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bedside at 0900, there was a bottle of champagne on it tied with a ribbon and accompanied by a posy. When she met Sandy by the pool at eleven, he asked whether she had enjoyed it.
    “So it was you who fixed it! Do you work for this hotel chain?”
    “This slumpy linkage? I’m insulted. Third-rank operations aren’t my framework. Shall we swim?”
    The next question died on her lips. She had been going to ask what pull he had, whether it was government or a hypercorp. But another explanation fitted, and if that were the right one, the implications were so enticing she dared not broach the matter without a buildup. She said, “Sure, let’s.” And peeled off her clothes.
     
    The wine list was not reprinted after all, and the manager wore a very puzzled expression. That convinced Ina her guess might be correct. Next morning while they were breakfasting in bed she put it squarely to Sandy.
    “Poker, I think you must be a CSC.”
    “Only if this bed isn’t bugged.”
    “Is it?”
    “No. I made sure. There are some things I simply don’t care to let computers know.”
    “How right you are.” She shivered. “Some of my colleagues at G2S, you know, live at Trianon, where they test new life-styles. And they boast about how their actions are monitored night and day, compare the advantages of various ultramodern bugs … I don’t know how they can stand it.”
    “Stand?” he echoed sardonically. “Not a matter of standing, except social standing, I guess. More, it kind of props them up. A few years and they’ll forget they have feet of their own.”
     
    All day Ina was near to shaking with excitement. To think that by pure chance she had bumped into a genuine three-vee tactile-true member of that prestigious elite, the tiny secretive tribe of computer-sabotage consultants … ! It was a perfectly legal discipline, provided its practitioners didn’t tamper with data reserved to a government dept under the McBann-Krutch “greatest-good-of-the-greatest-number” act, but its experts didn’t advertise themselves any more than industrial spies, and it would have been politer to ask whether he was into DDR, “difficult data retrieval.” Luckily he’d taken no offense.
    Delicately she hinted at what was worrying her. How much longer was she still going to be able to move upward, not crosswise, when she changed jobs? At first his response was casual: “Oh, turn freelance, why not, the way I did? It’s not so much different from the regular plug-in life-style. When you get adjusted to it.”
    Echoes underlying “freelance” resounded in her head: the lone knight riding out to champion his lady fair and Christian justice, the King’s Messenger, the secret agent, the merchant venturer …
    “I’ve thought about it, naturally. But I’d dearly like to know what G2S has added to my file before I decide.”
    “You could try asking me to find out.”
    “You mean”—hardly daring to hope—“you’re for rent?”
    “Right now?” He put the nip into nipple with sharp well-cared-for teeth. “No, my jiggle-oh rating is strictly O. This kind of thing I do for free.”
    “You know what I mean!”
    He laughed. “Don’t slidewise out of control. Of course I know. And it might be kind of fun to poke G2S.”
    “Are you serious?”
    “I could be, when my vacation’s over. Which it isn’t.”
     
    Musingly, at two in the morning—her sleeping time was being eroded, but what the hell?—she said, “It isn’t knowing that the machines know things about you which you wouldn’t tell your straightener, let alone your spouse or chief. It’s not knowing what the things are which they know.”
    “Sweedack. The number of people I’ve seen destabled by just that form of uncertainty, clear into paranoia!”
    “Sweedack?”
    “Ah, you don’t follow hockey.”
    “Now and then, but I’m not what you’d call a ’fish for it.”
    “Nor me, but you have to stay in circuit. It’s French. Came south with Canadian