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Lisa and Sar-Say no longer lived in their original cage. They had been given a suite with a central living/dining compartment, a personal hygiene station, and individual sleeping cubicles. The new apartment even had a viewport on the outer hull, allowing them to see the Earth when the station was in the proper phase of its orbit.

The only illumination showing as she floated into the compartment came from a comm unit on which Dieter Pavel’s features were frozen in a perpetual grimace. She anchored herself in front of the screen and noted the surprised reaction that often overtook people placed on hold.

“What is it, Dieter?”

“Why is everything so dark?”

“I have the overhead lights turned off. I was taking a shower.”

“You are in the living area?”

“Yes.”

“Please sign off and call me from your cubicle. I have a priority message for you.”

She opened her mouth to ask the reason, saw the expression on Pavel’s face, and then decided against it. “Right. Call you back in thirty seconds.”

She pulled herself via the handholds in the overhead to her cubicle, closed and locked the door, then asked the communicator to connect her with Dieter Pavel. Almost too late, she ordered the camera off.

She had shed her towel upon entry and was hunting around for something to wear.

“Now I can’t see you at all.”

“I have the pickup off. I am getting dressed.”

“Are you alone?”

“I am. Sar-Say is in the commons watching the entertainment screen. What’s the matter?”

“We have an intruder alert. He is somewhere on the station hull.”

She frowned. “An intruder? From where?”

“Apparently he flew in from a ship below us.
Magellan
has been chasing him for the better part of an hour, but they just decided to let us in on it. Probably a reporter with a story he is trying to follow up.”

“He knows about Sar-Say?”

“Hard to say. Better not take any chances. I want you to close the viewport cover and dog it down tight.

Make sure that Sar-Say doesn’t have a chance to communicate with this guy before they catch him.”

“Right. I’ll do it as soon as I get dressed.”

“Do it now!”

“All right,” she muttered peevishly. She switched off the comm and rotated in midair to look for her towel. As usual, it had floated to the most inaccessible corner of the cubicle. She debated going after it, then decided that Pavel had been serious when he said he wanted it done immediately. She sighed and hoped the security people would not make copies of the record module.

As she opened the hatch, the lights in the living area brightened automatically. Sar-Say took this as a sign to look at her inquisitively. She mouthed a curse under her breath and made ready to push off for the viewport. As she lined up her jump, she happened to look at the viewport itself. Her scream was entirely involuntary, but enough to alert the startled Sar-Say. The alien turned to follow her gaze.

#

Slowly Mark came to the realization that his surroundings were getting brighter again. That worried him.

In one of his zigs or zags, he must have become turned around and headed back in the direction he had come. He craned his neck to look through the top of his helmet. Just coming into view above the station limb was a new crescent moon. It, too, had a gray exterior cluttered with all manner of plumbing and equipment. It was
Magellan
.

Mark froze as a figure in a vacuum suit suddenly rose into view on his right. The spacer hovered in the black, gazing down intently as he scanned the station hull. He drifted across the black sky and disappeared once more below the too near horizon. Mark decided the time had come to sacrifice stealth for speed. He floated down into the little valley of pipes he had been following and began to pull toward the starship. Again, he found his way blocked, this time by a large antenna cluster. To one side was bare hull on which, if he tried to cross it, he would be silhouetted for all to see. On the other side was a viewport with a dim light emanating from it.

He decided to risk the dim glow in order to keep to a broken surface. He pulled himself forward, skirting the port. There was insufficient room to pass around it. He carefully pulled himself to the edge and glanced down into the station interior. It was then that several things happened all at once.

The first was that the interior lights flashed bright. For an instant, Mark thought he might have triggered some kind of sensor. Then, before he could react, a hatch opened, and a woman floated through. She was especially captivating in that she was nude. Her eyes rose to lock with his (though he knew she could not see anything but a helmet) and the back of her hand went to her mouth. The scream was silent, but obvious.

Under normal circumstances, a beautiful naked woman glimpsed through an open viewport in space would have held Mark’s full attention for as long as she allowed it. However, there was something else in the compartment, a figure that turned to face him in response to the woman’s scream. Mark suddenly found himself staring into the yellow eyes of something that looked very like a monkey.

Nadine Halstrom’s temper was one of her most carefully guarded secrets. Her public persona was that of an unflappable professional politician, someone who could mediate a dispute between God and Satan without betraying a hint of partiality toward either side. Many a pundit had commented on the ice water that must flow in the World Coordinator’s veins. Most of the time, they were correct in their perception.

However, those who worked closely with her occasionally saw another side of her personality. When she was angry, the Coordinator could swear like a spacer. This happened sufficiently often that she had borne the sobriquet “Iron Maiden” for more than three decades.

As she stared at the features of Anton Bartok, director of the Stellar Survey, Nadine was not angry - she had passed through angry twenty minutes earlier on her way to furious.

“How did it happen, Anton?”

Bartok flinched visibly at his desk half-a-world away. He had known his report would bring a reaction.

He just had not expected it this quickly.

“My fault, Coordinator. My people should have followed up with Rykand to make sure he was taking the news of his sister’s death better than he obviously was. In addition, no one considered the fact that his credit balance gives him freedom of action not available to mere mortals. After all, it isn’t every citizen who can afford to whistle himself up a yacht to deliver him to orbit.”

“Are you sure all we are dealing with here is a spoiled rich brat? This story that he was merely trying to find out about his sister’s death seems weak considering that we caught him actually staring at our guest through a viewport.”

“Dieter Pavel interrogated him rigorously. He is sticking to the story that he doesn’t believe his sister was killed by space debris and that he was trying to get to
Magellan
in order to confront Captain Landon.”

“He would hardly claim otherwise if he is a professional. How did he happen to make a beeline for that particular viewport?”

“He claims it was coincidence.”

Nadine’s response was a rude sound that was especially incongruous when coming from the World Coordinator. “I don’t believe in coincidences. I say there has been a leak.”

“If so, why haven’t there been any stories in the media?”

“Because they are afraid to broadcast anything so outlandish without proof,” she responded acidly.

“We would have gotten an indication of something if they were snooping around.”

“How do you know we haven’t had hints? Do your underlings rush to report bad news? What did your people in orbit tell Mr. Rykand after they took him into custody?”

“Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“Quite sure. I gave Pavel specific instructions on that point as soon as he reported the incident to me.”

“Have you considered what we are going to do with Mr. Rykand?”

“We’ll charge him with damaging public property, reckless endangerment, failure to heed warnings, and anything else we can hang on him.”

“Oh? And when is his court date?”

“Court date?”

“You have arrested him and are about to charge him. You don’t think we can just order him thrown into the castle dungeon, do you? We will have to arraign him in open court. If you will give me the date, I will arrange to be there. It ought to be interesting to watch his defense lawyer work.”

“Uh, I see your point,” Bartok said. The director’s expression was that of one who has just bitten into a rotten lemon. “But we can’t let him go. He has seen too much.”

“What are you suggesting, Anton, that we toss him out an airlock?”

“No, of course not.”

“I didn’t think so. So what are you going to do with him?”

Bartok considered for a moment, and then grimaced. “I don’t know.”

“Perhaps you should offer him a job.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know, a function that you perform for which someone pays you.”

“But what could he do?”

“That is your problem, Mr. Director. All I know is that if we are to keep him from talking, we will have to keep him aboard PoleStar. To do that, he has to stay of his own free will. Ergo, we need to entice him.”

“But the man’s a dilettante!”

“Perhaps he will welcome a little honest work for a change. Look, Anton, you have all the pieces to the puzzle. He wants to know what happened to his sister, doesn’t he? Tell him! Make sure he understands that we are working to identify the culprits. He might even volunteer.”

“I’ll issue orders at once.”

“Good. Now then, let us consider the more far-ranging consequences of this little drama. Just for the sake of argument, let us assume that Rykand is telling the truth and he stumbled across our little secret by accident. If he can do it then someone else can, too. Frankly, when I agreed to this secrecy, I didn’t expect it to last as long as it has.”

“But we are not yet in a position to go public.”

“Agreed. I suggest we take steps to get ready.”

“What steps, Coordinator?”

“Firstly, we get
Magellan
away just as fast as we can. A ship that has disappeared into superlight is a ship that cannot be recalled. When will Captain Landon be ready to space?”

“By the end of the week.”

“Very well. Tell him that I want his sorry ass gone by Saturday at the latest. When Rykand does not show up in his usual haunts, his friends are going to start to talk. They are the social strata where the reporters are likely to pick up the story. In addition, even if they do not gain the scent from Rykand’s friends, having
Magellan
at PoleStar is too damned conspicuous.

“The second thing I want you to do, Anton, is to set up a conference here on Earth where the scientists can go over everything we’ve learned. I want one of those long-winded free-for-alls where they try to dig each others’ hearts out with their pocket computers. Let them fight as long as necessary, but I want a consensus on whether our guest is telling us the truth. We can’t afford to have a dozen ‘expert’ opinions in opposition when the news breaks.”

“A conference will be noticed by the press.”

“Not if you hold it in some out-of-the-way place. Find a resort in the hinterlands we can take over for a couple of weeks. I want that conference convened within the month. Is that clear, Director Bartok?”

“Perfectly clear, Coordinator Halstrom. I will have my staff get to work on it immediately.”

#

The cell in which they had thrown him seemed to have once been used as a dormitory room. Normally in space, things retain the luster of newness forever. However, PoleStar had been continuously inhabited since its days as a power station, and the presence of atmosphere allows the growth of organisms. The smell in the cell was that of mildew and old corruption.

The events that had followed his arrest had been nearly as exciting as those preceding it. He had been dragged bodily away from the viewport where he had seen the ...
thing
, and towed to a nearby airlock.

They had delivered him to a suiting cubicle where he had stripped off his suit under the watchful gaze of several hard-eyed guards. Then he had been towed once more to a bare cubicle where he had to wait for more than an hour before they noticed him again. When someone had finally checked on him, it turned out to be a red-faced functionary who screamed in his face for ten minutes before ordering him taken to a holding cell.

Mark had lain awake for hours after strapping himself into a sleeping net, unable to turn his racing mind off. Dozens of times his brain insisted on reliving the long flight in from
Gossamer Gnat
, the near miss of the reflector, the chase across PoleStar’s darkened hull, and always, the yellow eyes that had stared intelligently into his own as he had crouched over that well of light. Suddenly his irritation at the survey for not telling him about his sister seemed petty. Something much bigger was going on.

He had eventually drifted off to sleep and slept more than six hours, waking in late morning, according to the wall chronometer. The lack of a day/night cycle in space was complicated by the fact that all orbital installations operate on Greenwich Mean Time, while Mark’s body rhythms were still halfway between California and Europe -- and in the wrong direction!

His stomach was just beginning to growl when he heard scrabbling sounds outside the hatchway. A moment later, the hatch opened and a bald man floated in with a covered food packet tucked under one arm.

“Who are you?” Mark asked.

“Hancock Mueller, station manager. I brought your lunch.”

“I am honored that the manager of this station would deliver it to me.”

“Everyone else is busy. Besides, I wanted to see the man who created all the commotion last night. I must say, you have guts to do what you did. I’ve twenty years in vacsuits and I would not have pulled that stunt of yours.”

“It seemed a good idea at the time. After leaving the ship, I wasn’t too sure.”

The manager clipped the food packet to a small table with a sitting rack in front of it. He swam to where Mark perched and stuck his face directly into Mark’s. Suddenly, his manner was as cold as Pluto. “I have another reason for seeing you. If you had hit my mirror, I would have made it a point to gather up every tiny piece of you we could find and piss on the entire collection. Goddamn it, don’t you know what that mirror cost?”