'The other side of Zellerfeld. I made a loop.' He drove slowly for another half mile and pulled up on a snow-covered patch alongside the road, dousing the headlamps. The moonlight brightened gradually. 'Is this the place?' 'Yes.' 'Where is he?' 'He should be here.' 'What's the landmark?' 'That sign over there.' Einbeck. I began worrying. 'How far is it to the checkpoint?' 'Four kilometres.' He began blowing into his hands and I reached over to the back seat and rummaged about and found the gloves and dropped them on to his lap. 'For Christ's sake put these on.' 'You'll need them when -' 'Put them on till then.' A slight break in the tone, inadmissible in the pre-jump phase but my nerves were only just under the surface and small things were picking at them because this is the phase when you're stone cold and your mind is clear and you know you're putting your life on the line and you know you've done it before and got away with it but this time it's different and you're scared again, and swallowing, and alert to the signs and portents that are suddenly in every sound and every shadow, till you can't stand a man blowing into his hands because the repetition drives you up the wall. Not good. Not at all propitious. Better to get to a telephone and pull Tilson out of bed and tell him to find Croder: Tell him I was right, I'm not ready, he'll have to get someone else. '. . . Gunther.' 'What?' 'His name's Gunther,' said Floderus again. 'The man with the truck.' I wound the window down and listened. The air was perfectly still and the snow had brought its own peculiar silence; a jet was moving at altitude, lost in the brightness of the moon, its thin whine threading the night. I could hear other sounds, distant and muffled by the terrain. 'Dogs?' 'What? Yes. At the checkpoint.' 'Where else?' 'Nowhere else, in this area.' I don't like dogs. 'You want a gun?' 'What for?' He looked at me in the pale light, sniffing a drop off his nose. 'For the mission.' 'No. Is this meant to be clearance?' 'Sort of.' I wanted to laugh. Clearance and briefing normally takes hours and you see a dozen people and sign a dozen forms and make half a dozen declarations because that's all that's going to be left of you if you muck it up out there: a record of what you were. It makes you feel you're important to somebody, if only to the computer clerks. But this trip I was being kicked across the frontier by a junior a-i-p with a drip on his nose and only just enough control over himself to keep him from telling me I shouldn't have got him out of bed in the first place. 'You'd better sign this.' He sniffed again and got out a crumpled handkerchief, taking off one of my gloves to use it. 'Is that your own code?' I looked at the form. 'My own what?' ' "Five hundred roses for Moira." ' I didn't want to talk about that so I got a pen and signed the form, no next-of-kin, no dependants, nothing saved up to leave to anyone, just enough for the roses. What was she doing now? When did she last think of me? 'Where the hell is that man Gunther?' Floderus looked at his watch in the moonlight. 'He'll be here.' He put the glove back on. 'How big's the truck?' 'It's a ten-tonner.' 'What's it carrying?'