ENTOVERSE

Scirio turned and walked back toward where Murray and Hunt were standing, passed them without a word, and went up the shallow steps and across the lounge above to disappear into another room. Nixie came over to rejoin the other two. “Is all very funny,” she said. “He talk about his pool and his boss. I think he know more than he say.”

Hunt flashed Murray an uneasy look. “These people he’s calling. It couldn’t be the hit squad, could it?”

“I dunno. What can we do about it if it is?”

“If he was one of them, an Ent, would Nixie know? Would she be able to tell?”

Murray asked her in Jevlenese. “He is not one,” she said. “I would know.”

For the next hour they appeared to have been forgotten as a buzz of activity erupted over the house. Jevlenese appeared from other parts of it or arrived from places outside, muttered in twos and threes, and went away again on mysterious errands. Much conferring went on behind closed doors, and the tones and chimes of incoming calls sounded constantly. Through it all, Scirio was everywhere, calling out orders, checking details, hurrying to take calls, usually accompa­nied by Dreadnought. Tenseness crackled in the air like static. Nixie was unable to make out what was going on. It felt like the prepara­tions for a military operation.

Then Dreadnought came out of a doorway that had been in constant use and called out something, at the same time beckoning. Nixie got up from a couch she had been perched on. Hunt unfolded from a deep, leathery chair, close behind Murray, who had been leaning against a pillar. “Well, here goes,” Murray murmured.

“What’s happening?” Hunt asked.

“Search me. But whatever it is, it looks like we don’t have much choice.”

Scirio, now wearing a dark suit and short blue topcoat, was waiting at the outside door with three more Ichena. After a brief exchange of questions and answers delivered in curt, harsh voices, the group went out into the corridor and followed the terrace back around the well to the elevators. But instead of returning to the seashell lobby with the bridge crossing the stream, they went up.

They came out into an airy, metal-walled space with wide, low windows running almost the full length of two adjacent walls, giving it the appearance of an observation floor high over the city. From the score or more of what were clearly flying vehicles of assorted shapes and sizes parked about the place, it was evidently a rooftop landing deck. The three henchmen led the way to a sleek machine, finished in yellow and white, at the end of one of the rows. Its general form was a bubble-canopied front end and solid center fuselage, tapering to the rear in a way that vaguely suggested a helicopter, but with no rotor or stabilizer. The rear body sprouted a pair of low-mounted, steeply anhedraled stub wings, carrying streamlined pods at the ends. There didn’t seem to be any wheels.

The doors were already open. A pulsating hum emanated from low down at the rear, and two men in blackjackets were in the nose seats. The remainder of the forward compartment contained three rows of three seats each, and there was an Ichena already seated in the back. Hunt and Murray were guided into the other two seats next to him; Nixie and two of the group who had come up from the house got in the center row, while the third, along with Dreadnought and Scirio, settled themselves ahead of them, behind the two nose seats. The doors closed, and a moment later the vehicle lifted from the floor, turning at the same time. It moved forward, and the whole section of wall and windows in front of it swung down and outward to form a takeoff platform projecting out from the building. The flier soared out with barely a feeling of movement over roof gardens similar to the one outside the crescent-shaped room they were in earlier, and screened from each other by the landscaping. Then came more rooftops, with the neighborhood avenues and strips of parkland visible farther below. On looking up, Hunt made out a faint seam joining part of the sky. It was one of the canopies: simulated, not real.