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the university of Paris had never been an exception. A woman approached him, dressed in genteel tatters, perhaps thirty years old, wrinkled as an apple doll but pretty not long ago. “Do you speak English?” she asked in English, and then, still in English, “Do you speak Dutch?” Blake shoved some colored paper bills into her hand and she thrust it crumpled into the waist of her skirt. “ Merci, monsieur, merci beaucoup ,” and in English again, “but guard your wallet, sir, the Africans will pick your pockets. The streets are swarming with Africans, so black they are, so big, you must guard yourself. . . .”
    He strolled past a sidewalk cafe where another woman, her baby face smudged and her hair wildly awry, was entertaining the patrons with a Shirley Temple imitation, tap-dancing The Good Ship Lollipop with demonic energy. They tossed money at her, but she wouldn’t go away until she finished her wretched performance.
A big black African approached and offered to sell him a wind-up plastic ornithopter.
    A row of men in their twenties, bearded, their brown faces splotched with broken red blisters, sat on the sidewalk and rested against the fence of the Luxembourg gardens. They didn’t offer him anything or ask him for anything.
    Blake reached Montparnasse. On the horizon, above the centuries-old roofs of the city, rose a ring of highrises which enclosed central Paris like a palisade. The wall of cement and glass cut off what breeze there was, trapping fetid summer air in the basin of the Seine. Around him the eternal traffic of Paris swirled, quieter and less smoky now that all the scooters and cars were electric, but as breakneck and aggressive as ever; there was a constant hiss of tires, accompanied by the jackass whinny and neigh of horns as drivers tried to shove each other out of the way and cut each other off by sound and fury alone. Paris, City of Light.
    Blake turned back along the same route. This time the African didn’t try to sell him an ornithopter. Shirley Temple was opening a new show, farther down the boulevard. The apple-doll woman came at him again, her memory a blank. “Do you speak English? Do you speak Dutch?”
Blake knew what he had to do next–he had to find a way to join the Free Spirit. Although the Tappers knew Blake Redfield all too well, other arms of the international cult fished in other waters; the homeless youth of Europe were a deep reservoir of malleable souls. After three days in Paris he had no doubt that Editions Lequeu and the Athanasian Society were the same organization. The Athanasians might find a derelict with a fascination for things Egyptian an especially attractive catch.
Before Blake could act on his plan, though, he had to return to London on unfinished business. . . .
    Almost two years had past since Blake saw Ellen Troy in the Grand Central Conservatory. At a Sotheby’s auction, Blake had agreed to represent a Port Hesperus buyer in what turned out to be a successful bid to acquire a valuable first edition of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom , by T. E. Lawrence. Then, while transporting the book to Port Hesperus, the freighter Star Queen had had a fatal mishap.*
* The Star Queen incident is related in Arthur C. Clarke’s Venus Prime, Volume 1: Breaking Strain .
    When Blake learned who had been assigned to investigate the incident, he immediately booked passage on a liner to Venus–ostensibly to see to the safety of his client’s property, but actually to confront the Space Board inspector who was handling the Star Queen case, Ellen Troy herself. This time Blake made it impossible for her avoid him.
    Thus it was on Port Hesperus, in that transformer room in the central spindle of the garden sphere, that Blake for the first time was able to share with his old schoolmate Linda the startling knowledge he’d gained. “The more I study this subject, the more connections I find, and the farther back they reach,” Blake told her. “In the 13th century they were