"The water's a little cold by now, isn't it?"

"Not as bad as in the spring."

"I'll pass, I think. It all sounds a bit youthfully athletic."

"Oh, this was a great place to be a kid." Miles thought it over. "There's fishing, I suppose. I never did much of that. Sergeant Bothari wasn't fond of cleaning fish."

"That sounds sedate enough."

"Tradition is, you take the local beer from the village—there's a woman there who home-brews it, extraordinary stuff—and hang the bottles over the side of the boat to stay cold. When the beer gets too warm to drink, it's too hot to fish."

"What season is that?"

"Never, as far as I could tell."

"Let us by all means observe tradition," said Illyan gravely.

It took half a day to get the power boat out of storage, which put them out on the lake in the hazy warmth of the next afternoon, instead of the foggy chill of the early morning. This suited Miles fine. The basic mechanics of fishing were not something Miles had forgotten, and he never had gone in for the refinements. The need for sticking hooks into wriggling unhappy live things had been technologically relieved by the invention of little protein cubes which, the package assured him, were guaranteed to attract fish in droves, or shoals, or whatever.

He and Illyan arranged their beer in a net bag over the side of the boat, and their awning overhead, and settled down to enjoy the peace and the view. The ImpSec guard on-shift, one of three assigned by HQ to trail Illyan around down here, got to sit on shore with a little pontoon-fitted lightflyer and watch from a distance, out of mind if not out of sight.

The two lines ploinked over the side nearly simultaneously, and the bait and sinkers disappeared into the water, gliding smoothly down. At this distance from the shore, the green view of the rocky bottom was replaced by a depth of black shadow. Miles and Illyan settled back in their padded chairs, and opened their first beers. The brew was smooth and nearly as dark as the lake waters, and doubtless swimming with vitamins. It slid down Miles's throat with a pleasantly bitter fizz, and its earthy aroma filled his nose.

"This would be more like a stakeout," Illyan remarked after a while, "if the fish were armed and could fire back. If fish fished for men, what kind of bait would they use?"

Miles pictured a line tossed onto the shore, tipped with a spiced peach tart. " 'Let's go manning?' I dunno. What kind of bait did you used to use?"