Meeting at Infinity by John Brunner

that he was able to ask himself why.

9
    W HEN G AFFLES came back to the Octopus, he found Jockey de-briefing a group of runners—yonder boys with tinted hair and jackets as wide across the shoulders as a cruiser’s nose. He cued them with a straight forefinger, hearing each of the runners out before shifting the finger like a clockhand. Gaffles whistled sharply at him; he glanced up, read the look on his aide’s face, and dropped his hand abruptly.
    “Out!” he said. “Come back in three minutes.”
    The runners got up and scrambled out of Gaffles’s way with a clatter of high boots. “You caught up with Curdy?” Jockey demanded when they had gone.
    “Got close behind him. But I broke off. This was too hot to hold on to.” Gaffles dropped into a seat and recounted what he had found out, about Nevada having lodged in the same block as Erlking.
    “That’s good clean long string,” said Jockey approvingly. “Where’s Erlking? You find him?”
    Gaffles shook his head. “He moved. He had money from someone and didn’t leave an address. And it’s going to be hell scouring town for him tonight, no free fall about that. It’s
rough
out there!”
    Jockey plucked at his lower lip, dubiously. “I heard. I was just getting the breakdown when you showed. But if he’sgoing to be useful, we’ve got to get him
now.
Lyken will have had it from Nevada that Erlking’s hypnolocks aren’t fast—if Nevada did get his news from Erlking, and that’s most likely. Lyken will go after Erlking and drag him through into his franchise, or just blot him. That’s what I’d do on his spot.”
    “You can add a fact to your breakdown,” said Gaffles. “I came through a bad riot on the way. The police are taking in four ’cruiters to every cultist, where they can. I heard, too, that sometimes they’re turning cultists loose on the quiet, running ’em around the corner and tipping ’em out the paddy wagon.”
    Jockey grunted. “There’s a knot here,” he said. “Unless Athlone is plain blind, he may have got the news about Erlking. He was right in the lodging block, you said. He saw Clostrides this morning, recall? Then the news may get to the Directors as well, and that’ll mean two parties we have to get to Erlking ahead of. Gaffles, go through to the Venus, will you? You’ll find about thirty runners hanging around. They’re tonight’s strategic reserve. Get them out after Erlking. Promise them the moon if they find him ahead of the competition.”
    It was a blow to Curdy Wence to get so close to Erlking and then to lose the trail. He paid the landlady of the lodging block fifty, and she still didn’t know Erlking’s new address, so either she was telling the truth or someone else had got to her first. Curdy wanted to assume the latter—there was something peculiar about her reactions, he thought—but on his first Rate One job he didn’t want to get involved with a beating-out. There were plenty of pugs around who could beat out the news, but Curdy thought it was unsophisticated. Philosophically, he went back to his previous method of procedure, which, in this Quarter where everyone knew about Jockey Hole, worked tolerably well. Frown to look older;hand in side of jacket to suggest a weapon; relaxed tone to indicate absolute confidence, and—
    “I’m from Jockey. He wants a man called Erlking. Used to be Ahmed Lyken’s Remembrancer. Where is he?”
    And the answer would take the form, “Sorry, I don’t know. But cuddy! Try so-and-so. He should know, I guess.”
    He could tell that the technique worked because after a further half-dozen calls he started to have people giving him Erlking’s old address, the one he’d moved away from. And he kept on getting more numbers to try.
    What he didn’t know was that after seven calls the half-hour waiting period laid down by Ahmed Lyken expired. And after eight calls he walked around a corner into the arms of a ’cruiter who picked him up, clobbered him, and