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“I didn’t plan to cut it as close as I did.”

“A hundred kilometers is too damned close. Hell, the men chasing you almost ripped the film with their exhausts. I understand you have a lot of credit with the bank.”

Mark shrugged. “I am comfortable.”

“Well if you had damaged my mirror, I would have made sure you ended up destitute and then some!”

“Look, I’m sorry. If they would let me book passage on a regular ship, I would have done so. All I really wanted was to talk to Captain Landon aboard
Magellan
.”

Mueller’s manner returned to affable as quickly as it had changed. “Then you are in luck. Eat up, you have an appointment with the captain in forty minutes.”

#

Mark had expected the interview to take place aboard PoleStar, but when the time came, two spacers arrived to escort him to a passenger lock and into a small interorbit ferry. A few minutes later, they docked with the starship and Mark found himself following one of the spacers to the captain’s cabin.

Mark had never been aboard a starship of the survey, but had heard Jani talk about them. The captain’s cabin was a study in luxury, with microgravity furniture clamped to the deck and bulkheads. Soft lights lit the overhead and the whole cabin was surfaced with sound absorbing carpet. The place smelled good, too.

“Sit down, Rykand,” Landon said without offering a greeting.

“Thank you, Captain,” Mark replied, ignoring the implied insult.

He pulled himself to the frame in front of Landon’s desk and strapped himself in.

“I understand you wanted to see me.”

“Yes, sir. I wanted to find out how Jani died.”

“You were told that on Earth.”

“I didn’t believe it.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe I just didn’t like thinking Jani died as the result of a random accident.”

“She didn’t.” Landon leaned back in his seat and told Mark about the encounter near New Eden. He told him everything, from the whispering chatter of the gravity wave passing through the ship, to the first reports from Scout Three, to the space battle that followed. He told him of Sar-Say’s capture and of the reason why the discovery of intelligent aliens had been judged too sensitive for public disclosure. Through it all, Mark listened without interrupting. When he finished, Dan Landon asked, “Any questions?”

It took Mark a moment to answer. When he finally did, it was with a huge sigh. “You say my sister was the first to report sighting these aliens?”

“Yes.”

“May I see the recording?”

“Are you sure you want to, considering how it ends?”

“I am sure.”

“All right, after we are through here, I will have my aide show it to you. We’ve something else to discuss first.”

“What is that, Captain?”

“How would you like to help find the aliens who killed your sister?”

“I beg your pardon.”

“I am offering you a job that will help you get back at the beings who killed your sister. Are you interested?”

“Why me?”

“I won’t beat around the bush with you, Rykand. You know about Sar-Say, which means that we cannot let you go. Since you are trapped here, why not make yourself useful? My ship and I will be going back to space in a few days. Those who stay behind can use your help.”

“But what will I do?”

“Anything you are qualified to do. What did you take in school?”

“I majored in computers and minored in astronomy.”

“Well, we ought to find a use for both of those. I will assign you to Dr. Bendagar, our chief astrophysicist. He is staying here to work with Sar-Say after
Magellan
goes out.”

Mark thought for long seconds, and then nodded. “Seeing that the alternative is prison, I suppose I will sign on with your project, Captain.”

Landon’s smile was so broad that Mark almost forgot that he did not mean it. “Welcome aboard, shipmate. We’ll just get you to sign a few papers to make everything legal, then get you settled into your new quarters.”

#

Lisa Arden sat at a table in the project mess and ate her breakfast alone. She had been up past midnight with Sar-Say, quizzing her charge on his knowledge of Broan politics, and then had dictated her impressions of the session for two more hours before finally getting to sleep. As she bit into a muffin covered with yeast butter, she pondered her knowledge of the Broan language - if indeed; it
was
the Broan native tongue. Because of the simplicity of its structure, she wondered if it was an artificial language - like the ancient Esperanto - designed to be spoken by a multitude of beings with different brains and vocal apparatus.

“Hello, mind if I join you?” a disembodied voice asked, shaking her out of her reverie.

She lifted her gaze from her plate to see a pair of ship boots hovering just above the deck. As she scanned higher, the figure of Mark Rykand came into view. She had spent the past couple of days avoiding him and her complexion now reddened involuntarily as she remembered how her weekly shower had ended.

“Hello. No, I don’t mind.”

“I am Mark Rykand,” he said, holding forth a hand after he had strapped himself down across from her.

“Lisa Arden,” she replied, shaking it.

“Look, Miss Arden, I want to apologize for intruding on your privacy the other night. Believe me, I would have never...”

“Never sneak a peek at a naked lady, Mr. Rykand?” she asked, her tone one of mock incredulity.

He grinned. “Well, now that you mention it, I suppose I have taken the occasional opportunity. Still, I did not intend to cause you any embarrassment. In fact, I did not intend anything. I was trying to get to
Magellan
.”

“So I’ve heard. Have you met Sar-Say?”

Rykand nodded. “Yesterday. Dr. Bendagar let me sit in on one of the interrogation sessions.”

“Where was I?” Lisa asked. Generally, she sat in on all interrogations to work out any misunderstandings Sar-Say might have.

“The professor said that you were ... ‘answering some damnfool question from some addle-brained, cretin of a bureaucrat who seemed to think we have nothing better to do here than answer his piss-brain questions,’ or something to that effect.”

Lisa laughed. “That sounds like the good professor, all right. What did you think of Sar-Say?”

Mark hesitated as he chased a globule of scrambled eggs around with a fork before replacing the cover to his tray. Finally, he said, “I suppose I was a bit disappointed.”

“Disappointed?”

“He just doesn’t seem alien enough, know what I mean? I keep thinking I am looking at a monkey.”

She nodded. “Yes, I sometimes find myself having the same reaction. I suppose it would be better if he were a big, throbbing mass of gelatin or maybe a rock with eyes. Yet, if you think about it, form follows function in evolution as in everything else. The Broa have naturally enslaved beings more or less like themselves, and since they are apparently our kind of creatures, so are most of their subservient species.

That, at least, is the way the biologists explain how it is that the three species we’ve seen to date are so similar.”

“Three species?”

“Sar-Say and the two types of corpses we took off the alien ship.”

“Oh. I didn’t know that.”

“That’s why
Magellan
is going back out this afternoon, you know. To salvage Sar-Say’s ship.”

“I didn’t know that either. I am afraid I’m a little out of my league here.”

She smiled. “It can be a bit overwhelming when you first come aboard. I liken it to drinking out of a fire hose.”

“They gave me a lot of old reports to read, but I haven’t had the time. Tell me, has Sar-Say told you why the Broa were after him?”

Lisa explained the Taff’s strange attitude toward the overlords, using the pet dog analogy. Mark was doubtful.

“He seems too intelligent for that.”

“We all have our blind spots, Mr. Rykand.”

“Please, call me Mark. After all, one of us has seen the other naked. That should put us on a first name basis, right?”

Lisa did not answer. She was too busy turning bright crimson.

#

Sar-Say sat in his cabin and ignored the entertainment screen on which a buxom young woman breathlessly related the details of the latest scandal involving a well-known actor and actress. His unseeing gaze was directed not at the screen, but inward.

Like humans, Sar-Say had the capacity effectively to switch off his external senses when he concentrated deeply. Also, like humans, he could worry endlessly over whether he had made the right decision at some time in the past. The decision he was worried about now was whether it had been smart to tell the humans essentially the truth about Civilization, what they were calling “the Sovereignty.” In retrospect, it might have been better if he had told them the galaxy was an association of free beings arrayed voluntarily in a great interstellar union. That, at least, would have piqued the curiosity they seemed to have in abundance. Instead, he had awakened fears inherited from ancestors who once cowered in caves to avoid beasts with fangs and claws. That he had known nothing of humans at the time of his capture, and therefore could not have risked such a lie, did little to calm his racing thoughts.

Sar-Say had learned a great deal about humanity since he had been brought aboard this orbiting prison.

He was not sufficiently conceited, however, to think that he understood them very well at all. Experience had taught him that thinking, rational beings are the most complicated things in the universe. Humans were no different in this respect from Vvralians, Antaks, or the Broa. For Sar-Say to understand humans would have required him to think like one, and that was a physiological impossibility. His brain structure was as different from the human cortex as their brains were from Vithians. Indeed, one thing he hoped to keep from them was just how different his thought processes truly were.

Even if he could never truly understand them, his study of humans had yielded a few tentative nuggets of knowledge. One stroke of luck had been the human language. It possessed a rigid structure, with word meaning often determined by position within the thought-unit. Compared to High Lantean or the multitude of dialects on Saporsva, the human tongue was a study in simplicity. In fact, it was nearly as structured as the lingua franca of Civilization.

After obtaining grounding in structure and pronunciation, he had devoted himself to gaining fluency. In this, he had been largely successful, or so Lisa Arden assured him. With fluency had come a plan to bend humankind’s actions to his own purposes. For Sar-Say had goals beyond merely being rescued from the beams of a Broan Avenger. His continued survival would mean little if he were forced to live his life circling this unknown planet of an unknown star, a
sendalth
sentenced to an eternity of pokes and prods by human scientists.

To be successful, to gain the fabulous wealth and power due him and his sept, he must not only survive, but return to his home. At first, he had been at a loss of how to accomplish this. After all, he had no idea where in space to look for Civilization. Indeed, until his talks with the astronomer Bendagar, it had never occurred to him to think of geography as something that might be applied to stars. In the Sovereignty, the physical positions of stars in space were of interest only to a few licensed philosophers.

He had thought long and hard about the problem while he was learning the human language. Slowly, as he became aware of the strength of human curiosity, his plan had begun to take form. There was one world that he was sure he could locate among the stars. It was marked by one of the most spectacular sky sights in all of Civilization, a cloud of gas so prominent that even the humans must know of it. Broan masters had traveled from as far away as Pryxal to see the Sky Flower Nebula in the night sky of Zzumer, created in historical times by the explosion of a nearby star. Sky Flower had been the third picture he had painted for Bendagar.

As he sat in front of the flickering screen and stared unseeing into its depths, Sar-Say considered the one factor that might wreck the plan he had so carefully constructed. This morning Lisa had let slip that
Magellan
was about to leave on a mission to salvage the
Hraal
. It had taken all of his concentration not to let her see how much the news disturbed him. So long as he remained the humans’ sole source of information concerning the Broa and their domain, he would be able to guide events to his own advantage. If these curious bipeds were successful in salvaging the
Hraal
, they would have an independent source from which to check his allegations. Though the risk of discovery was minimal, this plan of theirs was a complication he did not need. The stakes of the game he was playing were too great for even the smallest of risks.

#

Lev Bukovsky was new to Sky Watch, having just completed his mandatory three-month training assignment. In fact, he had been standing a regular watch for less than a week and had yet to get over the godlike sensation of it all.

Physically, Bukovsky was thirty meters below ground in Sky Watch’s operations center outside Omaha, Nebraska. Mentally, he was a million kilometers away - literally. With the aid of the latest full sensory interface, his disembodied self hovered a million kilometers above the Earth in the direction of Polaris.

From that vantage point, he could look down on a blue-white sphere the size of an apricot, its surface half light/half dark. From his position “One Meg North,” Bukovsky could survey all of the sky junk that orbited Earth in the plane of the equator -- everything from worn out communications satellites scheduled for salvage to the orbiting space docks that were the largest structures ever lofted by humanity.

Much of the sensation of godlike omniscience came from the supernaturally sharp vision granted to his

“virtual self.” Beyond the orbiting satellites lay the double curve of ships in transit between Earth and Luna. Beyond the half-sphere of gray-white that was the Moon, other ships headed for the planets and beyond.

Bukovsky’s vantage point was courtesy of a large sensor array at One Meg North. Strictly speaking, the array was not actually “in orbit.” It neither circled Earth nor traveled about the sun in an orbit whose focus lay at the center of mass of the sun. Rather, the sensors (and their twins at One Meg South) were maintained in position by electric thrusters that precisely balanced the gravitational pull of Earth and Sol.