aust. I'll have more power
than--"

"Where can I find Werner von Rausch?"

"Yes, Werner. Poor boy." Heinrich was calm again. "You'll have to do
your duty, officer. He's been annoying me all afternoon. So much
noise--a man can't think. He's in his shop at the end of the hall. But
don't be too severe with him. Perhaps this time just a warning will
make him see reason."

Hunter went back to the corridor, feeling again the shadow of horror
at this sick distortion of reality. In the distance, beyond the metal
fence, he heard the scream of sirens, and realized he had at best
another three minutes before the police would be there. Three minutes
to make a deal with Werner and save Ann.

Hunter pushed back the nightmare that welled up from the depths of his
mind. It wasn't true; it couldn't be true. If it were, nothing in the
jungle made sense.

VIII

As he felt his way along the hall, he passed the cage of a lift, a
private transit between the house and the cartel offices on the city
levels below. He noted it subconsciously, as a possible means of
escape. But he was through running. He could make a deal with Von
Rausch. After that the police wouldn't matter.

At the end of the corridor he came upon a paneled door. Behind it he
could hear the hum of a motor, and knew that he had found Werner's
shop, and the source of the noise that had disturbed Heinrich's
research.

Hunter flung open the door. The light was bright and gay. On the
floor, a fat old man sat hunched over the remote control console of a
toy monorail system. Toy space liners and fighting ships buzzed in the
air.

"Werner von Rausch?" Hunter whispered.

"You've come to play with me!" The fat, old man flashed the cherubic
smile of a child. "And you brought me a blaster. Oh, let me see it!
Let me see it!"

He clapped his hands eagerly.

Hunter turned and fled. The scream of the sirens still seemed no
closer, but without assessing his chances Hunter sprang into the
private lift. It dropped downward toward its unknown destination. What
that was, Hunter didn't care. Anything to escape from so hideous a
madhouse.

The Von Rausch clan: an old lady who lived with ghosts; a scholar of
demonology; a patriarch lost in an eternal childhood. All of them
running away into their own private fantasies.

But this Was the family which ruled a cartel and directed the conquest
of half the galaxy; these were the most powerful human beings who had
ever lived. And th