“It’s all right, Ches, I’m fine.” She gently freed herself. “None of this is my blood.”

“But . . . Madam President?”

He was inviting an explanation. Celine was not ready to give one. She walked past them, through the school-house and on into the open air. It seemed that she had been underground for many hours, and she expected to find it was night outside the building. Instead she walked out into the twilight gloom of an early evening downpour. The thunderstorm had come and gone, leaving in its place a steady rain.

Celine turned her face upward, welcoming the drops. It would be a long time before she felt clean again.

The armored car stood with the door open and the driver waiting. Celine nodded to him and climbed in without a word. Before the door closed she was reaching for the telcom unit to call Nick Lopez. He answered so quickly that she suspected he had been waiting by his own unit.

“Rolfe agreed,” Celine said at once. “He’ll start shipping more up by the end of the week.”

“I can’t believe it. How did you talk him into it?”

“I don’t think I did. I think he has his own reasons for wanting to send rolfes to Sky City, but I can’t begin to guess what they are. Nick, I’ve never had a meeting like that in my whole life. Gordy Rolfe is crazier than you can imagine.”

“I told you he was losing it. What did he do? Start lecturing you on the superiority of small mammals?”

“More than that.” Celine glanced around the armored vehicle. The rest of the security staff had piled in and the driver was waiting for instructions. “Back to the White House,” she said. And, as the car began to roll forward, “Our friend gave me his idea of a practical demonstration.”

“Meaning what? With Gordy, I hardly dare to consider the possibilities.”

Celine hesitated. Should she tell Nick, when the security staff would be hanging on her every word? Well, why not. They, had waited for hours in the rain, probably imagining that she was down there being lavishly entertained by the powerful head of the Argos Group. They might as well learn the truth.

“Did you know he raises dinosaurs down there?”

“He showed them to me. Dwarf varieties, hidden in the jungle around his habitat control room.”

“Not always hidden.” Celine described the minirex and its battle to the death with the cageful of rats. She omitted only her own role in delivering the coup de grace to the carnosaur.

Nick Lopez listened without saying a word. The security staff in the car with Celine were equally silent. The vehicle was racing back toward Washington at its highest speed, and the only sound adding to Celine’s voice was the soft hiss of fullerene tires over sodden roadway. Recalling the final moments with the carnosaur, she again became aware of the smell of blood and saliva permeating her hair and clothes.

“We just have to hope that he’s sane on other matters,” she concluded. “Either the rolfes will appear in a few days for shipping up, or they won’t.”

“How did he sound when you left?”

“Cheerful. Manic. As though we’d been partying together.”

“Then I think this might be a good time for me to call him.”

“You might not get through, Nick. He ignored calls when I was there.”

“I don’t think he’ll ignore me. I have a special tie line. One other question before we sign off.”

“Ask. But keep it short.” Celine was swept by a dreadful wave of fatigue. She wanted to put her head back on the padded car seat and go to sleep.

“What’s the rest of the story? I’ve never heard of Gordy Rolfe making a deal just for money. What else is he asking?”

“The land around the habitat, four miles in every direction, for as long as he’s alive and half a century more. His own personal paradise.” Celine laid her head back and closed her eyes. She could see the carnosaur, eyeless and half gutted, sinking into its death agony. “But you and I might call it hell.”

22

It was a nightmare from Maddy’s childhood. You woke slowly, in near-total darkness, knowing that you were not alone in the room. The thing — the shadowy form of the he-she-it — stood still and silent at the end of the bed. You lay frozen, too scared to move, too scared to scream.

At last you went back to sleep. In the morning you looked and looked, but you found no trace of the phantom.

It was happening now, and you were not a child. You were Maddy Wheatstone, a grown woman with no time for adolescent fantasies. You were no longer in the family home in Edmonton. You were — where?

Maddy struggled to full consciousness. Her eyes were wide open. This was not a dream. The shadow was still there. It loomed by her bedside, leaning over her, shaped like a man.

And she was — oh God, she was on Sky City, where the murderer of a dozen girls wandered free.

Maddy gasped, drew up her legs, and threw herself over the other side of the bed. She grabbed a boot, the only solid object she could find, and stabbed at the wall panel.

The light flashed on. It showed John Hyslop, mouth open and eyes squinted half shut against the glare, standing by the side of the bed.

“John!” Maddy’s curiosity was as strong as her relief.

“What are you doing in my bedroom in the middle of the night?”

“I’m sorry. I did knock before I came in, but you slept through it. I’ve been standing here wondering if I ought to wake you.”

“For what?” She saw the clock. “It’s three in the morning.”

He was not just looking at her, he was staring. Maddy realized that she was wearing a shorter-than-usual nightgown. Well, that was all right. Let him know what he was missing.

“You did say . . .” he began. “I mean, you did tell me you’d like to see it.”

“See what?” Maddy frowned, trying to shift gears.

“Whatever there is to see. When we get under way.”

“You mean we’re on the move?”

“Very soon. Everything is ready. The boosters fire at four.”

“Then of course I want to see it. I’m sorry, John, I shouldn’t have snapped at you. Thanks for waking me.” She saw his weary eyes. “Have you had any sleep at all?”

“No. I’ll sleep when I’m sure everything is all right.”

“Don’t do another Neirling boost. They’re bad for you.” Maddy heard the mothering tone in her voice, but it was too late to do anything about that. She went across to the small closet and pulled out pants and a sleeveless top. “I have to dress. You can stay if you like, but if it makes you feel uncomfortable, you should step outside.”

Back on Earth she wouldn’t have thought to mention it, but different privacy standards applied on Sky City.

“I’ll stay.” John’s mumble could barely be heard.

“Fine.” Maddy slipped off her nightgown and pulled on her clothes. She noticed that he kept his back turned the whole time. So much for her girlish charms. As she pulled on her boots she asked, “Where should I go for the best view?”

“Actually, for the first day or so there’ll be nothing to see. Sky City will accelerate so slowly, only the observing instruments will tell you that we’re leaving orbit.”

“You mean I won’t even know we’ve started boosting?”

“Oh, you’ll know all right. I hope we don’t know too well.” John smiled at Maddy’s perplexed look, his first smile since the light went on. “The acceleration will be very small, but to push the whole of Sky City we’ll be applying thrust to just a dozen areas, and each one’s only a couple of meters across.”

“Can that be a problem?”

“We’re hoping not. Our calculations say we’ll be all right. But imagine that you had an enormous dish, and you supported it on a dozen tiny pins around the edge and nowhere else. You’d worry that if the dish were heavy enough, the pins would push right through it. We can’t let the local boosters push so hard that they stress the Sky City structure locally beyond what it can stand.”