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That worked until it became difficult to tell just who was recruiting whom. Competing cop companies found themselves literally in rival armed camps, whose quartermasters, as like as not, were authorised charity distributors. We called it the Thailand Syndrome.

The weekly meetings of the Defence Liason Committee became daily, or rather, nightly. They usually began at 9.00 p.m. and went on until after midnight. This was all right by me. My sleep requirements had diminished with age. I resented having to go into VR, but that’s life. Every evening I’d take the washing-up gloves off, pull the datagloves on, give Annette a smile across the cleared table and put on the glasses and –

Be there. Some of us fancied ourselves as Heroes In Hell, and the setting was appropriate: a black infinity around us, and between us a round table with a common view of Norlonto, or London, or whatever we wanted to examine; a camera obscura view, patched together from satellite pictures and enhanced with all the data we could pull in. At this level there were thirteen of us, always a lucky number for a committee. Our fetches – our body-images in the virtual world – were the same as our actual forms, mainly so that we could recognise each other in real life or on television.

The night of the big crisis we were one short. I looked around, worried. Julie was there, Mike Davis, Juan Altimara, all from different tendencies of the space movement; a pair of identical youths whom I’d mentally tagged ‘the Mormon missionaries’ though actually they were from the Norlonto churches’ protection charity, the St Maurice Defence Association; and – moving from the voluntary sector to the commercial – a handful of defence company delegates who changed from week to week and always looked alarmingly young and pathetically exhausted, and always squabbled with the leftists –

‘Where’s Catherin Duvalier?’ She was young, fast, smart: a communist militia co-ordinator whose intelligence networks extended through the Green camps to the distant battles in the hills.

Julie smiled at me from across the table’s bright gulf.

‘Cat’s getting married tomorrow. Sends her apologies.’

‘No excuse,’ I grunted, but I was relieved we hadn’t had a defection, or indeed a casualty. ‘OK, comrades. First business.’

I keyed up the day’s trading figures for defence shares and combat futures. They were rising fast.

‘Well, chaps,’ I said to the defence-agency boys, ‘do you know something we don’t?’

A flicker of data interchange set the fetches wavering as if in a heat-haze. Then, their hasty conferring over, one of them spoke up.

‘We were about to say, Mr. Wilde…’

Oh, sure.

‘…all our companies have been separately approached today about, ah, potential conflict situations. It seems that once again a large number of street-owners have made deals to allow passage of, uh, armoured columns –’

‘You mean the Army’s coming in?’

Virtual eyes heliographed shock around the table.

‘Yes,’ he said uncomfortably. ‘We’ve been instructed to inform you that the government has decided to end Norlonto’s anomalous status – their words. It’s been done at the request of a significant part of the business community and a number of Norlonto’s more, uh, settled neighbourhood associations –’

‘Bastards!’ shouted Julie. She rounded on the ‘Mormon Missionaries’. ‘Did you know anything about this?’

‘Don’t look at me like that,’ one of them said. ‘We’ve been passing on the complaints from our clients for weeks. The situation really is becoming quite intolerable, especially for the less fortunate. I assure you all that the Association knew nothing of this, but I can’t say I’m surprised or sorry.’

‘So,’ I said, ‘when do the tanks roll in?’

‘Day after tomorrow,’ one of the agency reps said. ‘Show of force, and all that. Order on the streets.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘That gives us time to organise.’

‘Resistance?’ Several voices said it at the same time, in dismay or hope.

‘No,’ I said grimly. ‘Retreat. Tell your principals,