"You need not attempt to spare my sensibilities." The translator registered amus.e.m.e.nt. "I know what you're trying to say. You can never be at home there. That is perfectly natural. And of course the long-

range objective is to return you to your own world. I am only proposing this as a temporary expedient until such time as a return becomes practical. It is, I am afraid, all I have to offer."

Chloe and I looked at each other. There seemed no scope for discussion. "Okay," I sighed. "Let's do it."

We crowded into the Osak aircar, to the comically evident relief of its crew, who'd been casting anxious

glances at the sky for police aircars. As we lifted off, commands were given, and the wreck of the larger

vehicle below was consumed in an eye-hurtingly intense explosion."Hey, Khorat," I finally broke the silence. "Now that we're going to be seeing a lot of each other, maybe you could let us in on just exactly what this is all about. What was it that Novak was trying to buy from the Tosava gevroth?" I gave it my best effort at suavity. "I hope you don't think I'm imposing on the 'obligation' that you yourself were gracious enough to acknowledge just now."

"No, I don't think anything of the sort. And no, I won't tell you. You're not ready for that knowledge.""Renata Novak told us exactly the same thing," Chloe informed him pointedly."Then she was, for once, absolutely right. Where she went wrong was in failing to recognize that she isn't ready for it either. No one is."

"Except, of course, you and your organization," said Chloe with some asperity.

"Including us. But we unavoidably find ourselves in the position of being its custodians. That is simply a

matter of blank." The blank was just that: dead silence as the translator software rejected a concept as untranslatable. "But," Khorat resumed thoughtfully, "perhaps I will tell you . . . later. Perhaps you will come to be ready."

o

INTERLUDE.

Harvey Langston's eyes were like saucers. "Are you saying the ident.i.ty of this traitor is known?"

"Yes. It's been known since 1968 or '69. It turned out to be someone n.o.body would ever have suspected in a million years. Came as quite a shock to a lot of people in the Project, I'm told." The President looked thoughtful. "I've often wondered what the motive could have been. I sometimes think it must have been like that guy Hanson who was spying for the Russians in the 1990s. He wasn't like that slime mold Aldrich Ames a few years earlier, who was in it purely for the money. No, he did it for peanuts. Nor was he a fanatical Communist ideologue like the Rosenbergs; he was a very conservative Catholic, and anyway he went on working for the Russians after they'd given the Soviet regime the b.u.m's rush.

Instead, by all accounts it was pure game-playing on his part. He was a social zero who was driven to prove he was cleverer than everyone else. Maybe the traitor within the Project who let the secret slip to

the Tonkuztra was like that: stringing them along, never telling them everything. But that's all just speculation on my part. No one really knows."

"Why not? If this individual was caught back in the late 1960s-"

"Not 'caught.' Just identified, and never found."

"But . . . that means this traitor could have been taken away by the, uh, Tonkuztra, and told them more.

Or, perhaps, been made to tell them more." Langston spoke hesitantly, for he knew nothing about intelligence work, and was incapable of learning because no one ever learns a subject to whose very existence he is philosophically opposed. His campaign promise to abolish the CIA had been heartfelt, even though Sal DiAngelo and Sidney Goldman had taken pains to rea.s.sure everyone that Congress would never really let him get away with it.

"True," the President allowed. "Then again, the traitor might also be dead. To this day, the Project doesn't know how much of the truth has been compromised. So it's proceeded on the a.s.sumption that there have been no further leaks . . . and so far, that a.s.sumption seems to have panned out. There has been no change in Earth's diplomatic status, and no apparent change in the att.i.tude of the various Delkasu governmental and corporate pooh-bahs. This, in spite of the fact that the whole thing occurred at a moment when the secret was uniquely vulnerable."

"What do you mean?"

"The first Apollo landing was in 1969. Remember what I was saying earlier about the problem of concealing Farside Base from the human race's official s.p.a.ce-exploration programs? Well, it worked both ways. Those s.p.a.ce programs had to be concealed from the Delkasu, who thought we'd left such fantastically outmoded stuff behind. The Project has always used the excuse of traffic control to make d.a.m.ned sure no galactic ships have been arriving or departing at the right time to observe any howling anachronisms. But if the Tonkuztra or anybody else had been casting a suspicious eye on Earth around

that time, the Apollo landing would have stood out like a Spanish galleon in what was supposed to be a modern naval base.

"In short, the deception seems to be holding up. The Project isn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth

by questioning it. Instead, they've pushed ahead with the other half of their mission."

"You mean the introduction of galactic technology?"

"Right. In fact, they've accelerated it as much as they dare, taking advantage of what seems to be a reprieve as long as it lasts. They've tried to soften the societal impact as much as possible by releasing concepts into the culture before the actual 'invention' of the technologies. For example, ever since shortly before the turn of the century the neural-net computer has been something 'everybody knows' is just around the corner. Well, it's about to become reality. Unfortunately, there's really no way to prepare people for the revolution in theoretical physics that's coming in a few years. But the average person won't even be aware of it until later, when the practical applications begin to appear. And the Project has been taking steps, for decades now, to get notions like reactionless drives and artificial gravity firmly established in the popular consciousness. By now, they're part of the generic 'special effects'

visualization of the future, and never mind that physicists say they're impossible." The President chuckled evilly. "Those Hollywood sleaze-buckets have no conception of how they've been subtly manipulated."

Langston sought to catch up. "So . . . the Prometheus Project has proceeded since 1969 as though

nothing had happened?"

"Pretty much. Of course . . . you have to wonder what's been going on since then, out there in the galaxy, in places we don't even know about. . . ."

PART THREE:.

1969.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

The Khemava system was an incredibly wealthy one, even though it consisted of only a few planets huddled around a heat-stingy orange sun. In part, this was a matter of lucky breaks in planetary formation. The innermost world was like people back home still believed Mercury to be: tidally locked so that one hemisphere permanently faced its sun. It therefore had a "twilight zone" between its hot and cold sides, where mining of its abundant heavy elements was practical. (In reality, according to Dr. Fehrenbach, Mercury is "resonance-locked" into a day precisely two-thirds of its year, a consequence of having a highly eccentric orbit very close to the Sun. A lot of science fiction was due to become obsolete in a few years, when that fact became generally known.) Next outward was the Ekhemasu homeworld of Khemava. Then came a dense, mineral-rich asteroid belt where the t.i.tius-Bode formulation said a third planet should orbit. That planet's gestation had been aborted by the proximity of the actual third planet: a gas giant more ma.s.sive than Jupiter, glowing with the heat of its own gravitational compression. That heat, though insufficient to ignite the fusion fires of a sun, warmed the great planet's inner moons. One of those moons was bigger than Mars, big enough to hold an atmosphere (complete with an ozone layer to block the radiation that sleeted from the primary planet) and liquid water, in which life had arisen. Minimal planetary engineering had been required to turn that moon into a second home for the Ekhemasu race.

That last gives a hint as to why I said that the system's wealth was only partially a dispensation of cosmic chance. The Ekhemasu had never discovered the secret of interstellar flight; it wasn't the sort of thing their sciences tended toward. So they had remained in their own treasure-house system, and by now that system was as much their handiwork as an accidental by-product of the blind forces of astrophysics. They and their works pervaded it to a greater extent than I could imagine ever being possible for humanity in the Solar system.

This had something to do with their sheer numbers. The Ekhemasu were herbivores, descended from herd animals, and they tolerated-no, enjoyed-a degree of crowding that would have driven humans to the ugliest manifestations of ma.s.s psychosis. Planet II was a smaller world than Earth, only about six thousand miles in diameter, with seas rather than oceans, and vast expanses of desert. But it nonetheless held tens of billions of these large beings: a dense, orderly, incredibly productive hive, providing the foundation on which the Delkasu had erected their "Ekhemasu Empire."

But that was only part of it. The other part was the length of time they had been at it-a history stretching back over scores of thousands of years. You can maybe get some inkling of it if you're an American who's been to the Mediterranean and seen a place like Rome where buildings have arisen on the foundations of earlier civilizations until it's more like a geological formation than a city, or the Greek islands which have been terraced and cultivated so long that they are as much artifacts as geographic features. In such places, the very ground seems to exude an aura of thousands and thousands of lives that have worked, loved, hated, given birth, killed and died for millennia, until every square inch must surely be psychically charged. Khemava is like that, only more so-much more so. Even I could feel it, despite belonging to a different species . . . indeed, to a species that had evolved in a different spiral arm. So long is their history that the giant satellite of Planet III is much the same as Khemava itself, for the Ekhemasu colonized it before the Sumerians dreamed up the idea of keeping records on clay tablets. (At least I'm told it's much the same; I've never been there.) It wasn't until later that I learned all this. Chloe and I arrived in the Khemava system as concealed cargo aboard a ship belonging to a legitimate front corporation owned by Khorat's Tonkuztra buddies of the Osak gevroth. Reasonably comfortable cargo, I must admit, thanks to Khorat's arrangements. Granted, we had to eat computer-formulated human-type synthetic rations. And the ship's brain gradually altered the day/night cycle to the ninety-six-plus-hour one of Khemava-but that was actually a more convenient one for us, as it came to just about four Earth days. And otherwise, the environmental parameters of humanity and the Delkasu were so very similar that it was no worse than the time we'd previously spent in hiding on Antyova II under the sheltering Osak wing. That time had lasted for months, Earth time, and then the voyage to Khemava took weeks. For all that time we had a great deal of privacy, under the incurious care of aliens who were keeping us healthy as part of a business transaction.

So, astute reader, it's probably time to take up a subject about which I just know you've been wondering. . . .

* * * "No, Bob!" Chloe gasped, coming up for air after kiss number something-or-other. She sat up abruptly, swung her legs over the side of the Delkasu-sized bunk, drew her smock (the only term I can think of for the sleeping garment our hosts had provided), and released a gust of breath.

I gave a sigh of my own as I sat up beside her. A bunk the size of a love seat (ouch!) made intimacy unavoidable. Soon I had slid an arm around her shoulders and was nuzzling her neck. She started to respond, then stiffened.

"No!" she repeated, and stood up abruptly, shivering. "You know we can't. And you know why."

I fell back on the bunk with a groan of frustration. "Yeah, I know . . . I think."

At first we'd been restrained by the presence of aliens, but our inhibitions had gradually dissolved in the

face of those aliens' obvious disinterest in our behavior. They'd finally acceded to our request for separate rooms, without really understanding it. (Social customs designed to protect females-and, more importantly in some societies, their reputations-from the s.e.xual aggressiveness of physically stronger males were foreign to the Delkasu.) But that, too, had been insufficient. In the end, nature had taken its course . . . but not to its logical conclusion.

It had been difficult for both of us-probably more so for me than for her. In the end, she'd granted me physical release in ways that only made the longing for the ultimate consummation worse, but which at least did not run the risk which she was adamantly unwilling to take. And in truth, I really didunderstand.

Now, standing with her back turned, she explained once again, speaking as much to herself as to me."I will not bring a child into the kind of life we're looking at. We don't know how long we're going to be on Khemava, where we're going to be the only two humans. We don't know if we'll ever get back to Earth. In which case, when we die our child would be alone among aliens. We have no right to make that kind of decision in the name of an unborn human being who never asked for such a life."

"And the nearest human contraceptives are umpty-ump thousand light-years away," I nodded, staring at the overhead. "So where does that leave us?"

"I don't know," she said in a voice that could barely be heard.

I know what you're thinking. Forget it. In those days, abortion had yet to achieve the legal and social

acceptance you take for granted. Chloe wasn't Catholic, nor even noticeably religious; she was perfectly willing to prevent conception, had we possessed the means. But terminating pregnancy afterwards was something else again-something she would not and could not contemplate. And I wonder how many women of the oh-so-liberated later generations would have been willing to put their bodies-and the fetuses carried in their bodies-at the disposal of aliens for such a purpose. Especially considering that there was no a.s.surance that the aliens would know what they were doing . . .

So as usual I stood up and quietly left for my own room, pretending I didn't hear her m.u.f.fled sobs.

So matters stood when we landed on Khemava.

Khorat was as good as his word. He met our freighter at the vast s.p.a.ceport outside Khemava's imperial capital of Sakandreoun.

It was a completely clandestine meeting, of course. For the purpose of getting us through the

bureaucratic rituals of landing, we'd been transferred to a large modular transport unit-the interstellar equivalent of the cargo containers that you take for granted but which in those days were still causing the longsh.o.r.emen's union to get its undies in a bunch. It had been secretly equipped with life support, but there was no more nonsense about separate rooms. Fortunately, we weren't in it for long. And for part of that time we stayed strapped into the well-padded (but, of course, uncomfortably small) couches that had been provided, sparing ourselves bruises or worse as our container was shunted about, finally coming to rest in a warehouse along with the rest of whatever it was that was being shipped from Antyova to Khemava.

It was only then that a signal light flashed over our heads, and the access hatch clamsh.e.l.led open to

admit a harsh artificial lighting.

Two beings stood silhouetted in the glare. One was a Delkar-presumably an Osak operative, fidgeting with what I took to be eagerness to wash his hands of us. Beside him loomed an Ekhemar.

"Hi, Khorat," I said, even though I couldn't make out individual features.

"Greetings." My earpiece produced the voice the software had a.s.signed to Khorat. "No discourtesy intended, but we are rather in a hurry. So if you will come this way . . ."

Khorat took his leave of the Delkar and hustled us through the warehouse, which was of enormous

extent. He was in a hurry, and only the low gravity enabled us to keep up with him despite chronic shortness of breath in the thin dry air. We boarded an aircar whose ports were closed up lest anyone should observe the likes of us. The cabin held furnishings designed to accommodate both Delksau and Ekhemasu. We sort of fell between the two extremes, and there was no seating that really suited us. So we stood up, held on to stanchions, and watched the viewscreens as the aircar rose from the warehouse floor and soared through hangarlike doors into the protracted late afternoon of the orange Khemava sun, under a royal blue sky.

The cityscape that unfolded beneath us was an interesting contrast to the one we'd observed on Antyova