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Moh had a rented flat in Kentish Town. He stopped off to change into his newest and sharpest suit, and to place his call. He got a voice-only link, and introduced himself; feeling self-conscious and stupid, he said he was from the light company.

‘Come straight away,’ Wilde said. ‘You know where to find me.’

An hour later Kohn knocked at the door of Wilde’s office.

‘Come in.’

The office was small and bright, with a window overlooking Trent Park: grass, trees, gliders coming in. It smelled of paper and cement. Wilde sat at a plain desk behind a terminal. He finished saving a file and stood. Skinny, nearly bald, tanned, hook-nosed. Back straight as an old soldier’s. Handshake firm.

‘Well, comrade,’ he said, gesturing Kohn to sit in one of a pair of standard university chairs made from pine, sacking, rubber bands and polyurethane, ‘what can I do for you?’

Comrade? Kohn wondered if the man were being polite or ironic, and responded with a tight-lipped smile before giving an account of the morning’s events.

‘Hmm,’ Wilde said. ‘My guess is pressure from Space Defense.’

Kohn opened and closed his mouth. ‘What they got to do with the greens?’

‘More than you think,’ Wilde said. ‘Oh, there’s no conspiracy, as I am notorious for saying. I’m sure the smelly little vermin would be against the project anyway. But it’s SD that’s leaning on the space movement’s higher councils, which lean on the R&D company, which tells the union and the militia that this is one to write off against insurance.’ He smiled. ‘Act of Goddess.’

Kohn spread his hands. ‘But why?’

‘What else,’ Wilde asked, like a lecturer posing a problem, ‘could you do with a very powerful, very accurate ground-based fast-tracking laser, assuming one could be developed?’ He sighted along his pointed finger and swung it slowly upwards.

Kohn suddenly got it, and laughed at himself for not realizing it sooner. ‘Down battlesats,’ he said.

‘Yup,’ said Wilde. ‘Apparently our R&D actually didn’t know that laser-launchers were originally promoted as a civilian spin-off from an ABM system. Space Defense, needless to say, has a better memory.’

‘So that’s it,’ Kohn said.

‘You think so?’ Wilde’s voice rang sharp; his eyes narrowed.

Kohn thought for a moment, stood up and stalked to the window as his gall rose.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I won’t have it. OK, you can’t fight SD. We build the laser lab, they’ll lase it. But the greens…oh, shit.’

‘What do you feel about them?’

Kohn whirled. ‘One of them called me “krautkiller”, you know that? Fuck them and their nazi economics.’ He punched his palm. ‘Protection. Conservation. Restriction. Deep ecology. Give me deep technology any day. They don’t scare me. I’m damned if I’ll crawl, my children’s children crawl on the earth in some kind a fuckin harmony with the environment. Yeah, till the next ice age or the next asteroid impact. “Krautkiller”, huh? Chosen people, huh?’ He remembered the old taunts. Never thought of myself as…until until until…He took a deep breath, shook his head. ‘It’s them or us, man, and I’ve chosen people.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ Wilde said, ‘Now sit down and let me…enlighten you on a few things.’

Kohn listened, and saw the light. The ‘light company’ was evidently a codename for the Space and Freedom Party, the militant faction of the space movement that Logan had talked about at the meeting a couple of years earlier. It had pulled in people with diverse views in terms of conventional politics, who disagreed about everything but the struggle for space: the ultimate united front, nothing conceded, nothing compromised, but still holding something of the forbidden thrill of—

‘There’s no conspiracy,’ Wilde said.

As if to confirm it, he provoked Kohn into defending his own standpoint. Kohn tried – and felt he failed – to articulate the inchoate vision he held of a socialist society that would be even wilder and more free-wheeling than Norlonto, freer than the free market, where the common knowledge that could not but be common property would become the greatest wealth,