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raised her hand to him in a mocking salute. Safe.
    The Department of the Environment
sprawled across the entire acreage of its very big block. Dr Carriol's bus
dropped her on North Capitol Street near H Street, but the entrance she used was
on K Street, which meant she had to walk right up North Capitol Street, past the
main entrance, and turn the far corner into K Street.
    A small crowd had gathered about the main
entrance and was too involved with whatever lay at its middle to spare her a
glance as she strode by, tall and fashionable and elegant though she was. Her
sideways glance was cursory, her mind scarcely recording the fact that Security
was dealing with another suicide. The grandstand brigade all came to
Environment's environment to state their cases in the most forceful way they
knew how, convinced within the darkness of the tiny corners into which they had
boxed themselves that it was all Environment's fault, and therefore Environment
ought to see with its own eyes to what agonized abyss they had come. Dr Carriol
felt no urge to check whether this one was throat or wrists, poison or drugs,
bullet or something more novel. It was her job — given to her by the President
himself — to remove the reason why people needed to come to this squat vast
white marble building in order to put paid to existence.
    Instead of a uniformed battery of
attendants manning a battery of telephones, her entrance door had a combination
lock triggered by voice, and the phrase varied day by day to a code gleefully
chosen by that arch joker in high places, Harold Magnus himself. Secretary for
the Environment. Surely, she thought sourly, the man could find better things to
do. But then she was prejudiced against him. Like all permanent career public
servants with real seniority, she dismissed the titular head of her department
as an incubus around the Departmental neck. A political appointee, he came with
a new President, was never a career public servant himself, and went through a
predictable sequence from new broom to worn-down stubble — if he lasted in the job. Well, Harold Magnus had
lasted, and lasted for the usual reason; he possessed the good sense to let his
career people get on with their jobs, and on the whole was secure enough within
himself not to be causelessly obstructive.
    'Down to a sunless sea,' she said into
the speaker buried in the outside wall.
    The door clicked and swung open. Crap.
Useless shit. No one in the world could have duplicated her voice well enough to
fool the electronics analysing it, so why have a changing password? She disliked
the sensation it gave her of being a powerless puppet hopping up and down at
Harold Magnus's slightest whim; but that of course was why he insisted upon
doing it.
    The Department of the Environment was an
amalgamation of several smaller agencies like Energy that dated back to the
preceding century's second half. It was the brainchild of that most remarkable
of all chief executives, Augustus Rome, who had dealt with the people and both
Houses so deftly they had empowered him to serve four consecutive terms as
President of the United States of America. Thus he had guided the country
through its most troublous of all times, between Britain's entering the
Eurocommune, the series of bloodless popularly acclaimed leftist coups which
brought the entire Arab world under the Communist umbrella, the signing of the
Delhi Treaty, and the massive internal adjustments which came out of that
action. There were those who said he had sold them out, there were those who
said only his ability to give ground had preserved and cemented
the United States of America's sphere of influence in the much-closer-to-home
western hemisphere; certainly the entire western hemisphere from pole clear to
pole had swung markedly towards the U.S.A. in the last twenty years, though
cynics said that was simply because there was no alternative.
    The present Department of