Then he would sleep, as soundly as Henry Neirling himself, dead for the past six years.

4

Bruno Colombo’s office sat in the half-gee environment of the outer perimeter of Sky City. It was the choicest real estate on the space arcology, a place where Coriolis effects of rotation were at a minimum and you were far away from the noisy zero-gee workshops of the central axis.

Maddy Wheatstone didn’t begrudge the director his palatial surroundings. So far as she was concerned, Bruno Colombo had the worst job in the universe. Judging from all that she had heard of the man, he loved it. He was Homo bureaucratiensis, the pure product, happy juggling the mishmash of everyday affairs needed to run an eighty-thousand-person flying city. His worries were budget and construction priorities, plus international politics both Earthside and spaceside.

Different strokes for different folks.

The shuttle craft had docked smoothly on the zero-gee central axis of the rotating cylinder of Sky City. Maddy was late, she was exhausted, and she was hungry. She kept her suit on and hurried toward the perimeter. When she reached a quarter-gee chamber she operated the airlock, and at her command the suit removed itself from her body. Receiving her approval to leave, it headed back toward the axis. It would seek out the service facilities to take on new supplies and exhaust waste products. In half an hour it would be ready for reuse, by Maddy or anyone else.

Maddy didn’t intend to be that next user. She appreciated the suit’s devotion, but she had spent the past fifteen hours inside it, nine of them trying to catch up on lost sleep while the acceleration of her space environment ranged between the two and a half gees of takeoff and the easy float of free fall. The shuttle, for the fourth consecutive time that she had taken it, had been delayed at both ends. Enough was enough.

And in some ways it was too much. Her travel case would not be unloaded and taken to her room on Sky City for another two hours, but her appointment with Colombo was now. Maddy checked her appearance as she drifted down the incline of a spiraling outward corridor. The personal suit did a good job of removing waste products, and it tried to keep body and clothing free of perspiration; but it didn’t quite succeed. Late or not, she had to do something.

Just before she came to Bruno Colombo’s office she slipped into a washroom and did what she could in the way of repairs. Water and a quick brush and comb took care of her hair and skin. Makeup hid the signs of weariness around her eyes and mouth. Clothing was a more difficult problem. Her outfit was reasonably clean, but rumpled. It looked as though she had slept in it — exactly what she had been unable to do.

A woman occupied Bruno Colombo’s outer office. She j was, according to Maddy’s information, the notorious Goldy Jensen. She was barely forty, but she had been Dr. Bruno Colombo’s personal assistant for twenty years. She was also, according to the Argos Group information services, his longtime mistress. But beyond all that, she was his guardian. No one made it in to see Colombo without being subjected to Goldy’s scrutiny. Maddy had heard that even Bruno’s wife had to be cleared for access.

Goldy let her off easily. She gave Maddy’s clothes a disdainful stare, but she said, “Go on in. You are late.

Your meeting was scheduled to begin seven minutes ago. The others are already here.”

Others? Maddy had assumed that Gordy Rolfe had arranged for a one-on-one. “Who is in the meeting?”

Goldy Jensen stared at her stonily. “I feel sure that Dr. Colombo will introduce you as he thinks fit.”

And screw you, too. But Maddy didn’t say it. The briefing documents also noted that Goldy held grudges and forgot nothing.

Maddy slid the door open and walked through into Bruno Colombo’s office.

The view, if you felt comfortable in space, was spectacular. On the perimeter of Sky City “down” meant “outward.” The whole floor of the room was transparent. As Sky City turned on its axis you looked past your feet and watched the panorama of the heavens sweeping by. Once a minute the same view returned, except that Sky City was itself in synchronous orbit about Earth. Sometimes the benign face of the planet intervened, blocking out a full fifteen degrees of the sky.

Maddy knew that the transparent floor could turn opaque with the flip of a switch, but Bruno Colombo apparently had a habit of showing the wheeling starscape whenever he had visitors from Earth — particularly first-time visitors with weak nerves and little space experience.

If he hoped that was true in Maddy’s case, he had missed his target. She walked forward, stared down and out, and said, “Magnificent. I’d pawn my soul for an office view like this.” She held out her hand to the tall man standing with feet planted in the middle of the floor/window, and said, “Dr. Colombo, I’m delighted to meet you. And . . .” She stared pointedly at the other man in the room.

He was lounging at the low table. He had been speaking, but broke off in midsentence as she entered. Then he scrambled to his feet and held out his hand. “John Hyslop.”

Something was wrong already. According to her plans, John Hyslop should not be here. Her meeting was with Bruno Colombo alone, and her main task was to persuade the director that Hyslop should be made available to assist the Argos Group in the asteroid capture program.

She needed time to think. Colombo already looked grumpy and ill at ease. Was Gordy Rolfe the cause, playing power games behind her back?

John Hyslop was still holding out his hand. She took it, held on for a fraction longer than custom demanded, and used the time to study him. He was short and stocky, only a few inches taller than her own five-four. Steady gray eyes, dark-smudged with fatigue or illness, stared into hers. He wore a dark two-day stubble of beard. The beginnings of male pattern baldness, easily treated with follicle protozoans, sent a different message: He didn’t much care what he looked like.

Her peripheral vision made a lightning scan of his clothes. She concluded that she had worried too much about her own appearance. Compared to him she was well groomed and elegant. Her clothes looked as if she had slept in them. His looked like he had died in them.

Bruno Colombo moved between the two, forcing her to take a step backward. “Hyslop, this is Madeline Wheatstone. She lives in the United States. However, as I told you, she is not visiting us in any official government capacity.”

Hyslop’s gray eyes had been gazing at her with a curiosity that matched Maddy’s own. She felt a sudden conviction that he did not know why he was here. And he did not know why Maddy was here, either. Her background data said that he was all engineer, as much the pure product as Bruno Colombo was the pure bureaucrat. His expression asked, Why have I been dragged here from my work? The director, Maddy knew, was the last person on Earth — or off it — to waste time with casual visitors.

Colombo had somehow glided forward again so that her view was mainly of the director’s back. Bruno was enormously tall and broad-shouldered. He must seldom be in a setting where that groomed halo of silvery hair did not tower above the crowd.

Maddy took a quick step sideways, so that she and John Hyslop faced each other again. She said, “Actually, I prefer Maddy to Madeline. Why don’t we all sit down? I don’t think we’ve ever met, Mr. Hyslop, but I’ve heard a lot of good things about you.”

Judging by the look on Bruno Colombo’s face, none of those had come from the director. They all sat down, and now she and Hyslop were eye to eye. She was long-waisted, so a lot of her height was in her torso. John Hyslop was probably self-conscious about his own short stature. He would have been just the wrong age, all set to be given a series of growth hormone shots, when the supernova hit.