“It is. He had some tricky plan worked out, something involving Pipe-Rillas operating in the basement warrens that could made an end run around the quarantine. But somebody was trickier than he was. A pusher slipped him a dose of Paradox during dinner, and that was it. You know what they say, one shot and you’re gone.”

Deb Bisson sat down suddenly on the bed. “I thought it had to be injected.”

“For maximum effect, it does. Regulars always take it that way. But most people get hooked orally, the way Chan did.”

“The way I did,” said Tully. He had closed his eyes. “Oh, yes. That’s the way it’s done. One shot in your cup, and you never come up. That would still be true for me if you and Chan hadn’t taken me from Europa.”

“What happened after that?”

At Deb’s question the others looked at each other.

“To Chan?” Danny Casement said at last. “He never came back. You can buy Paradox most places now, but right after the quarantine all the suppliers were down on Earth. So he didn’t leave.”

“He couldn’t leave.” Tully sat rocking to and fro, his eyes still closed and his arms folded across his chest. “You have no idea how good you feel when it hits, or how frightened you get when you don’t know where the next shot is coming from. You want to follow your supplier twenty-four hours a day, just to make sure. Get a shot, you’re red hot; miss a hit, you’re in the pit.”

“Stay here as long as you like and help yourselves to anything you want.” Deb was suddenly on her feet again. “I’m leaving.”

“Where are you going?” Chrissie took her by the arm.

“To talk to Chan.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know.”

“Should I come with you?”

“ No!” Deb shook herself free and was out of the door before anyone could move.

“Better go after her,” Danny said. “When she finds him she’ll kill him.”

“No.” Chrissie spoke firmly. “You stay here. Don’t you people understand anything ? If she does kill him, it’ll only be because he deserves it.”

She settled back down on the bed and stared at the display. The Geyser Swirl was still pictured, and the voice of the Angel droned on: “Mean estimated survival time for a suited individual on the surface of the planet Swirl Kappa Three, sixteen minutes. On Swirl Kappa Four, four minutes. On Swirl Kappa Five, nineteen minutes …”

“Oh, shut up,” Danny said. “Tarb? Tully? Should we follow Deb?”

“I’ll go with Chrissie’s judgment. We’ll be at the Link in a few more hours. And then, if it works, we’ll be there .” Tarbush Hanson nodded gloomily at the display of the Swirl. “Relax, Danny, and have a drink. Get me one, too, while you’re at it. It may be our last ever.”

Deb had not been totally honest. She did know where Chan was — or at least, she knew where his rooms were, thirty meters along the corridor from hers.

Only he was not there. Glancing around — if he could enter private rooms without knocking, so could she — Deb found no sign that he had ever been inside. The bed had not been touched and a travel case sat unopened in the middle of the floor.

Where was he? The only thing she knew for certain was that he must be somewhere on board. She stood still long enough to slow her pulse to an even fifty beats a minute, then set out on a careful and deliberate search.

After half an hour she had found no trace of Chan, but she had gained an idea of just how much space there was inside an eighty-thousand-ton warship. The interior volume was close to a million cubic meters, divided into thousands of rooms and chambers interconnected through a maze of tunnels and corridors. At the rate she was going, long before she located Chan the Hero’s Return would have reached the Link entry point and made its transition.

She needed help. That was not going to be easy to find, in a ship where the service robots were too dumb to answer even the simplest question.

Deb headed for the main control room. Surely there, if anywhere, she would find other people.

Make that person rather than people , and she would be right. The control room of the Hero’s Return had originally also been the fire control zone. Row after row of weapons terminals, all unoccupied, formed a three-dimensional matrix. At the far end of the great cylindrical chamber, lolling at ease on a couch, Deb saw a solitary blonde.

The woman, lanky and starvation-thin, turned at Deb’s approach and said, “If you’re looking for Dag Korin, he’s taking a nap. He said he’d be here when the time came to make the Link transition.” She glanced at one of the displays. “That’s less than five hours from now. I hope he wakes up in time.”

“I don’t want General Korin. I’m seeking Chan Dalton.”

Deb expected a casual “sorry” or “never heard of him.” But the woman nodded.

“I don’t know where Dalton is now. But I know where he was , half an hour ago.”

“Where?”

“Forward. I told him, the best place to see what’s ahead of the ship is the bow observation port. When he left there he said he’d be back later.”

“Thank you.” Deb was already on the way.

“All the way forward,” the skinny woman called after her. “Follow the central corridor as far as you can go.”

Which, as Deb soon found, was very far indeed. She seemed to race for miles before the corridor ahead ended in a small ring hatch. It was open, and she dived through headfirst and emerged into a bubble-like observation chamber.

Chan was there, sitting in a swivel seat and staring out at the stars. She had made no plans as to what to do when she found him. She grabbed the back of his chair to slow herself and blurted, “You were a Paradox addict.”

He turned slowly and said in a sleepwalker’s voice, “Yes. I was a Paradox addict.”

“Down on Earth.”

“Yes.”

“For how long?”

“Forever.” He roused himself. “No, I guess that won’t do as an answer. From my first hit to my last, it was three years, five months and fourteen days. I didn’t know any of that at the time, of course. All the days blended into one.”

“How were you able to stop?”

“The hardest way. I needed money. An addict will do anything to pay for the next shot. One day I robbed the wrong person. He was chief enforcer for the Duke of Bosny. Next thing I knew I was in a labor camp in the Gallimaufries where the drug of preference was Velocil. The guards ran the trade in it, but Paradox and Velocil clash. Take both and you die.”

“What did you do?”

“I died. Or felt like I did. The guards knew I was hooked on Paradox, so they wouldn’t give me Velocil. I guess I ought to have been grateful to them, but I wasn’t. I screamed and howled and begged and prayed. No good. Four years later I was alive, out of the camp, and free of the habit. But you know what? In my dreams, I’m a Paradox addict still.”

It wasn’t the passion in his voice that made Deb shiver. It was the total lack of it.

“Out of the labor camp,” he went on, “and out of a job, too. Who would want anything to do with a man with a Paradox record?”

“Why didn’t you come to—” She checked herself. “What did you do?”

“I went to the man who caught me and put me in the camp. I told him, look, if it wasn’t for you I’d be dead now. It’s your fault that I’m alive, so you owe me a job. He said I had a hell of a nerve. But he seemed amused. He put me on his own staff and I became an enforcer for the Duke of Bosny. I was a good one, too. I knew every trick in the book, and a lot that weren’t there. I’d used them all to support my own habit.”

Deb had sunk to her knees at the side of the chair. “After you got out. Why didn’t you contact me?”

“It had been nearly eight years. Eight years going on forever. Too long.” Chan turned away to stare at the cold stars. Far ahead the rainbow beacon of the Link entry point was visible as a bright point, warning space vehicles to stay away. At last he said, “I did check with a couple of the old team. They told me you were living with someone else. That finished it. I had nothing to offer, and it wouldn’t be fair to contact you. Anyway, it would have made no difference.”