FRIENDLY SERVICE

So that was what they called their non-existent cops—the Friendly Service. They were even more efficient than he had expected. It could not be much more than half an hour since he failed to show up at the dockland shopping-complex bank, and already the word was out for him. They believed he was a dangerous man with a mission in

Paradiso—assassination, blackmail, espionage.

"Better tell them I'm here and mean to stay for a while," he said. "And that you've checked me out."

"As to that, there will have to be a medical check against the details in your capsule. But we'd have done that anyway before advancing you a million."

He would have answered, but when she started to send a message on the typer he left her to it and went to see the view from the window.

"Well, Mr. Burrell," said Flora Fay behind him, "I think that will regularize matters."

"My million buys off the cops?"

"There are no cops," she said coldly. "Merely a discreet security service. Naturally a spaceman loose in Paradiso has to be found and investigated. A spaceman with a million is another matter. But you must understand that it's up to you to settle matters with your ship, your captain. If you have a contract and he holds you to it, you must rejoin the ship." He came back from the window to sit in the client's chair in front of the desk.

What happened then seemed like an accident, and perhaps it was. Burrell moved lightly in halfgee, and the woman, who had sat down to program her message, was not looking at him. She rose and turned just as he came round the desk. The result was she rose into his arms. He could not have avoided embracing her if he'd tried.

He didn't try.

CHAPTER FOUR

On the way to a hotel recommended by Flora, Burrell realized that he might like Paradiso very much, but not for long.

Paradiso had everything. It offered the top food of the galaxy, the top drink. The entertainment was by the top stars of the galaxy, recorded of course, but in exclusive recordings, not to be seen or heard elsewhere. No hotel, restaurant, diner, café let Paradiso down. Some were more modest than others, but all were controlled by Starways. Your ham and eggs in the tiniest snack bar got the attention ham and eggs needed, just as in the top restaurant your fricassée de veau au vin blanc got the attention—and the six hours—it needed.

And Paradiso had one clever selling point. You paid for

accommodation, drinks, food, but that was all.

Transport was free. Entertainment, sports facilities, use of equipment or special clothes, exhibitions, all were free.

Even banking was free. Burrell smiled.

Probably in the end, Paradiso took you for more than you would have paid in smail charges for admission and hire, but Paradiso was for people who signed bills without looking at them. And such people, traditionally, were furious when they thought they were being cheated out of the smallest coin of the realm.

The Arcady, according to Flora, was the kind of hotel he was looking for—with good food, good accommodation, but no flunkeys. Burrell was not only prepared to light his own cigars, he preferred to light his own cigars. He had once thrown a hovering waiter through a window that was not open at the time. And he preferred to find his own feminine company. Before he had done more than take a shower to get the last of the Dirty Cow's grime out of his pores, the door buzzer went. If it was anything supplied by the management and not ordered by him, he thought grimly, he would throw it downstairs, whether machine, food or drink. In fact, it was Captain Hoyt, in whites and a flaming temper.

"You've been quick," said Burrell. "I only just got here."

"Well, now you can get out again and back to the ship. I've got you on contract, Burrell, and you know it. They told me at the docks Paradiso won't let you break it."

"Somebody told me that too," said Burrell. "You must have had to show the contract, Hoyt. Show it to me."

Hoyt hesitated, suspicious as ever. However, he had only a photostat with him, the original being secure in the ship's safe. "Here," he said, handing it over.

Burrell merely glanced at it and grinned. "I signed on for the voyage," he said. "I noticed that at the time, on Senta. Otherwise I wouldn't have signed."

"And the voyage is to Marsay."

"Hell, no. It's to Paradiso."

"Burrell, I made it perfectly clear what you were signing."

"I know you did. But you didn't put it on paper. The Dirty Cow just made a voyage from Senta to Paradiso. I've fulfilled my contract and I'm signing off."

Hoyt breathed hard. "Since Senta, we've called at Valley, Persus, Pecta—"

"And I didn't leave the ship because I didn't want to stay in Valley, Persus, or Pecta. But I do want to stay here. I signed a contract that let me stop off wherever I liked."

"Look at the minimum pay clause!" Hoyt shouted. "That's your pay to Marsay. Anybody can see that!"

"Sure," Burrell agreed. "And I'll have the other five hundred now." The captain cut himself off. He had made a mistake with that contract and he knew it, though he would never admit it. The contract should have specified either the length of time for which Burrell was signing or the discharge port. Hoyt had used a standard "voyage" form for his own convenience, enabling him to fire Burrell at Valley, Persus, or anywhere else he liked, if Burrell proved useless. But Burrell had done his work well enough, and Hoyt needed a full crew to Marsay.

If he didn't go on to Marsay, Burrell hadn't a hope of getting the extra five hundred but it was a just plausible counter-claim, and counter-claims could prove an expensive nuisance. With the captain claiming that Burrell had signed on to Marsay and Burrell claiming the company owed him five hundred even if he left the ship at Paradiso, the probable legal outcome was that Burrell wouldn't get the five hundred and the Dirty Cow wouldn't get Burrell.

At this point Burrell dangled a carrot. "Just to settle the whole thing here and now, Hoyt," he said, with an air of making a great concession, "if you sign my discharge, I'll forget about the five hundred."

"You're not due the five hundred till we dock at Marsay!"

"Okay, I'll fight the case. Paradiso and the five hundred." The captain had belatedly seen the carrot. He was comparatively honest, as honest as any captain of the Dirty Cow could be expected to be. However, there was this matter of the five hundred. If he could get the ship to Marsay with the crew apparently complete and file Burrell as discharged there, the five hundred was his. Of course he would have to sweeten the two other officers, maybe the rest of the crew as well.

"If I make out a Marsay discharge," he said, "will you sign it?"

"Sure. And I'll also sign for the five hundred you're not going to give me."

It was soon done. Before Captain Hoyt of the Dirty Cow walked out of Burrell's life, he asked curiously: "How do you think you're going to be able to stay here, Burrell? You just drew six hundred fifty. That won't last you a week here."

"Oh, I'll get by. For a fat man I don't eat much." He grinned at the door after it had closed behind Hoyt, who would have to go straight back to the ship. The law was not looking for Burrell, though there were a few places in the galaxy, especially places where former customers of his former business lived, where trouble might start if he showed his face. It was not necessary to lay a false trail when nobody was looking for him. However, it might at some time in the future prove convenient that he had officially signed off at Marsay from the crew of the Elegant Girl.

Like a ravenous man fobbed off with a snack, he found himself desperate for companionship. The encounter with the glamorous bank manager had been fun at the time, but that was finished. On the way to the hotel, he had had thoughts of food and drink and cigars and clothes. Now he had only one thought. The urge was rising in him again and, as he had done for many long years, he let it take possession.

A pool, he thought quickly. There were always girls at a pool. Then he thought: girls, yes, plenty of them, but escorted girls, gaggles of girls, girls showing off to chosen males. Cutting one out wasn't difficult but it took time. And then he thought: in a place like this there must be scores of women at every pool with exactly the same object in mind as his own. It was necessary only to identify them.

Besides, there was a pool right in front of him.

You could call it a pool, though it was more like a giant goldfish-bowl, towering over the artificial-sun-drenched patio on which a hundred sunbathers lounged, drank, or slept. Spiral walkways' led from behind the patio to the circular rim forty feet up, and at intervals there were ladders affording a quicker way up and down. Underwater swimmers nosed the glass like goldfish and explored the plastic grottos at the base of the bowl. Some had masks but most had none. Lower gravity meant less effort, a smaller oxygen requirement.

Spray flew freely from the rim high above but that was part of the fun. There were shrieks and giggles as bikini-clad beauties on sunloungers on the patio were showered with water, and another part of the fun, Burrell observed, was that this spray gave the men a chance to dash forward with towels to dry the damp damsels.

The high, unrailed walkways looked dangerous; even in halfgee a forty-foot fall could be fatal. However, as Burrell looked up, a thin, unsteady youth who obviously did not believe in swimming while sober staggered and fell off the walkway, and a nylon net automatically swung from underneath and caught him. He scarcely seemed to notice. A girl with ash-blonde hair lay in a sunfilter dress on a lounger beside a table and, astonishingly, read a book. Burrell didn't like sunfilter dresses, for though they were 95 percent transparent, they distorted the underneath image. What you saw was, in effect, a girl submerged in clear water disturbed by occasional ripples.

However, she was alone—also astonishingly. And the one part of her that was not distorted by the sunfilter, her face, was probably the prettiest among the many pretty faces around the pool.

Burrell sat down opposite the girl and said: "I don't know anybody here but you'll do."

She picked up her glass and with a twist of the wrist threw the contents in his face.

"I won't do anything about that now," said Burrell evenly, "but some day I'll pay you back."

"Pay me back now," she said in a clear, cultured voice, "by denying me the pleasure of your company."

"Sure," he said. "On one condition. I'm new here. So are you, or you wouldn't be wearing a sunfilter dress. You only need that for three or four days."

"I know how long I've been here," she retorted. "State your condition."

"You're new here but not as new as me. If you "don't want me, point out some girl who will."

This caught her interest. For the first time she looked at him. Evidently she didn't think much of what she saw, for she said: "No, I don't want you. If it will get rid of you, certainly I'll wish you on somebody else. See that girl in the green trini? She's a creep. She likes what she calls action. Hit somebody and she's yours."

"Thanks, Cindy."

The attempt to induce her to give her name didn't work. She didn't even answer.

The girl in the green trini—stars fixed in three places—had a court of seven men and a handmaiden, predictably plumper and less pretty than herself. She laughed a lot, and Burrell summed her up: rich widow or divorcee, without mental or spiritual resources enough to appreciate anything but play.

Burrell didn't expect to like her much. But then, there were few rich people whom Burrell had ever liked, and all these people had to be rich, including Cindy. In his business career Burrell had been half a latter-day Robin Hood. Instead of robbing the rich to feed the poor, he robbed the rich to feed himself. Whether he liked her or not didn't matter. Burrell moved across to the girl in the-green trini, without a plan yet suspecting that the brash approach that fell flat with Cindy would be efficacious with this one.

For the second time in several hours, somebody clambered to his feet and collided with Burrell. This time it was a slim youth, a member of the court. He was a nice-looking youngster, no more than eighteen, hairless in bathing trunks, dark-haired, tall.

"Sorry," he started to say. But Burrell hit him in the teeth, breaking two. The boy went down, blinking tears, and it became clear he was not eighteen after all but even less.

The girl sat up on her lounger, her breath coming fast. She was intrigued.

The handmaiden quietly slunk away and the remaining five men, without actually moving yet, gave the impression of having retreated. It was obvious that even if all five rushed Burrell, most of them, perhaps all of them, would get hurt. On the ground, the youth was spitting blood, and as everyone sensed, it was not yet a case for the cops who didn't exist, but it could be. All other activity on the patio had ceased; everyone was watching.

First one, then two, finally all five of the woman's admirers turned away. The youth, with a frightened glance at Burrell, jumped up and took to his heels.

Burrell touched the girl lightly but possessively. "Sugar," he said softly,

"let's go."

CHAPTER FIVE

Paradiso, predictably, was an expensive sham, teeming with people who were expensive shams. It was worth seeing, and when he had had the food, the drink, and the cigar that were now becoming urgent necessities, he would walk around and look at it. It was no use having been in a place like Paradiso without having looked around it while he was there. However, he wasn't going to be there long.

He had told Sugar neither his name nor the name of his hotel. The situation would be as he liked it—he could find her but she couldn't find him.

Burrell had no objection to promiscuity in women, but the trouble was, they took all and gave nothing. He would not have pretended for a moment that he gave much himself, except satisfaction. But that's all he was looking for, too. Yet why he remembered some women, particularly his wife, was because these few had something to give.

Although he was rich himself, Burrell had not had much social contact with rich people. He did not, however, despise them. On the contrary, he admired people who could amass money without stealing it, and for that matter people who, like himself, stole and got away with it. Unfortunately the rich people he encountered, like Sugar, always seemed to be loaded through no virtue of their own. Sugar had started out with a rich daddy even before she started collecting sugar daddies. In his rare introspective mood, Burrell realized that although without principles himself, he liked other people to have principles. His need for food, drink, and a cigar became so great that he had to get up. Without enthusiasm he put on his shorts and shoes. He really would have to buy some clothes. Always, however, there seemed to be something else to do. Back near the pool, there was bound to be somewhere he could get a drink and a good dinner wearing only shorts.

As he suspected, it proved perfectly possible to order dinner on a balcony overlooking the goldfish-bowl pool. Paradiso ran a twelve-hour, not twenty-four hour schedule, every via, pool, park, café, restaurant, cinema, bowling alley and all the rest of the amenities having a day and a night. This was no inconvenience since the next level ran on a different schedule. And although Burrell found that lunch was being served in the balcony restaurant, that was no reason why he should not have dinner. He ordered dry white wine, chicken noodle soup, roast chicken, chicken souffle and a chicken flan. The waiter who took the order didn't turn a hair and made no comment. So Burrell, who did not like waiters or their supercilious smiles, and had been considering throwing him over the balcony to see if it, too, was equipped with automatic safety nets, refrained.

He already knew that the bottle of wine he was drinking was going to cost him a week's pay on the Dirty Cow. That was all right. One thing he liked about the restaurant, as in Paradiso in general, was that there was a strict no-tipping rule. You might pay twenty for a meal but you didn't have to slip the waiter anything.

Reaching the end of an enormous meal, he noticed that Cindy, the ash-blonde, was still on her lounger on the patio below, still alone, still reading. He tried to work out her age; this was something Burrell was very good at.

Her coolness, culture, repose, suggested she was not too young. Twenty-six, perhaps. But there was an unwritten rule about sunfilter dresses. Girls of twenty-five or over invariably wore bikinis under them. Girls under twenty-five didn't, which made Cindy under twenty-five. Settling back in contentment, he had lit his cigar when down below, the girl suddenly shut her book, stood up, and started for the exit. Burrell had not intended to move until he had finished his cigar. And even now he had no intention of hurrying. He waved to the waiter, paid his bill, and made his way without haste to the via.

There was no sign of the ash-blonde.

It didn't matter in the least, except that Burrell could not now go back and finish his cigar at leisure.

Nobody greeted him in the Arcady, which was satisfactory. He walked upstairs, not taking the elevator, and as he turned the corner into the corridor where his room was situated, there was the ash-blonde, opening the door of the adjoining room.

"Hello, Cindy," he said.

"You followed me." Her voice was furious.

Burrell rarely denied anything, true or false. In any case, she didn't give him the opportunity. She swung at him so fiercely that Burrell, rough-house ace though he was, did not succeed in countering. Besides, instead of swinging wildly with an open palm to slap his face, as a well-brought-up young lady was expected to do, she hit him with a small hard fist under the ribs, where it hurt more.

He marvelled afterwards that he didn't instantly knock her cold. As a rule he didn't hit women first, but if they hit first, he hit harder. On this occasion, however, he remained conscious of the fact that she had some excuse. To her it seemed incontrovertible that he had followed her, that he was pestering her.

The coincidence was not remarkable. Clearly she liked being left alone, and the Arcady was the hotel for such people. Also the pool where he had encountered her was just across the via.

Instead of doing anything or saying anything, he stepped past her and unlocked the door of his own room.

He heard her gasp. She was no fool. She realized instantly that it was impossible for him not merely to have followed her but also to have the key of the adjoining room in his pocket. Out of the corner of his eye he saw her glance quickly back the way he had come, and he guessed what she was thinking: he had come up the stairs, not by the elevator as she had, and therefore could not be following her, could not have asked at the desk the number of her room and booked the one next door.

He heard her quick step as she moved towards him to apologize, at least to say something. Ignoring her existence, he went inside and shut the door.

Inside he waited, massaging his solar plexus and smiling in anticipation. When she knocked at the door he would be the injured party, the one reluctant to be friendly. There was no better situation to induce a girl to be friendlier than she had intended.

But there was no knock.

Oh well, he thought, you can't win them all.

In addition to the television screen, there was a scanner marked Entertainment. Wondering what this meant, he switched on the scanner and found the equivalent of the advertising brochures with which hotel reception desks were generally laden. It told him and showed him what Paradiso had to offer.

Palace Aphrodisia, he learned, was guaranteed to make the impotent virile. The Ritz Restaurant guaranteed to supply any gourmet dish in the galaxy. Cinema Galactic offered individual showings of any movie made in the last fifteen years. Bibliotheque offered every book in print, plus most out-of-print texts on microfilm. Sport Center claimed facilities for every physical recreation and all legal games. Pharmacy went one better in offering all drugs, even those whose use was illegal elsewhere. Femina claimed to carry not only the greatest fashion range in the galaxy, but every fashion which was documented in history; with every purchase a

"survival kit" of disposable underwear, bikinis, shorts, and playsuits was thrown in. Musica offered the galaxy's music, ancient and modern. Travel offered facilities for…

Burrell stopped the frenetic parade of grandiose claims and offers and pressed the button for Travel details. As he expected, Paradiso did not exactly encourage its guests to go away and not come back. What Travel offered was a series of tours or cruises, all returning to Paradiso, all run by Starways and staffed by Friendly Service Guides.

See the galaxy's most spectacular waterfall! the scanner exhorted. Wild Water Falls on Kenway is twenty-seven miles across and the water falls fourteen miles! It cannot be photographed! The spray defeats all camera lenses! Until you've seen Wild Water Falls, you haven't seen anything!

There was a lot more of this sort of thing. Usually the tours were illustrated with glowing 3D color, but sometimes, as in the Wild Water Falls tour ad, it was claimed that the view could not be photographed, or pictures cannot do justice to this awe-inspiring spectacle. The would-be traveller had to pay up to a hundred thousand for the privilege. The prices, on the whole, were reasonable. There were warning notes, however, that the accommodation and cuisine on the tour ships was modest; the idea, apparently, as well as keeping the prices down, was to make people glad to get back to Paradiso.

Burrell, who was no mere sightseer and never carried a camera, gradually lost interest and was about to switch off when suddenly his attention was riveted.

Visit Earth, the birthplace of man! This now backward world is a reservation. We regret you will not be allowed to meet the natives, but you can visit seven selected spots: Malta, Cuba, Shetland, Hawaii. All islands? No, you can also see the Sahara, Russia, Tibet. You can see—

Burrell frowned at the scanner. The tone was different. Instead of the wild enthusiasm over other wonders of the galaxy, there was understatement and reserve over Earth, almost as if Starways didn't really want people to go there. And the price, too, was considerably higher, an apparent non-bargain among glowing bargains.

Yet the opportunity to visit Earth was a sure-fire winner. Everyone knew about Earth.

He reached for the phone and called Travel. "Ram Burrell, 407 Arcady Hotel," he said. "Send me along full information on trips to Earth."

"I think the next one is fully booked, sir," a woman told him. "But I'll check and call you back in a couple of minutes."

Burrell put down the phone.

Everybody knew something about Earth but not much. Everybody knew that just about the time which nogee drive made star journeys possible, Earth was heading into dire population trouble. For a time it seemed that easy abortion, birth control, voluntary sterilization and the trend towards sex without marriage or children would solve the problem automatically. But the more people were encouraged to limit their families, the more they tended to rebel… and with the gradual removal of natural population controls such as drought, disease, early senility, and a vast road-accident toll, things started to get really serious.

Yet against all the odds, and over a century or two, Earth did become depopulated. The conditions of overcrowding had made the "grass" really greener elsewhere: the moon soon had a population of several million, and Mars and Venus served as way-stations to transport hundreds of millions to other worlds that attracted people, worlds such as New Terra, eighteen light-years away, with an Earth-like atmosphere but more land area than Earth.

The rules were simple: people who left Earth would be allowed to return for a visit but not to stay on there. This meant that what was known about present-day Earth was only what the few recent colonists from the mother world cared to say about it, and since they were often a tight-lipped lot, this information wasn't much.

* * *

The girl at Travel came back on the line. "That information you asked for, sir, about Terran Tours—are you sure you haven't got it?"

"I only just asked. How could I have it?"

"It was sent to the lady in the next room to you, 406. Roberta Murdock. I took it for granted you and she—"

"Okay," he said. Evidently he and Cindy were meant to get together, and he wasn't complaining. "But what was that about the next tour being fully booked?"

"I've checked that too, sir. It is. But Miss Murdock is on the list, and if you're together, we'll be glad to find a place for you."

"Do that," he said.

"The ship leaves in three days and the first call is at Sahara. So if you're not sun-conditioned, sir, I suggest you get started on it right away." That explained the sunfilter dress.

"One other thing," said Burrell. "I hear we won't get to talk to the natives."

"That's right, sir. That rule is by agreement between Starways and the Terrans. You'll visit seven places and you won't see a Terran in any of them, except possibly emigrants leaving by the ship that takes you there. I'm sorry, sir, but we always stress this to make sure there's no misunderstanding—our parties are strictly limited to the areas on Earth leased to us. You'll find it all explained in the material sent to Miss Murdock. If these conditions don't suit you and you wish to withdraw—"

"Leave me on the list. Tell me, isn't it possible to meet some Earthman here in Paradiso, somebody who was actually born on Earth?" There was a pause, and he expected excuses. Instead, the girl replied:

"Certainly, sir, there's a man called John Ehrlich. He lives here in Paradiso."

"Lives here?" Burrell knew of nobody living permanently in Paradiso except Starways staff. "Where can I find him?"

"Oh, it's all right, sir. He'll find you. Is there any other way in which I can help you?"

"No," said Burrell, and hung up.

The first thing was to see Roberta Murdock and keep her on the defensive by claiming she had received the information on Terran Tours intended for him. The fact that he knew about it would prove he had indeed been in touch with Travel.

He went next door but got no answer. She must have returned only to change her clothes.

Well, it was time he did something about clothes himself.

CHAPTER SIX

To preserve the nighttime illusion in the evening, the lights outside were turned down and the lights inside turned up. The downstairs lounge of the Arcady was cosy, and there was a cosy poker game going on in one corner.

Looking in to see if Roberta Murdock was there, Burrell, now attired in a gray lounge suit, saw the poker game instead. He also saw the Friendly Service man at another table, watching the poker players grimly. One of them looked up. "Care to join us, sir?" he asked, and there was a sudden slight stir of interest round the table.

Burrell, still in the doorway, entered. The Friendly Service man (he wore no uniform but Burrell could smell cop) continued watching warily. Paradiso, with its boast of having no law, could not stop gambling. However, taking the suckers' money was one thing; letting others take it decidedly another. It was not in Paradiso's interests to have customers fleeced by card sharps. Probably the Friendly Service man was there, more or less openly, to collect evidence on the five cardplayers that would eventually enable Starways to deport them—while they, more or less openly, were fleecing as many suckers as possible without giving any such evidence.

"Sure," said Burrell, and took the place quickly provided for him. "But let me watch for a couple of hands till I get the feel of this game again. It must be fifteen years since I played."

They were a typical team: quiet, nondescript. The man who had spoken had an unfinished face, pretty, womanish, with no feature large enough to give character. Not one of the five would be easy to pick out at an identification parade.

Another man joined the Friendly Service man. He was older, with pure white hair. They didn't speak: evidently they knew each other well. Presently, after half-a-dozen totally honest deals, Burrell let them deal him in. He won, lost, won again. Then he held a flush over a straight and bid it up recklessly. When he gathered his winnings he was five hundred up.

And he said: "Thanks, boys. I'll give you a chance to win this back another time." His tone made it quite clear he had no such intention. They stared hate at him. But the Friendly Service man and his mate were watching.

As Burrell turned to go, the white-haired man rose and motioned him gently to a table in a corner, away from both the gamblers and the Friendly Service man.

"That was pretty cute," said the white-haired man. "I can see you've been around."

Burrell shrugged. "They always let the sucker win to start with. They'd probably have let me win a couple of times more. But I couldn't be sure, so I quit."

"My guess is you could have held your own anyway."

"Me? With five cardsharps?"

"You look the kind of man who's played poker in construction camps. There's no tougher poker than that."

That was shrewd or lucky. But Burrell never gave information away free. He looked at the white-haired man and waited.

There was tacit agreement that the preliminaries were over. "It was you who wanted to see me. I'm John Ehrlich."

Now that was interesting. Ehrlich had found him, known who he was, and sat beside a Friendly Service man.

"Starways employ you?" Burrell asked.

"Not so fast, Burrell," said the old man, taking out an old-fashioned pipe. "Do you smoke?"

"Cigars. I'll have one now." He took one from his pocket and lit it, his second that day. He would not have another. This was one urge he bothered to control.

"What's the mystery about Earth?" Burrell demanded. Ehrlich took his time getting his pipe going. "Here we have an impasse," he said. "I want to know about you. I want to ask you questions. You want to ask me questions."

"Why do you want to know about me?"

"Because you're considering going to my world."

"Still your world? You live here. You can't go back."

"On visits, yes. And unlike the tourists, unlike you, I'm not confined to the tourist reservations. I see the natives."

"Look, Ehrlich, what's the mystery?" said Burrell rather impatiently.

"Let's stop tip-toeing around."

"Mystery," said Ehrlich. "I don't know about that. Lack of communication, yes. But there's no mystery about that. Only a few thousand people can visit Earth every year. Five hundred a tour, a month on Earth. Seven places to visit. It works out about a hundred tours a year. That's only fifty thousand people."

"Starways could do better than that. More tours, more tourists, more money."

"But would Earth allow it?"

"Few worlds can resist tourism pressures."

"You haven't got the picture. Earth doesn't make money from Terran Tours. Starways does."

Burrell wanted to pursue this line but Ehrlich sidestepped smoothly.

"Starways has too much commercial intelligence to create a demand for something it can't supply. Certainly the Starways directors want bigger concessions on Earth. They want Scotland and the whole of Australia for a start. Then they could operate a hundred times as many tours, advertise throughout the galaxy, make people come to Paradiso as a jumping-off point. Meantime they just keep the door open."

That made sense. It might be only half the story or less than half. But it did explain part of what Burrell had wanted explained.

Starways didn't have much of a toehold on Earth but what Starways had was apparently the only one there was. If, instead of going cautiously, the company created a vast galactic interest in visiting the mother world, the door might be forced wide, the walls knocked down, a highway into Earth built—but a highway open to all, not just tours strictly controlled by Starways.

"You were born on Earth, Ehrlich?"

"In Austria. Near Vienna. You've heard of Vienna. Everybody's heard of Vienna."

"Yes, I've heard of Vienna."

"Well, you can't go to Vienna. Nobody can. You wouldn't understand the people there anyway. They still speak German."

"A backward world."

"Yes, very backward."

"So how come they can resist Starways? Starways has enough money to buy Earth."

"Starways must obey the law."

"Starways can buy the law."

The old man shook his head. "The richer a combine is, the more vulnerable it is to financial sanctions. And remember, Earth isn't unprotected, even out here. I'm a sort of watchdog myself. Let Starways step out of line in their dealings with Earth, and all over the galaxy they'd find themselves with expensive legal battles on their hands." The mystery was fading. Yet as the big things became clearer, some small things became more baffling.

"Why did you leave, Ehrlich? To come here, no farther?"

"I've been farther. Much farther. Made money too. But now I'm old I stay here."

"Close to Earth. The closest you can get to Earth."

"Yes."

Once again Burrell sensed evasion. The old man would readily tell him things that didn't matter—about Austria and Vienna, about what Ehrlich himself had done and seen in the wide galaxy, not what Burrell waited to know about Earth.

But what did he want to know? You couldn't expect to find the answers when you didn't even know the questions.

"I guess I'll have to go see for myself," he said.

"Yes. You won't see much."

"You think I shouldn't bother going then?"

The cardplayers, tired of playing among themselves with a Friendly Service man watching their every move, got up and left. So did the Friendly Service man. Burrell and Ehrlich were alone in the lounge.

"Everyone should see Earth," said Ehrlich mildly.

"Suppose when I get to Earth I refuse to stay behind the reservation fences? Suppose I jump them and talk to the natives?"

"You can't." Ehrlich was enjoying a small secret joke.

"Why not?"

"You'll find out."

"Ehrlich, stop the playing around. What's the secret?" The old man looked at him reproachfully. "What is the secret of life?

What is the truth of religion? Is there a God? I, too, would like someone to tell me, in simple words that I could understand. But I'll tell you one thing."

"What's that?"

"Having met you and her, I think you should go to Earth with Roberta Murdock. I can arrange it if you like. I've already seen her and answered some of her questions, as I answered some of yours. I could quite easily—"

"No thanks," said Burrell, getting up. "I do my own arranging."

"You haven't had dinner. Dine here. She should be in the dining room now."

Burrell gave him a hard look and left without another word. The girl was indeed in the big dining room, sitting alone. He waited until she looked in his direction. At first she glanced at him without recognition, not knowing him in a lounge suit. She frowned, then she smiled slightly and pointed to the seat opposite her.

"Hello, Cindy," he said, sitting down and picking up the menu.

"I'm sorry for what I did earlier," she said. "And it's not Cindy. Roberta Murdock."

He shook his head. "You had your chance to be Roberta and didn't take it. Now you're Cindy."

For the third time he saw a flash of anger in her eyes. She had a low boiling point, this one.

Then, surprisingly, she laughed. "Very well," she said. "It's changed to Cindy. Who are you?"

"Ram Burrell."

"Ram." She wrinkled her nose. "I don't think anybody could call anybody Ram."

"Most people call me Burrell. Nobody's told you about me?" Suspicion this time. The flashes of sunshine were few and brief. "Why should anyone tell me about you?"

He played it cool. "I've been told about you. I've just been with John Ehrlich. He said I should go to Earth with you."

"And five hundred other people. There's only one trip in the next three weeks, and it's leaving in three days."

A waiter approached. Burrell said: "Steak. Roast and grilled."

"Roast and grilled, sir?"

"Consecutively. Roast first, with all the trimmings. Then grilled steak, with all the trimmings."

"Certainly, sir. What else?"

"If I think of something I'll tell you."

The waiter bowed and left them.

"Is that meant to prove you're a rugged individualist?" said the girl.

"Do you put your feet on the pillow?"

"Sooner or later I thought the conversation would get around to bed. But I thought I'd have to introduce the topic."

"The subject is already closed," she said coldly. As she ate her salad, delicately, and he waited for his steaks, he said:

"Why do so many people know so little about Earth?"

"Lack of communication. Didn't Ehrlich tell you?"

"That's like saying I'm having steaks because I want to eat. Why the lack of communication?"

She debated visibly the question of whether it was worth talking to him or not. Then she said indifferently, as if it was all obvious: "Earth wants to be left alone. The limited tours are a sop. They let some visitors from the galaxy outside step on the soil of the mother world, so they can see it's still there." Her gaze became calculating. "I wonder why Ehrlich wants us together? I think I can guess."

"I've got a slow mind," said Burrell. "It can only grasp one thing at a time. Earth still exports people. Why don't we pump them dry, and learn all there is to be known about Earth?"

"I've tried that. So have many others. It doesn't work. Either they don't know or they won't say. Some are conditioned so that they can't say." That jolted Burrell. "Brainwashing?"

"You could call it that."

His roast beef arrived and he attacked it. He would have liked to drink wine again, but one bottle of wine and two cigars a day was his limit. As for food, he ate when he could. Then he was able to go for a long time without it.

The girl had lit a cigarette. "Let's stop beating around the bush," she said. "You must be about four times stronger than I am. With you around, anything I try is doomed. Ehrlich is sending you to watch me, is that it?" The grilled steak arrived and he started on it.

"If I watch you, it'll be my own idea," he said. Until then he had scarcely noticed that she wore a long gray dress, covering not only her legs but also her arms and shoulders. Burrell's taste in women's clothes was unsubtle. If nothing was revealed, he scarcely bothered looking. What was the point in examining the cover of a book?

"He told you, didn't he?" she persisted.

"What?"

"That I mean to escape the guides. Meet Terrans, talk to them. Study their way of life. You're being sent along to stop me." It was years since he had had such a steak, seared on the outside, full of red juice inside. "I think Ehrlich knows very well I mean to jump the fence too."

For once, the girl looked flustered.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Sahara was the first call. There were splendid views of Earth on the big screens of the shuttle: sun and shade, misted, clear, hazy, bright.

"They could be recordings," Burrell murmured to Roberta.

"Why?"

"I just said they could be. We wouldn't know the difference." She nodded thoughtfully.

By now they had a certain cautious respect for each other: Burrell appreciated the woman's knowledge, which was considerably greater than his own in almost all theoretical matters, and her intelligence, which didn't have to be vast to top his. Roberta sensed that there was more to him than had first appeared and she admired Burrell's bull determination, strength, and honesty. On the last she was slightly deceived—Burrell knew that having acted like an honest man, one could always turn out to be a crook when necessary, but it didn't work the other way. Meantime he was proceeding cautiously with the girl, more cautiously than he had started, because she was undoubtedly going to be useful to him. She knew more about Earth than he could find in any book; he was not a great reader anyway. The main snag was that she wasn't tough even for a rather less than medium-sized girl, not the ideal partner for a venture which might demand strength and stamina. It was possible he would have to ditch her at an early stage.

The voice of a Friendly Guide came over the intercom. "In half an hour, ladies and gentlemen, you'll have to be strapped in for landing. If you wish to change first, now's your chance. Sahara is hot, very hot and very dry, and you'll need sunhelmets at all times. Don't wear sunbathing clothes, you need protection even if you're already tanned.

Wear whites—shirts, slacks, shorts, dresses—and close-fitting shoes or boots, or sandals if you don't mind the sand. It's harmless, but don't go barefoot—the sand is too hot…"

Burrell and Roberta were already in tropical kit. The girl's white skirt was not short; in fact it concealed her knees, and Burrell realized that had it not been for that first day he could only have guessed that she had a figure and skin that could stand revelation. Even now he couldn't be sure of it. Her sartorial modesty ever since vaguely irritated him: it was as if while writing a letter she kept her arm round the paper so that nobody could see what she was writing. He was not perceptive enough to guess that to Roberta, strangers didn't matter. Strangers could see her naked for all she cared. Friends and acquaintances could not.

"Now there aren't even pictures," he said, nodding at the blank screen.

"We could be landing anywhere."

The three people in the seat in front and the four in the seat behind had all gone to change. Nobody could hear what they said.

"Are you suspicious of Starways?" she asked. "Do you think they're putting something over on us?"

"They don't tell us much, do they?"

"No," she agreed, thinking about the kit. The Starways Terran Tour information about the Sahara was either a 100 percent deliberate lie or 100 percent ignorance, and it could scarcely be the latter. The Sahara had originally been a desert area of some 3,500,000 square miles, though the actual wasteland had been a million square miles less. In the map supplied, a single oasis was sketched in detail. Tourists could explore this area during their three-day stay. Babylon, according to the map, was thirty miles to the north and Bagdad twenty miles to the south, which was nonsense for a start. Bagdad and the ancient city of Babylon were indeed about fifty miles apart, but Babylon was south of Bagdad and both were in Iraq, on the opposite side of the Red Sea from the Sahara, a thousand miles away.

There might be nothing more behind the misinformation in the tour map than typical tourist-exploitation cynicism, linking five names the visitors might possibly have heard—Sahara, Bagdad, Babylon, Lake Chad and Timbuktu. Originally, these places had been thousands of miles apart, not within the fifty mile radius shown on the map. While one of the locations might be genuine, the others were undoubtedly renamed to give the tourists the pleasant feeling that they'd really seen these magic places. Roberta was reasonably certain that not one of the locations was genuine—except that the oasis called Sahara might well be somewhere in the Sahara region.

Gradually the other tourists returned and strapped themselves in. Burrell and Roberta might have been forced into each other's company anyway, for the others were all in groups, mostly plump and elderly, garrulous, credulous, snap-happy, rich and conscious of it. They were typical tourists, collecting places to stick in their scrapbooks, places with bright colors and fancy names.

"There's not a single person with intelligent curiosity among the whole five hundred," said Burrell wonderingly.

"One," she said rather coldly. "Me."

"Sure. But it's funny—you'd think the people on this tour would be professors, historians, researchers, people like that, and instead—"

"You know why. Professors don't have this kind of money."

"I know. I'm just wondering how you come to be here, Cindy. You're not like these people."

"Nor are you."

"I mean you're not rich and idle, like them."

"I'm not rich and not idle at all."

"I know you have to have some money," he said, checking his safety belt once again. The shuttle—a powerful, ugly ferry that had taken over from the starship twenty thousand miles out—swerved into horizontal flight.

"But you're not one of these people. You're a student, aren't you? A scholar?"

"You could say that."

He had never been so long with a girl before and made so little progress. For once, he was not thinking of becoming her lover—that tended to terminate his interest in a girl, and Cindy might turn out to be too useful. She not only concealed her body from him, she concealed her mind and except in flashes, her history, even her personality. Only in anger did her femininity come out.

Her sarcasm, her rudeness, her insults were a smokescreen. She hid behind it and he didn't know what she was really like. It kept others at arm's length, too, as it was meant to do.

The shuttle tried to stop in midair. Burrell had known better pilots than this one; Hoyt for one. If the Dirty Cow had been thrown about like that in atmosphere, she would certainly have disintegrated messily. Beside him there was a sudden sharp snap, followed almost instantly by a second identical sound. The slight, white-clad figure of Roberta Murdock, unrestrained, moved to dash itself to destruction on the back of the seat in front.

Burrell's powerful arm swung and met her soft midriff with considerable impact. She gasped painfully but she had more to worry about than pain. The catches of her safety belt had snapped, and Burrell, himself strapped beside her and facing the same way, could use only his right arm.

Burrell's straps were strong enough to hold him, perhaps not strong enough to hold them both. His right foot found purchase against a strut of the seat in front, taking some of the strain off the belts. Strong as it was, his arm could not force the girl back into her seat. Indeed, as the acceleration-deceleration battle continued, her usually slight, now immense weight gradually beat him and his arm was forced forward. In another moment she and his arm would be crushed.

But then the pilot ceased the reverse force and Roberta crashed back into her cushioned seat, breathless but otherwise unhurt. "Thanks," she gasped.

"What's the matter with your belts?" he demanded.

"Things always break with me. Burrell—you saved my life. I don't know how I can ever—"

"Forget it." He had the belt catches in his hands. They were perfectly sound. She had somehow managed to fasten the clasp wrongly. Of the five hundred people on board, 499 had managed to do it right.

He slammed them both shut and said: "Cindy, you sure as hell are accident prone."

"I know; around me things never seem to work properly. But nobody's ever had to save my life before. Sometimes I've wondered how I'd feel if anyone saved my life. Now I know. I didn't trust you before. Now I have to trust you."

"That doesn't make sense."

"Feelings don't make sense, didn't you know?" She leaned over and kissed him lightly on the cheek; after this first gesture of affection between them, it was he who looked wary.

Five minutes later, the ferry was down.

CHAPTER EIGHT

There were palms; there was sand; there was water. Most of all there was blinding, searing heat.

Somehow Burrell had always thought of Earth, when he thought of it at all, as cold. Merry Christmas, Santa Claus, snow. There were jokes too, about the way it rained on Earth: forty days and forty nights. Most people knew words or phrases that had originated in the unfriendly climate of Earth—fog, smog, the rains came, and stormy winds do blow, the day is dark and dreary, lovely weather for ducks, thunder and lightning. Roberta was struck dumb. "Isn't it wonderful?" she breathed when at last she could speak.

"It's bloody hot," said Burrell. He found it more interesting to watch her than look around him: in her delighted wonder she came alive as never before, and exuded a fresh, youthful vitality. She had never told him how old she was but he had guessed twenty-two, exactly half his own age. Now she looked sixteen. '

Vaguely he sensed some of the reasons for her ecstatic interest. She had obviously spent years reading about Earth, studying Earth, imagining Earth. And the blazing reality was no disappointment. Burrell himself had to admit that the air, parched though it was, was cleaner and sharper than the air of most worlds, that the colors were brighter, the vegetation greener, the sky bluer.

He liked extremes of temperature and climate, and though he could soon become tired of the burning intensity of the sun's rays beating down on the rolling dunes, the first prickle of sweat was pleasantly stimulating. The heat, he thought, worked wonders for Roberta, and he remembered that he had first met her soaking up artificial sun, offering her body to it and not to the onlookers.

"And this is only one facet of Earth," she murmured. "Next we go to Shetland. It's colder, wilder there. We'll see the sea… the real sea, the one from which we and all living creatures emerged billions of years ago. But this is the land of the Egyptians, the Pharaohs, mankind's first well-documented civilization…"

Burrell's attention, despite her considerable claims on it, was drawn to the crowd of people waiting to board the tender when the tourists had left it. For they were, obviously, Terrans, five hundred of them, men, women and children, black, white, yellow, red, brown.

The Friendly Guides who arrived with the tourists, and the other Friendly Guides already there, did not encourage the tourists to mingle with the emigrants and interrogate them. The tourists were hustled in the other direction, through the friendly oasis in the welcome shade of the palms, toward a white building that could be glimpsed through the greenery. And while many of the tourists photographed the waiting Terrans, exchanged a few words with them, asked inane questions and told them to be sure to go to this or that place in the galaxy, they quickly tired of the predominantly silent Terrans and willingly sought the shade of the trees.

Burrell and Roberta achieved very little greater contact. Since Earth retained scores of languages that had never made the leap into space, many Terrans spoke with strange accents. They talked politely to Roberta and Burrell but with neither willingness to enlighten nor desire to be enlightened. They were not curious "yet not indifferent either. They had been told or had decided for themselves not to seek information from the tourists.

A tall, well-built black man who, unlike almost all the others, defied conventional dress and was magnificently attired in a loincloth, sensed Burrell's galaxy experience and asked him: "Where should I go?" Burrell knew what he meant. With his skin, the big man would be a freak in some worlds, an object of derision in others, a target, a challenge, a reproach, an insult.

"Go to Rexian, Sutcliffe or Renn," Burrell said, "if you want to be a man. Go to Afrique if you want to be a black man. Go to Valuria if you want to be a nigger."

'Thank you. I'll go to Valuria."

"You want to be a nigger?"

"I want a chance to prove I am a man."

"Oh," said Roberta softly. "You have to prove something?"

"Not to myself. To those who still think a black man is a nigger." That brief contact was about all they achieved before the impatient and, at the moment, not too Friendly Guides ushered them after the others.

Surrounded by blinding yellow sand, the oasis called Sahara was not more than a mile square. Inside the square, however, was

everything—palms, dates, bananas, sand and a pool—that the average tourist would expect to find in an oasis, plus a gleaming hotel, swimming pool, casino, and tennis courts. Swimmers could choose between the tiled hotel pool or the more or less natural oasis pool. After lunch most of the tourists chose one or the other; the heat was intense and nobody had the siesta habit yet.

Burrell hired a car and he and Roberta debated whether to go to Bagdad, Babylon, Lake Chad, or Timbuktu. There was at least an illusion that the tourists could do anything, go anywhere they liked, unescorted if they chose.

"Chad would tell us most," said Roberta. "You can't fake a lake. The real Chad used to have an area of more than ten thousand square miles in the dry season—"

"You don't believe this is the real Chad?"

She waved at the sand which surrounded the oasis, apart from the four roads. "Chad was pastoral. It supported large herds of cattle, sheep, horses, and camels. Not much for them out there, is there?"

"Nearly everybody who's going anywhere today," said Burrell, "is going to Lake Chad or to Bagdad. A few to Timbuktu. Nobody to Babylon."

"All right," she agreed, "we'll go to Babylon." Several feet above the level of the desert, a straight, serviceable road had been constructed. In places sand had been blown across it, but never in sufficient quantity to impede passage.

Burrell drove the small open truck; and discovered that its top speed was about twenty miles an hour. The wheels were small and the tires narrow. Obviously the car would be useless on soft sand. It was a runabout for use on the four roads, nowhere else.

This was obvious to Burrell but not to Roberta. A mile from the oasis she said: "Could we get the car down those banks? Perhaps somewhere where the sand has been blown to form a ridge against the road?" Once again surprised that one so knowledgeable in theory could be so ignorant in practice, he swung the little truck into the next patch of sand on the road, stopped it, and jumped out.

"Now you get her out," he said.

She moved over, smoothed her skirt primly, and tried to drive out. The small wheels spun, digging themselves in. The vehicle was stuck.

"Burrell," she said anxiously, "have I broken it?" He laughed, swept away the sand around the wheels, jumped back in, and drove on.

"No," he replied, "but you get the point, don't you? It's not just difficult to use these buggies in sand. It's impossible. They wouldn't travel five yards."

"I see."

"Cindy, you say we're not in the Chad area. Have you any guesses where we really are?"

She looked around at the golden emptiness. "No mountains. Hardly any rocks. No vegetation. I don't think we're in the Sahara proper at all. This is what the Libyan desert is supposed to be like. That's a thousand miles from Lake Chad. Timbuktu is another thousand miles west. And Bagdad and Babylon are in a different country."

"Suppose we're in the Libyan desert, was that what you said? Would we be near towns, rivers, lakes, the sea?"

"It could still be a thousand miles to the sea."

"In what direction?"

"Due north."

He took a small compass from his pocket. "The way we're going." She gave a startled exclamation. "Where did you get that?"

"In Paradiso. It's scarcely more than a toy. But it works." She looked at it reverently but refused to touch it, sure she would break it. "I've seen pictures of them. In Dayton they don't work. Too many local magnetic fields. You're sure it points to the true north here?"

"You're the expert on Earth, Cindy, not me. I seem to remember the magnetic north on Earth isn't true north, and mariners had to make corrections. But without a map, what difference does it make? We're going towards the sea anyway, you think?"

"Anywhere in the Sahara the Mediterranean Sea lies due north. If we were in Iraq, where the real Bagdad and Babylon were, we should go west. Maybe we'll get a clue from this Babylon when we reach it." She did not seem to realize that it was going to take a long time to reach Babylon and a long time to get back, and if they spent some hours exploring what they found, as she was assuming, the drive back to Sahara might be hazardous and better not attempted in the dark.

There was a radio in the car, and when they were, by Burrell's reckoning, about halfway to Babylon, it bleeped. He flicked the switch.

"Mr. Burrell? Miss Murdock? This is your Friendly Guide. You are now halfway to Babylon. We have you on the scope. All part of the Friendly Service. I hope you've had no problems?"

"We got into a sticky patch of sand a while back," said Burrell. "That's all."

"Yes, we saw you stop. I hope you're enjoying your trip. Mr. Burrell?

Miss Murdock?"

They both said yes, and Burrell switched off thoughtfully. So they were under surveillance—probably not on radar, as the word scope suggested, but by a radio signal that went out all the time, whether the radio was switched on or not. Even if it had been possible to drive off the road into the desert waste, their route and direction would have been spotted immediately.

However, if he was right and the location device was in the car, that probably meant that when they left it and wandered about Babylon exploring, the Friendly Guides would have no means of knowing exactly where they were and what they were doing.

He glanced at the silent radio behind the wheel, wondering, if the device could send out a location signal while apparently off, it could also, perhaps, transmit their conversation. Anything was possible. But there were only some fifty Friendly Guides altogether to look after the party of five hundred. So everybody couldn't be monitored all the time. Roberta, sticky from heat, started to take off her blouse.

"No," he said. "The sun's too strong. Don't do it." She grinned quite impishly, something she had never done until they landed on Earth. "I got the impression you liked girls to dress skimpily. I even got the idea you thought I was covering up to annoy you." She saw more than he had guessed. "Right," he said, "both times. But I don't want you to get sunstroke. Here you sunbathe in the shade, if at all." It surprised him, too, that the car was not provided with at least a canopy. Certainly no such convenience would not have been blown off at the vehicle's maximum speed. However, he suspected he had already given the reason—it was intended to be obvious to all tourists that long journeys in these conditions, by car or on foot, were flatly impossible. When they finally reached ruins, Roberta was indignant. "These are modern ruins!" she said. "Look, there was an electric power point here. That was a concrete lamp standard. That was—"

Burrell, having picked up the hamper he had had packed for them under his personal supervision, led her away from the car. She had not said anything which would matter very much if the car was indeed wired for sound. But at any moment she might.

The road stopped at an extensive area of ruins. Burrell himself would have considered them quite picturesque, and might not, without Roberta's prior knowledge of what the real Babylon might be expected to look like, have known the difference. No building stood complete, but there were imposing stone steps and pillars and arches and avenues. Snap-happy tourists would have a field day.

Beyond the ruined city was a small oasis, as green and luxuriant as Sahara's but much smaller. Through the date palms, Burrell saw the gleam of water. Suddenly he realized how much he wanted food and drink, particularly drink after the long drive—the longest thirty-mile drive he had known for some time—and he wanted to plunge into cool water and wash off the sweat.

He had thought (the printed guide was not explicit) that there would be somebody at Babylon, though he had been warned to take all the food and drink he thought they might want, with a little extra for safety. No hotel as at Sahara, no restaurant, no store, but surely a Starways representative in a kiosk, a maintenance man, a gang of roadmen. There was nothing. No animals, few insects, just the ruins and the oasis beyond it.

Roberta grumbled: "Babylon was built on both banks of the Euphrates. Where is the Euphrates?"

"Come on," he said. "Let's get under those trees."

"Can't we take the car?"

He put down the hamper, climbed on a wall, ran up a fallen pillar and surveyed the terrain. The new road ran into a circular parking area that could take twenty cars and half a dozen buses. More parking space would never be necessary, not when the road back to Sahara could be used as well. A jeep or similar vehicle could have bumped its way through the sandy, stony, rutted roads that ran through the ruins. The buggy could not.

He made his way down again. "No. We'll have to walk." The disappointment of the rains—though she had never believed for a moment they could really be the ruins of Ancient Babylon—was still making her quite cross, for the first time since the landing on Earth. "Let's go right back," she said. "I'll tell them I know Babylon isn't Babylon and demand our money back. Make them take us to the real Babylon." Burrell had been patient for a long time. Not since he savagely chopped down the slim youth at the pool had he revealed the bully side of him.

"Are you coming or not?" he said shortly.

"No," she retorted even more briefly, and started back toward the car. Even if the car had a concealed scanner that enabled the Friendly Guides to watch them, they could not at the moment be seen because the wall intervened. They might, however, be heard. One powerful arm went round the girl's waist and the other over her mouth. Without gentleness he dragged her along the stone-strewn street and behind a massive concrete block. Now that she could not be heard by any device in the car even if she screamed at the top of her voice, he let her go.

He knew she would go for him and she did. Given this shadow of an excuse, he pushed her down and went down after her.

She fought more fiercely than he had believed possible, proving she had more strength and determination than he ever suspected. He fought back and enjoyed it, tearing her skirt accidentally and her blouse not so accidentally. Her fierceness and her refusal to submit worked both ways on him. If she had shown no spirit there would have been no fun in tussling with her. Her lithe, panting ferocity aroused his curiosity. She was quite prepared to tear his face with her nails if he let her and she did succeed in raking his chest so savagely he felt the blood spurt and saw the red drops fall on her torn blouse and on her bare midriff. Eventually, however, the fact that he needed her made him decide reluctantly not to carry the struggle too far. Forceful behavior made some women subsequently submissive, but he did not think this would be the case with Roberta.

He sat, finally, on her stomach so that her kicking legs could not harm him, and leaned on her arms stretched out above her head so that she could do nothing with them either. Even then she heaved strongly, trying to throw him off with the strength of her back, and nearly succeeded.

"Listen," he said. "Go back, make a fuss, and you blow everything. They'd give you your money back. And send you straight back to Paradiso. There's still time. And they would make sure you never set foot on Earth again."

The bludgeon sense of what he said pierced her fury and made her realize that whatever the rights and wrongs of his treatment of her might be, he had had to do something.

"Well, you might have said that," she gasped. "Instead of—" He told her of his suspicions about the radio. "I'm not saying they were listening to us all the time. I don't think it would be worth their while. But they could have been… and once we tell them in so many words we mean to skip the party, they could make it impossible."

"All right. Let me up."

"You won't run back to the car?"

"I'm not a fool."

He grinned, but didn't say any of the things he might have said. He liked the way she decided to forget the fight, taking her full share of the responsibility for it. All she said, when it proved impossible to fasten her torn skirt and her blouse refused to stay on her shoulders, was: "I thought you didn't want the sun to fry my soft tender body?"

"You brought other clothes."

"Not for you to tear."

"Well, don't fight, then. I'll go back to the car and fetch a few things I brought. You go on to the oasis. I'll catch up. Do you want your other clothes?"

"Yes, bring them, but meantime I'll stay as I am." Her tan, though light, betokened sufficient conditioning to ensure that she wouldn't burn or peel if she took reasonable care. The sunfilter dress had done its job.

He picked up her sunhelmet. "I like you better without it," he said, "but keep that on."

Leaving her poking about in the ruins, he went back to the car. It did not surprise him that the radio started to bleep when he started taking things out of the car.

He switched on. "Are you all right?" a voice asked.

"Of course," he said, acting surprised. "What would be wrong?"

"I just wanted to warn you, sir, not to stay too late. If you don't start back in the next half hour, it'll be dark before you reach Sahara. And driving at night is dangerous."

"Listen," Burrell interrupted. "The girl isn't here just now. Suppose we don't get back tonight? You won't have to send out a search party, will you?"

"Not if we know you're all right. You started late, you see. Best time for these trips is in the morning—"

"Well, don't expect us until tomorrow morning. I have a feeling something is going to go wrong with the car."

"Well," said the Friendly Guide doubtfully. "It's cold at night, you know."

"I know, and I brought plenty of food and extra clothes. Besides, there are other ways of keeping warm."

"The only thing, sir, is that the lady is our responsibility too. If she complains—"

"She won't complain," said Burrell with far more certainty than he felt.

"Whatever turns out to be wrong with the car, I'll say I can fix it, but not in the dark. There are no wild animals or wild people around, I take it?"

"No animals and I can guarantee you won't see a Terran. You're completely free here to do as you wish, sir. Just so long as you're sure the lady won't complain—"

"By the morning," said Burrell with a low chuckle, "I guarantee she won't complain."

Not that it made much difference, he switched off, picked up Roberta's bag and a few other things, and collected the hamper on the way back. She had not gone much farther on. She was examining the ruins, becoming interested, after her first annoyance that the site was not that of Babylon, in what were nevertheless ruins of a genuine desert city. Apart from her sandals she was wearing nothing but a white bikini, having thrown away her torn blouse and skirt and her sunhelmet.

"Watch that sun!" he said sharply. "It's too hot to sunbathe. And put on your helmet!"

"All right," she said, and they made their way on to the oasis. There, in the shade of the date palms, it was merely comfortably hot, and she again tossed aside the sunhelmet, to which she had taken an aversion.

"In a minute," she said, "we'll investigate that pool we saw. But first, what's in that hamper? I could use food, but it's a long cool drink I want…

oh!"

He had taken off his torn, sweat-sodden shirt. There were four long, deep scratches on his chest. She glanced at her nails, and then she spotted, apparently for the first time, the blood on her bikini top and on the bare skin below it.

"Don't pretend to be sorry about it," he said.

"I'm not. But I hate blood on my clothes."

"Then take them off."

She laughed. "Make up your mind. If you weren't here I would. But you're a lusty man, and one fight a day is enough."

He shrugged. "If I was going to do anything that drastic, I'd have done it back there."

"I expected you to, and if you had I'd have killed you. Not right away, but whenever I got the chance."

They drank wine and ate chicken sandwiches. He prompted her: "You'd have killed me, Cindy?"

"Somehow. With a knife while you slept, maybe. So take due note. I'll tell you this, gratis, and you can make anything you like of it—I've never been in love. I only once thought I was, and it turned out to be a mistake." He nodded, getting the picture. As a rule he frankly and deliberately used women, with no pretence of involvement. It seemed to be necessary, however, to become involved with Roberta, to understand what made her tick.

The strength, determination and ferocity she had shown did her no disservice in his eyes: the only black mark he gave her was for her temporary willingness to blow the whole thing out of mere annoyance. But at least she had quickly acknowledged her mistake when it was pointed out to her.

She jumped up. "Let's investigate that pool."

The small, shallow pool was scarcely deep enough for swimming. But it was cool, and it washed off the blood and sweat. Burrell noted with interest that she was a good swimmer. That opened up new possibilities. An island needn't be a prison.

The time passed quickly. Roberta liked soaking in the friendly pool, then lying in the sun for the few minutes it took to become completely dry and rather too hot again, and plunging back into the pool. And Burrell liked watching her.

Darkness came even more swiftly than Burrell had expected, and when the girl emerged from the pool for the umpteenth time—he had been content to lie on the sand for some time and watch her—she said: "Hadn't we better get back?"

"We're not going back. There's something wrong with the car's engine."

"Oh?" she said coolly. "The radio too?"

"No, the radio's working. I told them not to expect us till morning."

"And they stood for that?"

"I said I could fix the engine in daylight, but not in the dark. That's right, too. There is something wrong with the engine, and you can't fix it."

"You intended this all along."

"That's right."

"I told you," she said evenly, "I'll kill you."

"They warned me the nights get cold. It's getting cooler now." The stars were switching themselves on as the blue sky went deeper and darker. Although it not cold yet, merely divinely cool after the glare of the sun, the sudden drop in temperature was a foretaste of what would come later.

"Your idea is that after an hour or two I might be more willing?" He stood up. "My idea is that after an hour or two we'll be a long way from here."

She gasped, whether from relief or surprise he couldn't tell.

"I've brought clothes," he said. "Plenty of food and water. We know the sea lies due north. We set out due north. We won't leave tracks. The sand is dry and there's a light breeze that will cover our footprints in half an hour. We travel by night, stop when we find shelter for the next day, perhaps an oasis, perhaps rocks, perhaps shrub. Anywhere that provides shade from the sun and hides us from the copters they send looking for us."

She said nothing. In the luminous darkness she was more beautiful than he had ever seen her. Although she could stand the full glare of day, the night gave her the spice of mystery.

Since she didn't speak, he went on: "We can make twenty miles, maybe more. The nights are long, and they won't miss us until at least an hour after dawn. I made sure of that. We may never get a better chance."

"No," she said at last.

The one word was so definite, so coolly certain, that he said nothing and merely waited.

She sat down beside him, and it was amusing that after the hatred of just a few hours ago she came quite close, almost touching him, friendly again^even trusting.

"It's too easy, too obvious, too potentially suicidal," she said. "It can't be possible. I've told you how vast the Sahara is. I know I also told you this might be the Libyan Desert, which is comparatively near the Mediterranean. But it could be the Nubian Desert, the Syrian Desert, the middle of the Sahara. We've only seen a tiny thirty-mile stretch of sand. The Mediterranean could be two thousand miles to the north."

"We're looking for Terrans. They can't be far away."

"That's where you're wrong, Burrell. They're probably very far away. Earth isn't vastly overpopulated any more. The Sahara always was one of the least useful, least developed areas in the world. The Terrans may have given Starways this little area of oases and ruins because nobody lives within a thousand miles of it."

Burrell thought it over and then nodded. He liked action and hated inaction. It was typical of him, having planned to do something, to take the first, boldest, most direct opportunity. What she was saying, however, made too much sense.

She said: "Another thing. Perhaps this is a test, a trap."

"How?"

"Anybody can hire a car and drive here without guides. Anybody could know what I know. There could be an automatic radar installation hidden in the ruins, waiting for us to step over the line. Then they'd know."

"And they'd do what?"

"Perhaps nothing. Let us wander off into a thousand miles of desert waste, with no hope of getting anywhere and no hope of getting back."

"We could come back if—"

She laughed sceptically, waving her arm. "Out there? In nothing but sand? With your toy compass? We could miss this oasis by a hundred miles!"

"All right. I'm convinced. You've been wrong once; I've been wrong. Now let's try to figure out something right."

"Yes, and the first thing is to go back."

"Go back?" He was still interested in the prospect of spending the night in the oasis with Roberta, and had taken it for granted that this was still on, even if the desert hike was off. She was sometimes friendly. She was quite friendly now. When it became cold she would probably huddle close to him. He had known women whose wide-awake No! became sleepy acquiescence.

"I can guess what you said on the radio. I can also guess that the Friendly Guides thought what you were saying might be true, or that we might be planning to take a walk—and they'd soon find out. Suppose we drive back now. We stay together, eat together, but we're sulky. You've got scratches on your chest and you don't hide them, in fact you exhibit them unnecessarily, looking for sympathy. I think the result is going to be that the Friendly Guides will write you off as a fat loudmouth, and me as just…"

"Go on," he said, when she stopped. "You as just what?" She grinned, her teeth gleaming in the starlight. "Just a silly girl who gets a man excited and won't deliver."

"Which you are."

She grinned again. Her arm went round behind him and her fingers played with the hair at the back of his head. "No, I'm not," she protested gently. "I never even kissed you, did I?"

He pushed her away, and she didn't take offence.

"Okay," he said grimly. "We go back. There's plenty of light. We get in late, tired, cold, sulky and we go to our separate bedrooms… but first, since we can talk here—tell me about the other six places we're going to visit."

"First," she said, "I'll tell you about me and how I come to be here. You've asked before, but the times when you asked and the times when I was prepared to tell you never happened to coincide." In the darkness he smiled. Incredible though it sometimes seemed, they had things in common.

"I'm from Dayton—I think I let that slip. My parents died when I was eleven. There was enough money for me to stay at school, so I stayed. There wasn't enough money for me to go to university, but I checked on scholarships and found one that would support me at college if I studied Terra."

"I see."

"Yes, that was the start. I got so interested that the study wasn't work, it was fun. I graduated in Terran history, geography, and anthropology at eighteen. Then I stayed on at university as a fellow—"

"That must have been hard."

She realized he didn't know what a fellowship was. "There are lots of bursaries, scholarships, fellowships, and research grants for Earth study," she explained. "I started collecting them. It was easy. I don't think I know much about Earth. But by the time I was twenty I knew more about Earth than anybody on Dayton. I started thinking about actually going to Earth, and the idea caught hold of me."

"I know the feeling."

"But the various grants weren't enough. Eventually I'd have got here, when I was about thirty-five. But last year, when I was twenty-one…" On the nose. He could always tell a woman's age. Sometimes it was necessary not to tell it to her, but it was often necessary to know it. She was exactly half his age.

"… I was left money by an aunt I didn't even know existed. It was, well, it wasn't a fortune, but with research grants I managed to make this trip." Her life so far, it seemed to him, had been lonely and cheerless. Studying all the time—he couldn't understand how that could be fun. She had had at least one unfortunate love affair, deciding afterwards, not before or during, that she'd never been in love. With her face and figure she was bound to have been an object of desire to many. Instead of tasting, testing, living, learning, taking the pleasure and the pain, accepting and rejecting, she had turned it all down. And convinced herself she liked this approach.

"Tell me about the other six places," he said.

CHAPTER NINE

On the fourth day a huge jump jet arrived just after breakfast to take them all to their next destination, Shetland. A jump jet was an ideal choice for the transport of the tourists. It didn't require an airfield, just any reasonably clear flat surface. The sand was adequate: grass, prairie, concrete or baked earth would do as well. It had to be big to take the five hundred tourists—a three-decker, Burrell observed.

As the party was herded into the plane, Burrell and Roberta exchanged only surly monosyllables. They had agreed that while it was entirely possible the Friendly Guides had no interest in their charges beyond the obvious ones, they could not afford to drop chance remarks that might mean they would get the conducted tour and nothing more. The pretense that they had fallen out was convenient.

When the jump jet leapt up into the sky and the oasis fell away, Burrell soon saw that if he and Roberta had followed his first plan, they would have achieved nothing but death. Maybe they were meant to see that, he thought.

The four dots which were the places that could be freely visited from Sahara came into view as the plane climbed. Nothing else but sand was visible in any direction.

As the jet climbed still higher, more could be seen but in less detail. There were mountains. There was a vast green patch. No sea. To Burrell's chagrin, his compass refused to work in the plane. It spun aimlessly, disturbed either by the metal all around them or by some device in the plane. However, Burrell had already learned not to be entirely dependent on the compass for direction. He had checked the sun against the compass and vice versa. The sun rose in the east and set in the west. This fact was not of much use at midday, when the sun was directly overhead, but very useful at dawn and sunset. Also, Burrell always knew the time. Using his watch and the shadow of the sun he always had a rough idea of direction, even when the compass failed to work. Now he saw that the plane was heading almost due west, even slightly southerly. Why this should be so was a puzzle; no matter what desert on the continent they had been on, the way to Shetland was northwest, more north than west.

Roberta, who had also learned to tell direction by the sun, could have told him the answer but did not since they were still officially sulking. After two days of this she was getting tired of it and would gladly have broken it, would certainly have broken it if it had been real. Since, however, they shortly would be landing in Shetland, and be able to talk when they were sure it was safe, she kept it up.

The straight course would have led them over the Mediterranean, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, France, perhaps Britain, depending on where Sahara actually was. Instead they were going west across the Sahara to the Atlantic and would then turn northwards to reach Shetland without overflying anything but the Sahara.

It could be by agreement with the Terrans: no violation of airspace. Europe was still heavily populated, and the tourists were not supposed to see cities and large cultivated areas. Whatever the reason in detail, the general explanation was certainly that flying over the Sahara was all right but flying over Europe was not.

Presently Burrell sniffed, at first unconsciously and then with growing irritation. For the first time in their acquaintance, Roberta was wearing perfume. He disliked all artificial perfume and had hitherto given her a grudging good mark for never using it.

"Why the cover-up?" he inquired. "You smelled a lot better without it." Roberta, to her annoyance, found herself flushing. She knew perfectly well why she was flushing. As she had dressed that morning, knowing she would be stuck next to Burrell in a double seat for four hours, she had put on the perfume with the deliberate though only half-conscious intention of attracting him. She was annoyed that it didn't work, annoyed that he detected it instead of… the most irritating thing was that she had done it at all.

She didn't answer.

Drinks were served on the plane but no food. Only some half-dozen Friendly Guides travelled with the five hundred passengers, and the flying crew had not been seen. With no rival airline in competition, Starways did not go to the expense of running a flying kitchen and carrying food for five hundred. The drinks were shorts, no beer or wine; after a single whisky Burrell had no more. Roberta started on gin and stayed on gin, annoying him still further. First she showed she didn't have the sense, after all, not to overlay her fresh natural scent with chemical aphrodisiacs, and then she showed that she was capable of drinking too much for no reason. Burrell lived hard and to excess himself, but the injustice of his critical attitudes toward her excesses did not occur to him.

Over the sea the plane turned north. "How far this way?" Burrell granted.

"Four thousand miles. Perhaps five."

They were making a thousand miles an hour to reach Shetland in time for lunch.

Flying at a considerable height, they could see nothing of the sea. A little after noon, the jet descended confidently through the clouds; and only a few minutes later they saw Shetland.

They didn't see much. Their eyes still accustomed to the sunlight above the clouds, they found the gloom of the overcast like dusk. Checking on shadow for direction, Burrell was chagrined to find there was no sun shadow at all, and therefore his secondary direction-finding technique was useless. His compass still spun aimlessly. So after maneuvering in the clouds, they could be descending on the islands below from any direction. He scanned the horizon but could not see any other land. Shetland itself, which he knew from Roberta consisted of over a hundred islands, was only a dark gray-green mass in a dark gray-blue sea. Having memorized the Starways sketch map, he soon identified the north-south shape of the main island, with Yell and Unst off to the northeast. Roberta was sitting up and trying to take an interest, but having drunk too much gin, she had little success.

They were coming in from the north, Burrell saw, probably to avoid overflying Orkney. According to the printed pamphlet, landings were sometimes at Scalloway, sometimes at Lerwick or Sumburgh, depending on weather conditions. This time, he saw, they were landing at Lerwick on the east, guarded by the island of Bressay.

The landing was as coldly routine as all jump jet landings. The plane simply settled like a giant fly. Burrell and Roberta, not hurrying, were among the last to leave the plane. Roberta was unsteady on her feet and he didn't offer to help her.

An array of signposted choices stood at the foot of the ladder. Unlike Sahara, Shetland did not have one big hotel where everybody went for lunch. You could go to the Magnus or the Viking in Lerwick, but you might have to wait; you could board the bus for Scalloway, and have lunch there in fifteen minutes; you could go on a boat trip round Bressay and have a snack lunch on board; or you could take the bus for Sumburgh, but the trip would take nearly an hour and you would get nothing to eat until you arrived.

Burrell pushed Roberta, not too gently, in the direction of the truck waiting for passengers for the Bressay boat trip.

"I wanna go to Sumburgh," Roberta protested, her usually precise speech slurred, her usually cool manner aggressive. "Za Bronze Age village there. At Jarlshof. Excavacuated. I wanna go there."

"You wanna get something to sober you up," said Burrell. "And something to eat. A sea breeze and sandwiches will either sober you up or make you throw up, and which it is I don't give a damn." Lerwick had once been Shetland's major town. There was little of it left, and unlike the ruins at Babylon, it was neat and tidy, derelict buildings having been demolished. Instead of a garish new hotel there were two stone buildings that looked perfectly in character, and the cottages and shops, which formed what was no more than a village, could easily be four centuries old.

The boat, however, was modern, a big radio-powered cruiser. Burrell looked curiously at the slim radio antenna. He knew of broadcast electricity but had rarely seen it used. Though it was possible, it was not practical: power loss was enormous and installations using it were inefficient because of the frequent variations in voltage. The boaters were supplied with packed lunches that proved surprisingly adequate—hot soup in cartons, meat pies, cakes, coffee. Roberta ate hers sulkily; it was hard to tell how much of her and Burrell's behavior was pretense, or for that matter if any of it was. Since the landing, the weather had gradually and steadily improved. Patches of blue sky began to appear overhead. On Bressay, a gleam of sunlight turned the somber green to emerald, the black rocks to gold. Warned to expect cold, especially after the blinding heat of Sahara, all the travellers had wrapped up well.

It was certainly not warm, yet the air was so clean and bracing after the breathlessness of the Sahara that nobody felt cold.

The sun was full on Bressay as the boat sped out from Lerwick harbor. Burrell was not looking; he was checking the many small boats in the harbor. There were cries of delight from many of the passengers; Shetland was rocky, green, picturesque. The emerging sun turned the dull, greasy sea into sparkling white and blue.

The sea fascinated Burrell. Though the weather was apparently mild, it surged with a power an Orleans mariner would scarcely have believed. The oceans of Orleans were small, the oceans of Earth vast. A wind across a Terran ocean could build up over four thousand miles. Burrell had heard of tidal waves. On Orleans, nobody would ever see one.

Bressay was bold and rocky. Seagulls screeched around it and followed the boat, wheeling and suddenly darting in a new direction, plunging to the sea to snatch some scrap of food and sometimes a fish. Out beyond Bressay was another, smaller island. The cruiser took a wide sweep around it… and suddenly the motor died.

The boat, smooth and stable under power, was a pitiful, helpless thing without it. It rolled and pitched in the waves, and within seconds some of the passengers, hitherto quite comfortable, began to look green. The uniformed captain came out of his tiny bridge and raised his voice to reach the score or so of passengers. "Nothing to worry about," he said.

"My fault—sorry. I took the turn too wide. We're temporarily out of range of radio power. But the wind and tide are carrying us back in. Any moment now—"

As he spoke, the motors purred again and he dashed back inside. Under control once more, the cruiser became as smooth and stable and powerful as before.

CHAPTER TEN

Two hours later, Burrell and Roberta sat in a small sandy cove buttressed by black rocks. By now there was scarcely a cloud in the sky, the sun was bright and Burrell felt warm and good.

Roberta was cold and felt anything but good. She had been grumbling for half an hour about the Starways arrangements, or lack of them; the boat party didn't go back to Lerwick but to a small jetty that served an isolated inn. Tourist accommodation was spread all over the islands, and the five hundred visitors could later go anywhere there were vacancies but, for the first night, not having had a chance to look around, they had to stay where they were put. In the small inn called, most inappropriately, Queen of the Isles, there would be dinner at six but nothing before then, and their bags had not arrived yet.

For the heat of Sahara followed by the warmth of the plane, Roberta had worn a blouse and shorts. For the landing in Shetland she had with her a coverall jumpsuit. Normally the blue all-in-one suit was well insulated and should have kept her warm but the gin had released her physical reserves. She huddled, shivering in the worst kind of hangover, the kind that came of drinking too much too quickly and then stopping dead.

Burrell said: "Serves you right."

"That remark is hardly calculated to endear you to me."

"Why did you drink like that, Cindy? You're not a drinker."

"There was nothing else," she said coldly, "to do. Not with you sitting like a dummy."

"We agreed—"

"Yes. So I had a drink to pass the time. A few drinks."

"A lot of drinks. Well, never mind. We came here to talk—" She groaned. "My head aches. I don't feel up to it." He looked at her speculatively. "In ten minutes you could be feeling fine. On top of the world. How about it?"

"If you mean what I think you mean—"

"No. Something worse. Much worse. Kill or cure."

"I must admit I don't particularly care which."

"Okay, get that suit off for a start."

"Take it off?" she almost screamed. "We're practically in the Arctic Circle!"

He pulled the zip, however, and she didn't have the strength to resist. She found it soon afterwards when he stripped to his trunks, picked her up and made his intention clear. She shrieked, fought, struggled, tried to make him drop her. But she didn't scratch, she wasn't in a fury like last time, and her struggles were ineffectual. Burrell did not miss this, and he smiled to himself. As he knew very well, when a girl fought and meant it, she let you know. In Babylon Roberta had meant it. Now, though she certainly wanted to get free, she wasn't fighting him with hate, trying to kill him.

He waded into the curling breakers and held her above them. The sea, like the sea air, tingled with life. It didn't even resemble the warm, tired, sad waters of the pool at Babylon, which Roberta had liked so much but which bored him after a couple of tries. Of course it was cold. It forced a response: resist or die.

Enjoying the irony, he didn't even drop her but waited until her struggles nearly got her free and this time let her get free. Instead of going in inch by inch, she was dry one instant and totally submerged the next. She came up gasping and, amazingly, laughing. She clung to him, still laughing, hugging him when the receding sea tried to pluck her away from him into deeper waters. Then a seventh wave bowled them over and swept them back to the beach.

Roberta, faster on her feet, ran to where they had left their clothes. Behind her, as she picked up the jumpsuit, Burrell said: "Not over those wet things. Get them off. And we'll run."

"Not on your life," she said, laughing again. "We'll run, yes, but I'm not taking anything off."

"Suit yourself."

"I will. I usually do."

They ran back and forth across the small, rock-enclosed beach. He tried to make it a chase, finding himself strangely drawn to her but she stopped that… with a brisk shyness that surprised her a little.

When their thin clothes were dry they stopped, and while Burrell pulled on his jacket and jeans, Roberta zipped herself into her jumpsuit.

"All right, I give you that, it's worked," she said breathlessly. "I could push a mountain over. The only trouble is—now I'm starved." He put a hand in his pocket and handed her a couple of

plastic-wrapped ham sandwiches. For a moment she stared unbelievingly, then accepted them gratefully. "Where did you get them? I've been with you all the time."

"You ever heard of the Boy Scouts? I used to be a scout. On Orleans. Our motto was 'Be prepared.' " Smilingly he took out another pack of sandwiches. "I brought these from Sahara. Now, let's talk." His idea had been that they would steal a small boat in Shetland, where obviously there would be many boats, and sail southwards to Fair Isle, which was marked on the tourist map, or Orkney, which was not. It was some thirty miles to Fair Isle and in mild weather practically any craft larger than a rowboat could accomplish the journey.

"But they've thought of that," he said. "Every boat in the harbor is radio-powered, except a few tiny rowboats. I expected to find sailing boats, dinghies with outboards, oil-burners—"

"Are you quite sure they're all radio-powered?"

"Oh, yes," he said wryly. "That was quite clear. Also, there was that demonstration for our benefit."

"What demonstration?"

"You don't think the cruiser just accidentally ran out of power range, do you? They knew those interested in boats, the few among us who could handle a boat, would pick the boat trip. So they showed us that the power range extends only a few hundred yards offshore. That could be faked, but I think it's true. It explains their use of radio power too." Seeing her bewilderment, he explained: "Radio power isn't much good except in certain special cases where the advantages are greater than the disadvantages—where there's plenty of power, usually nuclear, and the enormous power loss doesn't matter. When you're doing a job on rough ground, for example, it's easier and cheaper to use a mobile power unit and half a dozen slave units than lay permanent cables maybe hundreds of miles long. Here the idea is to supply power to the whole island in a way that makes every motor, every machine useless if you take it off the island. The force field that contains the power area creates a wall round the island. You can move through it without knowing it's there but every engine stops."

"So what we need is a boat with a sail?"

"And there aren't any."

"Can't we hoist a sail on the power masts?"

"All the power masts are too flimsy. Besides, every boat in the harbor, big or small, is flat-bottomed."

"Does that matter?"

He remained patient because he knew she could think, once she had the facts, and explained. "To sail a boat you must have a keel or a centerboard, or all you could do was sail before the wind. He did, however, let his irritation show when she asked how he knew the small boats he had seen didn't have a keel.

"Because they don't need them, that's why," he said shortly.

"You haven't looked. You didn't dive into the water and swim under them."

He took a deep breath to blast her for her silliness, but it turned out she was not being as silly as he thought. "I know a little about radio power," she said. "It's unreliable in bad weather. Sometimes in electric storms it has to be turned off."

"That's true," he said, arrested.

"So there must be some alternative. The boats, buses, lights, cookers, and heaters on the island can't be entirely dependent on a source of power that sometimes has to be switched off."

"Batteries," he said. "Cindy, you've hit it. There's got to be an emergency system."

He stopped, thinking. He had not seen a battery in Shetland. It would be no use installing radio power and then letting every tourist know that there was an alternative. The batteries would be for emergencies only. Hidden, locked up, yet kept handy for the rare occasions when they were needed.

When the cruiser lost power, suppose the wind had suddenly veered and blown her out to sea? That would have meant danger, perhaps death, not only for a score of tourists, but also for the captain and his two crewmen. There was auxiliary power somewhere on board.

"Batteries," he said again. "I'll find them. Maybe they're stored at the powerhouse, wherever that it. Maybe—"

"I wasn't thinking about batteries. They could be built into boats so that you'd never find them. Especially if, as you say, tourists are supposed to believe there's only radio power. I was thinking about all those little boats. Starways staff have to live here when there aren't any tourists. Sometimes engines fail. Couldn't some of the boats sail, if they had to?"

"Well...." Burrell said doubtfully.

But he turned the idea over in his mind, and next day, while Roberta was poking around in her ruins at Sumburgh—which, as it happened, was the most southerly point on the island, and therefore nearest to Orkney and the Scottish mainland—Burrell took bus trips to Lerwick and Scalloway and looked closely, though not ostentatiously, at all the small boats in the harbors.

At Lerwick he was fairly sure his first impression was correct and that all the boats were power vessels and nothing else. He found nothing to support the idea that they could be speedily converted to run on battery power, or any convenient place where batteries could be stored. At Scalloway, however, on the west side of the island, he saw several boats that interested him. Although there was no sign that they were or had ever been sailing boats, Roberta's suggestion that sails might be used in emergency made him look with particular intentness at those dinghies whose lines didn't absolutely disqualify them for sailing. In particular, he found one fifteen foot half-decked boat which, though fitted with a sleek radio outboard, looked as if it was meant to be sloop-rigged. There was no sign of a centerboard, which would have been a complete giveaway; no mast, of course, anywhere on board where conventional sails could be stored; no rudder such as would be needed if the outboard was removed. But there were oars, and this made him consider the possibility of reaching Fair Isle by rowing.

Twenty-five miles or so of open sea to Fair Isle; it was a daunting prospect, even in the calm weather that prevailed. It was not impossible, but it was a big undertaking and highly dangerous. His compass should keep them headed in the right direction; but Fair Isle was small so they would have to travel by night. He didn't know if the island was inhabited. There might be no lights; they could be swept past it and out into the Atlantic. Even a light mist could prevent them from seeing land less than half a mile away.

Then, too, there was scarcely any darkness. It was approaching midsummer and he had observed the night before that sunset was very late and dawn very early. A copter sent up to look for them would have a very easy task.

Nevertheless, he arranged rooms for Roberta and himself in Scalloway and took another bus trip to fetch her. She was very calm about it. "If you're prepared to chance it, so am I," she responded.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

At dusk that night, the half-dark of these northern latitudes, Burrell told the two Friendly Guides who ran the small hotel that they were going out for a walk. They would let themselves in, he said. They might be quite late. They wanted to see the Northern Lights.

They could not take their bags, not so much as a small valise. But Roberta wore a coat over a skirt, trousers and shorts, two sweaters and two shirts. Burrell had trousers, shorts, sweaters, and shirts under his coat.

They had no weapons except clasp knives and an open razor Burrell had bought, no map except the one in the Starways pamphlet (which might be deliberately misleading), and no navigational aids except Burrell's toy compass. For food they had sandwiches, collected at various places during the day to avoid the suspicion that asking for them at the Scalloway hotel might have aroused. They had no water, not having been able to acquire a suitable container, but had four bottles of lemonade in their largest pockets.

And they had no money. Roberta was almost sure that outworld currency was useless on Earth. Burrell had not brought his diamond. The disadvantages of having it on him, to be discovered in a search, might prove to be greater than the possible advantages. Paradiso knew about the gem; he had lodged it with Flora Fay.

On the way down to the harbor Burrell said: "Cindy, this is the most dangerous thing you ever did in your life. There are so many things that may happen—"

"But we won't go into them, will we?"

He smiled at her appreciatively.

Earlier there had been people about and he had not been able to get closer to the half-decked dinghy than fifty feet. Now the harbor was deserted.

Terran Tours were run with a minimum of Starways staff. Because there were so many small hotels, buses, boats, sports, bathing and fishing facilities to be maintained, there was necessarily a much larger caretaker staff staying permanently in Shetland than in Sahara. But not enough helpers had been hired. The tourists, in accordance with the warnings on Paradiso, had to do many things for themselves which they were not accustomed to doing, such as making beds, cleaning their shoes, looking after their own clothes and sometimes serving food to themselves. There were certainly not enough Friendly Guides to keep a close watch on everybody.

Burrell pulled in the boat and in the half-light made out the name on the stern: Flora. He remembered Flora Fay with pleasure and was quite willing to take this as a good omen.

"So that's how you do it," said Roberta as they stepped down into the dinghy. "So easy. I thought we'd have to get wet." Burrell felt about in the boat. He could not see much: his hands told him more.

There was no sign of a centerboard, but he had known it wouldn't be obvious. More disappointing was that behind the foredeck there was no mounting for a mast. The boat had side decks about six inches wide but there was nothing stored under them except oars, a few ropes and sleeping-bags. Welcome as these were, he would rather have found sails. Feeling around the foredeck again, he made an exclamation of satisfaction: "Fine. It's all right, we'll take this one. Flora it is." He let the rope loose, leaving it trailing in the water. Although that rope might have been useful, he thought it better to leave it trailing in the water, enabling the owner of the boat, and others, to believe if they liked that the Flora had not been properly secured and had drifted away. The tide was on the ebb, which was good, and the light wind was from the north, which was still better. Burrell let the boat drift southward and westward, and presently switched on the radio-powered outboard. It was not noisy, and the Flora moved out from the land smoothly, still southwestward.

"Aren't you going to lose power?" Roberta asked.

"Eventually yes. Meantime no, I don't think so."

"Why?"

"Remember the map. The power failed out beyond Bressay. Much farther from Lerwick than we are from Scalloway now. And there's a group of islands ahead of us. West Burra. Power must be maintained all round those. Anyway, I'm taking the chance. There's a narrow passage southward close to the coast, but I'm going outside the islands. To make sure we aren't seen or heard."

Roberta knew the map as well as he did, and what lay beyond it considerably better. At this point, the main island ran due south to Sumburgh, where she had been earlier that day. From the headland there she had just made out Fair Isle, and that was reassuring now. They were not making for an island that might or might not be there. Radio power would take them to Sumburgh and with luck some distance beyond it. There was no harm in being optimistic, she reflected, so long as you had something to fall back on—like the oars. It was quite possible that radio power extended all the way to Fair Isle, Orkney, and to the Scottish mainland for that matter. The power failure off Bressay, as Burrell had admitted; could have been faked to mislead them. In her two sweaters and two shirts Roberta was warm, too warm. She took off her coat and folded it beside her. Burrell was at the stern with the outboard.

"Keep a watch ahead," he said. "Tell me if you see anything."

"A long island to the left," she said.

"Port."

"Oh, all right, port side. It's still on the left."

"Fine. We're running southwest. Tell me when you see the end of the island and we'll turn due south. Then southeast when there's no more islands."

Of course, there could be radar plotting their course already, and at any moment a big cruiser might come out to intercept them. But as the coast slid away northward Burrell became more and more sure that they had been successful at least in phase one of the enterprise.

Phase two came when, shortly after they had left Fitful Head behind them, the motor suddenly stopped.

So it was true that the radio power covered only the islands and a few hundred yards of coastal waters. "Now we have to row," said Roberta resignedly. "Maybe not. Wait."

He went forward and operated the concealed control he had found under the coaming of the foredeck. Loud ticking started, and he reared back, fearing for a moment that the boat had a self-destruct device. A stout telescopic mast began to extend itself from the rear of the enclosed foredeck. Also something moved beneath the boat, and he guessed exultantly that a center-board was being lowered.

"Clockwork!" he exclaimed. "Well, who'd have thought it… but it's perfectly logical. We've lost radio power and there's no battery on board. That would make it too easy for people like us. There's no gas engine either. Just a strong clockwork motor."

"What good is a mast without sails?" Roberta objected. The clockwork motor had not finished its job. Up the short, stubby metal mast, a second, thicker mast began to climb—in fact, two masts. Burrell kept well clear, careful not to touch anything. This was an automatic job.

The mast had drawn up with it a short foresail, very thin but presumably adequate for its purpose, probably of some synthetic fiber. It took Burrell quite a while to work out exactly what the next two masts were, and indeed it was only when it became obvious that the process was not entirely automatic and he had to step forward and grasp one that the design became clear.

The two poles were gaff and boom, another thin sail already in place between them. They were exactly the same length, longer than the mast, the thin whippy metal yard extending beyond the mast.

The boat had, in fact, become a gunter sloop with a tall, narrow mainsail. At least, it had almost become one. The one important thing missing was a rudder…

This didn't bother Roberta. She looked at the tall white sail in wonder.

"You expected this?"

"I knew from the start that this boat was meant to be a sloop. The question was, where was the rig? It wasn't much use storing it ashore if it might be needed in emergency."

He secured the boom and gave her the usual warnings about being decapitated. Already the sails were filling and hauling them smoothly to the southwest, which was not where he wanted to go.

There just wasn't a rudder. Apart from the clockwork-motor, the foredeck was now empty. A short handle had come up with the rigging and it was obvious the motor had to be wound up before it would operate again. Winding it now would take the mast and other gear down again, he guessed, with enough power left in the spring to bring them up again. There could be no rudder carried underneath the boat, or he would have felt the drag already. That left only one possibility—the radio-powered outboard had to be used as a rudder. This was not ideal, and he guessed that when the little boat was used as a genuine sailing dinghy the outboard was left behind and a proper rudder used. But that would not be when the islands were full of tourists. The rudder was stored away carefully until they left.

He trimmed the sails, put Roberta at the outboard and showed her how to keep the Flora heading southeast.

"Southeast?" she said. "Why? We'll miss Fair Isle."

"Exactly. I never meant to go there."

"But you said—"

"Cindy, if we'd had to row, all we could have done was head for the nearest land and hope for the best. Maybe Fair Isle is uninhabited, and there I'd have tried to rig some sort of sail. But now that we've got a decent boat, fair weather, and a reasonable wind, we've got a good chance of making the mainland of Scotland."

"The mainland… of course, that's much better. You don't mean to land on Fair Isle, or Orkney either?"

With the boat trimmed to his satisfaction, he lit a cigar. He didn't offer to take over from Roberta. The sooner she got the feel of the boat the better. So far she was doing astonishingly well.

"Cindy," he said at last, "we can't be the first to try this. Just tell five hundred people, 'You can't see any of Earth but the seven places we take you to, and you can't talk to any native Earthmen,' and the twenty or fifty of them with most spunk suddenly want to show they can. Most of them, unlike us, ruin their chances by arguing, challenging the Starways staff to stop them, and either get sent back or watched closely for their trouble. We got this far by not doing anything like that. But we may not get much farther."

"Planes, boats after us?"

"That, too. But I guess a call at Fair Isle would finish us. Notice that the propaganda handed out, while never suggesting we do anything like trying to run away, placed subtle emphasis on Fair Isle and the Orkneys? That's where anybody like us, having got this far, would naturally go, if only to have a look and prepare for going farther. So I guess that on Fair Isle, there are a couple of men with guns to capture runaways and, in the friendliest way possible, of course, take them back. And while Orkney's far too big for that sort of thing, I'd say it's quite likely there's an agreement with any Terrans living there that runaways are locked up and kept until called for."

"That may be the case anywhere in the world. Probably is." He shook his head. "I wouldn't say probably. Possibly. We'll have to wait and see, won't we? Anyway, the way Orkney is included in the subtle propaganda smells. It's almost as if we're being directed there. No, if the weather holds, we'll go for Scotland."

CHAPTER TWELVE

Mid-afternoon, and bright sunlight on a rocky coastline. The sun was welcome, for they had not had it all easy. During the first night, which had started well, they had been blown too far eastwards and Burrell cursed the imitation rudder.

The next day they had sailed southwest, their navigation by now a matter of blind guesses. Burrell had no idea of the tides and currents and could only guess the wind strength. And all he had for charts were the rough sketches Roberta made of this region. Although she was a mine of information on Ancient Earth, it was not to be expected that she would have detailed information on just one region of a world she had never seen. Several times he had to bite back his impatience with the vagueness of her information, particularly on distances. It was evidently a great deal farther from Shetland to the Scottish mainland than she, or he acting on her information, had believed. Maybe that was why they had seen no sign of a search party.

Now, however, after two nights and nearly two days at sea, they were approaching a coastline that spread farther and farther northeast and southwest, a coast which could not be that of a small island. It must be the coast of Scotland—or possibly England, if they had been blown even farther south than Burrell had guessed. And after two days of light winds, strong winds, rain, mist, and sunshine, the weather was again perfect and the wind obliging, blowing almost straight at the land.

Though Burrell did not know it, he had made an almost perfect voyage. Neither he nor Roberta dreamed that this was so. The lemonade and the food were gone and they had never been quite dry since a sharp ninety-minute squall had soaked everything.

The coast became more and more attractive as they drew nearer. At first the rocks were black and forbidding, but as they got closer they saw there was sand too.

"We'll land there," Burrell said, pointing, and Roberta, whose behavior on board had so far been impeccable, acted without thought. Standing up to get a better look at the broad sandy beach, totally clear of rocks though backed by a steep stony cliff, she released the outboard-tiller. The boat yawed, the boom snapped across, hit her on the head, and pitched her into the sea.

Burrell swore but that didn't do any good. Feeling some panic, he brought the boat into the wind, looked for Roberta and saw her face down six yards away. There was no boathook, only the oars.

He must go in after her, though for a split second he considered the safer course—as far as he and the boat were concerned—of running down the sails and rowing to pick up the girl, but he might not be able to get back with her to the dinghy before the wind caught her and piled her on the rocks. He might not manage to reach the shore with Roberta. But floating face down wasn't doing her any good, and so he leaped into the water and struck out for her. She was quite limp and none of his fears about the boat materialized. He pushed Roberta over the side and got in after her, shipping water.

There was no blood, and after he leaned two or three times on her back, squeezing water out of her, she gasped and gulped air and then, having almost regained consciousness for a moment, lapsed into coma. He thought it best to beach the boat first, and did so, jumping out and hauling the dinghy clear of the high-water line. Although concerned about Roberta, he quickly wound the mast and sails until the spring was fully charged; it might be necessary to make a quick getaway.

Then he hoisted the girl onto the warm dry sand and pumped her a few more times. Her breathing, however, was all right—it was the bump on the head that had done the damage.

Now he found it—a swelling lump above her left ear.

Her thick blonde hair hid the lump. It had also done something, no doubt, to protect her. She didn't look good and he realized that if he removed her wet clothes, he had nothing dry to wrap her in. Both he and she were wearing all their clothes, a piece of bad luck since in the warmth of the day they would certainly have taken some of them off if their attention had not been taken up wholly with the prospect of landing soon.

"Carry her up to the house," said a voice with a strange accent. He looked up, startled, to see two girls, one tall and fair, the other short and dark. Footprints in the sand showed they had approached from the cliff, where he now made out a steep path.

At another time he might have laughed to see how ordinary they were—two girls in their twenties, the tall one in green jeans and a white sweater, the other, who was pretty, in a blue shirt and short yellow skirt. There was hardly a colonized world in the galaxy where they would have attracted any attention exactly as they were, and there was not one where anyone would suspect they were natives of the legendary Earth. He didn't speak, giving them every opportunity to talk to him before he committed himself to talking to them. He picked up the unconscious Roberta and followed the two girls, who had started back towards the cliff path.

"We saw you from the cliff top," said the dark girl. "The path is steep. Can you manage?"

That remained to be seen. At least the steepness of the ascent and the exertion of carrying Roberta made him breathe so hard he had an excellent excuse for not talking.

From the girls' conversation as they climbed the path ahead of them, he gathered that their husbands, two brothers, were not at home at the moment. The tall, fair girl was Anne and the dark, pretty one, Lynn; their names were as ordinary as their clothes.

Flat grassland topped the cliff, and two or three hundred yards away stood a cottage. Beyond the cottage was a farm of sorts, but there were no farm buildings, just the cottage.

The girls hurried on ahead, which was just as well, for it gave him a chance to talk freely to Roberta when she stirred in his arms and opened her eyes.

"You bloody fool," he said rather brusquely, only his eyes showing his concern.

"The boom… yes. How long ago was that?"

"About twenty minutes. Listen. Two women are leading us to a cottage. I don't think they know we don't belong here. Keep quiet and listen when they talk. Maybe you'd better be unconscious again. At least dazed."

"I am dazed. And my head hurts."

"You surprise me," he said.

"I told you I'm not very practical. Sometimes I forget what I'm doing and…"

She didn't have to act. She lapsed into unconsciousness again. At the cottage door Lynn was waiting. "You must be very strong," she said. "Will you manage to take your wife upstairs? She is your wife, isn't she?"

He had to speak, and he didn't have much time to make up his mind whether, in the circumstances, it would be better for Roberta to be his wife or not.

Realizing in time that she might talk in sleep or delirium, he said: "No. Just a friend."

The room at the top of the stairs was tiny. He didn't have a chance to look around, for the two girls shut him out, assuring him that they would look after Roberta.

"Go into the living room at the left of the stairs," Lynn told him. "I've put out a dry pair of trousers and a shirt for you." The women were going to find that Roberta was wearing quite a collection of clothes, and being women, they would examine them curiously. Burrell had told Roberta to cut off all the labels, but had she done it? A girl who would let the tiller of a sailing boat go and stand up to be knocked into the sea by the boom was capable of anything. One label saying Dillon, Riga, or Carter, Dayton, would blow any chance they had of passing as Terrans.

In the room Lynn had indicated, he stripped naked and was about to pull on the clothes laid out for him when he noticed a door left open, apparently on purpose. In a tiny corridor beyond he found a tiny bathroom, the smallest he had ever seen. There was no tub, just a toilet, a washbasin and a shower.

He took a quick hot shower, his first wash since leaving Shetland, though he had scraped his beard off every morning. Then he reflected on the facilities of the cottage. Primitive certainly, unbelievably small but the clean water on tap indicated pipes, and a piped water supply indicated not just civilization but organization.

Back in the living room he pulled on the pants. It was pleasant to have his back and chest bare again after days and nights huddled in sweaters. The room was warm; although it was warm enough outside to go without a shirt, the room heating was on.

He examined it. Oil. Narrow-gauge pipes. Full central heating in an isolated cottage. The contradictions interested and baffled him. Hot water and central heating. No radio, television or telephone. Books. No scanner. Oil lighting. No electricity. Cooking presumably by oil too. No car, no tractor. From the window he could see the fields. Vegetables and fruit—potatoes, cabbages, carrots, onions, gooseberries, blackcurrants, in far greater quantity than four people would need. He wondered if there was a deepfreeze. There could be a deepfreeze running on oil. Some of the books were printed in Edinburgh, which he knew had been the capital of Scotland. Most were printed in London.

There was a tentative tap on the door. Lynn came in but nearly withdrew again when she saw him bare to the waist, He grinned at her, and saw a familiar response in her eyes. He felt the familiar stirrings within him…

She said: "Your… friend is all right, I think. Concussion, probably, but I expect she'll be fine tomorrow. Anne has gone to a neighbor's house—Dr. MacKay is due there today and she might catch him."

The girl went on hesitantly: "I don't think your friend really needs a doctor, and if Anne misses Dr. MacKay we needn't bother. Unless you feel…"

He had approached her slowly, and now he took her very gently in his arms. Startled, she tried to break free, staring at him.

She seemed incredulous. "I don't even know your name…"

"Ram," he said, tilting up her chin so that her lips were in the correct position.

"Mr… Ram, you must let me go."

"You don't want me to let you go."

"Of course I do, and I never said anything to make you think—" He kissed her, gently, for this was no Flora Fay or Sugar. Although he never had doubts and never swerved after getting a response, he was well aware that many girls needed time. Only on this occasion he didn't have time. The other girl might return at any moment with the doctor. The husbands might come back. Roberta might come to life and stumble downstairs.

The girl's face was like the softer things in Terran life, not like the bleakness, the isolation. Her skin was as clear as Roberta's, her cheeks as soft, her hair as well tended. And her clothes, simple as they were, were not the clothes of a country wench.

It was now or never.

* * *

Anne came in shortly afterwards. She had missed the doctor and come straight back.

"I came past the window," she said dryly. "I saw I was too soon and waited for a while."

Lynn gasped.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

In the early evening, when the men returned, Burrell was upstairs with Roberta. She was conscious and concussion was not apparent, though she was weak and had a splitting headache.

She had been offered food but Burrell hadn't, which was ironic because Burrell was ravenous and she couldn't eat. Anne's grimness and Lynn's apprehensiveness didn't bother Burrell but something was brewing and Roberta couldn't be moved yet. He thought it best to stay with her in case the women, who could do nothing against him, decided to take it out on Roberta.

He thought he heard someone on the stairs and waited. Just as he decided he had been mistaken, the bolt shot loudly. He tried the door and found it locked.

"Why would they do that?" Roberta murmured.

"I could hazard a guess." She knew nothing, so far, of his amorous interlude with Lynn.

"They can't mean to keep us locked up… unless… Do you think they guess we're not—"

"Maybe."

Time passed; perhaps ten minutes. Then there was another step outside and a paper was pushed under the door. Burrell picked it up and read:

Lynn has told me everything. It was not her fault. She says she has never met another man such as you, and I believe her. You cannot be allowed to stay among us, or in Scotland, or on Earth. We are going to fetch the police. It will be Exile for you and perhaps for the girl. That was all. It was not even signed. Silently Burrell handed the paper to Roberta. It was impossible to keep her in the dark much longer. She read it and then said: "What happened?"

"Use your imagination."

"I'd rather you told me. Did you rape her?"

He sighed. "No."

"It seems she says you did."

"A technicality. One that women, particularly married women, take refuge in. I don't suppose she said in so many words that I forced her. Just that she was too terrified to resist."

"Did you terrify her?"

"Do I terrify you?"

"Anyway," she said bitterly, "you might have waited… controlled yourself… instead of taking a tumble with the first Terran girl we saw."

"It's been a long time. And there have been temptations lately." He knew she was capable of fury, for which there was some justification.

But Roberta was not predictable. He could feel her disappointment in him, but he was surprised when she laughed weakly, holding her head.

"Really? I do tempt you, then?"

"I never wanted a girl more."

"But you don't love me."

"What's that got to do with it?" But he looked uncomfortable, his eyes held by hers as though hypnotized.

It was her turn to sigh. "And now?"

They heard a door slam, probably the front door. From the tiny window Burrell saw two men on foot making their way along a path.

"The men have gone," he said slowly. "Both of them. Leaving the girls with us."

"And a locked door between them and us."

"That's nothing. I can kick it down."

"And me in bed."

"You're going to have to move. We'll climb out of this window." He expected protest but got none. "You'll have to go," she agreed, "but I'm not sure I can make it."

"They don't seem to have gone near the boat, any of them. They think the locked door is enough."

She pushed back the bedclothes and tried to get up. Her head swam and she sat back dizzily.

The women had put a long nightdress on her. But she had some of her clothes with her, rinsed and dried. Burrell did not have his, only the borrowed shirt and trousers.

Sitting on the bed, she said: "Now that I know you're tempted, it's more necessary than ever for you to turn your back while I get dressed." He didn't make an issue of it. Behind him, she said: "I don't think I can walk."

"You'll have to climb down by yourself. I'll knot the sheets together. If you can manage that, I'll carry you to the boat."

She gave him the biggest of her sweaters and he put it on. "Wouldn't it be easier," she suggested, "to break the door down and go out the conventional way?"

"I want to avoid the women if I can. They could have a gun, though I don't think so. There would certainly be a scene: We'd have to damage property and possibly knock them out and tie them up. Far better to get away quietly if we can."

He made a ladder with the sheets, helped her to the window, and threw the ladder out. "Let me get down first," he said. "Then if you do fall, I'll have a chance to catch you."

He fastened the sheets to the window frame. It was a tight squeeze for him to get through the small window. Once out, he took only a few seconds to reach the ground, for even the upstairs window was not far up. Fortunately the only window from which the ladder would have been visible was the frosted glass of the bathroom.

Roberta came down slowly and cautiously, her tension obvious, and when she was five feet up he touched her leg and caught her in his arms. She did not speak as he made his way at right angles away from the cottage's blank gable end. Only when they were three hundred yards from the cottage did he turn toward the clifftop.

He found another path, longer but less steep than the one he and the girls had ascended. The dinghy lay where they had left it, apparently untouched.

"Let me down," said Roberta. "I'll manage now." He kept her where she was. "You're only half my weight," he said.

"Maybe less."

"Funny, now that I've had a breath of fresh air I'm hungry. Pity we couldn't stay to dinner."

"They'd have fed us in jail if we waited."

"I don't think much of Scottish hospitality."

"Oh, I don't know," he murmured, thinking of Lynn. She glared at him. He laid Roberta in the boat and started pushing the Flora out. They had arrived while the tide was rising and were leaving on the ebb; the water was much lower now and he had a long way to push the boat. He breathed a sigh of relief when the sea took the boat again. For ten minutes or so he rowed before running up the sails. The breeze was still from the north, though it was beginning to come off the land now.

"Pity we never found out where we were," said Roberta.

"Oh, I found that out all right. I stole this; it may be a long time before they miss it."

It was a small book of maps of Britain, a fairly large-scale map divided into sections.

"I think we're here," he said, pointing to the northeast coast just south of Buchan Ness, "and there's where we're going." He pointed.

Edinburgh.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Zipped into a sleeping bag, Roberta slept all night and didn't stir even when the sun came up. It was mid-morning when she finally sat up with a groan.

And once again they were approaching the coast; only this time it was flat, with a city over to the right. Instead of being blown straight toward the land with a favorable wind, the breeze was dead foul and Burrell had his work cut out making any headway.

"Here," he said abruptly, seeing she was awake, "you take the tiller and I'll attend to the sails. I've had my eye on a harbor for nearly an hour, but I can't make it."

Uncomplainingly she hoisted herself out of the sleeping bag and discovered, after a few uncomfortable moments, that her primary concern was no longer an aching head or the nausea she had escaped only in sleep, but ravenous hunger.

"And don't stand up!" Burrell added.

She winced. "No need to shout at me."

"You wouldn't have a headache if it hadn't been for that boner you pulled yesterday," he said unsympathetically.

"As to that, I think we're even," she retorted curtly. "Those women were friendly enough until you gave your well-known impersonation of a jackrabbit. They would at least have fed us."

"I am hungry," he admitted, "but some things matter more than food." She gave him a quizzical glance, and said no more. But her face betrayed something akin to anger and, for both, the atmosphere was filled with tension.

With her at the outboard-tiller, they made better progress tacking towards land.

Suddenly, however, Burrell said: "Damn!" and started winding down the sails. "We'll have to row in," he said over his shoulder. "Ditch that outboard. Tip it over and let it sink."

She was alert enough to comply without argument. There would be people around where they landed, and the radio-powered outboard motor would lead to questions they didn't want to answer.

He pulled for a flight of stone steps and a tall man in white trousers and a sky-blue jacket ran down the steps to meet them.

Burrell cursed under his breath. If there were harbor dues, they hadn't a cent to pay them. He had hoped that in a small harbor like this, nobody would pay much attention to them.

"I watched you tacking in," said the stranger. "You were doing very well… how did you come to lose your rudder? You must have had one then."

Worse and worse. "Women!" said Burrell explosively. "She let it get unshipped and it sank. It was metal, you see."

"Bad luck. My name's Eliot, by the way. That's my cruiser over there. Never tried sailing but I've always wanted to. Your sails came down very neatly. Not a sign of them; how was it done?"

Burrell made the best of it, inviting him to step into the boat to examine the mechanism. Eliot was fascinated, and didn't seem unduly suspicious. Burrell had guessed from what he had seen of the cottage the day before that a clockwork motor running up a collapsible mast and sails would not be startlingly original to these people. Though there might be great gaps in their technological resources, they had not reverted to barbarous ignorance.

"Staying here a while?" Eliot asked. If he noticed that neither Burrell nor Roberta had given their names in response to his introduction, he didn't comment. The story that Roberta's carelessness had lost their rudder now proved convenient. She sat in the stern apparently sulking while the two men talked.

"We're going into Edinburgh."

"Just for the day, or longer?"

"Longer. Maybe a few days."

"Then I've got a proposition that might interest you. Would you hire me your boat?"

"There's no rudder."

Eliot waved at the boats around. "I can easily get one. I'd like to try sailing, and you won't be needing your boat while you're in Edinburgh." Burrell considered. There might still be harbor dues. If Eliot took over the Flora, he would naturally take over such details. A total lack of money, even small change, was a tremendous handicap; despite their hunger, they couldn't buy a sandwich.

Burrell made up his mind: if Eliot was prepared to close the deal on the same casual basis on which he had suggested it, he'd agree. If, on the other hand, Eliot wanted names, addresses, guarantees, a written contract, proof of ownership and so on, Burrell would not only withdraw…

he'd have to withdraw.

"How long and how much?" he said.

"Three days. Ten pounds. How's that?"

Burrell, who had been a businessman, was inclined to haggle just on general principles. He himself was always suspicious when a deal was closed too easily. At the last moment, however, he realized that Eliot was a kind of wealthy yachtsman who didn't change much from country to country, from world to world—a gentleman, not the haggling type. Probably his offer was needlessly generous, made casually and expected to be received in the same way.

"Sure," he said. "Only we pay for the rudder. You fix it and we'll settle when we come back."

"Fine," said Eliot enthusiastically. "The wind's perfect for a sail right now. I'll hunt for a rudder right away. Probably pick up an old one for next to nothing."

He took out a wallet and gave Burrell two notes. Burrell stuffed them in his pocket without looking at them. Keeping up the act, Burrell said shortly to Roberta: "Coming?" and without a word she stepped ashore and started going up the stairs.

"No luggage?" said Eliot in mild surprise. "We'll buy what we need."

"Sure you'll be back in three days?"

"If we're not, the boat's yours."

Eliot laughed politely, treating this as a joke.

There was a small town directly behind the harbor. It was marked on the map as Musselburgh.

"Thanks very much," Roberta said bitingly. "I enjoy being an object of derision."

"I had to put the blame on somebody. It worked out pretty well." He took out the notes. "Two fives. Any idea what they're worth?"

"Not really. In Dickens' time, twenty pounds a year was a fair wage. A hundred years later twenty pounds a week wasn't much. But here on Earth, before the exodus, countries kept revaluing. A meal in France used to cost about thirteen hundred francs. So they divided by a hundred for convenience. The meal cost exactly the same, but they called it thirteen new francs. The British may have done the same. Let's find out. Let's go and eat."

He was willing. But he said, seeing a shop that sold tobacco: "Want cigarettes?"

She brightened. "Until you mentioned it, I didn't know I wanted a cigarette more than a steak."

Conspiratorily they both went in. He bought one cigar and twenty cigarettes. The elderly shopkeeper took the five and gave him four notes and some silver.

Outside, they checked. "Cigar, ten pence," said Burrell. Cigarettes, twenty-five. Any ideas?"

She was lighting up. At the first draw she choked. "That isn't tobacco!" she exclaimed.

Burrell didn't light his cigar, putting it in his pocket to smoke after lunch. "Now that's something I can tell you about," he said, "being a man who likes to know what he's smoking. Nothing that anybody smokes is tobacco. That was an old name for a certain plant that people smoked for centuries. Then they found it was a killer and looked for alternatives. You get different smokes all over the galaxy. Maybe for the first time you're actually smoking tobacco… but no, they never grew it in cool countries."

"Cool! I haven't felt so hot since Sahara!"

She was still wearing all her clothes, and people were staring. There was not another woman in sight wearing trousers. They all wore dresses, rather dowdy dresses. Anne and Lynn, it now became evident, were not less elegant than their city counterparts, as might have been expected, but considerably more attractively dressed. There was not a skirt as short as Lynn's in view.

"We'll have to ditch some clothes," he said. "Pity, because we may need them again. We may have to sail back to Shetland. But we can't go around being stared at."

"There's another way. Look."

From the way they looked around them, the young couple were obviously strangers like themselves. They wore stout shoes, shorts and sweaters, and carried knapsacks on their backs. And nobody paid any attention to them.

"Hikers," Roberta said. "That's what they called them. We could be hikers. We've got the gear—"

"Except the sacks."

"I saw packs like that in a shop not far back. As hikers, we'd be expected to be strangers with strange accents. We'd be expected to look around and not know our way and ask questions."

Burrell shrugged. "You're the expert. So we'll be hikers. But first, let's eat."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

It was a big moment for Roberta to walk down Princes Street, Edinburgh. Since she had seen pictures of the street in different periods and from different angles, it was also instructive, for she could see what had changed.

The castle still stood on the hill to the left, with the gardens in the valley between. But the railway was gone, and so was the Scott Monument. In the street itself, all the vast stores and hotels had disappeared; in their place were elegant but not very large or impressive houses. By constructing a mental picture from photographs she had seen, as well as from her experience with other cities, she was able to discern both what the street had been like and, comparing it with what she now saw, could draw certain interesting conclusions and form some theories. The big commercial palaces had all been axed. There was not a single factory, superstore, or luxury hotel in the whole of Edinburgh. Banks were small and what seemed to be the city's main post office was only a modest shop. On the other hand, the churches, the Royal Academy, the museums, theaters, and conservatories remained and'were in good repair. Edinburgh had once been called the Athens of the North. It seemed to have more claim to the title now than ever before.

There were no billboards and few posters, these only in discreet locations. They told of concerts, exhibitions, displays.

There were no private cars, only the buses, one of which had brought Burrell and her from Musselburgh. The streets were clean. Where once, presumably, there had been a wide roadway with at least four lanes of traffic and roadside parking, there now remained only a narrow road on which two buses could just pass, and broad, clean concrete pavements for the pedestrians.

These were not crowded. Once Edinburgh had had a million

inhabitants; Roberta guessed it had not a hundredth as many now. The people were drably dressed, even more so than in Musselburgh. This reversal of the usual order of things was puzzling—country girls being gaily, provocatively dressed, the people in a small town less so, and the people in a large town still less so. There must be a reason, but Roberta could not begin to guess what it was.

Anyway, their choice of disguise proved lucky; although they had seen few hikers, they were clearly common enough to attract little or no attention. True, quite a few people stared at Roberta, but that was not unusual. What was unusual, another puzzle, was the furtive way men stared at her bare legs.

One thing was clear—short skirts were out, and so were shorts unless, like Roberta, you carried a knapsack. But the men still stared… furtively. Edinburgh was clean, sober, civilized, rather drab, and its people were clean, sober, civilized, drab…

They had to halt as a scuffle erupted in front of them. Three youths, then four, then six fought. Three or four girls, none over fourteen, screamed encouragement.

The girls proved the most startling. Roberta had never heard so many filthy oaths strung together. Although there were, after all, only about a dozen words that really qualified as profanity and obscenity, these young girls used an astonishing mixture of the profane and obscene. And this in the Athens of the North. Meantime the fighting became more desperate, more savage, the youths panting and gasping as they drove fists into faces, chests, abdomens. Presently some of the smaller fighters were bowled over, and then the kicking started.

On the other side of the fracas Roberta saw, unbelievingly, two policemen watching. They were not enjoying the fight: from their expressions it was clear they would have liked to stop it but didn't dare. None of the bystanders were enjoying the fight either, except those in the thirteen-to-sixteen age group. Now there were nine youths fighting. Four of them were kicking two, who had given up all attempt at offense and were merely covering their eyes with their hands and arms. Then Burrell waded in.

He had dropped his knapsack. He seized one of the kickers and threw him horizontally against one of the others. He was stronger, more violent, and more destructive than any of the youths. Teeth were jarred loose or knocked free as he chopped the face of another youth with a karate blow. A gargantuan shove sent a sixteen-year-old rocketing into the chorus of foul-mouthed girls, scattering them, and that was not accidental. The two biggest youths came at him swinging. A boot came up. Burrell seized the leg and twisted it violently, upending the youth into the other. The second youth staggered but did not go down, and came on. Burrell hit him so hard on the chin that his feet left the ground. He fell back and did not move.

Impartially Burrell hauled up the two on the ground and sent them, too, staggering into the screaming girls. Then he looked grimly at the two policemen, challenging them.

They stepped forward. The youths, those who could, ran away. Four of them couldn't. The girls, except one, disappeared into the crowd. The remaining girl darted across to the unconscious youth to whom Burrell had given an upper-cut, then started kicking him in the face. Burrell lifted her off her feet, kicking wildly. He might have done no more to her but she succeeded in kicking him on the kneecap. He put her down and slapped her across the face so hard that everyone in the crowd jumped at the sharp crack.

She blinked, burst into tears, and ran.

One of the policemen took Burrell and Roberta to a bench facing the castle while the other cleared up the situation, moving everybody on, acting as he should have done five minutes ago.

"Name?" said the policeman, taking out his notebook.

"Are you going to charge me with something?" asked Burrell belligerently.

"No. I'm going to offer you a job."

Roberta choked on a laugh.

"I'm Sergeant Scott. Who are you?"

After a second's hesitation, Burrell gave him their names.

"Ram… you certainly acted like one. You're hikers? Come far?"

"Yes."

Fortunately Scott didn't pursue that. "Are you down for Exile?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Why should I be?"

Scott grinned grimly. "Anybody who can do what you can do, and does, is liable to find himself with a one-way ticket on a starship… sooner or later."

"But it had to be done. You should have done it." Scott sighed. "I know. But I couldn't do it. You could and did. Burrell, the kids are getting on top of us. It gets worse all the time. I believe my chief would be glad to hire somebody like you."

"As a professional bouncer?"

"Bouncer?" He didn't know the word. "Break up a few gang fights, that's all. Get yourself known. Be around. The kids are not so tough really."

"I know. They're just toueher than anyone else." Roberta stepped in. "What would I do while he was breaking up gang fights?"

He hadn't thought of that. He looked her over doubtfully. Scott was a tall, slim man of about Burrell's age, but there was something effete about him, something Burrell didn't expect in any cop. He had met a few senior police officers elsewhere who had something of that look, but generally, they were crooked. Scott, he was prepared to wager, was not crooked; yet he didn't seem to be much of a policeman, and nothing at all of a sergeant.

Suddenly Scott brightened. "There's a possible job for you, too, Miss Murdock, if you're interested. We need a girl to investigate the clubs. My daughter Tanya is too well known. If the two of you would care to come along to the station, we can talk it over with my chief." They wanted jobs, money, some stake in this world, some position from which to survey and evaluate Earth. But even Burrell, a tough man who didn't mind being tough, had no desire to go around hitting kids. To act as he had done, in anger—violently, even brutally—was one thing. To go out again deliberately looking for violence was another thing altogether. But this was a chance to learn a great deal quickly. He caught Roberta's glance over Scott's shoulder and also caught her quick nod.

"No harm in going to the station with you," he said.

* * *

If Burrell was not quick to assess a complicated situation, Roberta was. As they left the small unimposing police station to walk to Sgt. Scott's home address, she explained: "They're weak. All their strong characters are sent to the colonies—into the galaxy. Very much as rioters and sheep-stealers were transported many centuries ago. Women go too, if they transgress, or if they won't let their men go without them." Burrell stopped in his stride at this. "Women?"

"You know women go. You saw them at Sahara."

"Yes, I was thinking of something else. Somebody else. Go on."

"You're a tough character. Aggressive. Used to getting your own way. You saw Lynn and you wanted her. You took her."

She spoke quite composedly. She had felt annoyance, even anger, over that. Perhaps a touch of jealousy. But she told herself, rationally, that if she wouldn't give him what he wanted, she couldn't complain if he got it from somebody else—only complaining that he jeopardized their position by doing it.

"The poor girl literally couldn't resist you," she said. "You were far too strong for her. I don't mean just physically. You had your way, just as if you wanted the window open and she wanted it shut, you would win. And remember the consequence? Apparently her husband thought, they all thought, that the result would be Exile for you. Transportation, in fact. As a punishment? I don't think so."

"Not as a punishment? Then what?"

"As a simple means of maintaining the status quo. That's what they do here, it seems. All aggressive characters are expelled."

"Terrans aren't notable rebels in the galaxy."

"Remember, we know there may be some form of conditioning."

"If they can be conditioned into being tractable, why expel them?"

"They're still aggressive. They may be conditioned so that they accept Exile and don't fight to get back. But they remain strong—stronger than the people who stay here. If Terrans aren't notable rebels in the galaxy, they certainly aren't notable doormats."

He nodded thoughtfully.

"Teenagers, now… of course they rebel," she went on. "The child of weak parents bullies them. But Earth doesn't expel kids. Children go only when the whole family goes."

"Then what happens to young thugs like those today?"

"In time, they conform. As they get nearer twenty-one, they realize that they've got to knuckle under or leave Earth. Some decide, okay, we'll leave Earth. The rest gradually and progressively conform. So a prophecy comes true."

"What prophecy?"

"St. Matthew, Chapter Five, Verse Three: Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth."

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Sgt. Scott's wife was dead, the elder son had emigrated to a planet in the Tarsus sector and the younger was a doctor in Glasgow. That left a daughter and a larger house than was now needed, with the result that Scott occasionally took police recruits in temporarily.

As they met the daughter, Tanya, who was tawny, tall, and tigerish, Roberta wondered rather wearily why it was that Burrell's path was always so conveniently strewn with attractive girls.

Tanya was in her late twenties. She looked at Burrell speculatively, and Roberta knew it was only a matter of time before they tried each other out.

Yet at first Tanya seemed more interested in Roberta, openly admiring her. Her interest was caught from the first by the fact that Roberta had already accepted the assignment of investigating the clubs.

"Yes, you'll do," Tanya said, "if you don't run when somebody says 'boo'

to you. They know me, of course. You can't go with me. Burrell can. In fact, it would be an idea for us all to go tonight, Burrell with me, you on your own, not knowing either of us."

"I haven't a clue what this is all about. I was told you'd brief me."

"All right. There's hardly any organized crime in this city, except for the clubs. Nightclubs mostly, but some are open twenty-four hours a day. Frankly, we let them alone. There are twenty policemen in Edinburgh plus office staff and a hundred or so part-timers like me."

"You can't take on the clubs?" said Burrell.

"Let's say we're not sure we want to try. But we like to keep an eye on what's going on, and a girl like Roberta can be very useful. People will talk to her, tell her things. With her looks—"

"I need looks to qualify? Am I supposed to sell them?"

"One way or another. You work it your own way. Have you any money?

Clothes?"

"No."

"Then you can't act the wealthy socialite. You'll have to be looking for a job. Hatcheck girl, cigarette girl—you've got the legs. The clubs not only cloak nearly all the crime there is, they attract the rebels, the fugitives, the people skipping Exile, the pushers, the perverts."

Roberta and Burrell were careful not to exchange glances, but it sounded as if it was in their interests, quite apart from the job, to find out about these clubs and their clientele.

"And you think," said Roberta slowly, "I might get a job in one of these places?"

"You can start off by asking, anyway. Whether you get a job is neither here nor there. So long as you have some plausible excuse for being there. You might do well asking for a job at various clubs and turning down every offer made as not good enough. That's up to you." Roberta marvelled at the lack of organization. At the station, she and Burrell had not been asked for documents, signed no contracts, signed only for an advance on pay and were given badges. Neither was to work in uniform.

There was no reason why they should not go with the tide. When they didn't know exactly what they wanted to find out, anything they found out was progress.

Roberta had noted one significant thing: just after propounding her theory on exile and aggression to Burrell, they had met his daughter. Tanya was obviously anything but weak and helpless, indeed precisely the type Roberta would have expected to go for Exile long before she was twenty-eight—willing or unwillingly.

"In the long run," Roberta said, "I'd have to get a job. People don't tell you their secrets in the first five minutes."

Tanya nodded.

"And I don't fancy walking about all night with a tray of cigarettes."

"What else can you do, then? Gambling? Could you be a croupier?"

"No."

"Sing, dance, play an instrument?"

"I did appear in college revues," said Roberta, surprising Burrell.

"With your looks, you won't need much talent."

That night, all three of them visited the Marimba, a club near the university.

Burrell and Tanya were there first, apparently ordinary fun-seeking customers, but, as Tanya had warned him before they set foot in the place, certain to be spotted at once. Their presence, she said, might act as a blind for Roberta, arriving later: if all suspicion was centered in them, there would be none left for Roberta.

Inside, the club was like any nightclub: a small band, a small dance-floor, too many tables in too small a space, subdued lighting. The only thing out of the ordinary was the prices. Burrell, who by this time had started to see the Scottish pound in perspective, found them very low. He and Tanya were in evening dress, which didn't suit him and did suit Tanya. In a low-cut, strapless, floorlength green dress she proved an intelligent dresser. All her good points were emphasized and her bad points minimized.

She started by trying to draw him out, asking oblique questions. He parried them deliberately, almost rudely, and also blocked an attempt to talk about Roberta. Tanya was almost as brusque when he tried to talk about her. An unusual situation, he thought, enjoying it. Most people wanted to talk about themselves to the exclusion of all else. If the waiters, the barmen, the cigarette girls, or the unseen management were electrified by their presence, there was no sign of it. Burrell did notice, however, that they were attended to promptly, out of turn, which was significant.

The food was very good, in some ways better than in Paradiso, which prided itself on its cuisine. Its simplicity and lack of standardization stood in stark contrast to the rigid variety of the fun-world. Here meals could be much worse or slightly better. Burrell's steak was perfection. They were just finishing their meal when Roberta came in. There was no rule or convention about women having to have escorts, and several were alone at tables or at the bar. Burrell had already established by observation the pick-up routine: it was perfectly in order for any man to proposition any girl who was on her own, and she invariably responded politely. But if she didn't want company that was that; the man accepted it with good grace and moved away at once. Burrell hoped Roberta, too, would observe this before giving anybody the kind of brush-off she had once given him. It wasn't done here.

She had scarcely got her order, sandwiches and a drink that looked like whisky, when the lights dimmed still more and the floor show started. There was a comedian who went down well, though Burrell scarcely understood his patter; it was done in a broad accent and was full of allusions that meant nothing to him. Then the dancing girls came on, six of them.

They were energetic rather than skilled. Paradoxically, in a city where art and culture were rated more highly than in any other city of Burrell's acquaintance, where the food was often superb, service good, manners impeccable, and the band more musical than any nightclub group he had previously encountered, the girls were rank amateurs. They high-kicked with enthusiasm but without unanimity. Although they were young and nearly all pretty, they brought little else to their performance. Their costumes, most of all, reminded him of amateurs rather than slick professionals. The short skirts were just a little too long, the spangled bodices a little too loose.

Roberta, too, missed none of this, waited to gauge the applause, which was mild, and made up her mind. Until then she had not finally decided to try for a job as a singer or dancer, considering the idea somewhat fantastic. To pretend she wanted a job, yes. That would give her an excuse to talk to the manager, ask about the club, hang around without allowing anybody to take liberties, and inevitably learn something. If the dancers had been, as she expected, about three times as good as she was, she would have made certain her talents never came to the test. As it was, she wrote a note and handed it to a waiter with a terse request that he should give it to the manager. It read:

I've seen your floor show. I can do better.