I was given a Company flight suit, and a hip rig for my Sturmey. I put those on, and was taken to within a block of the port in a shuttered car. Not going all the way to the spaceport was my idea. The reason I gave Weidmann was good enough--there was no sense putting up neon markers to indicate that I was up to something special--but I had a better one than that. I had to give Pat a chance to get in touch with me. It didn't work out that way. I began walking down toward the Transolar revetment, using a shortcut street, looking around for Pat. It was a cinch she'd had some kind of a tail on me, and I was expecting to see her step out of almost any of the doorways I passed. Instead, I heard something. Back up the street, the way I had come, boot soles whispered on concrete. I turned around and looked, buried in shadow. I couldn't see anything. I turned back around, and kept on walking, and I heard a holster being unsnapped. I stopped to listen, and there was only silence. I moved, and somebody slipped a safety catch. I leaped suddenly to my right. My shoulders touched the wall of a house. My hands blurred forward, one locking on my holster and holding it down, the other scooping the Sturmey out and clear of the leather, then blurring again as I shot my hand as far away from me as I could, fired down the street, and spun myself away from the building. I fired again, and the street lamp above my head smashed into bits. Then I was in a deep doorway, crouched, waiting, while ribbons of light cut creases in the wall where I'd been. That was how it began. There were endless minutes of silence, and then someone would drag a heel or kick a step. There'd be the kick of my gun against my palm, and once, the count on their side dropped from five to four. A dot of light flickered from behind a high gutter, and rock chipped off a wall near my head. I ducked, kissed the sidewalk with my belly, slithered down a flight of steps to a basement alcove, rolled over, and slid behind the stone. On the way down, I fired back, and I heard a rasp of metal on stone. Not the momentary rake of a belt buckle or button, but a gun, dragging its muzzle against curbing while the man who'd fired it kicked his life away in the gutter. I heard it drop the last inch to the street. * * * * * I knew they'd be flanking me pretty soon. I heard cloth whisper as two of them slipped off to each side. The fellow they'd left behind began firing from all angles, weaving back and forth to cover them. He put too much pattern in his weave, though, and that was his mistake. The pattern broke, and became random as the guns spun out of his hands before he could even realize there was a shot coming.