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her.
    “Sing the cattle?”
    “Singing the cattle means soothing them to sleep.”
    “But you have cattle on your trailers, too.”
    “Packed so tightly,” he said sadly, “there wouldn’t be room for one note. However, those overlanding days are past.” •
    “Did you go straight into road trains?” she asked him.
    “Future Mrs. Mannering, road trains arc in the millionaire category. No, I did not. I toiled for years on trucks.” He grinned reminiscently.
    “Were they that funny?” She had seen his remembering grin.
    “They were always interesting I picked up a lone hiker one day because he carried a guitar and I rather fancied a song. But from nowhere it seems a whole group appeared, and I got all the music, full blast, that I wanted.”
    “Tell me more," she invited.
    “I’d like to show you more,” he said. “Ever slept in the cabin behind the steering wheel?”
    “No.”
    “It’s wonderful, Future Mrs. Mannering. There you are aloft in your safe eyrie, far up where no one can break the fortress, and if you look out at midnight you’ll see star shadows Ever seen star shadows?”
    “No,” said Gemma again, thinking how wonderful it would be.
    “Then we must show you some time.”
    “Perhaps.” Gemma added a little hurriedly: “Tell me about now. About the thirty-six-wheelers.”
    “I own twenty road trains,” he said quite casually, “more than that of trucks, plus a fleet of little beetles to run up and down The Bitumen and be general trouble-shooters for both.” He took a long slow drink. “I saw what was coining and got in quick.”
    “And ruthlessly, I would think,” she suggested.
    “Well, I didn’t stand back and say ‘You first'. There’s a team of two on every haul, and they’re changed at a prescribed time. It’s not an easy livelihood, road bossing, far from it. For instance you have to stop every fifty miles and charge up any fallen cattle, otherwise they’d die by being trampled on.”
    “How do you mean charge?” she asked.
    “A charger is used.”
    “Not a—”
    “Yes, an electric charger. Something to get him or her on their feet in a hurry, otherwise they’re history. It’s the only way. If you did it with a stick it would be cruel.”
    “It would also,” said Gemma distastefully, “bruise the meat for the abattoirs.”
    There was a silence for a while. The Territorian broke it. “Well, you did ask me,” he reminded her.
    “Yes. I’m sorry, it isn’t your fault. Do any of your men have hallucinations? I mean, one often reads about that, reads how they work so hard they imagine things and often finish up on the other side of the road.”
    “If they do, if mine do,” he said grimly, “it’s their own damn fault. I pay them a top wage.”
    “Yet you keep no timetable, you tell them to be as quick as they can.” Gemma remembered that from Bruce, though Bruce, she recalled, had added a significant “regardless”.
    “No, I don’t keep a timetable, but no, also, I don’t tell them to be as quick as they can. Some might... and do. The Territorian doesn’t. It pays well, very well, but it doesn’t pay extra for fast returns. Next question, please.”
    “Are tourists ‘terrorists’?”
    “Yes. They’re also fiends. They forget we’re twice their size, sometimes three times, and even reverse it by taking twice and three times their due themselves.”
    “Are mobs better moved quicker ? I mean, travelling leisurely surely is still the better way.”
    " I he nicer way, but not better.”
    “Docs a man have to be a different sort of man to be a road boss?”
    “Any man would have to be different driving a thing of that size through the middle of nowhere sometimes for five months at a stretch.”
    “But how different?” she persisted.
    “Just a little case of being born with a steering wheel in his hand.” He smiled across at her, his teeth very white in his leather brown face. “Coffee is served in the vestibule. Miss Interrogator. As