“Yes, Professor?” She spoke without looking at the screen.

“Darya?” a faint voice queried. “Is that you?”

Darya gasped and stared at the terminal, but all it offered was the white-noise display of a sound-only link.

“Hans? Hans Rebka? Where are you? Are you on Miranda?”

“Not any more.” The tone was faint and distorted, but even so the bitterness could be heard in it. “There was no point in staying. The Council wouldn’t even listen. I’m at the final Bose Network node before Sentinel Gate. I can’t talk now. Expect me on Sentinel Gate in half a day.”

The space-thinned voice faded and the connection was abruptly broken. Darya walked forward to the easy chair in front of the terminal and collapsed into it. She sat staring at nothing.

The Council did not believe them. Incredible. That meant that it had rejected the sworn statements of one of its own Council members; and of the embodied computer, E.C. Tally, who did not know how to lie; and of Hans Rebka, recognized as one of the most experienced and canny troubleshooters in the whole spiral arm.

Darya roused herself. She ought to call Professor Merada and tell him that many of the references that she wanted to cite had been dismissed by the highest authority in the spiral arm. What the Council did not accept, no one else would consider reliable. But she did not move. The Council rejection was certainly bad news, since it meant that nothing that she, or anyone else in their party, said about the events of the past year would have credibility.

But what the rejection implied was far worse, the worst news of all: Zardalu were at large in the spiral arm — and no one in authority believed it.

“Allow me to introduce Captain Hans Rebka.”

Darya had steeled herself for the looks she would receive when Hans was ushered into the institute’s dining room. Even so, they were hard to take.

“Captain Rebka is a native of Teufel, in the Phemus Circle,” she went on, “although most recently he has been on Miranda.”

The score of research workers sitting at the long table were doing their best not to stare — and failing. Darya could easily put herself in their shoes. They saw a small, thin man in his late thirties, dressed in a patched and dingy uniform. His head appeared a fraction too big for his body, and his bony face was disfigured by a dozen scars, the most noticeable of them running in a double line from his left temple to the point of his jaw.

Darya knew how her colleagues were feeling. She had experienced an identical reaction when she first met Hans Rebka. Courage and skill were invisible; it took time to learn that he had both.

She glanced down the table. Professor Merada had made one of his rare excursions from the den of his study to the senior dining room, while across from him at the far end Carmina Gold sat peering thoughtfully at her fingernails. Darya knew both of them well, and fully appreciated what they could do. If someone was needed to perform an excruciatingly detailed and encyclopedic survey of any element of spiral arm history, flagging every tiny inconsistency of data or missing reference, then the thoughtful, humorless Merada could not be surpassed; if someone was needed who could follow and tease out the most convoluted train of logic, simplify it to essentials, and present so that a child — or a councilor! — could grasp it, then Carmina Gold, moody and childish herself, was the absolute best.

But if you found yourself in deep trouble, without any hope of escape and so close to Death that you could smell his breath in your own terrified sweat… well, then you closed your eyes tight and prayed for Hans Rebka.

But none of that showed. To the eye of anyone from a rich world of the Fourth Alliance, the newcomer was nothing but an ill-dressed hick from the back of nowhere. He fitted not at all into the genteel, leisurely, and cultured frame of an Institute dinner.

The others at the table were at least making an effort at politeness.

“You were recently on Miranda?” the woman next to Rebka said as he sat down. She was Glenna Omar, one of the senior information-systems specialists and in Darya’s view quite unnecessarily beautiful. “I’ve never been there, although I suppose that I should have, since it’s the headquarters for the Fourth Alliance. What did you think of Miranda, Captain?”

Rebka stared blank-faced down at his plate while Darya, sitting opposite him, waited anxiously. If he was going to be rude or sullen or outrageous, here in her own home… there had been no time to brief him, only to give him a hug and a hurried greeting, after he had been decanted from the subluminal delivery craft and before the Immigration officials were ushering them into the dining room to meet her colleagues.

“Paradise,” Rebka said suddenly. He turned to Glenna Omar and gave her an admiring smile packed with sexual overtones. “I’m from Teufel, of course, where the best road you can find is said to be any road that takes you somewhere else; so some might argue that I’m easily impressed. But I thought that Miranda was wonderful, my idea of paradise — until I landed here on Sentinel Gate, and learned that I was wrong. This has to be the most beautiful planet in the whole Fourth Alliance — in the whole spiral arm.”

Darya took a deep breath and relaxed — for half a second. Hans was on his best behavior, but Glenna Omar’s response was a good deal too warm.

“Oh, you’re just being nice to us, Captain,” she was saying. “Of course, I’ve never been to any of the worlds of your Phemus Circle, either. How would you describe them to me?”

Dingy, dirty, dismal, and dangerous, Darya thought. Remote, impoverished, brutish, backward, and barbaric. And all the men are sex-mad.

“I haven’t been to all the worlds of the Phemus Circle,” Rebka was replying. “But I can tell you what they say in the Circle about my home world, Teufel: ‘What sins must a man commit, in how many past lives, to be born on Teufel?’ ”

“Oh, come now. It can’t really be that bad.”

“It’s worse.”

“The most awful planet in the whole Phemus Circle?”

“I never said that. Scaldworld is probably as bad, and people from Styx say that they go to Teufel for vacations.”

“Now I’m sure you’re joking. If the whole Phemus Circle is as horrible as you say, no one would stay there. What job do you have, when you’re back home?”

“I guess you could call me a traveling troubleshooter. One thing the Phemus Circle is never short of, that’s trouble. That’s how Professor Lang” — he nodded to Darya — “and I met. We ran into a spot of bother together on Quake, one component of a double planet in the Mandel system.”

“And she brought you back here, to the Fourth Alliance? Wise Darya.” But Glenna did not take her eyes off Rebka.

“Not right away.” Rebka paused, with an expression on his face that Darya recognized. He was about to take some major step. “We did a few other things first. We and a few others — humans and aliens, plus an Alliance councilor and an embodied computer — went to one of the Mandel system’s gas-giant planets, Gargantua, where we found an artificial planetoid. We flew through a bunch of wild Phages to get there, and rescued some of us from a Lotus field. Then a sentient Builder construct put our party through a Builder transportation system, thirty thousand light-years out of the spiral arm, to a free-space extragalactic Builder facility called Serenity. When we arrived there, Professor Lang and I—”

He was going to tell it all! Everything! All the facts that the whole party had agreed must remain dead secret until a high-level approval to discuss them had been granted. Darya tried to kick Rebka’s leg under the table and hit nothing but empty air.