ed back.

* * * * *

The guards at the check-out point were not men he knew, but Halder
walked through the ID-scanning band without incident, apparently without
arousing interest. Beyond, to the left, was a wide one-way portal to a
tube station. His aircar was in the executive parking area on the
building's roof, but the escape plan called for both of them to abandon
their private cars, which were more than likely to be traps, and use the
public transportation systems in starting out.

Halder entered the tube station, went to a rented locker, opened it and
took out two packages, one containing a complete change of clothing and
a mirror, the other half a dozen canned cultures of as many varieties
of microlife--highly specialized strains of life, of which the
pharmaceutical concern that employed Dr. Halder Leorm knew no more
than it did of the methods by which they had been developed.

Halder carried the packages into a ComWeb booth which he locked and
shielded for privacy. Then he opened both packages and quickly removed
his clothing. Opening the first of the cultures, he dipped one of the
needles into it and, watching himself in the mirror, made a carefully
measured injection in each side of his face. He laid the needle down and
opened the next container, aware of the enzyme reaction that had begun
to race through him.

Three minutes later, the mirror showed him a dark-skinned stranger with
high cheek bones, heavy jaw, thick nose, slightly slanted eyes, graying
hair. Halder disposed of the mirror, the clothes he had been wearing and
the remaining contents of the second package. Unchecked, the alien
organisms swarming in his blood stream now would have gone on to destroy
him in a variety of unpleasant ways. But with their work of disguise
completed, they were being checked.

He emerged presently from a tube exit in uptown Draise, on the terrace
of a hotel forty stories above the street level. He didn't look about
for Kilby, or rather the woman Kilby would turn into on her way here.
The plan called for him to arrive first, to make sure he hadn't been
traced, and then to see whether she was being followed.

She appeared five minutes later, a slightly stocky lady now, perhaps ten
years under Halder's present apparent age, dark-skinned as he was,
showing similar racial characteristics. She flashed her teeth at him as
she came up, sloe eyes flirting.

"Didn't keep you waiting, did I?" s