So I’m fixated, he told himself. That’s what the company psychiatrist would tell him. Obsession, fixation, unhealthy and counterproductive, though so far no one had commented on his work. But if this went on much longer, it would show up in his production. Now was not the time to raise doubts about his competence in his supervisors’ minds. Not with the Hong Kong presentation so close at hand.

It was Thursday. What if Polikartos didn’t come up with something by tomorrow? Did private investigators work weekends?

Eric decided he couldn’t take that chance. He strolled casually out of the office. As for their usual commute home tonight, Charlie would have to conjure up his own reasons for his friend’s absence.

Eric tried to put the girl out of his thoughts long enough to think up a good excuse for taking off work early, but nothing came to mind. Then he was in a robocab, listening to his own voice, a stranger’s voice, giving the machine directions.

They were delayed by street work in front of Babwater’s department store, and to his surprise Eric found himself cursing the machine. It ignored him, polite as always. When it finally deposited him outside the old office building, he found himself running all the way to the investigator’s office.

This is insane, he told himself He’s probably not here, and if he had anything to tell me he would have forwarded it to the house. He’s going to be mad and upset when I burst in on him unannounced. Maybe he’ll start thinking that he has a dangerous nut on his hands instead of a harmless one. Charlie would certainly think so, if he could see me now.

But he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t slow his mad rush any more than he could obliterate the image burning in his brain that drove him onward. He didn’t give a damn what Charlie thought, or his supervisors, or the company doctors. He didn’t care about anything anymore except the girl, whose face flashed repeatedly before his eyes like a wrong frame accidentally spliced into a daily newscast.

Mnemonic advertising, he told himself. If he put it that way, Charlie would understand. A quick flash of a word on the opto. Illegal, of course. Like the quick sight of those eyes, inserted into an otherwise ordinary street scene. Suddenly he felt terribly helpless.

On the right floor at last, racing toward Polikartos’s office. He touched the call connect, breathing normally.

“Mr. Polikartos is not in.” the smooth mechanical voice told him. “If you would like to leave a message, please direct your voice to the pickup below the contact.”

See, Eric told himself. A waste of time. Now you’re going to have to make explanations back at the office, and for what? He started to turn away, thoroughly discouraged. Something made him hesitate, make a last check.

He put his eye to the little spyhole set in the thick door. Optical distortion made everything beyond a blur, but it was an illuminated blur. The lights in the reception room were still on. That didn’t seem like the money-hungry investigator’s style.

Frowning, he tried the call a second time, received the same synthetic message. He knew that was all he’d get out of the door. He considered it carefully. There was no knob, of course. Polikartos wasn’t that old-fashioned.

How would such a door operate? He studied the plated lockseal. Not unlike the one that guarded his own home. A good engineer always carries a few tools of the trade with him. Eric was no exception.

From the miniatures in the case he always carried in his shirt pocket he selected a knurled cylinder with a fine, flexible metal tip. It just fit between the door and jamb. He slid it downward toward the lock, probing with the flexible tip. There was a brief flash of blue light and a faint shock. The short-circuited lock clicked and the door slid aside.

He took a deep breath and stepped into the reception room. If Polikartos wasn’t around, or if he was, it was still breaking and entering. If he was present, he might well call the police and rid himself permanently of his persistent and obviously unbalanced young client. Idly Eric touched the tool to the lock. Another crackle-flash and the door slid shut. It wouldn’t do to have some janitor stumble on the gaping door.

The lights in Polikartos’s office were on as well. That didn’t make sense, in the late afternoon. A hum came from overhead as the tiny video monitor above the inner door rotated to scan him. He ignored it as he knocked on the door.

“Polikartos? It’s me. Eric Abbott. Are you in there?”

No reply. He hesitated, then used the tool a second time. Might as well be damned for two break-ins as for one. The door shorted quickly. It pulled aside. Peering in he could just see the top of Polikartos’s head above the back of the chair. The investigator was turned away from him.

He felt a surge of anger. He hated being ignored.

“All right, why didn’t you let me in? Are you taking my money and doing nothing after all?” The investigator did not reply. “Come on, Polikartos, you owe me some answers. Or do you think I’m just going to let you bleed me?”

He reached out and spun the chair around. Polikartos did not try to stop him. Polikartos could not stop him. Not anymore.

The hole in the back of his skull was almost invisible, betrayed only by the singed hair surrounding it, but the matching cavity on the other side just above the right eyebrow was distinct. A little trickle of dried blood had run down and into the eye. It was not very dramatic. A pingun cauterizes as it penetrates.

Police. That was Eric’s first thought. Be here any minute. But there was no whirr of copter blades descending from above, no scream of sirens from the street outside. Everything was unnervingly normal. Except for that tiny hole in Polikartos’s head.

Both terminals had been battered, and one keyboard lay broken on the floor, as though an enraged child had sought to destroy a toy it could not understand. Someone had been at them. Why? Why did anyone go at a terminal? For information. Evidently Polikartos had not helped his visitors. Both man and machine had suffered as a result.

Eric gave the twin terminals a professional once-over. Both were only marginally functional. As he worked he tried to make sense of his surroundings.

Understandable. It was perfectly understandable. A man like Polikartos doubtless worked for disreputable citizens. That someone in his profession should come to a violent end was hardly surprising.

The thing to do was get out, now, before he could be involved in any way. Touch nothing, disturb nothing, leave no sign of his visit. Someone else would find the body. Leave them to notify the authorities.

He’d touched the terminals and Polikartos’s chair. Fingerprints. He removed them with damp tissue taken from the nearby lavatory. As he did so he found himself studying the terminal with the skewed keyboard. Was it information the intruders wanted, or had the anger of some old grudge merely spilled over to encompass the machines? Had Polikartos been in debt to someone? If so, somewhere there was a file marked POLIKARTOS, CLOSED.

Enough hypothesizing. Time to leave. But there remained the reason for his visit. He recalled Polikartos’s reluctance to delve deeper into the matter, his outright fear of pursuing it further. Something had prompted that fear. The investigator must have found something out, something he’d decided, for whatever reason, to withhold from Eric.

He hesitated, torn between common sense and desire. The terminals beckoned. Helplessly he turned and began an examination of the cable connections. Those seemed undamaged. He walked around the desk and absently pushed Polikartos’s chair aside. As an afterthought he wrapped more toilet paper around his fingertips.

The undamaged keyboard responded quickly to his touch, and the terminal lit up. There was no display, of course. From one pocket he extracted a tiny cable, plugged it into a socket in his wrist terminal. Several standard activation codes produced a border around the phosphor screen. The problem now was the keycode. If Polikartos’s visitors had been after information, they’d clearly failed in their efforts to divine the investigator’s personal codelock.

It took him half an hour. The code was surprisingly sophisticated. He wouldn’t have thought someone like Polikartos would have need of anything so elaborate, or that he would have bothered with the expense.

It was doubtful whether the most experienced information thief could have cracked that code, but Eric was not only familiar with such codes, he’d spent much of his life designing the relevant hardware. To him it was more of an exercise than a challenge.

The tiny screen on his wrist lit up with the sequence he needed. Using the key, it was a matter of seconds before the screen produced what he was looking for.

FILE ABBOTT, ERIC.

Beneath that were some simple statistics; his credit rating; personal information he didn’t remember giving Polikartos; then “Lisa Tambor, Magdalena Agency, Nueva York”; another address; and a number that might be a phone code. Eric entered it all into his home terminal via the investigator’s phone and his own clip-on modem.

Beyond the brief numbers and notations there was nothing in the way of exposition. Either Polikartos hadn’t learned anything more, or else he’d chosen not to place it in his files. Certainly there was nothing among the information that could be construed as intimidating. Maybe Polikartos had been lying to him all the time.

It didn’t matter. Eric had what he wanted: an address, and even better, a phone number, though there was nothing to indicate it belonged to Lisa Tambor.

It was extraordinary, but he found himself quietly considering the excuse he would make for not being able to go to Hong Kong next week. How utterly bizarre. Maybe he wouldn’t have to put his career on the line like that. It was conceivable he could get to Nueva York, meet the girl, resolve his obsession and still be back in Phoenix in time to catch the Monday morning suborbital.

That would be enough, he assured himself. Just to meet the girl. That ought to resolve his problem. Have I a problem, then? It was becoming harder and harder to deny it. How nice that he was logical enough to realize he was going crazy. Charlie would phrase it in more colorful terms.

He closed down the terminal and reactivated the lockcode, making sure he didn’t leave any prints on the keyboard. The contents of the other terminal didn’t interest him. No doubt it contained all kinds of juicy information, the kind of thing anyone might kill for: philandering husbands, minor embezzlements, criminal records. It was all so sordid. Somewhere within the terminal files lay something that had cost Polikartos his life.

Well, that had nothing to do with him. Cold it might be, but he felt nothing for the unfortunate investigator. He’d never particularly liked the man and always felt the dislike was reciprocated. Sure, he was sorry he was dead. He was sorry when anyone died. Polikartos would make a minor news item, nothing more. And Eric wouldn’t be a part of it.

A last look around assured him that he was leaving the office the same as he’d found it, even to turning Polikartos around so that he was once again facing the window. Then he exited carefully, making sure both inner and outer doors locked behind him.

He was just relaxing as he headed for the elevators when a man stepped out of a side corridor to confront him.

V

The man neither smiled nor frowned. He wore a blank expression that was somehow colder than anything threatening could have been. He was taller and heavier than Eric, and Eric was accustomed to standing an inch or two taller than his friends.

“Excuse me,” he said. Very polite, very controlled. “I couldn’t help but notice that you’ve just come from Mr. Polikartos’s office.”

“Mr. Polikartos,” Eric murmured. So Polikartos was a last name. That was interesting. “I didn’t know that.”

The stranger ignored the comment, said pointedly, “What were you doing in there?”