"Wha--" he started to say something. Danton pushed his flash-gun into the man's middle. And the Oligarch screamed. Danton's voice chopped into the scream. "I'm going to kill you," Danton said. "Unless you tell me what I want to know. Tell me where the power rooms are, the central power units." The man shook his head, no. Danton moved the gun around, pressed the stud. Burning flesh, and the Oligarch jerked away and fell twitching on the floor, his left leg charred from the knee down. He sat and stared at the leg, and he started whimpering. He reached down with his fingers, then drew them back again. "Tell me," Danton said. "Or what's left of you, even the body parts from your banks won't put back together again." The Oligarch murmured, and he had changed his mind. * * * * * The Oligarch led them into the gigantic room, then collapsed. Danton killed him where he lay. Danton recognized some of the equipment, though he was no nucleonics or electronics expert as Van Ness had been. "Listen to this, Van. Listen to me!" "Yes...." Danton told what he saw. He was Van Ness' eyes. The generators, huge oscilloscopes, vacuumtube voltimeters, electronic power-supply panels, rolls and skeins of hook-up wire, shielding of every color, size and shape, panel plates, huge racks of glowing tubes, elaborate transceivers, long solid surfaces of gleaming bakelite, color-indexed files of resistors and capacitances.... Van Ness told Danton what to do. Van Ness took a long time to say a few words, and after that he didn't seem to be able to say anything else. He didn't move either. Danton released the force of the flash-gun, left the gun in the position Van Ness had indicated, its beam burning deep into the heart of the complicated soul of the Oligarch fortress. He would have taken Van Ness with him, but Van Ness wasn't interested anymore. He was dead. Danton left him. He would remember Van Ness alive as long as he was capable of remembering anything. Van Ness as clay he had already forgotten. He ran toward the elevator. As it whirred upward, he felt the reverberation, the trembling, the beginnings of a low deadly murmuring. The elevator continued to rise smoothly, carrying Danton and the car, but Danton felt a giddy swaying like that of an earthquake. A social system strictly of the top-down variety. But in the final analysis, the top wasn't the mind of Rhone or of Weisser. It was something above both of them, above the Oligarchs. Machines. And above the machines, generators and switches and volts and tubes. The electronic interdependence was going insane within the fortress, like the intricate cellular structure of a mind within a skull. In a hall somewhere in a catacomb of metal, Danton sat in the car, wondering which way to go, wondering if it would make any difference now, feeling the fortress above, below, all around him, breaking apart.