This would be an excellent moment, Noyes told himself morosely. He did not want to be a catspaw for John Roditis any longer. He was tired of rushing around compromising himself for the sake of fulfilling the little entrepreneur’s ambitions. Committing murder now. True, true, Roditis had produced a pack of sophistries to persuade him that slipping cyclophosphamide-8 into Martin St. John’s drinking water was not murder in any valid sense, and so persuasive was Roditis’ glibness that Noyes had been nearly taken in. Nearly. Yet he knew that the quaestors would take a harder line with him if he were caught before Roditis could blank the crime from his mind. They’d accuse him of deliberate discorporation, and there was no more serious crime. He’d be erased. A small loss, maybe, to the universe and even to himself; but nevertheless humiliating. A man should destroy himself, not allow others to destroy him.

Gulp the carniphage now, he thought. You’ll make a mess in the plane, and the stewardess will throw up, but at least you’ll die an honest death.

His hand stole toward his righthand breast pocket. — Go on, Kravchenko urged. Why don’t you do it and get it over with? I’m so sick of being stuck in your lousy head, Noyes, you can’t possibly imagine!

The hand halted short of its goal. Some lingering Puritan sense of obligation assailed him. To kill himself now would be cowardly; he’d be running out on Roditis’ assignment. He had no right to do that. Roditis trusted him; Roditis relied on him. And Roditis had given him employment and a purpose in the world for many years past. Sure, Roditis was overbearing, tyrannical, self-centered, and all the rest. Sure, Roditis had bullied him into compromise after compromise, until at the end he was even crashing parties on the man’s behalf and sleeping with strange women to win a nugget of useful information. Nevertheless, those were the conditions of his employment. He had accepted them. He could not spurn them now. He owed it to Roditis to carry out this final assignment, this meaningless discorporation, this destruction of a body already dead and tenanted by a dead man’s ghost. After that, if he wished, he could swallow his carniphage at last, with even more justification than now. Running out on unfinished business was surely not in the Noyes tradition.

Noyes realized that he had just made use of his New England heritage to justify an act of murder.

So be it, he told himself. So be it The decelerating rockets whined. They were landing in New York. Kravchenko, mocking as always, set up a clamor of derision as Noyes moved his hand away from the carniphage. But Kravchenko, Noyes knew, could not have followed the complex inner processes of decision-making. The persona was simply trying to keep him off balance and unsettled. It was not really in Kravchenko’s interest to goad him into actually drinking the carniphage; merely to get him so rattled that he’d be vulnerable to the sudden swift strike of a counter-erasure, the violent ejection by a triumphant dybbuk.

He wondered how he was going to find Martin St. John. He could not simply look him up in the master directory. St. John was an Englishman and wouldn’t be listed here. Of course, Santoliquido would know where St. John was staying. But Noyes wanted to avoid tipping his hand to Santoliquido. It was too obvious that Roditis had an interest in getting Paul Kaufmann out of his present carnate form, and if Roditis’ known confederate Noyes were suddenly to begin making inquiries about St. John, any chance Noyes might have of gaining access to St. John would disappear.

Noyes decided to ask Elena. Elena seemed to know everything about everyone. She was at the center of the nexus, tentacles reaching toward Mark Kaufmann on the one hand, toward Santoliquido on the other, toward Noyes on the third. And she still had a tentacle or two left to extend in Roditis’ direction. She’d be a likely source of information.

She had a small apartment registered in her on name in New Jersey. Noyes scarcely expected to find her there, but it was the logical place to begin. He called from the airport and was surprised to find her answering.

Her privacy code appeared on the screen. Noyes identified himself. The screen cleared, and Elena came into view. She was nude, but the scanner cut her off at the breasts, and in any case the tiny screen in the booth did not give him much of a view.

“I’ve just come hack from a visit to Roditis,” he said. “In Indiana.”

“You told him about—”

“St. John? Yes.”

“He must have been furious!”

“Actually, he was quite cool about it,” Noyes said. “He seemed to be expecting some sort of fast shuffle of that kind, and he was braced. Listen, Elena, how soon can I get to see you?”

“Why not right now?”

“You’re free this evening?”

“Very much so. Would you like to take me to Jubilisle again?”

“No,” he said. “I’d just like a quiet visit. There are — some questions I’d like to ask.”

“Questions, questions, questions! Very well. Come to my apartment. When should I expect you?”

“How about an hour from now?”

“That will do.” She tapped out the hopter program for reaching her house, fingers moving swiftly over the data keys. An instant later the program card came chuttering out of the data slot in Noyes’ telephone booth. He seized it and blew her a kiss. Grabbing his one suitcase, he rushed up the ramp and stepped into a traveler’s-aid station, where he underwent a vibrator bath while his clothes were being pressed and refurbished. Freed of the grime of his journey from Indiana, Noyes proceeded toward the hopter zone, pausing on the way for a short snack. He chartered a hopter and slipped Elena’s house program into the receptor slot. The vehicle took off, found itself hung up momentarily in a delay pattern over the crowded airport, then discovered an exit vector and made its way toward New Jersey.

He arrived at Elena’s place a little after nine that evening. Noyes had never been there before. His previous meetings with Elena had taken place at his apartment. He did not know what to expect: a place of palatial luxury, perhaps, or some steamy, overdecorated temple of amour. But in reality the apartment was nothing more than a pied-а-terre, as simple and austere as his own little suite. Despite Elena’s known predilections for opulence, she did not seem to require it here, perhaps because it served only as a way station for her on those rare nights when she was not sleeping out. Greeting him in diaphanous, swirling pink robes that did very little to hide the exaggerated voluptuousness of her body. Elena seemed like some overblown tropical blossom blooming in a humble northern meadow.

They embraced tentatively and distantly. Elena evidently was ready for any kind of overtures he cared to make, but Noyes was too tense, too bound up in his own situation, to do more than go through a kind of ritualistic contact.

They broke away. She offered drinks. He settled into a chair; she chose a divan. Her robes parted to reveal tawny thighs. Noyes wondered if, as a matter of strategy, he should respond to her wanton unvoiced invitation. Or was she only teasing him? He was well aware that in all their relationships she regarded him only as a surrogate for other men. Sexually, she reached through him to make love to Jim Kravchenko. And when she passed secret information to him about the doings of Mark Kaufmann or Santoliquido, it was in the hope of winning favor with Roditis.

He said, “I need your help, Elena. I’m trying to find Martin St. John.”

Her eyebrows rose. Her full lips drew apart. “Roditis is after him so soon?”

Noyes made an effort to conceal his reaction. “I’d simply like to talk to the man.”

“About what?”

“Does it matter?”

“It might,” she said. Fidgeting, Noyes improvised. “All right. Roditis is interested in working out a deal with Paul Kaufmann. As long as old Kaufmann’s back in circulation and Roditis can’t have the persona himself, he’d like to come to an understanding with him. You see, Roditis is worried that Paul and Mark will form a family alliance to crush him. So he’d like to drive a wedge between them as rapidly as possible. Does that make sense to you?”