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hockey players. Short for je suis d’accord. Thought everybody had picked up on it.”
    Before she could guard her tongue she had said, “Oh, yes! I’ve heard Kate say it to her friends.”
    “Who?”
    “Uh … My daughter.” And she trembled, imagining the inevitable sequence:
    I didn’t know you had a daughter. She in high school?
    No—uh—at UMKC.
    Followed by the brief silence full of subtraction which would all too closely betray her location on the age scale.
    But this man, ultimately tactful, merely laughed. “Quit worrying. I know all about you. Think I’d have generated so much champagne on spec?”
    That figured. In seconds she was laughing too. When she recovered, she said, “Would you really come to KC?”
    “If you can afford me.”
    “G2S can afford anybody. What do you usually click on as?”
    “A systems rationalizer.”
    She brightened. “Fantastic! We lost our head-of-dept in that area. He broke his contract and—Say, you didn’t know that too, did you?” Suddenly suspicious.
    He shook his head, stifling a yawn. “Never had any reason to probe G2S until I met you.”
    “No. No, of course not. What attracted you to your line of work, Sandy?”
    “I guess my daddy was a phone freak and I inherited the gene.”
    “I want a proper answer.”
    “I don’t know. Unless maybe it’s a sneaking feeling that people are wrong when they say human beings can’t keep track of the world any more, we have to leave it up to the machines. I don’t want to be hung out to dry on a dead branch of the evolutionary tree.”
    “Nor do I. Right, I’ll get you to KC, Sandy. I think your attitude is healthy. And we could do with a blast of fresh air.”
     
    SOLD TO THE MAN AT THE TOP
     
    “I am not bleating you. This shivver is escape-velocity type. And we’ve been short one systems rash since Kurt bailed out and not wishing to cast nasturtiums at George she hasn’t made my job any less of a bed of nails—let alone yours, hm?
    “Sure, he asked for a trial period himself. Eight weeks, maybe twelve, see how he meshes with the rest of us.
    “Right now he’s on vacation. I told you: I met him in the Sea Islands. You can reach him there.
    “Great. Here, take down his code. 4GH …”
     
    UNSETTLEMENT PROGRAM
     
    The palisade of thousand-meter towers around Mid-Continental Airport had two gaps in it, memorializing not—for once—buildings that had been riot-blown or tribaled but the crash sites of two veetol airliners, one taking off and one landing, which had slidewised simultaneously off their repulsors last week. Rumor had it the reason might be found in the launch of Ground-to-Space’s latest orbital factory from their field westward in the cross-river state of Kansas; allegedly someone had omitted to notify the airlines of the volume and extent of the blast wave. But an inquiry was still in progress, and anyhow G2S was far too much of a Power in the Land hereabouts for any negligence charge to emerge from the hearings.
    Nonetheless the outcome was a popular subject for bets on illegal short-term Delphi pools. Legal pools, naturally, were forbidden to pre-guess a court’s verdict.
    The façades of the remaining towers, whether homes or offices, were as blank as ancient gravestones and as gloomy. They had mostly been erected during the shitabrick phase architecture had suffered through in the early nineties. There was a more flattering term for the style—antideco—but it was too lame to have caught on. Such structures were as dehumanized as the coffins employed to bury the victims of the Great Bay Quake, and stemmed from the same cause. The damage sustained when San Francisco, plus most of Berkeley and Oakland, collapsed overnight had come close to bankrupting the country, so that everything but everything had to be designed with the fewest possible frills.
    In a desperate attempt to make a virtue of necessity, all such buildings had been made “ecofast”—in other words, they were