He had collapsed across the body of his wife and lay sobbing.

Little Worker gently approached. She touched him tenderly. He jumped.

"Mister Michael," said Little Worker, "everything is all right now.

"You and I are alone."

I will allow as how bein' a waste gipsy is not the most settled way of life, nor the easiest on the nerves. And it's surely no career for a married man-as Geraldine never tires of remindin' me.

But I ain't married. And I never listen to Geraldine.

Anyway, what's so rough about the life? First off, there's the constant travel. You got to learn to keep as little in your kit as a blind Bhopal beggar and generally stay as loose as a Bull's balls. Your in-demand ass is always bein' faxed around the globe, from one hotspot to another, whenever some muni or fabrik or werke or abe gets to feelin' a tad guilty and decides they're gonna clean up a little piece of the big, big mess they've all made durin' the last filthy century.

Some of these places ain't so bad, in terms of relaxin' when the job's over for the day. When we were in Milan, Italy, for instance, reamin' out their toxic sewers where some asshole way back in '86 dumped twenty tons of assorted pollutants and contaminated the whole city's water supply, I was able to do all kinds of cultural things, like visitin' churches, and seem' The Last Supper (considerably improved,

in my opinion, since they sprayed the restorative bugs on it, despite all the juicer critics sayin' it looked digitally enhanced), and checkin' out the architecture of the Eye-tie chickenhouses. (One was in a real palace, and some of the girls was supposed to be real princesses. It was just possible, too, cuz I remember that when Monaco was forbsed-over and trumped-up, there was a whole generation that had to latch onto jobs real quick.)

Other times, you're gonna find yourself in the ass-end of nowhere, some god forsaken place that makes Robert Lee, Texas (my birthplace), look like New Orleans at Mardi Gras. I have shivered at fifty below with no audience but dumb greasy penguins, cleanin' up an Antarctic oil spill, and baked my sandy britches at one hundred plus, decommissioning a Mideast CBW plant. And both times there was nothin' to do after your shift except play flashcards, get wiped on needlestrength-one tropes, and spill atmosphere with your fellow gipsies. (Maybe summa the talk might lead to bumpin' uglies with one of your fellow gips, if that's what fills your receptors, but I try to stay away from the gals that work in the same line as me, they all bein' as familiar and excitin' as your elderly mustache-wearin' aunt or some old-maid grade-school trope doser.)

It's times like these that you tell spine-tinglin' kings and barkers about all the shit you have seen. Times when the rems was sleetin' around you thicker than fleas on a junkyard dog, knockin' your chromos loopier than those of a two-headed snake, and you were wrasslin' a hot core. Times when you were standin' waist-deep in some stinkin' swamp full of PCB's

and dirty antique motor-oil and industrial solvents and God knows what-all, and you seen the snout of a mutant Amazonian 'gator barrelin' toward you faster'n the Orient Express, and you barely had time to raise up your force-multiplier for a single blow before the 'gator was on you.

But surprisin'ly enough, the net effect of all these after-hours horror stories is not to discourage us gips, but rather to make us feel special and important. After all, who else has such a vital job as us? Cleanin' up this poor abused planet is-or should be-society's number-one priority, after all, and they ain't invented a robot yet that's smart enough or tough enough to do what we do, or take the shit we endure. Imagine some hunk of heuristics pokin' its sensors into the hells we gotta enter, without fryin' its CCD's and crispin' its boards. As for the splices, the union keeps them out. And as long as we get our regular search-and-repair silicrobe shots, we ain't gonna suffer any more weird diseases or terry-tomas than your average New Yorker or Nevadan.

Not that I do it mainly for glory or outa some sense of duty to humanity. Shit, no. I don't think you'll find one greenpeacer out of every thousand gipsies you talk to. I do it cuz the eft's damn good, and so are the bennies, and you can retire after fifteen years. (My company, Dallas Detox, Inc., was one of the first to pioneer that particular policy, and that's one of the reasons I'm purely proud to work for them. Another's that they are one hunnerd percent American, and there's not many companies left that can make such a claim, 'specially since they fully phased the Union in ten years ago. Now, I don't hold with them Sons of Dixie, or any of the other

constitutionalist groups, legal or underground, but there is something about being ruled by Canucks that just goes up my craw a mile. And if I got to be ruled by them, leastwise I don't have to work for them. Yet.)

Anyway, it's a decent life, and sometimes an excitin' one, even if, as I said, it's no career for a married man-as Geraldine never tires of remindin' me.

But I ain't married. And I never listen to Geraldine.

When Stack came into the dorm, wavin' the metamedium printout that bore the DDI logo in its upper corner (a pair of tweezers nippin' a double helix) and smilin', we all knew we had gotten a good postin'. But we couldn'ta guessed how good till the crewboss spoke.

"Parliament has voted, boys and girls. The Slikslak is deadmeat, and DDI's gonna pick the corpse."

Well, the roar of excitement that greeted this announcement rattled the biopolymer panels of the big Komfykwik Kottage we were livin' in, there on the shores of Lake Baikal in Greater Free Mongolia, which stagnant pisshole we had finally finished de-acidifyin' and ecobalancin' and revivifyin' and suchlike. We were goin' home, stateside, back to the good old U.S. of A. (and I'll continue to call it that till my dyin' day, despite all laws to the contrary). To actually get an assignment back in civilization-it was too good to be true. No more funny food or dark-skinned women or comic jabber which you couldn't understand without takin' a pill. It was hog heaven for a poor gipsy.

I was emptyin' my locker and packin' my kit on my bunk when Geraldine sidled up to me all innocent-like. I pretended not to notice her.

"Lew," she said, in a voice as sweet as corn syrup on candied yams, "Stack is making up the room-roster for Waxahachie. We are going to put up at a local motel, and all the rooms're doubles. I don't suppose… "

I looked up at Geraldine then. She was wearin' earrings shaped like biohazard signs, her brown hair was cropped shorter'n mine, with a lopsided swatch across her brow, her face was naked of makeup, save for silicrobe tattoon butterflies at the corners of her lips, and she barely filled out her size small DDI-issue coverall. She reminded me of the kid sister I'd never had.

"Geraldine, I do appreciate the offer or suggestion or proposition or whatever you wanna call it. But if I have told you once, I've told you a million times. The chemistry is just not there. My probe don't match your target. Look, I like my women big, busty, and dumb, and you are neither."

The tattoons a milli beneath Geraldine's skin fluttered their wings in agitation as the tears leaked like Israeli root-drips from her eyes.

"I– I could be dumb for you, Lew, if that was what you really wanted. There's new tropes for that, I heard. Dumbdown, MoreOn… As for the other stuff, well, it'd cost me plenty, but I'd do it for you. Honest, I would-"

I slapped my own forehead. "Holy shit, Geraldine, I ain't askin' you to change, get that into your head right now. I was only outlinin', like, the kind of woman that jumps my