Colin swung his legs shakenly off the bed. He knew Cal well—or he’d thought he did. They were friends—such good friends he would have risked contacting Cal if Sean hadn’t been available—and the one word Colin had always associated with him was “integrity.” True, Cal was young for his position, but he lived, breathed, and dreamed the Prometheus Mission… Could that be the very way they’d gotten to him?

Colin could think of no other explanation. Yet the more he considered it, the less he understood why they would have picked Cal at all. He was a member of the proctoscope team, but a very junior one. Colin put his elbows on his knees and leaned his chin in his palms as he consulted the biographies Dahak had amassed on the team’s members.

As usual, there was a curious, detached feeling to the data. He was getting used to it, but the dividing line between knowledge he’d acquired experientially and that which Dahak had shoveled into a handy empty spot in his brain was surprisingly sharp. The implant data came from someone else and felt like someone else’s. Despite a growing acceptance, it was a sensation he found uncomfortable, and he was beginning to suspect he always would.

But the point at issue was Cal’s background, not the workings of his implant. It helped Colin to visualize the data as if it had been projected upon a screen, and he frowned as the facts flickered behind his eyelids.

Cal Tudor. Age thirty-six years. Wife’s name Frances; two daughters—Harriet and Anna, fourteen and twelve. Theoretical physicist, Lawrence Livermore by way of MIT Denver, then six years at Goddard before he moved to Shepherd…

Colin flicked through more data then stiffened. Dear God! How the hell had Dahak missed it? He knew how he had, and the nature of his implant was a factor, for he’d never realized how seldom Cal ever mentioned his family.

Yet the information was there, and only the “otherness” of the data Dahak had provided had kept it at arm’s length from Colin and prevented him from spotting the impossible “coincidence.” Dahak had checked for connections with the mutineers as far back as college, but Cal’s connection pre-dated more than his college career; it pre-dated his birth! If Dahak had a human-sized imagination (or, for that matter, if Colin had personally—and thoroughly—checked the data) they would have recognized it, for Cal’s very failure to mention it to one of his closest friends would have underscored it in red.

Cal Tudor: son of Michael Tudor, only living grandson of Andrew and Isis Hidachi Tudor, and great-grandson of Horace Hidachi, “the Father of Gravitonics.” The brilliant, intuitive genius who over sixty years before had single-handedly worked out the basic math that underlay the entire field!

Colin pounded his knee gently with a fist. He and Dahak had even speculated on Horace Hidachi’s possible links with the mutineers, for the stature of his “breakthrough” had seemed glaringly suspicious. Yet they obviously hadn’t delved deeply enough for reasons that—at the time—had seemed good and sufficient.

Hidachi had spent twenty years as a researcher before he evolved “his” theory and he’d never done anything with his brilliant theoretical work. Nor had anyone else during the course of his life. At the time he propounded his theory, it had been an exercise in pure math, a hypothesis that was impossible to test; by the time the hardware became available, he was dead. Nor had his daughter shown any particular interest in his work. If Colin remembered correctly (and thanks to Dahak he did), she’d gone into medicine, not physics.

Which was why Dahak and Colin had stopped worrying about Hidachi. If he’d been a minion of the mutineers, he would scarcely have invested that much time building a cover merely to produce an obscure bit of mathematical arcanum. He would have carried through with the hardware to prove it. At the very least, the mutineers themselves would scarcely have allowed his work to lie fallow for so long. As it was, Dahak had decided that Hidachi must have produced that rarest of rarities: a genuine, fundamental breakthrough so profound no one had even recognized what it was. Indeed, the computer had computed a high probability that the lag between theory and practice simply resulted from how long it took the mutineers to realize what Hidachi had done and prod a later generation of scientists down the path it opened.

But this—!

Colin castigated himself for forgetting the key fact about the mutineers’ very existence. Wearisome as the passing millennia had been for Dahak, they had not been that for Anu’s followers. They could take refuge in stasis, ignoring the time that passed between contacts with the Terra-born. Why shouldn’t they think in generations? For all Colin and Dahak knew, the last, unproductive fifteen years of Hidachi’s life had been a simple case of a missed connection!

But if, in fact, the mutineers had once contacted a Hidachi, why not again? Especially if Horace Hidachi had left some record of his own dealings with Anu and company. It might even explain how a man like Cal, whose integrity was absolute, could be working with them. For all Cal might know, the mutineers were on the side of goodness and light!

And his junior position on the proctoscope team made him a beautiful choice. He had access to project progress reports, yet he was unobtrusive … and quite probably primed for contact with the same “visitors” who had contacted his great-grandfather.

But if so, he didn’t realize who he was truly helping, Colin decided. It was possible he was wrong, but he couldn’t believe he was that wrong. Cal had to think he was working on the side of the angels, and why shouldn’t he? If the mutineers had, indeed, provided the expertise to develop the proctoscope, then they’d advanced the frontiers of human knowledge by several centuries in barely sixty years. How could that seem an “evil” act to someone like Cal?

Which meant there was a possibility, here. He’d found exactly the connection he sought … and perhaps he could not only convince Cal of the truth but actually enlist him as an ally!

“You should let me go.”

Sean MacIntyre’s stubborn face was an unhealthy red in his Bushmaster’s dash LEDs, and despite the high-efficiency emission-controls required by law, the agonizing stench of burning hydrocarbons had forced Colin to step his sensory levels down to little more than normal.

“No,” he said for the fifth—or sixth-time.

“If you’re wrong—if he is a bad guy and he’s got some kind of panic button—he’s gonna punch it the instant he opens the door and sees you.”

“Maybe. But the shock of seeing me alive may keep him from doing anything hasty till we’ve had time to talk, too. Besides, if he does send out a signal, I can pick it up and bug out. Can you?”

“Be better not to spook him into sending one at all,” Sean grumbled.

“Agreed. But he’s not going to. I’m positive he doesn’t know what those bastards are really up to—or what they’ve already done to the human race.”

“I’m glad you are!”

“I’ve already gotten you in deep enough, Sean,” Colin said as the Caddy snarled up a grade. “If I am wrong, I don’t want you in the line of fire.”

“I appreciate that,” Sean said softly, “but I’m your brother. I happen to love you. And even if I didn’t, this poor world will be in a hell of a mess a couple of years down the road if you get your ass killed, you jerk!”

“I’m not going to,” Colin said firmly, “so stop arguing. Besides—” Sean turned off the highway onto a winding mountain road “—we’re almost there.”

“All right, goddamn it,” Sean sighed, then grinned unwillingly. “You always were almost as stubborn as me.”