Building A, it said occasionally, brown stencil letters a meter high, obscured here and there by the hanging pictures. Doors were brown-painted metal. There was, anomaly, an office with curtained hallward windows. That was the one that said, in a small engraved-plastic sign: Dr. Jordan Warrick, Administrator, Educational Division.

A guard opened that door for him. He walked in, saw Paul at the desk, Paul, who looked—like Paul, that was all: he was dyeing his hair—who got up and took his hand and hugged him.

Then he knew it was real. "Go on in," Paul said into his ear, patting him on the shoulder. "He knows you're here."

He went to the door, opened it and went in. Jordan met him there with open arms. For a long, long while they just held on to each other without saying a word. He wept. Jordan did.

"Good to see you," Jordan said finally. "Damn, you've grown."

"You're looking good," Justin said, at arms' length, trying not to see the lines around the eyes and the mouth. Jordan felt thinner, but he was still fit and hard—perhaps, Justin thought, Jordan had done what he had done, from the day Denys had called him into his office and told him he had gotten a travel permit—run lap upon lap in the gym, determined not to have his father see him out of shape.

"I wish Grant could have come."

"So did he." It was hard to keep his composure. He got it back. And did not add that there was reason to worry, that Grant was more scared than Grant wanted to let on, being left alone at Reseune—azi, and legally under Reseune's authority. "Maybe some other trip."

This trip hadto work. They hadto make it as smooth and easy as possible, to get others in future. He had an idea every paper in his briefcase was going to be gone over again by every means Security had here; and that when he got back to Reseune they were going to do it all again, and strip-search him the way they had before he boarded the plane, very, very thoroughly. But he was here. He had the rest of the day and till noon tomorrow. Every minute he spent with Jordan, two high-clearance Security agents would be sitting in the same room; but that was all right, right as the cameras and the bugs that invaded every moment of his life and left nothing private.

So he walked over to the conference table with Jordan, he sat down as Paul came in and joined them, he said: "I brought my work. They'll get my briefcase up here in a bit. I'm really anxious for you to have a look at some of it."

It's a waste of time, Yanni had said, in Yanni's inimitable way, when he had begged Yanni to give him a clearance to bring bis latest design with him.

And then cleared it by that afternoon. This'll cost you, the note Yanni sent him had said. You'll pay me in overtime.

"How have things been going?" Jordan asked him, asking him more than that with the anxiousness in his eyes, the way a son and a psych student could read and Security and voice-stress analyzers might possibly miss.

Is there some condition to this I don't know about?

"Hell," he said, and laughed, letting the tension go, "too damn well. Toodamn well, all year. Last year was hell. I imagine you picked that up. I couldn't do anything right, everything I touched fell apart—"

A lot of problems I can't mention.

"—but it's like all of a sudden something sorted itself out. For one thing, they took me off real-time work. I felt guilty about that—which is probably a good indicator how bad it was; I was taking too long, I was too tired to think straight, just no good at it, that's all, and too tied up in it to turn it loose. Yanni thought I could break through, you know, some of my problems that way, I know damn well what he was trying to do; then he R&R'd me into production again. Until for some reason he had a change of heart and shoved me back into R&D, on a long, long lead-time. Where I do just fine, thanks."

They had talked so long in time-lag he found himself doing it again, condensing everything into packets, with a little worry about Security objecting in every sentence. But here he had more freedom. They promised him that. There was no outside eavesdropping to worry about and they could talk about anything—that offered no hint of escape plans or hidden messages to be smuggled outside Reseune.

Jordan knew about the Project. Both Projects, Ari and Rubin.

"I'm glad," Jordan said. "I'm glad. How's Grant's work?"

"He never was in trouble. You know Grant." And then he realized how far back that question had to go.

All those years. Grant in hospital. Himself in Security's hands. Jordan being whisked away to testify in Novgorod before they shipped him out to Planys.

His hand shook, on the table in front of him, shook as he carried it to his mouth and tried to steady himself.

"Grant—came out of it all right. Stable as ever. He's fine. He really is. I don't know what I'd have done without him. Have you been all right?"

"Hell at first. But it's a small staff, a close staff. They can come and go, of course, and they know my condition here, but it's a real difference—a real difference."

O God, be careful. Anything you say, anything you admit to needing, they can use. Watch what you say.

". . . We take care of each other here. We carry each other's loads, sometimes. I think it's all that desert out there. You either go crazy and they ship you out, or you get seduced by the tranquillity here. Even Security's kind of reasonable. —Aren't you, Jim?"

One guard had settled in, taken a chair in the corner. The man laughed and leaned back, ankles crossed.

Not azi. CIT.

"Most times," Jim the guard said.

"It's home," Jordan said. "It's gotten to be home. You have to understand the mentality out here. Our news and a lot of our music comes in from the station. We're real good on current events. Our clothes, our books, our entertainment tapes, all of that—get flown in when they get around to it, and books and tapes don't get into the library here until Security vets the addition. So there's a lot of staff silliness—you have to amuse yourself somehow; and the big new E-tape is Echoes.Which ought to tell you something."

Three years since that tape had come out. "Damn, I could have brought you a dozen."

"Listen, anything you can do for library here will be appreciated. I've complained. Everyone on staff has complained. The garrison snags everything. Militarypriority. And they do the luggage searches. I couldn't warn you. I hope to hell you haven't got anything in your overnight kit that's in short supply here, because they've got a censored number of soldiers over at the base really desperate for censored, censored, and censored. Not to mention toilet paper. So we're not the only ones."

He laughed, because Jordan laughed and Paul laughed, and Jim-the-guard laughed, because it was desperately, bleakly funny to think of, when there was so much that was not at all funny in this isolation; because it was so much relief to know Planys finally, not as a totally barren exile, but as a place where humanness and humor were valuable.

They talked and argued theory till they were hoarse. They went to the lab and Jordan introduced him to the staffers he had never met, always with Jim and his azi partner Enny at left and right of them. They had a drink with Lel Schwartz and Milos Carnath-Morley, neither one of whom he had seen since he was seventeen; and had dinner with Jordan and Paul—and Jim and Enny.

He had no intention of sleeping. Neither did Jordan or Paul. They had allotted him a certain number of hours to stay and he could sleep on the plane, that was all.