Starblood

just once so that he could see that marvelous, shimmering sea-green once again. "That could be too easy a trap. It has to be someplace public."
    She seemed confused, but then she flipped her long yellow hair out of her face and said, "Huzzah Amusement Park," as if the informer was sitting beside her, giving her instructions out of camera range. "Around the—around the fountain. Where they throw coins and make wishes. An hour."
    "I'll be there," he assured her.
    She rang off, blanking the screen, though he stared at it for some minutes longer, retaining a vision of buttery hair, tan skin, and a quick flash of green…
    Timothy was oblivious to the stares he elicited as he entered the amusement park. He had long ago learned to live with the attention he drew, ignore it and rise above it. The sign of an ignorant and tasteless man, Taguster had once told him, was the tendency to stare at someone else who was different, whether they were abnormal in form or only in the clothing they chose to wear.
    A number of people stood at the mammoth pool into which the fountain emptied its water and drew more to spout. They tossed coins into the blue water, trailed hands in the coolness of it. Then he caught sight of Polly London. She was wearing a relatively expensive pants suit and a large and floppy hat with great, round sunglasses. Her hair was black—she was wearing a wig—but even that change in coloration could not camouflage her beauty. She seemed, in fact, even more stunning than before.
    "He's around the fountain," she said. "It's not so public on the other side."
    "Let's go," he said.
    The pool had a diameter of two hundred feet, and to walk around its circumference required a good deal of nudging, jostling and—in Polly's case—trampled feet. In a few minutes, they broke out of the worst of the crowd, through scattered tourists, to the far back of the pool where the bench that rimmed it looked out onto woods and was screened from the other side by the rock tower of the fountain and the huge spray of water. Here there was only one couple, arms around each other, watching the rise of the water, and a small, thin, intense man in a dark suit. He rose as they approached, then sat down when Polly did. Ti hovered before them, very close so that whatever was said could be kept from the ears of the young lovers.
    Introductions were made, and Ti discovered the man was Mr. Kealy; he thought it likely this name was a cover identity. The thin man was nervous, looking about as if he expected someone to jump from one of the trees. "I doubt your friends would be here," Ti said, trying to reassure the man. "It's hardly their form of entertainment."
    Kealy nodded, looked at Polly; their eyes locked a short moment She seemed to wince, and Timothy wondered what the two of them had just exchanged without benefit of words. "Timothy," Polly said, drawing his attention to her lovely face. "Mr. Kealy wants to talk money first. He—" She abruptly stopped talking, raising a tightly clenched fist from her lap toward her mouth, and the look on her face gave Timothy almost enough warning.
    He whirled as Kealy slipped the hypodermic syringe into his hip, just above the silver cap of his mobility system. Had it been a narcodart, he might still have had time to deflect it.
    But it had all the force of the small man's arm behind it—and was therefore unmoved by the ESP talent.
    Kealy depressed the syringe plunger; icewater flushed Into Ti's hip.
    He wanted to scream.
    And he wondered if it were too late to bother…

CHAPTER 7
    His body was no longer a smoothly functioning machine, but twitched and shivered as the drug flushed through it. He felt strangely hot and cold at the same time. He fancied he could even feel his blood surging through the tight walls of his veins and arteries; it was icy, nearly frozen, and the flesh it moved through was dry and hot as if it had been baked in an oven. His facial features seemed numb and twisted so that his countenance must have been more horrible than usual. He knew, if he had had feet and hands, those limbs would have been immobile, useless, semi-paralyzed as was his face.
    He tried to ask them what they had done to him.
    The words would not come; there seemed to be fingers around his throat, crushing it shut…
    Kealy rose, gripped him, and began to turn him around, away from the fountain. Ti tried desperately to order his servos to attack the little man, but the artificial hands just floated to either