“That’s nice, Turner,” Hamilton said, taking the stranger’s place.

“Yeah?” Turner watched as the man was lost in the confusion of the crowded lobby, amid pink-fleshed tourists.

“You don’t ever seem to talk to people. You always look like you’re running a make on them, filing a report. It’s nice to see you making friends for a change”

Turner looked at her. She was twenty, four years his junior, and earned roughly nine times his annual salary in a given week She was blonde, her hair cropped short for the series role, deeply tanned, and looked as if she was illuminated from within by sunlamps. The blue eyes were inhumanly perfect optical instruments, grown in vats in Japan. She was both actress and camera, her eyes worth several million New Yen, and in the hierarchy of Sense/Net stars, she barely rated.

He sat with her. in the bar, until she’d finished two drinks, then walked her back to the suite-cluster.

“You wouldn’t feel like coming in for another, would you, Turner?”

“No.” he said. This was the second evening she’d made the offer, and he sensed that it would be the last. “I have to check the seismics.”

Later that night, he phoned New York for the number of a firm in Mexico City that could supply him with screamers for the perimeter of the suite-cluster.

But a week later. Jane and three others, half the series cast, were dead.

“We’re ready to roll the medics,” Webber said. Turner saw that she was wearing fingerless brown leather gloves She’d replaced her sunglasses with clear-glass shooting glasses, and there was a pistol on her hip. “Sutcliffe’s monitoring the perimeter with the remotes. We’ll need everybody else to get the fucker through the brush.”

“Need me?”

“Ramirez says he can’t do anything too strenuous this close to jacking in. You ask me, he’s just a lazy little L.A. shit.”

“No,” Turner said, getting up from his seat on the ledge, “he’s right. If he sprained his wrist, we’d be screwed. Even something so minor that he couldn’t feel it could affect his speed...”

Webber shrugged. “Yeah. Well, he’s back in the bunker, bathing his hands in the last of our water and humming to himself, so we should be just fine.”

When they reached the surgery, Turner automatically counted heads. Seven. Ramirez was in the bunker; Sutcliffe was somewhere in the cinderblock maze, monitoring the sentry-remotes. Lynch had a Steiner-Optic laser slung over his right shoulder, a compact model with a folding alloy skeleton stock, integral batteries forming a fat handgrip below the gray titanium housing that served the thing as a barrel. Nathan was wearing a black jumpsuit, black paratrooper boots filmed with pale dust, and had the bulbous ant-eye goggles of an image-amplification rig dangling below his chin on a head strap.

Turner removed his Mexican sunglasses, tucked them into a breast pocket in the blue work shirt, and buttoned the flap.

“How’s it going, Teddy?” he asked a beefy six-footer with close-cropped brown hair.

“Jus’ fine,” Teddy said, with a toothy smile.

Turner surveyed the other three members of the site team, nodding to each man in turn: Compton, Costa, Davis.

“Getting down to the wire, huh?” Costa asked. He had a round, moist face and a thin, carefully trimmed beard. Like Nathan and the others, he wore black.

“Pretty close,” Turner said “All smooth so far.”

Costa nodded.

“We’re an estimated thirty minutes from arrival,” Turner said.

Nathan, Davis,” Webber said, “disconnect the sewage line “ She handed Turner one of the Telefunken ear-bead sets. She’d already removed it from its bubble pack. She put one on herself, peeling the plastic backing from the self-adhesive throat microphone and smoothing it into place on her sunburnt neck.

Nathan and Davis were moving in the shadows behind the module. Turner heard Davis curse softly.

“Shit,” Nathan said, “there’s no cap for the end of the tube.” The others laughed.

“Leave it,” Webber said. “Get to work on the wheels.

Lynch and Compton unlimber the jacks.”

Lynch drew a pistol-shaped power driver from his belt and ducked beneath surgery. It was swaying now, the suspension creaking softly; the medics were moving inside. Turner heard a brief, high-pitched whine from some piece of internal machinery, and then the chatter of Lynch’s driver as he readied the jacks.

He put his ear-bead in and stuck the throat mike beside his larynx. “Sutcliffe? Check?”

“Fine,” the Australian said, a tiny voice that seemed to come from the base of his skull.

“Ramirez?”

“Loud and clear...”

Eight minutes. They were rolling the module out on its ten fat tires. Turner and Nathan were on the front pair, steering;

Nathan had his goggles on. Mitchell was coming out in the dark of the moon. The module was heavy, absurdly heavy, and very nearly impossible to steer. “Like balancing a truck on a couple of shopping carts,” Nathan said to himself. Turner’s lower back was giving him trouble. It hadn’t been quite right since New Delhi.

“Hold it,” Webber said, from the third wheel on the left. “I’m stuck on a fucking rock...”

Turner released his wheel and straightened up. The bats were out in force tonight, flickering things against the bowl of desert starlight. There were bats in Mexico, in the jungle, fruit bats that slept in the trees that overhung the suite-cluster where the Sense/Net crew slept. Turner had climbed those trees, had strung the overhanging limbs with taut lengths of molecular monofilament, meters of invisible razor waiting for an unwary intruder. But Jane and the others had died anyway, blown away on a hillside in the mountains near Acapulco. Trouble with a labor union, someone said later, but nothing was ever determined, really, other than the fact of the primitive claymore charge, its placement and the position from which it had been detonated. Turner had climbed the hill himself, his clothes filmed with blood, and seen the nest of crushed undergrowth where the killers had waited, the knife switch and the corroded automobile battery. He found the butts of hand-rolled cigarettes and the cap from a bottle of Bohemia beer, bright and new.

The series had to be canceled, and the crisis-management team did yeoman duty, arranging the removal of bodies and the repatriation of the surviving members of the cast and crew. Turner was on the last plane out, and after eight Scotches in the lounge of the Acapulco airport, he’d wandered blindly out into the central ticketing area and encountered a man named Buschel, an executive tech from Sense/Net’s Los Angeles complex. Buschel was pale beneath an L.A. tan, his seersucker suit limp with sweat. He was carrying a plain aluminum case, like a camera case, its sides dull with condensation. Turner stared at the man, stared at the sweating case, with its red and white warning decals and lengthy labels explaining the precautions required in the transportation of materials in cryogenic storage.

“Christ,” Buschel said, noticing him “Turner. I’m sorry, man. Came down this morning. Ugly fucking business “ He took a sodden handkerchief from his jacket pocket and wiped his face. “Ugly job. I’ve never had to do one of these, be-fore...”

“What’s in the case, Buschel?” He was much closer now, although he didn’t remember stepping forward. He could see the pores in Buschel’s tanned face.

“You okay, man?” Buschel taking a step back. “You look bad.”

“What’s in the case, Buschel?” Seersucker bunched in his fist, knuckles white and shaking.

“Damn it, Turner,” the man jerking free, the handle of the case clutched in both hands now. “They weren’t damaged. Only some minor abrasion on one of the corneas. They belong to the Net. It was in her contract, Turner.”

And he’d turned away, his guts knotted tight around eight glasses of straight Scotch, and fought the nausea. And he’d continued to fight it, held it off for nine years, until, in his flight from the Dutchman, all the memory of it had come down on him, had fallen on him in London, in Heathrow, and he’d leaned forward, without pausing in his progress down yet another corridor, and vomited into a blue plastic waste canister.