Then someone came past, saying, " ... won't believe it! Biggest domestic screaming fight I've ever seen! Yelling cat and dog, they are, her waving a fist full of money at him, and the poor schmuck trying to explain it was for her he'd got himself swindled ... ."

Goldie cursed once aloud, explosively, earning curious stares from several 'eighty-sixers hanging on this gossip.

"Something wrong, Goldie?' Rachel Eisenstein asked, her brow furrowing slightly.

"Not a thing!"

Rachel shrugged and turned back to the storyteller. "Think it'll require stitches before they're done?"

Goldie stormed away from the terminal's head physician and the rest of the gossipers yammering about her money.

That ... that honor-bound, incompetent, downtime rat! . .

He'd given the blasted money back to Sam's wife!

She beat a dignified, hasty retreat toward her moneychanging shop, seething inside as she tried to come up with some other scheme that would net her a big gain over that mongrel cur, Skeeter Jackson.

Goldie slammed shut the shop door so hard, the bell jangled wildly against the glass. She stalked behind her counter and indulged in at least five minutes of unrestrained, sulky cursing where nothing but her glittering coins and jewels could hear.

Then, drawing several savage breaths, she added Kynan Rhys Gower to the list of names she owed serious paybacks. And then-caution overcoming wrath--she carefully struck his name off her list again. For reasons personally painful to recall, Kynan Rhys Gower was under Kit Carson's personal-and far-reaching-protection. After what Goldie Morran had suffered as a result of Kit's wrath, she did not want to find herself on the losing end of another deal with Kenneth "Kit" Carson, world-famous time scout and land-shark businessman.

Goldie muttered under her breath. "Damn meddling scouts, guides, and downtimers, one and all." She turned her savage anger toward a more productive target: Skeeter Jackson. She had to know what he was up to. After that blitzkrieg attack by those boys she'd hired, he'd gone virtually underground. Goldie tapped long, manicured nails against the glass countertop, noticed the rings she'd borrowed from her inventory. She replaced them in the glass case with a snort of disgust, then reached thoughtfully for the telephone. She might not have won this battle, but the war was far from over.

All communities, no matter their size, have rituals by which they measure the passage of time and gauge the meaning of life. These rituals serve purposes beyond seemingly superficial appearances; they provide necessary cohesion and order within the primate group to which humanity belongs, they sustain continuity in the endless chaos of life, they ensure proper passage from one phase of life into the next as the individual grows from childhood into adulthood responsibility and from there into old age, all within the context of the social group to which that individual belongs. This need for ritual is so profound, it is locked within the genetic code, transmitted over the generations from the vast distance of time when Lucy and her predecessors roamed the steaming plains of Africa, learning to use tools and language in a hostile, alien world-a world whose harsh beauty struck awe into the soul, a world where the terror of instant death could not be fully comprehended.

And so humans learned to survive via the evolution of rituals, changing not so much their physical bodies as their cultural, social patterns of behavior. In a world without rituals, humans will create their own, as in the gangs of lawless children who had before and still did, after The Accident, terrorized the streets of major cities.

The more chaotic the world, the greater the need for ritual.

La-La Land was an utter morass of conflicting cultures, religious beliefs, and behavior patterns. Its very nickname reflected the insane nature of the small community of shopkeepers, professionals, law enforcers, medical personnel, scholars, con artists, time-tour-company employees, stranded downtimers, freelance time guides, and the most insane of all the residents, the time scouts who explored new gates, risking their lives with each new journey alone into the unknown past.

In order to keep the peace, Station Management and representatives of the uptime government both had laid down sets of rituals-codified into law-by which residents and tourists alike were required to abide. Others sprung up naturally, as such things will any time human beings come together into more or less permanent groupings of more than one. (And, in fact, even hermits have their own rituals, whether or not they care to admit it.)

In La-La Land, there were two rituals of paramount importance to every resident: Bureau of Access Time Function's incessant attempts to enforce the cardinal rule of time touring, "Thou Shalt Not Profiteer from Temporal Travel" and the residents' unceasing attempts to thumb their collective noses at said cardinal rule.

The High Priests of the two opposing factions were Bull Morgan, Station Manager, whose sole purpose in life was to maintain an orderly, profitable station where a body could do pretty much as he or she pleased, so long as the peace was kept-and the other was Montgomery Wilkes, head ATF agent, a man dedicated to enforcing the cardinal rule of time touring at all cost.

Inevitably, when Bull and Montgomery locked horns, sparks flew. This, in turn, had given rise to a third universal ritual in La-La Land. Known affectionately as Bull Watching, it involved the placement of bets both large and small on the outcome of any given encounter between the two men. In its classic form, Bull Watching provided hours of entertainment to those men and women who had chosen to live in a place where light blazed from the ceiling of the Commons twenty-four hours a day, but where the only real sunlight came from the occasional trickle through an open gate.

In this sunless, brightly lit world, it was inevitable that Montgomery Wilkes would grow ever more bitter as residents flouted his authority at every possible moment and made bets that infuriated him about every word he did or did not utter. When Goldie Morran came to him with her plan to rid the station of Skeeter Jackson, he saw a golden opportunity to rid it of Goldie Morran, as well--a woman he knew in his bones broke the cardinal rule of time touring with every gate that opened, but was slick enough not to get caught.

In taking that wager with Skeeter-and then coming to him-she had sealed her own doom.

Montgomery Wilkes intended to deport both of the scoundrels before this business was done. That decision made, he indulged in a little ritual of his own. He called it "inspecting the troops." The ATF agents assigned to TT-86 called it words impossible to repeat in polite company.

Dressed in black uniforms that crackled when they walked, their hair cut to regulation length (Montgomery had been known to use a ruler to measure hair length to the last millimeter), every ATF agent in the ready room snapped to attention when he stalked in, six feet, one hundred-eighty pounds of muscle, close-cropped red hair, crackling green eyes, and set lips that underscored the lines of discontent in his face.

As he faced his agents, eyes alight with a martial glow that struck terror into their collective hearts, he said, "The time has come for you to start living up to those uniforms you wear. This station has hemmed us in, crowded us into a corner, prevented us from doing much more than searching luggage and levying taxes on the few items that actually get transported uptime. Meanwhile, we sit by and watch while out-and-out crooks scam fortunes under our very noses."

Shoe leather creaked in the silence as he paced the front of the room. He turned to glare at the nearest agents. "Enough!"

With brisk movements, he switched on a slide projector and clicked controls. Goldie Morran's pinched countenance filled a ten-foot wall.