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I came closer than I can say to screwing it up. I'd been so intent on flinging myself off as hard as possible that my feet went too far ahead of me, and for a terrible moment it looked as though I was going to end up smacking into the wall back first, smashing my skull in the process. I jacked my legs down and thrust forward with my arms, achieving semi-upright flight just in time to slam painfully into the wall just to the side of the pipe. As I fell I scrabbled out with my hands and the right one caught the lip of the outlet. I whipped the left over to it and for a moment my fingers slipped down the old masonry, but then they held.

A bullet smacked into the rock a foot from my head. Christ on a bike, I thought irritably, why not blindfold me and set my clothes on fire too? Desperately, but carefully so I didn't slip, I hauled myself up towards the lip of the pipe. My right arm was in far enough to get a minimal grip on a groove in there when another bullet cracked into the wall, this one much closer.

Sod it, I thought, and just heaved. I was up over the lip and into the pipe in one surprisingly fluid movement, in time to see a large chunk of rock disappear out of the wall at the level where my lungs had been seconds before. I scooted up the tunnel a couple of yards, until I was safe, and then sat down heavily, chest heaving. Things, I realised, had gone from crap to really, traumatically crap. There was no further sound of gunfire, but the guard outside would surely be radioing to the ones inside that an intrusion through the pipe was in progress.

I'm pretty tough, actually, by most people's standards, but I'm not Snedd: if they knew I was coming, then three machine-gun-toting guards were going to be more than I could handle. Unfortunately, there was nothing else I could do. I couldn't go back, because the guard would be standing there, sight steady on the entrance to the pipe. Even if I sped down he'd be able to get me as soon as I hit the water, and I didn't want to die by being shot full of holes in a lake of turd soup. It struck me as undignified.

There was no point in rushing up the tunnel firing my gun: a blanket fire of energy would cut me in half and quarters and eighths before I got anywhere near them. There was a bend in the pipe about five yards ahead, and that seemed to be my only potential hope. If I waited, and they eventually crept down to do me in, there was a tiny, minimal, infinitesimal chance that I might be able to get one or more of them first. My position would still be absolutely terrible, but I wouldn't be dead. Soon afterwards, perhaps, but when all you have is a few minutes, each one of them seems fairly precious, each couple of seconds worth having. I crouched down and waited, gun ready.

On impulse I fumbled the portable vidiphone out of my jacket and called my apartment. I told the fridge to make sure that Spangle was fed regularly, and to alert the store if it ran out of cat food. I think it sensed I was in a serious jam, and it dispensed with the usual backchat and wished me luck. There was still no sound from the pipe up ahead, so I quickly called Zenda's office and got Royn on the screen.

'Oh hi, Stark. Hey, you're in a tunnel.'

'Yeah. Is Zenda available?'

'Christ, no way, Stark, I'm afraid. She's in meetings for the next seventy-two hours solid. Any message?'

I thought for a moment. Nothing came, nothing big enough.

'Just say I called. No, say this: say I said to remember the waterfall.'

'Sure thing. Remember the waterfall. You got it.'

"Thanks, Royn.'

I heard a sound up ahead and cut the transmission, hugging the wall as tight as I could. Each shot was going to be critical, and so I braced my arm and held my torso as steady as I could, waiting, I knew, for death.

After everything I'd done, everything I'd seen, the distance I'd travelled, it was going to end in being gunned down in an ancient sewage pipe on an unimportant job. And I found I cared, strangely. A few years ago I wouldn't have done. Something had been changing in me recently, stirring and flexing beneath the surface. I'd started to feel worse, but to care more. Something was happening, but I didn't know what. Now it looked like I'd never find out.

Then the sound came again, and my arm wavered slightly. It was very faint, but I thought I recognised the kind of sound it was. I opened my mouth slightly to let the noise get to my eardrums through the eustachian tubes as well as my ears, and strained every nerve to hear. It happened again, and my mouth dropped open wider of its own accord.

It was laughter. The sound was definitely laughter.

* * *

I've had a lot of experience of macho people. In the last nine years I've worked for, with and against a wide spectrum of soldiers, policemen, lunatics, hit men and gang members, and I've met a lot of 'if it moves shoot it, and if it doesn't shoot it until it does' kind of guys. When that kind of person is on the hunt, when he's got a quarry in his sights and he's moving in to blow it to little bloody pieces, some of them will laugh. A few laugh with nervousness, with a last-minute realisation of the enormity of what they're about to do. Some will laugh heartily, desperately proud and strong, and some will laugh the thin giggle of the completely and utterly deranged as the twisted devil inside them peeks out to do its work.

None of them, however, have ever laughed with the guttural, lewd good humour of the sound I could hear echoing down the tunnel. It wasn't a pretty laugh, but it was a genuine one.

The conclusion was obvious, but so unexpected that I took a while to look at it from every side. Men who are on their way to kill someone do not laugh like that. At least one of the guards was laughing like that. Therefore they weren't coming to get me. They didn't know I was here.

That may sound like thin reasoning to you, but it's the kind that has kept me alive over the years, and I've learnt to trust it. I realised I was still in with a chance, in the short term at least. The guy who'd been shooting at me wasn't a guard. He couldn't be, because otherwise he'd have contacted the others and they wouldn't be laughing like that. So who was he?

He had to be a member of the gang which had stolen Alkland. There was no reason for anyone else to try to kill an intruder. The clever bastards had posted someone outside on the off-chance.

This was both good and bad news, of course. It meant I was on the right track, which was good. It also meant the gang were even more together than I'd thought, which was not so good. But as it meant I wasn't necessarily going to die in the next two minutes, I decided that on balance it qualified as good news, absolutely top quality news, news out of the top fucking drawer.

I dissuaded myself with difficulty from throwing a street party, and settled for re-evaluating my position. It was, I realised, just as if everything was going according to plan. That wasn't as good as all that, but it was okay. The gang was a problem I was going to have to deal with anyway when the time came. What I had to do now was just carry on as I'd intended. I knew my intrusion plan was only so good, but I felt so relieved that anything seemed possible, and I started to creep quietly up the pipe. I carefully made my way round the first bend, and saw that there was at least one more to go. A faint glow was coming down the widening tunnel, and the sound of more laughter. I reached the final bend and flowed round it like an oiled shadow or something similarly quiet.

About twenty yards ahead of me was a desk, bulky and big-boned in dark wood. A guard was sitting at it, with his back to me, and another was lolling on a chair on the other side.

There were only two guards. Not only that, but they were paying no attention to the outward end of the tunnel, but drinking out of plastic cups and swapping tales of unlikely sexual prowess.

These were not crack troops, wired up and itching for action. They were just a couple of cops, bored but content with their lot, sipping coffee and cheerfully telling each other fibs which both knew the other wouldn't believe. The guns on the desk weren't machine guns, but just a pair of old-fashioned revolvers. Maybe Snedd had been the last outsider to make an intrusion, and after eight years security had become a little lax.

What I couldn't do was risk the chance of the sound of shots echoing up the tunnel, and so I had something else in mind. I crept forward inch by inch until I was little more than ten yards away, and then stopped. The tunnel was becoming too light, and I didn't dare go any further forward. I felt in my jacket pocket for the device, steeled myself, and then snapped forward at a sprint.

I got to within a couple of yards before either noticed me, and that was far enough. By the time they were rising to their feet I was vaulting onto the desk, judging my landing so that one foot kicked the guns off onto the floor. I spun round and kicked the lamp very firmly into the wall. It smashed, plunging the tunnel into utter darkness. Then I leapt off the desk and after a few yards hurled the device back in their general direction.

It hit the desk and detonated with a barely audible crump, and the two guards immediately started sneezing, coughing and sniffing.

Then I ran like hell. As I sprinted soundlessly up the tunnel I kept a listen out for sounds of pursuit, but they soon faded into the distance. A hacking cough reached me every now and then, but that was all.

The device I threw was a Flu Bomb. Anyone within a two-yard range when it detonates instantaneously goes down with a really dismal dose of flu. Runny nose, headache, chesty cough, aching muscles, the whole works. Not in the least fatal, but all you want to do is go home, wrap up warm and watch old films while drinking gallons of hot lemon and honey. The absolute last thing you feel like doing is pelting down a dark tunnel after some lunatic and possibly being shot in the process. It just doesn't appeal.

I knew they'd be back there somewhere, dutifully trudging up the pipe and miserably complaining to each other about the aches in their backs, but as far as catching me went, they were out of the frame.

After a few hundred yards the tunnel opened into a dimly-lit room, and as I sped through I noticed an elevator in one corner. That was obviously the way the guards got down here, but as it doubtless opened in a police station it was no use to me. After the room the tunnel returned to its previous size and I raced up it, knowing I didn't have much time.

After another quarter mile I came to a junction. Following Snedd's route I pelted up the left fork. The gradual upward slope of the pipe was levelling out, and I guessed that I was now only about a few yards below street level. I ignored the first ladder I passed, and the second, but when I came to the third I leapt up at it and shinned quietly to the top. Above me was a manhole, and I paused for the briefest of moments, forgetting about the Centre, about Red, about Sound and Natsci, and just thinking Stable, Stable, Stable.

The world is very small, I thought, and I like it that way. I'm very lucky and content to be here, because outside the wall is a lethal wasteland. I know, because I've seen it, heard about it, learnt about it in school. We tried expansion, tried to go further than we should, and look what happened. The whole thing was a complete disaster. No, I'm really very happy where I am. Oh look, it's eleven o'clock: think I'll go to bed.

Then I shoved the manhole up, moved it to the side and popped out onto the street.

'And finally, the main points again. The rate of inflation has fallen for the third month running, to 4.5 per cent.

'Colette Willis, gold medallist in the Stable Games, has broken the 100 metres breaststroke record for the fourth time.

'Scientists from the Principle Institute agree that estimates on levels of external toxicity may have to be revised upwards again. It now appears that the level of radiation outside Stable will remain at; fatal levels for at least another two hundred years.

'The weather: tomorrow will be a bright day, with light rain between 9.00 and 10.05 a.m.

That's it from us: we'll leave you with more footage of Gerald the talking duck. Goodnight.'

Half an hour later I was sitting nonchalantly in a cafe about a mile away, drinking a rather nice cup; of coffee, smoking a relaxed cigarette and reading the paper. Stable scientists had run yet more tests, I read, and were now sadly confident that it would be at least three hundred years before it was safe to go out. That story was on page six. Good news" about the economy was on the cover, sports pages two and three, and some duck that could talk took up most of four. Sooner or later I was going to have to get on with the job, but for the time being I felt I deserved a coffee. It was now twelve o'clock, after all, and I hadn't had one since leaving the apartment. I was in, I was alive, and everything was going according to plan.

Okay, I admit I was kind of lucky in the tunnel. Three guys with machine guns would have been more of a handful. The plan, if you're interested, was to throw the Flu Bomb so that it broke the light as it detonated, and then run and jump.

Would have been a bit touch and go, I admit, but there you are. What can I say? I had a lucky break for once: do you begrudge me that? Well, shut up then.

There were only three people in the backstreet into which I emerged from the tunnel, an old man with a dog and a young housewife pushing a baby in a pram. At first they did look mildly surprised to see me, but I had a plan.

'Well,' I said, dusting off my hands, 'you don't need to worry about that any more!'

They had no idea what I was talking about, of course, but it sounded reassuring so they forgot about the whole thing and went about their business. I strode confidently up the street, head held high, quietly content that everything was so nice in here when there was only a radioactive wasteland outside. I turned the corner into a busy shopping street and slowed my pace to an apparent dawdle, looking in the windows and taking in the scenery.

I say 'apparent' because though I took care to look like just one of the strolling masses out on a Saturday afternoon, I was actually making sure that I got some distance between the wall and myself.

Stable was actually rather nice, I decided. The ceiling of the Neighbourhood was so high that there was enough atmosphere and haze to partially obscure the fact that it was there at all. The wide streets had trees dotted along either side, and every now and then there was a little park. No one was using a portable phone or trying to one-up other people on their knowledge of staff motivation theory; they weren't using a prostitute or casually disposing of a body. They were just lolling about on the grass or walking their dogs.