Dinner came and Hound had to dig me out and get me dressed and for four hours I had to sit at the long table and in the music salon being chatty with the Corsa girl and her brother. She weighed twice as much as me and was as muscular as a man. She talked of crops from a too-thin mouth and he talked of hunting lepertiges with cannons, and while I pretended interest, I was inwardly shuddering at the horror of being exiled to Modon and its fresh air with this pair. My mother's coy remarks and hints felt like somebody had a battering ram against my spine, pushing me off a cliff.

I was only too happy to get back to my study and continue to read the confession.

The man's villainy had been absolutely appalling. His shame-lessness had no slightest twinge of conscience. He was totally convinced that he was reacting quite naturally. I had never realized that the criminal mind operated that way. I read and read.

I was actually unable to put it down. When I finally finished the confession, it was the middle of the next night.

I sat there in the midst of the yellowed vocoscriber pages.

Well, (bleep) him!

Here were TWO empires left totally up in the air, Voltar and Earth! Here was a whole base about to be executed to a man. Here was Jettero Heller with a warrant out for him. Here was the Countess Krak possibly dead and falling into a mile-deep chasm. And it didn't even say what happened to the cat!

WHAT THE HELLS HAD HAPPENED THEN?

Oh, I was pretty peeved with this criminal, Soltan Gris. Here he was, begging to be executed. Well, he ought to be executed for leaving a reader in the middle of the sky like that!

Well, there was nothing for it. I knew that before I could get to sleep I would have to get some idea at least what had happened to Voltar and Earth at that time.

I routed out Hound and, with complaints, he woke up a seneschal and they got into the tower storerooms and, with many a raise of eyes to the ceiling, got out my old school books.

Confidently I opened the unread pages of a dusty history text. It had dates on the margins to keep the student oriented and I found the comparable era.

I read: "This period was noted for its peace and calm. The orderly succession from the reign of Cling the Lofty to that of Mortiiy the Brilliant was notable mainly for its unnotableness."

Hold it. Gris had mentioned that Prince Mortiiy was revolting on Calabar. Apparatus troops had undertaken the final assault to wipe out the rebel.

I hurriedly opened up a civics text on the Voltar government. I looked in the table of divisions and departments.

THERE WAS NO SUCH ORGANIZATION AS THE APPARATUS!

I sat back. I have mobs of relatives connected to every imaginable part of the Voltar government. I had never heard any of them ever mention the Apparatus. And then I suddenly understood:

THEY WERE KEEPING THE APPARATUS SECRET! . Oh, but what a cover-up that was! A whole organization!

But I was far from finished yet.

I got Hound back up out of bed and made him go wake up the chamberlain and unlock the library in the south tower and bring me up all the old encyclopedias, and when the footmen had lugged these in, with many an accusing look, I began to tear through them.

I found Jettero Heller, a famous combat engineer and noted space racer and bullet-ball champion. There was no mention of his ever having been to Earth.

I sent the staff scurrying for additional volumes.

Once more I tore into pages. This time I was looking for the Planet Earth or Blito-P3.

NO SIGN OF IT!

Well, I can tell you, reader, I was a very puzzled person.

I couldn't make heads nor tails of it.

At the insistence of the seneschal and the chamberlain and Hound and accompanied by many eyes of the staff rolled at the ceiling, I went to bed.

I was quite cross with Gris.

The following morning, when I awoke, despite the accusative racket Hound was making with spinbrushes and closet doors, I lay awake, on my back, looking at the ceiling.

WHAT had happened to those people?

What had happened to Izzy Epstein and Rockecenter?

Hound fell over some of the books still stacked in my bedroom and I turned to ask him if he didn't realize that writers needed quiet to concentrate, when my eye lit on one of the books that had fallen. It was 145th Deluxe Edition: In the Mists of Time, Legends of the Original Planets of the Voltarian Confederacy, Compiled by the Lore Section, Interior Division.

Wait a minute. The Gris confession had mentioned that. I padded into my study and brought it back and, despite Hound's eyeballs going to the ceiling, plopped it down on the bed in total disregard of the fountain of dust. Aha! Here was the number in the Gris confession: Folk Legend 894. It mentioned Blito-P3.

I turned to the Deluxe Edition, feeling lucky that it was recent and not abridged. At least I could check that point.

I flipped the pages. I found Folk Legend 893. I read the number of the next one. It was Folk Legend 895.

Hold it. Back up. FOLK LEGEND 894 WAS DELETED!

I seized the Gris manuscript. Could my eyes be playing me tricks? No, there it was: Folk Legend 894. It even quoted it, telling all about Prince Caucalsia and how he had escaped to Blito-P3!

Hound tried to distract me by making me sit down while he shaved me, but I clung to the confession with a grip of steel. I continued to thumb through it while I was dressed and all the time I was eating breakfast, looking at it, wondering about it. His descriptions of the Planet Earth seemed so real, I could not possibly imagine how he could have made them up.

My eye was wandering over a page where an investigative reporter, Bob Hoodward, had overturned the presidency. That didn't quite ring true. What was an "investigative reporter"? I tried to imagine it. Obviously, it was somebody who investigated and wrote a book about it. Yes, that must be it. But to overturn a presidency? That seemed to be laying it on rather heavy. There was no such profession as "investigative reporter" in the Confederacy. Had Bob Hoodward overturned the whole planet? No. The confession also said that he had gotten shot.

My mother interrupted my work by telling me that Corsa and her brother had been waiting on the lawn ever so long for me to come out and play bat ball. Of course I had to go and for the next hour had to watch Corsa galloping about shaking the ground while her brother broke bats. And when I got battered through a backstop by a sizzler, it was very plain to me that if I ever got pushed into marrying her and had to spend my life listening to their raucous provincial laughter whenever I fell down, life would be a very dreary thing. Modon was definitely not for me!

Showering off the sweat and turf stains, I was in the grip of desperation.

Seeking anything to get my mind off such awful fates, I returned to the subject of the confession. Wrapped in a towel, I turned over the pages of the Mists of Time. Yes, Folk Legend 894 was missing. Then, as I closed the book, my eye lit on its publisher. The Interior Division! It was a government book! For some reason they had seen fit to delete this reference to Blito-P3!

I stood in sudden shock. My schoolbooks were government.

The encyclopedias were government. Everything I had been examining was government printed!

If the Gris confession were true, then I WAS STARING AT THE GREATEST GOVERNMENT COVER-UP IN THE LAST MILLENNIA!

It was the first time I had suspected that the government would ever do such a thing. Believe me, reader, it shook me. I had always been brought up carefully to believe that, in government, truth, decency and honor were inseparable. Every relative I had, had dinned it into me! And I believed it myself! Could a government: actually pretend something didn't exist which did? Could it be partners with a lie? Incredible!