“I’ll wait. As long as you need.”

She looked at the box. “But this will take a while. How can you survive? I mean, you do need ectoplasm, too.”

“I can get enough to survive just being around people. And-if I must-I’m sure I can find someone willing.” She went pale. He hastened to add, “But I won’t have to for a while. Take your time. Get used to knowing what I am and see if knowing makes so very much difference.”

Very seriously, she said, “It does.” Her eye fell on the clock. “Shit. We’ve been talking for hours! I’ve got to get some sleep. I can’t think straight anymore.” She pocketed the box and went toward the door. “I never thought I’d be grateful for the shop training you forced on me, but now I am because I know exactly how to get Abbot Nandoha!”

Every step she took hurt. He had to clutch the sink rim to make himself stay there. She paused at the door, and he stopped breathing. “You’ll be all right?”

He nodded and tried to focus on her plan, telling himself he was letting her take the component because, even though they probably wouldn’t catch much of Abbot’s activity with bugs, still it would keep her too busy to challenge Abbot. Besides, maybe it would help. “Go. I’ll be fine.”

As the door closed behind her, his hand strayed to the packet of blood crystals on the sink drainboard. He shied from the thought of that sterile fluid coursing down his throat. He had to force himself to reheat the water and make the solution. He had lived on it alone for months at a time with no problem. Now, it was all he could do to choke it down. But he had to, just to get through tomorrow.

Sitting at the table, he chuckled over what Abbot would say if he could see him now. That led him to ponder Abbot’s condition, seeing Abbot’s risky use of Influence and the merciless pace he set himself in a new light. Feeling Abbot’s desperation in his own bones, Titus could suddenly believe Abbot’s vision of the end of the luren on Earth.

Titus saw himself through Abbot’s eyes as a wayward child who demanded the utmost patience. He felt his father’s love then, as he’d shared it on the shuttle leaving Earth. Maybe it’s wrong to stop their SOS?

The thought sent thrills of shock through him.

Had he let Inea take the component just so he wouldn’t have to destroy it, to strike that symbolic blow against Abbot’s mission? Could he have done it at all? What if I’ve been wrong and Abbot’s right?

Inea was as good as her word. With a bit of help from Titus getting parts and security codes, she designed eight tiny bugs slaved to a central unit made from a gutted pocket calculator and the miniaturized power source. She even put a memory into it, programmed to debrief the bugs at intervals and save the data. The central unit interfaced with Titus’s console, and would also pirate images from security scanners.

Titus, however, had little time to plant the bugs.

When he got back to his office, he discovered his black box had captured a terse message from Connie informing him he’d have to contend with Abbot alone.

Though she had people in the Project’s groundside Communications and Supplies, Connie couldn’t get anyone up to the station through the security designed to stop assassins. But she’d arranged to have his security clearance increased.

“When you hear about the bombing of your house,” the message continued, “don’t worry. We got there first, but this channel is not secure enough to discuss further plans.”

She ended, “We can now guarantee your blood supply. They’d perfected a way of turning the crystals into maroon packing chips to be used in boxes shipped to his lab. microwave to restore solubility, and dissolve. Connie.”

Titus reported Abbot’s doings and the situation with the sleeper and the transmitter, but omitted mention of Inea.

Later that day, while Colby was struggling to convince the reporters that the bombing had been a terrorist act, not an attempt to cover up a cloning lab, Titus was informed that his security clearance had been bumped up to Abbot’s level.

Within an hour, he was given a heavier meeting schedule than ever before. While it provided a better overview of the Project and of Abbot’s activities, it cut into the time he needed to compare the two copies of his catalogue.

Lorie had called in five other programmers. The news, however, was bleak. They found files that had been erased from the directory on each catalogue, files that didn’t have appropriate security or date stamps on them, files Titus didn’t recognize. Two different methods had been used on the separate catalogues, so it was likely that Titus could sort out the mess of fragmented temporary and backup files to construct one correct set of numbers.

Titus had both versions of the data put on line, and carried his Bell 990 around, tapping into his console through the station’s system so he could work during meetings. At the edge of despair, he cherished the idea that Connie had an untampered version of the data, and the Tourists might have kept one, too, when they took his flight bag. His life’s work was not lost, just inaccessible.

In one grazing encounter, Abbot coolly informed him that a mature luren would not be having such trouble.

After that, Titus spent a night attempting to reach a depth of the luren’s mnemonic trance he’d never reached before, but the numerical data eluded him. Relationships, equations, functions, and useful constants were clear, but it seemed the data one Plugged into the equations or substituted for algebraic expressions had never been recorded in his memory.

He had always been able to determine if a result seemed Plausible, but he had grown up relying on calculators. To him, a number was just a number and he’d even been known to confuse a number with its own inverse.

So he worked painfully and carefully through the Taurus region star systems described in his catalogue, searching for any anomalies, such as a planet at an incorrect distance from its sun, or a planet that was too large for its position. Laboriously, he wrote a program to compare the two sets of data, and soon had derived a third data set which he considered better than 70 percent reliable.

As he worked, the stellar systems he was intimately familiar with revived in his memory. During meetings, he would peck at his Bell, people thought he was checking every claim made by the speakers. In fact, as his mind leaped from one insight to another, he often missed whole hours of the ponderous speeches designed more to fend off blame than to inform.

However, he didn’t miss the departure of the reporters. Colby had Titus speak at the send-off ceremony. But she scripted the whole thing, allowing the reporters to read prescreened questions, to which Titus read prepared answers.

He told them how the loss of his home was also the loss of his life’s work, but that he intended to recoup his loss by reconstructing the original catalogue, and implied that success was a certainty, given just a short time. When the reporters departed, the whole station breathed a sigh of relief.

The situation on Earth, however, did not improve. Colby and Nagel had not convinced everyone that the Project was not planning an illegal cloning. Several countries mounted unilateral investigations into the Project, and though such wheels moved very slowly, they were a source of anxiety.

Carol Colby, seeming drawn and much thinner despite the low-gravity plumping of her face, ordered an increase in the working pace, convincing them all that the Project could well be scrapped unless it showed results very quickly.

The construction of the probe had been going smoothly, but was still the limiting factor in the race against time. The workers accepted the new schedule, but the feverish pace caused an increased number of accidents and lost man hours.