Gray addressed the grille, located next to the tiny camera lens just above the screen.

"Hi, Sue. Name’s Gray-R. J. Gray, airbound for SF, due to arrive about two hours from now. Could I reserve an aircar, please?"

"Sure thing. Range?"

"Oh-about five hundred…" He glanced at Hunt.

"Better make it seven," Hunt advised.

"Make that seven hundred miles minimum."

"That’ll be no problem, Mr. Gray. We have Skyrovers, Mercury Threes, Honeybees, or Yellow Birds. Any preference?"

"No-any’ll do."

"I’ll make it a Mercury, then. Any idea how long?"

"No-er-indefinite."

"Okay. Full computer nav and flight control? Automatic VTOL?"

"Preferably and, ah, yes."

"You have a full manual license?" The blonde operated unseen keys as she spoke.

"Yes."

"Could I have personal data and account-checking data, please?"

Gray had extracted the card from his wallet while the exchange was taking place. He inserted it into a slot set to one side of the screen, and touched a key.

The blonde consulted other invisible oracles. "Okay," she pronounced. "Any other pilots?"

"One. A Dr. V. Hunt."

"His personal data?"

Gray took Hunt’s already proffered card and substituted it for his own. The ritual was repeated. The face then vanished to be replaced by a screen of formatted text with entries completed in the boxes provided.

"Would you verify and authorize, please?" said the disembodied voice from the grille. "Charges are shown on the right."

Gray cast his eye rapidly down the screen, grunted, and keyed in a memorized sequence of digits that was not echoed on the display. The word POSITIVE appeared in the box marked "Authorization." Then the clerk reappeared, still smiling.

"When would you want to collect, Mr. Gray?" she asked.

Gray turned toward Hunt.

"Do we want lunch at the airport first?"

Hunt grimaced. "Not after that party last night. Couldn’t face anything." His face took on an expression of acute distaste as he moistened the inside of the equine rectum he had once called a mouth. "Let’s eat tonight somewhere."

"Make it round about eleven thirty hours," Gray advised. "It’ll be ready."

"Thanks, Sue."

"Thank you. Good-bye."

"Bye now."

Gray flipped a switch, unplugged the briefcase from the socket built into the armrest of his seat, and coiled the connecting cord back into the space provided in the lid. He closed the case and stowed it behind his feet.

"Done," he announced.

The scope was the latest in a long line of technological triumphs in the Metadyne product range to be conceived and nurtured to maturity by the Hunt-Gray partnership. Hunt was the ideas man, leading something of a free-lance existence within the organization, left to pursue whatever line of study or experiment his personal whims or the demands of his researches dictated. His title was somewhat misleading; in fact he was Theoretical Studies. The position was one which he had contrived, quite deliberately, to fall into no obvious place in the managerial hierarchy of Metadyne. He acknowledged no superior, apart from the managing director, Sir Francis Forsyth-Scott, and boasted no subordinates. On the company’s organization charts, the box captioned "Theoretical Studies" stood alone and disconnected near the inverted tree headed R D, as if added as an afterthought. Inside it there appeared the single entry Dr. Victor Hunt. This was the way he liked it-a symbiotic relationship in which Metadyne provided him with the equipment, facilities, services, and funds he needed for his work, while he provided Metadyne with first, the prestige of retaining on its payroll a world-acknowledged authority on nuclear infrastructure theory, and second-but by no means least-a steady supply of fallout.

Gray was the engineer. He was the sieve that the fallout fell on. He had a genius for spotting the gems of raw ideas that had application potential and transforming them into developed, tested, marketable products and product enhancements. Like Hunt, he had survived the mine field of the age of unreason and emerged safe and single into his midthirties. With Hunt, he shared a passion for work, a healthy partiality for most of the deadly sins to counterbalance it, and his address book. All things considered, they were a good team.

Gray bit his lower lip and rubbed his left earlobe. He always bit his lower lip and rubbed his left earlobe when he was about to talk shop.

"Figured it out yet?" he asked.

"This Borlan business?"

"Uh-huh."

Hunt shook his head before lighting a cigarette. "Beats me."

"I was thinking… Suppose Felix has dug up some hot sales prospect for scopes-maybe one of his big Yank customers. He could be setting up some super demo or something."

Hunt shook his head again. "No. Felix wouldn’t go and screw up Metadyne’s schedules for anything like that. Anyhow, it wouldn’t make sense-the obvious thing to do would be to fly the people to where the scope is, not the other way round."

"Mmmm… I suppose the same thing applies to the other thought that occurred to me-some kind of crash teach-in for IDCC people."

"Right-same thing goes."

"Mmmm…" When Gray spoke again, they had covered another six miles. "How about a takeover? The whole scope thing is big-Felix wants it handled stateside."

Hunt reflected on the proposition. "Not for my money. He’s got too much respect for Francis, to pull a stunt like that. He knows Francis can handle it okay. Besides, that’s not his way of doing things-too underhanded." Hunt paused to exhale a cloud of smoke. "Anyhow, I think there’s a lot more to it than meets the eye. From what I saw, even Felix didn’t seem too sure what it’s all about."

"Mmmm…" Gray thought for a while longer before abandoning further excursions into the realms of deductive logic. He contemplated the growing tide of humanity flowing in the general direction of C-deck bar. "My guts are a bit churned up, too," he confessed. "Feels like a crate of Guinness on top of a vindaloo curry. Come on-let’s go get a coffee."

In the star-strewn black velvet one thousand miles farther up, the Sirius Fourteen communications-link satellite followed, with cold and omniscient electronic eyes, the progress of the skyliner streaking across the mottled sphere below. Among the ceaseless stream of binary data that flowed through its antennae, it identified a call from the Boeing’s Gamma Nine master computer, requesting details of the latest weather forecast for northern California. Sirius Fourteen flashed the message to Sirius Twelve, hanging high over the Canadian Rockies, and Twelve in turn beamed it down to the tracking station at Edmonton. From here the message was relayed by optical cable to Vancouver Control and from there by microwave repeaters to the Weather Bureau station at Seattle. A few thousandths of a second later, the answers poured back up the chain in the opposite direction. Gamma Nine digested the information, made one or two minor alterations to its course and flight plan, and sent a record of the dialogue down to Ground Control, Prestwick.