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previous evening, and thought he would visit it.
    He walked out of the narrow sidestreets into the bright sunlight of the Boulevard, and went down to the harbour. Here many yachts were moving in and out, for the tide was falling and in an hour or two it would be unnavigable. Harkman walked past the cafes and stalls on the Boulevard to the skimmer-shop, where, in a brightly coloured display, the various pieces of equipment needed for the sport were laid out.
    Harkman looked first at the tide-skimmers themselves, of which several dozen were stacked under the awning outside the shop. These came in a variety of sizes and designs, and with a surprisingly wide range in prices. Harkman lifted one away from the stack, weighed it in his hands. He had forgotten how heavy a skimmer was, even unloaded! It seemed strong enough, and the painted finish was superb: bright flashes of red and yellow against a white background, polished to a high-gloss surface ... but there was something wrong with the balance, an instinctive feeling he had, something not quite perfect.
    He leaned it back against the pile, selected another.
    In a moment he walked into the interior of the shop, and looked around. There were several posters attached to one wall, depicting various incidents from the sport. One in particular attracted Harkman’s attention: thirty or forty wave-riders standing on their boards in the calm of Blandford Passage, while the tidal wave roared towards them from behind, fifty metres or more in height. It was a superb photograph, catching in its frozen instant the very essence of the sport: the sheer violence of the tide-race, the elemental quality of man against the forces of nature.
    Most of the stock was very high-priced: wet-suits were offered for just under ten thousand dollars, breathing-apparatus started at around fifteen thousand. Even the various books and instruction-manuals seemed to be priced above what one would expect to pay in London.
    There were some assistants standing around in the shop - three young men with fashionably pale skin, and dressed in sweatshirts and loose, baggy shorts - but none of them seemed anxious for his custom, being involved in a conversation on the other side of the store. Harkman went outside again, and looked once more at the skimmers on sale.
    The ideal craft had a combination of strength, balance and speed; the lower planes should be polished, the upper should be rough-grained enough for the rider’s feet to gain a firm grip even when the skimmer was waterlogged. The engine-housing had to be flat and streamlined, the tanks distributed so that as the fuel was used up the balance of the craft was not disturbed. The whole craft, fully fuelled and with the engine installed, should be light enough for a strong man to carry, yet heavy enough to provide stability when the same man was standing on it in rough water. There was no perfect or standard tide-skimmer; the rider’s demands of the best craft were as personal as the choice of a spouse.
    Harkman sampled several more skimmers, taking them from the stack and balancing them as best he could in his hands. He looked in through the shop doorway, but the assistants continued to show no interest in him. He wished he could take one or two selected craft out on the water, to see how they handled.
    He glanced at his wristwatch, and saw that he ought to return to the Commission. He took down one more tide-skimmer and held it in both hands above his head, but now each one felt like the one before it.
    ‘Do you want to buy a skimmer?’
    Harkman turned, thinking that one of the assistants had at last come forward, but the speaker was a young woman, standing in the shadow of the awning.
    ‘I’ve been watching you,’ she said. ‘You don’t look like the usual sort of buyer. Our skimmers are much cheaper.’
    Harkman went across to her, and recognized her as the attractive but rather dishevelled girl he’d seen on the quay the evening before.
    ‘You sell