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compound gate by a guy her father introduced as Al Raup. While his scalp was shaven, a thick black beard sprouted from his chin, giving Sally the odd impression that his head had been rotated around the axis of his stub nose and re attached upside down. He wore canvas shorts, grubby sneakers with no socks, and a black T-shirt too small for his belly with a faded slogan:
    SMOKE ME A KIPPER
    He might have been any age between about thirty and fifty.
    He stuck out his hand. ‘Call me Mr Ttt.’ Tuh-tuh-tuh .
    She ignored the hand. ‘Hello, Al Raup.’
    Willis raised an eyebrow. ‘Now, Sal, play nice.’
    ‘Come, let me show you around my domain . . .’
    Raup swiped them through the security barriers, and they walked into the compound. Sally heard the growl of heavy vehicles, smelled brick dust and wet concrete, and saw giant cranes loom over holes in the ground. Workers wandered around in yellow hardhats. In some cases she saw ‘danger: radioactivity’ signs, and that was new since she’d last visited. Nuclear rockets under develop ment maybe?
    She did notice a party of trolls labouring at a concrete mixer, apparently happy enough. Sally cared little for technology, or people, compared with animals.
    ‘So,’ Raup said. ‘Welcome to Cape Nerdaveral, Marsonauts!’
    ‘You’re exactly the type I remember from my last visit here,’ Sally snapped at him.
    ‘Ah, yes. When you snatched those trolls.’
    ‘When I liberated them. Glad to see your kind hasn’t gone extinct with the corporatization of this place.’
    Raup waved fat fingers. ‘Ah, well, we geeks were here first. We figured out the basic parameters of how to use the Gap, we started the construction of the Brick Moon and sent over a few test shots, all before anybody even noticed we were here.’ His accent might have been middle American, but he had a strangulated, showy way of speaking, with looping vowels and over-precise consonants. She had an odd sense that he had already rehearsed in his head almost everything he said, in case he ever had an audience to use it on. ‘We’re no innocents. We filed a few patents. But in the end the corporate guys had no interest in screwing us over. Easier to buy us out; we were relatively cheap, in their terms, and we had expertise they needed.’ He grinned. ‘We Founders are all dollar millionaires. How cool is that?’
    Sally couldn’t have cared less, and dismissed his bragging.
    In among the gargantuan industrial facilities she saw sprawling residential blocks, bars, a hotel, a cinema-cum-theatre, a lot of casinos and gaming houses, and shadier-looking establishments she guessed might be strip joints or brothels. And there was one modest chapel, she saw, built of what looked like native oak, with a small graveyard set out within a low stone wall: a reminder that space travel was a dangerous occupation even here.
    ‘I can see you have plenty of chances to spend all those dollars.’
    ‘Well, that’s true. It’s something like an Old West mining town,’ Raup said. ‘Or maybe an oil rig. Or even early Hollywood, if you want a more glamorous example. Actually you have to watch your step these days.’
    ‘He means, there’s organized crime,’ Willis murmured. ‘Always drawn to places like this. There have already been a few murders, over gambling debts and the like. One way to do it is to just drop you into the Gap without a pressure suit, and no Stepper box. Sleeping with the stars , they call it. That’s why there’s such a security presence now: policing the criminal element, and watching out for saboteurs.’
    Raup said, ‘But it’s still a cool place to be.’
    Sally just dismissed that remark.
    At the heart of the complex they walked down a kind of central mall lined with office blocks, brand new, concrete gleaming white and unstained. Raup led them to a low, flashy building marked with a bronze plaque: ROBERT A. HEINLEIN AUDITORIUM. There was a crowd at the doors and Raup had to produce passes