If he had failed. It was hard to sit calmly with your back to the minisaur, especially when you could hear its harsh breathing and the grating of stressed chain links.

“They are rolfes — of a sort.” Gordy perched on the arm of a chair, so Celine would have to look up at him. “I originally designed them to function in there.” He jerked his thumb toward the wall and the jungle beyond. “Now I’m doing a bit more fiddling, adding a few special functions. The new ones have the same general organization, but they’ll be smarter and more versatile. The sort of things your space dummies say they’re going to need, but won’t get.”

Deliberate provocation, designed to start an argument. Celine delayed her response, swiveling in her chair to add to her original first impression of the chamber. The floor was dust-free and clear of small objects. Cleaning machines would remove those, also the dust and dirt and spilled liquids. These machines — rolfes of the most primitive kind — were clearly in use here. Two moved across the room as she watched, little low-end servers no more than a foot long and a couple of inches off the floor. They would ignore large objects, or at most clean, lift, and replace them exactly.

Part of the room had been partitioned off, and she could see the end of a bed through an opening in the waist-high barrier. There were no doors, beyond one that led through to the encircling area of dense vegetation. A heap of spare machine parts lay in disarray against the wall on the side opposite to the chained carnosaur. She recognized axles, gears, motors, gauges, and metal rods and pipes of many sizes. A bench nearby was a jumble of wrenches, saws, pliers, hammers, and pincers. Stacked against the wall next to that stood a stack of cages, each one the size of a large chest. Changes in light and dark behind narrow slits in the front of the cages showed something moving within, but Celine could not determine what it might be. Next to the chests, incongruously, stood an old-fashioned bicycle.

“Do you ride that?”

“Sure.” Rolfe had his eyes fixed on Celine, as intent and unblinking in his gaze as the tethered carnosaur. The communications unit on his desk was buzzing with an external call, but he took no notice. “Got to stay healthy, you know. Mens sana in corpore sano. A healthy mind in a healthy body.”

Did he ride the bike down here, somewhere out there beyond the tangle of jungle? No. The whole thing was an obscure joke. Gordy Rolfe rode nothing. His face had the gray pallor of a man who shunned all forms of exercise. Furthermore, the bicycle sat in front of a dozen other anachronisms. Celine pointed to a radio that was not of this century, and from its appearance hardly of the last. “I suppose you use that, too.”

“No. Too valuable. It’s a real rarity. The woman who sold it to me guaranteed that Noah used it for ship-to-shore.”

“Why did you really agree to meet with me? You seem to have made up your mind that you won’t make more rolfes available on Sky City.”

“I did so because I owe you a favor.”

“I can’t think what.”

“I’ve owed it to you for a long time. If you hadn’t come here, Pearl Lazenby might not have been captured. I might never have got my start in electronics, never been able to found the Argos Group.”

“But you knew that so far as I was concerned, my visit here would be a waste of time. You’d already decided that you wouldn’t provide the rolfes.”

“I never said that.”

“Would you meet with Wilmer Oldfield and Astarte Vjansander, and hear what they have to say?”

“Waste of time. I know what they told Nick Lopez. Crazy. Somebody out at Alpha Centauri decided humans were a nuisance, so they deliberately destroyed a whole stellar system and made an impossible supernova just to zap us. That about it?”

“There’s more to it than that.” But it was disturbingly close to Star and Wilmer’s view.

Rolfe was grinning down at her from his perch on the chair arm. “I’m sure there’s more. I don’t need to hear it, because the whole idea is pure bullshit. You may believe it, but on this one you’re the person who’s not rational.

And I’ll tell you why you’re not. Fucking scrambles the brain, and you used to fuck old Wilmer.”

Celine wanted to say, How on earth do you know that? Her second thought, That was nearly thirty years ago! was not much better.

She said, “What about Nick Lopez? He heard Wilmer, and he believed him. Are you telling me Lopez fucked Wilmer Oldfield, too?”

“I wouldn’t put it past him. But I think he’s more interested in fucking Oldfield’s little black chippie Vjansander, even though she’s female. Wouldn’t you agree?”

Celine stood up. “I’m leaving. I have work to do. This is a stupid waste of time.”

“Maybe not. Sit down. Forget who’s screwing who, and what I believe and don’t believe. I might be willing to provide what you say you need — if the terms are right.”

“What terms? Money?”

“No — though I do run a business.” Rolfe strained forward, eyes gleaming. In intensity there was little to choose between the eager man and the carnosaur heaving at its chain. “I do want something, and it’s not money. Get it for me, and you’ll have rolfes for Sky City. All the rolfes you want.”

“Why didn’t you ask Lopez? He controls more of the world’s resources than I do.”

“Not this particular resource. I want land — this land, here where we sit and all around us. From ground level to the center of the Earth. I’m willing to pay, but the United States has to deed it to me for my lifetime plus fifty years.”

“What do you want it for?”

“That’s my business. But I have to be totally outside U.S. laws and U.S. justice. I must be able to do what I like, on it and in it — and with whatever lies within it.”

Celine glanced at the chained carnosaur. Genetic combination work of that kind was not easy. Within the United States it was also tightly controlled and monitored. If Gordy Rolfe had performed the gene mix himself, without licenses or oversight, he was already in violation of a score of statutes. Celine could remember no recent applications for similar experiments.

But why not go offshore, to any of a dozen Golden Ring labs that would happily do the work and deliver the results?

Because a crippled, wizened man enjoyed playing God? That she could believe. But she suspected a stronger motive. This underground stronghold was where Gordy Rolfe had been raised. It was his home, his fortress, his sanctuary. He wanted a guarantee that he could never be made to leave, for any reason.

“How much land are we talking about?”

“A circle of four miles, centered on the schoolhouse. There are no occupied houses, and I have checked ownership. Every landowner has already agreed to sell. The Argos Group is ready to make final purchase.”

“I assume you realize that you can’t be outside U.S. jurisdiction unless you are counted as a foreign territory. That’s difficult to arrange legally.”

“Difficult, but it happens all the time.”

“Between countries, not individuals.”

“I don’t want you telling me how hard it is. I’m telling you how it has to be. You get me the land, you get more and better rolfes. Otherwise, forget it.”

An independent country, completely surrounded by a single other country. There were precedents. Lesotho. Vatican City. More recently, Basque and Kurdistan. The area that Rolfe was demanding was tiny, but the political problems would be immense. Even the Indian nations on U.S. territory were subject to most U.S. laws. Celine began a mental count of the different Cabinet-level departments involved: State, Commerce, Interior, Agriculture, Defense, Transportation. After six she gave up. Congress would have to agree, and that might be the biggest hurdle. If it could be done at all, it would probably take years.

“I don’t know. The best I can promise you is that I’ll try. But it won’t happen overnight.” There was the understatement of the century. “Nothing in government happens fast.”