He swept the assemblage with a glance. Purposely he had stood for seconds in full view. A perfect fop--as frivolous, as dangerous as anything the Paradisiac harbored. The ultimate in elegance. Julian stepped on the conveyor and had the illusion of being borne along on a cataract of foam to where an immaculately garbed Ganymedean bowed and led the way to a secluded platform embowered in the geometrical interlacings of frost crystals. The panel in the table's center instantly suffused with softest light as he sat down, and a note like the echo of a forgotten song rang subdued. "Venusin ... undiluted!" Julian ordered laconically. Mentally he enjoyed in anticipation the exhilarating power of the treacherous drink. It was precisely what a successful adventurer would have ordered there. He waited calmly, conscious that he was the cynosure of many eyes. He knew a thousand dramas were being enacted in the sumptuous den, under the masking surface of convention and social intercourse. The place was like a gigantic cup abrim with beauty--so much of it--in the decors, in the music, in the _flesh_, left him cold. A glowing core of contempt burned within him at the overwhelmingly seductive weakness it induced. Julian knew he had to be as invulnerable as berylo-plast--deaf to all the mellower dictums of the heart. He was here for one single, solitary purpose that was the all-embracing, the tremendous _now_. To meet a bearer of information so secret, so profoundly vital, that its possessor had not dared even transmit it in the highly complicated secret code of the _Dekka_. For that he had braved what he now realized was certain death. It was his task to receive it, and pass it through channels that would reach the ten Dekkan patriarchs. Once more, as he had done when he'd paused at the top of the conveyor, Julian raised his arm and almost imperceptibly made the secret, immemorable gesture of the Dekka. He was impatient. There was no time. Disguise or no disguise, he knew that any minute now, the Paradisiac might erupt like a long-seething volcano. _Why wasn't the person he was to meet here yet?_ Mechanically his fingers groped for the vial he had taken from Fermin, and paused startled as he felt the unmistakable outline of something hard beside the shape of the miniature vial. He drew it out slowly, palmed so that no observer could discern it from even a short distance. It was a tiny plastic disc bearing the words: SUB ROHAN SQUARE. As Julian raised the glass of Venusin to his lips, he swallowed the disc, which he knew would dissolve. _He already had met the informant!_ The thought was almost shocking in its intensity. It could only have been the Ganymedean designer! And yet, the message in itself was disappointing. What could there be beneath Rohan Square, the central plaza before the Temple where he'd met Fermin?