Cobber might have talked, though. There were enough people who now
regretted that Jadiver had once given them new faces. As far as they
were concerned Jadiver was in the hands of the police.

The identity of the man outside didn't matter. He was not from the
police, but he did want Jadiver dead.

Jadiver stood back and pushed the door open. Another slug crashed into
it, tiny, but with incredible velocity.

He knelt, thrust his hand outside the door near the bottom and fired a
random fusillade down the corridor. Then he took his finger off the
trigger and listened. There wasn't a sound. The man had decided to be
sensible.

Jadiver stepped out. The man was crouched in an inconspicuous corner and
he was going to stay in that position for a long time. He couldn't help
breathing, though, and his chest was a tangle of wires. There were some
on his face, too, where his eyelids flickered and his mouth twitched.

The gun was in his hand and it was aimed nearly right. There was nothing
to prevent his squeezing the trigger--except the tangle extruded loosely
over his hand. And he could move faster than it could. Once, at any
rate.

"I wouldn't," said Jadiver. "You're going to have a hard time explaining
that illegal firearm. And it'll look worse if I'm here with my head
wrapped around a hole that just fits the slug."

The man reaffirmed his original decision to be sensible about it by
remaining motionless. Jadiver didn't recognize him. Probably a hired
assassin.

The man paled with the effort not to move. He teetered and the tangle
stuff coiled fractionally tighter.

"Take care of yourself," Jadiver said, and left him there.

* * * * *

Jadiver headed toward the transportation terminal. The police could
trace him that far. Let them; he intended that they should. It would
confuse them more when he walked right off their instruments.

Once inside the underground structure, he lost himself in the traffic.
That was just in case he had been followed physically as well as by
radiation. People coming from Earth, fewer going back. They arrived in
swarms from the surface, overhead from the concrete plain where rockets
roared out on takeoff or hissed in for landing. Transportation shunted
the mob in one direction for interplanetary travel, in another for local
air routes.

Jadiver reclaimed his bag, boarded the moving belts and hopped on and
off several times, again just in case. The last t