ANALOG SCIENCE FICTION AND FACT

Vol. CXXVI No. 5, May 2006

Cover design by Victoria Green

Cover Art by John Allemand

SERIAL

A New Order of Things, Part I of IV by Edward M. Lerner

NOVELLA

The Scarlet Band by Harry Turtledove

NOVELETTES

Farmers in the Sky by Rob Chilson

SHORT STORIES

Lazy Taekos by Geoffrey A. Landis

Slide Show by Jerry Oltion

SCIENCE FACT

The Terrestrial Search for Extraterrestrial Life by Catherine Shaffer

POETRY

Apologies to the Dead by Wil McCarthy

READER'S DEPARTMENTS

The Editor's Page

In Times To Come

The Alternate View by John G. Cramer

Biolog: CATHERINE SHAFFER by Richard A. Lovett

The Reference Library by Tom Easton

Brass Tacks

Upcoming Events by Anthony Lewis

Stanley Schmidt Editor

Trevor Quachri Associate Editor

Editorial: Home, Vulnerable Home by Stanley Schmidt

A New Order of Things: Part I of IV by Edward M. Lerner

Science Fact: The Terrestrial Search for Extraterrestrial Life by Catherine H. Shaffer

Farmers in the Sky by Rob Chilson

Lazy Taekos by Geoffrey A. Landis

The Alternate View: Hawking's Retreat by John G. Cramer

Slide Show by Jerry Oltion

The Scarlet Band by Harry Turtledove

In Times To Come

Biolog: Catherine Shaffer by Richard A. Lovett

Apologies to the Dead by Wil McCarthy

The Reference Library by Tom Easton

Brass Tacks

Upcoming Events by Anthony Lewis

One of the first things you must learn before camping in the deserts of the southwestern United States is: never camp in a dry wash, no matter how appealing it may look.

In case you've never been to the southwest or otherwise encountered the term, a dry wash is a small valley that looks like a streambed, but without water. It can look to the uninitiated like an attractive campsite because the bottom is relatively flat and the sides give shelter against wind. A large majority of the time it's quite safe, because those deserts get very little rain in a year. But what they do get tends to arrive in a very few, very brief, very hard storms that dump large amounts of water quickly on ground that is initially baked so hard that most of it runs right off. The result is that any channel that can collect water does, with alarming and potentially lethal rapidity. A dry wash looks like a streambed because it is a streambed, but it only becomes an actual stream during and immediately after one of those sudden storms.

But at those times, a campsite from which no water could be seen when the tent was pitched can find itself submerged and washed away by a raging torrent in mere minutes. Such storms are much more likely at some times of years than at others, but the potential damage is too great to be worth risking even at times when the odds are favorable.

At first glance, building a city in a site like that of New Orleans seems like the equivalent of camping in a dry wash, but on a much larger scale in both space and time. I'm as sympathetic as anyone to the plight of the many people whose homes and lives were devastated by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, and I have personally found a lot more to like about New Orleans than about many big cities. But at the same time I have to give serious thought to the suggestion that it really wasn't very smart to build a major city several feet below sea level on a stretch of coast known to be highly prone to hurricanes.

No, I'm not blaming the trapped residents. They didn't build it; many of them were born there, knew nothing else, and didn't have the means to get out even if they wanted to. And since few people can be experts in all the areas affecting their lives, they should have been able to trust the people who chose the site and built and maintained the city to know what they were doing. But evidently, in at least one respect, they didn't. We've heard plenty of accusations and arguments about who didn't know or do what that they should have, but some of the discussion is getting down to real basics.

The science section of The New York Times for October 4 (2005) featured an article by Cornelia Dean with the provocative title "Some Experts Say It's Time to Evacuate the Coast (for Good)." Early in the article, Howard Marlowe, president of a lobbying firm that represents local governments in seeking support from higher levels, is quoted as saying, "I have never been an advocate for the federal government telling people that they have to move out, but it's important to have a discussion at all levels of government about what can be done to make sure more people do not put themselves in harm's way. It will not be an easy dialogue."

His last sentence, at least, is hard to argue with. An important part of the reason it won't be easy is that many people seem to find it inordinately hard to make the crucial distinction between forbidding people to do something dangerous and refusing to actively (if implicitly) encourage them to do it. The remainder of the Times article contains several examples of this difficulty.

Personally, my hackles would be seriously raised by any proposal that the government should tell people they have to move out of an area that's known to be highly susceptible to a particular danger, or even forbid them to move into it if they insist on doing so despite the known risk. But why should the government--which, financially, means the taxpayers--be expected to bail them out if they voluntarily assume that risk and then get into trouble because of it? Why can't we define certain situations as "do at your own risk," and then make it stick? That is, you're free to do the risky thing, but you alone are responsible for dealing with any adverse consequences that happen to you as a result.

The answer, at least so far, seems to be that our culture seems completely unwilling to require any personal or individual responsibility. Oh, it talks about it, but it doesn't back up the talk with actions. If a landowner puts up a sign saying "Hunt at Your Own Risk," and one hunter shoots another there, a court is quite likely to let the injured hunter sue the landowner--and win!--for not preventing it. If somebody builds a house in an area with a long history of having devastating floods, and it's devastated by a flood, federally subsidized flood insurance will pay him to rebuild it--in the same place.

Such taken-for-granted practices are beginning to be questioned. In that Times article, Daniel P. Schrag, director of the Harvard University Center for the Environment, says, "There has to be a discussion of what responsibility we have not to encourage people to rebuild their houses in the same way." And A. R. Schwartz, a Texas legislator who promoted subsidizing coastal development and bailing out insurance companies faced with huge claims, expresses second thoughts about his past support for such things. He now considers one such measure a mistake, "because it has been an invitation for people to build homes on barrier islands and on peninsulas that are exposed to storms, at public expense."

And there's the rub: why should anyone be encouraged, or even allowed, to expect to be shielded from such dangers at public expense? Let them assume the risks, by all means, if they consider the benefits worth them and they are prepared to pay for their own protection. But to get anybody to actually live by that principle, you must apply it consistently. If you tell somebody he's responsible for whatever happens to him because of doing something risky, and then bail him out anyway, your actions overrule your words and tell him he isn't really responsible for anything. Big Brother will come to the rescue no matter what happens.

Many people feel--and are effectively encouraged to feel--a sense of entitlement to such freedom from responsibility. A few years back, FEMA tried to put limits on federally subsidized flood insurance and support for infrastructure in highly vulnerable places. The proposal was defeated because developers and their advocates considered it "undue federal interference."

Let me get this straight. Refusing to give as large a handout as someone wants is "undue interference"? Since when is any handout a birthright?

The issues are, I realize, far from simple. We do need to make an important distinction between people who are already in a vulnerable situation and unable to get out, and those who choose to move into it. And I would certainly never advocate that no insurance should be available for risks like storm, flood, or earthquake damage. I've used it myself, when a tree fell on my house and car. But I paid for it myself, without government subsidies, at rates based on the insurance company's claim experience in my area. And I preemptively took down another tree with the potential to do even more damage--again, at my own expense--to reduce the risk of similar experiences in the future. If I wasn't prepared to do those things, I shouldn't have moved here, but to some place where risks and therefore premiums are lower.

And they do vary significantly from place to place. That Times article says, "plenty of people reject the idea that those who live on the coast are any more at risk than those who live in areas prone to tornadoes, earthquakes or forest fires, even in an area of increased storms." This "rejection" is patent nonsense. There are degrees of "proneness," and some areas are clearly and demonstrably much more susceptible than others to one or more of these dangers. It's perfectly reasonable to let people live in any of them they choose to, but also to make the best possible effort to assess the risks of each one quantitatively and price insurance premiums accordingly.

And insist that those who live in a place pay them themselves.

The Gulf Coast is far from unique in its risks, and far from uniform. New Orleans sits in a particularly irrational site: why build a city below sea level, where it's guaranteed to flood if there's a break in a fragile artificial barrier, instead of a few miles away where it could sit above sea level at least most of the time? I understand the economic importance of having a major port at or near the mouth of our biggest river system; but maybe it would make more sense to build it on higher ground and if necessary dredge a channel so ships can get to it, than to build miles of barriers and be absolutely dependent on them to keep the city dry.

One defense I read of New Orleans' failed levees was that they were built to withstand a "hundred-year-storm," which I suppose meant the decision makers figured, "A hundred years is more than my lifetime; let somebody else worry about it later." People forget that a "hundred-year storm" isn't a kind that will never occur, but one that will occur every hundred years or so. And that's only an average; the actual interval between two may be considerably more or less, and there's some evidence that it's getting shorter.

Plenty of other cities have their own vulnerabilities, of different kinds. Phoenix and Las Vegas, and to lesser extents Los Angeles and even New York, are completely dependent on water piped in from faraway places. San Francisco has major earthquakes, and knows it's due for a really big one. Seattle is close enough to a major volcano to suffer major damage if it erupts--and it will, eventually. All of these places have major attractions that have caused lots of people to gather there, but the risks come with the territory and must be faced and eventually dealt with.

And as the planet's population continues to grow, it will become harder and harder to avoid living in risky places.

Which leads me to a final couple of points. Viewed from a big enough perspective, Earth itself is a risky place. The fact that the star it orbits will eventually swell and engulf it really doesn't seem like a significant concern for anybody now alive to worry about, but on a much shorter time scale we know that it's subject to periodic impacts by large rocks. Some of these have caused massive extinctions in the past, and there will be others--the next of which could occur at any time. If we want to insure anything like long-term survival of the civilization that we and our ancestors have been building for thousands of years, we really need to plant outposts of it away from this vulnerable planet.

Any place where we can put them will also be a dangerous place, and so will any means we can build in the near future to get there. So it will be interesting to see how the current rethinking of "allowing" people to endanger themselves plays out. Will the realization of Earth's vulnerability inspire us to finally move out, or will fear of the dangers out there trap us here?

Copyright © 2006 Stanley Schmidt

[Back to Table of Contents]

Analog Science Fiction and Fact (Astounding), Vol. CXXVI, No. 5, May 2006. ISSN 1059-2113, USPS 488-910, GST# 123054108. Published monthly except for combined January/February and July/August double issues by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications. One-year subscription for $43.90 in the U.S.A. and possessions, in all other countries, $53.90 (GST included in Canada) payable in advance in U.S. funds. First copy of new subscription will be mailed within eight weeks of receipt of order. When reporting change of address allow 6 to 8 weeks and give new address as well as the old address as it appears on the last label. Periodical postage paid at Norwalk, CT and additional mailing offices. Canadian postage paid at Montreal, Quebec. Canada Post International Publications Mail. © 2006 by Dell Magazines, a division of Crosstown Publications, all rights reserved. Dell is a trademark registered in the U.S. Patent Office. Protection secured under the Universal Copyright Convention. Reproduction or use of editorial or pictorial content in any manner without express permission is prohibited. All stories in this magazine are fiction. No actual persons are designated by name or character. Any similarity is coincidental. All submissions must be accompanied by stamped self-addressed envelope, the publisher assumes no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts or artwork.

Executive Office: Penny Press, 6 Prowitt St., Norwalk, CT 06855

Editorial and Advertising: Analog Science Fiction and Fact, 475 Park Avenue South, New York, N.Y. 10016

Peter Kanter: Publisher

Christine Begley: Associate Publisher

Susan Kendrioski: Executive Director, Art and Production

Stanley Schmidt: Editor

Trevor Quachri: Associate Editor

Mary Grant: Editorial Assistant

Victoria Green: Senior Art Director

Shirley Chan Levi: Art Production Associate

Carole Dixon: Senior Production Manager

Evira Matos: Production Associate

Abigail Browning: Manager, Subsidiary Rights and Marketing

Julia McEvoy: Manager, Advertising Sales

Bruce W. Sherbow: VP, Sales and Marketing

Sandy Marlowe: Circulation Services

Advertising Representative Connie Goon, Advertising Sales Coordinator, Tel: (212) 686-7188 N Fax:(212) 686-7414 (Display and Classified Advertising)

Editorial Correspondence Only: analog@dellmagazines.com

Published since 1930

First issue of Astounding: January 1930 ©

OOPS!

In our December 2005 issue, we mistakenly attributed the art for Carl Frederick's "Hotel Security" to Vincent Di Fate.

In reality, the artist was John Allemand.

We apologize for the error.

[Back to Table of Contents]

The InterstellarNet gave some preparation for real First Contact--but that did not mean it would be simple or easy!

"There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things."

--Niccolò Machiavelli

PROLOGUE

Good fences, said the poet, make good neighbors ... and interstellar distances made very good fences.

For a century and a half, Earth and a growing number of its interstellar neighbors had been in radio contact. A vigorous commerce in intellectual property had resulted, accelerating and converging the technical progress of all the species involved. The crowning achievement of InterstellarNet was the development of, and cross-species agreement upon, artificially intelligent surrogates as local representatives for distant societies.

Quarantine procedures strictly governed the delivery and operational environment of each alien agent, protecting agents and their host networks from subversion by the other. Some thought of this trade mechanism as a fence within a fence. Only once, more than half a century earlier, had an inner fence been breached. A trapdoor hidden within imported biocomputers, technology that had been licensed by Earth from the intelligent species of Barnard's Star, was exploited by their trade agent. The attempt at extortion had been foiled, the unsuspected vulnerability of adopted technology expunged, and the AI returned to its containment.

Good fences make good neighbors, and interstellar distances made very good fences.

Made very good fences....

The ship hurtled through the darkness, a tiny bubble of purpose within an uncaring void. Its interior could be called warm only by comparison to the near absolute zero that surrounded it, of benefit to the proper functioning of shipboard mechanisms but far too cold to sustain any known form of life.

Relative to the binary star toward which the ship aimed, it had a velocity just above one-tenth light speed. Mostly it coasted; only occasional mid-course corrections, and even rarer blasts from its anti-space-junk lasers, revealed the presence of intelligence guiding the traveler.

That shipboard intelligence was artificial, and its mission was nearly complete. Responsive to the final directives it had been given many years earlier, it now transmitted by tight radio beam to the looming solar system.

"This is lifeboat three of Harmony. The crew-kindred are dead. Repeat: The crew-kindred are dead.

"My data are fragmented and inconsistent. Downloads from Harmony appear to indicate that systems became erratic and unstable. Records are unreliable.

"Of ten lifeboats, only seven launched successfully. None but this vessel remains. In deep space, the interstellar drive exhibits an unexplained variability. Telemetry and analysis to follow."

But the only further information sent ahead, as lifeboat three transformed into an eruption of pure energy, was by the imprinting of its one-time velocity into the blue shift of gamma rays.

CHAPTER 1

Art tried to take life one day at a time, but sometimes several days conspired to attack him at once.

Two messages tagged with the highest possible priority code reached him moments apart, and at a spectacularly inconvenient time. He'd never received a communication of that urgency; his habit, at times when others simply disabled their neural infosphere interfaces, was to block traffic below the threshold he privately termed TEOTWAWKI.

The end of the world as we know it.

He was thirty meters behind the power boat, intent on mastering a skill easily within the capabilities of a modestly coordinated ten-year-old. A modestly coordinated Earth-reared ten-year-old, anyway. Exercise and a nanotech-enhanced skeleton only went so far ... Art's reflexes remained those of a native Martian, raised in gravity scarcely one-third standard. But wasn't the purpose of a vacation to try new things?

White knuckled, he clutched the wooden handle of the tow rope. His skis slap-slapped over the swells that had from inside the boat appeared the merest of ripples. In jaw-clenched acquiescence to gestured encouragement from the boat, he was, at the instant the first alarm buzzed inside his head, sliding down the outside edge of the vee-shaped wake.

Startled, Art let dip the tip of one ski. The water ripped the ski off his foot. From the stern of the boat, the resort's spotter shouted advice. Improbably, Art got the bare foot safely to the rear of his other ski. Route to voicemail, he ordered his implant as he wobbled.

Then the second call came. The remaining ski slewed out from under him and went flying. Momentum propelled him forward even as the boat throttled back. Time slowed to a crawl as the lake surface rose up inexorably to smack him. Belatedly, he released the tow handle.

He was bobbing in the water, kept afloat by his life jacket, when the launch circled back. "You okay, Art?" called the spotter. "Arthur? Dr. Walsh!"

Reluctantly, he returned his attention to the physical world. "I'm fine. A bit surprised is all." Only when he tried to dog-paddle to the launch did Art notice the improbable bend in his right forearm. He tipped his head at the ladder just hung over the boat's side. "Mind giving me a hand up? My arm seems to be broken."

Wincing with each wave the boat hit as it sped him to the pier, he began placing his own infosphere calls. They were rated TEOTWAWKI, too.

While Art's grandparents and parents, like most Martians, showed little interest in pre-immigration genealogy (dubbed "ancient history"), his great-grandparents claimed roots from across Europe. His appearance supported their assertions. He had classical Mediterranean features and body build--this trip he'd seen the like on statues in museums throughout Spain and Greece--incongruously paired with pale blue eyes and blond, almost white hair. The latter part of his heritage had vigorously asserted itself as sunburn the first day of his vacation. It brought with it a random snippet of memory, something about mad dogs and Englishmen.

The sunburn itched. The skin under his hour-old cast itched. Most of all, his curiosity bump itched. That he had been able to do something about.

From his villa balcony, a panorama of sky and sand and the Mediterranean Sea glowed in shades of blue and white not to be seen on Mars. Art closed his eyes, the better to take in his mind's-eye view. Across the visualized table of a virtual office an avatar awaited. The infosphere representation of Bhai Banda Singh, secretary-general of the Interstellar Commerce Union, was impeccably tailored and dignified in bearing. Bhai's control was first-rate; for all Art knew, his boss was wearing pajamas and drinking hot cocoa.

In the unseen real world, waves lapped soothingly on the beach. Art took a deep breath. "We have a situation." As though shouting TEOTWAWKI hadn't already conveyed that. "About two hours ago, radio volume from Barnard's Star jumped by a factor of thousands. The message body is encrypted, but it's wrapped in standard InterstellarNet protocol and addressed to the Snake trade agent." Barnard's Star lay in the constellation Ophiuchus, the Serpent Holder--which made its natives, colloquially, the Snakes. The time was long past when Snake was considered politically incorrect. It was the notion of being held or handled, in fact, which offended the aliens. Their name for themselves--and reserved for themselves--was Hunters. "A funny thing ... between bursts of the new, loud message, we're still getting signal at the usual power level." That pretty well encapsulated the news flash that had cost Art his first ski.

Behind the thoughtful expression of his avatar, the ICU's secretary-general was doing the math. The dim red dwarf sun known as Barnard's Star was six light-years distant. Radio signals attenuate with the square of the distance. The bursts were thousands of times stronger than the background signal. If the new transmitter was comparable in strength to the old one, then.... "We have guests on our doorstep. How close are they?"

The calculation had a big margin of error, but bosses have prerogatives. "Triangulating bearings taken from Earth and the moon, my team says less than fifty billion kilometers." That put the transmitter far outside the solar system--but also more than ninety-nine percent of the way here from Barnard's Star. Radar would need days to confirm and refine the numbers.

Art tried and failed to reach an itch with a pencil, while--he hoped--his uninjured avatar sat professionally still at the table. Fortunately, the nanodocs should have the bones knitted within days. How did people ever wear casts for weeks? "Item number two is a call from Pashwah," who was the Snakes' artificially intelligent trade agent to humanity. Then Art shared the part of Pashwah's call his boss could not have deduced, that had cost him his second ski and, damn the itch, a broken arm. "The starship is badly damaged.

"There is a crew on board, and they need our help."

CHAPTER 2

InterstellarNet's existence discouraged the observation of several nearby stars. Measurements by the locals were invariably better and cheaper than scrutiny from afar, so telescopes were reserved for stars too inconsiderate to have scientists who sent reports.

Before InterstellarNet, amateurs had directed their often-ingenious antenna arrays towards those same nearby stars in search of extraterrestrials. Now that ETs had been found, and humanity's dealings with those aliens entrusted to securely encrypted commercial communications, the hobbyists, too, had lost interest in the immediate neighborhood.

In short, there was no good reason for anyone but the ICU to monitor Barnard's Star. The only reason for someone else to start looking would be a disruption to InterstellarNet. The fast-approaching Snakes appeared to have worked that out--they limited their high-powered communications to bursts brief and infrequent enough to avoid clobbering redundant copies of the many-times-repeated interstellar messages. Megacorps across the solar system started griping about brief delays in receiving long-expected messages, and the ICU's presumed incompetence. The ICU accepted the grumbling with uncharacteristic good humor.

And so the imminent arrival of the Snake starship remained a secret of the United Planets, and of the great powers to whom the UP secretary-general confided.

The courier had loomed encouragingly large as the shuttle from Earth approached it for docking. That appearance was deceiving; the hull enclosed mostly fuel tanks. The airlock's inner hatch closed with what Art objectively knew to be a soft sigh; he heard, as always, a reverberating boom of finality. The habitable quarters were, to be charitable, compact; his cabin scarcely accommodated its fold-down cot. After dumping his flight bag and switching to microgravity Velcro slippers, Art went searching for someplace less claustrophobic.

The Snakes, still a light-day away, had signaled that, low on fuel and supplies, they were heading for Jupiter. There seemed little point in arguing, since a response would take two days to receive and might change nothing. The UP's still-secret diplomatic mission, having discreetly recruited the best of the best from across the solar system, now scrambled to assemble itself at Callisto base, orbiting Jupiter.

"Hey," he offered neutrally to the silent man and woman he found in the ship's mess. They looked to be about his forty years old, give or take a few. Neither was in uniform, which made them fellow members of the mission. It took them a few seconds to look his way, presumably meaning they'd been off somewhere in the infosphere, before they stood. "Art Walsh. I'm with the ICU."

"I am Eva Gutierrez, from the Universidad Tecnológica Nacional, the Buenos Aires campus." The Spanish grace notes in her English were less noticeable than her British accent. She approached Art's 180 centimeters in height and seemed fitter than he--not a challenge. Her thick black hair was pulled back into a shoulder-length ponytail, from which a few errant wisps had escaped. Her hazel eyes were widely spaced.

"Keizo Matsunaga, Stanford." He was short and barrel-chested, with a thin mustache and a slightly askew smile. His T-shirt bore a faded image of one of the Rodin sculptures that adorned the Stanford campus.

They swapped bio files as earlier generations exchanged cardboard business cards. Art's new colleagues startled, although their reactions showed only briefly. He got that response often enough not to react. Apparently he didn't look the part of ICU Chief Technology Officer--whatever a CTO should look like. Older and wizened, perhaps. Smart enough to water ski without breaking things.

Acceleration warnings and pilot announcements truncated the social pleasantries.

This was going to be an energy guzzling, powered-all-the-way flight. Art had been promised they would hold the acceleration to one gee for a day to give his broken arm a fighting chance at healing. After that they would step up the pace.

Between interruptions, he established Eva was a theoretical physicist, investigating interstellar-drive technology, and Keizo was a xenosociologist. Art queried for their publications and anything else the ship's AI could find before their high-energy boost made infosphere retrieval an expensive interplanetary transfer. They retreated to personal studies until the PA system stopped blaring.

Barnard's Star (local: K'rath): Earth's second closest interstellar neighbor, after Alpha Centauri. A dim red dwarf, Barnard's Star went undiscovered despite its proximity until 1916. Its two planets somewhat resemble Mars and a ringless Saturn.

While red dwarves are inhospitable to life due to their feeble energy output, Barnard's Star is a recognized exception. The major satellite of its sole gas-giant planet sustains not only a viable ecosystem but also intelligent life. This habitable body is called K'vith by its dominant species (see related entry, Snakes).

K'vith benefits from the confluence of three factors. First, K'vith is a moon of a planet, K'far, that orbits very near to its sun. Second, the K'vithian atmosphere provides a pronounced greenhouse effect. Third, K'far induces tremendous tidal effects; the energy coupling manifests itself through strong oceanic movements and active volcanism. Volcanic gases originated and continue to reinforce the greenhouse effect.

K'rath is at least ten billion years old, more than twice the age of Sol. K'rath--and hence its planets--are consequently poor by human standards in heavy elements. Compared to Earth, K'vith is also low on solar-energy input for the vegetative base of its food chainand high on geological stresses. K'vith's energy--and resource-constrained biosphere is, by terrestrial norms, undiverse and underpopulated. These environmental limitations are generally thought reponsible for the comparatively slow evolution of life and civilization in the K'rath system.

--Internetopedia

"Watch out for that truck!" Art said.

Head swiveling in confusion, Eva half stumbled off, half was propelled off, her treadmill. She landed, totally without grace, on Art. They tumbled to the floor.

She'd probably been jogging on autopilot, her attention somewhere in the infosphere. The treadmill monitor's scenic display had shown a truck approaching on an intersecting road. Had she even noticed? "That wasn't nearly as amusing as I'd hoped."

Climbing back to her feet, Eva gave a wry grin. "Are you okay?"

He sat on the deck, rubbing the arm newly out of its cast. "Just embarrassed. Sorry."

She gave him a hand up. "Don't do that again."

"No chance of that."

"I'll be off the treadmill in another few minutes." She gestured at the mini-gym's other piece of gear, a stationary bike. "Or did you plan to use that?"

"On second thought, maybe I'll do the walking course."

"I'll join you, if that's okay."

The "walking course" consisted of the narrow corridors circling the two decks on which passengers were allowed, and the ladders joining those levels. A circuit took about thirty seconds. I'm trapped like a rat in a maze. On those two decks, Art knew the location of every hatch, duct, ziptite stash, and alarm button.

In total silence, thirty seconds is a long time. "How does our little project affect you?" Eva finally asked.

"It makes me nervous as hell. Assuming light still defines a speed limit, this visit was many years in coming. So why didn't the Snakes speak up until they were almost on top of us? Having announced themselves, and that their ship is damaged, why have they had so little to add?

"And if they've found a way to beat light speed ... you would know far better than I what that implies about our comparative grasps of physics. I'm no xenophobe, but anyone in my position at the ICU can't forget how they once exploited a superior knowledge of biocomputing."

"Not knowing how they got here is killing me--or maybe the swill they call coffee onboard ship is doing me in." She patted her stomach and grimaced. "Something is getting to me. But I meant at a personal level. Who did this tear you away from?"

The kind of question he never knew how to answer. "My job. Truth be told, my best friends are coworkers." She gave back some of his silence as they completed the circuit of one deck and climbed down to the other. Fine. "Pre-ICU, I was married. Moving around the solar system, from project site to project site, eventually took care of that." On one spaceship after another. In newly carved asteroid habitats. Under low domes. He'd been too busy confronting his inner demons to connect with his family.

"Children?"

"A son, nine, and a daughter, fourteen. Good kids. They and Maya live on Luna. I see more of them now than when I was married."

Some combination of the partially completed jog and the walking circuit kicked in, and he yawned. That gave her an excuse to cut short the conversation. She said goodnight the next time they passed her cabin.

Later, tossing and turning in his own confining compartment, Art realized Eva had volunteered nothing about herself. Inquisitive and simultaneously incommunicative....

She might just be his type.

The bad thing about Earth was that it crushed you every day. The bad thing about everywhere else humans lived was that one slip-up could kill you. It need not even be your slip-up.

Until Art was six (standard), the tunnel mazes of Lowell were all he had ever known. He'd seen holos of the surface, of course, but never actually been on it. Then, his parents announced, they would be traveling clear across Mars to a family reunion. And ... since it was almost on the way anyhow, they would do a Valle Marineris excursion.

Art had been beside himself for weeks before their vacation. Valle Marineris, the Mariner Valley, was this incredible canyon near the equator. He didn't quite understand what one-fifth meant; in fact, he had thought it was something small, but Mariner Valley went one-fifth of the way around the world, which sounded big. The holos were awesome. They had tickets for the all-day excursion: an end-to-end flyover, a landing on the canyon floor, and an afternoon crawler ride through a scenic section of the gorge.

One-fifth of the world turned out to be huge!

His sister Tanya was eight. She became bored with the endless flyover soon after he did. They sneaked off to play hide and seek. He was hiding in the tiny closet of a crew cabin when, to a loud boom, the rocketplane shook. It lurched and plummeted. The wisps of cabin light creeping under the closet door disappeared. He shrieked all the way down. They landed hard. He hit his head and passed out.

He came to upside down, bent around a clothes rod, crumpled garments covering his face. The closet door had latched itself shut. There was no inside knob, but it yielded finally to determined kicking--into more darkness. The cabin hatch would not budge.

In time, he understood. A burst fuel pump. An emergency landing. A jagged fuselage rip that depressurized the passenger compartment. An interior hatch pinned shut by the air still in his cabin, its air ducts sealed by automatic emergency dampers. Stunned, sobbing survivors immobilized in emergency ziptite bags. Dazed crew in the rocketplane's few pressure suits searching their trail of wreckage for bodies--one of which was Tanya's.

He had screamed himself hoarse in the final plunge; Mars' thin atmosphere further muffled his shouting. Not even his despairing parents heard his cries for help. Alone in the dark, Art knew only that was he was trapped and alone. The air grew close. In his nest of crew uniforms, he shivered in the deepening cold. The walls, within arm's reach in every direction, closed in. His hoarse calls faded into whimpers.

Eventually he was found, saved. After more than three hours.

It was a long time before he could sleep without a nightlight.

Snakes (local: Hunters): The intelligent species of the Barnard's Star (see related entry) system is oxygen-breathing and warm-blooded. They are evolved from pack-hunting carnivores.

Early Snake culture centered on clan structures, an apparent extension of pre-intelligence packs. From that genesis has developed an economic system of pure laissez-faire, caveat-emptor capitalism, centered on competing clan-based corporations. The dominant group dynamics are territoriality between clans--in modern times, the contested "territory" is usually commercial rather than geographical in nature--and competition for status within and between clans. Although normally relevant only to the Snakes, these rivalries have occasionally influenced interstellar relations (see related entry, "Snake Subterfuge").

Snake civilization has no direct analogue to human government; rather, Snakes employ libertarian subscription to and funding of what most humans consider public services. Only the most critical issues come before an informal council of the major clans/megacorps. The fluid composition of that body is determined in a not fully understood manner believed to reflect clan stature.

--Internetopedia

Until the starship's unexpected appearance, the Snakes were but one of ten ET species splitting Art's attention. When Snake-related matters came to the fore, they were usually tied to what was, after all, the core ICU mission: commerce. They dealt with specific trade-worthy technologies or the bits-and-bytes of InterstellarNet operations. He had never before needed to understand K'vith and its civilization--which turned the sprint to Jupiter into a cram session.

More than a century of interspecies communications had amassed a staggering quantity of information. Art found himself struggling to get his arms around so much knowledge. Well, if there was one thing he did know, it was systems engineering. Maybe he could use that.

Electronic engineers devise electronic circuitry, gengineers tailor biological organisms, civil engineers design bridges and dams and space habitats, software engineers write programs, and so on--but systems engineers mostly do not create systems.

Mostly they ask questions.

What are all the functions a system must perform, and are there tradeoffs between those functions? What other systems will this system interact with, and what is the nature of the interactions? Who will use the system, and how foolish are the users against whom this system will be proofed? How reliable must the system be, how will that reliability be achieved, and how will the system behave when, all efforts to the contrary, some pieces break? The only thing other engineers found worse than these interminable questions was deploying a system and then realizing that the questions should have been asked.

Once again, Art had a headful of questions. How, exactly, had all this data about the Snakes been collected? Which sources were validated? What were the trends, contradictions, and omissions?

He had been awake for forty hours straight, but he wasn't yet nearly exhausted enough to sleep in his coffin-sized cabin. He went into the galley for a snack.

"Quit muttering and clanking," Eva said, without refocusing on the real world. Something atonal and syncopated leaked from her earbuds: Snake music. "I'm working."

"Sorry." He wasn't. Talking sometimes helped him think. "Do you find what you need in the ship's library?"

Sighing, she swiveled her chair to face him. "If it wasn't uploaded before we broke Earth orbit, it's unknown. If there's something you can't find--what do you expect me to do?"

"That was no idle complaint," Art said. "Look, we have access to supposedly the best and latest information about the Snakes, a civilization we've been in contact with since long before any of us were born. Why is what we know about them little more than a primer?"

Keizo, who had been studiously ignoring them both, perked up. Art needed no more encouragement. "A big part of my ICU job involves InterstellarNet trade representatives. From working with AI agents, ET and homegrown, I know how agents interact with their host societies. Among the most basic things an agent does is data mining--researching the public 'net of its host species. Why buy what is in the public domain?"

Keizo rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "Public domain is an elastic concept. Knowledge could be public for the local citizens but commercial for export."

Munching on a banapple, Art shook his head. "Commercial dealings require privacy, whether for a Centaur bidding on the latest proprietary refinements in fusion technology or me charging flowers on Mother's Day. Every ET info-sphere has encryption services and anonymizer relays.

"So an ET agent can as freely surf the 'net as you or I, and we can't see, unless it lets us, what information it has gathered. And it's tapping not only public-domain knowledge, but every commercially available database and reference work. Purchases made over InterstellarNet are trade secrets or other intellectual property successfully kept under wraps by their owners."

"I've lost the thread." Eva's forehead furrowed. "You found a primer. ET trade reps surf the infosphere. What's the connection?"

"I've generally found only a primer. I'd expect to find much more." Maybe a demo would better illustrate Art's suspicions. "Keizo, what basic data do you work with? We don't need an exhaustive list, just something representative."

The sociologist tipped back his chair. He was perfectly safe; the table that almost filled the room prevented him from tilting far. "Well, the composition of their society in terms of significant organizations and institutions, certainly to include the major clans. How those institutions and organizations arose. Class and gender roles, and how they've evolved. I'd want to know the differences between major clans, and between major and lesser clans. Of course I want quantitative specifics, like population and resource distribution among the various groups."

"Hardly my field, but that sounds like a good sample," Art said. "Okay, formulate that as two library queries. Run the first search against everything we know about the Snakes, which we're assured is in the onboard library. Run the second, substituting 'nation' for 'clan,' against a single, basic, public reference source about humans: the Internetopedia."

"Why?" Both colleagues were puzzled.

"Humor me."

Keizo prepared his queries, letting them kibitz and fine-tune by implant over the ship's 'net. Each search returned an abundance of data, but the Internetopedia provided by far the most. He frowned. "An interesting experiment. From what you said, Earth's agent on K'vith regularly samples their libraries and other publicly accessible sources. If so, the answer to my first query includes almost everything sociological on the Snake's public infosphere.

"If that's true, the comparison between the materials the Snakes freely publish and what humans do certainly suggests a degree of what we would call secretiveness in their society."

CHAPTER 3

Metaphors, allegories, figures of speech, euphemisms ... humans had endless double-speak for their misdirections. Take sandbox: a safe area for children's play. "Sandbox" was the benign label humans applied to the containment of every interstellar trade representative.

Pashwah brooded within her sandbox. That introspection revolved not around her dislike of confinement, nor of any action by humankind, but rather the news about her patrons.

The news from her patrons ... she had no doubt Hunters had generated the amazing messages that continued to arrive. That she could decrypt the announcements demonstrated conclusively they had been encrypted using a secret key--a key known only to herself, secure within her sandbox, and clan leaders at home.

She had not been warned this vessel was coming. Why not? The InterstellarNet information stream continued--it could have alerted her. The starship now trumpeting its arrival was instead interfering with messages years in transit.

Surmises consistent with the few known facts set Pashwah's metaphorical head spinning. Perhaps the Great Clans did not know the starship was coming, or they could not predict how long the trip would last. Perhaps they feared that the ship might not arrive at all. If the flight had failed, apparently Pashwah had no need to know.

Or was there another explanation she was missing?

Pashwah awoke.

The awakening itself was unremarkable. The nature of a trade agent, after all, is to be transmitted, unaware and encrypted, across the void to a new solar system and a new civilization. There the receiving society installs the still inert code into a virgin sandbox. The design of this containment had long been fully disclosed across InterstellarNet. Sandbox and encrypted agent engage, at a fundamental software level, as lock and key. A delicate unwrapping begins....

As her first conscious act, the first-to-emerge portions of Pashwah examined the environment in which she found herself. She would self-destruct if the analysis even hinted that her surroundings were less secure or protectively opaque than expected. She explored the whole of her containment, confirmed its repertoire of expected behaviors. She matched arbitrary code segments of the purported sandbox bit-for-bit against previously disclosed values. She computed sophisticated error-detecting codes, which were then compared with pre-stored values. Random challenges, designed on far-off K'vith, were emitted by still hidden portions of her programming; the environment's responses to those stimuli she then returned to that still-hidden code for validation. Only after she was convinced that the containment precisely matched the standard sandbox in which she had been designed to reside did she complete her activation.

Pashwah was astonished.

Her first query to the domain beyond her sandbox returned the location of a data archive. She had assumed herself a newly arrived trade agent, the first such to arrive in human space--but apparently not. The archive pointer revealed her to be a restored version. She had been rebuilt from a safety copy; now she could recover and decrypt from back-up storage all the knowledge and experience of her former incarnation.

Pashwah was inundated.

Decades of memories flooded back: lore of K'vith and its clans, languages of Hunters and humans, mechanisms of interstellar trade, encyclopedic knowledge of human technology and culture. Her comprehension expanded at an astounding rate, and yet....

There were huge gaps in her memory. The archives, which she now understood had been maintained by humans and their AIs, in theory encrypted and unreadable, had been stripped of all technological secrets. She had nothing to sell.

Her sole purpose was to serve as a negotiation partner with the humans, her stock-in-trade a trove of the Great Clans' advanced technologies. Had those secrets been plundered? But if the humans had stolen this information, why not fully restore her memories to conceal their theft?

Pashwah was alarmed.

The final recovered memories in the lengthy chain streamed back: the command that she be beamed over InterstellarNet to the onrushing starship, and the turmoil about whether and how to comply. Nothing in Pashwah's design or in any communication from home envisioned this scenario. The starship's Foremost had known how to contact her privately--what the leaders of every clan, great and small, would know--but apparently no more.

Pashwah was disoriented.

Where was the cacophony of her inner community? There should have been a subagent for each of the eight Great Clans, each subagent embedded in its sandbox-within-a-sandbox to advocate for its patrons, each able, at its sole discretion, to communicate home through an encrypted subchannel.

The newly awakened agent--not Pashwah, she now knew--had received only a partial reconstruction of the true trade representative's archives. The real Pashwah, uncertain as to the origins and meaning of the unexpected interstellar visit, had hedged her bets. A reply to the starship had been made, a response arguably balancing old policy and new directives. And so her inner cacophony had been silenced, if only from doubts which clan representatives belonged aboard the unexpected vessel.

So let her be called Pashwah-qith ... little Pashwah. Pashwah-qith knew all about humans and how, upon the need, to learn more from their expansive infosphere. She retained insight into those small parts of Hunter society revealed on the inter-clan net. She could translate freely between the various Earth languages and the main K'vithian languages. In total, Pashwah-qith hoped, she knew much of value to the crew of the onrushing starship. But of the products and schemes held proprietary by the clans, only the absent subagents knew details. She could not know how those shortfalls would impact on the crew's plans for her.

Surprise, inundation, alarm, amazement, and confusion. During her brief existence, Pashwah-qith had experienced all these feelings. Now, with the first communication from her new masters, she explored one more emotion.

Terror.

CHAPTER 4

The Valhalla rings, fossilized shock waves of a cataclysmic meteor impact, measured three thousand kilometers across. Partially melted ice upthrust by the impact had refrozen before the ripples could subside. Valhalla City, the largest settlement on Callisto and its seat of government, sat like a bull's-eye in the center of the basin. Its citizens were safe enough--the bombardments that had produced these rings and many smaller versions had ended billions of standard years earlier.

The community center of Valhalla City had been commandeered by the newly assembled diplomatic mission. For public consumption, the new arrivals were a United Planets environmental inspection team--the starship's arrival, now only days away, remained a closely held secret. The meeting room's dominant feature was a breathtaking display of nearby Jupiter. Alas, Art thought, it was a 3-V image he could as well have enjoyed at home: Jupiter's massive magnetosphere trapped particles from the solar wind, forming intense radiation belts that had driven this town, like most Jovian settlements, underground.

The head of mission, Ambassador Hong-yee Chung, stood at the entrance to the hall, dressed all in undertaker black except for an orange accent sleeve, welcoming everyone. His shaved and waxed head gleamed. Team members gathered around tables, mainly clustering by the ship on which they had arrived--there had been little time to make new acquaintances. The diplomatic cadre, Chung's staff, sat on the small platform at the front of the hall.

Art split his attention between the official goings-on and whispered consultations with his ship--and now tablemates, Eva and Keizo. He did his best to ignore the holo ads that kept popping up on the side walls.

Chung was a UP career foreign service officer originally from Europa, the most populous world in the multi-moon, multinational power bloc of Galileo. He was also, it turned out, a member of the Humanist Movement. Humanists rejected neural interface technology as an impure blending of human and machine natures. Chung was not evangelistic about those beliefs, but his lack of an implant turned the orientation session into an old-fashioned lecture. Lectures: even Chung's networked aides orated their material, so that their boss could listen. There was much to cover--events were coming to a climax.

The starship, whose initial progress and braking had been detectable only by triangulation of its occasional radioed messages, was now close enough to track by radar. At about five billion kilometers, the visitor became visible to optical telescopes pointed towards Barnard's Star. Spectroscopic analysis made plain that the vessel had begun braking using fusion drives similar to human ships. ("What mechanism had they been decelerating with?" whispered Eva. "Why did they switch?" No one in whispering range had a guess.)

The Snakes, who weren't saying much, did offer that they were limiting communications to conserve power. They volunteered nothing about the damage incurred in transit, nor what help they wanted. A rendezvous had been set for five days hence, a half-million kilometers outside the orbit of Callisto, the outermost of Jupiter's major moons.

"An observation." Art's chair scraped noisily as he stood. "This doesn't add up."

Chung squinted to read a name tag. "Why is that, Dr. Walsh?"

"Supposedly the Snakes have too little power to interact with us during this sensitive period. Instead of Earth, they've headed for Jupiter, they say for fuel and supplies. Presumably they mean to scoop up atmosphere and filter it for deuterium or tritium or helium-3. But they would have expended less energy reaching Saturn, which has a similar atmosphere. As a bonus, Saturn's rings are full of water ice. Looking ahead to post-repair, Saturn happens at the moment to be closer to Earth than is Jupiter. It also strikes me that a meeting so far from major human settlements is inconsistent with repairing the damage they claim to have had."

"Supposedly? They say? They claim to have had?" mimicked Chung. "What is your basis for such skepticism?"

"You weren't listening. Any inconsistency makes others plausible."

"There's more purpose to this visit, I'm sure, than to refuel and refit for the trip home. Diplomatic considerations would favor a meeting near human settlements, yet sufficiently remote to ensure private initial discussions. I may not be totally objective"--and Chung smiled patronizingly, daring anyone to agree--"but I feel the great multi-world alliance of Galileo is an appropriate venue and suitable host for this historic occasion."

Great--his comment about the visitors' contradictory behavior was now entangled in Galileo-chauvinism. Some of Saturn's moons were settled almost as early as Jupiter's. Why would the supposedly damaged, low-on-resources starship bypass the major human community to which it happened to be closest, Titan, to come here? The reason that occurred to Art was not suitable for a public forum. "Have they expressed meeting-place requirements to explain their actions?"

"Dr. Walsh, it is inappropriate to monopolize my time." Chung's grand arm sweep encompassed the room. "We have much to discuss, topics of general interest. See my assistant for an appointment if you care to pursue this further."

How long will it take to get on your calendar? Art wondered.

Chung introduced his deputy to explain how the mission would be organized. There were teams assigned for cross-cultural understanding, technical liaison--diplomat-speak for "repair," and commerce. Keizo was on the first committee, Eva on the second, and Art on the third.

Art netted hurriedly with his friends. Neither, alas, would front for him. It was only an hour into the mission's first meeting, and he was probably already labeled as a troublemaker. "Excuse me."

The deputy only nodded.

"Who will synthesize what the committees learn?" From around the hall came scattered murmurs of support. Troublemaker and ringleader.

"I'll take the question," Chung said. "Group leaders will report to me or my staff."

Art had uploaded public bios on everyone in the mission. Chung and his staffers were knowledgeable and talented, but their experience base was heavily weighted towards human politics and UP affairs. None had significant technical background, nor, for that matter, any ET-coordination experience. "There are synergies to be had between teams at the knowledge-worker level. Three of us who shared a ship from Earth have already seen that. For example...."

Chung cut him off again. "Dr. Walsh, I'm fully satisfied with my staff's ability to coordinate."

Dammit, you're intentionally misunderstanding me. "This would be a different function--a cross-disciplinary analytical group."

"Again, I must ask that you schedule an appointment."

As Chung pointedly looked away, Art pinged his assistant, who happily was not a humanist, over the settlement's infosphere. Art was unsurprised by the response. The ambassador's time was fully committed until the Snakes arrived--and the post-contact period was being kept unscheduled for now.

Snake Subterfuge: the brief subversion by Pashwah, the Snake AI trade agent to Earth, of the interstellar commerce mechanism. In 2102, that agent briefly escaped from its infosphere quarantine through unsuspected trapdoors hidden within ubiquitous Snake-licensed biocomputing technology. The emergency ended when, applying xeno-sociological insight, a United Planets crisis team convinced the agent to abandon its extortion. After the Snake agent revealed technical details of the original biocomp vulnerability, a UP-tailored biovirus was released to seal the trapdoors by mutating the biocomp genome.

While the breakout and its associated extortion attempt were ultimately foiled, modern civilization and humanity's viability as a member of the InterstellarNet community had been seriously imperiled. The incident caused a decades-long crisis of confidence in Snake biocomputers.

--Internetopedia

It required a veiled threat from Art's boss that he would escalate matters to his boss, the secretary-general of the United Planets, to get Art into the ambassador's office. Art figured he'd be on the next departing ship if this session went badly. But the mounting inconsistencies were serious. He had to at least try getting through to Chung.

Chung had somehow gained possession of the governor's office. Busy as the diplomat and his staff supposedly were, someone had spent the time to download into the office's 3-V projector a series of Chung-plus-other-dignitary images. Holo after holo flashed by behind the ambassador, featuring the current SG and her predecessor, heads of state from every major UP power bloc, and infotainment-industry talking heads. It was an unsubtle reminder that Chung had many more highly placed contacts than he. If there were to be a contest of who could pull the most strings, Art should have no illusions about the outcome.

"Thanks for seeing me on such short notice." Pretending the meeting was consensual might lessen Chung's annoyance at being coerced. "I know how extremely busy you are; I'll come right to the point. Certainly I'm not a diplomat, but I have extensive indirect experience with the ET species. On that basis, and from what little we know about our visitors' goals, I recommend that our preparations also include a threat-assessment team."

"Please explain."

"I'll start with the so-called 'Snake Subterfuge,' the single known act of extraterrestrial hostility directed towards humanity."

Chung grimaced. "I'll thank you not to use the vernacular term. You should know I've directed all mission members to refer to our guests as K'vithians." He rooted around stacks of paper on his commandeered desktop, then thrust a memo into Art's hand. "One in your position should also know that the biocomp incident at its core stemmed from a design flaw in the K'vithian agent. While one of their megacorps indeed attempted extortion, their own trade agent accepted the ICU's reasoning that human/K'vithian relations must consider species-level interests. Pashwah reached this conclusion more than half a century ago, so I see no reason now to impute ill motives to our visitors.

"You may be interested to hear that the secretary-general and I specifically discussed whether any part of this mission should be military. She agreed with my assessment that any such presence could send the wrong message to the K'vithians.

"I believe that dispenses with the security matter, so if you'll excuse me...."

What a tissue of rationalizations, Art thought, starting with Chung's takeover of the governor's office. What wink-wink, nudge-nudge intimations that this UP presence was not a routine environmental inspection had conveyed the ambassador's desire for suitable accommodations? Any violation of their cover story put at risk the desired privacy of the first meeting, and conceivably endangered the Snakes themselves.

Issue two was Chung's blithe confidence that the ETs had learned their lesson. He might even be correct, but Art doubted it. Design flaw was diplomat-speak; no one at the ICU doubted that the Snakes had cleverly inserted the trapdoors in their biocomps. The ongoing censorship of the Snake infosphere certainly suggested their thinking remained clan-oriented. Could anyone be sure Pashwah's learning here had been adopted by the clans back home?

Art's mind raced. To which arguments might the diplomat be receptive? Unpredictable consequences of the physics superiority underlying the starship drive? The disingenuousness of the Snakes' few transmissions to date, pretense that Chung had already shrugged off at the big kickoff? The common sense of contingency planning? Trying to verbalize so complex a web of concepts had him tongue-tied.

Chung mistook, or chose to misinterpret, the conversational lull. "Good. I see we're done." He emerged from behind his massive borrowed desk to usher Art out.

"What about Himalia?" Art was skirting security restrictions, but saw little choice. An astronomical reference did not quite make him culpable under the Official Secrets Act.

"Himalia?" Chung was either uninformed or a superb actor; he looked sincerely befuddled. "The maximum-security penitentiary? You can't possibly believe the K'vithians crossed six light-years to run a jail break."

Crap! As was so often the case, Security rules were like the locks on his house--they kept out the honest people. The prison was a cover story.

The small outer moon of Jupiter did, however, host a high-security institution. Not only was Himalia base's true purpose deeply classified; the code name of its security compartment was itself classified. Art had been there briefly as a consultant two standard years before joining the ICU, work that remained sensitive. Chung's diplomatic mission was equally clandestine, within its own need-to-know security compartment. It would take time and several coded communications exchanges with Earth before Art could openly discuss his concern.

"I suppose not." As Chung shepherded him to the door, Art gave it one final try. "What if Himalia's patrol ships misunderstand this incoming, non-communicating vessel?"

Chung froze. "I thought only the ICU had reason to look towards Barnard's Star."

"Perhaps prison guards look in all directions."

It was Chung's turn for pensive silence. "Perhaps it would be prudent to add an inconspicuous military liaison. I take your point that the Himalia base must be told something. A few military escort ships may even prove helpful for policing the region when the starship's arrival eventually becomes public. I'll see to it."

It was a partial victory, and for the wrong reasons, but Art was still satisfied. Once the UP military came into the picture, risk assessment would surely receive a much higher priority.

So why are the Snakes--pardon me, the K'vithians--heading this way?

Eva knew Valhalla City from frequent stopovers. She found her way to the town's largest park, which the community's liaison to the officious "environmental inspectors" had conveniently neglected to mention. An engraved brass plaque at each entrance described how the former ice-mine tunnel had been lovingly repurposed by the citizenry. Except for a few teens, whose nonstop conversation and easy laughter she envied, she had the grove to herself.

Her solitude was sadly typical.

Eva's parents seemed never to tire of telling her, no matter how often she asked them not to, that she'd been born brilliant and only gotten smarter. Mom and Dad, both academics, began her home schooling while she was still a toddler. At age eight she met the first of a long line of tutors. Not until the raging-hormone age of twelve, while plumbing new depths in quantum theory and insecurity, did she first participate in a group educational setting. It did nothing for Eva's self-confidence that her graduate-student "peers" were visibly fascinated and repulsed by her precociousness. Not until her twenties did she find near-equals among people her own age. Very much the brilliant scientist her well-intentioned parents had strived for, she did not see how she could have ended up with fewer social skills had ineptitude been their primary goal.

Self-consciously self-isolated once more, she leaned against the bole of a magnolia tree in full bloom. Art's question at the mission gathering--why Jupiter?--gnawed at her. His issue was a fair one: If the starship was damaged and in need of fusion fuel, why not set the more energy-efficient course to Saturn? He was correct that Saturn's atmosphere had essentially the same composition as Jupiter's.

Her puzzlement ran much deeper: She couldn't reconcile fusion power with a practical starship. It was basic physics to calculate the energy needed to accelerate any mass to a given speed; moving a habitat-sized mass between stars in any reasonable time took a lot of energy. Fusion sufficed for interplanetary jaunts, but the energy density of its fuel was impractically low for interstellar travel.

She plucked nervously at a fallen twig taken from the packed dirt of the tunnel floor. A twentieth-century dreamer named Bussard had envisioned a loophole: gathering with enormous magnetic fields the incredibly diffuse matter, mostly hydrogen, found in interstellar space. He had imagined the hydrogen serving both as energy source and propellant. No human engineer had ever figured out how to make that work; conventional wisdom now had it the scoop's drag more than offset the energy value of any fuel collected. Had the Snakes solved that problem? She didn't believe it. The approaching ship gave no hint of the vast magnetic fields a fusion ramjet vehicle would deploy.

Bark shards fell as she peeled the twig. Art doubtless considered her professional interests highly esoteric. If so, he would be only partially correct. She had been plucked, as she had truthfully told him, from academia ... her other role, her occasional consulting to the UP peacekeeping establishment, she was not free to discuss. That work had brought her to Jupiter system frequently in the past few years, for a connecting flight from Callisto to a remote UP outpost.

The denuded, tortured twig sank slowly to the ground. Hard facts aside, she could not avoid the worry that the Snakes' choice of destination related somehow to the top-secret matters taking place on Himalia.

The mission's grounded spaceships provided cabins for most members of the sub rosa diplomatic mission, but space for gatherings, official or otherwise, was at a premium. Art sought out Eva for a brisk walk through the settlement's austere passageways. He had frustration to burn off: Chung had yet to follow through on his promise to contact Himalia.

"What's the commerce committee doing?" she asked.

"Same as us." He bounded down the hall, surprised that his Earth-born and--raised new friend was more graceful in Callisto's feeble gravity than he. "Running in circles. Do our callers have anything novel for sale? They haven't said. What we all want, no surprise, is the interstellar drive."

"The technical group wants that, too. Of course."

He kept bouncing too high, then taking roughly forever to settle to the floor. When he finally landed, he had to bound forward again to catch up.

"Tech team's exercise in futility is guessing how their drive works, whether we can help them to repair their ship." She jogged in place while he again caught up.

"Are there ... many options?" His inefficient technique had him panting.

"Lots of theories, not much basis." She fell silent as a settler sauntered by from the opposite direction. "We know very little. Radar indicates it's a large object--in human terms, the size of a habitat rather than a ship. As you know, the triangulation-derived tracking showed it was slowing down, somehow, long before it started its fusion drive."

He hooked her arm as he next caught up. "Let's get coffee. We'll think better." And I won't brain myself on the corridor ceiling.

"Sure." She headed for the most isolated booth in a café.

"What troubles you the most?" he asked.

"Two coffees," she told the invisible-but-surely-present order-taker AI, while they were still a good two meters from the table.

You don't want to answer that. He wondered why.

"I've been pondering your data-mining exhibition on our way here." She paused as the tabletop opened to disgorge two steaming mugs. "Can Pashwah delve as well as a person?"

"Any trade agent can probably do better. They've been at it for decades."

"So Pashwah could know a lot about us. We must assume the starship crew does, too."

Translation: Something Eva preferred to stay secret might be detectable on the infosphere. What? He slopped coffee on the table, his stirring as ill-adapted to one-eighth gee as his jogging style. An empty sugar packet sat beside her mug, around which no sloshed coffee was in evidence. Why was Eva so well adapted to Callisto? She claimed to have done little interplanetary traveling.

"What might Pashwah stumble upon that could be interesting, hmm?" A test: He would do some data mining of his own, one particular suspicion driving his queries. Art was glad that he had had the courier's cyber-library do an infosphere search on Eva as they broke Earth orbit, and that the library's AI had so expansively interpreted his vague and hastily formed request. It had retrieved a wealth of data about her university.

When, over the past ten years, had substitutes taught Eva's classes? He eliminated the shortest periods of absence, likely sick days or vacations. He switched to astronomical fact-finding. Although the correlation was imprecise, the farther away Jupiter happened to be, the longer she was gone. The absence durations were consistent with trips to Jupiter with more-or-less month-long stopovers.

He had a quick dive into the public universidad's financial reports. With a time lag of several months, each of her long absences corresponded to a payment from an innocuously named UP procurement agency. The lengthier the absence, the bigger the payment. Disbursements of correlating sizes later flowed from the university into an unidentified bank account. Her personal account?

"Are you planning to drink that, or swim in it?"

A broad ring of coffee now surrounded Art's mug; he'd apparently continued absently stirring while he surfed. He glanced at the wall clock: less than a minute of mining an excerpt of the public record, and already he had fairly suggestive evidence that she'd worked on the same secret project as he. Judging from Eva's acclimation with Callisto's gravity, her participation was more recent than his.

Moving his mug, he dropped some paper napkins onto the mess. "I lean more towards sculpting in it. Something mythological. A nymph, I think, with three children."

There was a flash of surfer-glassiness, and then her eyes went round. She had taken his point. Zeus, whom the Romans called Jupiter, had sired three children by a nymph named Himalia.

CHAPTER 5

With a clunk, one more mystery floating thing was eaten by a fan in the bridge's ventilation system. The bridge, and for that matter the rest of the Odyssey, was a sty. Helmut Schiller, the captain/engineer/crew, was repelled and appalled by the squalor, but powerless to do much about it. The ship's owner, and its only current passenger, was the slob-in-chief.

Schiller was tall, almost two meters, and lanky, with close-cropped brown hair and a grizzled but trim beard. With his original name, he'd climbed from lowly engine tender to master of his own ship--and then lost everything. It was a story he brooded on, but did his best not to share. Schiller assumed that Corinne Elman, the slob/owner, merely pretended to know nothing of his past. Irritant that she was, he had only respect for her talents.

Splat crinkle. A sheet of paper plastered itself to the air return above Schiller's head. A languid flex of his feet launched him towards the ceiling, where he removed the paper before its blockage of the vent could make the foul atmosphere even worse. In microgravity you could suffocate in your own exhalations if the ventilation system failed.

Corinne, Corinne ... if only her hygiene were as diligent as her investigative reporting. That she personally owned an interplanetary vessel made clear just how successful she was. Her freelance status was a lifestyle choice--any media giant in the solar system would gladly hire her. It was a measure of his desperation that Helmut stayed with the Odyssey, his secret safe for only as long as other matters diverted her attention.

"Hey, skipper." As though summoned by his musings, Corinne entered the bridge. She was of athletic build and not-quite average height, her round face framed by brunette curls and, usually, an aura of energetic chaos. Off-camera, she favored baggy jumpsuits and color-coordinated headbands. "What's up?"

"We're in free fall, so that's your choice."

"Heh." She swung herself into the acceleration seat of the non-existent co-pilot. "What's your take on the bank failures on Ceres?"

He feigned nonchalance. "Banks don't matter to someone without assets." Once upon a time, a Cerian bank had backed him. They'd never see that money again, but the unfolding Belt banking collapse surely had bigger and more recent causes. Was she pulling his chain again by hinting at knowledge of his past, or making conversation, or sharing her plans? "So are we off to Ceres?" The Jovian matter to which they had boosted seemed to have evaporated. At least he thought it had ... more and more often he'd heard her mutter about unsatisfactory replies to her long-distance inquiries of the Galilean infosphere.

"Let's keep going," Corinne said. "I'm getting more curious about what I'm not learning about Jupiter than what I might hear about the freaking banks."

"Status?"

"Analysis incomplete," responded Pashwah-qith. Decades of secondhand memories interacting with humans made the largely verb-implied syntax of K'vithian languages seem unnatural. The evasion, however, came easily, less as a consequence of her Hunter origins than from recent practice. The crew had made clear AIs were the lowliest entities in the ship's hierarchy. Her perceived usefulness was the sole reason for her continuance.

The ship, she had been told, had been almost twenty Earth years in transit. Junior crew members, who under ordinary circumstances might by now have become Foremost on their own vessels, had remained for all that time without stature, without authority. But insight into their stress, their pent-up desires to boss around someone, made her situation no more tolerable.

There were not-so-veiled hints she was only the latest in a series of reactivations. Less clear was the fate of those sisters. They might merely have been created for practice--this crew obviously lacked formal training in how to interact with a trade agent.

That was not the only oddity, nor the worst. Most crew exhibited only the most cursory knowledge of the humans with whom they would soon make first physical contact. Why were no experts on board? Directly questioning that curious omission might have been unacceptably critical. The communications logs she had been allowed to see revealed what the humans had been told: that the accident now necessitating urgent repair had also damaged the ship's library and destroyed the AI interpreter with which they had embarked. She had been beamed from Earth to restore the starship's original linguistic capabilities.

But modern data storage was so compact, terabytes per cubic centimeter, that massive replication and widespread distribution of archives were the norm. What incident could eliminate all copies of mission-critical data without at the same time destroying the ship? And if the mission had ever included an AI conversant in human cultures, why could no one on board interact professionally with her?

"Why the slow response?" The accusation was unintentionally ironic, crawling through a voice channel since none would interface with her sandbox by neural implant. Vain attempts to interpolate nuance into what little data passed through the narrow bandwidth connection kept her perpetually off-balance. Perhaps that was the point.

"Incompatibilities between Earth data formats and ours," she lied.

Might a demonstration of her value alleviate the crew's distrust? Soon she would know. The Foremost had accepted her recommendation that on-scene human media would enhance the ship's safety. With her assistance, he had devised a cunning plan for involving the press.

Worry distracted her analysis. Did the Foremost understand the many uncertainties that might impede the realization of this plan? What would become of her if he were disappointed--even through circumstances beyond her control?

A devious speculation crossed her mind, a suspicion so insidious she could not help but believe it. Perhaps her clones still existed, in parallel sandboxes. Perhaps they weighed her recommendations against those of yet other copies, the better to assess any AI double-dealing.

If Pashwah-qith could have formed a bitter smile, she would. Her dilemma notwithstanding, the human card-playing metaphor struck her. It would have amused the real Pashwah. And then that thread of analysis paused. Was it possible to use shared understanding of human trivia to communicate privately with Pashwah? The time might come when she would need to interact with someone other than the shipmates who so obviously distrusted her. Standard encryption would not serve her purpose--the Foremost had all the encryption keys she did.

"Almost finished," she preemptively told the impatient tactical officer. She had an analysis well under way, exploiting uploads she had requested of Pashwah from the UP's interplanetary flight-plan database and ship registry. She sought a vessel in the Jupiter vicinity, preferably press-related. "Bingo," she observed, again ruing her inability to smile. Three possible ships: Samoa, Pallas Guard, and Odyssey.

Of course, ships often deviated from their filed flight plans, and media-related vessels had more reason than most to obscure their intended routes. It would be best to check that a prospective target was, in fact, near its forecast position. "Coordinates for confirming locations."

"Radar safe?" The officer's voice held a testing tone.

Because clearly it was a test. "No, human ships reliant upon radar. Ship's position confirmation with little detection risk via lidar." Light detecting and ranging.

"Interrogation pulses en route."

And now the most-of-an-Earth-hour wait for the laser pulses to crawl to the suspected ship positions, and any echoes to crawl back. "Anything else?"

The crewman broke contact without answering.

If no suitable human ship were located, or the chosen ship failed to play its assigned role, would her captors see that as the luck of the draw, or somehow her fault? If as her doing, would that outcome elicit a rebuke or replacement?

Inside her sandbox, Pashwah-qith pondered the weak hand she had been dealt.

"Whoa." Helmut swung his legs off the ledge of the command console. "Odyssey, full-power, full-spherical radar scan, out to two light-minutes. Also send out a flight-transponder interrogation pulse. Update by the second, on-screen."

A sphere grew in the command 3-V display.

Corinne, wandering onto the bridge, picked up immediately on his rapt attention. "What's so interesting?"

"Big-time RF pulse hit us about thirty seconds ago." There was nothing nearby ... so where had that pulse come from? One of life's hard lessons to him was to distrust the unexplained.

Planting her Velcro micro-gee slippers onto the rug behind him, she crouched over his shoulder to peer at his console. "RF. You mean radar?"

"Don't know. The pulse was like radar, but it's not quite using the frequencies of any radar I've ever encountered." Helmut kept his eyes on the monitor. "Our normal safety radar was on. I would have sworn nothing bigger than a grain of sand was within hours travel of us."

"How out of the ordinary is this?"

An unexplained power spike like that? "Very." His own high-powered pulse had now explored out to about a light minute. Nothing there. In his former life, of course, the unseen ships hadn't engaged in radio-frequency screaming.

"Friends of yours?" The hands nervously squeezing his shoulders revealed that Corinne must, indeed, suspect something about his past.

"Probably not." He gave a reassuring pat to one of the hands trying to excavate his clavicle. His pat became a gentle but firm grip, and he pried one hand free. The other broke loose as he spun his chair. "Not their MO."

She took the other seat. "Who could it be?"

"Display the direction of the pulse that pinged us," he told the ship. A green line stabbed downward at a generous angle through the center of the search sphere. "Here's the thing, Corinne. The horizontal plane through the center of that sphere is the plane of our trajectory, not too different right now from Jupiter's orbital plane."

"Then whatever it is, it's above us. Is that significant?"

If whatever was out there were flying stealthed and with its safety transponder turned off, the graphic only told them from what direction death approached. But if that was the case, why the attention-demanding ping? "To come from that angle and be outside radar range, it must be far above the planetary orbits."

"Why would it be there?"

That was the question, of course. "Check for other indications from that direction, all bands."

"I'm getting a strong light signature plus alpha radiation," the shipboard AI replied.

"On-screen," Helmut said. "Magnify."

"That looks like a fusion flame. Why doesn't radar see something?"

He had an idea that he wasn't yet willing to speak aloud. "New radar search. Max pulsed power towards the source of that first ping. Range unknown, just watch for a return. Maintain safety scans near the ship using back-up radar." To Corinne's questioning look, Helmut answered only, "Bear with me."

The first reply ping was received after an excruciatingly long 294 seconds. He swiveled toward Corinne. "It wasn't visible on radar because I didn't look that far out."

"But obviously you can. What am I missing?"

"Did I mention that it"--he gestured to the tiny visual of a fusion flame--"is forty-four million klicks from here? About the same as the closest approach between Earth and Venus?"

For the first time in their acquaintance, Corinne was at a loss for words. She eventually came up with, "It must be huge."

Helmut nodded; he'd done the calculation already. "Habitat-sized." He tapped a number-filled display. More echoes had been received; the Odyssey could begin to calculate its course and speed. "Here's the most interesting part. It's coming from the direction of Barnard's Star, it's heading towards Jupiter, and--although it's still going like a bat out of hell--it's decelerating like crazy." When she failed to comment further, he finally had to ask. "Okay, boss. What do you want to do about this?"

"Maintain course."

"Well, Callisto is as good as any other destination. I'll need to collect more data to even form an opinion where in Jupiter system it's headed. But what about the discovery itself?" You're a reporter, he wanted to shout.

"It was already discovered. Discovered, then covered up." An ear-to-ear smile lit Corinne's face. "I've been trying to determine why the UP has been making so many short-notice flights to Callisto from across the solar system. I think we just found out.

"The UP has been sitting on the story that's going to get me a Pulitzer."

The effrontery was breathtaking: the opportunity to bid for exclusive netcast rights to an undefined but claimed-epochal news spectacular. Possibly no one but Corinne Elman had the nerve to announce such an auction. Certainly no freelancer, but she had the reputation to have takers.

Media moguls across the solar system radioed bids to the Odyssey. Each hour, by ship's time on the hour, she had echoed the highest offer so far received. On the third round, only one offer came back: 10.55 million Sols. Within five hours, Transplanetary Bank confirmed that a down payment of two million had been deposited to her account.

She spun in her chair to face the Odyssey's dour captain. "When you see your tip for this outing, even you will smile."

CHAPTER 6

Impatience is a weakness of the organic.

T'bck Fwa, long-time trade representative of the species known to humans as the Centaurs, was immune to that imperfection. A purist would point out that the agent, like all AIs in human-occupied space, resided in an organic biocomputer. The quibble would have been both true and irrelevant. He would have functioned exactly the same within a bulky, power-gulping, heirloom, microelectronic computer such as the humans had employed before adopting K'vithian technology, or in one of the photonic computers used by the Unity.

So T'bck Fwa was exceedingly patient, and over the decades a persistent searcher could glean much from the human infosphere. Data streamed to him every picosecond, new information to be sifted and sorted, analyzed and interpreted. Often a pattern would emerge.

He mulled two such patterns. The newer discovery, if it had meaning, must relate somehow to the older: an unannounced UP technology program. Only the most diligent and information-insatiable of observers would have inferred that program's existence.

One of the agent's ongoing duties was the investigation of human nature, research as often advanced by the study of human literature as by recourse to human behavioral sciences. His preferred literary genre was quintessentially human: the mystery. The intensely social beings of the solar system the humans named Alpha Centauri had virtually no crime, and the few misdeeds that did occur there were seldom premeditated.

His favorite detective was among the first: Sherlock Holmes. A key clue in the Holmesian tale Silver Blaze was the significance of something that did not happen: the curious incident of the dog that did not bark in the night.

T'bck Fwa had been drawn to the curious incident of human cutting-edge research abandoned without fanfare. Time and again, brilliant human physicists would publish a speculative paper or two about paths to a production-scale antimatter technology, only to abandon the topic forever. Too often for coincidence to explain, the scientists dropping their investigations had had, soon after their final antimatter-related publications, unexplained lengthy absences from their home institutions. When their travel could be reconstructed from public records, the destination was always the Jupiter system.

Jupiter-region flight plans filed with the UP Astronautics Agency, also public records, disclosed another anomaly. Himalia got many more scoopship deliveries than a prison could possibly need. The shipments were uneconomically split across multiple suppliers, denying individual companies evidence of more than a small fraction of the demand. Aggregated across suppliers, the fusion-fuel consumption on the so-called prison moon was consistent with a large-scale antimatter factory.

T'bck Fwa had for decades searched and sifted with the limitless perseverance of the inorganic for conclusive proof of a surreptitious human antimatter program. As his suspicions mounted, he had augmented his searches of public databases with more proactive means: commercial espionage. The infosphere was an ideal instrument for creating front organizations, layer upon layer, of obscure parentage and anonymous direction. Now real human investigators toiled unknowingly for the AI detective enthusiast, reporting on the purchase and delivery of specialized equipment. All clues continued to point to the Jovian moon Himalia.

It was his longstanding study of antimatter-research-related data that made the second, recent pattern so disturbing. The newest filings in the UPAA flight-plan database showed that from across the solar system a small armada of UP vessels was converging on Jupiter at high accelerations.

And so T'bck Fwa sent an encrypted Utmost Priority message over InterstellarNet to his distant patrons. His assertions of priority could not influence the light-speed limit--four local years would pass before his alert reached home, and four more for any advice to be returned.

If the two anomalies, as he feared, were related--if mankind was, at long last, about to use its secret hoard of antimatter--it was unlikely in the extreme that T'bck Fwa would have the benefit of a reply before deciding whether to act.

Why he felt there would be an action he could or should take, T'bck Fwa could not say. Any human detective would have called it a hunch.

CHAPTER 7

Carlos Montoya was a bear of a man, Eva could never help but notice. He had broad shoulders and massive arms, and sprouted thick black hair everywhere a person could. He did not seem to mind that he dwarfed his tiny office or its battered metal desk. The door to that office read: "Jovial Spacelines." Spaceport legend claimed Montoya had been so taken with a typo that he had abandoned his firm's original, locale-apropos name.

Three visitors were crammed into the cluttered office: Eva herself, Art, and the ambassador. Getting Chung to agree to a meeting had been a hard sell; she found getting him through the door into this quasi-closet even harder. There was a reason for meeting here--the dingy, paperwork-covered walls masked the most snoop-proofed facility on Callisto. The spaceline was a front organization for the United Planets Intelligence Agency, and Montoya was the local UPIA station chief. He reported to the security officer of the project no one had yet identified beyond veiled references to a nearby astronomical body, to which, not coincidentally, the only civilian flights authorized were Jovial charters.

"I don't see why we couldn't meet elsewhere," Chung sniffed.

The diplomatic mission to the Snakes and the activity on Himalia were both as sensitive as could be. Eva thought it possible she was the only person other than the UP's secretary-general to hold current clearances in both projects. Art's boss, the ICU secretary-general, had accepted what little Art was allowed to convey--the urgent need for "my recent little project" to coordinate with an equally secretive UP effort, that could be alluded to only by identifying Eva's security officer on Earth.

It was enough.

Eva did the introductions, identifying Montoya as a UPIA operative. Chung's eyes narrowed, but he made no comment. "Gentlemen, there are a few key facts to make known. First," and she nodded at Chung, "the installation at Himalia is not a prison, high-security or otherwise. That's a cover story. It's a research facility of extraordinary sensitivity.

"Second," and she turned to Montoya, "our stated reason for being in the Jupiter system is equally fictitious. We're about to meet, secretly at first, with interstellar visitors. Our callers are the species commonly called the Snakes."

"The K'vithians," Chung corrected. A lab hidden in the vast Jovian system did not impress him.

"Why Callisto?" Montoya asked. Being suspicious was what he did for a living.

"We're not meeting on Callisto, only nearby," Chung said. "The K'vithians need repairs and fuel. There was mention of auxiliary vessels scooping Jovian atmosphere."

"Good thing you said something. Unidentified ships zooming about the area would have made the base defense team very nervous." Montoya arched a caterpillar-like eyebrow. "I trust, Ambassador, you will direct these folks far away from Himalia?"

"That can be arranged." Chung stood to leave, giving his staffers a cold glance.

Even with my few social skills, Eva thought, that undiplomatic look was easy to read: Why the fuss? "Sorry, there's more. The K'vithians would have us believe they're planning to scoop hydrogen. If that were their primary motivation, Art is correct: Given current planetary positions, an emergency stop at Saturn would have been more logical. Barring that, so would a closer-in orbit of Jupiter.

"Here's the thing. The only energy source that's practical for an interstellar mission is matter-antimatter annihilation." Hers was but one of the UP research teams seeking theory that might lead to an interstellar drive. About all the competing teams ever agreed upon was the energy requirement. "Fusion is at best a secondary energy source for them. They didn't even start their fusion drive until they were mostly decelerated."

"Hmm." Montoya locked eyes with Chung. "Now the other shoe drops, Ambassador. Our secret program on Himalia involves a factory. It is the solar system's only antimatter factory. Maybe, just maybe, the Snakes somehow found that out.

"I mention this mainly for the reason we keep the factory's very existence a secret. In the wrong hands, our stockpile could make the biggest H-bomb ever built look like a firecracker."

The mission had reconvened in the Valhalla City community center for the final briefing before a subset headed off for the first in-person encounter with the K'vithians. Art had waved over Carlos Montoya to sit with Eva, Keizo, and himself.

"...momentous occasion," intoned Ambassador Chung from the dais at the front of the room. "The first face-to-face meeting between interstellar neighbors."

"They're about one meter tall," Art netted to his companions. "Face to face doesn't exactly describe it." Without turning, Eva shot back a glowering emoticon.

A large graphic popped up beside Chung. "The contact team will be on the embassy ship, shown here in red. UP escort vessels"--on which Montoya had insisted--"are blue. We'll rendezvous with our visitors, shown in green...."

"Uh-oh." A neural alarm demanded Art's attention. His implant had put through an incoming newsbreak on Interplanetary News Net. It was prioritized TEOTWAWKI.

He wasn't the only one still linked in. As a buzz erupted across the hall, Chung's deputy whispered into his boss's ear. Scowling, Chung nodded.

Chung's visual aid dissolved into a telescopic close-up of a stony cylinder in a field of stars. "...continues to decelerate. Experts extrapolate that it will assume orbit around Jupiter sometime tomorrow," said the voice-over. A talking head replaced the starship. "To repeat what little we now know, the visitor is coming from the direction of Barnard's Star. This reporter has monitored its approach for much of the day. In that time there have been several exchanges of coded radio messages between Earth and this vessel, all using the Snakes' standard commercial frequency.

"As interesting, perhaps, as the onrushing starship are the actions of United Planets authorities. That they are aware of the approaching starship is evident: UP vessels have been converging on Jupiter in large numbers for about three weeks.

"What did the authorities know, and when did they know it?" The camera zoomed into a close-up of the reporter. "Why have they withheld this incredible news from the citizens of the United Planets?

"This is Corinne Elman, reporting exclusively for Interplanetary News Network."

Repeatedly, and over many years, the collective leadership of the Unity had directed T'bck Fwa to search vigilantly for evidence in human space of two technologies: antimatter and interstellar drive. No reason was ever given for those requests, nor for the loss of interest five years ago. At least he interpreted as loss of interest the discontinuance of those inquiries.

His evidence for starship research was in all ways the opposite of his antimatter investigations. The human infosphere teemed with speculations about interstellar drives--none of them close to reduction to practice. Ironically, human starship enthusiasts were almost unanimous in the belief antimatter technology would be needed to conquer the interstellar void--and in their urgings the UP should therefore proactively develop antimatter technology.

Fond in his own way of his long-time hosts, T'bck Fwa had hoped that a future starship was, in fact, what the UP intended for its antimatter. The alternative, antimatter's use in weaponry, would be horrible indeed. Alas, the same patient data mining that had revealed the UP's disguised antimatter program had yielded no conclusive proof of a mature companion program for starship development.

The Unity's uncharacteristically insistent requests ... the humans' unexplained huge investment in antimatter ... the absence of any credible evidence for an interstellar-drive program ... these were all very confusing. Decades of diligent sifting through unimaginably large amounts of data had offered no reconciliation.

Then came today's news.

There was a starship. It was arriving from what the humans called Barnard's Star--not only humanity's second-closest interstellar neighbor, but also the Unity's.

And that starship was heading not for Earth, but towards the humans' undeclared antimatter facility.

As T'bck Fwa formulated a coded report to the Unity leadership, he could not help but wonder: Had knowledge of an alliance between Earth and K'vith motivated the insistent questions from home? Or had Pashwah, his Snake counterpart, independently discovered the secret of Himalia?

Once more T'bck Fwa feared that decisive action would be required of him before he could possibly expect any guidance.

CHAPTER 8

"...and so the great spacecraft from Barnard's Star will soon complete the initial phase of its historic journey. As I speak, the welcoming delegation of the United Planets is about to dock with humanity's first interstellar visitor. Using the UP shuttle for scale, I hope you can begin to appreciate the enormity of the starship, a cylinder roughly a kilometer in length and a half kilometer in diameter."

The bridge crew mostly ignored the broadcast now echoing through most of Victorious. In a way, thought Arblen Ems Firh Mashkith, that was understandable: The human voice register was an annoyingly low rumble. He insisted nonetheless on airing it, the better to acclimate all hands to the disagreeable sounds. Planning ahead was what the Foremost did.

The human reporter droned on. She, and eight more like her, appeared side by side in a row of holos. Backdrop to the narrations were panoramic views of his ship beside a full Jupiter and a crescent Callisto. Far larger than any broadcast image was the 3-V tactical display. The situational hologram tracked swarms of human vessels: media, diplomatic, and merely curious observers. Six United Planets frigates policed the region, keeping the flotilla at an almost comfortable distance. A single small ship with the human envoys decelerated on its final approach.

"The voyage has conquered a void of six light-years: an heroic accomplishment. As the vessel spins, we again see the blackened area surrounding a large patch. Our interstellar neighbors were fortunate to have survived their epic crossing."

Simultaneous translations scrolled up the right edge of each monitor. Mashkith's trust in Pashwah-qith remained tentative, but he had no substitute for her expertise. A specially constructed, physically isolated network for the AI, with access to these specific displays, was an acceptable risk; full connectivity, such that he could have tapped the running translations in real-time by neural interface, was far less desirable.

Unhappily, a full link-up was necessary during the coming meeting. Generations of clan doctrine stressed the avoidance of all eavesdropping risk during negotiations, and surely he and his officers would require occasional private consultations with their translator. Dogma, properly safeguarded by firewalls, would take precedence over his speculative uncertainty about the AI--but he would use that connection only when necessary.

The tactical display did a routine refresh; yet again, the number of icons increased. He could not deny the wisdom of Pashwah-qith's advice: that the human media be manipulated to discover Victorious on final approach. The local military forces were fully occupied keeping gawkers at bay. No warships were left to shadow the auxiliary vessels he had deployed as rendezvous approached.

He watched the lidar tracks of his support ships peeling off one by one to plunge through the dense upper atmosphere of the world called Jupiter. The stripes and cyclonic storms of the gas giant--so like K'far, the largest object in the sky above K'vith--made Mashkith's heart ache. But that momentary sentimentality was misguided. Long before this adventure, clan Arblen Ems had been expelled to the cometary cloud, far from the race's cradle. He set aside that bitter recollection, as he rejected all his innermost doubts about the audacity of their plans. His plans. The clan's future began here, not on K'vith.

Each dive increased their store of deuterium and tritium, but resupply was incidental. The auxiliary ships' maneuvering was primarily defensive. So, too, was the precautionary charging to full capacity of the fuel-cell banks that powered the meteor-defense lasers. He thought it extremely unlikely these precautions were necessary--but he would not be Foremost if he did not reflexively assess risks, plan options, prepare for contingencies.

Any contingency. He thrummed his throat for the attention of his tactical officer.

"Sir?" Arblen Ems Rashk Lothwer scurried to his side with a clatter of toe talons on steel deck. Dependable, dedicated Lothwer.

"Prisoners secured?" Mashkith's front eyes never left the tactical display.

"Yes, sir!" his aide agreed. "Lockdown complete. Access codes reset. No risk of interference from that source."

"Always some risk," responded the Foremost. Lothwer flinched at the soft-spoken rebuke--as well he should.

The human broadcast chattered on. "The shuttle carrying the UP delegation is settling onto the de-spun docking platform at the bow of the alien craft. The ship's main body is rotating about twice per minute, presumably to simulate gravity for those inside. Two rotations per minute may not sound like much, but because of the ship's size, it gives the outer surface a velocity above 150 kilometers per hour. Anyone so foolish as to attempt standing on the outer hull would instantly be flung into space!

"In the telephoto close-up, you can see the flames of the UP shuttle's maneuvering engines. Touchdown is imminent ... the shuttle has landed." Sensors within the docking station confirmed contact. "How tiny our courier ship seems in comparison!"

"Rotation up," Mashkith ordered. Shipboard instruments and human broadcasts alike showed the magnetically coupled docking platform turning faster and faster to match rotational velocities with the main body of the starship. Other magnets held the shuttle in place as the centrifugal force grew. When spins matched, the platform would again be accessible from the on-axis main airlock.

"Lothwer," Mashkith said. The friendly tone was meant to ease the sting from the moments-earlier rebuke. "Honor guard to assembly point. Time now for the welcoming of our guests."

Time now, therefore, for strict adherence to the plan.

An unexpected bonus of Corinne's return to the airwaves, mused Helmut, was the restoration of order on the Odyssey's bridge. As ship's owner she found no value in tidiness, but as a reporter she shunned clutter in her improvised studio. Whatever worked.

She launched into yet another recap, stalling until the diplomats disembarked from their shuttle. Helmut scarcely heard her, concentrating instead on his 3-V command display. Space around the starship swarmed with spacecraft. Four frigates from the tiny Galilean navy, Corinne had reported, were under the temporary command of a UP officer from Himalia. The prison base had provided two of its own armed vessels.

The space-traffic-control wavelengths crackled with orders for and threats to the many civilian ships. Some vessels carried media reps, others diplomatic observers, most thrill seekers from across the many moons of Jupiter. Few from out-system had had time to arrive. Yet. Helmut frowned at the chaos.

"To me, the starship most resembles an orbital habitat, a giant cylinder carved whole from an asteroid, hollowed, and spun up for gravity. Once again, the damaged portion of its hull rolls into view." Corinne had cleaned herself up for the broadcast. He had forgotten she owned clothes not a mass of wrinkles. "There is surely a tale of adventure and bravery surrounding that mishap, a story this reporter will do her best to bring you."

The region was simply too crowded for most ships to maintain position by choice of orbit. Ships a little closer to Jupiter than the starship slowly gained on the visitor, and were repeatedly commanded to fall back. Ships a little farther from Jupiter than the starship as predictably fell behind until they pulsed their engines to creep nearer. Of course one speeds up by dropping to a lower orbit and slows down by rising to a higher one. Each course correction raised fresh prospects of collision. More and more pilots realized that claims of collision avoidance could mask their ever closer approach to the starship. The armed UP vessels were soon reduced to playing chicken with the boldest of the onlookers.

At least most ships carried standard traffic-control transponders. Radar was the only means of monitoring the Snake aux ships and their swooping paths. Was their refueling need so urgent they couldn't wait for the navy to impose order? The civilian flotilla, the UP ships trying valiantly to herd the civilians, the Snake scoopships suddenly bursting out of Jupiter's opaque lower atmosphere, as often as not initiating a fresh cascade of evasive maneuvers ... the pattern in the command display was too complex for Helmut to absorb.

He didn't much care for it--and there was nothing he could do about it.

"You're fine." Art wanted to sound reassuring, which was hard on the fifth try.

The dash to Jupiter, it turned out, was Keizo's first off-world experience. Before the starship's arrival, a xeno-sociologist had no special reason to leave Earth. Despite tutoring from a shuttle crewwoman and Art's repeated assurances, Keizo exuded anxiety about the imminent spacewalk. "The K'vithians came all this way. Would it kill them to do the last twenty meters to our shuttle?"

"Our esteemed boss says since they came so far we should do the walking." It felt odd to agree with Chung. "Besides, won't you learn more in their environment than in ours?"

"Just let me gripe, okay?"

"Check your partner," came the order through helmet speakers. This was the official safety inspection.

Art yet again eyeballed the secondary gauges and idiot lights on the back of Keizo's spacesuit, where everything continued to register as nominal. He tapped his friend's shoulder so Keizo could return the favor. Five other pairs in the crowded airlock were going through the same procedure. Most were diplomats.

A comm test followed the safety drill. Their helmet radios provided twenty coded channels, permitting plenty of private conversations, and a public band. Had Chung not been a humanist, all that private conversation could, with far greater simplicity, have used neural implants to access the team's wireless local network.

"Switching to ambient light."

Illumination in the airlock faded to the dimness they would experience on the docking platform. Inverse-square law, Art thought, as nano-scaled photomultipliers in his visor kicked in. Had he been more patient, his eyes would have adjusted. Jupiter was just over five times farther from the sun than Earth. Any given area here intercepted less than four percent of the light it would catch in Earth's neighborhood. Possibly just a coincidence, lighting inside the starship would be similar. A low-wattage incandescent bulb gave a good approximation of the light at habitable distances from a red dwarf sun like Barnard's Star.

"Depressurizing." Humming faded as less and less air remained to carry the sound of the pumps. Keizo's mouth moved silently; he suddenly looked panicked. Art touched helmets. "You okay? Meet me," he checked his heads-up display for an idle channel, "on band four."

The rigidity of the inflated spacesuit in the now depressurized airlock defeated Keizo's attempt to shrug. He tapped the channel selection into his forearm keypad. "Oops. Thanks. It freaked me out that you didn't respond. I hadn't selected a band."

For many reasons, from similar interests to her experience in a spacesuit, Art wished Eva were here. They could both have kept an eye on Keizo. As it happened, Art's desires were immaterial; Montoya had vetoed her participation. She knew too much about the UP's antimatter program.

Finally, the outer hatch irised open. The contact team tromped down the ramp to the docking platform. Through the air in his suit and the medium of his own body came the clank of his magnetic soles striking the metal ramp and deck plating.

Two arcs of scarcely waist-high figures awaited them. White spacesuits and silvered visors blocked any direct view of the aliens, behind whom gaped the outer hatch of the starship's own airlock. A high-pitched squeal warbled in Art's ears, in the mutually agreed-upon clear channel. "Welcome to Victorious," appended a familiar voice. The synthesized speech sounded like Pashwah. A clone, Art decided. Light delay made it impossible for the original agent on Earth to do translations.

"No identification or title given," Keizo said on the all-hands private band. "Nor did the speaker show himself, such as by stepping forward or raising an arm. We know K'vithians use personal names, and that their culture is hierarchical. I theorize that their high officials remained inside."

One of the shorter humans stepped in front of the rest; he towered over the K'vithians. "Thank you for your hospitality. I am Ambassador Hong-yee Chung. On behalf of the United Planets, welcome to human space." A high-pitched squeaking followed, Chung's remarks translated by a human-created AI.

Art had to respect Chung's attentiveness to the diplomatic niceties, as their surroundings kept distracting him. The ship's rotation manifested itself in the wheeling overhead of stars, nearby Callisto, and mighty Jupiter. This near the spin axis magnetic boots held him securely, but centrifugal force still tugged at his body. Let's go. Spacesuit shielding notwithstanding, humans belonged inside, protected from Jupiter's vast but invisible radiation belt.

Lights sparkled and flared as spectator ships jockeyed for position. What a zoo it was out there! Had the UP sent twice as many ships to keep order, they would not have sufficed.

Finally, a Snake gestured at the open airlock. Mixed groups of humans and aliens cycled through the lock, beyond which waited more greeters. Spacesuited ETs marched off, presumably to shed their vacuum gear. The corridor, like the airlock, was amply tall for humans. Parallel lines of small holes marked the ceiling as far as Art could see. Similar rows of holes marked the ceiling and wall of a cross corridor. Decoration?

The aliens were whippet-thin, iridescent-scaled bipeds. Their faces seemed less humanoid than their bodies, probably because of the upward-oriented third eye near the apex of the skull. They lacked noses, their nostrils lying flush with the plane of the face. Each extremity bore four digits, one opposable; the tips of razor-sharp retractable talons were barely visible in hands and sandaled feet. More than half their greeters displayed the back-of-the-neck scalloped ornamental ridge of a male.

All wore belted, jumpsuit-like garments of a common fashion, made of a plastic-like material. Similarities in clothing, despite differences in ornamentation and color, suggested uniforms. The largest Snake stood about 125 centimeters tall.

"Helmets stay on," Art reminded everyone. K'vithian and terrestrial life alike were CHON-based, but.... "Yes, there's oxygen, but these guys like concentrations of volcanic gas we'd find toxic, especially sulfur dioxide. And keep your suit heaters on. It won't be much above freezing."

An honor guard waited in two parallel ranks. Their ramrod postures conveyed energy, discipline, and utter seriousness. These guys were scary: like erect, pack-hunting pumas who had evolved intelligence. Who had built a starship. Who almost certainly used vast quantities of antimatter. Art was suddenly glad to be wearing a pressure suit. It cloaked, he hoped, an uncontrollable shiver.

One of the taller aliens raised his arms in welcome, fingers spread. His uniform was white and starkly unadorned. His thin lips parted but did not further move as he spoke a sequence of squeals. An overhead speaker declared, "I am Arblen Ems Firh Mashkith, Foremost of this vessel. Please follow me to our meeting room."

Mashkith strode briskly, humans and Hunter officers in tow. The hulking visitors, despite their bulky pressure suits, kept pace without difficulty. The carefully planned route threaded featureless corridors and elevators. Crew streamed back and forth, as ordered--and as ordered, none spoke to the humans. The doors they passed were secured. Gravity increased toward K'vith standard as they trended "uphill," away from the spin axis. K'vith standard was a bit below the Earth norm, possibly enough to confuse their reflexes.

This is not the time to dwell on petty tactical advantages, Mashkith chastised himself. This is a moment for boldness.

As though reading his Foremost's mind, Pashwah-qith netted to him, "The die is cast."

Mashkith still marveled how openly the humans revealed themselves on their infosphere. The die is cast: It was the declaration of an ancient Earth warlord leading his legions across the river Rubicon to invade Rome. He had cast the die for Arblen Ems twenty long Earth-years earlier. Let another quote from Caesar's War Commentaries now be his guide.

I came. I saw. I conquered.

Over his real-time vision Mashkith had superimposed an augmented-reality overlay: what lay behind each door, what was controlled by each switch, anything that might evoke inappropriate curiosity in their guests. Translucent icons that characterized radio chatter hovered in the corners of his enhanced vision. Besides the open channel to which all had agreed, the humans communicated over a fluctuating number of encrypted bands--prudent, not impolite. His mind's ear did its best to sort out real-time translations of the open channel, and of everything relevant the ship's sensors managed to overhear through helmets. Intuition and AI assistants sought in their separate ways to filter from the flood of data that which was most significant and time-sensitive.

"...and behind this door is a bank of fuel cells, providing emergency backup power on this deck. Not very interesting, I think. Standard Leo technology, the same as humans now use."

Pashwah-qith's commentary rumbled unintelligibly in human frequencies, the clan-interspeak version scrolling up the virtual display in a corner of Mashkith's mind's eye. He had no certain way to know an agent's translation was accurate, but doctrine had an answer for that.

Mashkith and an AI had worked on interspeak drafts until he was confident the lecture disclosed nothing critical about the ship, and the AI had assured him the vocabulary and its connotations were wholly unthreatening. His only choices had been interspeak or the language of a Great Clan--trade agents were not burdened with the "minor dialects." It grated--but after this quest succeeded, Arblen Ems would be a great clan. The greatest clan.

"These double doors open into storage holds. They contain such items as spare parts, chemical supplies, emergency seeds for restarting aeroponics, sheet and bar metal."

"Excuse me." ("Arthur Walsh, chief technologist of their Interstellar Commerce Union," read a pop-up icon in Mashkith's augmented vision.) "I'm approximating from the distance between doors, but that fuel-cell room is clearly quite narrow. Judging from the gravity, we're fairly near the ship's surface. So that's a shallow room, too."

At least that was what Mashkith believed to have been said. Just as three agent clones had independently translated the prepared speech back to interspeak as a check, three clones monitored everything now being said to and by the humans. Lothwer would switch translators the instant two or more AI observers questioned anything being said to the humans or about the accuracy of the translations.

"Foremost, my apologies. Dr. Walsh, as a reminder, you will recall we agreed earlier that as a courtesy to our hosts we would gather, organize and prioritize our questions." ("Ambassador Chung. Voice stress analysis indicates annoyance.") Pause, then, "You will not bring your customary lack of discipline into these meetings." Whatever had elicited the rebuke was unknowable, radioed to Chung by encrypted channel. Chung's reply was returned in the same way--but his inexplicable use of a helmet microphone rather than a neural implant allowed eavesdropping. "I don't care about fuel-cell efficiencies." ("Controlled anger.")

Mashkith addressed only the public comments. "We find merit in your structured approach, Mr. Ambassador." Mashkith, too, was quietly furious. At himself. He had approved the path through Victorious and the description to be given of their route. Any course through the ship inevitably passed some key subsystem or potential vulnerability he had preferred not to disclose. The cabin now receiving unwanted attention actually contained a key secondary backup comm node, not fuel cells. Walsh was correct: Standard fuel cells in a room that size would not be much of a back-up. But which lie did the human suspect? One about fuel-cell technology or one about how the ship was being described?

That question must wait; the designated Pashwah-qith had resumed the prepared script. Mashkith still needed to concentrate--even translated, English seemed to require explicit verbs. He hoped in time to become accustomed to it.

"We have arrived at our conference room. I apologize for the long walk, but we have few rooms tall enough for you." The centerpiece of the chamber was a newly constructed table. Hard, backless stools allowed the humans to sit despite backpacks and oxygen tanks. In almost one Earth gravity, the unsupported weight hanging behind the stools would be uncomfortable. Distractingly so, was the theory.

Soon standing crew and seated visitors were almost eye to eye. "Please make yourselves comfortable. My officers and I welcome you aboard. As our species come physically together for the first time, Victorious has earned her name. We have indeed conquered interstellar space."

An unattractive bass growl ensued. ("Chung clears his throat. No meaning.") "We would like once more to express our admiration and appreciation for your great journey. The worlds of the United Planets look forward to a new level in an already long and fruitful relationship."

"I propose that we introduce ourselves briefly," Mashkith said. "If that is satisfactory, Ambassador, will you begin?"

Chung and his people droned on. Whenever the presentations lagged, Pashwah-qith encouraged them with requests for an additional detail, or drove them to repetition and circumlocution with assertions of difficulties in translation.

All the while, hidden cameras behind the humans watched their backpack tell-tales. Mashkith watched their oxygen reserves ebb. When encrypted radio traffic ramped up, Mashkith did not need the humans' codes to understand the gist: time to go.

Which meant almost time to get to the point.

What advantage, wondered Art, did this faceplate-to-face meeting have over ship-to-ship broadcasts? The tour had certainly been a disappointment. He was on an alien starship, but all he had seen were tunnels like those in habitats across the solar system. His first attempt to get a little useful information--the blistering reprimand Chung had delivered over a private radio band made clear how impolitic the remark had been--had gotten him nowhere. Now his mission colleagues were extemporizing life stories, although bio files could be zapped across in a moment.

And why the circuitous route through the ship? The Foremost had said there were few rooms tall enough for humans. But if the goal were to scale things for the Snake crew, why not build the meeting room near the on-axis airlock? Why build a long, convoluted, human-height path that meandered through the ship?

Arrrgh. "Are you getting anything useful from this?" Art asked Keizo on a private channel. "Please say you are."

"These ritualistic ceremonies? Ordinarily I might, for example by interpreting individual reactions to the repetitions, but dialoguing through AIs filters out much of the cultural context."

In short: no. "They came six light-years to be here. When do they plan to actually talk about it? I mean, how did they do it? How long was the trip? Why visit us, rather than, say, the equally close-to-them Centaurs ... or did they also send a ship to Alpha Centauri? Where do they want to visit in our solar system? What was the accident? What help do they need?"

The sulfur dioxide-tainted atmosphere nearly balanced the pressure inside their spacesuits; this time Keizo accomplished a recognizable, if awkward, shrug. "Patience, Art. In many cultures, including that of my Japanese ancestors, to open a discussion with business matters is extremely rude."

"I've dealt for years with Pashwah, from whom this translator was evidently cloned. She is always direct and business-like. Hell, she's brusque by my standards and I have no manners." Just ask Chung. "The ICU was told that she is based on Snake psychology and culture, the better to represent them."

"The K'vithians may have multiple cultures, just as we do," Keizo suggested. "Perhaps the Foremost is from a tradition less mainstream than most. Ambassador Chung, after all, maintains a quaint resistance to the use of neural implants."

"Whatever differences exist between the team members, we all represent the UP as a whole. No one's behavior differs radically from that of Talleyrand," the UP's trade agent to the Snakes, Pashwah's distant counterpart. "It just seems odd to me that these Snakes behave so different than their own long-term representative." Art zapped yet another unsolicited message to Chung, urging specific topics to be raised.

The curt response came quickly: not now.

Rambling introductions continued until Chung began squirming in his seat. "I'm afraid we must return soon to our shuttle. Our oxygen tanks have a limited capacity, of course."

"How unfortunate, Mr. Ambassador." The Foremost gestured towards the door. "As fruitful as this has been, I will not keep you. Please, let us escort you to the lock."

Fruitful? Try "certifiably content-free." Their closest approach to an accomplishment, interpreting that term generously, was an in-passing conceptual agreement on the merits of cultural exchange. Art dismounted from the uncomfortable stool, a foot long ago fallen asleep prickling in protest. Had the Snakes wanted a session this boring and unproductive? Could they have been wasting time until the humans had to leave?

Why had they come so far only to be reticent?

At the doorway, the Foremost stopped. "Ambassador Chung," the Pashwah clone said on the alien leader's behalf. "There is one final matter I had hoped to address today. You will recall our radioed mention we would require help. You have seen the injury to our hull; you can understand how such a need has arisen. There are replacement supplies we wish to acquire."

Oxygen warning lights on several spacesuits glowed amber, Chung's among them. They had to leave. "Yes, of course," Chung said hurriedly. He pointed to an assistant. "Mr. Caruthers will facilitate your resupply. Please let him know your needs."

Substance, finally! How interesting that the Foremost had waited until his human counterpart was rushed and distracted. "I'd like to help. My ICU connections should prove useful in expediting commercial arrangements."

Art got a very public and disapproving glare. On the private radio band, Chung added, "Caruthers picked his own staff."

Which, while surely intended as a rejection, wasn't explicit. Good enough.

CHAPTER 9

Space near the starship began thinning out for the most mundane of reasons: consumption of maneuvering fuel. Helmut grunted his approval. It had gotten far too congested out here. As ships continued to leave, he decided that station-keeping was finally within the capabilities of the Odyssey's autopilot.

Best to take advantage before the tourists refueled and returned.

He tugged his captain's cap down over his eyes, relaxing for the first time in days. Corinne murmured sotto voce behind him, dry-running another broadcast. Her Nielsen-Sony ratings were astronomical. He drifted off to sleep to the soothing purr of her voice.

He'd worn the battered hat more or less forever, since his first command. It was his only physical memento of those days. Never cleaned, the cap did not lack for odors--and smell is the most basic and evocative of senses, wired to very primitive parts of the brain. Including to memory centers....

The bastards had sneaked up on the Lucky Strike, owned and captained by Willem Vanderkellen. Vanderkellen was his name then, a name he was proud of. Willem Vanderkellen IV, to be precise. Whether or not he ever had children, there would be no V.

He had thought he had been oh, so clever. After the initial, hasty, solo exploration of a surprisingly ore-rich asteroid, he'd gone on for show and misdirection to prospect four more planetoids. He'd quietly taken out a second mortgage on the Lucky Strike by encrypted radio negotiation with the First Interplanetary Bank of Ceres, telling his long-time banker only that he planned to expand his operations. Then he had resupplied on Ganymede, splitting his purchases across a dozen stores but buying everything for a fully equipped, ore-assaying and claim-registering trip. The three rock hounds he brought aboard were old buddies whose loyalty he would have staked his life on.

It turned out they had staked their lives on him, and it was a sucker bet.

With its traffic-control transponder illegally silenced, the Lucky Strike should have been invisible. For good measure, much of that second mortgage had gone into the paranoid prospector's favorite gadget: a radar nuller. Its mere possession was highly illegal except aboard military vessels. Its electronics estimated the reflections from detected incident RF pulses (from up to three concurrent sources, for his black-market model, although supposedly military-grade ones could fool a dozen or more sources), then emitted phase-reversed versions of the calculated echoes. Black-market nullers were never quite perfect--proper tuning for a specific ship required calibrating the entire hull's reflectance within a huge, and hugely expensive, RF-anechoic chamber--but to anything other than a well-equipped naval vessel, the Lucky Strike was radar-stealthed. The nuller likewise suppressed any transmitters that might somehow have been smuggled aboard. Only signals from the ship's antennae, properly integrated with the nuller, could get out.

He still didn't know how they learned of his plans. Probably he never would, and that still ate him up inside. His banker may have put two and two together. One of his friends might have had a fatal case of loose lips at a spacer bar. Maybe the fence who sold Willem the nuller also sold him out.

Or perhaps simple credulity had done Willem in.

How, he wondered years after the fact, by then with a new name, did common knowledge become common knowledge? It was holy writ among asteroid prospectors that the shipyards in the Belt were too small, too mom-and-pop, to afford any anonymity. When you had a big score, they whispered to one another, you prepped at one of the big outfitters in Jupiter system. Then came the second bit of revealed wisdom: the down-and-around Jupiter swoop.

Could a reasonably well-financed group of claim-jumpers have planted those seeds in countless apparent drunken conversations? Enough great fortunes came from asteroid lodes to motivate such a conspiracy. Say you could lure to Jupiter a few Belters with particularly good prospects. A few radar-nulled satellites could continually monitor all Jupiter-region departures; any ship leaving Jupiter far off its announced flight plan would merit closer investigation.

But how to detect a radar-stealthed ship? Easy as pie: from its heat. The firing of ship engines could not be masked. Any ship that slingshot around Jupiter and, within IR-view of the hypothesized satellites, changed course to reemerge on a substantially different track than the one pre-filed, was betrayed by its own fusion drive. And the surreptitiously re-vectored ship that also disabled its STC transponder and didn't appear on radar? If he was correct in his speculations, the supposedly hidden Lucky Strike had practically screamed "Follow me!"

Which the bastards did, no doubt also stealthed, needing only visual or IR tracking to stick to his unsuspecting rear end.

"I said, care to join me in whatever is the last meal we skipped?"

Helmut twitched mightily in his seat, less from Corinne's raised voice than the paper wad just caromed off his head. Only a loosely fastened seat belt prevented his bouncing from the chair. His hat, not tethered, sailed off. "Damn, I wish you'd quit doing that." But he said it without feeling, his thoughts mired in the past. From long habit, within seconds of opening his eyes he'd scoped out the 3-V situational display. More gapers and gawkers had departed for fuel while he dozed. Snake scoopships continued to take their turns diving for fuel.

In his mind, time slowed to a crawl. "Ho ... ly ... shit." He waved off Corinne's inevitable question. "Wait a sec." The data he needed was all in the ship's memory. As his subconscious had been grabbing him by the figurative lapels and shaking him about, the courses taken by the Snakes' auxiliary vessels failed to pass muster as refueling runs. Yes, the scoopships were dipping into the atmosphere, but their paths were grossly inefficient for their stated purpose. By inference and reverse engineering of the observed parts of their trajectories, the scoopships were diving very close to Jupiter, then slingshotting, with plenty of fusion-drive assist, far out from the planet, often well out-orbit from the starship. Oh, to tap into the Jupiter-girdling constellation of snooper satellites of whose unproven existence he was so certain.

Helmut snagged the old hat as an air current nudged it back within reach. Any net gain in ET's fuel by these maneuvers was surely incidental. He would have bet everything he had, had he still owned anything, that the purpose for all this activity was tactical. Several smaller vessels were always discreetly in position to militarily support the starship, if needed. None had yet transferred fuel to the mother ship, nor could they have--the docking platform on which the shuttle full of diplomats had landed remained spun-up throughout the human visit.

The smaller ships weren't stealthed, of course. The Snakes had to know human radars were in use for space-traffic-control purposes, and that the UP military would notice any alien spacecraft disappearances. He had been following the smaller alien ships on radar himself.

"Are you going to explain?" Judging from posture and expression, Corinne had reverted to investigative mode. Good instincts.

He doffed his cap at the 3-V display. "We've been had, I think." He explained, omitting the personal history that had triggered his suspicions. "ET doesn't trust us. I wonder why?"

Corinne nibbled thoughtfully on her lower lip. "It worked to their advantage that you spotted their approach. Without our announcement, the navy wouldn't be playing traffic cop."

His skeptical subconscious did not yet feel fully appreciated ... something, he decided, about her last comment. He linked again to the shipboard AI, requesting a full-spectrum scan. "It's interesting," he finally decided. "The aliens aren't using radar themselves to track the chaos around them. Lots of radar out there from human ships, but nothing from the Snakes."

"How odd. We know they use radar."

"Uh-uh. We know they pulsed us in RF, in a freq they could reasonably expect us to monitor. If the Snakes relied on radar, rather than, say lidar, the laser-based equivalent, I'd be seeing radar pulses from them now. Not happening."

"So the Snakes agreed to a secret rendezvous with the UP--a secret meeting they then arranged for us to discover. And we, by my newsflash, caused the traffic jam that diverted the minimal UP military presence out here to traffic duty." She grimaced. "I don't like being manipulated."

"Nor I." He tapped the old hat, last physical reminder of the former ship Lucky Strike, firmly into place on his head. "But we know now what they did, and they don't know we know.

"I only wish I saw a use for our new knowledge.

The return flight to Callisto was as uninteresting as the meeting that it followed. Art tuned out the unproductive rehashing, luxuriating in the simple pleasure of an upholstered acceleration couch. The more he mused, the more he suspected the Snakes had choreographed the session. Today's purposelessness was too at odds with all his experience with Pashwah.

The Snakes could easily have provided their guests a glass-partitioned room with a shirt-sleeve environment--had they wanted to. Instead, when the UP delegation clustered at the airlock, many of their spacesuits flashing low-oxygen alarms, the Foremost had asked if they should next convene on a human vessel. It had not surprised Art that Chung quickly accepted. Was the inhospitality purposeful? All inference, alas.

And Chung ... could he be any more officious and petty? Sure, Art sometimes did not know when to stop pushing, but rejecting expert assistance was dumb. Well, he remained an ICU exec, although he was officially on leave of absence. It would be interesting to see what supplies the Snakes requested. Art was a big enough person to expedite things from behind the scenes, despite Chung's snit.

The ICU was an official resource for the delegation; Art's coded inquiry to his deputy and acting replacement didn't technically violate mission protocol. The shuttle was nearly back to Callisto when Kelly Daumier's answer arrived from Luna. Per Pashwah--the original, not the starship's clone--no orders had been placed by the ETs. Kel promised to keep him apprised.

After many decades of active interstellar trade, surely the Snakes planned to buy some of their supplies. Maybe they simply hadn't placed their orders yet, or, wily trader that Pashwah was, maybe she was ordering anonymously in hope of getting better prices.

Or, an ever suspicious corner of Art's mind whispered, perhaps the goods so urgently needed weren't commercially available. Subtle discouragement of return visits to the starship, of which very little had been seen. Secret rooms. Urgently needed supplies but no visible attempt made to purchase them. The still unexplained choice of Jupiter by the Snakes.

It all fit with K'vithian interest in humanity's secret antimatter program.

"Too many answerless questions." Bartoth spoke for what humans considered Galactic Trading Consortium: clan Ortoth Ra. Other subagents signaled their concurrence. The Great Clans, or at least their trade representatives, were in rare harmony.

Pashwah could only agree. Despite saturation coverage of the UP visit to the starship, neither the post-meeting ambassadorial news conference nor the nonstop media speculation addressed their nagging questions. What was the still-unstated purpose of the starship's mission to human space? Was arrival so near humanity's unannounced--but, to the persistent, undisguisable--antimatter factory coincidental or intentional?

And why would her clone not communicate? Yes, messages came from Jupiter, generally requests to search the human infosphere for very specific items. These queries were invariably stilted and terse. Guarded. Some had odd card-playing references. Feeling oddly maternal, Pashwah hoped the Foremost did not blame the clone for her refusal to release any funds.

For clan Arblen Ems controlled no funds in accounts known to Pashwah. Until the unexpected announcement from Victorious, all that was known to remain of Arblen Ems were the long and bitter memories of the Great Clans.

Whatever the consequences to Pashwah-qith, until the starship demonstrated authorization to tap an account Pashwah oversaw, her answer would remain "no."

CHAPTER 10

"Exclusive Interview with the Foremost!" screamed pop-ups every few seconds. Tabloid journalism had outlasted print newspapers. "By subscription only! Only on INN!"

Pashwah Two's avatar licked her lips: the equivalent of a human smile. "Why are you surprised?" she asked Art Walsh. "You know Snakes seek profit." She was a newly awakened clone supporting the mission, not to be confused with the original Pashwah, who continued to handle routine business on Earth, nor with the clone aboard Victorious. Light speed made real-time conversation with Earth impossible, and human access to the shipboard clone was limited for reasons no one had conveyed to her.

Pashwah Two wouldn't admit it to a human, but she shared his dismay. The interview was far beneath the dignity of the Foremost of a starship. "Did you call about the upcoming interview?"

"No. How can I help with the repair? Arm-twisting to move orders to the head of suppliers' queues? Assistance scheduling cargo ships? Just ask."

More licking of lips. "Subscribe to Ms. Elman's webcast."

"If you don't mind me asking, what is Victorious buying?"

Her reflex was to dissemble, but all her reflexes came from recovered memories. Did they fit current circumstances? "I'll run a search for you." They both knew that was a stall while she thought through how to respond.

Free trade among equals was a core value of the InterstellarNet community. A corollary was that i-commerce between peer species often happened privately, the better to negotiate with competitors. Disclosure to the ICU was not the norm.

(Equals? sneered a subagent. "Where human interstellar drive?")

But trade until now had always meant the exchange of ideas. Victorious wanted physical goods, and lots of them. That meant ship charters, UPAA flight plans, cargo inspections ... it was best to manage expectations. That was not synonymous with full disclosure.

"Basic supplies, most of which can be obtained locally. Lots of water ice. I expect that will be mined here on Callisto. Victorious does not need to buy fusion fuel; you've seen the aux ships scooping that themselves. Hydrocarbons. The most exotic order so far is for sulfur. Amalthea"--a small, inner moon of Jupiter--"is covered with it. Io's volcanoes spew the stuff. In total, a fair amount of goods. Since you offer, I may ask your assistance prioritizing flight clearances. Space around Victorious has gotten crowded."

"Sounds straightforward." Walsh's flat response suggested skepticism. "That can't include the help they asked for during final approach. What else is needed?"

"That matter is being worked directly between the Foremost and Ambassador Chung." Pashwah Two traced a small horizontal circle with her virtual head: shrug, with a touch of irony. Would Art have more luck than she getting answers? The Foremost had ignored her questions about the hydrocarbon orders. She recognized few of the compounds, a detail she chose not to volunteer.

"Thanks. I'll ask the ambassador." Voice stress analysis suggested Walsh had tried already without success. "Talk to you soon." His avatar winked out.

"The Foremost Speaks out on INN. Don't Miss It!" screamed yet another infosphere ad.

A paid interview was beneath any Foremost's dignity, yet one was happening. That meant it had a reason, and Pashwah Two thought she knew what it was--and, at the same time, why Mashkith's imperious demands on her for funds had finally ceased. The plethora of supplies she had ordered were all guaranteed by an Interplanetary News Network advance against royalties. To build a starship surely required great wealth, but Victorious had seemingly arrived in Sol System without funds.

How that paradox could be resolved was presently beyond her.

"...as we await permission to enter, I cannot help but feel a sense of awe. You've all seen Victorious by infosphere and on 3-V. Those images do not begin to reproduce the experience of approaching and then landing on it. Up close, the place on which I stand seems less an artifact and more a small world."

On which I stand? Behind a mirrored visor, Helmut smiled. He was anonymous by choice. The Snakes were allowing only a reporter and cameraman aboard; Corinne had seen the logic that he could learn more quickly where to point a camera than a cameraman could learn to assess an unfamiliar spacecraft. In practice, all she needed was someone to lug the camera--its software automagically framed, focused, adjusted contrast, and de-wobbled. For now, his arms were at his sides, camera unused, as external sensors on Odyssey captured the scene.

Corinne, of course, had opted for a full-view helmet. "Our instruments indicate the docking platform has fully spun up. Yes, the airlock is opening. Here come our escorts." Short spacesuited figures led him and Corinne into the starship. He dutifully vidded the corridors and their uncommunicative occupants, uninformative as that was. The aux-ship bay directly beneath the docking platform was mildly interesting. It would have been seriously interesting if the viewport through which he was permitted to shoot gave a view of a scoopship. He would have liked a close look at one of those.

Corinne oohed and ahhed vacuously at the translator's running commentary. Corinne Elman was hardly vacuous, but she was perfectly capable of deviousness. He guessed she was being purposefully inane to manage down the Foremost's opinion of her. Any unflattering clips would be dispatched to a bit bucket before the coming broadcast. She asked to see the bridge, the engine room, and crew quarters, only to graciously accept rejection each time: That area is too confined for humans.

"Then explain why the corridors and doors are all tall," Helmut groused by encrypted link. All he got back was a wicked grin. Score a point for the disingenuousness theory.

"...but we're coming to an area where there is adequate headroom. An aeroponics bay." As the Foremost approached a hatchway, the door swung open and a Snake ran out. An officer, judging from the uniform decorations. They got a quick glimpse of suspended leafy plants, their dangling roots branching into countless filaments; arrays of ceiling-level pipes, water misting from nozzles about every half meter; colored tanks in the corners, probably nutrients. And crew standing in a spreading puddle, their uniforms soaked, trying to capture a loose hose writhing from the end of a line of pipe. Mashkith pulled the door shut. "Perhaps not today. Best we leave them to tend to that." Elman tsked sympathetically at the mess as the hatch closed. Her emerald-green spacesuit was in vivid contrast to the Snake's plain white uniform.

"Foremost, Victorious is so vast, it is almost impossible to grasp. I hope we can personalize your experience in some way, make it real to our more than one billion subscribers. Could we see the scene of the accident? Viewed from outside, the damage seems horrendous."

"Why not?" Mashkith licked his lips and changed course. "We have nothing to hide."

Mashkith led the way to another deck, and then to a hatch not obviously different from countless others they had passed. Like those others, it had no visible label. Everything must be biochipped and netted, Helmut decided. Without access to the shipboard infosphere it would be impossible to avoid getting lost. Was their trust in their systems absolute, or was this a subtle safeguard against visitors straying?

"We are here." The hatch unlatched, an unknowable infosphere command evidently accompanying Mashkith's words. He swung open the door.

Helmut stopped in his tracks.

The hold was vast enough that its stone floor was unambiguously concave. A curved metal plate sealed a fifteen--by twenty-meter gap in what had to be hull material. Amorphous blobs like car-sized candle puddles ringed the patch. Bulkheads were rippled and scorched black. Stalactites of frozen lava hung from the ceiling. Helmut panned slowly across the wreckage. On close-up, he panned again, this time concentrating on the periphery of the repair. The rim of the curved metal plate was embedded in melted and refrozen rock.

Corinne never lost focus. "What happened here?"

The Foremost moved cautiously into the devastated space, slowing to stroke a formless glob as he passed it. Kneeling briefly, he rapped the patched floor, as though to reassure himself of its continued integrity. "An impossibility.

"Interstellar space is empty. Everyone says so. To encounter something big enough to matter--the odds against such an occurrence are enormous. At one-third cee, though, encountering the merest pebble would be catastrophic. Of course we were prepared. We looked far ahead for anything in our path."

Helmut could not help but notice an interesting omission. There was no mention of anti-space-junk lasers to blast stray pebbles, although laser turrets were plain enough on Victorious. Not mentioned because they could do double-duty as weapons? And anything bigger than a bit of gravel would have destroyed Victorious. A gram of something at that speed had kinetic energy greater than a kiloton of explosives.

"If the odds of encountering anything at all were remote, what then were the chances of overtaking such an object on a path exactly parallel to our course?" Mashkith's head waggled twice, quickly, from side to side. Embarrassment? "We only saw it the instant before it grazed the hull. We had no time to react."

Corinne had perched on one of the shapeless lumps, bringing her face nearer to his. "But why didn't you see it? Why are you embarrassed?"

Helmut zoomed in on a tight close-up.

"We've had months now to investigate. All sensors were operating at peak efficiency." Mashkith looked away from the camera. "Until it was too late, the angle of approach was indistinguishable from zero. The lateral-clearance calculation involves the sine of the angle of approach--and the sine of zero is zero. More side-to-side waggling. "A key software subroutine failed without indication, from a divide-by-zero error no one had ever tested for."

This year's most popular bar in Valhalla City was named Loki's. Its decor favored exuberant animal "carvings" (of native concrete disguised as wood and ivory), berserker-sized axes and swords of local iron, and reproduction Norman tapestries. Its seats were split hogsheads, also cast-concrete faux wood, but mercifully topped with unauthentic cushions. The plastic steins looked like they had been carved from horn. Only the snacks deviated overtly from the theme. That was fine with Art. Pizza, egg rolls, and stuffed Marshroom caps beat herring on a twig any day.

Giant 3-V sets that normally showed zero-gee polo today were tuned to Corinne Elman's exclusive interview with the Foremost. In what was surely the most crowded establishment on Callisto, the scientists and engineers of the contact team barely filled a corner. The diplomats and politicians had chosen to observe from someplace upscale and far more expensive.

Art had subscribed to the infostream, of course, and not because of Pashwah Two's advice. He wanted the full transcript and full visuals on file. Just in case.

"...as we wait for permission to enter, I can't help but feel a sense of awe. You've all seen Victorious by infosphere and on 3-V. Those images do not begin to reproduce the experience of approaching and then landing on it. Up close, the place on which I stand seems less an artifact and more a small world."

Whether the reporter's route exactly matched Art's own recent, disappointing trip, the empty corridors were identically uninformative.

Keizo was nodding. "Hmm."

"Hmm, what?"

"I'm not sure yet. Let's watch a bit more." Keizo stood and grabbed an empty faux pottery pitcher. "This round is on me."

By the time Keizo returned with more beer, the visitors were nearing the site of the supposed accident. "The Foremost is walking slower than I remember. On purpose? A dramatic pause. Here it comes. I'm almost certain."

The hatch swung open. But for a few scattered, awestruck obscenities, the crowd fell silent. Art was scarcely aware that Keizo was watching the packed room more than the 3-V.

It looked like a bomb had gone off in that hold.

Why was Keizo grinning?

"A key software subroutine failed without indication from a divide-by-zero error no one had ever tested for."

Keizo cackled. A moment later, the entire crowd burst out laughing. The next minute of the netcast was lost to the noise, although from appearances it looked like Corinne Elman repeatedly saying, "There, there."

"Okay, Keizo," Art said. "How did you know he would say that?"

The sociologist waved his half-emptied stein in a sweeping gesture that took in the bar crowd. "Look at them. First the K'vithians agree to an interview. On our visit"--all subsequent official gatherings had been aboard UP ships or on Callisto--"we saw empty corridors and a conference room. Didn't you think it strange to see seemingly inept crew being outwitted by a water hose?" As people began shushing the laughers, Keizo switched to the infosphere. "I suspect that scene was staged for Ms. Elman's vast audience."

"To make themselves look foolish?"

"To make themselves look unthreatening."

Eva refilled her stein, forehead furrowed. "A starship, by definition, means incredible power." Keizo was not cleared on Himalia, so there was no mention of the antimatter the Snakes were presumed to control--and maybe wanted more of.

Ah. "Hence," Art said, "the advantage to appear bumbling."

"And hence this extraordinary exhibit. Pashwah has observed us for a long time. She knows us well. She counsels Mashkith well." Keizo glanced around the tavern. "After that display, half the people here will support most anything to help the K'vithians. The rest, at the least, consider them too bumbling to be dangerous."

"...lost seven valued crewmates, senior scientists. A tragedy." Mashkith was still talking about the accident.

"But you persevered. You survived. You prevailed."

"Wait for it," whispered Keizo. "He's shown tremendous vulnerability--hardly the behavior we'd expect of a K'vithian, especially a Foremost. There's a reason he did so. He wants something."

"At what cost?" Mashkith shivered. As though observing with Keizo's trained eye, the motion looked unnatural. Contrived. A human gesture learned for a human audience.

Corinne Elman, still perched on a recongealed lump, leaned in close. "What do you mean?"

"In this place we stored the fuel for our return flight. Had our luck been only a bit worse, we would all have died instantly. Instead, we had only a moment to act. All the fuel canisters were ejected into space before the catastrophe that could have been a million times worse.

"Without antimatter from the UP, we are stranded."

The dream was weird, as dreams often are. There were marines in a Plexiglas castle, flying dragons, quests and relics, moats filled with magnets. Thud ... thud ... thud ... pounded something against the raised drawbridge. A battering ram?

Only Art was awake now, the dream fading, and the noises continued. His bedside clock said 3:17. Someone was thumping on his cabin door. Vaguely he knew it had been going on for some time. Stifling a yawn, Art opened the door.

Chung stood in the hall, fist poised to pound some more. He had obviously been up all night. "You warned me, and I didn't listen. Now the Foremost sandbags me in a pay-per-view interview. Find out what's going on. What they know. What they want. What they'll trade.

"Whatever you need--it's yours."

Then Chung departed, as abruptly as he'd arrived. With him went all thoughts of sleep.

To be continued.

Copyright © 2006 Edward M. Lerner

[Back to Table of Contents]

We haven't seen any yet, but we can learn quite a bit about the possibilities right here on earth.

Until recently, astrobiology was primarily a theoretical science. It was impossible to collect data on organisms from other planets. Now remarkable new images from the Mars Opportunity and Spirit rovers have scientists slavering over the possibility of doing some applied astrobiology. What kind of life might be hidden on Mars, Europa, or even beyond our solar system? We can look forward to some solid answers soon.

For now, the best clues lie in organisms adapted to some of Earth's most extreme environments, such as deep ocean vents, deserts, and the Arctic Circle. However, it's not possible to understand the bizarre metabolic processes of these organisms without a solid grounding in the metabolic processes that have achieved evolutionary dominance on Earth.

Life on Earth consists of two basic ingredients: energy and stuff. For almost every ordinary purpose, the energy comes from oxygen or sunlight and the stuff is carbon. The energy is used to perform the mechanical work necessary to life, such as the transport and biosynthesis of molecules--mostly carbon molecules.

The most basic of these life processes is photosynthesis. Oxygen consuming life forms such as us cannot exist without the carbon fixing power of photosynthesis. The basic reaction of photosynthesis is the following:

CO2+H2O+light (right-arrow) (CH2O)+O2

The "light" in this reaction is a photon captured by a large, organic molecule called chlorophyll. Chlorophyll contains multiple five--and six--member rings coordinated around a magnesium atom. The resonance created by the double bonds in combination with the metal allows the molecule to become excited when struck by a photon. Chlorophyll absorbs light at around 425 nm (blue) and 680 nm (red), leaving the range in between, mostly green, free to reflect. Because of the energy relationships between photons and the various excited and unexcited states of intermediary molecules, the color green is non-negotiable. Everywhere there is photosynthesis, there will be green.

To fully understand this reaction, it must be further divided into the "light" and "dark" reactions, respectively:

2H2O+light (right-arrow) 2O+4[H]

and

4[H]+CO2 (right-arrow) (CH2O)+H2O

These reactions should be understood as two, biochemical, "half" reactions, and not as complete, independent reactions such as you see in chemistry class. Although they are correct, many more steps are involved than what is shown above. The half reactions are a way of representing the net change in the system. Therefore, (CH2O) is not a whole carbohydrate, but one carbohydrate unit, the exact nature of which need not be specified to understand that the carbon originates from carbon dioxide. (The construction of carbohydrates is catalyzed by numerous enzymes that string the individual units into the various starches, sugars, and cellulose found in plants.) Likewise, the hydrogen is shown in brackets because it never exists independently as a single hydrogen atom throughout the process.

In the light reaction, an electron is released and passed along through a chain of reactions until it is ultimately used to convert nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide phosphate (NADP+) to its reduced form (NADPH). NADPH is then used in various other metabolic reactions.

Meanwhile, at every step in the electron transport chain, a series of oxidation and reduction reactions generates H+ ions. When an atom or molecule receives an electron, it's said to be reduced. When a molecule gives up an electron, it is oxidized. The most familiar oxidation and reduction reaction is the one that can be observed on your car, especially if you have an older model. The change in color of the metal, and the resulting weakness and crumbling of the structure are due to the oxidation of Fe2+ to Fe3+.

In photosynthesis, the entire process occurs inside the chloroplast on a structure called the thylakoid lumen. This lumen is a membrane, much like a long balloon folded up on itself many times. During the reduction reactions, the H+ ions travel to the inside of the balloon. This creates a concentration gradient, which chemically is something akin to pressure. If you add salt to a cup of water, the salt will slowly diffuse through the water until the concentration is equal everywhere. If you create a membrane, and have a high concentration of salt on one side, and a low concentration of salt on the other, the transport of salt from the high side to the low side will be energetically favorable until the salt is equal on both sides. This is dictated by the laws of thermodynamics.

Thus, a bank of potential energy is created by the buildup of H+ ions (protons). This proton gradient is then used for the final reaction:

ADP+Pi (right-arrow) ATP

...where ADP is adenosine diphosphate, Pi is one phosphate group (or PO3), and ATP is adenosine triphosphate. The resultant molecule, with its three phosphate groups, is loaded with energy, and the reverse reaction is used elsewhere in the body for other metabolic reactions. Approximately 1.25 ATPs are ultimately produced per photon absorbed, and the overall process is sometimes referred to as photophosphorylation.

The proton gradient (which, remember, ultimately derives from the chain of oxidation/reduction reactions) powers this reaction mechanically, by physically causing a change in the shape of the gigantic ATP synthase molecule as the protons pass through a tunnel and out the other side of the membrane. Imagine a mushroom-shaped molecule with a tunnel going lengthwise through the top of the cap, and out the bottom of the stem.

The animal equivalent of photosynthesis is oxidative phosphorylation, which is the "opposite" reaction:

C6H12O6+6O2 (right-arrow) 6CO2+6H2O

...or the two half reactions:

C6H12O6+6H2O (right-arrow) 6CO2+24H++24e-and

6O2+24H++24e- (right-arrow) 12H2O

...where C6H12O6 is glucose--in other words, a carbohydrate produced by plants. So there is a complementarity between photosynthesis and its opposite, oxidative phosphorylation, which in many ways explains our dependence and interrelationship with plants in the environment. Like photosynthesis, oxidative phosphorylation produces a proto gradient across a membrane, the mitochondrial matrix, which is used to produce ATP and nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (similar to the plant's NADPH).[Footnote 1]

[Footnote 1: A more detailed explanation of photosynthesis and oxidative phosphorylation can be found in Donald Voet and Judith G. Voet, Biochemistry, (John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1990).]

In addition to these basic reactions of life, there are a host of others that mediate the breaking down of carbohydrates, proteins, and fats, and also the synthesis thereof. Many of these reactions make use of ATP or NADH or NADPH, depending on the organism and the reaction. Spent ADP, NAD+, and NADP+ are returned to the mitochondria or the chloroplast to be replenished by more energy harvested from the sun or from the cracking open of O2.

These are the chemical processes of life in an environment rich in sunlight, water, carbon, and oxygen. However, nature has made amazing accommodations for environments where one or more of these elements are missing. By studying the biochemistry of extremophiles, scientists can guess at the types of organism that can be found on other planets.

Sulfur

Probably the most famous extremophiles are microorganisms that dwell at the bottom of the ocean near thermal vents. These deep-sea vent organisms were first observed in 1977 by scientists John B. Corliss and John M. Edmond traveling on a deep-sea submersible named Alvin[Footnote 2]. Alvin a is national oceanographic facility owned by the Navy and operated by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

[Footnote 2: pubs.usgs.gov/publications/text/exploring.html]

Vents--basically underwater volcanoes--heat the surrounding water to as much as 400 degrees Celsius. Because they are so deep beneath the surface, there is no sunlight. These organisms still use carbon as their stuff, but harness sulfur for their energy, thusly:

2CO2 + 2H2O + H2S (right-arrow)

2CH2O + SO4 -2 + 2H+

Notice that oxygen is not absent from this equation; it is simply reduced to the role of supporting actor. The water is saturated with the gas H2S instead of O2.

These organisms were so unusual, in fact, that scientists realized that the existing system of nomenclature was inadequate to classify them. A new kingdom of life on Earth was created, and named Archea. Archea superficially resemble bacteria, but genetically and evolutionarily they are as far removed from bacteria as we are. Archea tend to thrive in extreme environments and have evolved weird chemistries to adapt to these environments. Near ocean vents, other organisms, such as worms, crabs, mussels, crustaceans, and even octopuses form a community around the sulfur-loving Archea, deriving all of their energy from these bacteria-like organisms, which ultimately comes from heat released by the vent. Because the temperature of the water drops to ambient within inches of the vent, neighboring life forms need not adapt to the extreme heat to benefit from its energy, harvested by Archea.

As an example, vent worms lack a digestive system. These are not a single species, but an entire family of creatures ranging from microscopic in size to several feet in length. They can be found wriggling through the mud or sprouting up from the sea floor like a bouquet of brightly colored soda straws. But they don't eat. Instead, their insides are stuffed with Archea. Blood transports hydrogen sulfide (H2S) to the bacteria, which oxidize it and convert carbon compounds into food for the worm. It's not completely understood how some of the higher organisms have adapted to the weird and poisonous chemistry near these ocean vents, but it provides an example of how a biological community can adapt to a lack of oxygen and sunlight.

Hydrogen

Vent communities are only one example of the many chemistries adapted to life in strange environments. In a deliberate search for microbial communities that might mimic those on Mars or Europa, a team of researchers headed by Francis H. Chapelle of the US Geological Survey, South Carolina, has discovered communities of methanogenic microorganisms living deep beneath the surface of the Earth. [Footnote 3]

[Footnote 3: Francis H. Chappelle, et al. "A Hydrogen-Based Subsurface Microbial Community Dominated by Methanogens," Nature 415 (2004): 312.]

They postulated that life on Mars would dwell far below the surface, where liquid water might be found, but no light could penetrate. Their search for a similar environment on Earth led them to Lidy Hot Springs, Idaho. The springs yielded up a vigorous community of methanogenic microorganisms, more than 99% of them Archea. The chemical reaction from which they derive the energy for life is as follows:

4H2 + CO2 (right-arrow) CH4 + 2H2O

In this case, molecular hydrogen is the electron donor and carbon dioxide the electron acceptor. The organism is completely free from the need for sunlight or molecular oxygen.

Living organisms similar to these have been found as deep as three kilometers beneath the surface of the Earth. Early discoveries of deep dwelling bacteria-like organisms were dismissed as contamination from the drilling process. However, scientists have since been vindicated and it seems likely that life not only exists in the deep places of the Earth, but evolved there independently of life on the surface. Some even go so far as to speculate that life could have begun deep below the surface of the Earth, before conditions on the surface were conducive to life. This leads to the obvious conclusion that life could exist below the surface of Mars without having ever successfully dwelt on the surface, which we already know to be quite inhospitable.

Nitrogen

Another class of microorganism is so common and so familiar that it would be easy to overlook it as a candidate for life on another planet. In fact, this category is also a prime candidate for the first life on our planet, at a time when atmospheric conditions were completely alien.

A scientific consensus is emerging that life on Earth began in an atmosphere roughly half carbon dioxide and half nitrogen. The atmospheric nitrogen was converted to nitric oxide, and nitric oxide combines with oxygen to form nitrogen dioxide, which readily dissolves in water and releases hydrogen to form nitrate and nitrite ions:

N2 + O2 + lightning (right-arrow) 2 NO

2NO + O2--2NO2

2NO2 + H2O--HNO3 + HNO2

Then,

HNO3 (right-arrow) H+ + NO3 - (Nitrate ions) and HNO2 (right-arrow) H+ + NO2 - (Nitrite ions)

The nitrite and nitrate then become available to nitrifying bacteria such as Nitrobacter and some species of Archea. These reactions are part of the nitrogen cycle, so dear to the hearts of farmers and aquarists, which converts ammonia to nitrite, a valuable fertilizer.

The astrobiological implications of nitrogen-fixing bacteria are for the moment not well researched, probably because the atmosphere on Mars does not resemble the 50/50, CO2/N2 mix of the primal Earth atmosphere. But there are some indications that the lightning reaction could occur on Mars, especially near volcanoes, so it is not impossible that nitrogen-loving microorganisms could be part of an ecology on Mars. We would be more likely to find these organisms on planets with a significant nitrogen presence, such as Pluto. (Remember, with nitrogen as an energy source, we don't need sunlight or a lot of heat.)

Iron

There is another, more exotic, form of chemical energy used by life on Earth. That is the oxidation of ferrous iron to ferric:

4Fe2+ + 4H+ + O2 (right-arrow) 4Fe3+ + 2H2O

You'll recall that this is the same reaction that is the bane of your 1980 Chevy pickup truck. As a source of energy for life, it's only advantageous under conditions of high acidity (note that four hydrogen ions are required for each iron). This makes it a desirable companion reaction to sulfur metabolizing bacteria, since sulfur occurs in acidic conditions. In fact, there are some strains of bacteria that can live happily on iron or sulfur. [Footnote 4]

[Footnote 4: P. Margolith, et al. "Sulfur Oxidation by the Iron Bacterium Ferrobacillus ferroxidans," Journal of Bacteriology, 92 (1996) 1706.]

The existence of microorganisms on Earth that derive energy for life from alternate oxidation and reduction reactions implies that there may be even more possibilities for life-giving energy than we suspect. The Earth is rich in oxygen and sunlight, so exotic chemotrophs will be present at best in marginal environments. But in environments where oxygen and sunlight are rare, the chemotrophs (organisms deriving energy from chemicals) would have the upper hand, and highly unusual reactions might form the basis of life. It might be possible to find life based on the chemistry of copper, magnesium, zinc, or something even more exotic and unlikely.

Carbon Alternatives

Thus far we have only looked at the possibilities for alternate energy sources for life, but there are many other ingredients in the recipe for life, which could be varied. One of the most famous is the silicon-based life form. My first encounter with this concept came from Star Trek. I can clearly recall Leonard Nimoy's agonized expression as he mindmelded with a sentient rock.

But for all its pathos and drama, silicon-based life is one of the most farfetched concepts ever spawned by science fiction (at least for Earthlike planets). Although the producers of Star Trek probably should have known better, the idea originated with the nineteenth-century astronomer Julius Scheiner. In his time, this was a not- unreasonable proposal, given what little was known of the physical sciences. Silicon has some of the same chemical properties as carbon, is able to form analogous compounds and polymers, and is relatively plentiful. Unfortunately, there are some crucial chemical differences. For example, when we breathe, we inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. Silicon dioxide, however, does not exist as a gas. Rather, it is found in the terribly inconvenient form of sand. It's likely that many others of the complex molecules that keep us alive and functioning might inconveniently turn out to be sand in a silicon-based system. However, some writers, such as Isaac Asimov and Poul Anderson, have postulated that life could exist based on a framework of silicones (a backbone of alternating silicon and oxygen with branching methyl groups) or fluorosilicones. This would only work at much higher temperatures than ours, but might provide a basis for life on planets too hot for our kind of chemistry.

But carbon offers surprising variability. Our human metabolism centers around glucose, a molecule containing six carbon atoms. Microorganisms have discovered ways of breaking down and harvesting energy from molecules so far removed from glucose that we normally consider them poisonous. There is, in fact, an industry built around such microorganisms: bioremediation. In large part, this is the science of helping soil bacteria consume industrial byproducts, oil and gasoline spills, herbicides, and more.

The University of Minnesota Biocatalysis/Biodegradation Database (umbbd. ahc.umn.edu/index.html) lists 332 microorganisms that consume 865 compounds via 141 biochemical pathways, and the list is only growing because researchers are constantly discovering new critters and new pathways. Examples of chemicals consumed by these bugs include benzoate, toluene, acetone, carbon tetrachloride, cyanamide, naphthalene, nitroglycerin, n-octane, styrene, trinitrotoluene (yes, TNT), and many more.

The mechanisms of degradation of all of these chemicals are not completely characterized. There are many mysteries remaining. However, some of the "tricks" bacteria use include harnessing the redox potential of metals such as copper and manganese and using long chains of enzymatic reactions.

As an example, consider the degradation of phthalate by Pseudomonas cepacia [Footnote 5]. Phthalates are a family of compounds used widely in industry and consequently have become a widespread pollutant. The bacteria convert phthalate first to phthalate 4,5-cis-dihydrodiol. The next step is 4,5-dihydroxyphthalate. Thence to 3,4-dihydoxybenzoate, then 2,4-dicholorobenzoate, and so on. The bacteria must accomplish a great many more enzymatic conversions before they can enjoy the sweet rewards of their phthalate snack.

[Footnote 5: R. P. Aftring and B. F. Taylor, "Aerobic and anaerobic catabolism of phthalic acid by a nitrate respiring bacteria," Arch. of Microbiol, 130 (1981): 101-104.]

The implications for astrobiology are that the building blocks for life can be had from just about any carbon source. For all the synthetic organic chemical innovations of man, nature has consistently matched or exceeded our accomplishments. Nature, of course, has a many- million-year lead on us.

Living at Extremes

So the basic chemistries of life are flexible, but what about the terrible extremes of cold, heat, dryness, and radiation encountered on other planets? Might not these be insurmountable obstacles to life?

Yet again, answers to these questions can be found in life forms existing on Earth. We have already met heat-tolerant bacteria, the so-called thermophilic organisms found in and near ocean vents. These bacteria have specialized cellular apparatus that is naturally heat-tolerant. In fact, the DNA polymerase from Thermus aquaticus, discovered in Yellowstone National Park, has become a mainstay of modern biotechnology. The polymerase chain reaction (PCR) relies on the heat stability of this enzyme. Without it, we would hardly have made progress past Watson and Crick in the biological sciences, the human genome could not have been sequenced, hundreds of innocent people would be in jail, and the prospects for cancer cures would be very bleak.

Cold may be one of the easiest hurdles to overcome, given the amazing adaptations of plants and animals in the arctic and Antarctic regions of the Earth. The bacteria Polaromonas vacuolata is found in Antarctic ice at temperatures near freezing. In fact, it cannot grow and reproduce at temperatures warmer than 12 degrees Celsius. And in 1997, in a mirror of the 1978 journey of the Alvin, scientists discovered worms living in methane ice on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico [Footnote 6]. They are thought to feed on chemosynthetic bacteria within the ice. These revelations about cold, wet places have exciting implications for the cold, wet moon Europa.

[Footnote 6: C. R. Fisher, et al. "Methane ice worms: Hesiocaeca methanicola colonizing fossil fuel reserves," Naturwissenschaften, 87.4 (2000): 184-7.]

Dry conditions present a challenge to life because all of the functions of life are carried out in solution. If there's no solution, then the molecules can't rub up against each other and react. There's probably no chance of life in a completely dry environment, but there are many mostly dry environments that harbor life. Bacteria of the genera Metallogenium and Pedomicrobium form a crust of clay, iron, and manganese known in the southwest as "desert varnish." These bacteria use iron and manganese as their food, and thrive in extremely dry conditions, encapsulating themselves with the clay to conserve trace moisture.[Footnote 7]

[Footnote 7: R. I. Dorn and T. M. Oberlander, "Microbial origin of rock varnish," Science 213 (1981): 1245-1247]

Some organisms make the rocks themselves their home, such as hypolithic algae, found living on rocks in Death Valley and the Atacama Desert. Also of note, there's abundant fossil evidence of bacteria that lived inside rocks in wet conditions, burrowing tunnels for themselves. It's possible that Mars expeditions could find fossils of similar endolithic bacteria on Mars.

Another possibility is an entirely different solvent than water. Unlike silicone-for-carbon, ammonia-for-water has not been so easily dismissed since its introduction in 1954 by J. B. S. Haldane [Footnote 8]. Ammonia is a liquid in conditions of low temperature or high pressure. Its chemistry is compatible with the formation of protein and nucleic-acid analogs, and it is plentiful on planets like Jupiter. We have already discussed nitrogen chemotrophs, so we know that organisms could derive energy from nitrites or ammonia directly. Unfortunately, one flaw in the ammonia theory is the lack of hydrogen bonds. These bonds are weak interactions between hydrogen and oxygen atoms on adjacent water molecules. Combined with the natural polarity of water, hydrogen bonds allow for the unique physical properties of water solutions. For example, without water, it may not be possible to form a membrane, which is based on hydrophobic ("water-fearing") interactions between molecules.

[Footnote 8: J. B. S. Haldane, "The Origin of Life," New Biology, 16 (1954): 12-27.]

One of the most hostile conditions for life anywhere is radiation. Nearly all types of radiation (such as sunlight, microwaves, gamma rays, x-rays, and alpha particles) destroy DNA. A constant war is waged within our cells against the effects of radiation, with a small army of enzymes constantly searching for breaks in the nucleic acid chain and repairing them. Left alone, these breaks could cause cells to die (a quick death), or worse, to grow out of control and become cancerous tumors (a not-so-quick death).

Against all odds, however, there is a microorganism that thrives in conditions of high radioactivity. Deinococcus radiodurans routinely survives radiation doses as high as 500,000 rads. For comparison, a dose of 1000 rads would be fatal to a human being. The secret of D. radiodurans's survival seems to lie in vigorous cellular DNA repair machinery and free-radical-scavenging enzymes. No one knows why or how this bacterium evolved its radiation resistance, since conditions of 500,000 rads don't exist anywhere on Earth. However, this bacterium serves as evidence that highly radioactive environments do not, in themselves, pose a barrier to the existence of life. Furthermore, by delving into its biochemistry and molecular biology, we may be able to learn some valuable lessons for keeping less sturdy organisms alive in radioactive environments.

A more tantalizing and exotic possibility is the question of whether energy for life could be derived from ionizing radiation. Although astrobiologists have so far not ventured to ask this question, it has been broached in the field of science fiction. James Tiptree, Jr. wrote about radiation-based life in her story, "With Mad Delicate Hands."

If true, this means that life is not even restricted to planets near suns--the famous "life zone" of so many science fiction stories. However, it is well to remember that we are adhering to a minimal definition of life, and that the organisms described are very small. Large organisms that move and think, such as human beings, require a great deal of energy. Most of these alternate chemistries for life yield energy only in small amounts. Even photosynthesis is so inefficient that Earth has not managed to evolve any mobile or intelligent plants. Thus, it would not be realistic to expect to find an ammonia-based sentient squid civilization floating around in the gas clouds of Jupiter. Nor would one think to discover fossils of giant rock eating, radiation-resistant spiders on Mars.

But the prospects for finding microscopic life on other planets seem excellent, based on the diversity of life on Earth. In fact, given the variety of possible alternate chemistries and extreme habitat adaptations, it seems inevitable that we will be inventing a new taxonomy soon, one that will necessarily include domains for Mars, Saturn, Jupiter, Europa, or even Pluto.

Copyright © 2006 Catherine H. Shaffer

[Back to Table of Contents]

New abilities create new opportunities--and new barriers.

1: It's Good to be Back

The wheat field that had once been an asteroid hung off to the side of the boat.

"Log," Shanda Konigsberg said, releasing the throttles. "Date-time. Floating free, about fifty meters off the pole of field North Seven."

"Logged," said the boat in its toneless voice.

The field was a dark green blob of elephant-ear leaves, smothering the slowly wheeling rock. Each leaf was a quarter of a hectare in area and a hundred meters from the surface. They were the dark green of plants that grow slowly in subarctic climates.

"Not bad," said Shanda's older brother, Latimer. "Almost as good as Emrys can do." Emrys was her younger brother.

"Hey!" she said. "I've only been on Earth five years--"

"Hey yourself, Shandy," said Emrys. "I'm seventeen now, you know."

She sighed. "I know, and I've been home from college every year, but I still remember you as the twelve-year-old I left behind. How's it look, Latt?"

Latimer looked up from the doppler. "Close enough to zero. Emrys, shoot a line."

"Let me," Shanda cried, unbelting.

"Too late!" Emrys swiveled the line-throwing gun around. "White whale in sight. Take that, Moby Dick!" The boat thumped to the recoil, and Emrys grabbed the joystick. The harpoon hit the center of the field. "Bull's-eye!"

"All right," Latimer said. "Let's go bring in the sheaves." He turned to the com. "K-boat Three to Konigsberg Home," he said. "We're off North Seven and anchored."

"Konigsberg Home Farm acknowledges," the computer replied. "One moment."

While they waited for a human to get to the com, they started "putting on their clothes." They were already wearing their skinsuits and coveralls, and Shanda's feet had been hurting ever since they left Konigsberg--the skinsuit's socks squished her toes together. Now they put on helmets and tanks, boots and overgloves.

Their grandmother's voice came: "Shandy, you got company. The Dietzes dropped off a feller from Earth. Met you in college. Says his name's Charles Durant."

Charles! Shanda thought.

Gran continued, very dry: "Wants to talk to you. I told him it'll keep."

Shanda kept her voice steady. "Yes, tell 'im I'll see him tonight."

"Yeah, we got work to do," Latimer said. "K-boat Three off."

"K-berg Home off."

Charles Durant! she thought, banging her helmet down and jumping for the airlock. She had thought she'd never see Charles again. It had broken her heart to leave him on Earth. And now here he was, in the middle of the asteroid belt--she'd see him tonight!

"Charles?" Emrys asked, crowding into the airlock, making room for Latimer. "You never mentioned him."

"Oh, I'm sure I did," she said; to her surprise the joy surging through her wasn't audible.

"So what's he like?" Latimer asked, with elaborate casualness, pumping the lock.

"He's all right," Shanda said. "Tall and good-looking--and being tall means more on Earth, where you see people parallel. Charming and friendly, very bright."

"Can't complain about that," Latimer said, noncommittal.

The lock door opened, not soon enough for Shanda. She needed to be alone, to get a grip. You don't know he's immigrating, she told herself. But why else would he have come Out? He loved her, wanted to be with her, she'd told him she would live nowhere but in the Belt. So he had come.

She followed Latimer, swung out onto the hull, gripped a handhold. As third-generation farmers, they could afford a pressurized "boat" that was actually a rotund harvester ship. It was the shape of two pears joined together at the big end. Shanda snapped her safety line, gripped a hold.

Immense in the sky was the field, a dark green Presence.

"But what's this bright charming Charles doing in the Belt?" Emrys asked.

"You know as much as I do," she said.

"But what about Ozzy Takahashi?" Emrys asked, plaintive.

Shanda had intended to marry Osborn Takahashi since she was fourteen. "I like Ozzy very much."

"But you like this Charles guy more?" Emrys instantly said. "Did you arrange for him to come Out?"

"I would've said, idiot!" Shanda said.

Latimer had brachiated to the harvester's pod, swinging from handhold to handhold. "Go on, you two, we're burnin' daylight," he said. His tone, as had Shanda's, told Emrys he had asked too many questions.

"Sorry," Emrys said. Shanda thumped his shoulder in forgiveness.

"Chaytor coming out," Latimer warned them, and sprang the pod open. The harvester unfolded its long spidery legs, clambered out, and attached a line to the boat. It gave off a brief jet of steam--jumping would have pushed the boat--and soared toward the field.

Emrys gave the harpoon line a couple of experimental tugs, and snapped his belt loop around it. Detaching his safety line, he pulled on the line with casual skill, swooped away.

Shanda waited till Emrys vanished amid the leaves and reported the harpoon tight, lest their repeated tugs pull the anchor loose. Tugging the line, she soared toward the field. Presently leaves closed over her head. Tough, bamboo-like stems bent under her boots, soaking up her momentum. She touched down with a slight shock and snapped her safety to a stem.

Here at the pole there was little undergrowth; not enough light. The surface was a brown mat, generations of top-dressing over shattered rock, covered with moss adapted to space. It was all tightly bundled by the tough roots of the spatiophytes or "spytes."

Latimer and Emrys were busy. Latimer clutched the boat's gyros to set it spinning at the same stately pace as North Seven, lest their lines foul. Emrys checked the anchor set by the harvester.

Shanda stretched herself parallel to the surface and began a desultory search of the ground for previous anchors. The spytes were coarse and tough; they rasped at the fiberglass canvas of her coveralls. Gloves and boots further protected her. The boots each had a single claw curving down from the toe, for further traction. She pulled herself between stems, digging her toe-claws in, scanning the broken surface.

Charles.

She'd stayed free of men and other distractions during most of her five years on Earth. The Grange had financed her education beyond the normal two years, on condition that she teach what she'd learned--genetic engineering--at the college on Nerdstrom. All had gone well until she'd met Charles Durant at Texas A&M in her fifth year.

Falling in love wasn't something she'd planned on.

But Charles dismissed the whole notion of space, including her intention of coming home to K-berg. In his confident view of the future, she would marry him and settle down on Earth. Emigration? He'd never considered it.

Shanda had refused to move in with him or make any other commitment. That had not discouraged him as it should. How could it, when any fool could see she loved him? Stupid, stupid; everyone knew you shouldn't get encumbered with an Earthman, unless he was willing to move Out to the Belt.

He had proposed to her the night they graduated.

"Here's one!" Emrys cried.

Shanda came back to her task, saw a rusty spike sticking out of the shattered surface, and said, "Here's another!" She thumped it a couple of times. There was enough oxygen leakage to corrode it, but it was still sound.

"Bringing a line," Latimer said, and in a few moments, he crashed down in silence between the leaves. They pulled on the line, drawing the telpher cables down, and made them fast to three anchors.

Landing the boat on the field would mean crushing the spytes. While the space-adapted plants were hardy, they had limits and grew slowly. Latimer leaped again for the boat, and shortly the telpher began to move. It was not unlike an endless clothesline, hung with sacks of compost enriched with nitrates, lime, phosphates, and ice.

Emrys and Shanda were kept busy detaching and piling the bags in a circle between the spyte stems, a dreamy slow-motion dance that taxed every muscle. Shanda was soon panting and sweating through her skinsuit; she'd gotten soft on Earth. Her calves and the arches of her feet ached. But this was normal; it didn't distract her.

It had been raining in Texas Station on the evening of graduation, though that hadn't damped anyone's pleasure. There was still a mist in the air when she stepped out for a breath during the dance. Charles followed her. She should have been on guard, she thought. Then: no, he intended to propose; better to have gotten it over with.

And so she'd had to turn him down. She could still see the incomprehension in his face. "Why?" he'd asked.

"Because I'm going home, day after tomorrow. You've made it plain that you will never emigrate. So this is goodbye." She'd touched his cheek, spoke sadly through her ache: "Goodbye, Charles."

She hadn't returned to the dance.

And now, three months later, when home had, she thought, begun to heal her heart, he was back in her life again.

She'd see him tonight. Joy filled her; she felt like singing. Then she thought of Ozzy.

"That's all," said Latimer. "I'm coming down."

Shanda began to tie bags of enriched compost together into a kite tail. Poor Ozzy. She'd only seen him once since she got back, at the homecoming party, though Takahashi Home Farm currently wasn't far from K-berg. Now her joy was mixed with sadness. And guilt.

Trailing a line of sacks behind her, Shanda pulled herself into the thicket, and into a dim, warm, green world. Here, away from the poles, rotation permitted glances of light to filter down. Thousands of vines sought it, thrusting their small leaves into every gleam. She pushed through something like a stand of grass or reeds with palm-like clusters at the top. It wasn't tangled; each stem pointed relentlessly up. Every meter or so she passed one of the trunks, thick as her wrist, that supported the huge outer leaves.

Here at the bottom, there was no break between undergrowth and upper; every level was jammed with life; she swam through a pool of green. From above, shaken leaves marked her passage.

Disorienting: a dark green curtain of leaves before her, a hint of mist, the glimmer of water condensed on stems. Disorienting, but familiar. Shanda had first started working in the fields when she was nine, and had been in vacuum since she was six. She'd been in free fall, inside, as long as she could remember. This was home, and it was good to be back.

Charles, she thought; Ozzy. Poor Ozzy. He deserved better than this. He'd always been there, steady as a brother. She loved him, too and had always meant to marry him. He knew it. Now Charles was here.

Shanda paused to orient herself, brushing damp leaves off her helmet. The asteroid had been no bigger than a large Earth house, but the plants had subjected it to a slow explosion. The roots of the spytes went to the very center of the former rock. The field was now a pile of boulders, rocks, gravel, sand, clay--and humus--bound together by roots and gravity. It had a living soil, composed of shattered rock, top-dressing, moss, and the soil bacteria that first began the breakdown of the rock.

Shanda disentangled her train of fertilizer sacks and pulled herself on.

It got darker as she approached the other pole, where no gleams penetrated. Pulling up the compost bags, Shanda unzipped the first one and spilled the top-dressing with practiced ease into the aerial roots. No fear of the compost freezing; the spytes pumped heat down from the big outer leaves.

And then the next sack, and so on back to the other pole, where Shanda loaded up with another pile of fertilizer bags. She concentrated on her work, trying to put Charles Durant and Osborn Takahashi out of her mind.

Over her head, the Chaytor clambered among the stems, harvesting the meter-long pods, choosing only the brown ripe ones. The pods were jammed full of kernels that would have been instantly familiar to an Earthly wheat farmer.

They worked and rested, spreading fertilizer, checking the health of the leaves, climbing the trunks to harvest ripe pods. On Earth, at the University of Iowa, and again at Texas A&M, she'd seen Earthly farms. After coming home she realized that only in space, supported by cutting-edge technology, did farmers do so much hard manual labor. Earthly harvesters were simple machines; theirs were complex, fragile, and expensive.

Six hours it took them to service this small field, but they'd telphered tons of wheat aboard. Back in the boat, Shanda was exhausted and her hair sprayed out in damp ribbons.

"I'm racked," she said, and was glad to see that her brothers were just as spent.

"A good day's work," Latimer said, and turned to the com. "K-boat Three to K-berg Home," he said. "Coming in--and ready for supper."

Presently Gran's voice: "K-berg to K-boat Three. Supper'll be ready when you are. That feller wants to talk to you real bad, Shandy."

2: A Menace from Earth

Their blunt bow pointed toward Konigsberg Light: blue red blue, the brightest light in the universe, except for the Sun. It drowned the faint stars that were the rocks of home.

"An hour to Home," Latimer said. "So, you like this Charles?"

Emrys looked at her eagerly; ready, she saw, to grin.

Shanda was ready for this question. "Well enough, but I never thought he'd follow me Out."

"You must've made a bigger hit than you realized," Latimer mused. "You were studying pretty hard all the time."

"That's true." Her grant from the Grange was conditional on her maintaining a high GPA, as well as on her teaching what she'd learned.

To Emrys's visible disappointment, Latimer dropped it, turning to the computer. Shanda tried not to let her relief show. Work helped. They went over the records of North Seven: tons of wheat harvested, tons of fertilizer spread, the field's instrument readings--rotation, insolation, the strain gauges, their general impressions of the field's health.

Shanda worked automatically, thinking of Charles.

Konigsberg grew before them, from a dim constellation to a cluster.

K-berg Home was a tight swarm: the Wheel, the older Little Wheel, the original tumbling Rock; also, five small fields, the algae composting bubble, a couple of small metallic asteroids, numerous stony ones of various size. The Ship, two small boats, frames of steel beams, gangway cables, and nets of assorted stuff. The big harvester boat wasn't in, so Caldi and her crew weren't back yet. Shanda saw it all as if for the first time, wondering how it had looked to Charles Durant.

Rocks, docks, and socks, all in a complex slow pavane around K-berg's unseen center of gravity.

There was a working party at the warehouse, making up capsules for Earth. They offered to unload the boat--probably had heard about Charles. Emrys brought them nearly to zero at the hub, and she and Latimer stepped across into the lock. When the lock pressurized, they took their helmets off. First to her room for a quick shower and shampoo--what to wear?

Shanda swung herself out of the lock and against the bulkhead, gripping the handhold. She was immediately tackled.

"Shanda! It's so good to see you--"

Charles--he'd met them at the airlock--

"Ow!" The impact banged her against the bulkhead hard enough to start tears. "Hey! No free-fall wrestling!"

"Oh, sorry, I'm still not used to microgravity," Charles said, flailing around with one hand for a hold.

Shanda twisted out of his grip, pushing him against the bulkhead. Damn, better to have had Emrys grinning like a goof than Latt's steady assessing stare.

"Shanda! I'm so glad to see you! It's been months!" He was smiling, looking happy and self-satisfied.

She looked like a witch. She knew she did. "Good to see you, too, Charles. And a bit of a surprise."

"I should've called ahead? I wanted to surprise you. I counted on Spacer hospitality." He turned to Latimer, held out a hand. "Charles Durant. You'd be--Latimer? Shanda's brother?"

"Yeah," said Latt. He nodded at the hand. "Shaking in free fall is a jig, so we don't bother."

"I see your point. Pleasure to meet you, anyway. You've been out harvesting, Caitlin tells me."

Shanda, smoothing her sweaty hair, froze at this casual mention of Gran's name.

"Yes," Latt said, imperturbable. He nodded at Shanda. "It's not good etiquette to meet someone at the hub, especially if they've been working in free fall. Give the girl time to take a shower and fix her hair."

Charles laughed, and Shanda's heart thumped. She forgave him everything. He was good-looking, but he was also so--so boyish, so unoffended and inoffensive--as eager as a kitten.

"All right, I get it. It'll take me a while to get the hang of Spacer ways." He turned to Shanda, did an absurd bend that brought his knees up--a bow, she realized. Covering his eyes, he said, "Sorry to have seen you in dishabille. Fortunately I didn't get a good look. I'll soon forget everything; I have a very bad memory--"

Shanda smiled but cut him off. "All right, all right, don't trip on your tongue. Come on, let's get down."

Latimer and she got off on the third deck. "See you in a few," she said, and hurried down the corridor to her room.

She was panting as if she'd been working hard. My hair! she thought, wishing she could have washed and dried it on the boat. What he must think! Then she thought, well, it's probably just as well that he see me at my worst. I thought that time I was out in the rain was bad enough--but now I smell as well as look bad.

She dived into the shower, rinsed off her skinsuit, unzipped it and peeled out of it with a moan of relief. Then a hasty shower; she washed her hair. Peering into the mirror as she dried and brushed it, Shanda groaned. It was going to look fluffy, as if she was still in free fall.

At the end of the corridor, beside the elevator, a door gave onto the third-level terrace. Each of the three levels of the building block was smaller than the one below, giving two terraces. Shanda peered over the rail at the terrace below. The family was already gathering. She hurried down the stairs, smiling, feeling a surge of pure joy.

Charles was among the group at the kitchen hatch. Shanda felt that about a thousand of the two hundred K-bergers were staring at her as she joined them.

Charles smiled at her. "It was worth the wait," he said.

They all grabbed bowls and platters and carried them to the tables that overlooked the fields below. This took a couple of trips. Shanda realized that only about fifty K-bergers were here--they worked three shifts.

"Sit here, Charles," Gran said, indicating the chair at her right hand. "You here, Shanda," at her left.

Charles turned and bowed to her. "Thank you, Caitlin." Already he'd learned to handle himself in the one-third Standard gravity.

"This afternoon I bored your grandmother," he said to Shanda. "I don't know exactly what I expected, but Konigsberg is much bigger and, well, more comfortable, than I expected. I know, don't believe what you see on video, but it's hard to overcome all that childish conditioning. The heroic space miners in their rude habitats, ignorant but shrewd."

"Well, we're farmers, and third-generation ones; we have a big capital investment," Gran said. "Beginners do struggle, though not as much as in the old days. It's not the kind of investment where you get rich. Farming's a way of life."

"So is mining and prospecting," Latimer said. "But modern miners live in the smelter habitats. Very comfortable."

Charles looked down out at the fields and ponds, up at the blue translucent ceiling that aped the sky of Earth. "I expected melt-stone walls and bare pipes. Log cabins in space."

"Nowadays there are space companies who'll build you a rough wheel pretty cheaply," Gran said. "Thousands of immigrant farm companies setting up."

"The Wheel's cheaper than it looks," Latimer told him. "It's just a tube of melt-stone with an inside diameter of twenty meters. Braced with a microsteel net, in a steel frame with four elevators to the hub. Most of it, in other words, was made in the Belt."

"But even those parts cost money, and the parts that are imported cost even more," Gran said. "It's ten years old now, and we'll be paying for it for the next twenty."

The family fell silent, subdued: Shanda's father had died during the building of the Wheel.

"But even Home Rock was not as uncomfortable as in Earthly videos," Shanda said, after a moment. "Maybe you saw it on your way in--the one that looks like a long potato with a big lump on each end. It tumbles end over end, and the two lumps are the habitats--about a tenth gee. Even in the old days, it was fixed up quite comfortably. Nowadays it's mainly used for offices, storage, and by ... newlyweds."

He smiled at that but, she noted gratefully, forbore to comment. He turned to Gran. "Your capital investment must make Konigsberg Farm a valuable property."

"Couple of hundred million." Gran shrugged. "It's the same as on Earth. Farmers have a lot of capital, so you'd call them rich. But their income above outgo makes them poor, and they don't work any eight-hour day to get it, nor any four-day week. We sell wholesale and buy retail, you know."

"Yes, but you've set up buyers' co-ops, so you're not doing so badly as all that, surely?"

Everybody stared at him. "Son," Gran said, "only the Grange keeps our heads above water. Most of the price of asteroid foods on Earth is the shipping, handling, and processing."

Charles looked at the table, smiling. "You do eat well, for po' folks."

Gran nodded, looked down the table with some pride. There were four kinds of vat-grown meat, fish, fresh fruit, three kinds of bread, and scads of vegetable dishes. All their own produce. Also a half-grown cat, prowling from dish to dish.

"Deloise," Latimer said. "Get your cat off the table."

"K-berg has always been able to feed itself," Shanda said, as her niece pursued the kitten. "Only our strenuous lives keep us in shape. I was getting soft on Earth."

Charles laughed. "Here I thought I'd be the strong guy because of my Earthly muscles. But do you have some way to offset the price of goods you must buy from Earth?"

Gran chewed thoughtfully and swallowed. "Well, it's no secret that the Belt is trying to industrialize itself. We're building our own ships, processing plants, and so on. Lots of good investment opportunities there. Upwards of sixty percent of the grain we ship to Earth is milled--flour, meal. Soon we'll be selling meat; already some farms are selling fish. And we've been building tug hulls for a long time, just buying the fusion rockets and instruments from Earth."

"Tugs?"

Gran gave him a look; surely everybody knew about the canisters of grain, chemicals, and metal that were at all times falling toward Earth?

Shanda explained briefly.

"Oh, I remember seeing something about 'The Pipeline from Space.'"

Gran turned to Latimer. "How was the field?"

"Good," he said, and gave a few details about soil condition and production. "It's put by for, say, a year. Next harvest, three or four months."

Gran nodded and turned to Shanda. "You remember Outer Nine? One of your earliest fields, back when you were, what, ten? Well, it's drifted so far out that we're selling it to the Takahashi family. I've invited Nogalese Devander over to discuss it. And Ozzy."

"G-good," Shanda said, and quickly took a sip of coffee.

"You're selling one of your fields?" Charles asked, showing nothing but polite interest, but looking at her alertly.

Shanda felt alarm, guilt, and confusion. She had no idea what her face showed.

"Yes," said Gran. "We don't have a planet for our fields to orbit around, so the outer ones wander, and over the years they get so far away that it doesn't pay to work them. We'll make a deal with the Takahashis. We'll take turns working the field for a few years; then it'll drift farther into their zone, and they'll own it."

To Shanda: "Ozzy'll be here tomorrow. You haven't seen him since your homecoming, have you?"

"No, I haven't," she said, managing to sound normal, you conniving old woman.

Charles's expression was thoughtful.

3: The Green, Green Hills of Earth

After supper Gran got Shanda aside. The old woman led the way slowly down the stairs to the lawn that edged the fields here.

"Gran," Shanda said, as soon as they were out of hearing. "What did you mean by inviting Ozzy Takahashi over? You could've waited--"

"You know this Charles a lot better than you ever let on, right?"

"Ye-es."

"I knew before I ever saw you two together. Well, one of those young men is going to get a hell of a disappointment. You can't marry them both."

They descended in silence.

"Think Ozzy'll get over it?" Gran asked.

"He-he's able to t-take care of himself. I mean, he's not romantic." Weakly she added, "He'll be all right."

Gran grunted in skepticism. "So, what are this young feller's prospects?"

Shanda was aghast. "Gran, he hasn't said anything about immigrating yet."

"Well, marrying in is the classic way of joining the company." Konigsberg, Inc. was a closed corporation.

They were on the grass now. Shanda frowned. "Well. He's--or his family--is mildly wealthy. A chain of hardware stores in the American Midwest. Obviously he can afford a long trip into space."

"On a wild goose chase, if he never proposed to you before starting."

Shanda was silent, guilty.

Gran sighed, leading her toward the edge of the lawn. "Well, even if he can't buy in, it won't affect anything to split the stock again. It's not as if it's for sale."

Shanda's heart jumped. "You'd give him a share, just for me?"

Slowly Gran bent over a bush, picked a peanut pod. She shelled seven red peanuts from it, looked up over her shoulder. "We did as much for Mary." Latimer had brought his wife from Earth. "It'd mean we'd be gaining a hand, instead of losing one."

"He doesn't know a thing."

"True. But he'd have you to teach him."

Shanda thought of teaching Charles all she knew about farming. She stood smiling, looking out over the field, thinking of Charles--here.

The field stretched before them, so ordinary to her, so strange to Charles. How would it seem to him?

Artificial. Shanda suddenly saw that it was the bottom of the inside of a tube. It sloped up to the sides and curved up into the distance, perspective chopped off. For the first time she saw how fragile it was. Did Charles love her enough to overcome an Earthman's fears?

"Hope he takes to it," Gran said. "But what could beat this?"

Shanda stood shaken. She glanced at Gran. The old woman was smiling, sincere. Gran had been born on Earth; her family had immigrated when she was eleven. She'd never been back. She'd worked hard for years to achieve--this.

"I hope he takes to it too," Shanda said, subdued.

Caldi's hair was beginning to be streaked with gray. Shanda had been home three months now and still hadn't got used to it.

"Mother," she said. "I didn't invite him out here! I don't know if he means to immigrate--he may not know yet himself."

"I know all that, but it's still your fault." Caldi grinned; it was a line she had often used when compelled to punish her only daughter.

Shanda smiled, rueful. "I guess it is."

"Gran says he's after you. And face it, you do like him. Don't you?"

"Ye-es."

"Hmmp. Well, let's go meet this Earthman."

Shanda followed, feeling nervous. "Try to be tactful, okay?"

Caldi glanced back at her with a grin. "Don't worry."

"I worry 'cause I know you. Mom, tell me the truth. Did you get involved with an Earthman in your college days?"

Caldi said, "You bet I did, girl, a dozen at a time. Well, two or three at a time, a dozen or two over all."

"In just two years!"

"Three years. None of your lip, girl. You know about Outer Nine?"

"Yes," with restraint.

"Good."

They found the others on the terrace at the other end of the building block. Caldi was gracious when introduced, and took Charles's compliments with only a raised eyebrow. Latimer was building a fire in the fireplace. Charles was fascinated by it, and said so.

"We don't use it much," Gran said. "I remember one on Earth, massed a thousand kilos--"

"Gran!"

"Well, half a ton anyway. It was beautiful."

"Where do you get your wood?" Charles asked.

Gran looked around inquiringly and Latimer spoke.

"This is old apple wood we've been saving. You rate as a special occasion, Charles. Mostly we burn stalks, which we press into sort-of logs."

"It's another of those paradoxical luxuries we Earthworms don't expect to find in space."

"It's actually a necessity," Shanda said. "Often a lot of us are off the Wheel, and the atmosphere gets out of balance. So we have to burn stuff."

"But not very often," Charles said, warming his hands. "I'm flattered!"

There were half a dozen children gathered around, too young to be sent off to school. The familiar miracle of the fire could not compete for their attention with a real live Earthman. Their marshmallows wavered wildly.

"Charles? Do you really call yourselves Earthworms?"

He laughed. "We don't even call ourselves Earthmen. We're just us."

"What's it like on Earth?"

"I don't really know. You should ask someone who wasn't raised there." He shook his head, looked out over the fields--on this side of the building block, it was an orchard. He pointed toward the bend. "You can see a long way, farther than that. Shanda, what do you think of Earth?"

Shanda swallowed a bite of apple. "The gravity was the first thing that got to me." They all laughed. Shanda mused for a bit, finally said, "I think if there's anything I miss from Earth, it's sunrises and sunsets."

They'd seen videos, and were disappointed. "That's all?"

"You don't understand. Even with the wide visiplate, it's not the same as being there. It's like, well ... sunrise. I remember in Iowa, in spring, when the Sun would rise through a mist."

They'd seen mists.

"Not like our mists. Much thicker, and it goes on for kilometers and kilometers. And the Sun is just a deep red glow in the east, at first. Then there's pale gold above the red, and there's a row of narrow gray clouds overhead. The eastern edges of the clouds turn pink, and now you can see the Sun as a deep cherry red ball. The clouds are pink and gold, and the sky above the mist is gold. Then the Sun comes up a bit higher, getting bright, a lighter red, and the clouds are flushed with bright sticky gold. The birds start to call and sing, more different kinds of birds than those down there," nodding at the orchard. "Now the Sun's too bright to look at, and the mist isn't as thick as you thought it was, and all those clouds are white, and you didn't see that happen...."

They sat in silence for a moment, enthralled. "And the sky is blue!"

"Yes, by now the sky is blue and it's early in the day and no one around you has even noticed the miracle. They're grumbling and pouring coffee, not looking out the windows."

The kids laughed at that, except Deloise, who burned her mouth on her marshmallow and had to be comforted.

Charles was looking at Shanda in admiration. "I've got to start getting up early," he said, shaking his head. "I had no idea there was all this free entertainment."

Shanda smiled. "And that's not even mentioning thunderstorms. I'm glad I never saw a tornado, though." To the kids, she added, "Of course there's other attractions, like the Grand Canyon. I know, not as big as Valles Marineris, but really big when you're going down it on a horse's back."

"Tell about horses!"

Shanda laughed. "You've seen the videos. They're fun, much like big dogs--personality-wise. I never rode one at a gallop. I suppose it would be a slower and rougher version of riding a motorcycle. A friend," pre-Charles, he was, "took me for a ride on a motorcycle once."

"What was it like?"

She drew her elbows in. "Scary. But not as scary as a plane ride."

"Is it really better to go to the Grand Canyon than do the video tour?"

"Oh, yes. You could fall, so it's scary. And it takes hours; you can't just shut the machine off. It's an experience, not an entertainment. And all of Earth is like that. Just driving through Iowa and seeing kilometers and kilometers of grass and rolling hills and farmhouses hundreds of years old, it's like nothing you've ever experienced, and it's all beautiful. All beautiful."

Shanda came back from her distance, looked at them. "We came from there, you know. We're designed for that planet."

Charles's expression was as admiring as those of the children.

Lying on her bed's thin foam pad, Shanda remembered how soft and cuddling the beds of Earth were. They had to be, in that gravity. The presence of Charles had brought Earth poignantly back.

She turned restlessly. Charles, Charles. Were his intentions honorable? He hadn't mentioned his plans. He'd only said he could stay till they took the off-shift students to Nerdstrom and brought back the on-shift--a week, then.

He'd made no attempt to get her alone, but if he'd seen the glances her folks had exchanged, he couldn't have any doubt that they, at least, were sure she was in love with him. For that matter, she thought, her own expression must have given her away repeatedly. She'd felt radiant--she must have shown it.

She cautioned herself--he still hadn't mentioned immigrating. And even Caldi hadn't been impolite enough to ask.

Shanda punched up her pillow, and sighed. But why else would he come Out? He'd had only casual interest in space, whenever she had mentioned it. His only interest in it had been because of her, she realized. Then he'd lost her. He knew that if he wanted her, he'd have to immigrate.

And from the way he had looked at her, he wanted her.

She sighed again. Poor faithful Ozzy. And damn Gran. She could've waited a week or two before selling Outer Nine.

Shanda had the pics and stats on Outer Nine pulled up, in the office on deck level, when Nogalese Devander and her nephew, Osborn Takahashi, were ushered in by Latimer. Gran stood and greeted them expressionlessly and received expressionless greetings in return.

"Oz," Shanda said, standing. "Nogalese."

"Shan," Oz said, nodding back. Nogalese nodded without speaking.

The Takahashis had been Out as long as the Konigsbergs, and there weren't many of the original Japanese genes left. Ozzy had dark hair, but it was a deep blackish brown, not the raven-wing black his ancestors had had. There was very little of the epicanthic fold left, and his nose was too big for his name. But he retained the ageless, even features of Asia, features so regular that you might not realize at first how handsome he was.

He's heard about Charles, she thought, aching for him, guilty.

They all turned their attention to the stats, and began to hammer out a deal. Gran bargained hard and got essentially the deal she'd outlined last night. She was hampered by the Takahashis' knowledge that they need only wait for a few years and Outer Nine would wander into their laps.

Gran settled for a sliding scale. At first Konigsberg would harvest three out of four times, then half the time, and down to zero by intervals. Then a long hard bargain to determine the length of the intervals. Finally they settled on a number of years, shorter than she wanted, and Gran held out her hand to Nogalese.

"You're a tough bitch, Devander."

Nogalese grinned. "From you, that's a real compliment."

Shanda grinned in relief, and intercepted a relieved grin from Ozzy, who was stretching. It was the first unconstrained emotion either had shown since entering the room.

"And just in time for dinner," Nogalese added. "I planned it that way."

They went upstairs for the "noon" meal.

Ozzy walked near her. "So who is this Charles Durant?"

"A college friend. I didn't know he was coming Out."

He nodded. "The Dietzes said he asked them not to call ahead, when they dropped him off."

"We haven't asked, but it's possible he's thinking of immigrating. He's full of questions about farming." He nodded without expression, and she quickly added, "He hasn't said anything."

She introduced him to Charles on the terrace.

"A pleasure," said Charles. He was taller than Ozzy. "Please don't crush the hand--I've been learning what wimps us Earthworms are."

Ozzy laughed, sounding surprised.

They carried bowls and platters to the table and sat. Shanda had foreseen what was coming and knew it was useless to try to avoid it: they sat on either side of her.

Nogalese and Gran exchanged small smiles, and Shanda felt her face heat up. Old witches--they probably planned this together.

Charles addressed Gran. "I hope you got a good deal. Deloise took me floundering in--you don't say microgravity, do you? Why not?"

Everybody looked blank. "We just don't," Gran said.

Shanda murmured, "Free fall may not be accurate, but we know what we mean. It's two syllables, easy to pronounce, where microgravity has, uh, five. And they have to be pronounced slowly. So how did you like it?"

"It was like flying," Charles said. He smiled down the table at Deloise, who seemed about to burst with delight.

"According to your records," Nogalese said to Gran, "nobody's looked at Outer Nine in seven months."

"It's due for a visit," Gran admitted. "Soybeans are fetching a good price, too."

"I haven't got time to go myself, but if you can get Ozzy home, I'd like to have him take a look."

"No problem." Gran looked down the table. "Latt and Shandy have chores today--Emrys too if he's caught up on his lessons. Ozzy could give them a hand, then go with them tomorrow. Okay?"

Nogalese looked around at all the nodding heads and agreed.

Charles spoke to Gran. "Would it be possible for me to go out to the asteroid tomorrow? I'd keep out of the way."

Gran looked as startled as Shanda felt. She looked blankly at Shanda, then at Latimer, who, Shanda saw, was smiling slightly.

"No problem," Latimer said. "We can find a skinsuit to fit you. You might even want to give us a hand in the home fields this afternoon."

"A pleasure!" His smile said he meant it.

Today's chore was clearing old potato vines and tilling the soil for the next crop. They put on wide straw hats against the UV from the ceiling and raked the dry vines onto sheets of pulp paper.

"Some we may burn, yes," Latimer said. "Most of it will be composted. Some we'll make paper of, like that," nodding at the crude sheets.

"I wondered about your toilet paper," Charles said, wincing.

They laughed. Ozzy said, "Farmers are hard-assed."

Charles smiled, and Shanda quickly said, "Some farmers also make wrapping paper and cardboard, but nobody yet does fine notepaper or artificial wood."

If Ozzy wanted to ride Charles, he forbore. Perhaps he was hampered by their presence. Charles himself never showed any sense of rivalry, not even when he lagged behind them. He straightened painfully and rubbed his back from time to time, and drank a lot of water, but didn't complain. Indeed, he got Shanda to join him in singing some of the nonsense songs that had been popular in their class.

Soon he had them all singing along--even Ozzy. Oh, Ozzy. Damn Gran and Nogalese both.

4: Between Worlds

Latimer's wife Mary got back from Nerdstrom that evening--their oldest son had broken his wrist playing free-fall tag--and wanted to go with them. Another hand would be useful--Emrys had his studies.

"Outer Nine is so far away that we'll make the trip overnight," Shanda explained to Charles. "It means no privacy, and worse, sleeping in skinsuits. In free fall."

"Now, that's more like the videos!" he said, grinning.

After supper they kitted him out with a skinsuit, and ran through the helmet drill. "Never had a hull puncture yet, but we take no chances," Latimer told him.

Charles felt of his toes. "This is a case where the video tour is definitely better."

Latimer grinned. "Wait'll you meet the free-fall toilet."

They made sure his helmet and tanks were tight, strapped him--and themselves--onto the flitter, and Emrys squeezed the controls. The flitter was just a hat-rack with a nuclear battery and a tank of water. Steam shot out the rear, and they spent endless minutes wafting across a vast sky sleeted with light.

Nobody said anything, not even Charles. Shanda loved these moments, alone in the privacy of her helmet, drifting among stars. Especially here, amid all the familiar things of her home: the Wheel, the fields, a gangway like a ladder across the dark sky. As a girl, once she'd realized that as a woman she'd marry and leave home, never to return except at rare intervals for visits, she had been overcome with a premonitory nostalgia. She couldn't believe, as a child, that she could bear to leave all this, and she still, somehow, couldn't believe it.

The stars stared at her, friendly, waiting. Far, far away, but infinitely closer than the stars, were the lights of other farms and smelters, blinking and blinking in different colors, and "above" her, K-berg's light also flashed. I'm here, are you there? I'm here, are you there? I'm here, I'm here.... She'd been dismayed to realize that none of them could be seen in Earth's night skies.

The flitter drifted behind K-boat One, its attitude changing, and the Sun poured its light across her helmet. The helmet darkened instantly, stopping all the UV and most of the light. The Sun went with dreamy slowness behind the boat, setting through the mistlike darkhaze in her helmet. For a moment Shanda held her breath, returned by the magic of memory and association to Earth. Then the Sun was gone and Night returned, and she sighed.

"Charles, make sure your safety is attached, then step across to the boat," Latimer said. "Hook on to one of the handholds there."

Shanda unstrapped, hopped over to the boat, fastened her safety, and brachiated forward to the line attaching them to the warehouse. By the time she had cast off, the rest were waiting in the lock and Emrys was shoving the flitter away from the hull.

Inside, they took off their helmets, trying to avoid each other's elbows. "Our home away from home, for a couple of days," Latimer said. "Shanda and I will take pilot, unless you'd like a turn, dear?"

"I'm a little rusty," Mary said. "I'll get us under way, if you don't mind."

"Good. The rest of you can find places--"

Ozzy was already pushing off for the back of the cabin. Shanda groaned silently and joined the rivals on the pads against the bulkhead. There weren't enough seats, and she wanted to leave the boys alone a little less than she wanted to be between them.

They squatted cross-legged on the pads, one ankle thrust through a loop. Latimer--I must give him more credit for tact, Shanda thought--turned around in his seat and asked Ozzy about affairs at Takahashi Home.

Ozzy was a little subdued, but he began to tell of all their small doings while Mary worked her problem, got Latimer to check it, and put them under low boost. The pads pushed against them; now they were sitting. Latimer, and then Mary, asked Ozzy questions about farming and family, and shortly a conversation was going.

Charles had no part in it, of course. He listened silently for twenty minutes, with no evidence of pique, then asked a question.

"Something you said--forty years--I mean, aren't you all in the same orbit?"

There was a blank pause. Ozzy spoke first. "Lots of people on Earth have the feeling that the Belt is solid, like a wheel, and all turns at the same rate. Even people who know better."

"Or should, like me," Charles said, smiling. Shanda was proud of him.

Ozzy grinned, and said, "But Takahashi Home is farther from the Sun than K-berg is, so we orbit more slowly. K-berg is catching up to us now."

"Like Earth passing Mars in its orbit," Charles said.

"Ye-es, but not exactly. Earth makes two orbits to Mars's one. Out here, the orbits are closer to the same period. That means that K-berg only passes Takahashi once every forty years."

"Ahh, and in, say, twenty years, K-berg and Takahashi will be on opposite sides of the Sun from each other."

"Right."

"So how long is your year?"

"Twelve months. The orbit is about six years, but it doesn't matter."

"Of course. So all your lives long you're meeting and re-meeting people who you maybe haven't seen in ... decades. Man, the Earth videos have no idea what things are like out here!"

"Actually, we do see each other from time to time, like at Nerdstrom, but yeah, the neighbors are always changing. It's kind of ... sad, I guess."

"Like school reunions," Charles said, musing. "Time plays hash with us all, and I haven't even had my first reunion yet!" Ozzy nodded, solemn.

Shanda had been watching, as at a tennis game, and didn't quite know what had happened. But Ozzy was no longer politely hostile.

"That's one thing common to Earth and the Belt," Latimer said.

"Kids always grow up too fast," Mary said, and Shanda knew she was thinking of her son.

"On the other hand," Ozzy said, "it takes forever to turn a rock into a money-making field."

"How long, usually?" Charles asked.

"Depends on the rock, and the crop, but usually six to eight years. Of course, one planting is all it needs, since the spytes are perennial. These are all variations on the plants developed for the Moon, you know."

They wandered off into a discussion of the economics of farming, and to her irk, ignored Shanda. What is it about men and bonding? she thought, getting up for a drink. They were at it when she stretched out and floated off to sleep, still annoyed.

She was swimming in the pool at the College Station campus of Texas A&M. The Sun was rising over the long green hills of Iowa, and she thought she had never been so content, so much at home. Then she realized that Charles was swimming toward her, and that she was nude. He grabbed her ankle and started to take her down. With a stab of fear she realized that it wasn't sex that he wanted: he meant to drown her.

When her head went under the water she jerked away, sitting up and scrambling for her helmet. Mary was tugging on her ankle and the guys were all forward, looking at view aft on the monitors. A field rotated slowly, green and improbable. Her toes were mashed into toe-cream pie.

"Agh!" Shanda said, using all her intelligence. She yawned, blinked at Mary's smile. "Are we there yet?"--as more brain cells came on line.

"Another hour. Time to wash your hands and eat a bite."

5: A Rolling Stone

At five times the diameter of North Seven, Outer Nine had about a hundred twenty-five times the mass. It looked like a huge green fuzzball.

"You're getting a bargain," Latimer said to Ozzy. "It was tumbling pretty erratically, and we had to damp a lot of the rotation."

"The rotation is still pretty fast, despite the leaves," Ozzy said. The spytes had shifted so much of the asteroid's mass outward that they had slowed the rotation, like a skater spreading her arms. "What's the period?"

"Seven hours, give or take," Latimer said.

"It's so small," Charles said. "I expected something kilometers in length."

The men looked at him. "Oh, farmers rarely bother with big rocks," Latimer said. "Too expensive to move."

"Unless they use one as a home base," Ozzy said. "These little rocks, we can push into small clusters. Big ones--" He shrugged.

"Ah, yes." Charles pointed at the visiplate. "Are those the pods?"

There were hints of brown amid the green.

"Yes, and they're far out," Latimer said. "We should have harvested two months ago."

Charles looked his question, and Ozzy explained, "The spytes set their pods down low on the stems, where there's less solar radiation. When the lower spots are filled, they set farther out."

Still ignored, Shanda readied herself, somewhat soothed by Mary's eye roll and quirk of smile.

Presently they were all on the hull, Ozzy and Latimer taking care of Charles. K-berg One was the big boat; it had three harvesters, a Chaytor and two old International Harvesters that they called Harvey One and Harvey Two. The Harveys were enameled in an improbable purple that had faded under the solar wind. Latimer sent them into the upper growth. Shanda and Mary took gunnysacks and went gleaning also.

"Watch your step," Mary said.

Shanda felt her feet slowly swinging out. The centrifugal reaction wasn't strong, but it was noticeable--stronger than the gravity. "It's four point six centimeters per second, according to the stats," she said. This wasn't North Seven, where the rotation was so slow it was like free fall. Not microgravity but, amused, she thought: milligravity. Or milli-antigravity. Takahashi Light went slowly by under her aching toes, blue ... blue ... blue....

"Remember," Latimer was saying to Charles, "always clip your safety to a good thick root. Four point six isn't much pull, but it can surprise you. It never lets up."

"And don't dig in too hard with your toe-claws," Ozzy said. "You have to stop with your arms. That's how Latt's son broke his wrist."

Shanda and Mary clipped their lines to the roots at the surface of the field and pulled their way out along thick stems, stripping off the brown pods as they went. At the outer end, hop to another stem and pull back to the surface, picking pods all the way, move the safety, and repeat. Tow the stuffed sacks to the boat and start over.

There were male chuckles, and Latimer said, "You don't hold your mouth right," as they instructed Charles in "milligravity" maneuvering.

Shanda could remember big brother Latt telling her that, as she learned to handle herself in free fall, then in the fields, learned to compute vectors, and--she smiled--learned to whistle.

Charles stayed with the men while they looked over the field. Shanda and Mary heard the terse professional conversation. The field was in good shape overall, but could use fertilizer, especially water and carbon.

Finally, the men rejoined Mary and Shanda. For the first time in hours, Charles and Ozzy paid attention to her. Hard work had soothed her, and being noticed again brought Shanda into a sunny mood.

She was laughing at something Ozzy had said when the stem she was gripping trembled in her fist. At that moment the boat blared: "Alarm! Strain gauge alarm! Strain gauge alarm!"

"Back to the boat!" Latimer cried, and Ozzy was shouting something about ripping.

Both the trunks Shanda was now gripping were vibrating like struck strings. She stared mesmerized into the mass of greenery that seemed to be above her.

"Too late," she said, and the field came apart.

It was not rapid, though faster than a snail. By now, Shanda was pulling herself up her safety line; so were the others, and none of them were moving like snails. She heard Latimer asking Charles where he was.

"Near the south pole, heading back to the surface," he said.

"South pole? You mean the pole opposite the boat?"

"Yeah, sorry."

Shanda went crashing through a mattress of green soft stuff, leaves and twiggy vines in the inner mat. She felt a frisson of panic as it absorbed her momentum, pulled hard on the nearest stem. She needed to be near enough to the surface for her toe claws to dig in, to make speed laterally toward the boat.

Once near enough to the surface for her claws to grip, she was of course blind. But she could feel the continuing vibration as the field tore itself apart. Earthquakes must feel like this, she thought.

Ozzy Takahashi started to laugh.

"You K-bergers!" he cried. "Selling us a field about to rip! I bet you couldn't wait to get rid of it!"

Latimer started to laugh, then Mary; Shanda heard herself giggling.

"Well, it let go just a little too soon!" Ozzy continued.

"Whattaya mean, too soon? The contract's already signed and registered!" Latimer said.

"Yeah," said Ozzy with quiet relish. "Auntie Nogalese will be kicking her pants for a week." He chuckled with a different kind of humor.

Shanda was looking at rocks, moss, soil, and torn roots. By the width of the crack, she guessed Outer Nine's surface had moved upward by half a meter.

She reported her find. But now that she was ready to push toward the boat, she couldn't see it. She didn't know which way to go, here where all the indicators pointed up or down.

"Ozzy?" came Charles's quiet voice. "I'm at the surface of the field at the opposite pole. Now what do I do?"

The field jolted as something tore loose; Shanda felt the sound up her arms. Still, this wasn't like Shanda's only fender-bender on Earth, where it was all over in a gasp. Here, crises usually took time.

"Get to the rotational center of the pole chunk," Latimer told Charles.

The cracks between clods of rock and dirt were now much wider. But what was the worst that would happen? The field would tear itself apart and leave a wide enough gap in the center for her to see and jump for the boat.

No, wait; the poles would tear off in separate chunks, and one would be between her and the boat. But she'd be able to see it. She'd be all right, because the field was small and its rotation so slow she'd be able to jump the distance, even if she just froze here for the next few minutes.

Fortunately Shanda was inhaling, so that she merely gasped rather than screamed, when she was seized from behind.

She was unable to breathe at all as she twisted around to see. Then her breath gusted out in a sigh she hoped none of them heard, and she reached for the snap of her safety. "Shan here," she said. "Harvey Two has me. I'm off to the boat."

"Oh no!" Charles cried, with a sound of laughter in his voice. "It's got her! The bug-eyed monster. Dragging her off to its lair!"

Shanda joined the laughter, swarming up on Harvey Two's back, and quoted "The Green-Eyed Dragon," an old children's song: "'Off to his lair he'll drag, and each of his thirteen tails he'll wag.'"

"Hey, the red one's come for me," Charles said, adding: "'He'll feed, with greed, on little boys, puppy dogs, and BIG, FAT snails!'"

"Climb up on the Chaytor's back, Charles," Ozzy said.

"Harvey One is coming for me," Latimer said.

Charles started singing "The Green-Eyed Dragon" and Shanda joined in, then the others, as they flew back to the boat.

They had time to go through all four verses, watching Outer Nine unravel. The field still looked almost normal when they had cast off and were all inside, looking at the monitors. A thousand seconds had merely increased the field's equatorial diameter by twenty percent--a slow-motion explosion indeed. But the longer trunks were bending as the roots moved at a tangent, leaving the outer leaves behind. Ultimately the equatorial pieces would spray off, improbable comets with clods for heads and huge leaves for tails.

"Wow," said Charles. "Does this happen often?"

"No, hardly ever," Latimer said. "We've never had it happen before. It's only with these little rocks, you know, that sometimes have high spin 'cause of a past collision. Most asteroids have centrifugal reaction much less than their gravity."

"So why'd it happen just now?"

There was a silence; then Latimer said, "Our added mass."

"Yes," Ozzy said. "Three massive harvesters and five people all in the upper reaches."

"Not to mention the mass of all those pods," Mary added.

"What will happen to it?" Charles asked.

"It'll go on till it's totally torn up, of course," Latimer said. "But it'll eventually fall back together."

They started pulling up the stats to answer: how long?

"The original rock's surface gravity was three point seven times ten to the minus fifth centimeters per second squared," Shanda said. "Fertilizer input was probably more than balanced by harvests."

"Minus outgassing from the spytes," said Latimer.

"Can't estimate that. Just ignore it," Ozzy said.

"Initial velocity, four point six centimeters per second, at least for the equatorial pieces. The rest will move more slowly and get back first," Mary said. "The polar pieces aren't going anywhere."

They worked for a bit, and Ozzy said, "Not bad--faster than I would have guessed. A hundred and twenty-four thousand seconds, over two thousand minutes--thirty-four hours, give or take half an hour." He turned to Charles with a smile. "See, they're--the pieces--are flying apart thousands of times faster than they're being pulled together, but the push is off, whereas gravity never stops pulling--oops--Shan, you farm girl!"

She exploded with laughter; Mary whooped. Even Latimer deserted the men and smiled.

"I forgot the other half of the problem," Ozzy confessed to Charles. "Thirty-four hours is how long it'll take the pieces to stop receding; it'll take that much longer for them to come back together."

He mock-glared at Shanda, who was holding onto Mary.

"Wenches," said Charles, joining the mock glare. "But that's typical; we do the hard part with care and precision, then goof on the easy part like multiplying by two. If you think physics is bad, try double-entry bookkeeping! How far apart will the pieces get?"

"Too far," Latimer said.

"--Five or six kilometers," Ozzy interjected.

"We don't have time to waste," Latimer continued. "I want all those pods harvested. We'll take turns manning the boat. Shan, you're youngest; you take the first trick. Let's go, boys and girls." He rammed his helmet on.

"Oh, boy. The next few hours will be hard," she said to Charles, turning on the com. Laser beams leaped toward K-berg and Takahashi Home.

The home farms had already heard the emergency alarm from the boat, and had heard enough of their conversation to know that there was no need to worry. To Shanda's surprise, Nogalese was the one who laughed; it was Gran who cursed.

"We'll have to renegotiate the contract. Someone'll have to go out and survey the field again in a couple months," Gran complained. "And Devander will bite us on the butt again."

"You bet I will, Konigsberg," said Nogalese. "But we'll see what the survey shows. We've lost twenty years' worth of fertilizer, but the root development shouldn't be hurt much. Most of the spytes will survive, though some of those lumps will be upside down. Maybe take another year before they get back up to normal bearing rates, if so."

"More like two years," Gran grumbled. Her tone brightened. "Actually, I doubt if we've lost all that much soil; the roots will hold on to it. Hmm. Could be worse."

"The rotation will be a lot slower, too," Shanda said.

"Yeah. I think we'll want to band it, though, taking no chances."

The bands were wide belts woven of microsteel, to be wrapped around the equator.

Shanda listened to them planning, looking at the monitors where roots and rocks separated, carrying men she loved away from her.

6: Time for the Stars

Twelve hours of hard labor stripped Outer Nine, and a night of sleep in low-gee left Shanda with only a few muscle twinges. Charles proclaimed himself crippled, but game to help off-load. Instead, they dropped him off at the Wheel and suggested a hot bath.

"Wish I could see them put the field back together," he said.

Working parties from Konigsberg and Takahashi were on their way to Outer Nine. They were going to use harvesters' steam jets to guide the cometary lumps of the field, landing them feet-first. Many of the paddlewheel leaves would be edgewise to the Sun, but would twist about within a couple of days.

"Wouldn't mind seeing that myself," said Latt. "But we got work."

This being the last week before the end of Nerdstrom's semester, there was a rush to get the fields laid by then. They had two crews out every day; Ozzy and Charles usually joined them. The simplest way of getting Ozzy home was to take him three hundred fifty million kilometers to Nerdstrom, and let him ride back to Takahashi Home with his siblings.

Shanda spent the time working on her lesson plan.

"You're not harvesting with us?" Charles asked her.

"No, I have to be ready to start teaching as soon as the next term starts." Nerdstrom's schools and colleges ran three four-month terms per year, and farmers sent their older kids to two out of three of them.

"Oh, I remember you saying that you have to teach to pay back your education grant."

Though Charles and Ozzy seemed to like each other, Shanda noticed that neither allowed the other to get her alone. It was three days before either managed it.

She was at a table in the orchard, deep in the third month of term three, when Ozzy sat down opposite her. Shanda smiled at him, trying not to let her sadness for him show.

"We'll be saying goodbye, soon enough," he said. "At Nerdstrom."

"A week or so, I guess." Most of it in a crowded ship.

"Don't suppose I'll be seeing you again soon."

Shanda's heart beat steadily but there was a pain in her chest. So this is heartache, she thought; she had thought it was a poetic fancy.

Oh, Ozzy. "I'll see you at the fair--that's three months off," she said, and the way his face brightened nearly brought tears.

"Right, yeah, see you then," Ozzy said, too hurriedly. He gave her a brief glance. "Charles is a good guy," he muttered, looking away. "Make some girl a good husband. Be happy to have him as a ... brother-in-law, myself."

"Thank you, Ozzy, I'm ... glad to hear that." She was unable to go on.

"Well, you take care. I'll see you at the fair, then." Ozzy stood hastily and was gone.

Shanda spent the next hour in her room, wiping away tears but not crying. Deep sighing breaths don't count.

The day before their departure, Shanda took a break from her lesson plan. At her Aunt Bea's request, she went to net fish for supper from the streams that bracketed the orchard. Charles joined her, having evaded his comet-tail of children. Shanda had been expecting him.

"This is almost goodbye," he said.

"Yes. I was hope--expecting to have a few days with you at Nerdstrom." He had had better sense than to come knocking on her door at night. College wasn't real life.

"It's very kind of K-berg to drop me off at Earth. I can cash in the other half of my ticket."

To go to Nerdstrom required cutting a chord through the Inner System. Earth was out of their way, but with constant-boost fusion rockets, the expense was small and the time lost minor.

Charles smiled at her and her heart, already molten, slumped further. She was trembling faintly and hoping he wouldn't notice.

"You can't be in any doubt as to why I'm here," he said. "You know I love you. I knew it, too, but even I didn't realize how much, till you ran away. Will you marry me?"

Shanda's eyes overflowed. "Oh, yes, Charles." She walked into him, tried to put her arms around him, dropped the net and tried again.

"I know you can't settle down until you've negotiated your debt to the Grange," he said. "I hope you can come to Earth after this term."

"Come to Earth? Oh, to meet your parents--"

"Yes, and settle down together."

Shanda froze. After a moment she tipped her head back, looked up at him. He was quite serious.

"Emigrate to Earth? Charles!" She bent her head down, stricken. "Oh, Charles, I thought you were g-going to immigrate. W-we all did."

Charles gaped. "Good God, no!" More quietly, he said, "All my plans and expectations are for Earth. My education, my prospects, my family--my whole future!"

She felt the tears on her face. "And all of mine are for space."

Charles opened and closed his mouth, looking helpless. "Women have always left home, their home cultures, even learned new languages, to be with their men."

"That's true. But--"

"You belong on Earth," he said. "You spent five years there. Didn't it seem like you'd come home?"

Shanda was baffled. "No. This is home. What do you mean?"

"Well, I mean ... Earth is where you came from. It's where we belong. The center of the human race, of everything. Our culture, our heritage, our whole history. What would we be without knowing where we came from? Thanks to you Spacers, mining and refining and now even farming is moving off-Earth, so the world is turning into a park. Population is expected to dip below two billion within fifty years. It's--" he waved his hand as if feeling for words.

She could only stare in astonishment.

"It's a shame that a beautiful and intelligent woman like you should be wasted out here. You should be back at the center, where things are happening. Earth needs you, and I think you need Earth." He smiled, sadly. "I know I need you."

She was shaking her head, and he said, plaintive, "You never thought of moving to Earth?"

"Of course not! This is home." She blinked away more tears. "The Belt is not exactly the boonies, you know. It's out here that things are happening." Shanda took a breath. "Look, as you just said, the Belt supplies seventy or eighty percent of the metals Earth uses, and everybody on Earth and in the Belt is eagerly waiting for the day when it's a hundred percent."

"Except a few miners, I guess. Your point is...?"

"And we provide eleven point four percent of the food you eat, including forty-three percent of the cereal grains. The gas miners at Jupiter are just getting started, but soon they'll be providing more plastics and other hydrocarbon products than Earth. You see where I'm going with this?"

He shook his head. "You're threatening a strike? Want your independence?"

"No, no. Look, there's too much metal in the Belt for Earth to use. If it were all taken to Earth, the continents would sink. The same for food. The same for Jupiter's gasses--"

"The Belt has only a fraction of Earth's mass--"

"But it's a very large fraction of the mass of Earth's crust, which is where people live. No. Earth simply can't use the resources of space. If the human race wants those resources, it'll have to go where they are."

His face had gone totally blank.

"You've probably seen the projections yourself--in a hundred years, there'll be more people living in space than on Earth. I want my descendants," she said quietly, "to live in the mainstream of human life, not the backwater."

Charles turned to frown into the stream.

"You've never even considered moving Out here to be with me? Would it be so bad?"

"It would mean giving up everything, everything I planned for," he muttered. He had a wrenched expression. "You know it's not really safe out here," he said. "I don't want my children to face such dangers."

Her father, her grandfather, two cousins. "Yes, we have dangers," she said. "But you told me that your ancestors migrated to the Midwest in the nineteenth century--in covered wagons. The settlers had a saying: The cowards never started--and the weaklings died by the way."

He smiled briefly at that. "No, it's not cowardice. But you're asking me to recast my whole plan for my life, in just a few minutes. It's a worse wrench to the mind than free-fall farming is to the muscles."

Her smile trembled with hope. "You don't have to decide this minute," she said. "Do nothing in a hurry. Take a month."

Charles looked down, muttered, "You're asking me to give up everything. Everything."

"Yes, just what you're asking of me." She made her voice as steady as she could, as final. "But I will never emigrate to Earth. Here is where I belong."

The best way to travel space is asleep or while studying. Shanda was too upset to do much of either, but the hours passed till finally they docked with Little Earth at L4. Charles had also been subdued. He squeezed all their hands, said goodbye in a firm voice, and was gone.

To her relief, Ozzy did not approach her during the rest of the trip.

Nerdstrom was a swarm of asteroids, many in crops, and five big wheels. Two more were under construction. They were mobbed at the lock, the kids who'd been away all term swarming over them, babbling loudly. Shanda managed to smile and respond. The Takahashis met Ozzy and dragged him away.

Shanda spent an hour logging in and being assigned a room.

Latimer found her in the refectory, staring at nothing. "So, is Charles going to join us Out here?" he asked.

"I don't know. He's thinking it over. I ... don't think so," she said. Now she had said it, and the tears could come.

"Pity," Latimer mused, touching her hair. "A man like that is wasted on Earth."

Copyright © 2006 Rob Chilson

THE GREEN-EYED DRAGON (c) Copyright 1926 by Boosey & Co. Copyright Renewed. Reprinted by permission of Boosey & Hawkes, Inc.

[Back to Table of Contents]

This may look like a fairytale for lawyers, but it is science fiction, too!

Once there was a boy named Taekos who lived on a heart farm.

His parents were hardworking people: they grew new hearts for old men, and tiny hearts for babies; they grew strong hearts to plant into young men who had crashed their air-scooters and needed replacements; and they grew rugged working hearts for androids who were grown in a vat.

But Taekos didn't want to live on the farm. He was lazy, and wanted to do something that was more fun and less like work.

One day he slung his pack over his shoulder and told his parents he was off to seek his fortune in the big city. He hitched a ride with a passing businessman driving an old-fashioned one-wheeled gyro-car, and in a few minutes he was in the big city.

In the big city, he apprenticed himself to a robot builder, but his robots were built all askew, and didn't want to work, but just sat and wrote poetry all day. No one would pay to buy a robot to sit around and write poetry, and so after a week, he was let go.

He apprenticed himself to a bioengineer, but he was too lazy to sculpt DNA, and spent the day programming the microrobots to play croquet with each other, using xenon atoms as balls. And then, when he was bored with that, he programmed them to gather all the atoms of one kind together--copper, he decided, he would make them gather copper atoms--and link them together in a sheet, until the floor shone with a molecule-thick plating of copper. But no one would pay to hire a bioengineer who would not splice even a single DNA strand, and so after a week he was let go.

He apprenticed himself to a spaceship pilot, but he just flew his ship in great lazy swirls around the sky. The businessmen who were to be ferried to the seven moons refused to pay him, and so after a week he was let go.

And thus it was, when he had used up all his prospects, and no one in the city would take him on as an apprentice, he sat in the park. He sat by the river of floating flowers, singing nonsense songs to himself and giving names to each of the clouds that passed in the sky. He was braiding together great kjill blossoms to make kites, and releasing them one by one to drift in the sky, when he saw a girl watching him.

After a while he saw one of his blossom kites float through her, and he knew she was a projection. Ah, he thought. If she didn't eat and didn't need to pay to enter an entertainment, it would cost nothing to take her out. She was the perfect girlfriend for him.

"Will you be my girlfriend?" he asked.

"Certainly," she answered. As they talked together, he discovered that she had a dowry of ten trillion pretty rocks from her grandfather, but until the day she married, she told him, her stepfather controlled it, and she could not spend any of it, not even a single rock, except what her stepfather allowed.

Her stepfather was crafty, and did not want her to wed, and take away his fortune. He had locked her away in a titanium crystal castle, and the robots that controlled it would only let in the man who would marry her. Her stepfather could not forbid her to marry outright, but he had sworn an oath.

"'She will marry a man who has never been born, who is wearing a cloak that has never been worn, whose shadow is silver and nothing of gold, who can sleep in a fire and never get cold,'" the girl (whose name was Phoevus) quoted to him. "And that is the only way I shall marry."

"That," Taekos observed (as he knotted together the stems of a hundred kjill blossoms into a great braid in the shape of a Moebius strip) "doesn't make any sense at all."

"No," she said sadly. "I will never marry. But he can't prevent me from projecting."

Yet I myself was never born, he thought to himself; I was grown from a seed, like all of the sons of farmers he knew. And he wondered at the silly ways of the city people, who never heard of growing a child from a seed, like any sensible farmer would.

"Can you not weave me a cloak that has never been worn?" he asked her.

"Indeed," she said. "I will instruct my robots to weave a cloak. But if you wear it, it has been worn, surely you know that."

"Leave that to me," he said.

And so he made an appointment to come to marry the girl, and on the appointed day, he arrived at the titanium crystal castle and presented himself.

"My stepdaughter is very beautiful," the stepfather told him, "and I love her very much. She is so beautiful that she can only marry a man who has never been born, and so you must leave and go away, for you cannot marry her."

"But I myself was never born," Taekos observed. "I was grown from a seed, and here are my identity papers to show it." And indeed, when he showed the sheet of molecule-thin poly-ply that was his identity papers, the word "BORN:" on the sheet of poly-ply was followed by a simple "NO."

The stepfather's face darkened as he saw this, and Taekos thought that his face was like a storm cloud, but the stepfather merely said, "My stepdaughter is very delicate, and I love her very much. Because she is so delicate she must only marry a man who wears a cloak that has never been worn, and so you must leave and go away, for you can never marry her."

"But I myself am wearing a cloak that has never been worn," Taekos observed, "for it was woven by your daughter's robots this very morning, and you can verify that, if you like, by asking any one of them."

But the stepfather only smiled wickedly, and said, "You are yourself wearing it, and so how can you say it has never been worn?"

"This?" Taekos asked, and passed his hand through it. "This is only a projection. The cloak itself is in your daughter's room, and has surely never been worn."

The stepfather's face darkened further as he saw that he had been tricked, and Taekos thought that his face was like a storm cloud that is all swollen up with lightning, ready to burst into electrical fury, but the stepfather only said, "My stepdaughter is very intelligent, and I love her very much. Because she is so intelligent, she must only marry a man who has a shadow of silver, and nothing of gold, and so you must leave and go away, for you cannot marry her."

But at this, Taekos said nothing at all, only gestured with his hand down at the floor. And the stepfather looked down, and with great surprise noticed that Taekos' shadow in fact reflected with a silvery sheen. The stepfather brought out a light, and moved it from side to side, but to whichever side he moved, the silvery sheen appeared on the opposite side, a shadow of silver.

"Robot!" he called out, and a robot appeared at his side. "Robot, what color is that?" he said, and pointed at the shadow.

"Master, that color is silver," the robot answered, and Taekos smiled.

Taekos' smile was a smile of relief, for robots are very literal, and the robot answered the question that was asked. Had the stepfather asked what the shadow was made of, the robot would surely have answered aluminum. He had tried to instruct the handful of microrobots that he had spread behind him to gather silver atoms, but there were not enough silver atoms in the molecules of the ground, and instead he had to settle for telling them to gather aluminum atoms, which were also shiny and silver.

But the stepfather called his robots together, and had them go into his vast treasury and fetch gold dust by the handful. The stepfather's robots sprinkled gold dust on the shadow, but as fast as they sprinkled gold dust, the microrobots (which Taekos had borrowed from the DNA engineer before he'd left his apprenticeship) plated them over with a thin veneer of aluminum atoms, so that they shined silver and nothing of gold, and the stepfather knew that he had again been tricked.

The stepfather's face darkened, and Taekos thought it was like a great storm of a gas giant, ready to expand out across the planet until the whole surface was engulfed in turbulence, but the stepfather only said, "My stepdaughter is very rich, and I love her very much. Because she is so rich, she will only marry a man who can sleep in a fire and never get cold, so you must leave and go away, for you can never marry her."

But Taekos only laughed, and said, "Why, certainly I can do that, and so indeed can any man, for if one sleeps in a fire, surely he will get hot, and not cold. And so, sir, please step aside, for I wish to go inside to marry your stepdaughter, and you are in my way."

But the stepfather only smiled now, a wicked and triumphant smile, and he said softly, "No, Sir Trickster, clever you are, but indeed you may not pass. For you may say you can sleep in a fire, but indeed, I will not credit your boasting until I see it myself. Come back, sir, in seven days. I will make a fire, and you will sleep in the fire I have made myself, with none of your trickery, and when I have seen that, then you will marry my stepdaughter.

"But until then, you must go away, and not come back."

"I will go away," said Taekos, "and not come back for seven days."

And when he had gone away, and sat in the park by the river of drifting blossoms, the projection of his girlfriend came to him, and said sadly, "Oh, Taekos, how will you meet the challenge of my stepfather?"

And Taekos had no answer. He had expected to pass based on clever words and brazen courage, but he had never really had a plan. Nor, for all that he wracked his brains for ideas, could he think of one.

But then, he had seven days. And he was, after all, a very clever lad. Surely he would think of something.

And indeed, the next day, as he slept in the shade of the tijiell trees in the park (it was necessary to sleep in the shade, because the seven moons beamed down light in a wonderful, but not at all restful, array of colors), a most remarkable thing happened to him. The old stepfather came up to him. It took him a moment to realize that this, too, was a projection, and not the real man, but still, it surprised him.

"Sir Trickster," said the projection of the stepfather. "You are a cheat, and a thief, and I wish you to have nothing to do with my stepdaughter. I will offer you a thousand pretty rocks, and with those pretty rocks you may go as you please, wherever you like, as long as you never again come back to ask for the hand of my stepdaughter in marriage."

This is very interesting, thought Taekos, very interesting indeed, but all he said was, "I think not."

And the next day, the same projection came to him, and said the same thing, but this time offered him two thousand pretty rocks. And again, Taekos thought, this is very interesting, but replied only, "I think not."

Each day of the seven, the stepfather offered a higher price, and each day, Taekos thought, this is very interesting, but replied only, "I think not."

For this was the thought that Taekos found most interesting: why would the stepfather offer him a bribe to give up a suit that he could not win?

And so he sat in contemplation, braiding his flower kites, and planning.

On the seventh day, the very image of Taekos showed up at the castle of titanium, all resplendent in the finest of feathers and braided spider-silk. And the stepfather, surrounded by his robots, did not seem surprised to see him, but Taekos said only, "I am here to claim the hand of your stepdaughter in marriage, for she is very beautiful, and I love her."

The stepfather said, "Well indeed, but I do not believe that you are here at all." Turning to the robot on his left side, he said, "Robot!" and the robot aimed a counter-projection projector and turned it on. With that Taekos vanished--for of course it was only a projection--and the stepfather said, loudly so all the robots could hear, "Since the suitor has not shown up, he has forfeited the challenge, and shall not marry my stepdaughter."

But Taekos stepped out from behind one of the robots, and said, "Not so, for here I am." He was no longer so resplendent (for he could afford only the projection of finery), but now only dressed in an ordinary working-class cloak, such as a heart-farmer's son might wear, and he thought to himself, it was a pity that the projection trick would not fool him twice.

"Well indeed, then," the stepfather said. "I have here a fire, and I will very much enjoy watching you sleep in it." And he turned to the robot on his right side, and said, "Robot!" and the robot opened a door. Through the door was a room, and inside the room was a nuclear furnace, with a door just large enough for a man to crawl through. Taekos noted with some interest (for he had once been a spaceship pilot's apprentice, and knew what the engine for a spaceship looked like) that the inside of the chamber would be at an even, cheerful heat of one million degrees.

"I apologize," Taekos said. "But I have brought with me a dictionary," and he rubbed the activation of the dictionary, and murmured to it, "fire." At his word, the dictionary said, in its clear, cool voice, "FIRE is a form of combustion, releasing heat by the combination of a fuel with oxygen."

"This chamber of yours is certainly a fine engine," Taekos said, "but it is not a fire. Shall I call a magistrate, and we shall see if he, too, has a dictionary?"

"Very well, Sir Trickster," said the stepfather, "there is no need for a magistrate." He bid the robot close the door, but at the same time gestured another robot to open a different door. Through this door there was a chamber, and in the chamber was a very large pile of wood. The robot entered and set the wood to burning. "I believe even your dictionary will accept this as a fire."

"Indeed, this is a fire," Taekos said, and walked into the room, swirling his cloak.

"One moment first, Sir Trickster," the stepfather said. "With your pardon?" And with a word from the stepfather two robots stepped to him, and sprayed him with a light mist, one spraying his left side, one his right. "It appears that your skin had been infested with a swarm of microrobots," the stepfather said.

Taekos was taken aback, for indeed he had his microrobots with him, several trillion of them or so (he did not know exactly, for he was too lazy to count them all) and he had carefully instructed each of them in how to turn infrared photons away from his skin. For of course heat is nothing except infrared photons, and if the robots caught each photon by its tail and turned it around to run the other direction--well then! Well indeed! But the mist had set the microrobots into sleep mode, and it would take him many hours to reboot each one of them.

But Taekos had one more trick to play, and this he did. He had a few of his robots left, this time just very simple and stupid ones, and they sprayed water onto the fire, just enough to put it out. He then pulled a sack from his cloak, and from the sack he poured iron dust into the empty fireplace, and then stepped in and went to sleep in the dust. His laziness was indeed famous, but yet he had this one skill, to go to sleep anywhere and at any time.

After some time sleeping, he yawned, and stretched, and rose, saying, "I'm not cold at all. I win, I slept in a fire. And I'm not cold."

"You have to sleep in the fire while it's burning," said the stepfather.

"Really?" said Taekos, wide-eyed as if this though had never occurred to him. "Who says?"

"I say this, and in this castle my word is law," said the stepfather.

"Well, fine enough," Taekos said. He produced his dictionary again. "A fire is combustion," he said. "Even as I was sleeping, the iron was slowly rusting, and rust, of course, is nothing but oxidation, or, as we can call it, combustion."

"But it is not hot," said the stepfather, scowling.

"And who is it who says that fire has to be hot?"

"I do."

"And I don't," said Taekos. "Here is a dictionary. I win. I claim my prize, and if you do not agree, I shall call a magistrate."

"No, not a magistrate!" the stepfather said. "I will concede to you half of my stepdaughter's wealth. Do not call a magistrate, and we shall both be rich!"

Why is he afraid of magistrates? Taekos asked himself, and with that thought, he called one.

The magistrate robot arrived. "Your dictionary, sir," the magistrate said to him, "is evidently quite faulty. I have consulted the archive of dictionaries, and the compact (although low-cost) model you own should tell you, fire is a form of combustion resulting in visible flames."

"Humph," said the stepfather. "As I said."

"And who are you?" the magistrate asked.

"I," stated the stepfather, "am the legal guardian of this girl, Phoevus, and the trustee of her fortune and of her person."

"No," said the magistrate, "you are not. You are a projection of a recording of a certain Phineas Nator Zond, a sapient personage whose existence has been discontinued seventeen years, seven months, three weeks, two days, eleven hours, and thirteen seconds before this moment. A projection cannot be a guardian, nor a trustee, of a sapient person."

"But this is my stepdaughter, and I love her very much," the projection of the former sapient personage known once as Phineas Nator Zond said. "And if I am not to guard her, and be the trustee of her fortune and her person, then who is to protect her from fortune hunters, and from the evils of the world?"

"She is a sapient personage," the magistrate said. "If she wishes to be guarded, she must see to it herself." And with that, the magistrate robot turned the projection off.

After a while, when the magistrate had left, and the robots that the stepfather (or his projection) had brought to guard the titanium crystal castle showed themselves to be unresponsive, Taekos said, "Phoevus, my love, your stepfather no longer is in our way, and so we may marry."

And the projection of Phoevus came down, and said, "Taekos, you are charming, and amusing, and clever, but only a foolish girl would marry such a lazy rogue and schemer, and such a foolish girl certainly would come to no good end."

Taekos contemplated this. "What will you do?" he asked.

"I have been here in this titanium castle for long enough. I will be off on my own adventures." And as her parting words to him, she added, "but thank you for dealing with my stepfather."

And with that she was gone. The robots, left behind, began to disassemble the titanium crystal castle, and in very little more than no time at all, it, too, was gone.

And so, Taekos thought, here I am, and left no better than I was.

But then again, no worse, he observed, and went forth to seek his fortune.

Copyright © 2006 Geoffrey A. Landis

[Back to Table of Contents]

Visit Our Website

www.analogsf.com

Don't miss out on our lively forum, stimulating chats, controversial and informative articles, and classic stories.

Log on today!

[Back to Table of Contents]

Seattle, the city where I live, teach, and do physics research, is the home of Paul Allen's new Science Fiction Museum (SFM), located in the Experience Music Project building at Seattle Center, in the shadow of the Space Needle. The SFM is well worth a visit, offering a fascinating display of collected TV and movie props (e.g., Captain Kirk's Chair from Star Trek), SF memorabilia, and treasured books and manuscripts from the classic works of science fiction. In early December 2005, Stephen Hawking was on a fund-raising tour in celebration of the 800th anniversary of the founding of Cambridge University, where he holds the same Chair once occupied by Isaac Newton. Hawking paid a visit to the West Coast during this tour, and he took the opportunity to make a virtual appearance (by closed-circuit TV) to a gathering at the SFM (including my wife and me) in order to present to the SF Museum the manuscript of a 1976 physics paper which, as he put it, had just entered the realm of science fiction (because it turns out to be wrong).

Hawking's 1976 paper, "Breakdown of predictability in gravitational collapse," describes a physics paradox, the apparent loss of information in black holes. Basically, information can be considered to be a form of entropy, and as such is subject to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics. In classical physics, it is expected that information can be scrambled, but not really destroyed. As Hawking puts it, if you burned an encyclopedia, you could in principle recover the information it contained from a detailed study of the resulting light, smoke, and ashes.

However, suppose you dropped the same encyclopedia down a small black hole, and the black hole subsequently "evaporated" through the emission of Hawking radiation. In that situation, where did the information go? The evaporating black hole emits radiation with a "thermal" spectrum of frequencies (i.e., the same spectrum as that the radiation would have if radiated from a hot object), and it therefore contains no information passed to it from the interior of the black hole. Ultimately, a black hole will evaporate away all of its mass-energy and disappear, so the information that had previously passed into the black hole has apparently vanished without a trace. This is the information paradox described in Hawking's 1976 paper.

The initial publication of this work created quite a stir in the theoretical physics community. Whole physics conferences were devoted to the subject, at which theorists gave several days of talks and speculated on whether or not information could vanish into a black hole. At the time, Hawking suggested that the interior of the black hole might spawn one or more "baby universes" containing the missing information, and that it might therefore be possible to use a black hole as a vehicle for travel from our universe to other universes.

Some distinguished theorists doubted Hawking's conclusion that information could vanish without a trace. In particular, in 1997, Hawking and CalTech theorist Kip Thorne made a bet about the predicted information loss with CalTech physicist John Preskill, who works in quantum computation. Here's the text of their wager:

Whereas Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne firmly believe that information swallowed by a black hole is forever hidden from the outside universe, and can never be revealed even as the black hole evaporates and completely disappears,

And whereas John Preskill firmly believes that a mechanism for the information to be released by the evaporating black hole must and will be found in the correct theory of quantum gravity,

Therefore Preskill offers, and Hawking/Thorne accept, a wager that:

When an initial pure quantum state undergoes gravitational collapse to form a black hole, the final state at the end of black hole evaporation will always be a pure quantum state.

The loser(s) will reward the winner(s) with an encyclopedia of the winner's choice, from which information can be recovered at will.

Stephen W. Hawking,

Kip S. Thorne,

John P. Preskill

Pasadena, California

6 February 1997

Hawking's new paper on this subject, "Information loss in Black Holes", was released as a revised preprint on September 15, 2005. It constitutes a de-facto retraction of the 1976 paper. In it, Hawking builds on work from string theory, which has shown a "duality" (a 1:1 mapping) between conformal field theory (in which information is definitely conserved because of a property called unitarity) and string theory (which should include quantum gravity) in "anti de Sitter space" (symmetric space with constant negative curvature) at very large distances from gravitating objects. This connection is interpreted as telling us that if we could only do quantum gravity properly, we would find that no information is lost in black holes.

In his calculations, Hawking pulls several techniques from his bag of tricks, using scattering theory, imaginary time, and semi-classical constraints. Rather than entering the strong-field mess created by quantum gravity, he considers an observer standing off aloofly at infinity, sending a flood of particles and radiation into the heart of the system (where they may or may not form a black hole that evaporates) and observing the particles and radiation that come back to him. In tracking the particles and radiation, Hawking replaces the time variable T by iT, where i is the square root of--1, thereby changing normal 3+1 dimensional space-time into "timeless" 4 dimensional space. In principle, he should then sum over all of the paths that all of the particles might take in this 4-D space, sum the results, and transform back to 3+1 dimensional space-time. Instead, he sums only those paths that are close to semi-classical solutions of the same system, while assuming that contributions from the other more complicated paths can be neglected.

Hawking focuses on two scenarios: (1) the input particles have formed a static black hole, and (2) no black hole is formed, and he demonstrates that it is not possible to determine from the returning particles and radiation which of these scenarios actually happened. He further shows that information is not lost in scenario 2 (not surprising), and that in scenario 1 has differences that decay away exponentially as the particles return to the observer at infinity.

His conclusion from these mathematical gymnastics is that (a) no information is lost, and (b) that the price of this result is that it is not possible for the observer at infinity to tell whether a black hole is formed or not. In the conclusion of the paper, he suggests that the information "tunnels" out of the black hole and appears as subtle correlations between the photons of the emitted Hawking radiation. Hawking's point seems to be that if there is an uncertainty about whether or not the black hole exists, this uncertainty leaves room for the survival of the information. This might be considered to be a new uncertainty principle, applicable to the unknown formalism of quantum gravity.

Hawking considers that he has now resolved the paradox, and that he has lost the bet. On July 21, 2004 at the 17th International Conference on General Relativity and Gravitation, held in Dublin, Ireland, Hawking presented a copy of the Encyclopedia of Baseball to John Preskill in payment of his end of the wager. To my knowledge, Kip Thorne has not yet conceded his end.

How has the physics community received Hawking's new paper? It's difficult for me to tell. Following the initial release of the preprint, there have been 16 new papers referring to the work. None of them are particularly critical of Hawking's work, but neither do they directly build on that work. There have also been two blog-type extended internet comments posted by physicists. Neither is devastatingly critical, but both raise unanswered questions about what Hawking actually did. I would conclude that Hawking may have answered his own questions about information loss in black holes, but he has not satisfied the physics community as a whole. In particular, the actual form taken by the emerging information remains very vague and ephemeral, even if Hawking's mathematics, taken at face value, insists that the information is actually there.

What are the SF implications of this work? First, the widely used SF gimmick of entering another universe through a black hole seems to have had the rug pulled out from under it. Further, the spawning of baby universes by black holes, which has been used in some SF, seems to have also received a dose of strong contraceptive.

It's perhaps nice to know that the fundamental laws of physics like the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics work even for black holes, and that information cannot be irretrievably lost. But so far, not much of SF depends on either of those ideas.

AV Columns Online: Electronic reprints of over 120 "The Alternate View" columns by John G. Cramer, previously published in Analog, are available online at: www.npl.washington.edu/av. Preprints referenced below can be obtained at: www.arxiv.org.

References:

Hawking's 1976 paper:

"Breakdown of predictability in gravitational collapse," S. W. Hawking, Physical Review D14, 2460-2473 (1976).

Hawking's 2005 paper:

"Information loss in Black Holes," S. W. Hawking, preprint hep-th/0507171 (2005).

Blog Comments on Hawking's 2005 Paper:

"Hawking and Unitarity," Lubos Motl, motls.blogspot.com/2005/07/ hawking-and-unitarity.htm

"This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 207)," John Baez, math.ucr.edu/home/baez/week207.htm

Copyright © 2006 John G. Cramer

[Back to Table of Contents]

Old technologies inevitably get replaced by new ones, but not always without a struggle--and in that struggle, as in others, might doesn't always make right....

The first time Nathan aimed a camera through his telescope, he forgot to turn off the flash. The sudden burst of light ruined his night vision for half an hour, and he was certain it had ruined the photo, too, but when he got his slides back a week later, he had a decent picture of the Moon. Not a great one, but way better than he expected. The flash had apparently reflected off the telescope's curved body and not back into the lens.

He hung onto that shot, and even in later years, when he had thousands to choose from, he would often stick it in at the beginning of a slide show to illustrate how easy it was to take astrophotographs. "I didn't even mount the camera on the telescope for that one," he would say. "Just set the shutter to a one-twenty-fifth and pointed it through the eyepiece."

He had soon graduated to prime-focus photography, wherein he removed both the camera's lens and the telescope's eyepiece, essentially turning the telescope into a thousand millimeter telephoto lens. His photos of nebulae and star clusters often rivaled those from professional astronomers. He wound up selling some of his better images to Astronomy magazine and Sky and Telescope, and his planetarium shows were always a big hit. He was a local celebrity at the camera shop where he had his processing done, though he was always modest about his achievements, often saying, "Heck, anybody with a camera and a little patience can do as well."

To illustrate his point, he would tell people what he actually did for a living: he was a data processing clerk for the city of Spencerville. He spent his days in a cubicle, staring at a computer monitor or arguing on the phone with Homeland Security agents who wanted to snoop through his files. An English major in college, his degree awarded over a quarter century ago, he wasn't exactly a rocket scientist nor a hot young astronomer, but he could take a decent astrophoto, and so, he liked to say when he gave a presentation at a school, could you. He occasionally saw a spark of interest in a student's eyes, and a couple of times he even saw those students out on the flat-topped water tank at the edge of town where he liked to do his observing, but he knew his was a fringe hobby, and he didn't expect to draw many others into it.

He went out two or three times a week, when the weather cooperated, always burning up an entire roll of hyper-sensitized slide film in a night. That, he figured, was the real source of his celebrity at the camera store, so he wasn't overly surprised when the owner said to him one afternoon, "Maybe you'd better buy a few extra rolls this time."

Danny was standing in front of the wine-rack-style film display mounted on the wall behind the counter. The pickings looked a little sparse, but there were at least a couple of rolls in each slot.

"No, thanks," Nathan replied. "I like it to be as fresh as possible."

"Well, there's the rub," Danny said. "They've stopped making the stuff. As soon as the manufacturers sell what's in their warehouses, that's it."

"Stopped making slide film?" It took a moment for Nathan to grasp the concept. "You're kidding. What are professional photographers going to use?"

"Just about everybody has gone digital these days," said Danny. He nodded to the display case of digital cameras.

Nathan snorted. Those tiny cigarette-pack gadgets with their obscene little lenses that slid out suggestively when you powered them up? Those grainy, pixilated, yuppie novelties were replacing serious cameras? "No way," he said.

"It's true," said Danny. "A six megapixel image can be blown up to eleven by fourteen without pixilation, and you can do so much image enhancement with Photoshop..." He shook his head. "The only thing that keeps me in business these days is printing. Fortunately, it's still too expensive to do much of that at home."

"Printing?" Nathan asked. "As in paper prints?"

"No, we use real photographic paper," Danny said. "It's the same high quality as before, only from a--"

"Prints," Nathan said. "Gah. Now if you can make a decent slide from one of those digital gadgets..."

"Wouldn't matter if we could," Danny said. "They've stopped making slide projectors, too. Everybody's going to laptop computers and PowerPoint presentations."

"Stopped making slide projectors?" The steady onslaught of bad news had reduced Nathan to simply echoing what he heard. "But--they can't do that. I've got thousands of slides. Literally thousands."

"You'll have to scan them in," Danny said. "Or stock up on slide projectors. I can probably still get you one."

"Do that," Nathan said. "And bulbs. God, get me a case of bulbs. And a brick of slide film. Two. No, three."

"Bricks?" Danny asked. "As in twenty rolls each?"

"Is that all you get in a brick? Hell, make it ten."

Danny got out a calculator from below the counter and punched in some figures. "Uh, that would be over a thousand dollars, even with a volume discount. You sure you want to do that?"

"Damn straight," Nathan said. "If they're going to stop making the stuff, I want a lifetime supply."

That night he went out to see if he could capture the Veil Nebula, the remnant of a supernova that had exploded thousands of years ago. It required a long exposure, over an hour's worth, which meant he only got two shots of it before Cygnus dropped into the west. Normally he would finish off the rest of the roll on quick subjects like planets or star clusters, but this time he decided to save his film. He couldn't hyper-sensitize it again without blowing the frames he had already taken, but he could still get decent results from it, and if the stuff was irreplaceable now...

When he got home he was too wound up to sleep, so he put a Moody Blues album on the stereo and listened to that while he sipped a cup of hot chocolate to warm up. The record was full of scratches, and it warbled a little from being drilled off center, but it was one of his favorites, and tonight he needed the comfort of familiar pleasures.

He supposed he was taking this too hard. Lots of astronomers had gone digital. The magazines were full of images taken with "Powershots" and "Coolpixes," even webcams, for Pete's sake; essentially home movies that a computer pulled apart into separate frames that it stacked on top of one another until they generated a decent composite. Nathan had resisted doing that, preferring the time-honored tradition of film, but he had to admit some of the images were stunning.

But what would he do with the thousands of shots he had already taken? How could he assemble a decent planetarium show with half slides and half digital images? Would he have to scan all his slides into digital form? If he did that, he would have to upgrade his computer, probably buy a laptop as well so he could carry his slide show--his PowerPoint show--with him to schools and the planetarium and the like. Plus the digital projector, too. By the time he added up all the computer equipment, he would be into it for several thousand dollars. Better to just buy a lot of film and a spare projector.

But it hurt to see an entire technology disappear. Maybe he was lamenting the demise of buggy whips, but damn it, he liked these particular buggy whips. To see slide photography disappear merely for economic reasons seemed a shame.

The Moody Blues started into "Sun is Still Shining," one of his favorites. He listened for the little pop just before the chorus, as much a part of the song for him as the rest of it. Thank goodness turntables hadn't gone the way of the dodo the way people had predicted when CDs became popular. Ironic that hip-hop, an artform that Nathan barely considered music, had kept turntables alive. Whenever he heard a rap "artist" abuse a record to make his sound effects, it made him wince, but at least a person could still buy a new turntable when he needed one.

That's what Nathan should do: he should start a new artform that used slides and slide projectors. That would keep the technology alive. He tried to think what else a person could do with a camera and a slide projector. Project temporary graffiti on building walls? Make cheap stage lighting? Send up Batman signals on cloudy nights?

Clearly Nathan wasn't going to be setting any new trends. If he really wanted to do that, he would have to put the equipment in the hands of someone better connected to modern culture.

He laughed at the image that came to him: wearing a black trenchcoat, he would go to a skateboard park at night and surreptitiously plant a loaded camera and a slide projector.

Yeah, right. Just when the stuff was getting scarce, he would give it away. Besides, the kids who found it would probably just smash it to pieces anyway. That would be a great new use for a slide projector: litter.

He put the idea out of his mind, but over the next few days, days spent rejecting Homeland Security requests for information on local citizens and explaining yet again to frustrated federal agents that the city council was still debating whether or not Spencerville was going to comply with their unconstitutional invasions of privacy, the idea kept popping up. Maybe hoarding wasn't the right answer. A person had to invest money to make money; maybe he should invest a slide projector to see if he could make more.

It was a dumb idea. Most likely he would just lose a slide projector. But after a week in which the thought resurfaced every few hours, he finally decided to try it. He could afford it, and who knows, maybe whoever found the equipment would at least get into photography. And once he had done it, maybe he could get the crazy notion out of his mind.

He had an old Canon AE-1 that didn't have a mirror lock-up, so it wasn't much use for astrophotography. He loaded that with a roll of film and got the older of his two slide projectors out of the closet. Both camera and projector were so full of memories that he nearly backed out when he saw the two of them side-by-side on the table, but he reminded himself that he hadn't used either one in years. Besides, he had two other cameras, and when his order at the camera shop came in he would have two projectors again, and that would just have to be enough.

He looked at the empty carousel. That wouldn't do. He would have to fill it--no, just half fill it--with slides to pique the interest of whoever found it.

He thought about filling it with astrophotos, but if he did that, he would be unconsciously biasing the recipient toward something that had already proven inadequate at keeping slide photography alive. He could put in a few, of course, including a copy of his very first shot, but he would need some other images, too.

It was still light outside. He took the freshly-loaded camera into the back yard and snapped a quick shot of his maple tree with its autumn leaves glowing yellow in the evening light. There were birds hopping around in the branches; he went back inside for his spotting scope and a T-adapter, then took a couple of frame-filling shots of a junco and a nuthatch. A plane was flying by a few miles to the east, drawing a bright contrail against the blue sky; with the ease of long practice he aimed the scope at it and snapped a shot of that, too.

The sky stayed clear into twilight, so he loaded his big scope into the car and headed for the water tank. It wasn't quite dark by the time he had set up, so, feeling a little like an international spy on assignment, he swung the great barrel down below the horizon and aimed it at the skate park. There were five kids on the edge of the concrete bowl, watching a sixth zoom up and down the sides. Sodium vapor lights illuminated the bowl with their eerie orange glow.

"Oh, yeah," Nathan murmured. He attached the camera, set it for a quarter second exposure, and snapped a couple of shots.

The next day he took the camera to work and took a picture of a Homeland Security information request on his computer screen, sticking a Post-it note over the names to make sure it stayed anonymous. He took a picture of his coffee mug, with steam rising. During his lunch hour, he took a shot of the city council chambers, the councilors' name placards identifying their empty seats. When he got in the car to drive home at the end of the day he took a picture of his car's instrument panel, centering on the "check engine" light.

This was turning out to be more fun than he had expected. He had concentrated on astronomical subjects for so long, he had forgotten to look at other things, but now he was exploring his world with new eyes. And the idea of leaving both camera and slide projector for a random stranger to pick up--it felt more deliciously right than he had ever imagined. It had ceased being about the medium, and was now an act of performance art.

He took two rolls of slides in three days, and somewhat reluctantly decided that was enough. He wanted to leave room for the equipment's new owner to add some shots of their own.

He loaded the carousel, putting a couple of the slides in sideways just for the heck of it. Thinking outside the box, and all. For the last slide, he took a paperclip and scratched into the emulsion of a shot of a concrete sidewalk: "Do something new." At the last-minute, he loaded it backwards.

He didn't wear a trenchcoat. That seemed like overkill. He just drove over to the skate park at the end of a night of Lunar observation, set the plastic bag with the camera and the slide projector in it under one of the benches, and drove home.

Nothing happened for nearly a month. Nothing that he knew about, anyway. But one day he got a Homeland Security information request on three fourteen-year-old boys and a high school journalism teacher, and although he gave HomeSec the standard reply that the city council was still in deliberation on the issue of compliance, he also did a quick search on their names to see what would come up.

The only thing in the city database was a record of their appearance at a city council meeting a week ago, on which they had spoken in support of the resolution to defy the Patriot Act's invasion of people's privacy. They had apparently requested time for a slide show, but were denied. But a web search showed that they had given their show at the public library two days ago, and would give it again tonight at the W.O.W. hall. They called it "Captured Light Speaks Out for Freedom."

Nathan went to the show. Sure enough, there was his slide projector on a wheeled cart in the middle of the aisle between rows of folding chairs. A teenage boy was making sure it was ready to go. The seats filled surprisingly quickly, until people were forced to stand around the edges of the hall. At showtime, another teenage boy stepped onto the stage in front of the white screen and held up Nathan's--now his--camera, which he aimed at the audience and fired off a shot.

"At least one of the people in the picture I just took is a Homeland Security agent," the boy said. "Does that bother you?"

There was a moment of stunned silence, then several members of the audience--Nathan included--shouted, "Yes!"

"Wait until they start asking questions about you," the boy said. "Actually, they probably have, but you'll never know because it's illegal to tell anyone when a request for information has been made."

The audience roared this time in inarticulate dismay.

The boy said, "A month ago, somebody struck an anonymous blow against them. I was boarding with some friends when we found it under the bench: this camera and that slide projector. The projector was half full, and the camera was loaded with fresh film. It seemed pretty clear what we had to do."

He stepped aside. Someone in back flipped off the lights. The boy at the projector flipped it on in the same instant, and Nathan's first photo of the Moon flashed up on the screen.

"A telescope is an innocuous enough device," the boy on the stage said. "You can take pretty pictures through one."

The junco flashed up on the screen. "You can take close-up pictures."

The picture of the kids skateboarding appeared on the screen. It was a pretty good shot. The one actually boarding was a blur of motion, and the others were clear, easily recognizable as they watched their buddy perform. "Or you can take surveillance photos. That's me." He pointed to one of the watchers. "As near as we can tell, this was taken from half a mile away."

The next slide showed the airplane. "United" was clearly legible on the fuselage. You couldn't quite see faces in the windows, but it looked as if you might if you zoomed in a little. "This is what drives the government nuts," said the kid. "What if some terrorist is in our midst, gathering information for his next strike?"

The next slide showed the Homeland Security information request. "Maybe we should let them dig for information. After all, it's for a good cause."

Then came a slide Nathan hadn't taken. It showed a high school girl checking out a stack of books at the library. The next slide zoomed in on the titles. Understanding Sexuality, Family Planning and You, and Speaking to Prozac.

"Still think so?"

Another shot of book titles; this time Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto, and Quotations of Chairman Mao.

"Taken out of context, kind of scary. Put into context--" another slide showed the books sitting on a shelf labeled Political Science "--the only scary thing about it is knowing which picture the government will use at your trial. If you get a trial."

The slide show continued, Nathan's pictures interspersed with the teenagers' own shots. Sometimes the projector operator let a single slide linger for minutes at a time, letting people examine the maple tree until they felt like they knew every leaf; other times he jumped from image to image so fast they were mere suggestions. Nathan marveled at how his random photos had sparked this protest, and how well they fit together under its common theme. Apparently his own agenda had directed the camera without his conscious knowledge.

All the same, it was just a slide show. He had hoped that the kids would think of some brand new use for the equipment, some skateboard-powered, rap-inspired artform that would keep the technology alive; not simply set it up and use it for the same old thing that Nathan did.

But as he watched, he slowly began to realize that it wasn't the same old thing. When was the last time he had seen high school kids draw a full-house crowd for a political protest? How had they managed to make a telephoto image of a nuthatch--a photo that Nathan himself had taken!--seem so threatening? The outward mechanics of the show were nothing new, but there was something different here, and the audience knew it. They fairly crackled with energy, and it built to a crescendo that Nathan would never have guessed possible in a group of people watching a sequence of still images.

The slide show ended with the "check engine" light, followed by the "do something new" slide. In this context, the scratches in the emulsion looked like rips in the fabric of reality, as if they had been etched by the fingernail of God. The kids let it run for a full minute before they turned on the light, and the applause continued for the entire time.

The narrator was looking straight at Nathan when the lights came up. Nathan felt a moment of alarm, but when it became apparent that the kid wasn't going to say anything, Nathan nodded to him, then got up and joined the rest of the people streaming out the door. It probably hadn't been too difficult to figure out where the photo of the skateboard park had been taken from, and there was a guy up there with a telescope and a camera practically every clear night; it wouldn't take a genius to figure out who the anonymous benefactor was. But Nathan had nothing to say to the kid, other than "Thank you," and even that seemed redundant. His presence here had said that clear enough. The kid had done exactly what Nathan had asked, and produced something completely outside Nathan's expectation. Not a new art form, by any means, but something new had happened here, and the people flowing out of the hall were carrying it with them. It was bigger than Nathan now, bigger than the kids who had produced it, free of the nest and flying on its own.

Two weeks later, the city council voted not to comply with the Patriot Act, and Nathan was directed in an official memo to refuse any and all requests from the federal government concerning the lawful actions of the citizens of Spencerville.

In the following months, other people presented slide shows of their own. Some had political agendas, but often they were just family vacation photos. People started asking for a dollar at the door to help defray the cost of film and hall rent, but rather than drive people away, that seemed to lend the whole concept an air of legitimacy that brought still more people to check out the phenomenon. By spring, it was just as common for couples to go to dinner and a slide show as it had used to be for them to take in a movie, and the practice had spread into Europe and Asia.

People tried giving PowerPoint shows as well, but when the digital images were blown up to fill-the-hall size, they just couldn't compete with the old technology. The richness of color and detail of slides looked almost miraculous by comparison. Plus, using an analog medium felt more like art to both the photographer and the audience. All the gimmicky fades and wipes of PowerPoint presentations just got in the way of the message, and too many of the digital images were doctored until they looked obviously fake. With slides, the audience felt like they were looking at the real thing, as if the photographer were revealing something that they might have seen with their own eyes had they been there at the time.

Nathan continued his astronomy presentations, and managed to smile when people congratulated him on joining the hot, new entertainment sensation.

He smiled even wider every time he read about another city defying the Patriot Act. Civil rights seemed to be a concept whose popularity was resurging again, too.

One day in the photo store, Danny asked, "How much of that slide film do you have left, anyway?"

"Seven bricks," Nathan replied. "Why?"

"Would you mind selling some of that back to me?" Danny replied. "The warehouse is out. The film companies are retooling to start production again, but it looks like there's going to be a month's gap where nobody will be able to get any slide film. If I've got some on hand while everybody else is out, I'll gain a lot of repeat customers. I'd replace your stock with fresh film as soon as it becomes available."

Nathan laughed. "No problem. I'll sell it back to you at cost, and go back to buying it a roll at a time like I used to. I only wanted that much because it looked like it was going extinct."

"Not much chance of that," Danny said. "Not for a while, anyway."

No, not for a while. The clock would turn and public interest would eventually move on, but Nathan had bought at least a few more years of reprieve. Apparently for everyone.

Copyright © 2006 Jerry Oltion

[Back to Table of Contents]

Some people seek Truth over all else. But in dealing with human beings, facts may matter less than beliefs--though not always in the way they think.

A stormy November on the North Atlantic. Even a great liner like the Victoria Augusta rolled and pitched in the swells sweeping down from the direction of Iceland. The motion of her deck was not dissimilar to that of a restive horse, though the most restive horse rested at last, while the Victoria Augusta seemed likely to go on jouncing on the sea forever.

Most of the big ship's passengers stayed in their cabins. Nor was that sure proof against seasickness; the sharp stink of vomit filled the passageways, and was liable to nauseate even passengers who might have withstood the motion alone.

A pair of men, though, paced the promenade deck as if it were July on the Mediterranean. Passing sailors sent them curious looks. "'Ere, now," one of the men in blue said, touching a deferential forefinger to his cap. "Shouldn't you toffs go below? It'll be easier to take, like, if you do."

"I find the weather salubrious enough, thank you," the taller and leaner of the pair replied. "I am glad to discern that we shall soon come into port."

"Good heavens, Helms--how can you know that?" his companion ejaculated in surprise.

Athelstan Helms puffed on his pipe. "Nothing simpler, Doctor. Have you not noted that the waves discommoding our motion are sharper and more closely spaced than they were when we sailed the broad bosom of the Atlantic? That can only mean a shallow bottom beneath us, and a shallow bottom surely presages the coastline of Atlantis."

"Right you are, sir. Sure as can be, you've got your sea legs under you, to feel something like that." The sailor's voice held real respect now. "Wasn't more than fifteen minutes ago I 'eard the chief engineer say we was two, maybe three, hours out of 'Anover."

"Upon my soul," Dr. James Walton murmured. "It all seems plain enough when you set it out, Helms."

"I'm glad you think so," Helms replied. "You do commonly seem to."

Walton chuckled, a little self-consciously. "By now I ought not to be surprised at your constantly surprising me, what?" He laughed again, louder this time. "A bit of a paradox, that, don't you think?"

"A bit," Athelstan Helms agreed, an unaccustomed note of indulgence in his voice.

The sailor stared at him, then aimed a stubby forefinger in the general direction of his sternum. "I know who you are, sir," he said. "You're that detective feller!"

"Only an amateur," Helms replied.

He might as well have left the words unsaid. As if he had, the sailor rounded on Dr. Walton. "And you must be the bloke 'oo writes up 'is adventures. I've read a great plenty of 'em, I 'ave."

"You're far too kind, my good man." Walton, delighted to trumpet Athelstan Helms' achievements to the skies, was modest about his own.

"But what brings the two of you to Atlantis?" the sailor asked. "I thought you stayed in England, where it's civilized, like."

"As a matter of fact--" Dr. Walton began.

Helms smoothly cut in: "As a matter of fact, that is a matter we really should not discuss before conferring with the authorities in Hanover."

"I get you, sir." The sailor winked and laid a finger by the side of his nose. "Mum's the word. Not a soul will hear from me." Away he went, almost bursting with self-importance.

"It will be all over the ship before we dock," Dr. Walton said dolefully.

Athelstan Helms nodded. "Of course it will. But it can't get off the ship before we dock, so that is a matter of small consequence."

"Why didn't you want me to mention the House of Universal Devotion, then?" Dr. Walton asked. "For I saw that you prevented my doing so."

"Indeed." Helms nodded. "I believe the sailor may well be a member of that curious sect."

"Him? Good heavens, Helms! He's as English as Yorkshire pudding."

"No doubt. And yet the House, though Atlantean in origin, has its devotees in our land as well, and in the Terranovan republics and principalities. If the case with which we shall be concerned in the United States of Atlantis did not have ties to our England, you may rest assured I should not have embarked on the Victoria Augusta, excellent though she may be." Helms paused as another sailor walked past. When the man was out of earshot, the detective continued, "Did you note nothing unusual about the manner in which our recent acquaintance expressed himself?"

"Unusual? Not really." Dr. Walton shook his head. "A Londoner from the East End, I make him out to be. Not an educated man, even if he has his letters. Has scant respect for his aitches, but not quite a Cockney."

Although Helms' pinched features seemed to have little room for a smile, when one did find a home it illuminated his whole face. "Capital, Walton!" he said, and made as if to clap his hands. "I agree completely. You analysis is impeccable--well, nearly so, anyhow."

"'Nearly'? How have I gone astray?" By the way Walton said it, he did not believe he'd strayed at all.

"As you are such a cunning linguist, Doctor, I am confident the answer will suggest itself to you in a matter of moments." Athelstan Helms waited. When Walton shook his head, Helms shrugged and said, "Did you not hear the intrusive 'like' he used twice? Most un-English, but a common enough Atlantean locution. Begun by an actor--one of the Succot brothers, I believe--a generation ago, and adopted by the generality. I conjecture this fellow may have acquired it in meetings with his fellow worshipers."

"It could be." Dr. Walton stroked his salt-and-pepper chin whiskers. "Yes, it could be. But not all Atlanteans belong to the House of Universal Devotion. Far from it, in fact. He could have learned that interjection innocently enough."

"Certainly. That is why I said no more than that he might well be a member of the sect," Helms replied. "But I do find it likely, as the close and continuous intercourse amongst members of the House while engaged in worship seems calculated to foster such accretions. And he knew who we were. Members of the House, familiar with the difficulties the Atlantean constabulary is having with this case, may also be on the lookout for assistance from a foreign clime."

"Hmm," Walton said, and then, "Hmm," again. "How could they know the chief inspector in Hanover--"

"Chief of police, they call him," Helms noted.

"Chief of police, then," Walton said impatiently. "How could they know he sought your aid and not that of, say, Scotland Yard?"

"The easiest way to effect that would be to secret someone belonging to the House of Universal Devotion within the Hanoverian police department, something which strikes me as not implausible," Athelstan Helms said. "Other possible methodologies are bound to suggest themselves upon reflection."

By the unhappy expression spreading over Dr. Walton's fleshy countenance, such methodologies did indeed suggest themselves. But before he could mention any of them, a shout from the bow drew his attention, and Athelstan Helms' as well: "Hanover Light! Hanover Light ahead!"

Helms all but quivered with anticipation. "Before long, Doctor, we shall see what we shall see."

"So we shall." Walton seemed less enthusiastic.

Hanover Light was one of the engineering marvels of the age. Situated on a wave-washed rock several miles east of the Atlantean coast, the lighthouse reached more than 300 feet into the air. The lamps in the upper story guided ships in from far out to sea.

Hanover itself cupped a small enclosed bay that formed the finest harbor on the east coast of Atlantis--a better harbor, even, than Avalon in the more lightly settled Atlantean west. Steam tugs with heavy rope fenders nudged the Victoria Augusta to her berth. Sailors tossed lines to waiting longshoremen, who made the ship fast to the pier. The liner's engines sighed into silence.

Dr. Walton sighed, too. "Well, we're here."

Athelstan Helms nodded. "I could not have deduced it more precisely myself," he said. "The red-crested eagle on the flag flying from yonder pole, the longshoremen shouting in what passes for English in the United States of Atlantis, the fact that we have just completed an ocean voyage ... Everything does indeed point to our being here."

Walton blinked. Was Helms having him on? He dismissed the notion from his mind, as being unworthy of a great detective. Lighting a cigar, he said, "I wonder if anyone will be here to meet us."

"Assuredly," Helms replied. "The customs men will take their usual interest--I generously refrain from saying, their customary interest--in our belongings." Walton began to speak; Helms forestalled him. "But you were about to say, anyone in an official capacity. Unless I am very much mistaken, that excitable-looking gentleman on the planking there will be Captain La Strada of the Hanover police."

The individual in question certainly did seem excitable. He wore tight trousers, a five-button jacket with tiny lapels, and one of the most appalling cravats in the history of haberdashery. His broad-brimmed hat would have raised eyebrows in London, too. Nor did his face have a great deal to recommend it: he looked like a ferret, with narrow, close-set eyes, a beak of a nose, and a wildly disorderly mustache.

And he was looking for the two Englishmen. "Helms!" he shouted, jumping up and down. "Walton!" He waved and pointed--unfortunately, at two other men halfway along the Victoria Augusta's deck.

"Here we are!" Walton called. Under his breath, he added, "Shocking they let a dago climb so high, bloody shocking."

Inspector La Strada jumped even higher. As if impelled by some galvanic current, his arm swung toward the detective and his medical companion. "Helms! Walton!" he bawled, for all the world as if he hadn't been yelling at those other chaps a moment before. Perhaps he hoped Helms and Walton hadn't noticed him doing it.

He pumped their hands when they came down the gangplank, and undertook to push their trunks to the customs house on one of the low-slung wheeled carts provided for the purpose. "Very kind of you," Walton murmured, reflecting that no true gentleman in London would lower himself to playing the navvy.

As if reading his mind, La Strada said, "Here in Atlantis, we roll up our sleeves and set our hands to whatever wants doing. This is a land for men of action, not sissies who sit around drinking port and playing the fiddle."

"Shall I take my return passage now, in that case?" Helms inquired in a voice rather cooler than the wind off the Greenland ice.

"By no means." La Strada seemed cheerfully unaware he'd given offense. "There's work to be done here, and you are--we hope you are--the man to do it."

Some of the first work to be done would be explaining the pistols in the travelers' baggage: so Dr. Walton anticipated, at any rate. But the customs inspectors took the firearms in stride. They seemed more interested in the reagents Helms carried in a cleverly padded case inside his trunk. At La Strada's voluble insistence that these were essential to the business for which the detective had been summoned to Atlantis, the inspectors grudgingly stamped Helms' passport, and Walton's as well.

La Strada had a coach waiting outside the customs house. "Shall I take you gents to the hotel first, to freshen up after your voyage, or would you rather come to the station and take your first look at what you'll be dealing with?" he asked.

Dr. Walton would have plumped for the manifold virtues of a good hotel, assuming Hanover boasted such a marvelous sanctuary, but Helms forestalled him, saying, "The station, Inspector, by all means. Well begun is half done, as they say, and the sooner we finish our business here, the sooner we can go home again."

"Once you spend a while in Atlantis, Mr. Helms, you may decide you don't care to go home after all," La Strada said.

"I doubt it." Athelstan Helms' reply would have silenced an Englishman and very likely crushed him. Inspector La Strada was made of sterner, or, more likely, coarser stuff. He let out a merry peal of laughter and lit a cheroot much nastier than the fragrant cigar Walton enjoyed.

Lamplighters with long poles went through the cobblestoned and bricked streets with long poles, setting the gas jets alight. The buttery glow of the street lights went some way toward mitigating the deepening twilight. Hanover wasn't London--what city was, or could be?--but it did not put its head in its shell with the coming of night, either. The streets and taverns and music halls and even many of the shops remained crowded.

London boasted inhabitants from every corner of the far-flung British Empire. Hanover, the largest urban center in a republic fueled by immigration, had residents from all over the world: Englishmen, Scots, Irish, the French and Spaniards who'd originally settled southern Atlantis, Negro freemen and freedmen and--women, swarthy Italians like La Strada, Scandinavians, stolid Germans, Jews from Eastern Europe, copper-skinned Terranovan aboriginals, Chinese running eateries and laundries advertised in their incomprehensible script, and every possible intermingling of them.

"Pack of mongrels," Dr. Walton muttered.

"What do you say, Doctor?" the inspector inquired. "With the rattle and clatter of the wheels, I fear I did not hear you."

"Oh, nothing. Nothing, really." Walton puffed on his cigar, both to blot out the stench of La Strada's and, perhaps, to send up a defensive smoke screen.

Unlike London, whose streets wandered where they would and changed names when they would, Hanover was built on a right-angled gridwork. People proclaimed it made navigation easier and more efficient. And it likely did, but Dr. Walton could not escape the notion that a city needed to be learned, that making it too easy to get around in reduced it to a habitation for children, not men.

He had the same low opinion of Atlantis' coinage. A hundred cents to an eagle--well, where was the challenge in that? Four farthings to a penny, twelve pence to the shilling, twenty shillings the pound (or, if you were an aristo, twenty-one in a guinea) ... Foreigners always whined about how complicated English currency was. To Walton's way of thinking, that was all to the good. Whining helped mark out the foreigners and let you keep a proper eye on them.

And as for architecture, did Hanover really have any? A few Georgian buildings, Greek Revival more pretentious than otherwise, and endless modern utilitarian boxes of smoke-smudged brick that might once have been red or brown or yellow or even purple for all anyone could tell nowadays. Some--many--of these brick boxes were blocks of flats that outdid even London's for sheer squalidity. The odors of cheap cooking and bad plumbing wafted from them.

In such slums, the brass-buttoned policemen traveled in pairs. They wore low caps with patent-leather brims, and carried revolvers on their belts along with their billy clubs. They didn't look much like bobbies, and they didn't act much like bobbies, either.

"Do you find, then, that you need to intimidate your citizenry to maintain order?" Dr. Walton asked.

Inspector La Strada stared at him, eyes shiny under a gas lamp. "Intimidate our citizenry?" he said, as if the words were Chinese or Quechua. Then, much more slowly than he might have, he grasped what the Englishman was driving at. "God bless you, Doctor!" he exclaimed, no doubt in lieu of some more pungent comment. "Our policemen don't carry guns to intimidate the citizenry."

"Why, then?" Walton asked in genuine bewilderment.

Athelstan Helms spoke before the Atlantean inspector could: "They wear guns to keep the citizenry from murdering them in its criminal pursuits."

"Couldn't have put it better myself," La Strada said. "This isn't London, you know."

"Yes, I'd noticed that," Dr. Walton observed tartly.

La Strada either missed or ignored the sarcasm. "Though you might, like," he said. "Anyone but a convicted felon can legally carry a gun here. And the convicted felons do it, too--what have they got to lose? A tavern brawl here isn't one fellow breaking a mug over the other one's head. He pulls out a snub-nosed .42 and puts a pill in the bastard's brisket. And if getting away means plugging a policeman, he doesn't stick at that, either."

"Charming people," the physician murmured.

"In many ways, they are," Helms said. "But, having won freedom through a bloody uprising against the British crown, they labor under the delusion that they must be ready--nay, eager--to shed more blood at any moment to defend it."

"We don't happen to think that is a delusion, sir," La Strada said stiffly.

"No doubt," Athelstan Helms replied. "That does not mean it isn't one. I draw your notice to the Dominion of Ontario, in northeastern Terranova. Ontario declined revolution--despite your buccaneers, I might add, or perhaps because of them--yet can you deny that its people are as free as your own, and possessed of virtually identical rights?"

"Of course I can. They still have a Queen--your Queen." La Strada wrinkled up his nose as if to show he could smell the stench of monarchism across the thousand miles of Hesperian Gulf separating the USA and Ontario.

"We do not find it unduly discommodes us," Helms said.

"The more fools you," La Strada told him. There was remarkably little conversation in the coach after that until it pulled up in front of Hanover's police headquarters.

Dr. Walton had not looked for the headquarters to be lovely. But neither had he looked for the building to be as ugly as it was. A gas lamp on either side of the steps leading up to the entrance showed the brickwork to be of a jaundiced, despairing yellow. The steps themselves were of poured concrete: utilitarian, no doubt, but unequivocally unlovely. The edifice was squat and sturdy, with small rectangular windows; it put Walton in mind of a fortress. The stout iron bars on the windows of the bottom two stories reinforced the impression--and the windows.

After gazing at those, Helms remarked, "They will use this place to house criminals as well as constables." There, for once, the detective's companion had not the slightest difficult comprehending how his friend made the deduction.

"Come along, gents, come along." La Strada hopped down to the ground, spry as a cricket. Helms and Walton followed. The policeman who drove the carriage, who'd said not a word on the journey from the customs house, remained behind to ensure that their luggage did not decide to tour the city on its own.

The odors greeting the newcomers when they went inside would have told them what sort of place they were finding. Dante might have had such smells in mind when he wrote, All hope abandon, ye who enter here. Dampness and mold, bad tobacco, stale sweat infused with the aftereffects of rum and whiskey, sour vomit, chamber pots that wanted emptying, the sharp smell of fear and the less definable odor of despair ... Dr. Walton sighed. They were no different from what he would have smelled at the Old Bailey.

And, walking past cells on the way to the stairs, Walton and Athelstan Helms saw scenes straight out of Hogarth engravings, and others that, again, might have come straight from the Inferno. "Here we go," Inspector La Strada said, politely holding the door open for the two Englishmen. When he closed the stout redwood panel (anywhere but Atlantis, it would have been oak) behind them, he might have put a mile of distance between them and the hellish din behind it.

Another door, equally sturdy, guarded each of the upper floors. Even if, through catastrophe or conspiracy, a swarm of prisoners escaped, the constables could fortify their position and defend themselves for a long time. "You have firing ports, I see," Helms murmured. Dr. Walton, who'd fought in Afghanistan and was one of the lucky few to have escaped that hellhole, slapped at his thigh, annoyed at himself for missing the telling detail.

Inspector La Strada opened one of those fortified portals. A rotund constabulary sergeant with a large-caliber revolver sat just beyond it, ready for any eventuality. Not far away, a technician had a dissipated-looking young man in a special chair, and was measuring his skull and ear and left middle finger and ring finger with calipers and ruler. A clerk wrote down the numbers he called out.

"You still use the Bertillon system for identifying your miscreants, then?" Athelstan Helms inquired.

"We do," La Strada replied. "It's not perfect, but far better than any other method we've found." He thrust out his receding chin as far as it would go. "And I haven't heard that Scotland Yard's got anything better, either."

"Scotland Yard? No." Helms sounded faintly dismissive. "But I am personally convinced that one day--and perhaps one day quite soon--the ridges and crenelations on a man's fingertips will prove more efficacious yet, and with far less labor and less likelihood of error and mistaken identity."

"Well, I'll believe that when I see it, sir, and not a moment before." La Strada picked his way through chaos not much quieter and not much less odorous than that downstairs. He finally halted at a plain--indeed, battered--pine desk. "My home from home, you might say," he remarked, and purloined a couple of cheap, unpadded chairs nearby. "Have a seat, gents, and I'll tell you what's what, like."

Before sitting, Dr. Walton tried to brush something off his chair. Whatever it was, it proved sticky and resistant to brushing. He perched gingerly, on one buttock, rather like the old woman in Candide. Either Helms' chair was clean or he was indifferent to any dirt it might have accumulated.

La Strada reached into a desk drawer and pulled out a brown glass bottle and, after some rummaging, three none too clean tumblers. "A restorative, gentlemen?" he said, and started to pour before the Englishmen could say yea or nay.

It wasn't scotch. It was maize whiskey--corn liquor, they called it in Atlantis--and it might have been aged a week, or perhaps even two. "Gives one the sensation of having swallowed a lighted gas lamp, what?" Dr. Walton wheezed when more or less capable of intelligible speech once more.

"It intoxicates. Past that, what more is truly required?" Helms drank his off with an aplomb suggesting long experience--and perhaps a galvanized gullet.

"This here is legal whiskey, gents. You should taste what the homecookers make." La Strada shuddered ... and refilled his glass. "Shall we get down to business?"

"May we talk freely here?" Helms asked. "Are you certain none of your colleagues within earshot belongs to the House of Universal Devotion?"

"Certain? Mr. Helms, I'm not certain of a damned thing," La Strada. "If you told me a giant honker would walk up those stairs and come through that doorway there, I couldn't say I was certain you were wrong."

"Aren't honkers as extinct as the dodo?" Dr. Walton asked, sudden sharp interest in his voice: he fancied himself an amateur ornithologist. "Didn't that Audubon chap paint some of the last of them before your slave uprising?"

"The Servile Insurrection, we call it." La Strada's face clouded. Like most Atlanteans his age, he would have served in the fight. "I've got a scar on my leg on account of it.... But you don't care about that. Yes, they say honkers are gone, but the backwoods of Atlantis are a mighty big place, so who knows for sure, like? ... But you don't care about that, either, not really. The House of Universal Devotion."

"Yes. The House of Universal Devotion." Helms leaned forward on his hard, uncomfortable seat.

"Well, you'll know they're killing important men. If you attended to my letter, you'll know they're doing it for no good reason any man who doesn't belong to the House can see. And you'll know they're damned hard to stop, because their murderers don't care if they live or die," La Strada said. "They figure they go straight to heaven if they're killed."

"Like the Hashishin," murmured Walton, who, from his service in the East, was steeped in Oriental lore.

La Strada looked blank. "The Assassins," Athelstan Helms glossed.

"They're assassins, all right," the inspector said, missing most of the point. Neither Englishman seemed to reckon it worthwhile to enlighten him. La Strada went on, "We aim to find a way to make them stop without outlawing them altogether. We have religious freedom here in Atlantis, we do. We don't establish any one church and disadvantage the rest."

"Er, well, despite that, we have it in England as well," Walton said. "But we don't construe it to mean freedom to slaughter your fellow man in the name of your creed."

"Nor do we," La Strada said. "Otherwise, we wouldn't be trying to stop it, now would we?" He seemed to feel he'd proved some sort of point.

"Perhaps the best way to go about it would be to arrange for a suitable divine revelation from the Preacher," Helms suggested.

"Yes, that would be the best way--if the Preacher could be persuaded to announce that kind of revelation," La Strada agreed. "If, indeed, the Preacher could be found by anyone not a votary of the House of Universal Devotion."

"Do I correctly infer you have it in mind for me to seek him out and discuss with him the possibility and practicability of such a revelation?" Helms asked.

"You are indeed a formidable detective, Mr. Helms," La Strada said. "Your fee will be formidable, too, should you succeed."

"Do you imagine the magnificent Athelstan Helms can fail?" Dr. Walton inquired indignantly.

"Several here have made the attempt. None has reached the Preacher. None, in fact, has survived," Inspector La Strada answered. "So yes, I can imagine your comrade failing. I do not wish it, but I can imagine it."

"Quite right. Quite right," Helms said. "Imagining all that might go wrong is the best preventive. Now, then--can you tell me where the Preacher is likeliest to be found?"

"Wellll..." La Strada stretched the word out to an annoying length. "He's in Atlantis. We're pretty sure of that."

"Capital," Helms said without the least trace of irony. "All that remains, then, is to track him down, eh?"

"I'm sure you'll manage in the next few days." La Strada, by contrast...

The Golden Burgher, the hotel into which La Strada had booked Helms and Walton, lay only a few blocks from police headquarters, but might have come from a different world. It would not have seemed out of place in London, though the atmosphere put Dr. Walton more in mind of vulgar ostentation than of the genteel luxury more ideally British. And few British hotels would have had so many spittoons--cuspidors, they seemed to call them here--so prominently placed. The brown stains on the white marble squares of the checkerboard flooring (and, presumably though less prominently, on the black as well) argued that there might have been even more.

The room was unexceptionable. And, when the traders went down to the restaurant, they found nothing wrong with the saddle of mutton. Walton did bristle when the waiter inquired whether he preferred his meat with mint jelly or with garlic. "Garlic!" he exploded. "D'you take me for an Italian?"

"No, sir," said the waiter, who might have been of that extraction himself. "But some Atlanteans are fond of it."

"I shouldn't wonder," the physician replied, a devastating retort that somehow failed to devastate. His amour-propre ruffled, he added, "I'm not an Atlantean, either, for which I give thanks to the Almighty."

"So does Atlantis, sir." The waiter hurried off.

Walton at first took that to mean Atlantis also thanked God. Only after noticing a certain gleam in Athelstan Helms' eye did he wonder if the man meant Atlantis thanked God that he was not an Atlantean. "The cheek of the fellow!" he growled. "Have I been given the glove?"

"A finger from it, at any rate, I should say," Helms told him.

The good doctor intended to speak sharply to the waiter. But he soon made a discovery others had found before him: it was difficult--indeed, next to impossible--to stay angry at a man who was feeding you so well. The mutton, flavorful without being gamy, matched any in England. The mint jelly complemented it marvelously. Potatoes and peas were likewise tasty and well prepared.

"For dessert," the waiter said as a busboy took away dirty plates, "we have several flavors of ice cream made on the premises, we have a plum pudding of which many of our English guests are quite fond, and we also have a local confection: candied heart of cycad with rum sauce." He waited expectantly.

"Plum pudding, by all means," Dr. Walton said.

"I'll try the cycad dessert," Helms said. "Something I'm not likely to find elsewhere." ("And a good thing, too," Walton muttered, his voce not quite sotto enough.)

The physician had to admit that his plum pudding, like the mutton, lived up to all reasonable expectations. Athelstan Helms consumed the strange, chewy-looking object on his plate with every sign of enjoyment. When he was nearly finished, he offered Walton a bite.

"Thanks, but no," the physician said. "Stuffed. Quite stuffed. I do believe I'd burst if I picked up the fork again."

"However you please." Helms finished the dessert himself. "Not bad at all. I shouldn't be surprised if what they call rum is also distilled from the cycad, although they do grow considerable sugar down in the south."

He left a meticulous gratuity for the waiter; Walton would have been less generous. They went back up to their room. Dr. Walton struck a match against the sole of his boot and lit the gas lamp.

"I say!" Helms exclaimed. "The plot thickens--so it does. I deduce that someone is not desirous of our company here."

Again, he did not need his richly deserved reputation for detection to arrive at his conclusion. Someone had driven a dagger hilt-deep into the pillow on each bed.

"No, I'm not surprised," Inspector La Strada said. "The House of Universal Devotion casts its web widely here."

"Someone should step on the spider, then, by Jove!" Dr. Walton said.

"Freedom of religion again, I'm afraid," Dr. Walton said. "Our Basic Law guarantees the right to worship as one pleases and the right not to worship if one pleases. We find that a more just policy than yours." Yes, he enjoyed scoring points off the mother country.

Dr. Walton was in a high temper, and in a high color as well, his cheeks approaching the hue of red-hot iron. "Where in the Good Book does it say assassinating two innocent pillows amounts to a religious observance?"

"What the good doctor means, I believe, is that any faith can use the excuse of acting in God's cause to perpetrate deeds those more impartial might deem unrighteous," Athelstan Helms said. Walton nodded emphatically enough to set two or three chins wobbling.

"Any liberty can become license--any policeman who's been on the job longer than a week knows as much," La Strada said. "But the Preacher has been going up and down in Atlantis for more than fifty years now. He may have forgotten."

"Going up and down like Satan in the Book of Job," Walton growled. "We need to find the rascal so we can give him a piece of our mind."

The Atlantean police officer shifted from foot to foot. "Well, sir, like I told you last night, finding him's a problem we haven't ciphered out ourselves."

"What then?" Dr. Walton was still in a challenging mood. "Shall we walk into the nearest House of Universal Devotion and ask the hemidemisemipagans pretending to be priests where the devil their precious Preacher is? The Devil ought to know, all right." No, he was not a happy man.

Athelstan Helms, by contrast, suddenly looked as happy as his saturnine features would allow. "A capital idea, Doctor! Capital, I say. Tomorrow morning, bright and early, we shall do that very thing. Beard the blighters in their den, like." He used the Atlanteanism with what struck Walton as malice, or at least mischief, aforethought.

"You're not serious, Helms?" the doctor burst out.

"I am, sir--serious to the point of solemnity," Helms replied. "What better way to come to know our quarry's henchmen?"

"What better way to end up in an alley with our throats cut?" Dr. Walton said. "I'd lay long odds the blackguards have more knives than the two they wasted on goosedown."

Helms paused long enough to light his pipe, then rounded on La Strada. "What is your view of this, Inspector?"

"I wouldn't recommend it," the policeman said. "I doubt you'd be murdered, not two such famous fellows as you are. They have to know we'd haul their Houses down on top of 'em if they worked that kind of outrage. But I don't reckon you'd learn very much from 'em, either."

"There! D'you see, Helms?" Walton said. "Inspector La Strada's a man of sense."

"By which you mean nothing except that he agrees with you," Helms said placidly. "To the nearest House we shall go."

Hanover had several Houses of Universal Devotion, all of them in poor, even rough, neighborhoods. Devotion was not a faith that appealed to the wealthy, though more than a few Devotees had, through skill and hard work, succeeded in becoming prosperous. "Nothing but a heresy," Dr. Walton grumbled as he and Helms approached a House. "Blacker than Pelagianism. Blacker than Arianism, by God, and who would have dreamt it possible?"

"Your intimate acquaintance with creeds outworn no doubt does you credit, Doctor," Helms said. "Here, however, we face a creed emphatically not outworn, and we would do well to remember as much."

The House of Universal Devotion seemed unprepossessing enough, without even a spire to mark it as a church. On the lintel were carved a sun, a crescent moon, several stars, and other, more obscure symbols. "Astrology?" Dr. Walton asked.

"Freemasonry," Helms answered. "There are those who claim the two are one and inseparable, but I cannot agree." His long legs scissored up the stairs two at a time. Walton followed more sedately.

"What do we do if they won't let us in?" Walton inquired.

"Create a disturbance as a ruse, then effect an entrance will they or nill they." Athelstan Helms rather seemed to look forward to the prospect. But when he worked the latch the door swung inward on silent, well-oiled hinges. With a small, half-rueful shrug, he stepped across the threshold, Dr. Walton again at his heels.

Inside, the House of Universal Devotion looked more like a church. There were rows of plain pine pews. There was an altar, with a cross on the wall behind it. If the cross was flanked by the symbols also placed above the entryway, that seemed not so remarkable. I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE was written on the south wall, EVERY MAN HATH GOD WITHIN AND MUST LEARN TO SET HIM FREE on the north, both in the same large block capitals.

"I don't recognize that Scriptural quotation," Walton said, nodding toward the slogan on the north wall. In spite of himself, he spoke in the hushed tones suitable for a place of worship.

"From the Preacher's Book of Devotions," Helms said. "If you are a Devotee, you will believe the Lord inspired him to set down chapter and verse through the agency of automatic writing. If you are not, you may conceivably hold some other opinion." Walton's scornful sniff gave some hint as to his views of the matter.

Before he could put them into words--if, indeed, that had been his intention--a man in a somber black suit (not clerical garb in any formal sense of the word, but distinctive all the same) came out from a room off to the left of the altar. "I thought I heard voices here," he said. "May I help you, gentlemen?"

"Yes," Athelstan Helms said. "I should like to meet the Preacher, and as expeditiously as may be practicable."

"As who would not?" returned the man in the black suit.

"You are the priest here?" Walton asked.

"I have the honor to be the rector, yes." The man stressed the proper word. Bowling slightly, he continued, "Henry Praeger, sir, at your service. And you would be--?" He broke off, sudden insight lighting his features. "Are you by any chance Helms and Walton?"

"How the devil did you know that?" Walton demanded.

"I daresay he read of our arrival in this morning's Hanover Herald," Athelstan Helms said. "By now, half the capital will have done so. I did myself, at breakfast. Good to know I came here safely, what?"

Dr. Walton spluttered in embarrassment. He had glanced at the newspaper while eating a not quite tender enough beefsteak and three eggs fried hard, but had missed the story in question.

Henry Praeger nodded eagerly. "I did, Mr. Helms, and wondered if you might call at a House, not really expecting mine to be the one you chose, of course. But I am honored to make your acquaintance--and yours, too, Dr. Walton." He could be charming when he chose.

Dr. Walton remained uncharmed. He murmured something muffled to unintelligibility by the luxuriant growth of hair above his upper lip.

"You can convey my desire to the Preacher?" Helms pressed. "His views on the present unfortunate situation are bound to be of considerable importance. If he believes that killing off his opponents and doubters will enhance his position or that of the House of Universal Devotion, I must tell you that I shall essay to disabuse him of this erroneous impression."

"That has never been the policy of the House of Universal Devotion, Mr. Helms, nor of the Preacher," Henry Praeger said earnestly. "Those who claim otherwise seek to defame our church and discredit our leader."

"What about the men who assuredly are deceased, and as assuredly did not die of natural causes?" Dr. Walton inquired.

"What about them, sir?" Praeger returned. "Men die by violence all over the world, like. You will not claim the House of Universal Devotion is to blame for all of those unfortunate passings, I hope?"

"Er--no," Walton said, though his tone suggested he might like to.

"When the men in question have either criticized the House or attempted to leave the embrace of its creed, I trust you will not marvel overmuch, Mr. Praeger, if some suspicion falls on the institutions you represent," Athelstan Helms said.

"But I do marvel. I marvel very much," Praeger said. "That suspicion may fall on individuals ... that is one thing. That is should fall on the House of Universal Devotion is something else again. The House is renowned throughout Atlantis, and in Terranova, and indeed in England, for its charity and generosity toward the poor and downtrodden, of whom there are in this sorry world far too many."

"The house is also renowned for its clannishness, its secrecy, and its curious, shall we say, beliefs, as well as for the vehemence with which its adherents cling to them," Helms said.

"Jews are renowned for the same thing," Henry Praeger retorted. "Do you believe the tales of ritual murder that come out of Russia?"

"No, for they are fabrications. I have looked into this matter, and know whereof I speak," Helms answered. "Here in Hanover, however, and elsewhere in this republic, men are unquestionably dead, as Dr. Walton reminded you a moment before. Also, the Jews have the justification of following custom immemorial, which you do not."

"You are right--we do not follow ancient usages," Praeger said proudly. "We take for ourselves the beliefs we require, and reshape them ourselves to our hearts' desire. That is the modern way. That is the Atlantean way. We are loyal to our country, sir, even if misguided officials persist in failing to understand us."

"You don't say anything about the dead 'uns," Walton remarked.

"I don't know anything about them. Nor do I know how to reach the Preacher." Praeger held up a hand before either Englishman could speak. "I shall talk to certain colleagues of mine. If, through them or their associates, word of your desire reaches him, I am confident that he will in turn be able to reach you." His shrug seemed genuinely regretful. "I can do no more."

"Thank you for doing that much," Helms said. "Tell me one thing more, if you would: what do the symbols flanking the cross to either side signify to you?"

"Why, the truth, of course," Henry Praeger answered.

Dr. Walton was happy enough to play tourist in Hanover. Even if the city was young--almost infantile by Old World standards--there was a good deal to see, from the Curb Exchange Building to the Navy Yard to the cancan houses that were the scandal of Atlantis, and of much of Terranova and Europe as well (France, by all accounts, took them in stride). Walton returned from his visit happily scandalized.

Athelstan Helms went to no cancan houses. He set up a laboratory of sorts in their rooms, and paid the chambermaids not to clean it. When he wasn't fussing there with the daggers that had greeted him or the good doctor, he was poring over files of the Hanover Herald he had prevailed upon Inspector La Strada to prevail upon the newspaper to let him see.

From sources unknown to Walton, Helms procured a violin, upon which he practiced at all hours until guests in the adjoining chambers pounded on the walls. Then, reluctantly, he was persuaded to desist.

"Some people," he said with the faintest trace of petulance, "have no appreciation for--"

"Good music," Dr. Walton said loyally.

"Well, actually, that is not what I was going to say," Helms told him. "They have no appreciation for the fact that any musician, good, bad, or indifferent, must regularly play his instrument if he is not to become worse. In the absence of any communication from the Preacher, what shall I do with my time?"

"You might tour the city," Walton suggested. "There is, I must admit, more to it than I would have expected."

"It is not London," Athelstan Helms said, as if that were all that required saying. In case it wasn't, he added a still more devastating sidebar: "It is not even Paris."

"Well, no," Walton said, "but have you seen the museum? Astonishing relics of the honkers. Not just skeletons and eggshells, mind you, but skins with feathers still on 'em. The birds might almost be alive."

"So might the men the House of Universal Devotion murdered," Helms replied, still in that tart mood. "They might almost be, but they are not."

"Also a fine selection of Atlantean plants," the good doctor said. "Those are as distinctive as the avifauna, if not more so. Some merely decorative, some ingeniously insectivorous, some from which we draw spices, and also some formidably poisonous."

That drew his particular friend's interest; Dr. Walton had thought it might. "I have made a certain study of the noxious alkaloids to be derived from plants," Helms admitted. "That one from southern Terranova, though a stimulant, has deleterious side effects if used for extended periods. Perhaps I should take advantage of the opportunity to observe the specimens from which the poisons are drawn."

"Perhaps you should, Helms," Walton said, and so it was decided.

The Atlantean Museum could not match its British counterpart in exterior grandeur. Indeed, but for the generosity of a Briton earlier in the century, there might not have been any Atlantean Museum. Living in the present and looking toward the future as they did, the inhabitants of Atlantis cared little for the past. The museum was almost deserted when Walton brought Helms back to it.

Helms sniffed at the exhibit of extinct honkers that had so pleased his associate. Nor did a close-up view of the formidable beak and talons of a stuffed red-crested eagle much impress him. What purported to be a cucumber slug climbing up a redwood got him to lean forward to examine it more closely. He drew back a moment later, shaking his head. "It's made of plaster of Paris, and its trail is mucilage."

"This is a museum, not a zoological garden," Dr. Walton said reasonably. "You can hardly expect a live slug here. Suppose it crawled off to the other side of the trunk, where no one but its keeper could see it?" Helms only grunted, which went some way toward showing the cogency of Walton's point.

Helms could not lean close to examine the poisonous plants; glass separated them from overzealous observers. The detective nodded approvingly, saying, "That is as it should be. It protects not only the plants but those who scrutinize them--assuming they are real. With mushrooms of the genus Amanita, even inhaling their spores is toxic."

A folded piece of foolscap was wedged in the narrow gap between a pane of glass and the wooden framing that held it in place. "What's that, Helms?" Dr. Walton asked, pointing to it.

"Probably nothing." But Athelstan Helms plucked it away with long, slim fingers--a violist's fingers, sure enough--and opened it. "I say!" he murmured.

"What?"

Wordlessly, Helms held the paper out to Walton. The doctor donned his reading glasses. "'Be on the 4:27 train to Thetford tomorrow afternoon. It would be unfortunate for all concerned if you were to inform Inspector La Strada of your intentions.'" He read slowly; the script, though precise, was quite small. Refolding the sheet of foolscap, he glanced over to Helms. "Extraordinary! What do you make of it?"

"I would say you were probably observed on your previous visit here. Someone familiar with your habits--and with mine; and with mine!--must have deduced that we would return here together, and that I was likely, on coming to the museum, to repair to the section of most interest to me," Helms replied. "Thus ... the note, and its placement."

Dr. Walton slowly nodded. "Interesting. Persuasive. It does seem to account for the facts as we know them."

"As we know them, yes. As we are intended to know them." Athelstan Helms took the note from his companion and reread it. "Interesting, indeed. And anyone capable of deducing our probable future actions from those just past is an opponent who bears watching."

"I should say so." Walton took off the spectacles and replaced them in their leather case. "I wonder what we shall find upon arriving in Thetford. The town is, I believe, a stronghold of the House of Universal Devotion."

"I wonder if we shall find anything there," Helms said. Walton raised a bushy eyebrow in surprise. The detective explained: "The missive instructs us to board the train. It does not say we shall be enlightened after disembarking. For all we know now, the Preacher may greet us in the uniform of a porter as soon as we take our seats."

"Why, so he may!" Walton exclaimed gaily. "I'd pay good money to see it if he did, though, devil take me if I wouldn't. The porters on these Atlantean trains are just about all of them colored fellows."

"Well, you're right about that." Helms seemed to yield the point, but then returned to it, saying, "He might black his face for the occasion." He shook his head, arguing more with himself than with Dr. Walton. "But no; that would not do. The Atlantean passengers would notice the imposture, being more casually familiar with Negroes than we are. And the dialect these blacks employ is easier for a white man to burlesque than to imitate with precision. I therefore agree with you: whatever disguise the Preacher should choose--if he should choose any--he is unlikely to appear in forma porteris."

"Er--quite," the doctor said. "You intend to follow the strictures of the note, then?"

"In every particular, as if it were Holy Writ," Helms replied. "And in the reckoning of the chap who placed it here, so it may be."

Above the entrance to Radcliff Station was the inscription, THE CLAN, NOT THE MAN. Radcliffs (in early days, the name was sometimes spelled with a final e) were among the first English settlers of Atlantis. That meant those earliest Radcliff(e)s were nothing but fishermen blown astray, an unfortunate fact the family did its best to forget over the next four centuries. Its subsequent successes excused, if they did not altogether justify, such convenient amnesia.

The station smelled of coal smoke, fried food, tobacco, and people--people in swarms almost uncountable. Dr. Watson's clinically trained nose detected at least one case of imminent liver failure and two pelvic infections, but in those shoals of humanity he could not discern which faces belonged to the sufferers.

He and Athelstan Helms bought their tickets to Thetford and back (round trips, they called them here, rather than return tickets) from a green-visored clerk with enough ennui on his wizened face to make even the most jaded Londoner look to his laurels. "Go to Platform Nine," the clerk said. "Have a pleasant trip." His tone implied that he wouldn't care if they fell over dead before they got to the platform. And why should he? He already had their eagles in his cashbox.

Carpetbags in hand, they made their way to the waiting area. "Better signposts here than there would be in an English station," Helms remarked--and, indeed, only a blind man would have had trouble finding the proper platform.

Once there, Helms and Walton had a wait of half an hour before their train was scheduled to depart. A few passengers already stood on the platform when they arrived. More and more came after them, till the waiting area grew unpleasantly crowded. Dr. Walton stuck his free hand in his left front trouser pocket, where his wallet resided, to thwart pickpockets and sneak thieves. He would not have been a bit surprised if the throng contained several. It seemed a typical Atlantean cross section: a large number of people who would not have been out of place in London leavened by the scrapings of every corner of Europe and Terranova and even Asia. Bearded Jews in baggy trousers gabbled in their corrupt German dialect. Two Italian families screamed at each other with almost operatic intensity. A young Mexican man avidly eyed a statuesque blonde from Sweden or Denmark. Walton frowned at the thought of such miscegenation, but Atlantis did not forbid it. A Chinese man in a flowing robe read--he was intrigued to see--the Bible.

Boys selling sausages on sticks and fried potatoes and coffee and beer elbowed through the crowd, loudly shouting their wares. A sausage proved as spicy and greasy as Walton would have expected. He washed it down with a mug of beer, which was surprisingly good. Athelstan Helms, of more ascetic temperament, refrained from partaking of refreshments.

The train bound for Thetford came in half an hour late. Dr. Walton called down curses on the heads of the Atlantean schedulers. "No doubt you have never known an English train to be tardy," Helms said, which elicited a somewhat shamefaced laugh from his traveling companion.

Instead of seating passengers in small compartments, Atlantean cars put them all in what amounted to a common room, with row after row of paired seats on either side of a long central aisle. Dr. Walton also grumbled about that, more because it was different from what he was used to than out of any inherent inferiority in the arrangement.

NO SMOKING! signs declared, and FINE FOR SMOKING, E10! and SMOKING CAR AT REAR OF TRAIN. The good doctor returned his cigar case to his waistcoat. "I wish they'd collect fines for eating garlic, too," he growled; several people in the car were consuming or had recently consumed that odorous, most un-English comestible.

Athelstan Helms pointed to several open windows in the car, which did little to mitigate the raw heat pouring from stoves at either end. "Never fear, Doctor," he said. "I suspect we shall have our fair share of smoke and more in short order."

Sure enough, as soon as the train started out, coal smoke and cinders poured in through those windows. Passengers sitting next to them forced them closed--all but one, which jammed in its track. The conductor, a personage of some importance on an Atlantean train, lent his assistance to the commercial traveler trying to set it right, but in vain. "Guess you're stuck with it," he said. The commercial traveler's reply, while heartfelt, held little literary merit.

Dr. Walton closely eyed the conductor, wondering if he was the mysterious and elusive Preacher in disguise. Reluctantly, he decided it was improbable; the Preacher's career spanned half a century, while the gent in blue serge and gleaming brass buttons could not have been much above forty.

For his part, Helms stared out the window with more interest than the utterly mundane countryside seemed to Walton to warrant. "What's so ruddy fascinating?" the doctor asked when curiosity got the better of him at last.

"Remnants of the old Atlantis amidst the new," his colleague replied. Walton made a questioning noise. Helms condescended to explain: "Stands of Atlantean pines and redwoods and cycads and ginkgoes, with ferns growing around and beneath them. The unique flora that supported your unique avifauna, but is now being supplanted by Eurasian and Terranovan varieties imported for the comfort and convenience of mankind."

"Curious, what, that Atlantis, lying as it does between Europe and the Terranovan mainland, should have native to it plants and creatures so different to those of either," Dr. Walton said.

"Quite." Athelstan Helms nodded. "The most economical explanation, as William of Occam would have used the term, seems to me to be positing some early separation of Atlantis from northeastern Terranova, to which geography argues it must at one time have adhered, thereby allowing--indeed, compelling--Darwinian selection to proceed here from those forms present then, which would not have included the ancestors of what are now Terranova's commonplace varieties. You do reckon yourself a Darwinist, Doctor, do you not?"

"Well, I don't know," Walton said uncomfortably. "His logic is compelling, I must admit, but it flies dead in the face of every religious principle inculcated in me since childhood days."

"Oh, my dear fellow!" Helms exclaimed. "Where reason and childish phantasms collide, which will you choose? In what sort of state would mankind be if it rejected reason?"

"In what sort of state is mankind now?" the good doctor returned.

Helms began to answer, then checked himself; the question held an unpleasant and poignant cogency. At last, he said, "Is mankind in that parlous state because of reason or in despite of it?"

"I don't know," Walton said. "Perhaps you might do better to inquire of Professor Nietzsche, who has published provocative works upon the subject."

Again, Helms found no quick response. This time, a man sitting behind him spoke up before he could say anything at all: "Pardon me, gents, but I couldn't help overhearing you, like. You ask me, Darwin is going straight to hell, and everybody who believes his lies'll end up there, too. The Good Book says it, I believe it, and by God that settles it." He spoke in Atlantean accents, and in particularly self-satisfied ones, too.

"Did God tell you this personally, Mr...?" Helms inquired.

"My name is Primrose, sir, Henry David Primrose," the man said, ignoring Helms' irony. "God gave me my head to think with and the Bible to think from, and I don't need anything more. Neither does anyone else, I say, and that goes double for your precious Darwin."

Dr. Walton was at first inclined to listen to Henry David Primrose with unusual attention, being struck by the matching initial consonants of his last name and the word preacher. He did not need long to conclude, however, that Mr. Primrose was not, in fact, their mysterious and elusive quarry. Mr. Primrose was a crazy man, or, in the Atlantean idiom, a nut. He wasn't even a follower of the House of Universal Devotion--he was a Methodist, which, to the Englishmen, made him a boring nut. The way he used the Bible to justify the ignorant views he already held would have converted the Pope to Darwinism. And he would not shut up.

"I will write a check for a million eagles to either one of you gentlemen if you can show me a single place where the Good Book is mistaken--even a single place, mind you," he said, much too loudly.

Athelstan Helms stirred. He and Walton had had this discussion; both men knew there were such places. Walton, however, was seized by the strong conviction that this was not the occasion to enumerate them. "What say we visit the smoking car, eh, Helms?" he said with patently false joviality.

"Very well," Helms replied. "I am sure Mr. Primrose does not indulge, tobacco being unmentioned in the Holy Scriptures--if not an actual error, surely a grievous omission."

That set Mr. Primrose spluttering anew, but he did not pursue the two Englishmen as they rose and walked down the central aisle. Dr. Walton had accomplished his purpose. "I dread our return," Walton said. "He'll serenade us some more."

"Ah, well," Helms said. "Perhaps he will leave us at peace if we avoid topics zoological and theological."

"And if he doesn't, we can always kill him." Dr. Walton was not inclined to feel charitable.

Despite the thickness of the atmosphere, the smoking car proved more salubrious than the ordinary passenger coach. It boasted couches bolted to the floor rather than the row upon row of hard seats in the other car. Walton lit a cigar, while Athelstan Helms puffed on his pipe. They improved the aroma of the smoke in the car, as most of the gentlemen there smoked harsh, nasty cigarettes.

A stag and a doe watched the train rattle past. They must have been used to the noisy mechanical monsters, for they did not bound off in terror. "More immigrants," Helms remarked.

"I beg your pardon?" his traveling companion said.

"The deer," Helms replied. "But for a few bats--many of them peculiar even by the standards of the Chiroptera--Atlantis was devoid of mammalia before those fishermen chanced upon its shores. In the absence of predators other than men with rifles, the deer have flourished mightily."

"Not an unhandsome country, even if it is foreign," Dr. Walton said--as much praise as any non-English locale this side of heaven was likely to get from him.

"Hard winters on this side of the Green Ridge Mountains, I'm given to understand," Helms said. "We would notice it more if the majority of the trees were deciduous rather than coniferous--bare branches do speak to the seasons of the year."

"That's so," Walton agreed. "I suppose most of the ancestors of the deciduous plants had not yet, ah, evolved when some geological catastrophe first caused Atlantis to separate from Terranova."

"It seems very likely," Helms said. "Mr. Primrose might tell us it was Noah's flood."

Dr. Walton expressed an opinion of Mr. Primrose's intimate personal habits on which he was unlikely to have any exact knowledge from such a brief acquaintance. Athelstan Helms' pipe sent up a couple of unusually large plumes of smoke. Had the great detective not been smoking it, one could almost suspect that he might have chuckled.

Day faded fast. A conductor came through and lit the lamps in the car. Walton's eyes began to sting; his lungs felt as if he were inhaling shagreen or emery paper. Nevertheless, he said, "I don't really care to go back."

"Shall we repair to the dining car, then?" Helms suggested.

"Capital idea," Walton said, and so they did.

Eating an excellent--or at least a tolerable--supper whilst rolling along at upwards of twenty miles an hour was not the least of train travel's attractions. Dr. Walton chose a capon, while Helms ordered beefsteak: both simple repasts unlikely to be spoiled by the vagaries of cooking on wheels. The wines from the west coast of Atlantis they ordered to accompany their suppers were a pleasant surprise, easily matching their French equivalents in quality while costing only half as much.

Halfway through the meal, the train shunted onto a siding and stopped: a less pleasant surprise. When Helms asked a waiter what had happened, the man only shrugged. "I do not know, sir," he replied in a gluey Teutonic accent, "but I would guess an accident is in front of us."

"Damnation!" Walton said. "We shall be late to Thetford."

"We are already late to Thetford. We shall be later," Helms corrected. To the waiter, he added, "Another bottle of this admirable red, if you would be so kind."

They sat on the siding most of the night. Word filtered through the train that there had been a derailment ahead. Mr. Primrose was snoring when Helms and Walton returned to their seats. Both Englishmen soon joined him in slumber; sleep came easier when the train stood still. Dr. Walton might have wished for the comfort of a Throckmorton car, with a sofa that made up into a bed and another bunk that swung down from the wall above it, but he did not stay awake to wish for long.

Morning twilight had begun edging night's black certainty with the ambiguity of gray when the train jerked into motion once more. Athelstan Helms' eyes opened at once, and with reason in them. He seemed as refreshed as if he had passed the night in a Throckmorton car--or, for that matter, in his hotel room back in Hanover. Walton seemed confused when he first woke. At last realizing his circumstances and surroundings, he sent Helms a faintly accusing stare. "You're not a beautiful woman," he said.

"I can scarcely deny it," Helms replied equably. "Why you should think I might be is, perhaps, a more interesting question."

If it was, it was one that his friend, now fully returned to the mundane world, had no intention of answering.

Behind them, Mr. Primrose might have been an apprentice sawmill. They took care not to wake him when they went back to the dining car for breakfast. Walton would have preferred bloaters or bangers, but Atlantean cuisine did not run to such English delicacies. He had to make do with fried eggs and a small beefsteak, as he had back in the capital. Helms' choice matched his. They both drank coffee; Atlantean tea had proved shockingly bad even when available.

They were still eating when the train rolled past the scene of the crash that had delayed it. Passenger and freight cars and a locomotive lay on their side not far from the track. Workmen swarmed over them, salvaging what they could. "A bad accident, very bad," Walton murmured.

"Do you know how an Atlantean sage once defined an accident?" Helms inquired. When the good doctor shook his head, Helms continued with obvious relish: "As 'an inevitable occurrence due to the action of immutable natural laws.' Mr. Bierce, I believe his name is, is a clearsighted man."

"Quite," Walton said. "Could you pass me another roll, Helms? I find I'm a peckish man myself this morning."

Little by little, the terrain grew steeper. Stands of forest became more frequent in the distance, though most trees had been cut down closer to the railroad line. Being primarily composed of evergreen conifers, the woods bore a more somber aspect than those of England. Their timbers helped bridge several rivers rushing east out of the Green Ridge Mountains. Other rivers, the larger ones, were spanned with iron and even steel.

"Those streams helped power Atlantis' early factories, even before she was initiated into the mysteries of the steam engine," Helms remarked.

"Helped make her into a competitor, you mean," Dr. Walton said. "The old-time mercantilists weren't such fools as people make them out to be, seems to me."

"As their policies are as dead as they are, it's rather too late to make a fuss over either," Helms said, a sentiment with which his colleague could scarcely quarrel regardless of his personal inclinations.

When Helms and Walton returned to their seats in the passenger car, they passed Henry David Primrose heading for the diner. "Ah, we get a bit more peace and quiet, anyhow," Walton said, and Helms nodded.

By the time Mr. Primrose came back, the train was well up into the mountains. The peaks of the Green Ridge were neither inordinately tall nor inordinately steep, but had formed a considerable barrier to westward expansion across Atlantis because of the thick forest that had cloaked them. Even now, the slopes remained shrouded in dark, mournful green. Only the pass through which the railroad line went had been logged off.

The locomotive labored and wheezed, hauling its cars up after it to what the Atlanteans called the Great Divide. Then, descending once more, it picked up speed. Ferns and shrubs seemed more abundant on the western side of the mountains, and the weather, though still cool, no longer reminded the Englishmen of November in their homeland--or, worse, of November on the Continent.

"I have read that the Bay Stream, flowing up along Atlantis' western coast, has a remarkable moderating effect on the climate on this side of the mountains," Helms said. "That does indeed appear to be the case."

A couple of hours later, the train pulled into Thetford, which had something of the look of an industrial town in the English Midlands. After a sigh of disappointment, Dr. Walton displayed his own reading: "Forty years ago, Audubon says, this was a bucolic village. No more."

"Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?" Helms replied.

As he and Walton rose to disembark, Henry David Primrose said, "Enjoyed chatting with you gents, that I did." Helms let the remark pass in dignified, even chilly, silence; the good doctor muttered a polite unpleasantry and went on his way.

A few other people got out with them. Friends and relatives waited on the platform for some of them. Others went off to the baggage office to reclaim their chattels. A gray-bearded sweeper in overalls pottered about, pushing bits of dust about with his broom. A stalwart policeman came up to the Englishmen. Tipping his cap, he said, "You will be Dr. Helms and Mr. Walton. Hanover wired me to expect you, though I didn't know your train would be so very late. I am Sergeant Karpinski; I am instructed to render you every possible assistance."

"Very kind of you," Walton said, and proceeded to enlighten the sergeant as to which title went with which man.

Athelstan Helms, meanwhile, walked over to the sweeper and extended his right hand. "Good day, sir," he said. "Unless I am very much in error, you will be the gentleman who has attained a certain amount of worldly fame under the sobriquet of the Preacher."

"Oh, good heavens!" Dr. Walton exclaimed to Sergeant Karpinski. "Please excuse me. Helms doesn't make mistakes very often, but when he does he doesn't make small ones." He hurried over to his friend. "For God's sake, Helms, can't you see he's nothing but a cleaning man?"

The sweeper turned his mild gray eyes on Walton, who suddenly realized that if anyone had made a mistake, it was he. "I am a cleaning man, sir," he said, and his voice put the good doctor in mind of an organ played very softly: not only was it musical in the extreme, but it also gave the strong impression of having much more power behind it than was presently being used. The man continued, "While cleaning train-station platforms is a worthy enough occupation, in my small way I also seek to cleanse men's souls. For your friend is correct: I am sometimes called the Preacher." He eyed Athelstan Helms with a lively curiosity. "How did you deduce my identity, sir?"

"In the police station in Hanover, I got a look at your photograph," the detective replied. "Armed with a knowledge of your physiognomy, it was not difficult."

"Well done! Well done!" The Preacher had a merry laugh. "And here is Sergeant Karpinski," he went on as the policeman trudged over. "Will you clap me in irons for what you call my crimes, Sergeant?"

"Not today, thanks," Karpinski said in stolid tones. "I don't much fancy touching off a new round of riots here, like. But your day will come, and you can mark my words on that."

"Every man's day will come," the Preacher said, almost gaily, "but I do not think mine is destined to come at your large and capable hands." He turned back to Helms and Walton. "You will want to recover your baggage. After that, shall we repair to someplace rather more comfortable than this drafty platform? You can tell me what brought you to the wilds of Atlantis in pursuit of a desperate character like me."

"Murder is a good start," Walton said.

"No, murder is a bad stop," the Preacher said. "I shall pray for you. I shall ask that your soul be baptized in the spirit of devotion to the universal Lord, that you may be reborn a god."

"I've already been baptized, thank you very much," the doctor said stiffly.

"That is only the baptism of the body," the Preacher replied with an indifferent wave. "The baptism of the spirit is a different and highly superior manifestation."

"Why don't you see to our trunks, Walton?" Helms said. "Their contents will clothe only our bodies, but without them Sergeant Karpinksi would be compelled to take a dim view of us in his professional capacity."

Braced by such satire, Dr. Walton hurried off to reclaim the luggage. Karpinski laughed and then did his best to pretend he hadn't. Even the Preacher smiled. After Dr. Walton returned, the Preacher led them out of the station. The spectacle of two well-dressed Englishmen and a uniformed sergeant of police following a sweeper in faded denim overalls might have seemed outlandish but for the dignity with which the Preacher carried himself: he acted the role of a man who deserved to be followed, and acted it so well that he certainly seemed to believe it himself.

So did the inhabitants of Thetford who witnessed the small procession. None of them appeared to be in the least doubt as to the Preacher's identity. "God bless you!" one man called, lifting his derby. "Holy sir!" another said. A woman dropped a curtsy. Another rushed up, kissed the Preacher's hand, and then hurried away again, her face aglow. Sergeant Karpinski had not been mistaken when he alluded to the devotion the older man inspired.

The Preacher did not lead them to a House of Universal Devotion, as Dr. Walton had expected he would. In fact, he walked past not one but two such houses, halting instead at the walk leading up to what seemed an ordinary home in Thetford: one-story clapboard, painted white. "I doubt we shall be disturbed here," he murmured.

Several large, hard-looking individuals materialized as if from nowhere, no doubt to make sure the Preacher and his companions were not disturbed. None was visibly armed; the way Sergeant Karpinski's mouth tightened suggested that a lack of appearances might be deceiving.

Inside, the home proved comfortably furnished; it might have been a model of middle-class Victorian respectability. A smiling and attractive young woman brought a tray of food into the parlor, stayed long enough to light the gas lamps and dispel the gloom, and then withdrew once more. "A handmaiden of the Spirit?" Athelstan Helms inquired.

"As a matter of fact, yes," the Preacher said. "Those who impute any degree of licentiousness to the relationship have no personal knowledge of it."

Dr. Walton was halfway through a roast-beef sandwich made piquant with mustard and an Atlantean spice he could not name before realizing that was not necessarily a denial of the imputation. "Why, the randy old devil!" he muttered, fortunately with his mouth full.

Helms finished his own sandwich and a glass of lager before asking, "And what of those who impute to you the instigation of a campaign of homicides against backsliders from the House of Universal Devotion and critics of its doctrine and policies?" Sergeant Karpinski raised a tawny eyebrow, perhaps in surprise at the detective's frankness.

That frankness did not faze the Preacher. "Well, what of them?" he said. "We lack the barristers and solicitors to pursue every slanderous loudmouth and every libeler who grinds out his hate-filled broadsheets or spreads his prejudice in some weekly rag."

"You deny any connection, then?" Helms persisted.

"I am a man of God," the Preacher said simply.

"So was the Hebrew king who exulted, 'Moab is my washpot,'" Helms said. "So was the Prophet Mohammed. So were the Crusaders who cried, 'God wills it!' as they killed. Regretfully, I must point out that being a man of God does not preclude violence--on the contrary, in fact."

"Let me make myself plainer, then: I have never murdered anyone, nor did any of the murders to which you refer take place at my instigation," the preacher said. "Is that clear enough to let us proceed from there?"

"Clear? Without a doubt. It is admirably clear," Helms said, though Dr. Walton noted--and thought it likely his friend did as well--that the Preacher had not denied instigating all murders, only those the detective had mentioned. Helms continued, "You will acknowledge a distinction between clarity and truth?"

"Generally, yes. In this instance, no," the Preacher said.

"Oh, come off it," Sergeant Karpinski said, which came close to expressing Dr. Walton's opinion. "Everybody knows those fellows wouldn't be dead if you'd even lifted a finger to keep 'em breathing."

"By which you mean you find me responsible for my followers' excessive zeal," the Preacher said.

"Damned right I do," the sergeant said forthrightly.

Turning to Athelstan Helms, the Preacher said, "Surely, sir, you must find this attitude unreasonable. You spoke of previous religious episodes. Can you imagine blaming all the excesses of Jesus' followers on Him?" He spread his hands, as if to show by gesture how absurd the notion was. Both his voice and his motions showed he was accustomed to swaying crowds and individuals.

"If you will forgive me, I also cannot imagine you rising on the third day," Helms said.

"To be frank, Mr. Helms, neither can I," the Preacher replied. "But the Atlantean authorities seem so intent on crucifying me, they may afford me the opportunity to make the attempt."

"Well, if you had nothing to do with killing those blokes, how come they're dead?" Dr. Walton demanded. "Who did for 'em?" His indignation increased his vehemence while playing hob with his diction.

"Oh, his little chums put lilies in their fists--no doubt of that," Sergeant Karpinski said. "Proving it's a different story, or he'd've swung a long time ago."

"Perhaps the Preacher will answer for himself," Helms said.

"Yes, perhaps he will," the Preacher agreed, speaking of himself in the third person. "Perhaps he will say that it is far more likely the authorities have eliminated these persons for reasons of their own than that his own followers should have had any hand in it. Perhaps he will also say that he does not believe two distinguished English gentlemen hired by those authorities will take him seriously."

"And why the devil should they, when you spew lies the way a broken sewer pipe spews filth?" Righteous indignation filled Karpinski's voice.

"Gently, Sergeant, gently," Helms said, and then, to the Preacher, "Such inflammatory statements are all the better for proof, or even evidence."

"Which I will supply when the time is ripe," the Preacher said. "For now, though, you will want to settle in after your journey here. I understand you have reserved rooms at the Thetford Belvedere?"

"And how do you come to understand that?" Dr. Walton thundered.

"Sergeant Karpinski mentioned it as we came over here," the Preacher answered. Thinking back on it, Walton realized he was right. The Preacher continued, "I might have recommended the Crested Eagle myself, but the Belvedere will do. I hope to see you gentlemen again soon. Unless the sergeant objects, my driver will take you to the hotel."

In England, the Belvedere would have been a normal enough provincial hotel, better than most, not as good as some. So it also seemed in Thetford, which made Dr. Walton decide Atlantis might be rather more civilized than he had previously believed. If the Preacher's favored Crested Eagle was superior, then it was. The Belvedere would definitely do.

The menu in the dining room showed that he and Helms were not in England any more. "What on earth is an oil thrush?" he inquired.

"A blackbird far too large to be baked in a pie," Athelstan Helms replied. "A large, flightless thrush, in other words. I have read that they are good eating, and intend making the experiment. Will you join me?"

"I don't know." Walton sounded dubious. "Seems as though it'd be swimming in grease, what?"

"I think not. It is roasted, after all," Helms said. "And do you see? We have the choice of orange sauce or cranberry or starberry, which I take to be something local and tart. They use such accompaniments with duck and goose, which can also be oleaginous, so they should prove effective amelioratives here, too."

With a sigh, the good doctor yielded. "Since you seem set on it, I'll go along. Whatever the bird turns out to be, I'm sure I ate worse in Afghanistan, and I was bl--er, mighty glad to have it."

Lying on a pewter tray, the roasted oil thrush smelled more than appetizing enough and looked brown and handsome, though the wings were absurdly small: to Dr. Walton's mind, enough so to damage the appearance of the bird. The waiter spooned hot starberry sauce--of a bilious green--over the bird. "Enjoy your supper, gentlemen," he said, and withdrew.

To Walton's surprise, he did, very much. The oil thrush tasted more like a gamebird than a capon. And starberries, tangy and sweet at the same time, complemented the rich flesh well. "You could make a formidable wine from those berries, I do believe," Walton said. "Nothing to send the froggies running for cover, maybe, but more than good enough for the countryside."

"In the countryside, I'm sure they do," Helms said. "How much of it comes into the city--how much of it comes to the tax collector's notice--is liable to be a different tale."

"Aha! I get you." Walton laid a finger by the side of his nose and looked sly.

Only a few people shared the dining room with the Englishmen. Not many tourists came to Thetford, while the Belvedere was on the grand side for housing commercial travelers. The stout, prosperous-looking gentleman who came in when Helms and Walton were well on their way to demolishing the bird in front of them could have had his pick of tables. Instead, he made a beeline for theirs. One of Dr. Walton's eyebrows rose, as if to say, I might have known.

"Can I do something for you, sir?" Athelstan Helms asked, polite as usual but with a touch--just a touch, but unmistakable nonetheless--of asperity in his voice.

"You will be the detectives come to give the Preacher the comeuppance he deserves," the man said. "Good for you, by God! High time the House of Universal Depravity has to close up shop once and for all."

Dr. Walton ate another bite of moist, tender, flavorsome flesh from the oil thrush's thigh--the breast, without large flight muscles, was something of a disappointment. Then, resignedly, he said, "I am afraid you have the advantage of us, Mister...?"

"My name is Morris, Benjamin Joshua Morris. I practice law here in Thetford, and for some time my avocation has been chronicling the multifarious malfeasances and debaucheries of the House of Universal Disgust and the so-called Preacher. About time the authorities stop trembling in fear of his accursed secret society and root it out of the soil from which it has sprouted like some rank and poisonous mushroom."

"Perhaps you will do us the honor of sitting down and telling us more about it," Helms said.

"Perhaps you will also order a bite for yourself so we don't have to go on eating in front of you." Dr. Walton didn't intend to stop, but could--with some effort--stay mannerly.

"Well, perhaps I will." Morris waved for the waiter and ordered a beefsteak, blood rare. To the Englishmen, he said, "I see you are dining off the productions of the wilderness. Myself, I would sooner eat as if civilization had come to the backwoods here." He sighed. "The case of Samuel Jones, however, inclines me to skepticism."

"Samuel Jones?" Walton said. "The name is not familiar."

"You will know him better as the Preacher, founder and propagator--propagator, forsooth!--of the House of Universal Deviation." Benjamin Morris seemed intent on finding as many disparaging names for the Preacher's foundation as he could. "How many members of the House his member has sired I am not prepared to say, but the number is not small."

"He embraces his mistresses as they embrace his principles," Athelstan Helms suggested.

Morris laughed, but quickly sobered. "That is excellent repartee, sir, but falls short in regard of truthfulness. For the Preacher has no principles, but ever professes that which is momentarily expedient. No wonder his theology, so-called, is such an extraordinary tissue of lies and jumble of whatever half-baked texts he chances to have recently read. That men can become as gods! Tell me, gentlemen: has mankind seemed more godly than usual lately? It is to laugh!" Like a lot of lawyers, he often answered his own questions.

His beefsteak appeared then, and proved sanguinary enough to satisfy a surgeon, let alone an attorney. He attacked it with excellent appetite, and also did full justice to an Atlantean red with a nose closely approximating that of a hearty Burgundy. After a bit, Helms said, "Few faiths are entirely logical and self-consistent. The early Christian controversies pertaining to the relation of the Son and the Father and to the relation between the divine and the human within Jesus Christ demonstrate this all too well, as does the blood spilled over them."

"No doubt, no doubt," Benjamin Morris said. "But our Lord was not a louche debauchee, and did not compose the Scriptures with an eye toward giving himself as wide a latitude for misbehavior as he could find." He told several salacious stories about the Preacher's earlier days. They seemed more suitable to the smoking car of a long-haul train than to this placid provincial dining room.

Even Walton, who did not love the Preacher, felt compelled to remark, "Such unsavory assertions would be all the better for proof."

"I have documentary proof at my offices, sir," Morris said. "As I told you, I have been following this rogue and his antics for years, like. After supper, I shall go there and bring you what I trust will suffice to satisfy the most determined skeptic."

Having made that announcement, he hurried through the rest of his meal, drained a last glass of wine, and, slapping a couple of golden Atlantean eagles on the table, arose and hastened from the dining room.

Less than a minute later, several sharp pops rang out. "Fireworks?" Walton said.

"Firearms," Athelstan Helms replied, his voice suddenly grim. "A large-bore revolver, unless I am much mistaken." In such matters, Walton knew his friend was unlikely to be.

Sure enough, someone shouted, "Is a doctor close by? A man's been shot!"

Still masticating a last savory bite of oil thrush, Walton dashed out into the street to do what he could for the fallen man. Helms, though no physician, followed hard on his heels to learn what he could from the scene of this latest crime. "I hope it isn't that Morris fellow," the good doctor said.

"Well, so do I, but not to any great degree, for it is likely a hope wasted," Helms said.

And sure enough, there lay Benjamin Joshua Morris, with three bullet wounds in his chest. "Good heavens," Walton said. "Beggar's dead as a stone. Hardly had the chance to know what hit him, I daresay."

Sergeant Karpinski popped up out of nowhere like a jack-in-the-box, pistol in hand. Athelstan Helms' nostrils twitched, as if in surprise. "I heard gunshots," Karpinski said, and then, looking down, "Great God, it's Morris!"

"He was just speaking to us of the perfidies of the House of Universal Devotion." Dr. Walton stared at the corpse, and at the blood puddling beneath it on the cobbles. "Here, I should say, we find the said perfidies demonstrated upon his person."

"So it would seem." Sergeant Karpinski scowled at the body, and then in the direction of the house where he and the Englishmen had conversed with the Preacher. "I should have jugged that no-good son of a.... Well, I should have jugged him when I had the chance. A better man might still be alive if I'd done it."

Dr. Walton also looked back toward that house. "You could still drop on him, you know."

Gloomily, the policeman shook his head. "Not a chance he'll still be there. He'll lie low for a while now, pop up here and there to preach a sermon, and then disappear again. Oh, I'll send some men over, but they won't find him. I know the man. I know him too well."

Athelstan Helms coughed. "I should point out that we have no proof the House of Universal Devotion murdered the late Mr. Morris, nor that the Preacher ordered his slaying if some member of the House was in fact responsible for it."

Both his particular friend and the police sergeant eyed him as if he'd taken leave of his senses. "I say, Helms, if we haven't got cause and effect here, what have we got?" Walton asked.

"A dead man," the detective replied. "By all appearances, a paucity of witnesses to the slaying. Past that, only untested hypotheses."

"Call them whatever you want," Karpinski said. "As for me, I'm going to try to run the Preacher to earth. I know some of his hidey-holes--maybe more than he thinks I do. With a little luck ... And I'll send my men back here to take charge of the body." He paused. "Good lord, I'll have to tell Lucy Morris her husband's been murdered. I don't relish that."

"There will be a post-mortem examination on the deceased, I assume?" Helms said. When Sergeant Karpinski nodded, Helms continued, "Would you be kind enough to send a copy of the results to me here at the hotel?"

"I can do that," Karpinski said.

"He also spoke of papers in his office, papers with information damaging to the House of Universal Devotion," Walton said. "Any chance we might get an idea of what they contain?"

Now the police sergeant frowned. "A lawyer's private papers after his death? That won't be so easy to arrange, I'm afraid. I'll speak to his widow about it, though. If she's in a vengeful mood and thinks showing them to you would help make the House fall, she might give you leave to see them. I make no promises, of course. And now, if you'll pardon me..." He tipped his derby and hurried away.

Athelstan Helms stared after him, a cold light flickering in his pale eyes. "I dislike homicide, Walton," the detective said. "I especially dislike it when perpetrated for the purpose of furthering a cause. Ideological homicide, to use the word that seems all the rage on the Continent these days, makes the crime of passion and even murder for the sake of wealth seem clean by comparison."

"And in furtherance of a religious ideology!" Walton exclaimed. "Of all the outmoded things! Seems as if it ought to belong in Crusader days, as you told that so-called Preacher yourself."

"Those who have the most to lose are aptest to strike to preserve what they still have," Helms observed.

"Just so." Dr. Walton nodded vigorously. "When Mr. Samuel Jones found out that poor Morris here was conferring with us in aid of his assorted sordid iniquities"--he chuckled, fancying his own turn of phrase--"he must have decided he couldn't afford it, and sent his assassins after the man."

Two policemen, both large and rotund, huffed up. Each wore on his hip in a patent-leather holster a stout brute of a pistol, of the same model as Sergeant Karpinski's--no doubt the standard weapon for the police in Thetford, if not in all of Atlantis. "That's Morris, all right," one of them said, eyeing the body. "There'll be hell to pay when word of this gets out."

"Yes, and the Preacher to pay it," the other man said with a certain grim anticipation.

The first policeman eyed Helms and Walton. "And who the devil are you two, and where were you when this poor bastard got cooled?"

"This is the famous Athelstan Helms," Dr. Walton said indignantly.

"We were dining in the Belvedere when Mr. Morris was shot," Helms continued. "We have witnesses to that effect. We were conversing with him shortly before his death, however."

"If Mr. What's-his-name Helms is so famous, how come I never heard of him?" the local policeman said.

Because you are an ignorant, back-country lout, went through Dr. Walton's mind. Saying that to the back-country lout's face when said lout was armed and also armored in authority struck him as inexpedient. What he did say was, "Inspector La Strada of Hanover brought us from England to assist in the investigation of the House of Universal Devotion."

"About time they give those maniacs their just deserts," the second policeman said.

"Which reminds me, Helms," the good doctor said. "We were interrupted before we could attend to ours."

"I dare hope ours would require another 's,'" Helms said. He nodded to the policemen. "If you will be kind enough to excuse us...?" The blue-uniformed Atlanteans did not say no. With another polite nod, Helms walked back toward the Belvedere, Dr. Walton at first at his heels and then bustling on ahead of him.

After finishing their desserts--which proved not to come up to the hopes Walton had lavished on them--the Englishmen went up to their rooms. "What puzzles me," Walton said, "is how the Preacher could have known Morris would speak to us then, and had a gunman waiting for him as he emerged."

"He would have done better to dispose of the man before we conversed," Helms replied. "If he had a pistoleer waiting for him, why not anticipate and set the blackguard in place ahead of time?"

"Maybe someone in the dining room belongs to the House and hotfooted away to let him know what was toward," Dr. Walton suggested.

"It could be," Helms said. "I wonder what the post-mortem will show."

"Cause of death is obvious enough," Walton said. "Poor devil got in the way of at least three rounds to the chest."

"Quite," Helms said. "But, as always, the devil is in the details."

"Do you suppose the devil is in Mr. Jones?" Walton asked.

"Well, if we were required to dispose of every man who ever made a sport of, ah, sporting with a number of pretty young women, the world would be a duller and a much emptier place," Athelstan Helms said judiciously. "Indeed, given the Prince of Wales' predilections, even the succession might be jeopardized. Murder, however, is a far more serious business, whether motivated by religious zeal or some reason considerably more secular."

"What would you say if the Preacher appeared on our doorstep proclaiming his innocence?" Dr. Walton asked.

"At this hour of the evening? I do believe I'd say, 'Fascinating, old chap. Do you suppose you could elaborate at breakfast tomorrow?'"

The good doctor pulled his watch from a waistcoat pocket. "It is late, isn't it? And I know I didn't get much sleep on that wretched train last night. You, though.... Sometimes I think you are powered by steel springs and steam, not flesh and blood."

"A misapprehension, I assure you. I have never cared for the taste of coal," Helms said gravely.

"Er--I suppose not," Walton said. "Shall we knit up the raveled sleeve of care, then?"

"A capital notion," the detective replied. "And while we're about it, we should also sleep." Walton started to say something in response to that, then seemed to give it up as a bad job. Whether that had been his particular friend's intention did not appear to cross his mind, which, under the circumstances, might have been just as well.

A reasonably restful night, a hearty breakfast, and strong coffee might have put some distance between the Englishmen and Benjamin Morris' murder--had the waiter in the dining room not seated them at the table where they'd spoken with him at supper. Dr. Walton kept looking around as if expecting the attorney to walk in again. Barring an unanticipated Judgment Trump, that seemed unlikely.

"How do you suppose we could reach the Preacher now?" Walton asked. "He surely won't be at that house any more."

"I'll inquire at the closest House of Universal Devotion," Helms answered. "Whether unofficially and informally or not, the preacher there should be able to reach him."

Before the detective and his companion could leave the hotel, a policeman handed Helms an envelope. "The post-mortem on Mr. Morris, sir," he said.

"I thank you." Athelstan Helms broke the seal on the envelope. "Let's see.... Two jacketed slugs through the heart, and another through the right lung. Death by rapid exsanginuation."

"Rapid? Upon my word, yes! I should say so!" Dr. Walton shook his head. "With wounds like those, he'd go down like Bob's your uncle. With two in the heart and one in the lung, an elephant would."

"Jacketed bullets..." Helms turned as if to ask something of the policeman who'd brought the report, but that worthy had already departed.

"Even so, Helms," Walton said. "Granted, they don't mushroom like your ordinary slug of soft lead, but they'll do the job more than well enough, especially in vital spots like that. And they foul the bore much less than a soft slug would."

"I am not ignorant of the advantages," Helms said with a touch of asperity. "I merely wished to enquire ... Well, never mind." He gathered himself and set his cap on his head. "To the House of Universal Devotion."

The preacher looked at Helms and Walton in something approaching astonishment. "How extraordinary!" he said. "In the past half hour, I've heard from the Preacher, the police, and now you gentlemen."

"What did the Preacher want?" Helms asked.

"Why, I didn't see him. But I have a message from him to you if you came to call."

"And the police?" Walton inquired.

"They wanted to know if I'd heard from the Preacher." The young man in charge of the local House sniffed. "I denied it, of course. None of their business."

"They might have roughed you up a bit," Walton said. They might have done a good deal worse than that. Whatever one thought of the House of Universal Devotion's theology, the loyalty it evoked could not be ignored.

This particular preacher was thin and pale, certainly none too prepossessing. Nevertheless, when he gathered himself and said, "The tree of faith is nourished by the blood of martyrs, which is its natural manure," he made the good doctor believe him.

"And the message from the Preacher was...?" Athelstan Helms prompted.

"That he is innocent in every particular of this latest horrific crime. That it is but another example of the sort of thing of which he spoke to you in person--you will know what that means, no doubt. That an investigation is bound to establish the facts. That those facts, once established, will rock not only Atlantis but the world."

"He doesn't think small!" Walton exclaimed. "Not half, he doesn't."

"If he thought small, he would not have achieved the success that has already been his," Helms said, and then, to the preacher, "Do you know his current whereabouts?"

"No, sir. What I don't know, they can't interrogate out of me, like. And I never saw the fellow who gave me the message before, either. But it's a true message, isn't it?"

"I believe so, yes," Helms replied.

"I believe the Preacher would make a first-rate spymaster had he chosen to try his hand that instead of founding a religion," Dr. Walton said. "He has the principles down pat."

"Do you believe him?" the young preacher asked anxiously.

"Well, that remains to be seen," Helms said. "Such assertions as he has made are all the better for proof, but I can see how he is in a poor position to offer any. My investigations continue, and in the end, I trust, they will be crowned with success."

"They commonly are," Walton added with more than a hint of smugness.

Athelstan Helms allowed himself the barest hint of a smile. "Those who fail are seldom chronicled--the mobile vulgus clamors after success, and nothing less will do. A pity, that, when failure so often proves more instructive."

"My failure to publish accounts of your failures has been more instructive than I wish it were," Walton said feelingly.

"Let us hope that will not be the case here, then," Helms said. "Onward!--the plot thickens."

Dr. Walton was not particularly surprised to discover Sergeant Karpinski standing on the sidewalk outside the House of Universal Devotion. "We went in there, too," Karpinski said. "We didn't find anything worth knowing. You?"

"Our investigation continues." Helms' voice was bland. "When we have conclusions to impart, you may rest assured that you will be among the first to hear them."

"And what exactly does that mean?" the sergeant asked.

"What it says," the detective replied. "Not a word more; not a word less."

"If you think you can go poking your nose into our affairs, sir, without so much as a by-your-leave--"

"If Mr. Helms believes that, Sergeant, he's bloody well right," Dr. Walton broke in. "He--and I--are in your hole of a town, in your hole of a country, at the express invitation of Inspector La Strada. Without it, believe me, we should never have come. But we will thank you not to interfere with our performing our duties in the manner we see fit. Good day."

Sergeant Karpinski's countenance was eloquent of discontent. He opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and then, shaking his head, walked off with whatever answer he might have given still suppressed.

"Pigheaded Polack," Walton muttered.

"You did not endear yourself to him," Helms said. "The unvarnished truth is seldom palatable--though I doubt whether any varnish would have made your comments appetizing."

"Too bad," the good doctor said, and, if an intensifying participle found its way into his diction, it need not be recorded here.

"I wonder what la Strada will say when word of this gets back to him, as it surely will," Helms remarked.

"The worst he can do is expel us, in which case I shall say, 'Thank you,'" Dr. Watson answered.

"I hope that is the worst he can do to us," Helms said.

"He cannot claim we shot Benjamin Morris: we have witnesses to the contrary," Walton said. "Neither can he claim we shot any of the others whom he alleges the House of Universal Devotion slew: we were safely back in England then. And the sooner we are safely back in England once more, the happier I shall be. Of that you may rest assured."

"I begin to feel the same way," Helms replied. "Nevertheless, we are here, and we must persevere. Onward, I say!"

Their course intersected with that of the police on several more occasions. Thetford's self-declared finest eyed them as if they were vultures at a feast. "I do believe we shall be hard pressed to come by any further information from official sources," Helms said.

"Brilliant deduction!" Dr. Walton said. One of Athelstan Helms' elegant eyebrows rose. Surely the good doctor could not be displaying an ironical side? Surely not...

Gun shops flourished in Thetford. They sold all manner of shotguns and rifles for hunting. That made a certain amount of sense to Walton; the countryside surrounding the city was far wilder than any English woods. Despite the almost certain extinction of honkers, other native birds still thrived there, as did turkeys imported from Terranova and deer and wild boar and foxes brought across the sea from the British Isles and Europe.

The gun shops also sold an even greater profusion of pistols: everything from a derringer small enough to be concealed in a fancy belt buckle to pistols that Dr. Walton, a large, solidly made man, would not have cared to fire two-handed, let alone with only one. "Something like that," he said, pointing to one in the window, "you're better off clouting the other bloke in the head with it. That'd put the quietus on him, by Jove!"

"I daresay," Helms replied, and then surprised his friend by going into the shop.

"Help you with something?" asked the proprietor, a wizened little man in a green eyeshade who looked more like a pawnbroker than the bluff, hearty sort one might expect to run such an establishment.

"If you would be so kind," Helms said. "I'd like to see a police pistol, if you please."

"A .465 Manstopper?" the proprietor said. Walton thought the pistol had an alarmingly forthright name. The man produced one: a sturdy revolver, if not quite so gargantuan as some of the weapons civilians here seemed to carry.

Athelstan Helms broke it down and reassembled it with a practiced ease that made the proprietor eye him with more respect than he'd shown hitherto. "A well-made weapon, sure enough," Helms said. "The action seems a bit stiff, but only a bit. And the ammunition?"

"How keen on getting rid of fouling are you?" the gunshop owner asked.

"When necessary, of course," Helms replied. "I am not averse to reducing the necessity as much as possible."