The first sensible step in the new situation should be to withdraw his verbal resignation, but he was in no mood to race Mellor again at that moment. Mellor was not a particularly perceptive man, but he had picked up Dallen's resentment over hearing Mathieu spoken with admiration. That had been a lapse on Dallen's part, and it was something he would have to take extra care over if — as was quite possible, given the irrationality of most human beings — Mathieu were to be elevated to the status of local hero because of his amazing luck. It was important for Dallen to show no enmity towards Mathieu, to display no special interest. On the other hand, he should display no special lack of interest either… Or was his thinking becoming too involuted and obsessional?

Frowning, breathing deeply to ease the growing pressure between his temples, Dallen walked along the corridor towards the elevator which would drop him into the building's main reception area. In the past he would have taken a short cut by way of the north-side emergency stair, but that was a trick he had passed on to Cona, and as a result of it she and Mikel had been… He wrenched his thoughts back into the present as a door opened just ahead of him. Vik Costain, personal assistant to the Mayor, came hurrying through it and almost collided with Dallen.

"Fm so sorry," Costain exclaimed in his prissy manner. There was a flustered expression on his grey race and his hairless scalp was glistening with perspiration.

"You should slow down a bit," Dallen said, "or get persona] radar."

"Spare me the witticisms. Carry — this has been the worst afternoon in my thirty years in this place."

"Frank giving you a hard time?"

Costain turned his eyes up for a second. "Between him and Beau bloody Brummel…"

"Who?"

"Young Mathieu. They've been having a radiophone battle for the last hour and I'm right in the middle of it, and there's nobody here to do any goddamn work. I suppose you've heard the latest about Mathieu?"

Dallen nodded. "Mister Indestructible."

"Not that," Costain said impatiently. "He has just quit his job without giving notice, and that throws his workload on to Frank and me. Frank is furious."

"I'll bet he is," Dallen said, again the hunter, feeling the hunter's quickening of the pulse as the trail makes a sudden swing. "What is Gerald planning to do with himself?"

"Orbitsviile. He claims he's getting out immediately on some kind of special flight. Have you ever heard of this Renard character?"

"Renard?" Dallen felt a sick satisfaction, a furtive and intoxicating glee, which spread through him as he imagined being close to Mathieu for almost a week in the unnatural environment of a starship. So many dangerous complexities, so many traps for the unwary, so many ways in which a man could be overtaken by premature death…

"As a matter of fact," he said peacefully, "Rick Renard and I are good friends. Oddly enough, I've been thinking of going home with him on the same flight."

Renard's ship detached itself from Polar Band One and began the long climb to the edge of interstellar space.

Almost half-a-century old, the Hawkshead was a bulk cargo freighter which had been buih when Earth's space technology was still high on a crest. It had the classic configuration developed by the historic Starflight company — three equal cylinders joined together in parallel, with the central one projecting ahead by almost half its length. The control deck, living quarters and cargo space were in the central cylinder; the outer pair housing the thermonuclear drivers and flux pumps, plus the warp generators which were only brought into play in the higher speed regimes. Because the huge magnetic fields created by the pumps swirled out symmetrically from the fuselage, ships of the type were popularly known as flickerwings, though the name was misleading. The fields were vast insubstantial scoops which gathered interstellar matter for use as reaction mass.

Spatial weather conditions were good as the Hawks-bead spiralled outwards from the orbit of Earth. Great billows of energetic particles which had originated in the heart of the galaxy were rolling across the Solar System. These sprays of fast-moving corpuscles — which meant as much to the starship as wind, wave and tide had done to oceanic dippers — provided a rich harvest for the vessel's drivers, enabling it to accelerate at better than 1G.

In the first century of interstellar travel it had been necessary for a ship to attain a speed of some fifty million metres a second before it entered a paradoxical domain, governed by the laws of the Canadian mathematician Arthur , where Einsteinian ideas about space and time no longer held sway. Arthurian physics had made it possible for a ship to journey between Earth and Orbitsville in only four months, with almost no relativistic time dilation, but even that kind of mind-defying speed had been insufficient for the needs of the Migration. The solution, born out of experience and computer-enhanced genius, had been the tachyonic mode, described by one orthodox theorist as "crooked accountancy applied to mass-energy transformations", and it had cut the transit time to an average of six days.

It was a brief time by anybody's standards, and that thought was much on Dallen's mind as he stood in the ship's observation gallery and watched the Earth-Moon system begin to shrink to the semblance of a double star. His move against Gerald Mathieu would have to be made very soon.

Dallen had been too busy winding up his affairs in Madison to think much about the journey which lay ahead, but in view of the circumstances he had half-expected some of the features of an old-style oceanic cruise. He had visualised Renard sitting at the head of the evening dinner table, with Silvia London nearby, revelling in and taking every conceivable social advantage from his position as benefactor-employer. That notion had been compounded from ignorance of conditions aboard freighters and the assumption that Renard would have despotic control over the ship's daily routine.

In actuality Renard seemed to spend most of his time in bitter argument with the freighter's captain, Lars Lessen, a morose, pigeon-chested man in his fifties. Lessen, it transpired, had undertaken to provide a crew and run the ship on a fixed-price contract, and he was deeply unhappy with the way things were working out.

Forty years earlier the Hawkskead would almost have flown itself to Orbitsville. Now more and more human interventions were required to keep its myriad systems in operation, and the extra man-hour payments were gnawing into Lessen's profits. He reacted by waging psychological warfare on Renard — one tactic being to call him with unnecessary frequency over minor decisions — and to Dallen's surprise seemed to be gaining the upper hand, evidence of the advantages of playing on one's home ground.

The ship had one largish canteen area, in place of Dallen's imagined dining room, but it was jealously monopolised by the thirty-strong crew. The group of ten supernumeraries recruited by Renard were more-or-less expected to use the mealomat dispensers and eat in their rooms. These were prefabricated cabins ranged in a partial circle on Deck 5, the one just above the vertiginous well of the cargo hold.

The living arrangements, which could have been described as unsociable, came as an unwelcome surprise to the others, but they suited Dallen quite well because Cona had not taken to space travel. She had become hysterical during the brief shuttle ride to the ship, necessitating heavy sedation, and had continued to react badly to the confinement of the cabin Dallen shared with her and Mikel. The only way he could keep on top of the situation was by dosing her with a tranquiliser prescribed by Roy Picciano, a drug which on Dallen's insistence included an effective libido depressant.