“Because it’s too damned noisy near in.” McAndrew became more like his old self as the conversation turned closer to physics. I decided there was hope — maybe he wasn’t a broken man after all. “It’s the Sun’s fault,” he went on. “Sol generates such an infernal din, gravitationally and in almost every electromagnetic wavelength you can think of, that you can’t do a decently sensitive experiment closer than half a light-year. It’s like listening for a pin drop, when somebody’s banging a bass drum right next to your ear. We have to go out, out where the interstellar medium is nice and quiet.”

“But that’s exactly what you will be doing. You’ll be flying out on the Hoatzin, and as far from the Institute as you want to be. So why aren’t you pleased?” I had a horrible thought. “Unless you’re telling me that Jarver proposes to go along with us.”

“No, no, no.” McAndrew went right back to being gloomy. “He says he’d like to, but he’s far too busy running the Institute. He’s not going. But he’s sending his aunt’s pet bully-boys, Lyle and Parmikan, along to keep an eye on things and report back. Now that’s what really has me going, Jeanie. That’s the reason I sent you the letter.”

I got very annoyed with McAndrew. He was taking a perfectly natural decision, from Jarver’s point of view, and blowing it up out of all proportion.

Of course, this was before I met Van Lyle and Stefan Parmikan.

The doubtful pleasure of that meeting was not long delayed. It came the same afternoon, when McAndrew dragged me along to the weekly seminar, a tradition of the Penrose Institute for as long as I had been visiting it.

The old meeting room, with its poor air circulation and white plastic hard-backed chairs, had vanished. In its place was a hall with tiers of plushy seats running in banks up towards the rear. It could hold maybe three hundred. The seminars that I remembered might draw fifty if they were on a really hot subject.

Today there were no more than thirty people in the room. McAndrew and I took seats at the end of the last occupied row. I tried to recognize the people I knew from the look of the backs of their heads. I did pretty well, over half the audience. Wenig and Gowers and Macedo might be gone, but most of the other old-timers at the Institute hadn’t given up yet.

The lecturer, Siclaro — another Institute perennial — was already in position and raring to go.

“The first ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang is far more interesting than the entire rest of the history of the Universe.” That was his first sentence. I couldn’t tell you what his second sentence was. I didn’t expect to understand the seminar, you see, because I never had in the past. But I might still enjoy it. Like the psychologist at the burlesque show I concentrated on the audience, examining the newcomers to try to guess their specialties and how good they were at them.

A futile exercise, of course. Emma Gowers, the System’s top expert on multiple kernel arrays, looks and dresses like a high-class whore. Wenig could be her pimp, and McAndrew himself resembles an accountant in need of a haircut and a good meal.

You just can’t tell. Brains won’t correlate with appearance.

Over to the far left of our row sat a group of three. I saw Dorian Jarver. He was leaning forward, intent on the presentation. To his immediate right were two men of particular interest to me — because they too were taking no notice of the lecture and showing a lot of interest in the audience. I nudged McAndrew, just as someone hurried in from the back of the room and leaned over to whisper in Jarver’s ear. He sighed, shook his head, and followed the woman quickly out of the hall.

“What?” said McAndrew at last. He had missed the whole episode with Jarver.

“Those two men. Who are they?”

He snorted. “Them two? Van Lyle. Stefan Parmikan.”

I stared with redoubled curiosity. Van Lyle (I found out later which was which) was a big, broad-shouldered fellow with curly blond hair and a handsome, craggy profile. He made no pretence of listening to the lecture, but he observed the audience with open interest. At his side the little, round-shouldered figure of Stefan Parmikan was far more discreet. To a casual observer he was following everything that Siclaro said — but every few seconds his head would turn for a moment and his eyes would flicker over everyone. When they met mine he at once turned away.

“Mac,” I said. And paused.

He had slipped away from my side. I saw him down by the lecturer’s podium next to Siclaro, one hand pointed at the screen.

“You know the problem,” he was saying. “We all believe that the amount of matter in the universe is just enough to keep it expanding forever. That gives asymptotically flat spacetime, an idea we have half a dozen good theoretical reasons for wanting to believe. But the bright matter — the stuff we can see — only accounts for maybe a hundredth of what’s needed to close spacetime. So, where’s the rest of it? Where’s the missing matter?

“I agree with Siclaro, it’s the devil to answer that question from any experiments we’ve been able to do so far. I wouldn’t propose to try. But we’ve designed a whole new set of crucial experiments that we can do if we are far out from Sol, where there’s not so much interference.”

He was getting into a discussion of the hidden matter, the reason for taking the Hoatzin on its light-year round-trip. But I couldn’t listen to him, because I was no longer alone. The two men next to Jarver had slid quietly across from the other side of the room and were now by my side.

“Captain Roker?” said the blond-haired man. “I wanted to say hello. I hear we’re going to be shipmates.”

He gazed sincerely into my eyes, took my hand in his big, meaty paw, and held on a few seconds longer than necessary.

“Pleased to meet you,” added his companion, leaning across and taking my hand in turn. “I’m Stefan Parmikan. I’ve heard a lot about you.” His smile was a wet, shapeless version of Van Lyle’s intimate grin. And instead of riveting me like Lyle, his brown eyes would look anywhere but into mine.

“You heard about me?” I was surprised. McAndrew is closer than a clam. “From whom?”

“The boss. Councilor Griss.”

His limp grip was like a lump of wet gristle, much worse than Van Lyle’s intimate clutch; but that wasn’t what bothered me.

Suddenly, I could put it all together. So far my thinking had managed to get everything wrong. Anna Lisa Griss could push her relatives into high places, and no one would be surprised by that. Nepotism never changes. She had arranged for Dorian Jarver to take over the Penrose Institute.

But it was her bad luck that Jarver happened to be genuine, a conscientious scientist with a real feel for physics and science. She couldn’t change his nature. What she could do, though, and had done, was to install as his assistants her chosen few: people with no feeling for science, who would follow the Councilor’s style of operation and do exactly what she said. She had told them to mold the Institute to her own taste, to change it to a copy of the standard Terran bureaucracy that she understood and controlled so well.

And they were doing it. I was now convinced that the real author of the message to me had not been McAndrew. Lyle or Parmikan had structured it, with Anna Griss behind them. Mac had asked for my help, but she had been the manipulator. She wanted me on board the Hoatzin, for a trip that she would control, through Van Lyle and Stefan Parmikan, from beginning to end.

What made me so sure? There’s one point that I neglected to mention about the run-in that we had with Anna Griss out in the Oort cloud. McAndrew had cut off her arm, which was bad enough but maybe forgivable since he thought he was doing it to save her life. But before that I had stared her down, overridden her authority, and asserted my own position as ship’s captain. She had been forced to accept it. But knowing Anna, I knew that would never be forgiven, or forgotten. Not even when she had taken an eye for an eye — or an arm for an arm.