost as incriminating as free-lance programming. Will didn't ask further. Ted Marshall made the Bookman and its chips vanish. "I'll see what I can do. You won't mind if I make copies for myself, will you?"

"Of course not."

"Still. Won't the, uh…" He cast his eyes toward the ceiling. "Don't our friends need things like algae for their hydroponics a lot more than they need books?"

Will shoo his head. "Man does not live by pond scum alone."

«logon»

«Ghost: Honeycomb, won't you be my baby. Batman»

«logoff»

"Oh, what a cute little bunny rabbit!" said Adrienne Martine-arnes, stooping over to peer into the cage. The oversize rodent inside laid her ears back and sniffed. The Gnawing incisors lay bucktoothed over the lower lip. Yes, aren't you cute." And plump, too. Rabbits gave good meat per volume. So did guinea pigs.

"May I help you?" The pet store manager had come up behind her.

Adrienne rose and turned. "Yes, you may." She had the commanding presence of the queen of Olympus. A white streak accented her otherwise black hair, as lightning does the night sky. "How much are the rabbits and the guinea pigs? The manager told her and she nodded. She pulled a checkbook from her handbag. "And do you give quantity discounts?"

When they came to the Interstate bridge over the Mississippi, they slowed, and Harry and Jenny came by on the motorcycle. Harry held up his hand, thumb and forefinger in a circle.

"All clear," Bob said. "At least from outside."

Alex could see the St. Louis waterfront laid out below him. Many of the docks and wharfs along the river stood dry and inaccessible, since so much of the river's source water was locked up in northern ice. Starved as she was, though, the Mississippi was still a mighty stream; and tug barges and riverboats crowded her like a Manhattan street. The Missouri, which entered a few miles upstream, was still running near strength wind and rain patterns having so far kept her watershed nearly ice-fee.

Even so, Alex noticed two barges aground o a mud bar near the East St. Louis side of the river. Grain barges from the north, Bob told him. Files of people, ant-mall in the distance, marched on and off the barges, balancing baskets full of grain on their heads. He wondered how much of the cargo they could salvage before rats and rot did for the rest.

Gordon, sitting between them, suddenly perked, up and pointed through the windshield. "What is that?" he asked.

"That is the Gateway Arch," said Bob, taking the exit onto Memorial Drive. "Our destination."

"But what does it do? What is its function?"

"The Arch? There's an elevator inside that takes you to an observation platform on top. And there used to be a Pioneer Museum underneath; that's closed up now for lack of funds."

"That's all? Not for microwave relay or, your word… weather observation or such?"

"No, it was a tourist attraction. A monument. Why?"

Gordon shook his head in wonder. "I have never seen such an artifact built for no useful purpose. Could make poem about such beauty. Building under constraint of gravity field is like building poem under constraint of sonnet form. Requires craft and artistry."

Alex noticed Gordon's lips move and grunted. The stilyagin was probably trying to compose a poem on the spot. It was that sort of distraction that got him put on probation, then on the dip trip.

But Gordon was right about its beauty. In orbit Alex would not have wondered twice about the Arch. Such construction would have been easy, given the mass… which is never given, in orbit. That's why we need Moonbase so badly. All that free mass! But in a gravity field… how did they keep it up? Its soaring lines seemed to defy gravity. He tried to imagine the forces acting on the arch. The downward vectors must be translated into vectors along the length of the arch itself. A neat problem in basic physics. It was a fascinating planet. His eyes travelled along the sleek parabola until, in an odd echo to his thoughts, he saw what looked like vector arrows pointing down from the top of the Arch. As he watched, the arrowheads swayed slightly in the wind.

"What are those?"

Bob squinted through the windshield. "Beats me." He reached back over his shoulder and rapped on the back of the cab. "Coming up on the Arch," he said.

The panel separating the sleeping cubicle from the cab slid back and Sherrine stuck her face through. "The fan club meets in the underground museum, right?"

"That's what Violetta said. They'll give us a place to spend the night." He pulled to the side of the street and turned on his blinkers. A car and two horse carts drove around him. "All clear," he announced.

Alex heard the door to the sleeping cubicle open and shut. He squirmed a bit in his seat; then he gripped his cane, unlatched the passenger door and slid to the sidewalk.

"Hey," said Bob, "where are you going?"

"With Sherrine," he answered. He flourished his cane. "For the practice. And just in case."

Sherrine saw him coming and waited politely on the tiled plaza. She was framed by the gleaming Arch against the backdrop of the river. A barge drifted lazily behind her, keeping carefully to the cannel buoys. He was struck again by her fragile beauty; a beauty she herself seemed oddly reluctant to acknowledge. Most Earth girls seemed terribly short and muscular to him; and he had seen enough by now to realize that pudgy and burly were the norm. Yet, Sherrine continued to allure him.

Was it only a physical thing? Or was it a fixatione--imprinted like a baby duck!--brought on by the fact that she was the first woman he had seen after Mary had… had betrayed him? Now there was a thought!

Betrayed you how, Alex? Because she didn't order you back upstairs after that first missile attack? Because she left it up to your own stupid pride? Ifanyone betrayed you, Alex, it was yourself.

A sudden horn jolted him from his reverie. Two men in a horse jitney shook their fists at him as they pulled around. As if they hadn't the whole street to themselves, Alex thought sourly.

Sherrine said, "Alex? What's up?"

"You don't want me with you?"

Her lips parted to answer him, then she shook her head. "Come on, then. I think the entrance to the old museum is over this way." Alex wondered what she had been about to say. He thought he could make a reasonable guess. Couldn't stick to the flight plan, could you, Alex? And why? To moon along after a woman who… He wanted to say that he found her attractive; that he admired the way she had abandoned her career and freedom to help him; that he wanted to get to know her better. But the words stuck awkwardly in his throat. Held down by gravity.

She led him down a concrete ramp festooned with gaily-colored graffiti and handbills. One large poster, plastered overtop the others, announced a closed-circuit TV address by Emil Poulenc, "Discoverer of the Ice Folk." Whatever that meant. The sun was high in the sky, brushing the shadows from the ramp. Four odd, circular shadows wavered like black spotlights on the paving stones.