M. Harrison: THE CENTAURI DEVICE

Nice. Crouching and eager to maim, he chuckled. It might have been taken for a groan. He pretended to get up, sank his fingers into the second man's thigh instead, feeling for a pressure point. 'Your turn to fall down.'

He was drawing back his foot, preparatory to putting it in, when something hit him in the kidneys. He grunted. He staggered forward flailing his arms and tripped over his original victim. He squirmed around trying to get a look at who was hitting him so hard, pulled his head in rapidly, and rolled onto the lee side of the knuckle man as a shoe caught him in the chest. It was a lace-up shoe with a thick sole and a weighted toecap: a fact which surprised him so much that he forgot to keep his head moving. All he could do after a little more of that was curl up into a ball and wrap his arms round his face while he thought about it.

For a while, there was nothing but the quiet shuffle of feet and a ragged sound in his head which told him John Truck must be involved in it all somewhere — but not how many people were kicking him. Or indeed, why. He was beginning to feel frightened that they wouldn't stop.

Eventually, though, two of them hauled him upright and began half walking, half dragging him toward a battered black vehicle parked across the street. From Truck's position it looked about the size of a Fleet battleship, but even with both of them working at it they had a job trying to fold him up enough to get him inside.

'I think I'm going to be sick,' he told them plaintively, but they ignored him.

While they were sorting it out, a late-model Lewis Phoenix with all eight headlamps on main beam hurled out of Bread Street and drifted to a stop endwise across East Thing. 'Better get a move on, lads,' said Truck. He spread his legs wide and went limp. He jabbed with his elbows, bit a hand that came too close to his eyes.

Tap, tap, tap, went some heels.

'Leave him alone,' said Angina Seng, her voice bright and tight.

She was supporting an ugly Chambers reaction pistol with both hands. Did he detect a slight tremor in her big bony frame? He wasn't in a condition to detect anything. A dark cloak was thrown over her indoor clothes.

Silence.

Truck spat some blood into the road.

'Don't shoot them yet,' he muttered. The inside of his mouth had swollen, he kept biting his cheek by accident 'I would just like a go with one of their knuckledusters first.'

With sulky looks, they left him alone. Plucky Angina patched them rat off down the street, heading for the dock. They were dressed almost like spacers. She put her Chambers away and helped him into the Phoenix.

'Well, Captain Truck,' she said. 'You would think, wouldn't you, that they'd at least leave their own kind alone. Do you want the window down?'

Truck said nothing. One of his lower canines was giving him trouble; and between tentative explorations of his mouth, he was listening to the wind.

'Suit yourself then.' She smiled encouragingly at him.

'Where have you brought me?' he asked suspiciously. It was all the same to him. He was a heartbreaking sight, slumped in the lift cage with his long chin on his chest, his hair all tangled and dirty.

'Where's my hat? I can't go anywhere without that hat.'

He was shivering with reaction. He had a puffy lip, an immense purple bruise stretching from under his left ear down to his shoulder, and swollen glands in his neck. Not that it was anything new. Morosely, he stuck a finger into the great rent in his snakeskin jacket.

'There was nothing wrong with that hat. Christ, I hate being sick.'

Angina Seng smiled sympathetically at him. He hoped it was sympathy.

'I thought you might like to speak to my sponsor after what happened,' she told him. 'Once you know all the facts, you might change your mind about that job.' It was an affront.

'Facts,' he chuckled. 'Sponsor. Ho ho.'

He glared at the wall above her head. An uncomfortable silence descended.

'How did you get this way?' she asked suddenly.

Stuff you.

'I don't know what you mean,' he said.

They didn't speak again, but she wasn't downhearted. Wagging her tail and already anticipating the plaudits of the shepherd, she sheepdogged him out of the lift and into a reception area. There, she vanished behind an unmarked door, leaving him stranded in a front-office landscape of fake-antique carpets like fine soft cellar mold, power-sculptures cunningly designed to achieve optimum blandness and the castration of the art of the time, and no chairs. He didn't care if he never saw her again.

All the dispossessed and wayward have a fear of frontages. He discussed going back to The Spacer's Rave there and then, but he knew it was probably too late for that: gravitational tides had thrown him up here and, for the moment, he was marooned. He leered at a receptionist (who sat behind the keyboard of her input terminal as long-legged and unapproachable — by losers — as any ice-princess). She smiled back politely, because that year it was polite to be polite to the underprivileged. He scratched his head.

Far away, somebody shouted, 'Don't come to me! I told you I couldn't answer for the cluster sampling!' A door opened and shut. Clearly: ' Run off and lick her boots then.'

'You may go in now, Captain Truck,' said the receptionist.

So far, nobody had offered any options. Suddenly remembering Angina Seng's big Chambers gun, he wondered just how much of her gravitational attraction it represented. What was really keeping him here?

'I can see you're wearing a girdle,' he said. 'As a matter of interest, where am I?'

Her smile curdled: it was polite that year for the underprivileged to be polite back. 'The Israeli Consulate,' she said, 'and I don't think you ought to go round saying things like that to people.'

But he was already on his way through the unmarked door, shouting 'You can just entirely forget about it, Miss Seng!' She wasn't there, of course. 'Oh hell!' He went to leave, but some nosy treacherous element of his make-up had already slammed the door behind him and faced him up to the room's other occupant.

General Alice Gaw, postmenopausal but hardly decayed at all: onetime vacuum-commando, late of the Fleet Police, now prime executive of IWG's military arm, with a roving commission and carte blanche in any matter of hemiglobal security. Decorated and fêted, she had been one of the six enigmatic 'wardens' of the discontinued Environmental Prison experiment — that nodal myth of the hinterlands, its seeping ducts peopled with ghouls, its vaults packed with lost souls in Gothic decaying orbits about the solar enormity of their own innocence, administered by Fungus Men with cattle prods for arms and ECT machines for heads; and closed-down eventually, so rumor had it, by the revulsion of the very elements of IWG politics that had demanded its institution. Rumor had it also that Alice Gaw was the only one of the Six ever to regret the move.

She was short and heavily built. She wore the sleeves of her Women's Army uniform perpetually rolled up to display chapped muscular forearms, and affected the coarse jocularity of a male psychiatric nurse. Truck knew her by repute: her eyepatch was a Galactic curiosity, her hands were thick and square. She radiated a fiercely ambiguous sexual energy which was more disturbing for her consciousness of it than for its actual effect.

Lineal descendant of that characteristic blossom of the twentieth century, the 'National Security Manager,' with a grasp of the art of ad hoc politics almost as breath-taking as the speed of her rise in the IWG hierarchy, she fixed Truck with an eye the color of concrete and said:

'I want to talk to you, boyo, and I can't do that until you pack it in and sit down.'