CHAPTER NINE

"Piot Kval," the man behind the battered wood desk said in his heavy Poldrogi accent.

His uniform tunic was open at the neck and mottled to a dark brown with sweat. In his hand he held a self-contained power fan larger than any I'd seen before, and he was making no progress at all with it on the sweat that beaded his red face and bald head. If he'd used a mirror instead, his eyes would have put a frost line wherever they touched. I stared at him.

Stared at him and at my camera on the desk top in front of him.

My camera. Clean and undamaged and looking as though I'd never crushed it to the earth beneath my body; as though it had never held any laser but the one in its own innocuous speedlight.

"Piot Kval," he repeated and waited for my answer. I shook my head. "I don't know the name," I said. And I didn't.

"You do not know the name," he said. He reached out to his desk, picked up my wallet from the small array of my possessions spread out beside my camera; a scattering of keys, coins, pocket flotsam, my sleeve camera, kept safe from the cold Poldrogi lake by its waterproof casing. Slowly, almost lazily, using only his one hand, his other not putting down his fan, he examined his prize, fingering the few plastic credits in their separate compartment, idly turning over the leaves of the card section.

Without saying a word, he was putting a chill in the air. I pulled closer about me the thin blanket the police had given me while they went over my sodden jumpsuit and boots. It reeked of disinfectant, but it was better than standing before the police corporal in nothing but my skin. My head and neck still glowed a bright green, I knew. They had done nothing about the riot marker dye I was stained with. My beam-shocked strength came and went. I fought myself to keep it from showing.

I knew what the cold-eyed corporal was looking for, and I was sure that he knew I knew. Yet when he came to it he flicked right on past it and, if he wanted my heart to skip a beat, it did.

He flicked the small panel over, then flicked it back, as though he'd just that moment noticed its contents. He pressed open the clear plastic envelope shape, inserted a heavy thumb, sat there, not pulling out the yellow plastic rectangle, not taking his thumb from it.

He looked up at me. "You gave us a great deal of trouble, you know," he said. "It was all my men could do to keep our people from overtaking you."

If he meant to sweat me, he was doing it. I couldn't help licking my lips. "Thank you," I said, and I think I might have meant it.

I couldn't take my eyes off his thumb on my Communications Equipment license. Ebb and flow went my strength. Ebb and flow.

"There are no thanks required," he said, speaking in the same matter-of-fact manner as had the fat transhaus manager when he'd turned aside my thanks for calling me to what I'd thought was a photo assignment. "If we had tried to save you from them openly, our people might have resisted our efforts and it would have caused an embarrassment all around. It is better that they should believe for a while that they lost you of themselves."

He ran his thumb back and forth over the face of my CE

license. If he meant to remind me that he could pull it, he didn't have to. "Would it make a difference if I told you your fingerprint had not yet been obliterated from the record?" he said.

I didn't follow him. I didn't follow anything. My camera, battered, perhaps even damaged where someone had smashed it open to get at its killer laser, would have been a starting point for me to at least begin to tell my story. My camera, clean and pristine looking, on the corporal's desk. What could I say that it didn't give the lie to before I opened my mouth?

I was staring at it and now I saw the corporal eyeing it with a flicker of interest.

"Look," I said, taking the plunge. "Am I being charged with anything specific?"

The corporal's eyebrows went up. "Specific? A charge?" He smiled, but his eyes did not warm, and neither did he take his thumb from my CE license. "You feel a guilt, perhaps?

You must remember that you ran?"

"I ran," I said. "I heard a masher beam, I got sprayed with riot dye, and the mob took off after me. I ran. I ran as hard as I could."

I did not mention that my head had not let up its humming since the near-miss passage of the beam, nor that the phasing in and out of my strength was just on the rim of my control. I did not mention this because what I wanted was out, and not to be held for even medical observation.

But if the corporal did not finish with me soon, I knew the wavelike surging would slip from my control and be as evident to him, and anyone else within spraying distance, as would be the effect of any wavelike, surging action on any tired and queasy stomach.

"A masher beam," the corporal was saying. "You are familiar with the sound of a sniper's weapon?"

"Look among my cards in your hand," I said. "You'll find my SpaceNav discharge. I'm familiar with the sound of a sniper's weapon."

"Yes. And yet is it not most curious? A weapon capable of firing a masher beam ... at a children's home? You could not have been mistaken about the sound? A flying insect perhaps? Coming at a critical moment?"

His thumb did not move from my CE license. And from his tone I couldn't tell if I was the only one to have heard the beam... or if he even believed what I'd said. Believe what I said? He had the look of a man you'd just taken a big pot from asking to see your openers. I touched a hand to the dye on my head. "This is no mistake. It set me up for the crowd. And something was going on to get them riled up."

He was silent a long moment, the only sound in the room being that of my own breath in my nostrils and the fault whir of his fan.

Abruptly he pulled his thumb clear of my CE license, spread my wallet on the desk top in front of him. "These," he said, jabbing at my license with a thick forefinger. "These they do not hand out without some discretion. The fact that you are the possessor of an authentic one ..."

An authentic one! Then the corporal had checked it out more thoroughly than his casual manner with it had indicated.

". . . possessor of an authentic one would indicate that you are a man of some dependability."

He folded over my wallet, leaned back in his chair. "Mr. Pike," he said, "I can tell you that the dye on your head was not fired at you by any of my men. It could be a ... a joke of practicality, or it could be that someone has designs upon you.

He eyed me a moment. "It could also be that you have not wished to confide in me ... that you are involved in something you do not wish to speak of to the police. . . ." He let his voice trail off and when, after a long moment I did not speak, he raised it. "Kuba," he called, and, when a sweating police private came in through the door behind me,

"please see to it that the dye on Mr. Pike's head is counteracted and that his things are returned to him." He was no longer looking at me and his voice sounded disinterested. Was he turning me loose? It sounded like it The police private saluted. "Yes, Corporal," he said, and took hold of my arm.

I pointed at my camera and my things on the desk. "Could I take them with me now?" I asked.

"If you wish," the corporal said. "Kuba will have a receipt for you to sign."

When I hefted my camera I knew I'd been right. Its feel in my hand was as it should have been. I was sure that when I got the chance to look, I'd find no killer laser, no beautifully miniaturized power pack.

I followed the private.

"Kuba," the corporal's voice came after us, "when he is ready, drive Mr. Pike wherever he wishes to go." He was turning me loose, and with few questions. Why?

I turned in the doorway. "Thank you," I started to say, then, remembering the local reaction to thanks, stopped myself in the middle of the phrase. The corporal looked up. "Yes?"

"I ... this Piot Kval, am I supposed to know him?" I said.

"It is of no consequence," the corporal said. "If the name is not known to you, it is not known to you." His voice was an unmistakable dismissal and I was glad to take the hint, even though I felt uneasy. I thought of it, but I did not search my clothes for hidden carrier-beam transmitters when Kuba brought them to me, clean and dry.

"My wrist-chrono," I said. "I had a wrist-chrono." Kuba tapped my sleeve pocket and, when I groped in it, my fingers touched my timepiece.

"Thank you," I said without thinking.

"Thanks are not necessary," Kuba said, but I was already nodding that I knew.

He left me and I was glad to be alone to struggle with my clothes and my great weariness.

Piot Kval, I thought to myself as I waited for a rise in the strength of my hands. My clothes were clean, and they were dry. But they were also stiffened and rough and they smelled highly of the ever-present Poldrogi disinfectant. Piot Kval. And the corporal with the cold eyes seemed to feel that I ought to know him.

Piot Kval... and my fingerprints on a record. No, not fingerprints, fingerprint.

Fingerprint! And I had an idea.

Fingerprint!

A great wave of queasiness surged up to take me over. I fought it down. Rest. I needed rest.

Rest ... and sleep ... and a chance for my body to clear itself of shock ... stop this dreadful hum in my head. ... I dressed, and when I was ready, went looking for Kuba and the promised ride home.

Home. The transhaus and its sleep cubicle ... and my thumbprint on the safebox at the foot of my bunk. I might have been wrong, my hearing at a low point, but I was sure the corporal had said "print" and not "prints." And the transhaus was the only place that I knew that had required a record of just my one thumbprint.

Not as a record in itself, but as a pattern for the safebox lock to record electronically, and to recognize when it was presented to it again by the simple act of my pressing my thumb against its lockplate.

It was at least a starting point, but it would have to wait.

Wait . . . and sleep first . . . and where was Kuba?

Kuba.

I was proud of the way I could walk without weaving ... and I resented his hand under my arm.

I yanked my arm away from his support. "I'm all right," I said.

"Yes," he said. "There is a step here ... and another below that and then we are on the level ground." I did not thank him.

Weave ... do not weave when you walk ... tired ... else they will keep you ... must not let them keep you. The hum ... the hum in my head.