Far away, somebody shouted, 'Don't come to me! I told you I couldn't answer for the cluster sampling!' A door opened and shut. Clearly: 'Run off and lick her boots then.'

'You may go in now, Captain Truck,' said the receptionist.

So far, nobody had offered any options. Suddenly remembering Angina Seng's big Chambers gun, he wondered just how much of her gravitational attraction it represented. What was really keeping him here?

'I can see you're wearing a girdle,' he said. 'As a matter of interest, where am I?'

Her smile curdled: it was polite that year for the underprivileged to be polite back. 'The Israeli Consulate,' she said, 'and I don't think you ought to go round saying things like that to people.'

But he was already on his way through the unmarked door, shouting 'You can just entirely forget about it, Miss Seng!' She wasn't there, of course. 'Oh hell!' He went to leave, but some nosy treacherous element of his make-up had already slammed the door behind him and faced him up to the room's other occupant.

General Alice Gaw, postmenopausal but hardly decayed at all: onetime vacuum-commando, late of the Fleet Police, now prime executive of IWG's military arm, with a roving commission and carte blanche in any matter of hemiglobal security. Decorated and fêted, she had been one of the six enigmatic 'wardens' of the discontinued Environmental Prison experiment — that nodal myth of the hinterlands, its seeping ducts peopled with ghouls, its vaults packed with lost souls in Gothic decaying orbits about the solar enormity of their own innocence, administered by Fungus Men with cattle prods for arms and ECT machines for heads; and closed-down eventually, so rumor had it, by the revulsion of the very elements of IWG politics that had demanded its institution. Rumor had it also that Alice Gaw was the only one of the Six ever to regret the move.

She was short and heavily built. She wore the sleeves of her Women's Army uniform perpetually rolled up to display chapped muscular forearms, and affected the coarse jocularity of a male psychiatric nurse. Truck knew her by repute: her eyepatch was a Galactic curiosity, her hands were thick and square. She radiated a fiercely ambiguous sexual energy which was more disturbing for her consciousness of it than for its actual effect.