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would improve—slowly. In perhaps a year, when the main storm was over, sunlight would bleed back in and the air would turn clear and clean. Before that, the species die-off might be worse than anything seen during the Permian or Cretaceous/Triassic mass extinctions. Humans ought to survive, but there could be another halving in population, matching that of twenty-seven years ago. Said that way, it didn't sound too bad. Say it as two billion people dying in awful ways, and it became unthinkable.
    John's head and stomach were churning. The shield team's job was to make sure that the worst you could imagine didn't happen. But was the team up to the task, even without the new problems?
    He turned off the visual feed from Cusp Station. Into the foreground sprang the sunlit upper face of the "space pill," the thin disk of Sky City, a kilometer across and a hundred and ninety meters deep. He was closing on the nerve center for space operations, and he must prepare himself for arrival.
    The trouble was, his brain refused to cooperate. The images of Earth's once and future woes distracted him, boiling and bubbling through his mind. John glanced at the condition monitor and understood what was happening. These were Neirling boost side effects, annoying but not unusual. He squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated. After a few minutes the disturbing mind pictures began to fade.
    A law of diminishing returns applied to the Neirling boosts. Boost once, and you gained a clean twelve hours of wakefulness and heightened attention. Boost again, before you crashed, and you had maybe eight more hours, with some loss of judgment at the end of it and a danger of making decisions you would later regret. If you tried to stay awake too long in second boost, your consciousness turned off without warning like a failed light bulb.
    And third boosts?
    They were done only in life-or-death circumstances. The user had at most five good hours, followed by an unavoidable twelve-hour crash. You woke feeling fine. However, observers insisted that the person who came out of a three-in-a-row Neirling boost was not the person who went in. Psychological tests were inconclusive.
    John did not intend to add to the body of available evidence. He would go to Bruno Colombo's office and listen to what the Sky City director had to say about the "new problem"—presumably the simulations. After that he would find a place where he could hide away.
    Then he would sleep, as soundly as Henry Neirling himself, dead for the past six years.

4
    Bruno Colombo's office sat in the half-gee environment of the outer perimeter of Sky City. It was the choicest real estate on the space arcology, a place where Coriolis effects of rotation were at a minimum and you were far away from the noisy zero-gee workshops of the central axis.
    Maddy Wheatstone didn't begrudge the director his palatial surroundings. So far as she was concerned, Bruno Colombo had the worst job in the universe. Judging from all that she had heard of the man, he loved it. He was Homo bureaucratiensis, the pure product, happy juggling the mishmash of everyday affairs needed to run an eighty-thousand-person flying city. His worries were budget and construction priorities, plus international politics both Earthside and spaceside.
    Different strokes for different folks.
    The shuttle craft had docked smoothly on the zero-gee central axis of the rotating cylinder of Sky City. Maddy was late, she was exhausted, and she was hungry. She kept her suit on and hurried toward the perimeter. When she reached a quarter-gee chamber she operated the airlock, and at her command the suit removed itself from her body. Receiving her approval to leave, it headed back toward the axis. It would seek out the service facilities to take on new supplies and exhaust waste products. In half an hour it would be ready for reuse, by Maddy or anyone else.
    Maddy didn't intend to be that next user. She appreciated the suit's devotion, but she had spent