'Samhedi, there's another one in here. Be ready .'

'What is it?' asked Dom. The fleck appeared to have grown.

'A collapsed proton. Does that help you?'

'Sure. Like in a matrix engine.'

'Something like that. By the look of it it's already ingested its own atom. What you can see is angular light effect. It's being controlled.'

The first thing that Dom realized was that both of them were standing like statues. The second was...

'I have seen that before.'

'It was the gravity whirlpool that got you before, though. Take one step now and it'll be a bullet with teeth. Ever been sucked through a hole one micron across?'

'Uhuh.'

'I'm sorry, that was tactless. If Samhedi doesn't get here soon you won't have to bother about that, though.'

'Asphyxiation? It'll suck the air out of the room.' She nodded.

'Samhedi's voice came from the wall grille.

'When I say so, please to lie flat on the floor, keeping away from the approximate centre of the room... now!'

Dom caught a glimpse of a flying silver ball the size of a grape before he hit the floor.

When he rolled over it was floating a metre above his head. There was an odd sensation of heat along his spine. They had caught it in a matrix field. It was still sucking up air like a miniature tornado. Presently it drifted out through the wall, leaving a hole with its edges twisted into high-stress shapes. He could hear shouts outside, and the whine of the matrix generator.

He helped Joan to her feet.

'You seem to have it all figured out,' he said.

'It was a sensible precaution. After your - your party, it was days before we figured out how to get rid of the damn thing. It was your robot who came up with the answer.'

'You couldn't put it on a ship because it would eat its way through the floor... Isaac? What did he suggest?'

They watched through the hole. On the lawn outside Samhedi's equipment was clustered around the baby black hole. The silvery sheen had disappeared now. It appeared as a point in space that wrenched at the optic nerves, and the men working around it had to hang on against the wind that was driving into nowhere.

Three of them manhandled a tall cylinder until it was standing upright under the thing. The cylinder was thick with matrix coils.

'This should be quite impressive,' said Joan.

'I'm getting the idea, I think,' said Dom. 'The bottom of the tube is sealed, the matrix field stops it touching the edges, the air rushes in at the top...'

Samhedi bellowed an order against the gale. The thing - it looked like an eye now, a malevolent one staring straight at Dom - dipped into the cylinder.

There was an explosion.

It was the cylinder, reaching Mach One a mile overhead. It sucked itself on towards the stars.

'Neat,' said Dom. 'Suppose it hits the sun? No, you'd have a ship up there. Then what?'

'Seal it up and dump it in deep space. Isaac suggested finding a genuine black hole and dumping it there. That sounds like an invitation to blow up the universe, though, so Hrsh-Hgn suggested accelerating it to about half as light as it was. It'd accelerate, he believes, on interstellar hydrogen.'

'And end up drilling a hole in someone's planet on the other side of creation,' said Dom. He was trying to smile.

His grandmother reached out and took his shoulder.

'You're not doing badly at all, Dom.'

'You neither, grandmother.'

'Just because I am reasonably adept at Disassociation. You won't see me when I choose to turn off.'

Dom shuddered despite himself. He had been with friends when they turned off after DA trips. It was a discipline only taught within the Sadhimist klatches. A man could go for days, weeks, without being affected by his emotions. One or two had told him it was a great sensation - there was a feeling of icy intellectual power, an ability to face problems shorn of the deceptive roccoco of feelings. Cool-heads, they were called. And then you turned off, and the backlash hit you, and you were glad to have an emotional friend around to unroll you with a crowbar and put you to bed - preferably with a bullet.

'How long have you been cool?' he asked.

'Since dinner. And for most of the last four months. But that doesn't matter. You seem to have mastered the technique, anyway. Without drugs, too.'

'Don't you believe it.'

'One thing I'll ask you to believe is that I never heard that second part of that cube before. He was talking to you. He did it—'

'He did it for the million-to-one chance. Oh, there's lots of ways. If he'd foreseen all this, he could have put a simple time delay into the cube. Lots of ways,' he said reassuringly.

'And what will you do now?' Dom tensed at the undertone in her voice.

'It seems I've got to discover the Joker's World. Half the history cubes say it never could have existed.'

'I can't let you,' said Joan.

'I'll be safe until I discover it. You heard the prediction.'

'Your father could have made another mistake. There might be a million-to-one chance, another one. Dom, someone is trying to kill you! That was the third attempt!'

Dom backed away as she walked forward.

'But the first time I dived into the marsh and I turned up forty kilometres away. The second time something saved enough of me from that thing - someone's trying to save me, too! I want to find out who, and why.'

He took another step back and let the door slide across. Then he turned and ran.

'SADHIMISM: the pantheistic/conservation religion founded in cold blood by Arte Sadhim (q.v.), the ruler of Earth from 2001-12. Contemporary documents suggest that he devised the dogmas, beliefs and rituals of Sadhimism in a day and a night, incorporating gobbets wrenched wholesale from druidism, the marginally-surviving witchcraft practices, voodoo and the Survival Handbook for Spaceship Earth. As a religion it worked well and achieved its purpose, which was solely to impress environmental thinking deeply on human minds, and then developed a life of its own and became greater than its creator. Sadhim himself was ritually murdered by a breakaway sect called the Little Flowers of the Left-hand Path on the eve of Good Friday - the Night of the Long Athames ...'

Charles Sub-Lunar: Religions of a Hundred Worlds.

Dom lay on his bed, reading a long rambling letter from Keja. She was glad to hear that he was better; life on Laoth was quite pleasant, and there would be a state visit to Earth soon, and she had seen snow for the first time – and enclosed a refrigerated cube in which several snowflakes were preserved - and dear Ptarmigan had built her a garden that Dom really ought to see ...

Isaac slipped in on well-oiled feet.

'Well?'

'There's guards all over the place, boss. I can't find that gecky frog anywh—'

'That's shape-hatred talk, Isaac.'

'Sorry, chief. The cook says he's left the domes and moved down to the buruku.'

Dom buckled on his grav sandals. 'We're going to fetch him. He's the only one round here that knows more than three facts about the Jokers. And then I kind of think we're going to look for the Joker's World.'

The robot nodded impassively.

'Well? Aren't you going to ask why?'

'Up to you, boss.'

'It's just as well. It seems I've got to fulfil a prediction. I've been pretty bad at fulfilling them lately. I think I will find one or two answers on the way. You know about the third attempt to kill me?'

'Oh yes, and all the others.'

Dom froze. He looked up from stuffing clothing into a back-pouch and spoke slowly.

'How many others?'

Isaac hummed. 'A total of seven. There was the poisoned food in hospital, the meteorite that just missed the power plant, two attacks on the flyer that brought you here. And another artificial black hole. That turned up in the hospital. You were still in the tank then.'