from its water-proof holster. Maddalena felt a twinge of
worrywas it wise to have given him the weapon when
any instruction had necessarily to be theoretical? She
had restrained him from firing it only with difficulty,
but she dared not let him see a bolt actually fireden-
ergy guns were not the sort of weapons common fisher-
folk could afford, and their discharge was extremely
conspicuous, especially over water where they raised a
wall of steam fifty or more feet high.
Too late to change her mind nowtime was wasting,
and well before midnight they had to explore the house,
the nearby estate and the high ground behind, among the
trees. For that, in Maddalena’s judgement, was the only
place a spaceship could put down near here, unless it
landed on water, and that too was an attention-getting
event attended by clouds of spray and high waves.
Almost certainly among the trees, she had concluded.
And going at a snail’s pace, it would talte a couple of
hours to carry out their preliminary survey, let alone
prepare counter-action against Rimerley and his staff.
“Anchor!” she told Bracy.
Silent as a ghost, he lowered it to the bottom and gave
a cautious tug to ensure it had gripped. On his whispered
confirmation, Maddalena let herself over the side and,
using a stroke that created minimum disturbance in the
water, set off for the shore.
There were lights on in the extension of the house that
ran along the sea-bed, but the room within was empty.
On a low table lay the remains of a mealthe eater, ap-
parently, had had little appetite tonight. Through win-
dows higher up, women could be seen moving about
three of them in all, one in white, the others in dark
green gowns.
Maddalena led Bracy some distance along the shore
before heading inland. She had already got a clear idea
of the layout of the house: the seaward side was the
owner’s, the landward included servants’ quarters and all
the domestic and mechanical offices. There seemed to be
no trace of children; presumably either Rimerley was
unmarried or he maintained a separate establishment else-
where. Or, of course, he might be old enough to have
children already grownshe had somehow been thinking
of him as a young man, greedy and ruthless, rather than
an old man, merely callous.
Their first stop was the dock where the skimmers
were moored. No one noticed them as they bent over
first one, then the other, of the graceful craft. From
there, they went to the ‘copter. The mechanic was just
finishing his job, wiping his hands and putting away
some tools. They waited for five minutes to let him get
clear, and then Maddalena tossed a small sticky object at
the side of the machine. It clung as it touched.
Now, anyone attempting to leave the island by skim-
mer or ‘copter would attract the unwelcome attention of
a homing rocket with a shaped-charge head, unless he
was sufficiently observant to remove the sticky objects
Maddalena had planted.
Which she doubted. The said person was likely to be
in a wild panic.
“Door shut,” Maddalena whispered very softly. “Now
the ventilators.”
The house’s air-conditioning system was quite conspic-
uous from the trawler: two high circulating stacks led
down to the pump-chamber on the roof. Bracy had as-
sured her that he, accustomed to grappling with solar
sails in unexpected gales of wind, could get to the top
easily; nonetheless, she waited with heart in mouth and
hand on gun while he scaled the intake stack and placed
at the top the three glass canisters tied into a bundle with
an explosive cord which she had given him. There was a
radio-activated fuse on the end of the cord.
She had been puzzling for some time over the matter
of where Justin Kolb would be located; it wasn’t until
she was planning this job on the air-conditioning that she
saw the most likely possibility. Any sensible doctor tak-
ing patients into his private dwelling would put them at
the terminal end of the air-circulation system, in case
they had infections which draughts could carry to the
other occupants. As soon as Bracy had come down