But it was Philip who worried him. The old man looked just awful; a heavy woollen shawl wrapped round his thin frail shoulders, eyes that were yellow and glazed. His deterioration even over the five short days since the dinner party was quite obvious. He seemed to be having a great deal of trouble following the proceedings, his attention intermittent.

Julia shared Greg's opinion, judging by her expression. Her pretty oval face was pale and drawn, crestfallen. It looked as though she hadn't slept for days, her big tawny eyes were red-rimmed, never leaving her grandfather. He wondered if he'd asked too much from her, especially at this time.

"It was Kendric di Girolamo who organised the spoiler operation," Greg said. "The evidence which Julia has unearthed for us puts it beyond doubt."

The corners of her lips lifted in acknowledgement.

"My girl," Philip rumbled.

"We had two problems arise out of what we discovered," said Greg, "which when taken together cancel each other out. We already knew that with his control of High Shunt, Kendric could divert the memox crystals from the waste dump. But that left us with the question of how he could get hold of a Sanger to bring them back down to Earth. At five hundred million Eurofrancs each, it's too expensive for him to buy one, besides we'd know if the di Girolamo family house owned a spaceplane. And to hire one from a legitimate spaceline he would've had to list the cargo manifest, both for the operator and the spaceport authority. It would've been impossible for him to explain where the memox crystals originated from. Oh, he might've been able to do it once, or even twice. But not on a regular basis. The space industry is close knit, it knows itself. If he was bringing down three flights of memox crystals a month, the pilots and payload handlers would've started to ask questions."

"Then we have the second problem: why did he bother with the monolattice filament when he'd already corrupted the memox-furnace operators? Julia found the answer to that."

"After I found High Shunt was owned by the di Girolamo house, I took a closer look at all the other companies working up at Zanthus," she said, reading from her cube. Her voice was like a construct, level and droning. "The clincher was a company called Siebruk Orbital. It's the smallest one up at Zanthus, consisting of a single standard microgee module staffed by two technicians. They're listed as a research team investigating new vacuum-fabrication techniques."

"So?" Philip asked.

"Fabrication techniques," Greg said. "I think they're turning the monolattice filament into small re-entry capsules inside that module. Then they fill them with memox crystals and hand them back to High Shunt for a waste dump, retroburning them so they fall into the atmosphere."

"Siebruk Orbital belongs to Kendric?"