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fingers together. She bent them back against one another fiercely. "But they couldn't ignore Don, could they? And besides . . ." she added, her eyes drawn to the window but her mind drifting far beyond the present, "I never really wanted him to leave. Whatever I said."
"Well, knowing Don," said Danny Pritchard from his chair, "I'd expect him back just about any time now."
"He mustn't come now," the woman blurted. "It's too late. The Council's committed. They'd kill him."
"They would?" said Danny Pritchard. "Those down in the yard?" The professional began to laugh. "They'll learn something about status in Hell if they try, milady. They will that."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The slideway rose and fell like a tank racing over broken ground. Danny Pritchard had only a plastic bucket and not the hundred-odd tons of tank armor between him and danger, however.
The sea lifted and ebbed beneath him at no fixed period; or rather, at a period set by as many variables as a sun-spot sequence, theoretically calculable but for human practice lost in uncertainty. The water was a lucent gray-green, metallic. In it moved blurs of other colors, jetsam sucked from the current to be filtered and compacted by type in the tubes running back to the building on the shore.
The