Finally as the next government working day began in the green dawn, Lombar Hisst sat red-eyed, slumping with exhaustion and defeat in the animal cave he called his office.

"It must have gone straight to the Grand Council," Lombar muttered to himself more than to me. "Maybe it even went to the Emperor himself. This is bad." He sat a while, silent. I still did not dare to ask anything.

"I feel it in my gut it will be taken up at the next meeting of the Grand Council," he muttered at length.

Lombar slumped for minutes, shaking his head. "It will upset their Invasion Timetable. Yes, I'm sure they will think that." After a long time he roused himself. "Well, we've got to prepare ourselves. I'll put the screws on Endow,* my lordly and asinine superior. Yes, that's what I'll do. Sometimes the 'Lord of the Exterior' has his uses. I don't think I'll have to bring up his last private meeting with that pretty spaceman. No, it won't take that. But I'll have it ready. I put the photographs someplace." He got up to find them and did so. But his moving around had brought me to his attention again.

With sudden ferocity, he snarled, "You're going to that meeting too! Do you realize, (bleep) you, that you may have upset the whole thing?" I was tired enough to be incautious. I was also tired of not knowing what this was all about. I managed to speak. "Could you please tell me what's happening?" That did it. He loomed over me. He was shouting.

* The name has been changed. There never was an Endow on the Grand Council. The so-called Apparatus was not under the Exterior Division. – Publishers"They'll read that report! They'll be certain their Invasion Timetable has been upset! Two years ago I told you to be alert and to block and change every report the Patrol Service turned in on Blito-P3. Earth, you idiot, Earth!" He grabbed me by the tunic lapels and lifted me out of the chair. He was really shouting now. "You let one get through!" He was shaking me so hard the room blurred.

"You have threatened ourtimetable! To Hells with theirs! You've probably wrecked the entire basic plan of the Apparatus! You're going to suffer for this!" And he hit me across the face with the stinger. Yes, I understood now. We of the Apparatus werein trouble. And particularly Lombar Hisst!

It was three nervous days before the Grand Council met and Lombar Hisst made us suffer every moment of it. From minute to minute the Apparatus central staff did not know if they would be tortured, shot or tortured andshot. Nor whether it would be done by Lombar Hisst now or the Imperial Government later.

The Chief Executive of the Coordinated Information Apparatus would go into hours of gloom and then suddenly burst out of it like a rocket and tear people apart or rush off to have another interview with Endow, Lord of the Exterior.

Endow even came personally to the office once. I had seen him from a distance but up close I was very unimpressed. He was in his dotage and always had a nurse with him to mop the slobbers from his chin. He was only about half Lombar's size and very fat. He could be very clear for a bit but then he would drift off and vaporize, completely out of it. He had been chosen for his post as a remote relation of the late Emperor's third wife and had been retained when Cling the Lofty had ascended the throne. Endow's appetite for pretty young men was notorious and he was generally regarded with disguised contempt. I can say this now that I am out of his reach. Only Lombar's desires and organization kept Endow in power. On this visit, he pottered around the office while Lombar bullied him. I almost felt sorry for the old man when Lombar showed him some photos of recent executions. The old fellow almost fainted and I wondered what he would have done if Lombar had produced the latest pictures of his peccadillos with the pretty young spaceman. But he promised he would do his part and remember his lines.

At last the day of the Grand Council meeting arrived. We set out well before dawn, Endow and his nurse, Lombar, two Apparatus clerks and myself in Endow's air limousine.

Now I know you may find this hard to believe, but I had never before been to Palace City. The Academy Cadet Corps goes there every year to march in review. The newest class members are always introduced to the Emperor – if you can call standing in a group of ten thousand before the throne "being introduced." But it just happened, not from any design, that each time that day had come around, I was doing punishment drill for low grades and was not included.

Palace City makes a lot of people nervous. Today I found it impressive enough with its circular buildings, its circular parks, its circular walls, everything seven times as big as life. I have heard that it was once the capital city of the race overthrown by the Voltar invasion so long ago but has been so improved, one would never find traces of it: I think the original city was simply crushed to rubble and cleared away. Some find the hugeness of the place overwhelming and others say the glittering gold walls are hard on the eyes. But none of that was what made me sweat: it was the time shift.

Anyone with a lot of space travel behind them gets nervous about anything to do with a black hole. If you ever got too close to one, that would be it.The consequent warping of space, as you know, causes a time shift.

Undoubtedly it was a wise and clever thing, but early Voltar engineers moved a very small, nuclear black hole into the mountain behind Palace City as a power source and defense mechanism. This is fine: it gives Palace City an unlimited supply of thermonuclear energy to run its vast complex of machines and devices. For defense, the usefulness cannot be overstated: space-time distortion takes the whole of Palace City thirteen minutes into the future and any invader would find no target, nothing whatever to shoot at.

All this may make things very defense-safe but even a small black hole, when it finally expends, can blow up with a violence that levels mountains. They say it takes them a billion years or more before they go "bang" and that the one at Palace City is perfectly safe and has a long time to run yet. But how do they know how old it already was when they installed it? And if it's so safe, why did they build Palace City so far away from centers of population? I don't know how the Emperor stands it, frankly. They say, "The head that wears a crown has nightmares," and living that close to even a small black hole would not just give me nightmares, I wouldn't be able to sleep at all.

The time shift, I find, is not just hard on your watch. Personally, I get a bad feeling in my bones every time I'm around a time shift.

This morning, I was already feeling awful, nervous about what might come out in the meeting. And it wasn't helped any by a near collision at the time barrier as we went in. I'd heard accidents had happened with outgoing traffic, suddenly shifted down in time, hitting head-on with incoming flight traffic moving up in time at the entrances. And this morning – it was still dark on our side – a big Imperial delivery ship, probably going out to markets, abruptly materialized dead ahead and Endow's pilot, almost as senile as Endow, reacted late and we got hit with airwash – a near thing.

So when we finally got landed in the circular airpark, I was so shaky I could hardly make it up the spiral staircases to the Grand Council hall. I am telling you this because there were some things I may have missed in the meeting.

I was half-blinded by the flashing light on helmets and ceremonial axes, gold and jewelled tablecloths, diamond-studded banners and moving colored lights of the huge circular Council room, and the reflective clothing of the Lords of State and their retinues didn't help. A splendid portrait of Cling the Lofty and his two sons, now dead, glared down.