Even Stephen

The henna-haired young man with the vermilion cape boarded Stephen's vehicle on the thirty-third air level, less than two whoops and a holler from a stationary police float, by the simple expedient of grappling them together with his right arm, climbing over into the seat beside Stephen, and allowing his own skimmercar to whisk off at a thousand miles an hour with no more control than its traffic-dodging mechanism afforded.

The peregrinator was barbarically splendid, and his curls showed the effect of a habitual use of some good hair undulant. More to the point, he had a gun. It was one of those wicked moisture rifles which can steam the flesh off a man's bones at three hundred paces. Quite illegal.

He smiled at Stephen. His dentures were good. They were stainless steel, but in this day and time that was to be expected. Most of his generation, in embryo during the last Blow-down, had been born without teeth of their own.

"Sorry to inconvenience you, Citizen," he said, "but the police were right on my brush that time. Please turn right at the next air corridor and head out to sea."

And when Stephen, entranced, showed no inclination to obey, he prodded him with the weapon. Prodded him in a most sensitive part of his anatomy. "I have already killed once today," he said, "and it is not yet eleven o'clock."

"I see," Stephen said stiffly, and changed course.

He might simply have exceeded the speed limit in the slow traffic stream and gotten them arrested, but he sensed that this would not do. A half-memory, playing around in his cranium, cried out for recognition. Somewhere he had seen this deadly young man before, and with him there was associated a more than vague unpleasantness.

Soon the blue Pacific was under them. They were streaming southwest by south at an altitude of eighty miles. Stephen was not terrified at being kidnapped, for he had never heard of such a thing, but there was one thing that did worry him. "I shall be late for work," he said.