The voice message had been waiting for her after breakfast. “Hey. I gotta little problem to take care of down on Earth. I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone, ’cause flights to an’ from Sky City are gonna be tight as hell ’til the blip storm excitement dies down. You go ahead and handle John Hyslop. Tell him anythin’, but make him say yes.”

Didn’t Seth realize that the same particle storm that could maroon him down on Earth would probably ruin all their chances of a meeting with John? The whole inside of the space city thrummed with energy and activity. For the first time in many months, worries about the Sky City murders had been pushed into the background.

Maddy went first to the plant engineering test facility, the meeting place that John had suggested. It was no surprise to find that he was not there. She sent a message over the Sky City general telcom channel. Ten minutes later she still had no reply.

Where was he? In one corner of plant engineering Maddy found Jessie Kahn and a slew of new attendant rolfes. A distracted Jessie, dictating rolfe assignments that yesterday would have been far above her level of seniority, waved a vague hand at Maddy. “Try the generating plant — they’re going loony there because the bundles interfere with the control circuits, and that might shut everything down. Or the engineering information center; John was there most of the night. Or Bruno Colombo’s office — I know a major flap was going on there. Maybe even Cusp Station. That has to be battened down before the storm hits. He could be there.”

Jessie’s tone said more than her words. Go anywhere, Maddy Wheatstone, but get the hell out of my hair.

Maddy went to the power-generation facility, on the axis beyond the main body of Sky City. Panic, yes, but no sign of John Hyslop. No one seemed to be expecting him. The engineering information center was deserted except for Torrance Harbish, who provided even less than Jessie Kahn: a gloomy shake of the head and a “Could be anywhere.” At Bruno Colombo’s outer office, guardian-of-the-inner-sanctum Goldy Jensen greeted Maddy with a snarl like a rabid wolf and a curt “Of course he’s not here. And he’s not on Cusp Station.”

“Then where is he?”

“How should I know? Am I John Hyslop’s keeper?”

Not John Hyslop’s, lady; Bruno Colombo’s. Maddy politely thanked Goldy and retreated.

Where? Maddy felt increasingly useless. Her wanderings through Sky City had made one thing evident: The space facility was in total turmoil. People were trying to cram weeks of labor into days, and it wasn’t working. They didn’t have a moment to spare.

It was already ten-forty. The time for the meeting with John had come and gone; still he had not answered her telcom message. Was there a place where he would be sure to go at some time in the next twenty-four hours?

Well, even if John were on a Neirling boost, he would crash by late tonight. And no matter where he passed out, he would be trundled back to his own quarters to sleep it off.

Maddy knew where John lived — a good thing Seth wasn’t here, or she’d have received his knowing wink. She ascended twenty levels, moved halfway around the cylinder of the city, and arrived at John’s apartment. She tried the door, and it was not locked.

Her glance both ways along the curved corridor seemed ridiculous — maybe she had no right to enter, but after all she was not planning to steal anything. She only wanted to leave a message.

She slipped inside and gently closed the door. Once in, she stared around with curiosity. This was the place, in her imagination, they had returned to last night. The living room was small, decorated much the way she would have imagined it: simple but comfortable furniture; a dozen nonprofessional color photographs on the walls, with John against a background of vast suspension bridges; a 3-D hologram of Sky City’s interior structure; and, a little more surprising, half a dozen of Escher’s gravity-defying lithographs and wood engravings. She recognized “Relativity,” “Waterfall,” “Ascending and Descending,” and “Other World,” but the strange lithograph “Print Gallery,” with its bizarre curved cityscape whose geometry somehow suggested the interior of Sky City itself, was new to her.

The bedroom was on the right. Maddy went into it, telling herself that John’s bed was the one place he was sure to find a message when he came home. The room was much too functional for her taste, and noticeably short on furniture. Bed, dresser, closet, a door that presumably led through to the bathroom — there was not even a comfortable chair. Maddy perched on the small bedside table. She was all set to write a note when her eye caught another detail. The dresser was bare except for a single picture.

It was a portrait of Maddy, as she appeared in one of the Argos Group’s rare promotional materials. She was smiling out of the frame in well-groomed and confident splendor, assuring the world that no job was too difficult or complex for the management skills of Maddy Wheat-stone. The spoken blurb, as Maddy remembered it, said much the same thing.

The brochure was almost a year old. John must have found it somewhere in the records of Sky City, and cut out and framed the picture. That knowledge, much more than anything she was doing, made Maddy feel like an absolute intruder.

She stood up. Forget the note; she would find some other way to reach John. She headed for the bedroom door, and at that moment heard a sound behind her.

She gasped and the skin of her forearms prickled into goose bumps. Someone else was in the apartment. She could hear them, just a few feet away.

She swung around and saw nothing. Imagination? No. The bathroom. The door was open a few inches.

Maddy tiptoed that way and peered through the crack. She saw John, sitting on a radiator cover and slumped back in the angle of the walls. He was naked, his eyes were closed, and his hair was tousled and damp. A towel lay on the floor in front of him. It looked as if he had taken a shower and fallen asleep in the middle of drying himself. No surprise, if he had been up all night.

The right thing to do was tiptoe away. John would never know that she had been here. But he was sitting in an unstable position. If he fell forward in his sleep, a sharp corner of the sink was waiting for his head.

Make a noise to wake him up, then run?

Stupid. That was even more likely to make him fall over.

Maddy opened the door all the way. In the quarter-gee field it was easy to place one arm under his legs and the other behind his back and lift him clear of the radiator cover. Harder was the move through the narrow door, but she managed it without banging on either side. She carried him over to the bed and gently laid him down. He was on top of the covers, but it was not cold.

Time to leave.

Maddy moved to the foot of the bed and stood there, staring down at him. He had spoken of mountain climbing in his youth, and now that he was unclothed she could see the corded tendons of his legs and arms. His skin was fair and unnaturally pale — or maybe, for someone who lived on Sky City, it was naturally pale. Direct sunlight out here was a killer, rich in the hard ultraviolet radiation that never made it through the Earth’s atmosphere to the surface.

But John was overworked, too. It was not ultraviolet, or its absence, that had placed the dark smudges below his eyes. Maddy moved her glance back along his body. She was startled to see that those eyes were no longer closed. John was staring — not at her, but straight up at the ceiling.

Was he still asleep, with his eyes open? Maddy backed away, through into the living room.

Time to leave. This time, definitely. She could hear sounds from the bedroom.

Again she hesitated. She was here; John was here. When would there be another chance of a meeting? Not until the present crisis was over, and maybe not for a long time afterward.