"I cannot," Rachmael said, "pay. And you know it." Above, the jet-balloon heard; it had exceeding mar­velous aud receptors. But it did not believe him or care if what he said was true; its job was to hound him, not to seek the truth. Standing on the runnel as it auto­matically carried him along, Rachmael said, as reason­ably as possible, "At present I have no funds, because continuously up to now, one by one, I've paid off as many of Applebaum Enterprise's creditors as I can."

Tauntingly, the mechanical voice from above boomed, "At three sigs on the poscred. Some settling of accounts."

Rachmael said, "Give me time."

"Plans, Mr. Applebaum?" The voice twisted with scorn.

After a pause he said, "Yes." But he did not specify; it depended in part on what he obtained from the private police agency, Lies Incorporated. If that was anything. But over the vidphone at least — he did think he had detected a certain sympathetic resonance from the master proprietor of the police agency, Matson Glazer-Holliday.

Now, in five minutes, in a formal screening-interview with a Lies Incorporated psych-rep, Rachmael would find out — learn just how far the private police agency, which after all had to survive the competition, had to stand up to the UN and the lesser titans of the nine planet system, would go in staking a man who was not merely broke but who owed — owed for the wreckage of an industrial empire which had collapsed, carrying its operator and owner, Maury Applebaum, to his — evi­dently — voluntary death.