“How long’s it gonna take us to make Freeside?” Molly asked from her web beside Maelcum’s pilot module.

“Don’ be long now, m’seh dat.”

“You guys ever think in hours?”

“Sister, time, it be time, ya know wha mean? Dread,” and he shook his locks, “at control, mon, an’ I an’ I come a Freeside when I an’ I come....”

“Case,” she said, “have you maybe done anything toward getting in touch with our pal from Berne? Like all that time you spent in Zion, plugged in with your lips moving?”

“Pal,” Case said, “sure. No. I haven’t. But I got a funny story along those lines, left over from Istanbul.” He told her about the phones in the Hilton.

“Christ,” she said, “there goes a chance. How come you hung up?”

“Coulda been anybody,” he lied. “Just a chip... I dunno....” He shrugged.

“Not just ’cause you were scared, huh?”

He shrugged again.

“Do it now.”

“What?”

“Now. Anyway, talk to the Flatline about it.”

“I’m all doped,” he protested, but reached for the trodes. His deck and the Hosaka had been mounted behind Maelcum’s module along with a very high-resolution Cray monitor.

He adjusted the trodes. Marcus Garvey had been thrown together around an enormous old Russian air scrubber, a rectangular thing daubed with Rastafarian symbols, Lions of Zion and Black Star Liners, the reds and greens and yellows overlaying wordy decals in Cyrillic script. Someone had sprayed Maelcum’s pilot gear a hot tropical pink, scraping most of the overspray off the screens and readouts with a razor blade. The gaskets around the airlock in the bow were festooned with semirigid globs and streamers of translucent caulk, like clumsy strands of imitation seaweed. He glanced past Maelcum’s shoulder to the central screen and saw a docking display: the tug’s path was a line of red dots, Freeside a segmented green circle. He watched the line extend itself, generating a new dot.