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.Shortly she was walking with him back to his room.When the door had closed behind them, he cleared his throat and said, "You may have heard this before.""You're not a stickman," she opined, raising an eyebrow."If that means am I with the police, no, I'm not.I just meant that all I really want to do is talk."In her fact amusement began to struggle with other things and eventually prevailed."As a mat-ter of fact," she said at last, "that's all I really wanted to do myself."He started to offer money, but she pantomimed it away, at which point he began to watch her very alertly.Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.htmlShe said, "Mr.Shen-yang." and paused there to let him appreciate the fact that she already knew his name."I am sorry your trip was inter-rupted so unpleasantly but glad that you got to Lorenzoni in one piece.I represent what the rulers of Condamine call the underground.Dirty Ungavan sympathizers.""Ah.Are there many of you in Vellere?"She waved aside the question, preferring to speak of something she considered more important."If you go out again in the next hour—walk clear of Middle Street.It would be your most direct route from here to the foreign ministry, should you be going that way.But do not take it."He nodded."All right.But why?""Now I must go.They will soon be here to keep a watch on you again."He nodded again.When the door had closed behind the girl, it would have been easy to imagine that she had never been here.He looked at his timepiece and laughed.His appointment at the foreign ministry was in just half an hour.A quarter of an hour later, he was given the chance to show his diplomatic card again.When the Condamine police had looked at it and had talked quietly on their radios to some invisible authority, they saluted and let him go on his way at once, brushing the dust of the recent spinbomb blast from his new clothing and shaking his head in an effort to dispel the ringing ache that the explosion had installed immediately inboard from his right ear.He assumed the thing had been a spinbomb because other kinds of explosives were now too easy to detect.He calculated that he must have been leaving his new hotel just about the time the nameless terrorist was setting down the bomb on Middle Street and quietly pulling its axis pin and walking on, colorless and invisible in the crowd.Shen-yang had just bypassed Middle Street and gone on around a corner when someone brushed the bomb in its no doubt innocent-looking container, or traffic shook the walk enough to make it wobble, and its tiny flywheels, counter-rotating inside their vacuum bottle with aGenerated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.htmlrim speed equal to a substantial proportion of the velocity of light, disintegrated.If it had been a small nuke instead of a tiny spinner, Shen-yang supposed, the ministry three blocks away might have gone up with a sizable surrounding chunk of city, instead of a mere storefront or two.But certainly the police would have detected a nuke before it had been carried into the middle of the city.The blast seemed to have made no great impression on the vast majority of the folk hurrying busily through the streets.No one who was not bleeding seemed to take it all that hard.It was evidently something that happened from time to time, like rain, and the business of getting and spending had to go on.The foreign ministry was no bigger than a large house and tastefully ornate, set apart from the city around it only by a simple-looking fence and a narrow belt of lawn.There were uniformed guards at the door, keen-looking though they did not seem to be actually doing much.They gave Shen-yang and his card a simple looking over and courteously directed him on his way; if he underwent any other inspection, the means by which it was accomplished were imperceptible.The elevator went down instead of up, down for almost twenty levels [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]