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confiscated. One of his paid informers informed to us. We ransacked his house while he was out, found the file he had on us. Not much, but enough to get a good many people sold down the river—which means something might leak to help the UN find out what the stuff is."
    "That shouldn't have bothered you. You could buy the authorities off."
    "Local, not UN. Did you ever try bribing a UN delegate officer, the kind they have in narcotics? Impossible."
    "So you killed him."
    Margle was still trying to pin him down, keep him talking long enough to level a fairly accurate barrage at him. "The Hound did. You were pretty clever about that, you know. Had us worried. But calling the local constabulary—now that was a stroke of pure idiocy. It made finding you much easier."
    Ti knew enough now. There had been a side to Taguster he had not known. It hurt him a bit to think the musician had not fully trusted him, but all of that was past now. Taguster was dead. He moved toward the couch, making no effort to conceal himself.
    "There!" Margle shouted. Both men rose, seeing him in the same instant, and fired point-blank into his twisted body.
    He deflected all the pins.
    Then Ti was behind the couch and on top of them. They danced backwards, opening fire. He returned the pins, getting Margle in the cheek and the gunman in the neck. They died with such precision that it seemed like a grotesquely choreographed dance.
    He left the room and phoned Creel, getting him out of bed. He asked for two reporters and two cameramen to cover all angles of the incident Creel, true to form, asked no questions; he merely wondered if he might come over too. He smiled slightly when Timothy said yes.
    As Ti waited for his people to arrive, a weariness settled over him like a hand sliding onto a glove. He had once made a promise to himself that he would never kill. It had been a way of making amends to the gods—if there were gods—for having been the product of an experiment of war. And now he had broken that promise in order to avenge the death of his only close friend. It was going to take some time before he would be able to think this through, to learn and understand which was the most precious: integrity of one's self, or unlimited love and devotion for another human being.
    He could not cry. He wished he could—that might relieve the tension. But Taguster was dead, his mind and personality beyond retrieval, and the world still turned. The hate would have to be dissolved, burned down, disposed of. A man could not live with such hatred. No matter how he had been hurt. He decided that, after the statsheet people and the police left, he would get roaring drunk. And stay drunk for two or three days. And then everything would be fine. He was sure that would end it…

CHAPTER 5
    A darkly painted personal grav-plate automobile, without benefit of any chrome fixtures, drifted up the mountainside in the dim wash of moonlight that managed to filter through the relatively heavy cloud cover of the humid summer night. The craft's interior lights were off, as were its headlamps and its fore and aft warning beacons. It was nothing more than a shadow among other shadows, and its power plant had been insulated against emitting noise so that the illusion of ethereal unreality could be maintained; it was a ghost searching the night, nothing more.
    In the forest below, small animals scattered for cover into burrows and holes in rotted trees, somehow aware of the machine's presence. But the rest of the world knew nothing of it.
    Farther up the cliffside, an ultra-modern house jutted from the forest, perched precariously on thrusting fingers of rock. Despite its advanced design, it seemed an integral part of the natural forces around it. The driver of the grav-car had required several minutes, at first, to make out the lines of it. Now, as he drew closer, his admiration for its architecture increased, even though he would soon take steps to destroy it utterly.
    He held the