Compared to all the other fifty-two races known, drosks, phnobes and men were like brothers. To some races, like the Spooners who lived on little icy worlds, they were merely identical. Many others would be incapable of thinking of them as life at all - like say, the Tarquins, who lived in the upper layers of some proto-stars.

A few races had a larger conception of life. The Creapii lived on small, hot worlds, in the deep layers of the larger gas giants and occasionally on the surface of very cool suns, but could discourse on philosophy with men as easily as they could discuss the untranslatable with Tarquins. Then there were the sundogs, who were merely raw life and derived their picture of the universe from the minds of their customers. The First Sirian Bank was in a class of his own, as always. A few races - The Pod, for one - were alien even to Spooners and Tarquins.

But all the races had one thing in common. They were all less than five million years old, and all had originated within a sphere of stars less than two hundred light years across, centred on Wolf 429. The Creapii discovered that first, and so were the first to investigate the one planet that orbited the Wolf.

They found a Joker Tower, a monomolecular spire frosted with frozen methane, standing dark and alone under the airless sky. They found the thing later known simply as the Centre of the Universe.

The Creapii ranged far. They found more Towers, other Joker Artifacts like the Ring Stars, Band and the Internal Planets of Protostar V. As an incidental, they found Earth and sold a working matrix motor for homesteading rights on Mercury. The Creapii were beginning to feel in the grip of a galactic mystery, and had long before decided that they needed extra insights.

Seventy standard years later a joint Man-Phnobe team deciphered Joker Curiform C, the only one of the five Joker scripts translatable. There were hints of a great civilization, although the word was only an approximation, and there was probably the first poem in the universe.

Geological evidence suggested that the towers were all between eight and five million years old. They were ranged more or less equally across the light years, accepting all energies, radiating none.

The Creapii knew that they had recognizably evolved from the mildly-intelligent salamanders about four million years before, to judge from the desiccated aluminium-polysilicate remains on their planet around 70 Ophiuchis A. They knew of no race older.

They were long-lived. They had travelled up the Tentacle - Creapii mythology saw the galaxy as a giant Creap, with a glittering carcase of stars - to the sparse stars at the rim. They had sailed down the Tentacle to the cathedral of stars at the hub. The stars were barren. There were one or two freak accidents. But generally, life was still merely some slightly more complex chemical changes. Only in the bubble of stars behind them did worlds teem.

Impetuous races would have reached a definite conclusion hastily , maybe in two or three hundred years. The Creap minds, of which each individual had three, did not jump so readily to conclusions ...

'And what conclusion did they reach?' asked Dom.

'The Creapii are powerful, and slow, and thorough. They have as yet reached no conclusion. They are seeking the meaning of life. Why sshould they hurry?'

'Chel! Isn't the theory that the Jokers seeded our stars before they - uh - moved away? Come on, you know it is.'

The phnobe nodded slowly. 'That is certainly the hypothesis that the Joker Institute appears to work on.'

Dom bit his lip, and opened his mouth to speak. Hrsh-Hgn raised a hand.

'You are about to assk why. Boy, remember that of fifty-two races in the life-stars you, an Earthman—'

'A Widdershine!'

'True, a Widdershine of Earth stock - can only vaguely understand the mental workings of perhaps three or four races. Why should we hope to understand the Jokers?'

'But the Institute did understand Joker Curiform C. It was one of their languages.'

'Yes, but a written language is merely a machine to convey information, and once we had the key it was remarkably easy to translate.'

'How was it broken?'

'They used a poet, and a mad computer.'

Hrsh-Hgn picked up the cube of pink silica that had been his present to Dom, thumbed the reference face and set it to project. The words of the Joker Testament hung in the air, glowing.

You who stand before us We have held the stars in the hollow of our hands, and the stars Burn. Pray be careful now As to how you handle them. We have gone to wait on our new world There is but one It lies at the dark side of the sun.

'Pretty derivative stuff,' said Isaac. 'That last couplet is really a singlet.'

'I must admit it is better in phnobic,' said Hrsh-Hgn, 'As for the rest, well, you musst know most of it. On a purely practical level, hotheads have searched every sizeable body in the bubble and many out of it.'

'Now we're getting down to the nitty-gritty,' said Isaac. 'You'd have had to include suns, of course, and the deeps themselves. Although it sounds more likely that the Jokers originated on-planet somewhere.'

'The popular belief is that Jokers World is laden with wonders beyond belief,' said Hrsh-Hgn.

'Sitting in here it's hard to get some idea of the deeps, but they must be big enough to hide a world in. The Jokers might have had a world with no sun,' said Dom.

'It's just conceivable,' agreed Hrsh-Hgn, politely.

'It's been thought of, huh?'

'About once every five years,'

'How about it being invisible?' said Isaac. Dom laughed.

'Maybe,' said Hrsh-Hgn, 'You'd heard of Ghost Stars, Dom?'

'Uhuh. So dense that not even gravity escapes from them.'

'Now this is just an idea to kick about, I'm just dropping it on the plate to see if anyone pours mayonnaise on it, but you could outfit an entire solar system with matrix engines and drop it into interspace,' said Isaac. Dom was about to laugh, but looked sidelong at Hrsh-Hgn.

'That's the legend of the Prodigal Sun,' said Hrsh-Hgn, 'A low-temperature Creapii story. Yes, you could do it in about fifty years time, at our present rate of technological expanssion. The catalytic power would not have to be too great. But the practical application of the matrix equation makes it impossible.' He caught Dom's blank expression. 'You see, you do not need a great deal of power to drop even a large mass in and out of interspace.'

Hrsh-Hgn used more technical language to explain that it was the on-board computer that really counted. Since a body in interspace was theoretically everywhere at the same time and would if randomly dropped out almost certainly materialize in the centre of the nearest solar body, the navigational matrix computer was very necessary. It had to be big - 'everywhere' was a large volume to be quantified. The bigger the body, the greater chance of error, so the bigger the computer.

'The sundog carrying us now registered a current drain in microamps to achieve interspace. 'It's little more than a mental discipline. Four fifths of its body iss a hind-brain designed to locate it accurately with regard to the datum universse, with fortunately just enough sspare capacity to allow for the extra mass of a medium-ssized sship.

'To get a medium-range star successfully through interspace you'd have to have a computer about one hundred times its mass.'

'How about one planet?' asked Dom.

'The graphs meet at planets like Phnobis or Widdershins, small and dense. You could just about do it if you hollowed out the world and filled it with computers. But this is a fruitless line of sspeculation. Personally I believe that the Jokers—'