“Do you know who that is?” asked Titus of the man beside him, who was wearing a space suit-liner, not gym clothes.

“They call her the Diving Belle. I don’t know her name, but she’s here every night putting on a show. They say she’s really one of those stuffy doctors of something or other.”

“Oh. Thank you.” Titus asked others, but got only the nickname, that she spoke with a Georgian accent, and that she was a physical anthropologist. It was enough to enable him to find her file, but he didn’t have to. Abbot had collected another one with clearance to study the alien “corpse.”

Since she was Marked, he didn’t dare touch the Diving Belle, so he moved on around the gym. Gold was in the weight-lifting class with the ebony statue, working as if taking out a rage. He has a right. Have to talk to him.

As Titus passed, the class broke up, but Gold didn’t register Titus’s presence. He headed blindly for the locker room. There was no trace of Abbot’s Influence on him. After that, Titus noticed the ebony statue twice more as he circled. But there was no sign of Sisi Mintraub. He was about to leave when he remembered he owed time in the centrifuge. If he just signed out of the gym, Medical would be after him immediately.

But when he logged into the centrifuge, there was Sisi’s name on the waiting list right above his. The attendant handed him a suit, saying, “Number three will be ready to roll in five minutes. And don’t forget the telemetry.”

The five separate centrifuge units started on a regular schedule, but with staggered times so there was no wait.

He changed quickly, determined to get into the same unit Sisi entered. The pale green suit made his complexion more conspicuous, but he set a low grade of Influence around himself so people would perceive his dusky pallor as normal. His human ancestry had blessed him with dark skin, so he didn’t seem as stark white as some luren.

When he emerged, he again noticed the ebony statue lingering nearby, but thought nothing of it. Inside the cylindrical chamber, he found his quarry, strapped in with the elastic safety bands, ready to walk the treadmill. She was the only other one on this ride, though the chamber could accommodate eight on treadmills and six more seated.

Titus took the treadmill beside hers and secured his towel to a bar. Attaching the straps, he called, “Don’t I know you? We met out at the starship today, didn’t we?”

She peered at him. She was quite pretty, and no doubt used to every line in the book.

“I’m Titus Shiddehara,” he added.

“Oh! Yes, Dr. Colby introduced us. Did you get the chemists’ display tank?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

“Amazing you’d recognize me. I didn’t know you.” The warning chime sounded, and she gripped the handles of the treadmill. “Here we go.”

Elegantly muted sound heterodyned up to a pleasant, multi-voiced hum as the tank began to rotate, and the platforms swung up onto the sides of the drum. They flexed their knees and blinked away the slight disorientation from the Coriolis force and then they were both walking in place.

Titus had attached his telemetry monitors to a device that would feed it good human data, so he didn’t have to worry about the duty tech noticing anything odd about him. He could concentrate on Mintraub.

Titus made small talk, probing for subject areas where Abbot had Influenced her. He’d learned the trick from Abbot but rarely used it. Luren who acted as agents were trained to create and erase identities, tying human records into knots. Occasionally, they hunted luren gone feral, thus honing their skills. But Titus, except for a few episodes, had been a scholar depending an agents to protect him.

He was bemused at his own audacity. To expect to outmaneuver Abbot at this game was more naive than expecting to best him in computers. Yet even Abbot wasn’t invulnerable.

Delicately, he advanced into a sensitized area. “Did you say cryogenics? Haven’t there been some marvelous advances in that machinery in the last five years?”

“Yes, but don’t you use the new superconductors in physics these days? All our hardware does.”

“My new computers had them in the core that was destroyed.” He took a deep breath and pitched his voice carefully. Abbot Nandoha has had to fabricate replacement components based on the older technology.“

“He is a genius, isn’t he?” she agreed starry-eyed.

Oh, Abbot, that’s unfair, implanting hero worship in a her! “Thorough,” Titus allowed.

She rallied to Abbot’s defense, and gradually, a picture formed. She knew little of the objectives of either Biomed or Cognitive Sciences, though both drew on her equipment pool. But Abbot had convinced her that she couldn’t handle the alien “corpse’s” preservation chamber alone. Since she would be involved when they did anything to the “corpse,” Abbot would also be called in. Very neat.

Preparing to withdraw, Titus began to reinforce in her a reluctance to mention this casual conversation to Abbot, as if she’d shared trivial confidences with another woman.

Out of the blue she volunteered, “You know, Abbot’s a strange one. I often wonder if he has an apartment! He turns up at all hours, even keeps a shaver in my desk. And I think he’s stashed his toiletries in the cryogenic room and uses the sterilizing shower as if it were his own. How do you account for someone like that? I mean it couldn’t take more than fifteen minutes to get to his apartment!”

“People are strange.” He hadn’t Influenced that out of her. She was jogging along at a good clip, and had augmented his hypnotic effect by going into natural alpha state.

What’s really in the sleeper’s room? A transmitter component? The whole transmitter? Getting in to find out would be a project itself. Before he even tried, he’d rifle the Brink’s files for the cryogenic chamber’s alarm system, and find out more about Diving Belle. As a physical anthropologist, she’d be in the Cognitive Sciences group, next door to the chamber. But he couldn’t ask Sisi about her. Abbot would notice such an inquiry immediately.

Titus came out of his thoughts to find Sisi slowing down, puffing hard. He felt as if he were jogging uphill.

The pleasant hum of the rotators climbed in pitch, and as it did, Titus’s knees began to sag. He jabbed at the stop button, at the emergency override, at the attendant call signal-nothing-The panel stayed dark. “Malfunction!” he said. “Dismount and try to make it to one of the chairs!”

“Impossible,” she stated with the adamant conviction of an expert mechanic. She kept poking control buttons in varying combinations while Titus tried to dismount.

He estimated they were at two g’s now, but his reflexes, if they weren’t off too much from low grav, should be up to it. He ripped the telemetry wires free then unhitched his safety belt. The treadmill was forcing him to run faster and faster. If the telemetry had not crashed with the g-control, he’d be in a lot of trouble. His idiot program would have kept sending dead-level healthy signals for one-g stress.

Calculating mentally, he stepped off the treadmill and curled into a forward roll, matching his momentum relative to the floor. It would make a wonderful exam question for his freshmen. He landed hard, the black traction strips on the floor ripping his suit and scraping his skin raw. He sat up, bleeding from his forehead and nose.

Mintraub still clutched the handlebars of the treadmill, her feet trailing out behind her, her body sagging alarmingly under the increasing gravity. He lunged to his feet and staggered to her, shouting, “Let go. I’ll catch you.”

“No!” she yelled back. “I’m too heavy now.” Her knuckles Ere white, her hands slipping gradually.

He planted his feet to either side of hers. She might weigh two hundred pounds now, which Titus could manage. But he had to get her free before her weight climbed to three hundred and neither of them could move. “Let go!” he commanded with Influence and yanked her loose, pulling them both over backwards. “Got to get to the chairs,” he gasped, struggling to his knees. “They’re contoured for four g’s.”