The latter function was of particular concern to Constable Moore on this 
morning. "It's been nasty of late,"
he said. "The fighting has been very bad." Nell had already inferred this 
from certain peculiarities of the Constable's behavior: he had been staying up 
late at night recently, managing some complicated enterprise spread out across 
his mediatronic floor, and she suspected that it was something along the lines 
of a battle or even a war.