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in the jungle, hunting wild game?” O’Hara said.
    “I don’t know. More likely, they’re living in the city and stalking supermarkets. There’s probably not much game around here, and it takes years to become a good hunter. It would be fascinating to study them.”
    A sudden thought chilled O’Hara. “What if they have guns?”
    “I was thinking about that. Private ownership of fire-arms was strictly forbidden in the Pan-African Union; I think even the police were only armed with tanglers.”
    “We’re lucky it’s not America.”
    “We are…they’re acting out their own tribal rituals over there.”
    O’Hara suddenly tensed. “Did you see that?”
    “No,” Ahmed said.
    “I did,” Goodman said. “The big one’s still in there. We oughta start a fire.”
    “Better check with Berrigan,” O’Hara said.
    “Go ahead,” she said over their intercom. “But use Ten’s weapon, or Jackson’s. Goodman and O’Hara should save fuel.”
    “He was over by that big tree with the pink flowers,” Goodman said.
    “All right,” Ten said, and fired a burst into a thicket about fifty meters to the left of the tree. “We just want toscare them away.” He let the thicket smolder for a minute and then gave it a sustained blast. It burst into bright flame and the flame began to spread.
    “I wonder,” Marianne said. “When I was here we visited a game preserve about a hundred kilometers south. The man who showed us around did have a gun, an air rifle that shot tranquilizer darts. I guess something that could pierce a rhino’s hide would punch through a space-suit pretty easily.”
    “And if it could put a rhino to sleep, it’d probably kill a human being,” Ten said. “But there can’t be too many of those guns.”
    “Besides,” Jackson put in, “if they had anything like a rifle we’d sure know about it by now.”
    “Or they mighta gone to get it,” Goodman said. “How far can one of those things shoot, I wonder.”
    “Probably farther than we can,” Jackson said.
    “Why don’t you stop making each other nervous,” Berrigan suggested. “We’re going up now.” The doors squealed shut and the lift rose smoothly, up a hundred meters to the control-room hatch.
    Nobody talked while they eavesdropped on Berrigan and the other two engineers, muttering numbers and arcane jargon. Over the buzz of the feeding flies they could hear clicks and whirs from inside the gleaming machine.
    “Seems to check out,” Berrigan said finally. “Marianne, Jimmy, you go mess up the op center. Then meet the others at the cryogenics area. I’m going to stay here, just in case.”
    They started down the crumbling sidewalk as fast as the suits allowed. Goodman switched to a private channel. “I don’t like that much. She can take off without us.”
    “She wouldn’t. She just wants to make sure the children don’t come aboard.”
    “They ain’t gonna come aboard. They had two years to go inside there and they didn’t.” Berrigan had had to break an inspection seal to get into the control room.
    “It might have been taboo, with all the dead people in the lift. Everything’s different now.”
    “I still don’t like it.”
    “Let’s just get this job done as quickly as possible.” They passed by a long black window and mounted marble steps that were slick with green growth. The sliding doors of the entrance were frozen shut, the shatterproof glass crazed from a hundred impacts. A sustained blast melted one of the doors and set off a yammering alarm.
    Inside, there was another hindrance. It was a once-comfortable reception foyer, now gone to dust and mildew. There were prominent signs directing you to various places, but they were all in German and Swahili. Two years before, O’Hara had been rushed through the building on a tour, but she couldn’t remember which direction they’d gone.
    “Maybe we should call Ahmed,” O’Hara said.
    “Nah… we couldn’t pronounce that Swahili, or spell it. Let’s