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are 90 percent nuclear these days in France, and we have electricity to burn.”
    The rear seat was a softly upholstered couch done in deep navy velour, and the carpeting was of the same material, as were the tiny cushioned ottomans upon which to rest one’s feet. Tiny adjustable overhead halogen spotlights bathed each of them in a soft pool of ersatz sunlight. The compartment walls were covered with pastel blue leather set off with chrome brightwork that might actually have beensilver plate. Below the sealed window separating them from the front seat, an incongruously cheap-looking little screen and keyboard were built into the plush seatback.
    There were sets of dual controls built into each passenger’s armrest. André fiddled with one set, and some kind of subdued electronic pseudo-oriental symphony began playing mellowly in the background. He did something else and laughed when Jerry did a take as a compartment in the seatback before them popped open, revealing the inside of a small refrigerator containing two glasses and a cold bottle of champagne, then snapped shut again.
    “Is this thing
yours
, André?” Jerry exclaimed.
    André Deutcher laughed. “Don’t I wish!” he said. “Actually, it’s a diplomatic limousine lent to ESA by the Foreign Ministry for the occasion. After the way you were forced to travel here, we were able to convince them that the honor of France demanded it.”
    Amazingly enough, less than ten minutes later, while André was showing him how the videotel in the seatback was both videophone and computer terminal—connecting the car with the phone system, the teletel public data net, and, via access code, with the ESA mainframes too—Marcel appeared with Jerry’s luggage on a little trolley; how he was able to retrieve it with such speed was a bit of magic that somehow impressed Jerry even more than the sail through passport control or this state-of-the-art automotive palace.
    “Avanti,” André shouted into thin air as Marcel climbed into the front passenger seat, and the car pulled away from the curb with hardly a lurch and no sound at all that was audible above the low background music.
    Soon they were out of the airport and on a highway slicing through verdant green countryside interspersed with fields of dry brown cropped stubble, and it was then it really hit Jerry Reed that he was truly in a foreign country, and not just because the cars and trucks on the road all looked subtly alien and barreled along at incredible high speeds or because the road signs were all in French.
    For there was no roadside ticky-tacky at all, no Burger Kings, no Golden Arches, no car lots, no shopping malls and parking lots, no sprawling cheap housing developments, none of the endless suburban crudscape that marked the ride from the airport to any major American city.
    And when the Parisian suburbs finally started, it was all at once, as if the car had suddenly crossed a frontier; godawful, they certainly were, but godawful in a way quite different from anything Jerry could have imagined. Blocks of huge apartment houses with balconies from which actual laundry hung drying, gray grim concrete, a lot of it, but a lot of it painted in truly garish pastel colors, sometimes in two orthree hideously clashing hues of green and pink and powder purple. And then this gave way to industrial buildings, gasworks, and railyards that might have been anywhere save for the French lettering on the walls, and the billboards that began to appear, flashing bare tits and asses huckstering unknown brands of ambiguous products.
    And then the car took a sweeping turn across a bridge, and there it was, faintly visible in the far distance above the ticky-tacky, the unmistakable pinnacle of the Eiffel Tower.
    “Et voilà!” André exclaimed, and popped open the refrigerator again, this time withdrawing the champagne bottle and peeling off the gilt foil.
    “A little early for me, André,” Jerry muttered in a daze.
    “Mais