If Grishkin's lunatic violation of his innards in the Cathedral of Intestinal Revelation had robbed him of his sense of proportion — what Pater had called his 'fine vulgar iconoclasm' — ben Barka's scruffy little retreat among the rubbish was doing a lot to restore it. He knew a wrecking yard when he saw one, and he remembered the PCO from innumerable hinterland corners: snotty-nosed, one foot in the gutter, leaving small toothmarks on the bone.

It was a pusher's Galaxy all right.

After a bit, he reviewed his situation. His assault on the PCO, however satisfying, had been by nature an exploration; next time, he expected to get the Chambers pistol. He retrieved the knuckleduster from his boot, paced round a few more times — hobbling and cursing — to work the stiffness out of his bruised right arch, then squatted down to wait in a position that would put him behind the door next time it opened.

It stayed shut for nearly three hours.

He worried because he needed darkness, and the dawn must be near. He dozed off, he woke up with a guilty start. His stomach grumbled, his legs developed pins and needles. He recalled the holograms of Howell, and conceived a sudden retrospective lust for sallow Heloise, uncrowned queen of the Aesthetic Asteroid. Grinning into the luteous gloom, be clenched a fist and rubbed the cold steel knuckles against his cheek…

The sides of the Cowper stove boomed faintly as someone outside kicked at the door. He shot to his feet, sweating. He was only partly upright when the door slammed back — grabbed at it for support, found it swinging further toward him as a result, and was shoved painfully into the wall. So much for ambush. Sodding and blinding, he extricated himself and rolled out of the closing gap into the yellow arena -

White light pinned him crouching to the scaly floor like a child caught in the awful act.

'You watch it, spacer,' said a soft voice. 'What you doing in there?'

He sat on his right hand to hide the knuckleduster, blinked.

'Hey,' he whined placatingly, 'that hurts. I was having — ' Flapped his left hand in front of his eyes. The light went out.

'Fetch him here,' ordered the PCO, who'd sensibly sent a couple of commandos through ahead of him. They grinned at one another, pistols dangling negligently from their hard thick fingers. One of them shrugged and advanced.

'You just leave me alone!' pleaded John Truck, cowering away as the brown hand touched his shoulder, so that its owner had to stretch and grab at the last minute. Balance undermined, he swayed. 'Right, you sod!' shouted Truck, brought the knuckles round in a dirty gray arc and hit him in the mouth. Something broke, the Arab's fingers went lax, Truck had hold of the gun before it hit the floor.

'Now,' he said, trembling with relief and fury. He wound his left hand into the hashishin's belt and held the flaccid body up as a shield. Red unsteady light dispelled the gloom as the PCO and the remaining Arab let go simultaneously with their pistols. Lunchtime smells in the Cowper stove.

'No, no,' said the PCO.

'Oh yes,' whispered Truck, shuffling inexorably forward behind the smoldering corpse, 'Oh yes.'

All three of them were on fire when he left the chamber, expressions of horror on their rigid features. What else should he have done? He watched them dispassionately for a moment or two, then, weighed down by more guns than he'd ever owned in his life, ran off into the jungle of railway tracks and junkheaps. Rusty gear trains rolled about under his feet as he went, like the fossil bones of preposterous little animals.

Energy fronts resonated silent and dating from the cliff-faces of the rolling mills; from the convection currents dancing like translucent veils above the mounds of the city came a wicked, sucking roar; hot-air refraction shifted the positions of the known stars, cold winds howled toward the stricken center of it all across the bleak loading platforms. It looked like a dream of arson. It looked like Hell -

He didn't quite know what to do. Dwarfed and stumbling, a gun in each hand and a spare one stuck down the side of his boot, he took to the lanes of shadow beneath the great corroded walls, drawn toward that essential solipsistic djinn thrashing the confines of its magnetic bottle.

Ianthine light fired the lines and pylons of the high voltage system; it limned the Kaldo converters and the vast corrugated sheds of the borax refinery; it spilled like hot glass over Truck's bald, vulnerable skull as he turned to scan the waste behind him, and discovered twenty cruel black figures leaping through the rubbish — a complete fellaheen death-commando, threading the lunatic peep-show flicker in a classic search-and-destroy maneuver.

Ben Barka had decided to cut his losses.

Truck got down on the floor and crawled further into the shadows, shaking. He could see them, but he didn't think they could see him. He rubbed his face into the rust, he bit the inside of his cheek so hard it bled. They'd have found their dead by now, smoking in the Cowper stove. 'Oh Jesus,' he sobbed. He hadn't got a chance.

He fled down a blind narrow walkway, falling repeatedly into troughs and sumps of lukewarm sticky water — at the end of the alley, fetched up against a blank wall of flaking steel — opened his split lip and dropped one of his guns.

Panicked.

'Oh my Christ, my Christ,' staring back, mouth open, bloody-chinned, no way out.

He scrabbled about, discovering rivets.

There was a door.

He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. Spreading his cloak to hide the flare, he fired half a Chambers magazine into the rusty lock; reeled back from the heat with his forehead blistering; stab-kicked the door and dived through it panting and laughing like a madman, reeking of scorch and smoke and death.

He had broken into a gutted pumping station, where a score of small-bore pipelines converged to supply raw organic material to one great conduit fifteen feet in diameter. Most of the transfer valve gear had been ripped out, but a faint odor of partly-processed polymers still haunted the sour air. A shattered inspection window gave access to the conduit: as soon as he had relaxed enough to be able to turn his back on the rapidly cooling door — fairly sure that for a moment the pursuit had gone off in some other direction — he poked his head through it and had a look.

The main stretched away right and left in a slight but perceptible curve, lighted by dim orange bulbs strung from a frayed cable in the ceiling — adopted by the denizens of Junk City as a trunkline for furtive journeys, a rat's highway smeared with cryptic brown graffiti and littered with rubbish. He rested his elbows on the windowsill and wondered if it would get him anywhere. Small drafts fluted through splits in the inner cladding, drying the sweat on his temples.

He was clambering in, and stuff the consequences, when someone came tap-tapping out of the dim fallopian reaches, footsteps quick and purposeful. He ducked back into the pumping station until the noise got very close, then shoved his pistols through the window and hissed, 'Move, and I'll blow you to hell!'

A short, ironical laugh, then a female voice said, 'Go on and shoot'

'What?'

'You'd be doing me a favor, Captain.'

He peered through the window.

It was Angina Seng, all coppery hair and long body. She stood regarding him with a pinched, censorious expression. Once again, he had the feeling that she was fighting a doomed action to prevent her soul evacuating her skull and boiling off into space. The lines around her mouth were deep and sad.

'I can't seem to get rid of you, can I?' she said. 'Are you going to get it over with, or can I go?'

He was amazed to realize that she honestly didn't care. He hauled himself through the window and frowned aggressively. 'I've got a bone to pick with you,' he told her, remembering that he had.