“I’ll try to arrange it.” Garamond stared through the wavering blur of the North Field’s perimeter fence, wondering if he would see any signs of unusual activity.

Carlos Pennario allowed the shrubs to spring together again and, for the first time since his youth, he crossed himself.

He backed away from what he had seen, dragging the frantic dogs with him, and looked around for help. There was nobody in sight. He opened his mouth with the intention of shouting at the top of his voice, of unburdening his dismay on the sleepy air, then several thoughts occurred to him almost at once. Pennario had seen Elizabeth Lindstrom only a few times, and always at a distance, but he had heard many stories told in the night-time quietness of the staff dormitory. He would have given a year’s wages rather than be brought before her with the news that he had allowed one of her spaniels to choke on a chicken bone.

Now he was almost in the position of having to face Elizabeth in person and describe his part in the finding of her son’s corpse.

Pennario tried to imagine what the President might do to the bringer of such news before she regained whatever slight measure of self-control she was supposed to have…

Then there was the matter of his superior, Arthur Kemp. Pennario had no right to be on the terrace in the first place, and to a man like Kemp that one transgression would be suggestive, would be proof, of others. He had no idea what had happened to the dead boy, but he knew the way Kemp’s mind worked. Assuming that Pennario lived long enough to undergo an investigation, Kemp would swear to anything to avoid any association with guilt.

The realization that he was in mortal danger stimulated Pennario into decisive action. He knelt, gathered the spaniels into his arms and walked quickly down the steps to the lower levels. Shocked and afraid though he was, his mind retained those qualities which had lifted him successfully from near-starvation in Mexico to one of the few places in the world where there was enough air for a man to breathe. Locked away in his memory was a comprehensive timetable of Kemp’s daily movements in and around Starflight House, and according to that schedule the acidulous little Scot would shortly be making his final inspection tour of the afternoon. The tour usually took him along the circular terrace, past the shrubbery in which Harald’s body was hidden — and how much better it would have been if Domestic Supervisor Kemp had made the fearful discovery.

Pennario kept slanting downwards across the hill until he had reached the lowest point from which he could still see a sector of the upper terrace and gauge Kemp’s progress along it. He moved into the shade of an ivy-covered loggia, set the dogs on the ground and pretended to be busy adjusting their silver collars. The excited animals fought to get free, but Pennario held them firmly in check.

It was important to him that they did not make their predictable dash to the terrace until Kemp was in exactly the right place to become involved with their discovery. Pennario glanced at his watch.

“Any minute now, my little friends,” he whispered. “Any minute now.”

In contrast to what Garamond had feared, the field seemed quieter than usual, its broad expanses of ferrocrete mellowed to the semblance of sand by the fleeting sunlight. Low on the western horizon a complexity of small clouds was assembled like a fabulous army, their helmets and crests glowing with fire, and several vaporous banners reached towards the zenith in deepening pink. As the car drew to a halt outside the S.E.A. complex Garamond shielded his eyes, looked towards his assigned take-off point and saw the squat outline of the waiting shuttle. Its door was open and the boarding steps were in place. The sight filled him with a powerful urge to drive to the shuttle, get Aileen and Chris on board, and blast off towards safety. There were certain pre-flight formalities, however, and take off without observing them could lead to the wrong sort of radio message being beamed up to the Bissendorf ahead of him. He pushed a heavy lock of hair away from his forehead and smiled for the benefit of Aileen and the driver.

“Some papers to sign in here, then we’ll take the slidewalk out to the shuttle,” he said easily as he opened the car door and got out.

“I thought Chris and I’d be going up to the observation floor,” Aileen replied, not moving from her seat.

“There’s no fun in that, is there, Chris?” Garamond lifted the boy off Afleen’s knee and set him down on the steps of the S.E.A. building. “What’s the point in having a Dad who’s a flickerwing captain if you can’t get a few extra privileges? You’d like to look right inside the shuttle, wouldn’t you?”

“Yes, Dad.” Chris nodded, but with a curious reserve, as if he had sensed something of Aileen’s unease.

“Of course, you would.” Garamond took Aileen’s hand, drew her out of the car and slammed the door. “That’s all, driver — we can look after ourselves from here on.” The driver glanced back once, without speaking, and accelerated away towards the transport pool.

Aileen caught Garamond’s arm. “We’re alone now, Vance. What’s… ?”

“Now you two stand right here on these steps and don’t move till I come out. This won’t take long.” Garamond sprinted up the steps, returned the salutes of the guards at the top, and hurried towards the S.E.A. Preflight Centre. The large square room looked unfamiliar when he entered, as though seen through the eyes of the young Vance Garamond who had been so impressed by it at the beginning of his first exploratory command. He ran to the long desk and slapped down his flight authorization documents.

“You’re late, Captain Garamond,” commented a heavily built ex-quartermaster called Herschell, who habitually addressed outgoing captains with a note of rueful challenge which was meant to remind them he had not always held a desk job.

“I know — I couldn’t get away from Liz.” Garamond seized a stylus and began scribbling his name on various papers as they were fed to him. “Like that, was it? She couldn’t let you go?”

“That’s the way it was.”

“Pity. I’d say you’ve missed the tide.” Herschell’s pink square face was sympathetic.

“Oh?”

“Yeah — look at the map.” Herschell pointed up at the vast solid-image chart of the Solar System and surrounding volume of interstellar space which floated below the domed ceiling. The solar wind, represented by yellow radiance, was as strong as ever and Garamond saw the healthy, bow-shaped shock wave on the sunward side of Earth, where the current impacted on the planet’s geomagnetic field. Data on the inner spirals of the solar wind, however, were of interest only to interplanetary travellers — and his concern was with the ion count at the edge of the system and beyond. Garamond searched for the great arc of the shock front near the orbit of Uranus where the solar wind, attenuated by distance from Sol, built up pressure against the magnetic field of the galaxy. For a moment he saw nothing, then his eyes picked out an almost invisible amber halo, so faint that it could have represented nothing more than a tenth of an ion per cubic centimetre. He had rarely seen the front looking so feeble. It appeared that the sun was in a niggardly mood, unwilling to assist his ship far up the long gravity slope to interstellar space.

Garamond shifted his attention to the broad straggling bands of green, blue and red which plotted the galactic tides of fast-moving corpuscles as they swept across the entire region. These vagrant sprays of energetic particles and their movements meant as much to him as wind, wave and tide had to the skipper of a transoceanic sailing ship. All spacecraft built by Starflight — which meant all spacecraft built on Earth — employed intense magnetic fields to sweep up interstellar atomic debris for use as reaction mass. The system made it possible to conduct deep-space voyages in ships weighing as little as ten thousand tons, as against the million tons which would have been the minimum for a vessel which had to transport its own reaction mass.