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them in threes and fours. Her heart was pounding and she was hardly able to comprehend what Eddie was doing. She told herself that what she feared just could not be happening, while the realist in her thought back over the week and recalled all the tell-tale signs of Eddie's increasing disaffection.
    She dragged open the cubby door beneath the stairs and hauled out her bike, an old Suzuki turbo she took on long rides into the country when she was feeling low. She pushed it down the hall and through the gaping front door. A tangle of vines and brambles, not cleared for a day or more, barred the way. Using the bike as a battering ram, she charged ahead, thorns catching her clothing on the way through. She came to the caged run down the centre of the street, mounted the bike and kicked it into life. She shot forward, fish-tailing on the slime that slicked the tarmac, then accelerated. The headlamp illuminated the narrow corridor ahead.
    She came to the cleared intersection and turned right, down a wide avenue lined by derelict buildings. A street gang on the corner jeered as she passed, hurling insults and beer bottles. The avenue took a bend and straightened up, and Ella opened the throttle. If she could get to the 'port before Eddie, warn the authorities of what he intended... The disadvantage was that, while her bike was faster than his beat-up flier, she was restricted to following the roads, while Eddie could fly directly across Orly to the 'port.
    He might want to kill himself now, she told herself - but that's because he's low. He'll snap out of it in a day or two, return to his normal stoic self, look back and realise how close he came...
    If only she could get there before him.
    She cut down side-streets and alleys, zigzagging between derelict tenements in what she calculated was a short-cut to the massive 'port complex. Her heart surged when, up ahead, she made out the ponderous shape of the Peugeot, flying low, and beyond it the bright blue halation of the screen in the night sky to the south.
    "Eddie!" she screamed, the wind chapping her cheeks where her tears had coursed.
    Almost as if her subconscious was acknowledging the fact that she'd lost him, the image of Eddie when she'd first met him appeared in her mind's eye. In his thirties, not yet run to fat or greying; kind, gentle, haunted by his loss and yet amazed by his good fortune at being the recipient of all her affection...
    She skidded around the bend of the approach road to the 'port, perhaps half a kilometre away. As she straightened up and increased speed, she realised that she had lost the race. Eddie had lifted his flier and accelerated over the perimeter fence. The security guards were firing at the vehicle, bright tracer hosing through the night sky. The flier took a hit and lurched, but continued on towards the screen. Ella screeched the bike to a halt and it skidded out from under her. She rolled, fetched up in a sitting position on the grass verge. She watched the flier limp pathetically towards the brilliant membrane of the interface.
    She climbed to her knees, then to her feet, and limped towards the fence. She hooked her fingers through the mesh and hung there, her face pressed up against the diamonds.
    "Eddie, stop. Please stop..."
    Six metres away, through the fence, a uniformed security guard turned and stared at her.
    "Please... please stop him."
    The guard was young, in his late teens, and later, when Ella went over and over the sequence of events, one of the inconsequential images that would enter her mind would be that of the guard's young face, his stricken expression as he looked from Ella to the flier, and back to Ella again, unable to do anything to halt the flier, and prevented by regulations from leaving his post and trying to console her.
    She watched as Eddie approached the interface. Even at this late stage she maintained the ludicrous hope that the authorities would activate the screen, open the portal to some colony planet, so