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approval."
    "I know." John realized that he was going to shock her, but she had to learn sometime about the world of impossible deadlines. "I'll fly back. You get in touch with me when your meeting finishes. Whatever you decide, I'll approve it."
    He saw her face. He was feeling the pressure himself, and he was tempted to add, Don't give me a hard time, Jessie. I'd hate to spoil your idealism, but I don't have time for polite discussion. I have to boost again, because when I reach Sky City I have to be awake for whatever shit Bruno Colombo throws at me. And the thought of that second boost doesn't thrill me at all.
    His warning wasn't necessary. Will Davis was a seasoned shield engineer who had spent only three days on Sky City in the past year—the opposite of Amanda, Lauren, and Rico, who left Sky City only when dragged out for emergency efforts like today's. But Will was Jessie Kahn's unofficial mentor, and he knew enough to step in and ask in his lilting Welsh, "What is it then, John Hyslop? A direct command? Might it be you've received marching orders from His Lordship?"
    "You've got it."
    "What's he want with you this time?"
    "Do you think he's going to tell me before I get there?"
    "No, man. Not if he's half the pain in the ass he used to be. I'm glad it's you off to see him and not me."
    Everyone but Jessie laughed. They had suffered their own unpleasant experiences with Bruno Colombo. She, not sure how the conversation had suddenly veered away from her concerns, looked from one person to the other but said nothing.
    John decided that there was no point in further discussion. The others could give whatever additional explanations they liked. "I'm going to do a second boost, Lauren," he said. "Right now. You don't need to do that, so make sure you get somewhere safe before you crash. Will, you'll have to wrap it up here in an hour or two. Make sure the rolfes are reassigned to the shield when you're done with them."
    Their meeting was taking place in hard vacuum. John headed straight for the station exit, switched to suit channel as soon as he was outside, and said, "Take me to Sky City. Use a continuous one-gee thrust trajectory, and provide a zero relative velocity on arrival."
    It was a routine command. The return trip along the extended spine of the space shield and the transfer trajectory to Sky City would require none of John's attention. His personal suit informed him that a one-gee boost with midpoint turnover would carry him the hundred-thousand-plus kilometers from Cusp Station, at the outermost limit of the shield, to his usual docking port on Sky City in one hundred and sixteen minutes.
    One hundred and sixteen minutes, in extended boost mode and with little to do but indulge in worried speculation. Couldn't Bruno Colombo have offered a word or two to indicate the nature of the difficulty? Something like, they had a different problem and not just another problem? Or had there been another death, another disappearance, another frightful episode in a lengthening sequence?
    Probably not. But the murders were getting to him, as they were to everyone living on Sky City.
    The suit was accelerating him smoothly along the axis of the space shield. The shield was eighty-five percent complete, but for that you had to take the word of the computers. There was nothing to be seen.
    John looked out to the side anyway, at right angles to his direction of motion. Of course, he saw nothing. The three-billion-ton mass of the shield was there, but it spread out to form a narrow cone almost a hundred thousand kilometers long and eighteen thousand kilometers across at the base. The matter in the shield, about a gram of it per square meter, formed a delicate spiderweb of superconducting fibers, load filaments, node sensors, thrustors, and computing tubules. It could stand considerable tension forces, but an ounce of compression anywhere would make it buckle. The structure made small but constant adjustments in relative geometry