But he didn’t let his mind wander there, either. The door opened for the tag, as he’d been told it would, and he walked inside. There was a live guard in the lobby, middle-aged but fit, with a heavy mustache hiding his mouth, sitting behind a high counter and regarding him with curiosity. But William just showed him the tag and the guard gave a half-smile, a twitch of the bushy mustache, really, and then turned back to his monitors. When William reached the elevator, it opened for him, and he stepped inside. He told the elevator to take him to the nineteenth floor, and the doors closed and then they opened again a moment later and he was there. He stepped out.

The apartment number was 1907, he knew that much. The rest, he had been assured, would become clear when he needed to know it. He found 1907. It would be empty now.

In the corridor, he waited.

“Most people,” Kyle Riker said, “achieve enlightenment, if at all, through living. Through the process of life, going through it, you know, a day at a time. That’s most people. Me, I achieved it all at once, through surviving. That’s all. Nothing to do with me, just the luck of the draw. But I survived, and what wisdom I have ...”

He let the sentence trail off there. It didn’t matter. The man he’d been talking to—talking at, running off at the mouth toward, he decided—had ceased to listen and was leaning toward the bartender, signaling for another Alvanian brandy. Kyle, drinking instead a sixty-year-old single malt from right there on Earth, recognized that he had probably reached his own limit. His limits were stricter these days than they had once been, and he was better about enforcing them. Had to be. He gripped the bar with both hands as he lowered himself from the stool, and with a wave at Inis, the shapely Deltan bartender who was two-thirds of the reason Kyle came here in the first place, he headed for the door.

You sound like an old fool,he mentally chided himself as he went. The bar was thirty-five stories up, with floor to ceiling windows facing west, and the sun, he could see as he walked out, was an enormous red ball sinking into the sea on the far side of the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s sunset,he thought, that’s the problem.There had been a time when he’d liked sunsets, but that had been before Starbase 311. As he went to the elevator that would take him down to the twentieth floor, from which he could tube across the street to his own building, he remembered another sunset when he’d had virtually the same conversation. He’d stopped himself, on that occasion, at about the same moment, and said, self-pityingly, “This is the kind of story a man should tell his son. If he had, you know, a son he could talk to. Because a boy needs to hear that his dad—”

“Kyle, dear,” Katherine Pulaski had said then, interrupting him, “shut up.” She had taken away his drink.

Too many painful memories associated with sunsets,he thought. But the wounds had been fresher then, the scars more raw. He was better now. Obviously not whole— you don’t jabber at strangers in bars like you were doing if you’re whole.But better, nonetheless.

When he rounded the bend toward his door, he saw a uniformed Starfleet officer, young and well-scrubbed but with a strangely vacant look in his pale green eyes, standing outside his apartment. A yeoman in a red duty uniform. Kyle had been drinking, but not really that much, and seeing this unexpected sight brought him around to sobriety fast. The yeoman started toward him.

“Are you Kyle Riker?” he asked. His voice sounded odd, as if he were distracted by something even as he voiced the question.

“Yes,” Kyle said. Most of his work was for Starfleet. Maybe the young man was a messenger. But he didn’t see a parcel, and couldn’t imagine any message that would have to be delivered in person. Anyway, he had just been at headquarters before heading home— well, heading for the bar on the way to heading home,he admitted. If anyone had needed to tell him anything they could have done it there.

“I need to see you for a moment, Mr. Riker,” the yeoman went on. His expression—or lack of one, to be more accurate,Kyle thought—didn’t change. He didn’t even blink. “Can we go inside?”

“I ... sure, come on in.” Kyle pressed his hand against the door and it swung open for him. “Can I ask what this is about?”

The yeoman nodded but didn’t verbalize a response as he followed Kyle into the apartment. For a moment Kyle thought this was all the setup for some kind of elaborate practical joke. Friends would pop out from hiding places and wish him a happy birthday. Except that it wasn’t his birthday, nowhere near it, and he didn’t have friends with that kind of sense of humor. Hedidn’t have that kind of sense of humor. That was something else he’d left on Starbase 311.

The yeoman came into his apartment and the door swung shut behind him. “I’d really like to know who you are, young man, and what this is all about,” Kyle said, more forcefully than before. “Now, before we go any further.”

He waited for an answer. But the man’s face didn’t change, and he didn’t speak. Instead, he drew a phaser type-2 from a holster on his belt. Kyle threw himself to the floor, behind a couch, thinking, That’s some message.

The yeoman fired, and the phaser’s beam struck the wall in front of which Kyle had been standing a moment before, blowing a hole in it. Sparks flew, and a cloud of smoke roiled in the air. “Unauthorized weapons discharge,”the apartment’s computer said in its toneless robot voice.

Kyle rolled to the side and tucked his feet underneath himself, preparing to spring. “I know,” he told the computer through clenched teeth.

The yeoman turned stiffly toward him, phaser still at the ready. Kyle jumped toward the young man, slamming into him with all the strength he could muster. They both went down, crashing onto a low table, and then the table tipped over and they rolled to the floor. Kyle caught the man’s wrist and twisted, aiming the phaser anywhere but at himself.

As he did—panting from the exertion, blinking back sweat—he noticed that the yeoman’s blank expression still had not changed. He could have been waiting for a transport, or watching a singularly unexciting game of chess. Kyle pounded the man’s wrist against the edge of the overturned table, once, twice, again; and finally the phaser went flying from his hand. The man gave a soft grunt of pain, but that was the first sound he had made since they had come into the apartment.

“I am alerting the authorities,”the computer said.

“Fine,” Kyle barked back. He made the mistake of turning away from his opponent for a brief moment, and the man took advantage of the opportunity to reach out with his other hand, locking it around Kyle’s throat. Kyle released the now-empty phaser hand and brought both his arms up, hard and fast, knocking the choking hand away. Regaining his feet, he waited for the yeoman to try to rise. When the man did so, his face still empty, Kyle shot out with a right jab to his chin, then a left hook, and another right that cut the flesh above his eye. The man took the blows, air puffing out of him, but showing no evidence of pain or fear.

Then, without warning, he blinked three times in rapid succession. His eyes seemed to focus suddenly, and he looked around, turning his head from left to right quickly. “What ... ?” he started to ask, and then he stopped, blinked once more, and pitched forward. Kyle stepped back as the man landed in a heap at his feet.

He didn’t move. Kyle hesitated a moment, in case it was a trick, then knelt and touched his fingers to the guy’s neck. He could find no pulse.

“You alerted the authorities?” Kyle asked the computer.

“They are on the way,”was the response.

“Cancel them. Get Starfleet Security, not civilian authorities.”