Me too?

It made him abruptly cold to think of what she might have-not guessed=.deduced about him. His briefing had never taken a person like her into account.

Yet he had learned to trust some of his own instinctual reactions, too, and nothing about Magda-Danty was a different matter-had made his nape prickle, his usual warning-sign. There was no hint of menace about her, just a curiosity that he found almost refreshing, as though she

put the most personal possible questions without a thought of giving offence.

He said, framing his words carefully, “I guess you must have noticed how hard this country has hit me. I mean, when I took on this job of mine, fixing that pulp-contract that brought me down here, I walked into it thinking what ;' I guess most people think north of the border: 'They're .` right next door, so they're probably no more different than those people down the streetl' If you-uh-follow me.”

“Well, Danty and Lora aren't a hundred per cent typical,” Magda murmured, taking a cigarette from the dis-penser on the dash. The EMPTY light came on as she removed it; as though by reflex, she felt for her own pack and slipped a couple into the store to compensate. The light went out. There was almost nothing on the dash that related to the operation of the car-the speedometer and the ignition-on light were almost buried among the ancillaries, the radiation-counter, the rain-detector light, the controls for the radio, and the sir-conditioning instruments.

Clearly from the back: “Oh, Dan-ty-y-y . . !”

“You don't get it,” Magda said, having drawn and let go the first puff of her cigarette.

“Frankly, no,” Sheklov grunted, and twisted the wheel the few degrees necessary to carry them through a wide curve.

“It's like I was saying,” Magda answered with a shrug. “When things become intolerable, the obvious way is out. In our case, you can't go out-not unless you're prepared never to come back. And Lora wasn't joking when she talked about the risk of being shot at the border. Except that treading on a mine is probably a bigger risk, and then of course the-uh-the private enterprise bit is unpredictable.”

“The what?”

“Private enterprise. Lots of privately financed organisations patrol the borders, too. And mine them. Security doesn't approve, and sometimes they get hauled into court on the grounds that if they don't trust the official patrols they can't be loyal. But usually they get let off with a nominal fine and a warning, because patriotism with a capital P is the excuse for anything.”

“I -I don't believe I ever heard about that,” Sheklov admitted, wondering when the border in his mind was going to be crossed, the one between Sheklov and Holtzer, who was fading moment by moment as he struggled with the problem that had troubled him since his arrival . . .

I'm on a fool's errand here! It's as though they'd sent me to an asylum three thousand miles wide! An idea that is brand-new could be new because it's insane, couldn't it?

Suppose 1'd walked into one of the “private enterprise” patrols when 1 came ashore?

Hell! Mavbe 1 did!

“Getting tired? Like me to spell you?” Magda said. He realized with a wrenching sense of panic that he had let his attention drift from the wheel, and crossed into another lane alreadv crammed with cars.

“Uh-no,” he forced out. “No. I'm fine.”

Providentially. in the lane just vacated, a car howled past with its governor cut out, doing far more than the legal maximum. and he was able to jerk his head at it.

“Saw him coming up-thought I'd better move over.”

"Ah-yes " Magda said. and took another drag on her cigarette. A few heartbeats later, she continued with what she had been saying as though there had been no distraction.

"Yes! There are two ways to go, assuming you want to go somewhere and aren't just content to be forced into the official mould. You can go insane, and that's the easy one. You can buy Koenig's. and keep a gun on the dash" -there was one in this car and she tapped it with long, sharp nails-"and convince yourself you're taking the ordinary, reasonable precautions a human being has to take to protect himself. That's what I meant when I said you can go out of the world other people share."

“But surely,” Sheklov hazarded, “other people do share that world.”

“You miss my point. They share the idea that the world mustn't be shared. Tap a friend on the shoulder when you meet him on the street, he whirls around and pulls a gun, doesn't he? Likely a gas-gun. that onlv blinds and doesn't kill, but a gun nonetheless. And he fires before he looks to see whether you're known to him.”

“Yes,” Sheklov said at length, a mile of dark road later. “I'm with you.”

“It's a whole pattern,” Magda said. “And it's crazy. Like with warts on. You know-you ever hear-of any sane species whose worst natural enemy was himself?”

“Man?” “Natural species?”

Silence except for the humming sound of traffic all around them. Signs were beginning to say COWVILLB up ahead.

“Yes, I guess we tried to defy nature at some stage,” Sheklov said at last. “One gets to see the results in the timber-trade, naturally-” He caught himself as Magda gave a dry laugh and echoed his last word in a whisper: naturallyl

“So what's the other way?” he asked, irritated.

“Hold it,” Magda said, twisting around in her seat. “Heyl Close out, you twos”

In the back seat, a mutter of annoyance. Sheklov spared a glance in his mirror and saw the two heads, one fair and one dark, separate and move to a regular sitting position.

“What's the trouble?”

“Pigs, what else?” Magda said, and leaned away from him. A car with a spotlight on the corner of the windshield was working its way up the line of traffic, and the man next to the driver was flashing the light into the windows of the cars it passed.

When they came up to Lora's car, they found her and Danty decorously sitting, more or less fully clothed, in opposite corners of the rear seat.

“The other way?” Magda said when they had been overtaken in due sequence. “Find a route where the bastards can't follow you and shine spotlights on you, of course.”

“There isn't one,” Lora said in a dead voice.

The turnoff signs were saying COWVILLE-NORTH. Sheklov remembered that from their entry on to the superway. He slowed and signalled right.

“You're not with me,” Magda said. “I mean the route where the things that count in your life aren't the things they're worried about-even though they ought to be afraid of them, because they're the most dangerous. Danty, are you okay?”

He was rubbing his temple with the hand of his injured arm.

“My head hurts,” he said in a dull tone.

“Oh, Dantyl” Lora burst out. “It must be that cutl Don, get us off the superway quick as you can, find a drugstorel” “Nol” Magda snapped. “Zip it, will you? Danty?” “I . . .” He licked his lips. “I don't get it all,” he said after a pause. “But the one thing we mustn't do is go home.” -

“But-(” Sheklov began.

“Make for it, sure,” Danty said. Little beads of sweat, shiny in the lights of the city, were springing out on his skin. “But don't try and stop outside, that clear? Something's happening, something bad. We got to smell the scene and find out what.”

Sheklov gave Magda-a blank stare. She sat back with a resigned expression.

“Told you,” she said. “Danty was born at the wrong end of time, peg? So you do what he tells you. If you don'tshit, the sky may fall on us.”

. ~cu . It was a long time before Morton Clarke could believe impersonal report of the computers, so far away from familiar desk of his, yet-electronically speaking-so close at hand that he could reach out and touch them.

They had a kind of reality to them that people never seemed to have.

He looked again at the print-outs, dangling over the automatic destruction unit, and eventually picked them up and laid them side by side, because he had to convince himself.