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the real reason for the advent of the Four Mile Circus in Green Bay. He jaunted and arrived in darkness
and empty space and immediately plummeted down.
`Christ!' he thought. `Mis-jaunted?'
The broken end of a rafter dealt him a bruising blow and he landed heavily on a shattered floor upon the
putrefying remains of a corpse.
Foyle leaped up in calm revulsion. He pressed hard with his tongue against his right upper first molar.
The operation that had transformed half his body into an electronic machine, had located the control
switchboard in his teeth. Foyle pressed a tooth with his tongue and the peripheral cells of his retina were
excited into emitting a soft light. He looked down two pale beams at the corpse of a man.
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The corpse lay in the apartment below Robin Wednesbury's flat. It was gutted. Foyle looked up. Above
him was a ten-foot hole where the floor of Robin's living-room had been. The entire building stank of fire,
smoke and rot.
`Jacked,' Foyle said softly. `This place has been jacked. What happened?'
The jaunting age had crystallized the hoboes, tramps and vagabonds of the world into a new class. It
followed the night from east to west, always in darkness, always in search of loot, the leavings of disaster,
carrion. If earthquake shattered a warehouse, they were jacking it the following night. If fire opened a
house or explosion split the defenses of a shop, they jaunted in and scavenged. They called themselves
Jack-Jaunters. They were jackals.
Foyle climbed up through the wreckage to the corridor on the floor above. The Jack-Jaunters had a
camp there. A whole calf roasted before a fire, which sparked up to the sky through a rent in the roof.
There were a dozen men and three women around the fire, rough, dangerous, jabbering in the cockney
rhyming slang of the jackals. They were dressed in mismatched clothes and drinking potato beer from
champagne glasses.
An ominous growl of anger and terror met Foyle's appearance as the big man in black came up through
the rubble, his intent eyes emitting pale beams of light. Calmly, he strode through the rising mob to the
entrance of Robin Wednesbury's flat. The iron control that he was making a habit gave him an air of
detachment.
`If she's dead,' he thought, `I'm finished. I've got to use her. But if she's dead . . .'
Robin's apartment was gutted like the rest of the building. The living-room was an oval of floor around
the jagged hole in the centre. Foyle searched for a body. Two men and a woman were in the bed in the
bedroom. The men cursed. The woman shrieked at the apparition. The men hurled themselves at Foyle.
He backed a step and pressed his tongue against his upper incisors. Neural circuits buzzed and every
sense and response in his body was accelerated by a factor of five.
The effect was an instantaneous reduction of the external world to extreme slow action. Sound became a
deep garble, color shifted down the spectrum to the red. The two assailants seemed to float towards him
with dream-like languor. To the rest of the world Foyle became a blur of action. He sidestepped the
blow inching towards him, walked around the man, raised him and threw him towards the crater in the
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living-room. He threw the second man. To Foyle's accelerated senses their bodies seemed to drift
slowly, still in mid-stride, fists inching forward, open mouths emitting heavy clotted sounds.
Foyle whipped to the women cowering in the bed.
`Wsthrabdy?' the blur asked.
The woman shrieked.
Foyle pressed his upper incisors again, cutting off the acceleration. The external world shook itself out of
slow motion back to normal. Sound and color leaped up the spectrum and the two jackals disappeared
through the crater and crashed into the apartment below.
`Was there a body?' Foyle repeated gently. `A Negro girl?'
The woman was unintelligible. He took, her by the hair and shook her, then hurled her through the crater
in the living room floor.
His search for a clue to Robin's fate was interrupted by the mob from the hall. They carried torches and
makeshift weapons. The Jack-Jaunters were not professional killers. They only worried defenseless prey
to death. `Don't bother me,' Foyle warned quietly, ferreting intently through closets and under overturned
furniture.
They edged closer, goaded by a ruffian in a mink suit and a tricorne hat, and inspired by the curses
percolating up from the floor below. The man in the tricorne threw a torch at Foyle. It burned him. Foyle
accelerated again and the Jack-Jaunters were transformed into living statues. Foyle picked up half a chair
and calmly clubbed the slow-motion figures. They remained upright. He thrust the man in the tricorne
down on the floor and knelt on him. Then he decelerated.
Again the external world came to life. The jackals dropped in their tracks, pole-axed. The man in the
tricorne hat and mink suit roared.
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