Titus retained only a copy of the message he coaxed the transmitter to spit out. Its targeting data were, of course, his own, and of no particular interest, but the message was long, detailed, and obscurely coded. Titus was certain it would have brought the whole galaxy to their doorstep. With little to occupy him now, he spent time attempting to read the message, but without luck– except for the section that identified Earth’s sun in both digital code and in something that must have been Kylyd’s coding system. His real purpose, however, was to access H’lim’s part of the message and read it back to him to see if Abbot had altered it. It was a longshot, he admitted, but he had to do something to jar the whole truth out of the luren.

The work served another purpose, too. It kept his mind off his hunger and his growing inability to keep the orl blood down. H’lim, aware that his try with the orl blood had not been a success, wanted to risk cloning human blood in his lab, but Titus wouldn’t hear of it. If the luren was caught, the whole attitude of the station humans would change. “You might be torn limb from limb, and I mean that literally. Humans can be savage.”

When Abbot, looking worse than Titus did, supported Titus’s position, H’lim capitulated, and redoubled his efforts to refine his booster. With the mystery of why Titus was rejecting the orl blood nagging at him, H’lim wasn’t nearly as confident of the booster now.

The work went slowly, and Titus often saw the alien’s frustration with the best of Earth’s equipment. But he never compared the hardware to what he was used to. He only worked harder to master the primitive tools and to understand the hazy images the microscopes produced in color schemes all wrong for his eyes. Titus believed the luren’s boast that he knew seventy or eighty different scientific systems and was undaunted by learning one more, even one based on an “oddly disjointed model of reality.”

Titus could never get H’lim to elaborate on that observation, and in fact the luren apologized profusely, trying to convince Titus that he hadn’t meant to disparage Earth’s achievements. “Perhaps it’s just that I haven’t had time to investigate all your uniquely divided specialities. And you are a devoted specialist, Titus. There are so many of your world’s disciplines that you know nothing of-not even the basic vocabularies. When this war is over, I expect I’ll have plenty of time to learn all of Earth’s other ways of studying the relationship of space, time, will, vision, and the life force.”

Titus allowed that mysticism was indeed not his field, but that Earth had a plethora of such disciplines. Not wanting to start an argument by revealing his aversion to the sloppy thinking of mystics, Titus dropped the subject. In retrospect, he later realized that he’d missed his chance to convert H’lim into an ally of Resident policy at a point where it would have saved a lot of lives.

One afternoon soon after that, in H’lim’s lab when the Cognitive people had finally left and H’lim had secured their privacy, the luren commented, “It’s only a question of time, now, Titus. Abbot’s had to start using Mirelle again, but I’ve asked him to go easy on her. A few hundred hours, and I should have a test quantity of this formula to try.”

“The war could be resolved before then.” When Inea sees Mirelle fading, what will she do?

As H’lim worked, they discussed the war. The luren understood that W. S. might not win, but in that event, he intimated, the Tourists had a plan for smuggling his dormant body to Earth. H’lim did not believe he was revealing any secrets when he told Titus that the Tourists had infiltrated the blockaders, and could just about guarantee his safety regardless of who won, provided he could manage to die with his spine and brain intact.

Either Abbot’s lying through his teeth, or he’s got his communications working again. Outwardly, Titus just nodded as if it were old news. “The secessionists want this station dead and kept quarantined. If they win, it’ll be a long dormancy for you.”

“I doubt that. You mustn’t underestimate your father.”

Really? Watching H’lim putter about, he was certain the luren had no idea of what he’d just revealed.

Noticing how Inea’s log showed Abbot’s attention focused around the observatory and the Eighth Antenna Array’s console, Titus had searched the console and all connecting installations clear to the edge of the station looking for any way Abbot had of getting the Eighth to transmit his message. It had never before been a top priority because the Eighth hadn’t had a window into the volume of space H’lim had come from. But now, with his old theory returning to haunt him, and with just such a window coming up, Titus went through the hardware again, found nothing, and rechecked all the software.

They had used the Eighth to communicate, via relays, with Wild Goose as well as several other experimental stations. It had been built to serve the manned exploration program, which had been abandoned for lack of funds again. But the Eighth was still equipped to be linked to its seven other counterparts around the moon, providing global coverage of the entire firmament.

A good deal of Titus’s department’s computing power had been designed to link the Eight Arrays with the satellites and mobile observatories, forming what might have to become Earth’s first global defense network communications system.

It had never been used, or even tested. The nearest they’d come was Abbot’s being ordered to use the Eighth to break into the blockaders’ communications. To date, he had reported only sporadic successes, with recordings that had revealed little. He hadn’t even been able to give warning of the attack on the probe. Did Abbot know and just not say anything? Is that why he wasn’t concerned about the humans finding his transmitter? Would he have knowingly sacrificed the device? Or maybe, since Titus hadn’t heard of the increased use of anti-hypnotic conditioning and rechecking of work, perhaps Abbot hadn’t heard either? Perhaps he hadn’t known how close his transmitter had been to being discovered. Or if he had known, perhaps he wanted the probe destroyed in the attack.

Fruitless speculation, Titus told himself. But one thing seemed obvious. Abbot must have been using the Eighth to communicate with Tourists among the blockaders to set up H’lim’s escape. He might even be able to communicate with his control back on Earth, Connie’s opposite number. In any case, when the window opened, he’d be ready to send the Tourists’ message to the stars.

If he was planning to have such a stunt go unnoticed, then ne must have a way to prevent Maintenance from noticing the power drain. Ah, but that’s Abbot’s department. He could gimmick all the monitors and nobody would ever know.

Renewing his study of the Eighth’s console, Titus figured a way to configure his black box to use the Eighth’s transmission capability to contact Earth. It was an absurd use of an Array, like swatting flies with a baseball bat, but it could be done. Since it was possible, if not feasible, Abbot had probably done it. But Titus couldn’t see how to hide his transmission without an official transmission from Colby to hide it under.

What little official traffic went in and out of the station now went via moving ships in space. Their news came audio-only, or with black and white video at the most. Personal mail was totally cut off. And in the attack on the probe, they’d lost one of their last transmission masts. Though a crew was working on reconstructing it from the debris, there was little hope it would last long. The land line to Luna Station had been cut and repaired, debugged and retapped so many times nobody trusted it.

During one of the interminable committee meetings on the subject, Titus brought up one of his earliest suggestions. “We could use the Eighth to guide an unmanned supply ship in to a hard landing out on the mare, then go out and truck the supplies back. It’s dangerous, but it could be done.”