"I'm setting up somebody for a kill?" asked Castellano.

"You're following orders," said the man with the pointer.

"Do what he says, Jim," said the district supervisor. "This is important."

"At this time in my life, I don't know if I want to be responsible for another man's death."

"It's very important, Jim. You must know how important," said the district supervisor, and James Castellano, age forty-nine, agreed for the first time in his life to participate in a killing if it were necessary.

He rode to the corner of Sebastian and Latimer in the back seat of a gray four-door sedan. One of Forsythe's men was at the wheel. The exchange item was wrapped in wire and tape and thick plastic all inside the gray felt-covered box; this was designed to give Castellano more time to look at the counterfeit plates than his contact would have to look at the computer software program for creative intelligence.

The car's back seat smelled of stale cigars and the seat cover felt sticky and the stop and go of the driver made Castellano woozy. He knew a bit about computers and the space age and what he was delivering was designed, he was sure, to enable unmanned space vehicles to make creative decisions when beyond the range of earth control.

But why would anyone want something like this? On earth it was next to useless, because any normal person had many times the creative intelligence of this program.

As the limousine passed a supermarket, Castellano abruptly realized the enormity of the mission. It was just possible that these 1963 Series A Federal Reserve Notes had already watered down the value of the entire currency. Massive use of the printing plates he was to pick up could account for the phenomenon of inflation during an economic depression. In the supermarket window, he saw the price of hamburger at $1.09 a pound and it was clear in that instant. When money is worth less, you need more of it to buy less. It was America's money itself that was becoming worthless if these bills had been passed massively. And why shouldn't they have been? Who could stop them?