Perchevski studied the faceless man while he told his tale. The interrogator's most noteworthy feature was his wrinkled, blue-veined, weathered hands. His inquisitor was old...

The Faceless Man usually was not. Normally he was a young, expert psychologist-lawyer. The old men in the Bureau were ex-operatives, senior staff, decision-makers, not technicians.

He knew most of the old men. He listened to the questions carefully, but there was no clue in the voice asking them. It was being technically modified. He reexamined the hands. They offered no clues either.

He began to worry. Something had gone broomstick. They did not bring on the dreadnoughts otherwise.

His nerves were not up to an intensive interrogation. It had been a heavy mission, and the trip home had given him too much time to talk to himself.

Debriefing continued all month. They questioned him and counterchecked his answers so often and so thoroughly that when they finally let him go he no longer really felt that the mission had been part of his life. It was almost as if some organ had been removed from him one molecule at a time, leaving him with nothing but a funny empty feeling.

Five weeks after he had arrived at Luna Command they handed him a pink plastic card identical in all other respects to the white one he had received at Decontamination. They also gave him an envelope containing leave papers, money, bankbooks, and such written persona as a man needed to exist in an electronic universe. Included was an address.

An unsmiling amazon opened a door and set him free.

He stepped into the public tunnels of Luna Command. Back from beyond the looking glass. He caught a bus just like any spacer on leave.

The room was exactly as he had left it—except that they had moved it a thousand kilometers from its former location. He tumbled into his bed. He did not get out again for nearly two days.

Cornelius Perchevski was a lonely man. He had few friends. The nature of his profession did not permit making many.

For another five days he remained isolated in his room, adapting to the books, collections, and little memorabilia that could be accounted the time-spoor of the real him. Like some protean beast his personality slowly reshaped itself to its natural mold. He began taking interest in the few things that made a unified field of his present and past.

He took down his typewriter and notebooks and pecked away for a few hours. A tiny brat of agony wrested itself from the torn womb of his soul. He punched his agent's number, added his client code, and fed the sheets to the fax transmitter.

In a year or two, if he was lucky, a few credits might materialize in one of his accounts.

He lay back and stared at the ceiling. After a time he concluded that he had been alone enough. He had begun to heal. He could face his own kind again. He rose and went to a mirror, examined his face.

The deplastification process was complete. It always took less time than did his internal mendings. The wounds within never seemed to heal all the way.

He selected civilian clothing from his closet, dressed.

He returned to public life by taking a trip to the little shop. The bus was crowded. He began to feel the pressure of all those personalities, pushing and pulling his own... Had he come out too early? Each recovery seemed to take a little longer, to be a little less effective.

"Walter Clark!" the lady shopkeeper declared. "Where the hell have you been? You haven't been in here for six months. And you look like you've been through hell."

"How's it going, Max?" A self-conscious grin ripped his face open. Christ, it felt good to have somebody be glad to see him. "Just got out of the hospital."

"Hospital? Again? Why didn't you call me? What happened? Some Stone Age First Expansioner stick a spear in you again?"

"No. It was a bug this time. Acted almost like leukemia. And they don't even know where I picked it up. You have anything new for me?"

"Sit your ass down, Walter. You bet I have. I tried to call you when it came in, but your box kept saying you weren't available. You ought to get a relay put on that thing. Here, let me get you some coffee."

"Max, I ought to marry you."

"No way. I'm having too much fun being single. Anyway, why ruin a perfectly good friendship?" She set coffee before him.

"Oh. This's the real thing. I love you."

"It's Kenyan."

"Having Old Earth next door is good for something, then."

"Coffee and comic opera. Here's the collection. The best stuff is gone already. You know how it is. I didn't know when you'd show up. I couldn't hold it forever."

Perchevski sipped coffee. He closed his eyes and allowed the molecules of his homeworld to slide back across his taste buds. "I understand. I don't expect you to hang on to anything if you've got another customer." He opened the ancient stamp album.

"You weren't out to the March of Ulant, were you, Walter?"

"Ulant? No. The other direction. Why?"

"Because of the rumors, I was curious. You know how Luna Command is. They say Ulant has been rearming. The Senators are kicking up a fuss. High Command keeps telling them it's nonsense. But I've had a couple of high-powered corporate executive types in and they say the Services are smoke screening, that there's something going on out there. A lot of heavy ships moving through here lately, too. All of them moving from out The Arm in toward the March."

"It's all news to me, Max. I haven't had the holo on since I got back. I'm so far behind I'll probably never catch up. These Hamburg... The notes all over the page. What are they?"

"Jimmy Eagle did that. Right after I picked up the collection. Lot of them are forgeries. The cancellations. Most of the stamps are good. He marked the reprints. You haven't heard any news at all?"

"Max, by the time I got back from Illwind I was so sick I couldn't see. I didn't care. I don't know why we've got an embassy on that hole, anyway. Or why they sent me there. The only natives I ever saw were two burglars we caught trying to blow up the Ambassador's safe. They need a military assistance mission like Old Earth needs another Joshua Ja. Their methods of killing each other are adequate already."

"Then you haven't even heard that Ja is done for?"

"Hey? What happened? This I got to hear about."

Joshua Ja was one of Old Earth's more noxious public figures. The holonet newscasters had dubbed him the Clown Prince of Senegal. The nets followed his threats and posturing faithfully, using him as humorous leavening for their otherwise grim newscasts.

The self-proclaimed Emperor of Equatorial Africa was no joke to his subjects and neighbors. His scatterbrained projects and edicts invariably cost lives.

"He invaded the Mauritanian Hegemony while you were gone."

Perchevski laughed. "Sounds like one gang of inmates trying to break into another's asylum."

Old Earth was a nonvoting member of Confederation. Both Confederation itself and the World Government refrained from interfering in local affairs. World Government held off because it had no power. Confederation did so because the costs of straightening out the home-world were considered prohibitive.

Earth was one of the few Confederation worlds supporting multiple national states. And the only one boasting an incredible one hundred twenty-nine.

World Government's writ ran only in those countries deigning to go along with its decrees.

Centuries earlier there had been but two states on Earth, World Commonweal and United Asia. United Asia had remained impotent throughout its brief, turbulent history. World Commonweal might have created a planetary state, but had collapsed at Fail Point, so called because at that point in time agro-industrial protein production capacity had fallen below the population's absolute minimum survival demand.