"May I tell you something?"

"Yes." Maren nodded.

He said huskily, "My first impulse. Was. To jump."

"You're airborne? In a hopper?"

He nodded, unable to speak.

"Okay. Fly here to Paris. So it costs. Pay! Just get here and then you and I together."

Lars said, "I'd never make it." I'd jump somewhere along the way, he realized. And he saw, she realized it, too.

Levelly, with that great female earth-mother coolness of conduct, that supernatural balance that a woman could draw on when she had to, Maren said, "Now look, Lars. Listen. You're listening?"

"Yep."

"Land."

"Okay."

"Who's your doctor? Outside of Todt?"

"Got no doctor outside of Todt."

"Lawyer?"

"Bill Sawyer. You know him. That guy with a head like a hardboiled egg. Only the color of lead."

Maren said, "Fine. You land at his office. Have him draw up what's called a writ of mandamus."

"I don't get it." He felt like a small boy with her again, obedient but confused. Faced by facts beyond his little ability.

"The writ of mandamus is to be directed at the Board," Maren said. "It shall require them to permit you to sit with them in session. That is your goddam legal right, Lars. I mean it. You have a legal, God-given right to walk in there to that conference room down in the kremlin and take your seat and participate in everything that's decided."

"But," he said hoarsely, "I've got nothing to offer them: I have nothing. Nothing!" He appealed to her, gesturing.

"You're still entitled to be present," Maren said. "I'm not worried about that dung-ball in the sky; I'm worried about you." And, to his astonishment, she began to cry.

Three hours later—it had taken his attorney that long to get a judge of the Superior Court to sign the writ—he boarded a pneumatic-tube null-lapse train and shot from New York down the coast to Festung Washington, D.C. The trip took eighty seconds, including braking-time.

The next he knew he was in downtown Pennsylvania Avenue surface traffic, moving at an abalone's pace toward the dinky, transcendentally modest above-surface edifice which acted as an entrance to the authentic subsurface kremlin of Festung Washington, D.C.

At five-thirty p.m. he stood with Dr. Todt before a neat young Air Arm officer, who held a laser rifle, and silently presented his writ.

It took a little time. The writ had to be read, studied, certified, initialed by a sequence of office-holders left over from Harding's administration. But at last he found himself with Dr. Todt descending by silent, hydraulic elevator to the subsurface, the very subsurface, levels below.

With them in the elevator was a captain from the Army, who looked wan and tense. "How'd you make it in here?" the captain asked him; evidently he was a dispatch-runner or some such fool thing. "How'd you get all that security fnug?"

Lars said, "I lied."

There was no more conversation.

The elevator doors opened; the three of them exited. Lars—with Dr. Todt, who had been silent throughout the entire trip and ordeal of presenting the writ—walked and walked until they reached the last and most elaborate security barrier which sealed off the UN-W Natsec Board, in session within its chambers.

The weapon which here and now pointed directly at him and Dr. Todt came, he realized with pride, from a design emanating from Mr. Lars, Incorporated. Through a meager slot in the transparent but impenetrable ceiling-to-floor bulkhead he presented all his documents. On the far side a civilian official, grizzled, bent with canny experience, with even wisdom engraved on his raptor-like features, inspected Lars' ident-papers and the writ. He pondered for an excessive time... but perhaps it was not excessive. Who could say, in a situation like this?

By means of a wall speaker the ancient, efficient official said. "You may go in, Mr. Powderdry. But the person with you can't."

"My doctor," Lars said.

The grizzled old official said, "I don't care if he's your mother." The bulkhead parted, leaving an opening just wide enough for Lars to squeeze through; at once an alarm bell clanged. "You're armed," the old official said philosophically and held out his hand. "Let me have it"

From his pockets Lars brought every object out for inspection. "No arms," he said. "Keys, ballpoint pen, coins. See?"

"Leave everything there." The old official pointed. Lars saw a window open in the wall. Through it a hard-eyed female clerk was extending a small wire basket.

Into the basket he dumped the entire contents of his pockets and then, upon instruction, his belt with its metal buckle, and last of all, dreamlike, he thought, his shoes. In his stocking feet he padded on to the big chamber room and, without Dr. Todt, opened the door and entered.

At the table General Nitz' chief aide, Mike Dowbrowsky, also a general, but three-star, glanced up at him. Expressionlessly he nodded in greeting and pointed—peremptorily—at a seat vacant beside him. Lars padded over and noiselessly accepted the seat The discussion continued with no pause, no acknowledgment of his entrance.

An akprop man—Gene Something—had the floor. He was on his stocking feet, gesticulating and talking in a high-pitched squeak. Lars put on an expression of solemn attention, but in reality he simply felt tired. He was, within himself, resting. He had gotten in. What happened now appeared to him an anticlimax.

"Here is Mr. Lars," General Nitz interrupted Gene Something, all at once, startling Lars. He sat up at once, keeping himself from visibly jerking.

"I got here as quickly as I could," he said stupidly.

General Nitz said, "Mr. Lars, we told the Russians that we knew they were lying. That they put BX-3, our code for the new sat, up there. That they had violated section ten of the Plowshare Protocols of 2002. That within one hour, if they did not acknowledge having launched it into its orbit, we intended to release a g-to-a mis and knock it down."

There was silence. General Nitz seemed to be waiting for Lars to say something. So Lars said, "And what did the Soviet Government reply?"

"They replied," General Mike Dowbrowsky said, "that they would be happy to turn over their own tracking-stations' data on the sat, so that our missile could get an exact fit on it. And they have done so. In fact they supplied additional material, spontaneously, as to a warping field which their instruments had detected and ours had not, a distortion surrounding BX-3, kept there evidently for the purpose of misleading a thermotropic missile."

"I thought you sent up a team of robot weapon percept-extensors," Lars said.

After a pause General Nitz said, "If you live to be a hundred, Lars, you will say, to everyone you ever meet, including me, that there was no team of robot percept-extensors sent up. And, that since this is the case, the fabrication that this 'team' was vaporized is the invention of rancid homeopape reporters. Or if that doesn't do it, the deliberate, sensation-mongering invention of that TV personality—what's his name?"

"Lucky Bagman," said Molly Neumann, one of the concomodies.

"That a creature like Bagman would naturally dream it up to keep his audience deluded into believing he has a conduit to Festung W, here." He added, "Which he doesn't. Whether they like it or not."

After a pause Lars said, "What now, general?"

"What now?" General Nitz clapped his hands together before him atop the pile of memoranda, micro-docs, reports, abstracts ribbon-style that covered his share of the great table. "Well, Lars—"

He glanced up, the weary carrot-like face corrupted with utterly unforeseen, unimaginable, feckless amusement.

"As strange as it may sound, Lars, somebody in this room, somebody a bona fide participant of this meeting, actually suggested—you'll laugh—suggested we try to get you to go into one of your song-and-dance acts, you know, with the banjo and blackface, your—" the carrot-like features writhed—"trances. Can you obtain a weapon from hyper-dimensional space, Lars? Honestly, now. Can you get us something to take out BX-3? Now, Lars, please don't pull my leg. Just quietly say no and we won't vote you out of here; we'll just quietly go on and try to think of something else."