To his left, the sunlight panel had been cleaned in patches. A
cadre of lumpy robots were scraping and mopping the fretted
glass. Lindsay nosed the ultralight down for a closer look. The
robots were bipedal; they were crudely designed. Lindsay realized suddenly that they were human beings in suits and gas
masks.
Columns of sunlight from the clean glass pierced the murk like
searchlights. He flew into one, twisted, and rode its updraft.
The light fell upon the opposite land panel. Near its center a
cluster of storage tanks dotted the land. The tanks brimmed
with oozing green brew: algae. The last agriculture left in the
Zaibatsu was an oxygen farm.
He swooped lower over the tanks. Gratefully, he breathed the
enriched air. His aircraft's shadow flitted over a jungle of refinery pipes.
As he looked down, he saw a second shadow behind him.
Lindsay wheeled abruptly to his right.
The shadow followed his movement with cybernetic precision.
Lindsay pulled his craft into a steep climb and twisted in the
seat to look behind him.
When he finally spotted his pursuer, he was shocked to see it
so close. Its splattered camouflage of dun and gray hid it perfectly against the interior sky of ruined land panels. It was a
surveillance craft, a remotely controlled flying drone. It had flat,
square wings and a noiseless rear propeller in a camouflaged
exhaust cowling.
A knobbed array of cylinders jutted from the robot aircraft's
torso. The two tubes that pointed at him might be telephoto
cameras. Or they might be x-ray lasers. Set to the right frequency, an x-ray laser could char the interior of a human body
without leaving a mark on the skin. And x-ray beams were
invisible.
The thought filled him with fear and profound disgust. Worlds
were frail places, holding precious air and warmth against the
hostile nothingness of space. The safety of worlds was the universal basis of morality. Weapons were dangerous, and that
made them vile. In this sundog world, only weapons could keep
order, but he still felt a deep, instinctive outrage.
Lindsay flew into a yellowish fog that roiled and bubbled near
the Zaibatsu's axis. When he emerged, the aircraft had vanished.
He would never know when they were watching. At any moment, unseen fingers might close a switch, and he would fall.
The violence of his feelings surprised him. His training had
seeped away. There flashed behind his eyes the uncontrollable
image of Vera Kelland, plunging downward, smashing to earth,
her craft's bright wings crumpling on impact. . . .
He turned south. Beyond the ruined panels he saw a broad
ring of pure white, girdling the world. It abutted the Zaibatsu's
southern wall.
He glanced behind him. The northern wall was concave,
crowded with abandoned factories and warehouses. The bare
southern wall was sheer and vertical. It seemed to be made of
bricks.
The ground below it was a wide ring of blazingly clean, raked
white rocks. Here and there among the sea of pebbles, enigmatically shaped boulders rose like dark islands.
Lindsay swooped down for a closer look. A squat guardline of
black weapons bunkers swiveled visibly, tracking him with delicate bluish muzzles. He was over the Sterilized Zone.
He climbed upward rapidly.
A hole loomed in the center of the southern wall. Surveillance
craft swarmed like hornets in and around it. Microwave antennae bristled around its edges, trailing armored cables.
He could not see through the hole. There was half a world
beyond that wall, but sundogs were not allowed to glimpse it.
Lindsay glided downward. The ultralight's wire struts sang with
tension.
To the north, on the second of the Zaibatsu's three land
panels, he saw the work of sundogs. Refugees had stripped and
demolished wide swaths of the industrial sector and erected
crude airtight domes from the scrap.
The domes ranged from small bubbles of inflated plastic,
through multicolored caulked geodesies, to one enormous isolated hemisphere.
Lindsay circled the largest dome closely. Black insulation foam
covered its surface. Mottled lunar stone armored its lower rim.
Unlike most of the other domes, it had no antennae or aerials.
He recognized it. He'd known it would be here.
Lindsay was afraid. He closed his eyes and called on his
Shaper training, the ingrained strength of ten years of
psychotechnic discipline.
He felt his mind slide subtly into its second mode of conscious-
ness. His posture altered, his movements were smoother, his
heart beat faster. Confidence seeped into him, and he smiled.
His mind felt sharper, cleaner, cleansed of inhibitions, ready to
twist and manipulate. His fear and his guilt faltered and warped
away, a tangle of irrelevance.
As always, in this second state, he felt contempt for his former
weakness. This was his true self: pragmatic, fast-moving, free of
emotional freight.
This was no time for half measures. He had his plans. If he was to survive here, he would have to take the situation by the
throat.
Lindsay spotted the building's airlock. He brought the
ultralight in for a skidding landing. He unplugged his credit
card and stepped off. The aircraft sprang into the muddy sky.
Lindsay followed a set of stepping-stones into a recessed alcove in the dome's wall. Inside the recess, an overhead panel flicked into brilliant light. To his left, in the alcove's wall, a camera lens flanked an armored videoscreen. Below the screen, light
gleamed from a credit-card slot and the steel rectangle of a
sliding vault.
A much larger sliding door, in the interior wall, guarded the
airlock. A thick layer of undisturbed grit filled the airlock's
groove. The Nephrine Black Medicals were not partial to visitors.
Lindsay waited patiently, rehearsing lies.
Ten minutes passed. Lindsay tried to keep his nose from
running. Suddenly the videoscreen flashed into life. A woman's
face appeared.
"Put your credit card in the slot," she said in Japanese.
Lindsay watched her, weighing her kinesics. She was a lean,
dark-eyed woman of indeterminate age, with close-cropped
brown hair. Her eyes looked dilated. She wore a white medical
tunic with a metal insignia in its collar: a golden staff with two
entwined snakes. The snakes were black enamel with jeweled
red eyes. Their open jaws showed hypodermic fangs.
Lindsay smiled. "I haven't come to buy anything," he said.
"You're buying my attention, aren't you? Put in the card."
"I didn't ask you to appear on this screen," Lindsay said in
English. "You're free to sign off at any time."
The woman stared at him in annoyance. "Of course I'm free,"
she said in English. "I'm free to have you hauled in here and
chopped to pieces. Do you know where you are? This isn't
some cheap sundog operation. We're the Nephrine Black
Medicals."
In the Republic, they were unknown. But Lindsay knew of
them from his days in the Ring Counciclass="underline" criminal biochemists
on the fringes of the Shaper underworld. Reclusive, tough, and
vicious. He'd known that they had strongholds: black laboratories scattered through the System. And this was one of them.
He smiled coaxingly. "I would like to come in, you know. Only
not in pieces."
"You must be joking," the woman said. "You're not worth the
credit it would cost us to disinfect you."
Lindsay raised his brows. "I have the standard microbes."
"This is a sterile environment. The Nephrines live clean."
"So you can't come in and out freely?" said Lindsay, pretend-