Well, disappeared anyway....

There was a car waiting for us on the ground, but we were delayed by the inevitable decontamination baths-no telling what bugs were still floating around-and then had to wait again until our vaccinations could be updated.

It was another hour before we were in the Jeep and on otir way south. We didn't have a driver-the car knew the way without one. There was the standard taped welcome on the screen, which Duke and I both ignored, and a thermos of te

The jeep delivered us to the Special Forces officers' billet-formerly the downtown Oakland Holiday hin. "Probably because they couldn't find worse," Duke explained. There were no humans on duty here either-just a couple of terminals, a bell-cart and a mindless robot, noisily polishing the lobby floor. We had to step around it to get to the desk.

The terminal beeped and clucked, checked our ID, issued us key-cards and wished us a nice stay. It also called us "Mr. and Mrs. Anderson."

Duke wasn't amused.

"It must have heard what you said-" I pointed out. We were following the bell-cart down the hall. "You know, all these machines talk to each other. They compare notes."

Duke gave me a withering sideways glance. I shut up. One day I would learn-Duke did not appreciate whimsy. "Clean up quickly," he said.

"No sleep-?"

"You'll sleep in October. There's a war on, remember?" Right.

A hot shower and a shave later-the second-best substitute for six hours sleep, (the first-best being eight hours sleep)-Duke handed me hardcopy orders. "There's a colloquium at ten hundred about the worms. You're already cleared through. I want you to specifically see if anyone knows anything about nesting habits. They've already got the disks of yesterday's mission. Find out if they've seen them. I think we're seeing another shift in behavior. Oh yeah-and be polite. The science boys are starting to chafe at the presence of the military."

"Right. "

As interested as I was in the Chtorran ecology, I still would have preferred the sleep. With luck, I could sleep in the session-as long as they didn't put me in the front row.

The Oakland Control Section of the United States Ecological Agency was hidden behind a long range of rolling hills. The jeep whined as it rolled up the winding slope. As it came over the top, I saw that most of the buildings below were hardened inflatables. They were large and roomy and blandly amorphous. A platoon of twenty shining robots was mowing the lawns around the buildings. Lawns! I didn't know whether to laugh at the extravagance-or be annoyed at the waste of energy. But the grass was green and lush looking.

I showed my credentials to the gort at the entrance-it scanned them with an evil-looking eye; these machines weren't designed for friendliness-and then passed me through. I still hadn't seen another human being yet.

The jeep headed toward the largest of the domes. It rolled right into the building and delivered me to a tall set of double-steel doors and an armed sergeant in a glass booth. The glass looked thick and the sergeant wore a grim expression.

The jeep beeped. Something clicked. The red lights went on above the doors. Surveillance cameras swiveled to look at meand so did other devices that weren't cameras.

Maybe this wasn't going to be as easy as I thought.

The sergeant looked up, saw I was an officer and saluted perfunctorily. Then he directed me to approach the booth and stand on the white platform in front of it.

After he finished scanning me, the sergeant let me take two steps forward to state my business. He studied his screens for a moment, nodded and hit a button. The red lights went off, the surveillance cameras swiveled back into their housings-so did the other devices-and I relaxed. Somewhat.

The sergeant touched another button and the steel doors groaned and slid apart, revealing a bright-lit maze of doors, passageways, stairs, halls, catwalks and elevators. There were conduits and pipes everywhere, all brightly colored and labeled with large stenciled letters and numbers. It looked like they'd forgotten the interior walls of the building.

I looked to the sergeant with what I hoped was a questioning expression.

The sergeant nodded-obviously he'd seen the expression before-and pointed to a door. He directed me down a long featureless corridor-follow the red stripe on the floor-and into an anteroom, through the double doors and

A lady in a white coat looked up from her desk and greeted me with a frown. "You're-?"

"McCarthy, James Edward, Lieutenant, Special Forces."

She looked back to her terminal. "You're not on my list-"

"I just arrived in Oakland two hours ago="

"I'll have to double-check this-" She was already reaching for the phone.

I said the magic words: "-and I'm in the Uncle Ira Group." She replaced the phone neatly on the hook. "Right." She slid her chair back and stood up. I saw that she needed a cane to walk. "Follow me, please-"

Through another set of double doors, and down another corridor-why bother with security, I wondered; just paint out all the stripes and nobody will be able to find anything-and into a small angular theater, already darkened. The seats were stacked in steep rows overlooking a curtained wall. A young-looking woman in a lab coat stood at the podium. I saw a lot of uniforms and lab coats and grim faces. I looked for a place in the rear of the room, preferably a comfortable one

"There's one down here, Lieutenant-" the woman at the podium said. She looked familiar.

I threaded my way down toward the front row. Damn. "Oh-it's McCarthy. I thought I recognized the Special Forces." Now I knew her. I smiled back-weakly. Her name was Fletcher-but she'd once introduced herself as Lucrezia Borgia. I didn't know her first name. As I took my seat, she said, "Good to see you again, Lieutenant."

The man sitting in the next chair glanced at me curiously. I flushed with embarrassment.

"All right," said Dr. Fletcher. "Let's get back to work. Dr. Abbato at the Cairo Institute has raised an interesting question about the gastropedes-and their place in their own ecology-and that's opened up a very interesting, and perhaps very fruitful, line of research. I think you'll find today's demonstration very-" she allowed herself a smile, "-enlightening."

I propped my elbow on the chair arm and my chin on my knuckles, and tried to look awake.

Dr. Fletcher had close-cropped dark hair. She had high cheekbones and wore thin-rimmed glasses-and she had that professional look, neither plain nor pretty. She looked competent. I guessed it was the crisp way she handled herself.

"Dr. Abbato has posed the question-what kind of ecology could produce creatures like the Chtorran worm? What is the home planet like? That's where he began.

"All right-these are today's answers:

"Heavier gravity, we know that. The musculature of Chtorran creatures, the strength of their shells and skeletons, the rigidity of Chtorran plant stems-we are assuming that Chtorr had a minimum gravity of 1.1 Earth normal and a maximum of 1. 5. That latter figure is probably a little high, but we're giving ourselves a margin for error.

"A thicker atmosphere, of course, but we have no way of really knowing its makeup. Chtorran plants and animals are extraordinarily good at extracting oxygen from this atmosphere, so we are allowing the assumption that the Chtorran air has somewhat less free oxygen.

"We do think that the Chtorran primary is a red star. Very old. Perhaps very close to final collapse. Chtorran plants seem to prefer red light, the redder the better, and Chtorran eyes seem to work best in the red end of the spectrum.

"And finally, we think that the Chtorran ecology is at least a half-billion years older than ours. That means-if Chtorr evolved anything like Earth-that there were the equivalent of mammals, or even more advanced life-forms, walking the surface of Chtorr when the best this planet had to offer was slime not even distinctive enough to make an interesting fossil. That means that the Chtorran ecology has at least a half-billion-year head start in the evolution race."