“What’s that supposed to mean?” Madoc demanded obligingly.

“It means that self-appointed gods inevitably begin to see everythingas a game,” Damon told him. “When you can do anything at all, you can only decide what to do at any particular moment on aesthetic grounds. Once you get past the groundwork of Creation, what is there to do with what you’ve made but play with it?”

Madoc picked up the thread of the argument readily enough. “Is that what your foster parents are doing? Playing a game with the world they made?”

Damon shrugged his shoulders. “If they are,” he said, “they’re being very secretive about it. Karol dropped a few hints, but the guys he hired to remove me from the action were giving nothing away. I suppose it’s only natural that after I dropped out they’d want me to get down on my knees and beg before they let me in again.”

“But you don’t want to get back in. You’ve got a life of your own now.”

“It’s not that simple anymore,” Damon said.

“It is if you want it to be.”

“I suppose I can simply refuse to play messenger no matter how hard I’m pressed,” Damon conceded, working through that train of thought. “I could go home, get back into my hood and pick up where I left off, building Planet X for those game players, designing phone tapes, putting Di into the pornotape and taking her out again, using her and then erasing all the recognizable aspects of her individuality. I couldjust get on with my work and hope that I’ll be allowed to get on with it in peace—except that after my little trip to Olympus, I’m no longer sure that kind of thing is worth doing. The chrome-plated cheat who told me I could fly was lying—but I think he was trying to persuade me that if only I were willing to come aboard I might be able to learnto fly.”

Madoc couldn’t follow that, but Damon was too preoccupied with his own train of thought to pause for fuller explanations. “The trouble is,” he went on, “that when you’ve looked up at Olympus and down into the ultimate abyss, it puts everything else into a new perspective—even though you know full well that it’s only a VE, just one more small step on the way to realizing allour dreams. That’s who the realmovers and shakers were supposed to be, in the original poem: not statesmen or corpsmen, but dreamers of dreams.”

“Realizing our dreams is a long hard road for people like you and me,” Madoc pointed out. “Our kind of work might look a little shabby compared with PicoCon’s, but how else are people like us going to work our way up? Unless, of course, you’ve decided that now you’ve broken into your father’s money you might as well use it all. You don’t have to—just because you’re not a virgin anymore it doesn’t mean you’re a whore.” He sounded genuinely concerned for the matter of principle that seemed to be at stake.

“I want to know, Madoc,” Damon said softly. “I want to know exactlywhat’s going on—and you can’t find out for me. PicoCon has all the answers; maybe I shouldtry to get aboard.”

“A corpsman? Not you, Damon. Not that.”

Damon shrugged again. “Maybe I should go to Lagrange-Five, then, and make my peace with Eveline. She might have been a lousy mother, but she’s the only one I have left . . . and shemust know what all this is about, whether my father’s alive or not.”

“Nobody needs mothers anymore,” Madoc opined. “All that went out with the sterility plagues—but if you choose your friends wisely, they’ll be with you all the way. Whether you use the money or not, you can still be Damon Hart. If you and I stick together, we can still take on the world.”

Damon knew that they were talking at cross-purposes—that Madoc’s anxieties weren’t connecting with his at all. Even so, the underlying substance of Madoc’s argument was closer to the heart of the matter than Madoc probably knew.

Damon was still trying to figure out what his next step ought to be when the door buzzer went.

“Shit!” said Madoc, immediately moving to hit a combination of keys on the console of Lenny Garon’s display screen.

The camera mounted in the outside of the door dutifully showed them two men standing in the corridor, waiting for an answer to their signal. Damon couldn’t put a name to either one of them, but one of them was unusually tall—and he was sporting an ugly and very obvious bruise.

Damon echoed Madoc’s expletive.

“Who are they?” Madoc asked, having picked up the note of recognition in Damon’s tone.

“Probably cops,” Damon said. “The big one followed me from my building. I thought I’d put him out of it—I hit him hard enough to stop any ordinary man tailing me. Must be tougher or smarter than I thought.”

The man with the bruise was already growing impatient. “Mr. Tamlin?” he said. “It’s all right, Mr. Tamlin—we’re not the police. We just want—”

Mr. Tamlin?Damon echoed silently, wondering why on earth they were addressing themselves to Madoc rather than to him. Before he had time to focus on the seemingly obvious inference, however, the tall man’s attempted explanation was brutally cut short. Something hurtled into him from beyond the limits of the picture frame and sent him cannoning into his companion.

“Oh, shit!” said Madoc, with even more feeling than before—but he was already diving for the door to wrestle it open.

Damon, for once, was much slower to react. He was still trying to piece together the logic of what was happening.

Lenny Garon had obviously not gone far when Madoc had suggested that he take a walk. Indeed, he had evidently taken it upon himself to stand guard somewhere along the corridor. As soon as he had seen the two strangers press his door buzzer, he had decided that Damon and Madoc were in dire need of his protection—and he had thrown himself at the two visitors with little or no regard for his own safety. If they were telling the truth about not being the police, Lenny might be in very grave danger indeed; he didn’t have the kind of IT which could pull him through a realfight.

Madoc had the door open by now, and he hardly paused to take stock of the situation before throwing himself at the tall man’s companion, who was already struggling to his feet.

The man with the bruise had knocked Lenny aside, but wasn’t going after him. Instead, he was backing up toward the far wall of the corridor, holding his arms out as if he were trying to calm everything down. He had opened his mouth, probably to shout “Wait!” but he choked on the syllable as he looked into the open doorway and caught sight of Damon. The shock in his eyes seemed honest enough. He really had come looking for Madoc Tamlin, not knowing that Damon would be here too.

Damon still hesitated, but Lenny Garon didn’t. Lenny had already committed himself and he was sky-high on his own adrenalin. The boy went after the tall man like a ferret after a rat, and his adversary had no alternative but to turn his placatory gesture into a stern defense.

Cop or not, the man with the bruise was certainly no innocent in the art of self-defense, and he had already been knocked down too often to tolerate being put down again. He blocked Lenny’s lunging blows and hit the boy, then grabbed him and smashed him into the wall as hard as he could—hard enough to break bones.

That made Damon’s mind up. He went after the tall man for a second time, determined to amplify the bruises he had already inflicted. As he charged through the doorway he didn’t even look to see what had become of Madoc and the second man; he trusted Madoc’s streetfighting instincts implicitly.

Again the man with the bruise tried to avoid the fight. He backed up the corridor as rapidly as he could, and this time he actually managed to shout: “Wait! You don’t—”

Damon didn’t wait for the “understand”—he kicked out at the knee he’d already weakened in the alley. The tall man yelped in agony and dropped to one knee, but he was still trying to scramble away, still trying to put a halt to the whole fight.