Flickerwing ships had their own disadvantages in that their efficiency was subject to spatial ‘weather’. The ideal mission profile was for a ship to accelerate steadily to the midpoint of its journey and decelerate at the same rate for the remainder of the trip, but where the harvest of charged particles was poor the rate of speed-change fell off. If that occurred in the first half of a voyage it meant that the vessel took longer than planned to reach destination; if it occurred in the second half the ship was deprived of the means to discard velocity and would storm through its target system at unmanageable speed, sometimes not coming to a halt until it had overshot by light-days. It was to minimize such uncertainties that Starflight maintained chains of automatic sensor stations whose reports, transmitted by low-energy tachyon beams, were continuously fed into weather charts.

And, as Garamond immediately saw, the conditions in which he hoped to achieve high-speed flight were freakishly, damnably bad.

More than half the volume of space covered by the map seemed entirely void of corpuscular flux, and such fronts as were visible in the remainder were fleeing away to the galactic south. Only one wisp of useful density — possibly the result of heavy particles entangling themselves in an irregularity in the interplanetary magnetic field — reached as far back as the orbit of Mars, and even that was withdrawing at speed.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” Garamond said simply.

Herschell handed him the traditional leather briefcase containing the flight authorization documents. “Why don’t you take off out of it, Captain? The Bissendorf is ready to travel, and I can sign the rest of this stuff by proxy.” “Thanks.” Garamond took the briefcase and ran for the door.

“Don’t let that ole bit of dust get away,” Herschell called after him, one flickerwing man to another. “Scoop it up good.”

Garamond sprinted along the entrance hall, relieved at being able to respond openly to his growing sense of urgency. The sight of ships’ commanders running for the slidewalks was quite a common one in the S.E.A. Centre when the weather was breaking. He found Aileen and Chris on the front steps, exactly where he had left them. Aileen was looking tired and worried, and holding the boy close to her side.

“All clear,” he said. He caught Aileen by the upper arm and urged her towards the slidewalk tunnel. She fell in step with him readily enough but he could sense her mounting unease. “Let’s go!”

“Where to, Vance?” She spoke quietly, but he understood she was asking him the big question, communicating on a treasured personal level which neither of them would ever willingly choose to disrespect. He glanced down at Chris. They were on the slidewalk now, slanting down into the tunnel and the boy seemed fascinated by the softly tremoring ride.

“When I was waiting to see the President this afternoon I was asked to take care of young Harold Lindstrom for an hour…” The enormity of what he had to say stilled the words in his throat.

“What happened, Vance?”

“I… I didn’t take care of him very well. He fell and killed himself.”

“Oh!” The colour seeped away from beneath the tan of Aileen’s face. “But how did you get away from… ?”

“Nobody saw him fall. I bid the body in some bushes.”

“And now we’re running?”

“As fast as we can go, sweet.”

Aileen put her hand on Chris’s shoulder. “Do you think Elizabeth would… ?”

“Automatically. Instinctively. There’d be no way for her not to do it.”

Aileen’s chin puckered as she fought to control the muscles around her mouth. “Oh, Vance! This is terrible. Chris and I can’t go up there.”

“You can, and you’re going to.” Garamond put his arm around Aileen and was alarmed when she sagged against him with her full weight. He put his mouth close to her ear. “I can’t do this alone. I need your help to get Chris away from here.”

She straightened with difficulty. “I’ll try. Lots of women go to Terranova, don’t they?”

“That’s better.” Garamond gave her arm an encouraging squeeze and wondered if she really believed they could go to the one other human-inhabited Starflight-dominated world in the universe. “Now, we’re almost at the end of the tunnel When we get up the ramp, pick Chris up and walk straight on to the shuttle with him as if it was a school bus. I’ll be right behind you blocking the view of anybody who happens to be watching from the tower.”

“What will the other people say?” “There’ll be nobody else on the shuttle apart from the pilots, and I’ll talk to them.”

“But won’t the pilots object when they see us on board?”

“The pilots won’t say a word,” Garamond promised, slipping his hand inside his jacket.

At Starflight House, high on the sculpted hill, the first man had already died.

Domestic Supervisor Arthur Kemp had been planning his evening meal when the two spaniels bounded past him and darted into the shrubbery on the long terrace. He paused, eyed them curiously, then pushed the screen of foliage aside. The light was beginning to fail, and Kemp — who came from the comparatively uncrowded, unpolluted, unravaged north of Scotland — lacked Carlos Pennario’s sure instinct concerning matters of violent and premature death. He dragged Harald’s body into the open, stared for a long moment at the black deltas of blood which ran from nostrils and ears, and began to scream into his wrist communicator.

Elizabeth Lindstrom was on the terrace within two minutes.

She would not allow anybody to touch her son’s remains and, as the staff could not simply walk away, there formed a dense knot of people at the centre of which Elizabeth set up her court of enquiry. Standing over the small body, satin-covered abdomen glowing like a giant pearl, she spoke in a controlled manner at first. Only the Council members who knew her well understood the implications of the steadily rising inflexions in her voice, or of the way she had begun to finger a certain ruby ring on her right hand. These men, obliged by rank to remain close to the President, nevertheless tried to alter their positions subtly so that they were shielded by the bodies of other men, who in turn sensed their peril and acted accordingly. The result was that the circle around Elizabeth grew steadily larger and its surface tension increased.

It was into this arena of fear that Domestic Supervisor Kemp was thrust to give his testimony. He answered several of her questions with something approaching composure, but his voice faltered when — after he too had confirmed Captain Garamond’s abrupt departure from the terrace — Elizabeth began pulling out her own hair in slow, methodical handfuls. For an endless minute the soft ripping of her scalp was the only sound on the terrace.

Kemp endured it for as long as was humanly possible, then turned to run. Elizabeth exploded him with the laser burst from her ring, and was twisting blindly to hose the others with its fading energies when her senior physician, risking his own life, fired a cloud of sedative drugs into the distended veins of her neck. The President lost consciousness almost as once, but she had time to utter three words :

“Bring me Garamond.”