And then his phone rang.

"Is this line secure?" a scrambled, m.u.f.fled voice asked.

Johnson Smith hesitated.

"Very secure," he said.

"Upgrade went in through EOF yesterday."

Pause.

"Good."

Pause.

"What can I do for you?"

"I understand you're looking for the Houdini stuff."

"What?"

"The transport guys. Teleport. Vanishment."

Johnson Smith closed his eyes, trying to imagine.

"I.

don't know what I'm looking for," he said.

"I can see what happened. And I've got a hunch what kind of person did it."

"How's that?"

"Crazy xenophobe. Somebody who hates--aliens.

Aliens are new, here--I guess I'm looking for a hater."

Silence.

"Yeah, that's him."

"Who?"

Silence.

"Who?"

"I have come to you in peace and with good will," Roni Tahr said.

"There is no fraud. I have only come to know and love you."

"Bull spit."

"Bull .. . ?"

"You're lying to me."

Roni Tahr shook his half-inhuman head.

"I do not lie," he said.

"I cannot."

"All right, so let's say you aren't lying. Tell me this:

What the h.e.l.l are you trying to accomplish, wandering around the world as if you were some kind of a messiah?"

As Roni Tahr finally came upon a word he understood, and his eyes went wide.

"Messiah .. . ?" "Savior. Augur--prophesier. A holy man, for G.o.d's sake--if you were a man instead of an alien."

The alien closed his eyes. Shook his head. Moaned.

"Oh, no," he said.

"That is not what I meant."

Opened his eyes, and looked away.

"That is not it.

At all."

They found the xenophobe sleeper in his office, in the Pentagon; they raided his home at the same hour, and found more than enough evidence to convict him.

Souvenirs. From Orogam and Kure.

Bits of anatomy--things they couldn't live without.

Couldn't? Who could say? They were aliens, and their nature was more uncertain than the wind.

They took the sleeper--whose name was Ron Thomason, and who had been a ranking civilian on a DIA project that's still subject to serious cla.s.sification--they took the sleeper to a small, dark room in the bas.e.m.e.nt of a safe house in Langley.

And they asked him many, many things, Asked hard, and long, using every technique they could legally apply.

And quite a few that might've got the questioners prosecuted.

If they'd left their marks behind. If anyone could have proven anything at all.

But all the same, in the end they could only go so far: there was no way any man in our government's employ could bring himself to commit the kind of torment that will always bring an answer from a man.

"Maybe we ought to loan him to our new friends in the KGB," somebody joked.

"G.o.d, remember what they did in Lebanon?"

And everyone in the room laughed a long rude laugh, except for Ron Thomason, who lay strapped to the padded examination table in the center of the room, turgid and unmoving, staring at the ceiling.