Relief and disappointment both seemed premature. Louis stood up and walked toward the couple. Glenna came undulating along the path, her hand laid possessively on the arm of the tall man at her side. She was wearing a long-sleeved, high-necked gown of pale green that left a minimum of exposed skin and made her appear positively virginal.

“Hello, Louis.” She smiled at him warmly. “I hoped we’d find you here. There’s been a change of plans. I was in the middle of a discussion with Professor Bloom—”

“Quintus.”

“Quintus.” Glenna snuggled close to her companion. “And we hadn’t finished talking. So he invited me to continue through dinner. And naturally…”

“No problem.” Louis meant it. He admired real nerve, and there was no hint of apology in Glenna’s manner. “Hello, Professor. I’m Louis Nenda.”

“Indeed?” Bloom removed his arm from Glenna’s grasp and offered a limp-fingered wave of the hand. He regarded Louis with the enthusiasm of a man meeting a Karelian head louse, the sort that popped out of a hole in the rock and nipped your head off with one snip of the mandibles. “And what do you do?”

“Businessman, mostly, for exploration projects. Last trip I was out at the Torvil Anfract, came back via the Mandel system.”

“Indeed?” Bloom had turned to look back up the hill even before Louis answered the question.

Glenna lingered a moment, her fingers on Louis’s bare arm.

“He’s an absolute genius,” she whispered. “I do hope you understand, but given a chance like this…”

“I said, no problem.” I know that game, sweetheart. You take the one you want right now, but be sure to put the other one in cold storage in case you need him later. “Go and enjoy your dinner.”

“Some other time, though, you and me?”

“You bet.”

Glenna squeezed his arm happily. But Quintus Bloom had turned, and was sauntering back with a frown on his face.

“I say. Something you said just now. Did you mention the Torvil Anfract?”

“Sure did. I just came back from there, way out in the Zardalu Communion.”

“That’s the name that the Lang woman mentioned the other evening at dinner.” Bloom was explaining to Glenna, while managing to ignore Louis. “She said that it was a Builder artifact, but of course as Professor Merada pointed out, there is no evidence of that. If it were an artifact, however, that could be a finding of enormous significance.” Bloom at last turned directly to Louis. “Do you know Darya Lang?”

“Certainly.”

“Was she at the Anfract with you, by any chance?”

“At it, and in it. Right in it.”

“Three days ago, after our dinner, she left the institute.” Bloom lifted his gaze above Louis’s head, and stood staring at nothing. “She told no one where she was going. So almost certainly…”

Quintus Bloom didn’t spell out his thought processes to Louis. He didn’t need to. Louis had the answer to the next question ready, even before Bloom asked it.

“If I were to provide you with a ship, could you fly me to the Torvil Anfract?”

“Could, and would. I even have the ship. If the price is right, I mean.”

The last sentence had come out without thinking, but Louis didn’t try to kid himself. The ‘right’ price? Even if Bloom didn’t have more than two cents, it would be enough.

Daybreak on Sentinel Gate was, if anything, more spectacular than sunset. The air was magically clear, the flowers and shrubs touched with fragrant dew. The birds, awake but not yet in motion, sang a dawn chorus from within their hidden roosts.

Glenna, strolling back to her house, noticed none of this. She was frequently heading home in the early daylight hours, and the charms of daybreak’s plant and animal life left her unmoved. She was, in fact, feeling faintly disappointed. Quintus seemed to like her well enough, and to enjoy their long hours together. They had talked, and laughed, eaten and drunk, and talked again. They had wandered arm-in-arm around the Institute, inside and out. They had watched the romantic setting of Sentinel Gate. The touch of his hand on Glenna’s shoulder had set all her juices flowing. And then, when everything seemed ready to go full speed ahead, he had gone back to his own quarters instead.

Glenna sighed. Maybe the demure dress had been a tactical error? Without spelling it out in detail, she had known faster men. In the case of Quintus Bloom, that slowness might be a deadly drawback. He was a career man, a man on the move, heading upwards and already itching to leave Sentinel Gate. In retrospect, it was a pity that she had introduced him to Louis Nenda, with his talk of the Anfract, because they would soon be on their way. Glenna might not get a second chance — at either of them.

She was close to home, near enough to see the soft light that she left burning at night by her front porch. Near enough to see that the porch door, which she was sure had been left open, was now closed. Someone had been inside her house. Perhaps they were still in her house.

Glenna frowned — in puzzlement, not in alarm. Theft and violence were almost unknown on Sentinel Gate. She lived alone. Maintenance and cleaning robots were punctiliously careful to leave a house’s doors and windows exactly as they found them.

She felt the delicious tingle of a desired though unexpected treat. Quintus Bloom had disappointed. He had proved regrettably diffident. But Louis Nenda would not be like that. He was a real out-worlder, a wild man from one of the rough-and-tumble planets of the Zardalu Communion. She had postponed his date, and all that went with it. But he wasn’t willing to wait.

She just loved an impatient man.

Glenna slipped off her shoes, eased open the door, and drifted inside. The livingroom was empty, but she could smell a faint, alien musk. Of course, he would already be in the bedroom, lying waiting for her on the soft, over-sized bed. Would he have removed those dark, tight-fitting clothes? Or would he have waited, to let Glenna do it? Waited, if he was the man she hoped he was. He must know how eager she was to explore for herself the ways in which he had been augmented.

Glenna tiptoed into the bedroom. As she approached the bed itself she paused. Louis was not lying on it. And crouched beside it—

A great nightmare shape rose up, as high as the ceiling. A pair of long, jointed limbs swept Glenna from the floor, and her scream was muffled by a soft black paw. She was drawn in toward a broad, eyeless head, and to the thin proboscis that quivered at its center. Faint, high-pitched squeaks sounded in her ears.

Glenna struggled, but not as hard as she might have. She had recognized the intruder. It was a Cecropian. She knew through the institute’s grapevine that a female of that alien species had recently arrived there. Arrived, according to Glenna’s informant, with Louis Nenda.

“What do you want?”

It was wasted breath, because everyone knew that Cecropians didn’t speak. But the eyeless white head nodded at the sound, and carried Glenna back to the door of her living room. One black limb pointed silently through the doorway to Glenna’s communications terminal, then to a gray box that sat next to it. Glenna found herself placed gently back on the floor at the doorway. She was at once released.

She could flee — Glenna’s intruder would have a difficult time squeezing back through into the living room, though she must have entered that way. However, it was hard to believe that anything that intended her real harm would have placed her where she was free to run away. Glenna walked unsteadily across to the communications terminal, and stood there waiting.

The Cecropian eased her way through the door and crept across to the gray box. Nimble black paws began a complex dance of movement in front of it. The terminal screen came to life, displaying words: SPEAK YOUR HUMAN SPEECH. THIS DEVICE WILL INTERPRET IT.