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together and talked without any radio link at all, but a scrambled message could not be transferred and interpreted that way. Also, from John Hyslop's point of view the communication could hardly have come at a worse time. Sky City maintained mid-Atlantic, a clock zone convenient for workdays in America and Europe. So far as city workers were concerned, the call to John was made at eight in the morning—a reasonable time.
    But the few humans and innumerable machines working on the space shield enjoyed no regular hours and no fixed clock. Schedules were defined by need, with always the same underlying message: Do this as fast as you can, and remember that it may not be fast enough.
    The cat-sized rolfes, robotic brainchildren of Gordy Rolfe and his great contribution to the building of the space shield, could work twenty-four hours a day. But humans could not. So the call arrived when John Hyslop, Amanda Corrigan, Will Davis, Lauren Stansfield, Rico Ruggiero, and Jessie Kahn were at the tail end of a thirty-hour troubleshooting stint. John and Lauren were also at the tail end of their stamina. They had been up for seven hours before this effort began, tying up a meeting at Sky City before heading for Cusp Station. For the final ten work hours their awareness had been Neirling-boosted, so they would have to boost again soon, or crash. And when you crashed, you stayed out for a full sleep period. John had hoped to see this meeting to its end, then fade at once.
    He switched to internal mode and listened to the message as it was unscrambled by his suit. "Dr. Colombo needs your presence as soon as possible on Sky City. We have a new problem."
    The voice was that of Goldy Jensen, Bruno Colombo's personal assistant. Her tone—like her message—revealed nothing more with repeated hearings.
    A new problem.
    That might, please God, mean a technical difficulty. The John Hyslop job description, if anyone ever bothered to pull it up and read it, said he was chief engineer for the shield. In practice, he seemed to do whatever Bruno Colombo needed him to do, on Sky City and off it.
    John switched back to external mode. Will Davis and Lauren Stansfield were uploading the proposed revision for the construction profile of one section of the space shield into the subsidiary computation network at Cusp Station while Jessie, Rico, and Amanda transferred the group recommendations to Torrance Harbish and the main network back on Sky City, where the real computing power resided. But they all had one eye on him. As soon as he clicked back to local circuits they stared at him expectantly.
    "Everything all right?" Lauren asked. She was John's number one assistant, a short, soft-spoken woman with auburn hair and big eyes. She dressed well and expensively, which together with her careful attention to her appearance made some of the engineers regard her as a lightweight. John knew better. He had learned to rely on Lauren in any emergency. She knew more about the interior layout of Sky City than anyone—John included—and her only hobby seemed to be roaming the space city's thousands of corridors, checking the various life-support systems.
    Now she was asking a question within a question. They had two more decisions to make before the meeting ended, and Lauren wanted to know if that would be possible.
    There was no point in waiting, and no way to pull out gracefully.
    "I'm sorry." John spoke on open circuit. "Everything here is going well, and I think we're pulling things back toward schedule. But I have to leave. I must return to Sky City."
    Jessie Kahn was young, new, naturally shy, and up from Earth only four months. She also had an intensity and an honesty that outweighed her natural reticence and, in John Hyslop's view, pointed to a very bright future.
    She said at once, "The questions of reduced shield efficiency and probable sensor losses must be addressed today. They can't wait. And those issues require your personal involvement and