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The high colour left his father’s face. His mother threw herself back on the bed with a moan. She said something into the pillow about the cities of the plain.

‘You would go from Beulah to that Babylon? Then you’re beyond reasoning with.’ His father looked at him with contempt. ‘Just you try it! You’ll soon be back with your tail between your legs. You don’t even have a passport.’

‘Yes I do,’ Jordan said. His hand patted his side pocket, felt the weight like a book. ‘Freedom’s own passport. Money.’

‘So you’re a thief as well as a renegade.’

‘It’s not stolen—’ Jordan began hotly, then stopped.

The enormity of what he’d done struck him for the first time. Until now he’d been thinking forward, not backward, of the implications of having that money. What it amounted to was taking a fee from the ultimate enemy, the foe of the community, of the state that protected the community and of the alliance that shielded the state. And they knew or suspected it. That was why his father had thrown ‘communist’ in his face! Mrs Lawson must have found out something about his unauthorized activity and dropped some heavy hint. Scheming Christian witch.

‘Think what you like,’ he said.

He hefted the rucksack and took a step towards his parents, with some vague notion of a handshake, a kiss – stupid, stupid. They recoiled from him as if frightened. Jordan backed off to the door, and on a sudden inspiration smiled and waved and stepped out through it and closed it and locked it. It wouldn’t take them long to get out, he thought as he descended the stair-ladder, the stair, the steps. But, maybe, long enough. When he reached the street he turned left and started running, down the hill.

He cursed every subversive atheistic volume in his possession a lot sooner than his parents would have dared to hope. About ten minutes after leaving them, as he hurried along Park Road. It was a well designed frame rucksack, and it didn’t dig into his back and shoulders, but the weight was enough to send sweat flying from his face. He walked past upmarket shops – delis, boutiques, craft – and respectable apartment houses. This, however, was the faintly disreputable fringe of Beulah City, the abode of essential but intrinsically unreliable types: inspirational artists, clean-minded scriptwriters, decent clothing designers, conservative sociologists…they all found it necessary to congregate close to the border, and even to make discreet business trips across it. No amount of sarcastic pulpit speculation about what possible benefit they could derive from this proximity to the imminent Ground Zero of divine wrath made any difference. A fine sight they would make at the Rapture (Jordan had heard on innumerable Sundays) when, if – and, one was given to understand, it was a very big ‘if’ – they were among the chosen, they would float skywards miles away from the main body of ascending believers, clutching their drinks or worldly magazines!

But, scrupulous though it was about what it allowed in, Beulah City, as a literally paid-up member of the Free World, couldn’t afford to be seen restricting people from going out. A population self-selected for enthusiasm had to be a better advertisement for a way of life than a conscript citizenry. Such liberal principles didn’t apply to fleeing felons. And apart from the money, which, even if its source was as untraceable as the Black Planner had made out, would be difficult to account for, he now had a charge of unlawful imprisonment to answer.

After a kilometre the traffic on the road beside him slowed to a pace that had him overtaking one vehicle after another. Little electric cars and long light trucks, bumper to bumper. Jordan glanced at them idly. The flowery italics of a Modesty logo caught his eye. He had of course been aware that a lot of the community’s exports were high-cost and low-weight, ideal for transport by airship from the skyport – Alexandra Port, just up the hill in Norlonto. He simply hadn’t made the connection before.

He shook his head. The habit of averting eyes and thoughts had worn deeper tracks