“ ‘We’?” Thamnos echoed him.

Koval’s answer was a cryptic smile, and even Thamnos knew enough not to follow that line of questioning further. Then something else occurred to him.

“If word gets out that I’ve got the cure, what’s to stop anyone with a big enough fleet from invading Renaga and stealing all of it?”

“Now, there’s a curious thing,” Koval said. “Hilopononly seems to work on Renaga. We’ve tried taking it offworld, and it’s useless. Our scientists are not certain whether it’s something in the atmosphere, the sun’s radiation, the climate, some interaction with other elements in the soil, or simple magic. We’ll figure it out eventually, but how fortunate for you that we haven’t yet, hm? And because Renaga’s inside the Zone, the machinations necessary for either side to violate treaty, confront the other side’s patrols, invade and conquer, are simply too costly in this day and age. Both sides will have to come to you.”

But Thamnos wasn’t even thinking that far ahead. It never occurred to him to ask why, if Romulan scientists knew all about hilopon,Koval even needed him. All he could think of to ask was “Why me?”

“Because you’re here. Because you were resourceful enough to bring specimens of R-fever with you. And because if a Romulan scientist announced that we’d discovered the curative effects of hilopon,we’d be accused of violating the Neutral Zone, wouldn’t we? Suspicions would be aroused no matter what. Romulans are always blamed when there’s trouble, seldom honored when honor is due. But you’re a Federation expatriate, married to a Renagan female. You’d have immunity. Do you see?”

Thamnos did, but he didn’t. Ultimately, Koval knew, it was all too complicated for him. It never occurred to him to refuse. Maybe it was the echo of the words “the Nobel Prize, the Zee Magnees Prize” that crowded everything else out of his brain. He’d asked Koval what he meant by “immortality,” and now he finally understood it. He thought.

McCoy wished he hadn’t said anything about “house calls” within Uhura’s hearing.

“You are not—repeat notgoing to Rigel IV to talk to any member of the Thamnos family,” she scolded him, surprised that McCoy, who had previously resisted so much as moving off the porch, was suddenly packing a bag and arranging transport. “Someone from Medical can handle this, or one of my Listeners. There’s no need for you to—”

“This is personal!” McCoy interrupted, his jaw set. “There’s a special circle in hell reserved for doctors who create illness instead of treating it, and I have no doubt whoever did this has a front-row seat, but I’d be happy to hasten his journey. What was it Jim used to say about risk?” he asked rhetorically, stuffing clean socks into a travel bag.

“Leonard, I’m serious. Stop it right now! If you want to talk to Thamnos Senior, rattle his cage, that’s fine. But you do that onscreen, not in person. Neither of us has time to waste on this.”

“Is that the real reason?” McCoy demanded testily. “Or are you just mothering me?”

“It’s not about that. I want a record of the transmission. We can analyze it, determine if he’s telling the truth or not.”

McCoy stood there with the last pair of socks in his hand; he seemed to have forgotten what he intended to do with them. Finally he remembered what he was doing and began unpacking the travel bag.

“Hadn’t thought of that,” he acknowledged. “All right, you win. I’ll try to get him to talk to me on subspace. Won’t be easy, but before you ask, yes, I’m up to it. Anger is a wonderful tonic, young lady. Now get off my screen; I’ve got work to do.”

Some of the bluster had worn off by the time he’d been routed through a maze of security checks and retina scans and spoken to half a dozen Rigelian authorities, each more officious than the one before, and he had no doubt that if he wasn’t who he was he’d have been ignored entirely. But even Papaver Thamnos knew better than to let Leonard McCoy talk to his automated comm system.

By the time the lanky, liver-spotted old pirate, who was not much younger than McCoy himself, appeared onscreen, McCoy was ready for his afternoon nap. Still, they managed to exchange pleasantries and talk about the weather and what to do about arthritic knees, and McCoy was about to do his diplomatic best to lay out his case for needing to know the whereabouts of Thamnos the Younger without telling the old man why when, as if on cue, a pack of multicolored five-toed Rigelian emillihounds came bounding into the room where Thamnos the Elder was, setting up a fearful baying racket.

The old pirate feigned surprise, but didn’t order the dogs away. Instead he began laughing and playing with them, encouraging them, in a scrabble of toenails and a kind of breathless yapping, to race around the room in a kind of bizarre choreography as he sat back and watched McCoy’s reaction. His face—an older, cannier version of his son’s—was a grinning mask.

McCoy, to his credit, didn’t rattle. He’d figured the dogs had been introduced in an attempt to distract him, and he was not about to be distracted. He also knew the yapping would make it difficult for the voice-print analyzers to do their job. He waited calmly until most of the hounds tired and flopped panting on the floor before he asked Thamnos where he might find his son.

“No idea,” Thamnos said. “Wouldn’t tell you if I did know. Wouldn’t be prudent. None of your business, anyway. Can’t help you. Don’t know why I should. Only professional courtesy, one physician to another, letting you get this far. Goodbye.”

And that was that. The two men sat glaring at each other for a few moments while the senior Thamnos sat stroking of one of the dogs, stonewalling him. Then McCoy tried again.

“There’s a disease akin to the Fever,” he began. “Some of the first victims were on your own world—”

But Thamnos merely held up one liver-spotted hand to silence him.

“Not interested. Someone else’s problem. Isn’t it?” he asked the dog, fondling its ears and checking them for ticks.

How long they sat there at an impasse, McCoy couldn’t tell. He cleared his throat and tried one last time.

“Dr. Thamnos—”

“Can’t hear you.”

Now it was a question of who would terminate the transmission first. Much as it irked him to do so, McCoy shut it down from his end without saying goodbye. He hoped Papaver would eventually divert his attention away from the dogs and wonder how long he’d been performing to an empty room, but he doubted it.

“Tuvok? What is a ‘red herring’?”

Tuvok was scanning transmissions from the worlds they passed on the way to Quirinus, searching for any report or rumor, official or otherwise, of unexplained fatal illnesses. Had they the time and the guarantee of safety, they might have come closer and scanned the worlds themselves. But Uhura sent them daily updates on the spread of the disease; it bloomed from world to world on the starcharts like the blight of fungus on an endangered tree. There was no time to refine the search process. Perhaps if there were Listeners in the vicinity, they could go to ground and search out data on the worlds they passed, but Albatrosshad to hurry.

Thus Tuvok scanned, encoding his findings and sending them back to Earth for Dr. Crusher’s team to analyze.

And now this question, the sort of question one of his children might have asked when they were far younger than she, Tuvok mused. But if Zetha was what she claimed to be, her education has been incomplete at best, and such questions could logically be expected.

She was tending the orchid he had brought with him. An indulgence, he had told himself at the time, most illogical. And yet, he thought now, it provided an esthetic touch to the Albatross’s drab, utilitarian surroundings, and each of his crewmates had, at one time or another, admired it. Zetha seemed particularly taken with it.